The Spectre of Capitalism: The Haunted Ideological Subject in Don DeLillo's Falling Man
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, Don DeLillo wrote that contemporary America lived 'permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit.' For DeLillo, the attacks on the World Trade Centre constituted a disruption of this ahistorical ideology by reinstating radical violence into American consciousness. In DeLillo's words, the terrorists 'want to bring back the past.' In his recent fiction, this return of the past is manifest in the recurring spectral figures that haunt his contemporary American subjects.
This paper will consider the function of ghosts in DeLillo's Falling Man, utilising Derrida's concept of hauntology. The phantom figures of historical and ideological alterity complicate the utopian urge of the free market paradigm, highlighting the immateriality of delimited, speculative capitalism and by injecting this paradigm with repressed memories of the past. How might we characterise the ontological status of Americans who constitute their subjectivity through this purportedly ahistorical paradigm when it is haunted by its repressed memory? Can this ideology maintain itself and grapple with its inherited history?
Concomitant with these questions is the relationship of literature to political agency. Given DeLillo's suggestion that terrorists, and not novelists, shape and reflect history in contemporary culture, to what extent can artistic representations produce historical and political meaning without resorting to the spectrality of recursive images.