skandalon

I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 195

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jul 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis consumption customer money economy credit debt identity existence reality being

He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn’t realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn’t planned on this. Where was the life he’d always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all direction were the same?

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 180

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis lost space gnomon direction sense orientation lost loser life

The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 207-208

Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?

Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Jun 18, 2010 link notes tagged: author book novel art technology communication translation computer machine DeLillo Cosmopolis identity self network event effect reality life subject subjectivity apparatus node

We went to the movies because we were trying to learn how to be alone together.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 185

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 16, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis alone lost loneliness movie family together community desintegration destruction

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint-Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 189

The reference is Saint-Augustine’s Confessions, book X, chap. 33 (§50) :

“But do you hear me, O Lord, my God: look upon me and see, have mercy and heal me, for in your eyes I have become an enigma to myself, and herein lies my sickness.” (google books preview)

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 13, 2010 link notes tagged: art,n ovel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis enigma confusion anxiety identity knowledge self becoming Saint-Augustine

Widespread throughout Latin America, susto is a folk illness associated with a broad array of symptoms. It is considered by susceptible populations to be a sickness caused by the separation of soul and body which is precipitated by a supernatural force. Most studies of culture-bound diseases have relied on descriptive approaches that focus on pathologies derived from medical textbooks. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, looking for explanations of susto in the interaction of social, physiological, and psychological factors.

✖ Via Susto. A Folk Illness by Arthur J. Rubel, Carl W. O’Nell, and Rolando Collado-Ardon, University of California Press, 1991, 195 p.

Previously on Skandalon : Hwabyeong, yet another culture-bound somatization disorder.

Both hwabyung and susto are quoted by the same character in Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis.

• Jun 09, 2010 link notes tagged: illness pathology cultural soul sickness separation Cosmopolis DeLillo

The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• May 14, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo art author book capitalism critic integration market novel revolution system Cosmopolis

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.”
“Its own grave-diggers,” he said.
“But these are not grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are the fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Apr 25, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo Marx art author book capitalism critic integration market novel resistance revolution Cosmopolis

PARIS — Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg will bring Don DeLillo’s novel “Cosmopolis” to the big screen, the film’s producer said Friday. Paulo Branco’s Paris-based production house Alfama Films will co-produce with Cronenberg’s Toronto Antenna Ltd. “Cosmopolis,” which has yet to be cast, will tell DeLillo’s story of a 28 year-old billionaire who crosses Manhattan for a haircut. The film is set to start shooting in 2010 in New York and Toronto. “Cosmopolis” is DeLillo’s 13th novel published in 2003 by Scribner.

✖ Via The Hollywood Reporter: “David Cronenberg takes on ‘Cosmopolis’” by Rebecca Leffler, July 24, 2009.

Read more about DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Read an excerpt from the book on the publisher’s site. About DeLillo: “Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy” (Wikipedia). Not suprisingly, DeLillo stated that he rather not react to such a designation.

• Jul 26, 2009 link notes tagged: Cosmopolis adaptation alone art author book economy film lost movie DeLillo