Abstract
Abstract: A drama of personal failure lies at the heart of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis (2003), as currency trader Eric Packer's misguided strategy of borrowing enormous sums of yen backfires when the currency fails to depreciate. DeLillo treats Packer as a point of contact between the concrete world and abstract value, and Packer desires, accordingly, to become a piece of abstract data. Yet failure undermines Packer's fantasies of abstraction and forces upon him an awareness of his constitutive openness to alterity. It is through Packer's failure that DeLillo weaves into Cosmopolis an ethico-political project that aligns his novelistic art with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy—a project that plays out on both a narrative and a formal level.
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