“The City Eats and Sleeps Noise”: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Contours of Entangled Corporeality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay aims to explore Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) in order to examine how the corporeal schema of a feeling human is radically reconfigured in the contemporary capitalist culture that thrives on augmenting the lived body’s somatic and cognitive experientiality. By accommodating a narrative frame where the location of the body as an organically sealed discrete biological category is problematized, the novel partakes in a landscape of endless entanglements. How such an ontological convergence unsettles the epistemic realms of reasoning is what this reading attempts to investigate. DeLillo’s novel dramatizes a reconceptualization of human subjectivity by unpacking a conflation of biogenetic matter and algorithmic flow of data within a postmodern metropolis. To situate this problematic, the reading affirms “intra-active” transactions between the biomedically theorized body and extra-human ontologies. In illustrating how the notional frames of epistemological certitude seem increasingly untenable in the cultures of neoliberal technocracy, the novel points toward a posthuman condition and wagers what appears to be a transhumanist ethos at the end. The essay interrogates this trajectory by looking at templates of corporeal entanglement in the text.