Don DeLillo's “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11

Abstract

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject's perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo's rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11.