The paradox is that, seen from a different angle, security’s recovery of the business of living appears as enamored with death itself, as is attested by the violence committed in its name. Security thus promises a revitalization of life itself. But the focus of security on vulnerability does offer a way of perverting the contingency management of finance capitalism: It is security’s fascination with mortality that can transform finance capitalism’s business with the future into what DeLillo calls “the business of living,” i.e., a life lived in the awareness of contingency and the certainty of death. Ultimately, DeLillo suggests, in a financialized world like ours there is no direct exit out of the temporality of risk, and security certainly does not provide it. Yet, DeLillo’s novel isn’t a fantasy of some simple return to the real and authentic. The preoccupation with security enables a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. The future-mindedness of financial risk management is counteracted by the lethal threat constructions that drive the concern with security and that emphasize finitude and mortality. In DeLillo’s homecoming tale of a mega-rich currency trader, financial risk and the contemporary cult of security come together as the novel’s two thematic axes. The essay focuses on Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis in order to show that this novel stages the appeal of (in)security as resting on its promise to offer an alternative to the future-fixation of the risk regime of financial capitalism.

This essay aims to come to terms with the cultural power of security, which-so this article contends-is better understood as a fascination with insecurity.

Charles bukowski pulp fiction