Original scientific paper

The Art of Recovery in Falling Man

Sven Cvek orcid.org/0000-0002-3330-9421 ; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of the aftermath of the Septemeber 11, 2001
attacks in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man. By exploring both trauma’s social effects
and its metaphorical meanings, DeLillo’s novel registers and enacts the disappearance
of politically informed social practice as a communal force in the contemporary
US. This disappearance the novel posits as being accomplished through a process of
traumatization of the national polity contingent both on a “global” clash of disparate
worlds and on domestic interventions of the state. The article proposes that such
depoliticization rests on particular constructions of the human citizen and the nonhuman
terrorist, and that it represents a tactic through which the sovereign power
of the state is ultimately manifested. DeLillo responds to the state’s instrumentalization
of trauma by asserting the possibility of a socially productive aesthetic practice.

Keywords

trauma; 9/11; terrorism; body; politics

Hrčak ID:

61581

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/61581

Publication date:

15.4.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

Visits: 2.556 *