The precarious geopolitics of urban encounters in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on America, grief has been co-opted to legitimize the fortification and fragmentation of cities. Whilst geographical works have emerged to critique the emotive infrastructures that underpin such urban-centric, militaristic initiatives, they fall short of providing positive interventions against this so-called ‘new military urbanism’. This paper addresses the aforementioned lacuna by taking up calls to explore possibilities for counter-geographies that spatialize the world in less violent ways. Drawing on geographers’ reworkings of Judith Butler’s philosophical musings on precariousness/precarity and non-violence and fusing them with literatures pertaining to urban encounters, we propose that Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC) (2005), reimagines the post-traumatic city as a place in which embodied encounters with grief occur. Although these encounters are not pre-given to non-violence, they entail the possibility of revealing a shared, generalized condition of precariousness from which non-violent imperatives might arise. As such, ELIC can serve to ignite further reflections of the processes, relationships and avenues that nourish the emotive premises of non-violence for the defence of precarious lives.