Point Omega de Don DeLillo : adresser la terreur du réel à soi‑même

Abstract

Point Omega, Don DeLillo’s fifteenth novel, is both overtly and covertly about a historical reality, that of the Global War on Terror and some of its tragic consequences, the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandals. Centered on the figure of Richard Elster, a retired architect of the GWOT, the novel enacts a counterterrorist politics of terror thanks to a haunting poetics. Indeed, everything about DeLillo’s opus seems to convey the general atmosphere of counterterrorist terror that characterized the US abroad and that is now surreptitiously and spectrally performed on national ground. Considering that the plot takes place in the US and that the main victims—whether direct for Elster’s daughter Jessie who disappears or, indirect for Elster himself in the face of that loss—are American citizens, I argue that the shadowy implementations of the GWOT have, so to speak, contaminated the US itself due to an autoimmune principle. I examine how DeLillo suggests that the terroristic real returns to the sender and afflicts those it was designed to protect in the first place.