Conference Paper given at

Liberty and Justice: America and the Middle East

7-10 January 2008
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Jonathan Hall
University of Balamand

Infinite Justice: The Uses of Transcendence in Post-9/11 Novels

Operation Infinite Justice was the infamous name initially given to the official US military

response to the attacks of 9/11. After heavy criticism, not least from Islamic scholars who

quite rightly pointed out that only God could claim to dispense infinite justice, the name was

hastily changed on 25 September 2001 to Operation Enduring Freedom. Nominally at least,

enlightenment rationalism and materialism seemed to have won out over Old-Testament-style

divine judgment, but not before the fault line running through official US policy between the

finitude of politics and the infinity of transcendent ideas had been exposed. The irony was of

course that the White House and the 9/11 attackers had something in common in operating in

a confused way across that fault line between politics and transcendence. In any case, it

seemed that God had come back into play.

A precursor to Operation Infinite Justice was 1998’s Operation Infinite Reach – all

nations lie within striking distance, it seemed to say. The more material use of infinite in this

context to refer to the technological evaporation of boundaries mirrors the problem of

misidentifications, or synecdochic slippages, between Americanization, globalization and

universalization, a problem that is only made more complicated by the fact that these

infinities of “reach” and “justice” are justified by assertions of national sovereignty and the

identification of the US as a “homeland.” In response to 9/11, the novelists I will be focusing

on – John Barth, Don DeLillo, and John Updike – each try to configure relations between the
US and Arab and Muslim worlds, and in order to do so, they each in different ways invoke

some form of transcendence so as to imagine a universal space in which such transactions

become possible. Each engages in what the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj

Žižek calls “the infinite task of translation” that might constitute universality, defined as the

“shared space of understanding between different cultures.” However, do they also point to

what Žižek calls “actual universality,” which is “the violent experience of how, across the

cultural divide, we share the same antagonism?”1 Under Žižek’s claim that we all share a

certain type of impossible relation between singularity and universality, the inability to enter

into the “infinite task of translation” without falling back into our particular language,

translation becomes a necessary but impossible attempt at transcendence.

In this paper I examine the uses of transcendence in some literary responses to 9/11 in

the light of the uses of transcendence within the official response to 9/11, to pose the question

of whether we can ever legitimately invoke “infinite justice.” Following Walter Benjamin’s

concept of “divine violence” and Jacques Derrida’s quasi-transcendental concepts, not least

of which is his idea of justice as beyond deconstruction, is there a line that can be traced from

the finite to the infinite, or from singularity to universality, or from immanence to

transcendence? What do we do when we imagine the arrival of the infinite within our

historical situation? At stake here is the question how infinite ethical demands intersect with

finite political systems, and what happens in the attempt to realize universal ideals via the

technological procedures of globalization, one of which is the novel, enabled by printing

technology, in which multiple voices and points-of-view encounter one another.

In writing Terrorist, Updike set himself the task of creating the world of an Arab-

American teenager who becomes caught up in radical Islam. Seemingly, in writing the novel

based on detailed research into Islam, Updike set himself up as the arch-cosmopolitan,

confident in the reach of his knowledge to all cultures and in his ability to incorporate other

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forms into his work. However, although there are legitimate concerns about the orientalism in

some of his depictions, he does recognize the limitations imposed by cultural difference.

Indeed, Updike does not blithely traverse cultural boundaries. Knowing that the act of

imagining a foreign terrorist – let alone an Arab and Muslim terrorist – is tricky territory, he

purposefully makes Ahmad an American, with a mixed Irish and Arab heritage. In a radio

interview he explained that Ahmad being an American is crucial; he would not, he said, have

tried to get inside the head of “a Palestinian terrorist or an Iraqi freedom fighter.”2 For

Updike’s realist pen, it seems the limitation that prevents the invention of a “Palestinian

terrorist” as a main character is a matter of empirical detail, which is itself a function of

distance. Updike seems confident that from within national boundaries he can begin the work

of cultural translation that, by a series of contiguities and further acts of translation, might

end up somewhere in the vicinity of a Palestinian. Updike says that as he worked on the

novel he found Ahmad “increasingly understandable,” and that he was able to “conjure up the

human elements which are constant.”3

I do not intend to dismiss this universalized idea of humanity, but I do want to

question how Updike proceeds to it. His creation of Ahmad is based on a relation between

singularity and universality that is all too easy. For Updike, the obstacle between singularity

and universality is not structural, but merely our limited experience. If one amassed enough

experiential data, in other words, one might get closer to universality. (Think of the way in

which the rich cultural diversity of the US creates that aforementioned slippage between the

US, globalization, and universality.) The novel assumes that creating the hybrid Arab-

American identity of Ahmad Molloy, and other characters such as Shaikh Rashid, is a matter

of getting the details right, including the attempt to create “the effect of the real” in their

voices.4 But this requires the strange procedure of using archaic English syntax and diction to

create authentic-sounding voices of a young devout Muslim (“I am not of your faith”) and an

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Islamic scholar (“Do thou likewise, Ahmad”).5 The same problem occurs when Updike tries

to recreate the speech of New Jersey teenagers. Although the problem of translation arises in

conversations when Ahmad tries to use contemporary American slang, the novel lacks self-

reflexive uncertainty over the trauma and asymmetries of the relation of self and other and of

relations between all the other others that contribute to the construction of hybrid identities.

The hyphenated construction Arab-American in itself reminds me of Derrida’s declaration in

Monolingualism of the Other: “A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger

or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.”6 In exploring the impossibility of

giving an account of his own hyphenated Franco-Maghrebi identity in Monolingualism,

Derrida suggests that hybridity is not a matter of adding one thing to the other. Languages

and identities are not countable objects, the sum total of which might be universality.7 The

relation of universality to singularity is less calculable than that.

Turning to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and John Barth’s Book of Ten Nights and a

Night, I want to suggest that although, like Updike’s Terrorist, these are literary responses to

9/11 that attempt to reach beyond national boundaries and configure relations to Arab and

Muslim worlds, unlike Updike’s Terrorist, they do so with a sense that there is something

fundamentally incalculable at play, which gives them a self-reflexive sense of the

impossibility of their task. In calling this task impossible I do not mean to dismiss any idea of

intercultural understanding and so resign myself to absolute singularity. I am relying here on

Derrida’s idea of impossibility – an impossibility that is not simply the absence of the

possible. Upsetting a hard and fast distinction between the possible and the impossible,

Derrida argues that the impossible is “the chance of the possible.”8 What he means is that if

something is a possibility that suggests that we can proceed because the conditions are all

already set up. In which case, wonders Derrida, what is to be done? Doesn’t the act then

become automatic? Derrida is determined to keep open the possibility of strenuous ethical

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decision-making and ethical action, without succumbing to the deadening forces of technical

procedure. Both DeLillo’s Falling Man and Barth’s Book of Ten Nights and a Night respond

to 9/11 by self-reflexively questioning the possibility of such response. More than mere

playful postmodern complexity, I argue that this is an attempt to shoulder the overwhelming,

even infinite demands of ethical responsibility. It does, however, suggest that there are forms

of encounter that are vertical rather than horizontal for which there can be no preparation in

advance. In speaking about the arrival of the foreigner, Derrida speaks of a verticality in

some such encounters: “By verticality, what I meant was that the foreigner, what is

irreducibly arrivant in the other – who is not simply a worker, or a citizen, or someone easily

identifiable – is that which in the other gives me no advance warning and which exceeds

precisely the horizontality of expectation.”9

Falling Man explores the immediate aftermath of 9/11 within the lives of a group of

characters living in New York. The main character Keith is in one of the towers on the

morning of 9/11, and having survived the attacks, he then stumbles through a clumsy attempt

to reunite with his estranged wife and son, has an affair, and then ends up drifting around

airports, hotels and casinos as a professional poker player. Meanwhile his wife, Lianne, has

her own struggle to come to terms with the attacks, particularly through a series of encounters

with Arab and Muslim cultures and people, and through an attempt to find a rapprochement

with the idea of God. The novel further fragments spatially and temporally by also exploring

the mind of one of the attackers in the lead-up to 9/11. Shifts in narrative point-of-view

continually foreground the distances and differences across which acts of translation must

take place.

The violent collapse of that distance with the arrival of the other is one of DeLillo’s

key concerns regarding terrorism. When Keith visits a doctor shortly after surviving the 9/11

attacks, the doctor gets caught up in an explanation of how bits of flesh and bone of suicide

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bombers travel at such high speed that they embed themselves in the bodies of the victims of

the explosion, like “organic shrapnel” – surely a DeLillo invention.10 The violent arrival of

the other from afar is dramatized in the novel by a subplot in which DeLillo creates a

fictional 9/11 attacker, Hammad, who is followed from Hamburg to flight school in Florida,

and finally to Manhattan, a progression that emphasizes distance, movement, convergence,

and collision. As Hammad’s plane approaches the tower, and Hammad is sitting facing

backwards, DeLillo gives him a strange vision in which the world becomes partly

transparent, dissolving the material objects between him and his very material target.

He didn’t know the aircraft’s location but believed he could see straight out
back of his head and through the steel and aluminum of the aircraft and into
the long silhouettes, the shapes, the forms, the figures coming closer, the
material things.11

The narrative point-of-view shifts with most disruptive force when Hammad’s plane actually

hits the tower in which Keith is working. In a single sentence, across that moment of impact,

the narrative shifts from Hammad to Keith, collapsing the distance between them.

A bottle fell off the counter in the galley on the other side of the aisle, and he
watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way
and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then
skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then
fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith
Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall.12

There is an intriguing materiality about Hammad’s train of thought in the moments before the

attack. Rather than being swept up in religious fervor, he watches the bottle roll in the aisle;

even his dematerializing vision of transparency maintains its material focus. Just before that

he performs the oddly material act of fastening his seatbelt. All this is in keeping with

DeLillo’s construction of Hammad as a skeptic who does not share the ferocious

fundamentalism, verging on nihilism, of his fellow conspirators. DeLillo’s decision to

focalize the subplot through Hammad rather than his mentor, Amir, otherwise known as

Mohamad Atta, seems to be an attempt to translate the attacks into secular, material terms,

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rather than construe them as acts of absolute evil inspired by an otherworldly belief that may

then legitimize a response of “infinite justice.” At the same time, however, the presence of

Hammad in the novel remains an interruption that cannot be assimilated. Interestingly these

three sections are not included in the chapter numbering, but are instead given titles based on

the place where the action takes place. Is there something incalculable about the relation

between the story of Hammad’s life and the stories of Keith’s and Lianne’s lives? Is the story

of Hammad fundamentally inassimilable to the events of the novel?

At one point, as Lianne is replaying the footage of the planes hitting the towers, she

reflects on how the sky out of which the planes comes is not the sky as described by her

science textbook at school: “This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those

streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men’s intent. […] Every helpless

desperation set against the sky, human voices crying out to God and how awful to imagine

this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both.”13 The attempt to understand

how the sky as described in a science textbook relates to the sky that is a backdrop to human

desire, violence, terror, and belief – or how the material and the immaterial intersect – has

been a constant concern of DeLillo’s work. A passage about Keith’s poker games is typical

of DeLillo’s propensity for exploring secularized forms of transcendence, forms of

transcendence that grow out of the materiality of the world. The narrator explains that Keith

and his three poker buddies love the story of four friends who after a lifetime of friendship

and poker playing are buried in the same configuration as their places at the poker table: “It

was a beautiful story about friendship and the transcendent effects of unremarkable habit. It

made them reverent and thoughtful.”14 As they play, Keith and his friends develop codes and

prohibitions; ritualistic words take on profound meaning.

The small dry irony of these announcements faded after a time and the words
became a proud ritual, formal and indispensable, each dealer in turn, five-card
stud, and they loved doing this, straight-faced, because where else would they

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 encounter the kind of mellow tradition exemplified by the needless utterance
of a few archaic words.15

One of the problems of the novel is that it is difficult to limit transcendence to merely “the

effects of unremarkable habit,” when transcendence seems to have arrived as a violent

interruption. A distinct issue in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 was to give this event a

name.16 One of Lianne’s Alzheimer patients with whom she does storytelling sessions,

expresses the commonplace that the events of 9/11 are not assimilable: “But this, what

happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t

get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. […] Because they’re a

million miles outside your life.”17

The shifts in narrative point of view do not simply happen across a horizontal plane in

which self and other are fully accessible to one another. Rather there is a vertical axis to the

encounters. For the novel, the arrival of the other is also the arrival of God. In the dialogues

and narratorial reflections on God, the novel runs up against the impossibility of accounting

for these events on the horizontal plane of political and economic calculations. Two

characters, Nina and Martin, argue about whether these events can be understood in strictly

historical and materialist terms, or whether they are only acts of religious fanaticism. Is there

any possible translation for these events? Martin, who in the 1960s and 70s was a political

revolutionary in Europe and may have even committed terrorist acts, argues that the events of

9/11 are continuous with a world of “lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money,

empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West.” Nina, however, is convinced that “there’s

something else and it’s not history or economics.” To understand the role of God in these

events, she eventually uses an argument that recalls William James’s pragmatist attempt to

translate religion into materialist terms: “If you call it God, then it’s God. God is whatever

God allows.”18 As a result of her conviction that “we can’t forget God,” she decides that it is

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not possible for her to understand 9/11. She accuses Martin: “First they kill you, then you try

to understand them.”19

The translatability of the events of 9/11 is also at issue in the titles of the three parts of

the novel. All three parts of the novel are named after characters who have alternative names

or are misnamed. Part One is entitled “Bill Lawton,” which is taken from an incident in the

novel in which the youngest of three children mishears the name bin Laden as Bill Lawton.

The children play a game in which they imagine that their distorted invention, Bill Lawton, is

plotting another attack, creating a mythology around Bill Lawton, imagining a whole list of

key features, such as that he is bearded, he walks barefoot, he flies planes, he speaks thirteen

languages, and there are particular foods he plans to poison.20 This parody of the invention of

bin Laden as a media icon, as the face of evil about whom we learn strangely banal empirical

details (from kidney problems to family life), simultaneously opens and closes the gap

between the US and those who would attack it, playing with proximity and distance,

familiarity and alienation. From the US perspective of the novel, the name Bill Lawton seems

to familiarize evil, making it seem banal; yet at the same time, since we are aware of the

distortion, it makes the terrorist all the more distant and alien.

The title of the second part of the novel, “Ernst Hechinger,” is also taken from a

strangely peripheral element of the novel, but one that highlights the question of how one

might translate violent action across spheres such as religion, politics, and art. Ernst

Hechinger was Martin’s name when he was a political revolutionary, and perhaps a terrorist,

in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. When we meet Martin in the novel, he has become an

international art dealer and his political radicalism is restricted to dinner-table conversation.

The relationship between art and terrorism, or between representation and the event, is also

evoked in the title of Part Three of the novel, “David Janiak,” which is the real name of the

performance artist, Falling Man. That the novel bears his performing name, and Part Three

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bears his real name, emphasizes the novel’s perpetual interest in how the event may be

named, represented, and translated. Falling Man is thus self-conscious about how language

and representation may be complicit with either alienating or incorporating the terrorist event.

The figure of the terrorist in particular is neither fully alienated nor fully incorporated as the

novel plays out both possibilities, never resolving the antinomy in which it is both possible

and impossible to comprehend or to translate the event of terrorism.

On the face of it, Barth’s Book of Ten Nights and a Night does not even attempt such

an act of translation. It is a collection of short stories, none of which has anything to do with

the events of 9/11. However, the stories are held together by a frame-tale in which the writer

of those short stories meets his imaginary muse and tells her stories for eleven imaginary

“nights” from September 10 to September 21, 2001. The key problem of the frame-tale is the

question of how a writer should respond to a national crisis. How does a writer continue to

write in the ten days following 9/11? And what should the writer write about under such

circumstances? Must a writer give an account of the crisis? Barth’s own account of writing

Ten Nights and a Night is that he set himself the task of “defending the relevance of

irrelevance” after being perpetually questioned about the inappropriateness of irony after 9/11

– an explanation that is self-reflexively reproduced in the frame-tale of Ten Nights in an

imaginary conversation that the writer has with his muse.21

By irrelevant, of course,” she said, “we mean irrelevant to Black Tuesday’s

terrorism, American unilateralism, Islamic fundamentalism vs post-
Enlightenment Western rationalism, the fallout from economic globalization,
and like that? […] We don’t mean irrelevant to the human experience of life,
language, and storytelling.22

If irrelevance is relevant then this is a matter of putting things at a distance into contact with

one another, a task that Barth entrusts to aesthetic strategies such as narrative framing, self-

reflexivity, metonymy, and metaphor. However, although the frame-tale is very much pre-

occupied with the fact that “Ground Zero is still ablaze” while Graybard, the writer, attempts

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to keep writing, it is nonetheless located entirely in his house, his study, and his imagination.

Does this aestheticized detachment thoroughly compromise the book as a response to 9/11?

Does it become a tribute to the transcendent imagination that keeps itself remote from the

event so as not to be “swamped, drowned out, overwhelmed by circumambient, an

aphrodisiac Reality?”23

Barth has had an abiding interest in the way that storytelling and counting are

linguistically entangled with one another among terms such as counting, accounting,

recounting, giving an account. In its title and its frame-tale structure, Book of Ten Nights and

a Night is evidently paying homage to A Thousand Nights and a Night, a work that is

important to Barth not least for its suggestion that storytelling incalculably exceeds our finite

systems of calculation. The narrator tells us that frame-tales such as the story of

Scheherezade in Thousand Nights and a Night make the work larger than the sum of its parts.

The calculation is no longer merely a process of addition. It is no accident that Barth takes an

event named by a number, an absolutely singular calendar date, and writes a book that at least

partially dissolves the event into the mythic, universalized space named as “ten nights and a

night,” a space in which he is both the guest and the host of one of Arabic literatures great

works. Although the book is located so self-consciously in the imagination of an aging writer

living on the Chesapeake Bay, Barth relies on the universalizing resources of literature and

language so as not to be trapped within himself. To use Derrida’s argument in

Monolingualism, Barth only speaks one language, but it is not his own. “We only ever have

one language,” Derrida writes, “this monolingualism is not at one with itself.”24 This

monolingualism, he goes on, is “uniqueness without unity.”25 The universality that Derrida

argues for is not assembled by the addition of a plurality of discrete entities. Rather, it stems

from the fact that our absolute singularity is not in the first place our own. Equally, Barth’s

aestheticism is not self-consuming and self-enclosed; rather it is a literary and linguistic

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inheritance that binds and connects because it does not originate with him. Unlike Updike’s

realist aesthetic, it does not assume to overcome the self by amassing historical particulars,

but looks to the paradox of language as both singular and universal, both translatable and

untranslatable.

Storytelling bears the burden of integration, connection, continuity, and universality

in Barth’s response to 9/11 in Ten Nights because storytelling is an inheritance that makes all

of humanity our ancestors. Storytelling, for Barth, is an essentially human form of primal

bonding that provides the ground for and transcends the political formation of nations. The

book becomes an attempt to figure a kind of embedded transcendence, embedded, that is, in

biology, in language and in storytelling. The short stories of Ten Nights, which concern

themselves with the material lives of modern-day Americans, are embedded in a

dematerialized frame-tale in which a writer tells them to his imaginary muse who inhabits

both the Maryland tidewater marsh and a transparent house adjacent to it. Primordial

nakedness, transparency, even a mythic transcendence become important figures in the

frame-tale of Ten Nights. For Barth, at a time of national crisis, when attempts are made to

secure national integration and sovereignty through political and technical calculations and

procedures, the incalculable, irrelevant excess to be found in organic, aesthetic universalism

becomes a means of integration – but integration without closure.

Forms of integration and connection, both biological and technological, are the central

focus of a number of stories in Ten Nights. In one such story, Adam Bauer, who sets about

producing an electronic version of his family-tree, realizes that by extension the tree connects

everyone to everyone else. Adam begins to envision a transcendent computerized

genealogical program that could generate enough connections to lead back either to the God

who created Adam and Eve or to the “first single-celled earthly life-form.”26 With “enough

clicks” it might be possible to assemble humanity, not as an abstract entity in which

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particularity is overlooked, but as a sum total of particularities, which are understood as

biologically or spiritually embedded. In less transcendent moments such counting is used for

more historical, finite ends. Adam wrongly imagines every member of the planet as an

ancestor (based on the false reasoning that in a family tree that ends with me I have two

parents, four grand-parents, eight great-grandparents and so, in thirty generations, about two

billion ancestors), which leads him to the thought that, if so, he would have ancestors who

fought on both sides during the First Crusade. He goes on to imagine Al-Ghazali, the

eleventh century Islamic scholar, as one of his two billion plus ancestors. Adam Bauer’s

ultimate goal is to enable his grand-daughter and “her fellow Denver mallsters” to realize that

we are not “de novo,” but “all of us are indivisibly part of the ever-renewing tissue of life on

earth, […] and related to every other living thing.”27

Adam’s family-tree, based on the technological ability to generate masses of data,

enables then a globalized universalism based on addition. To some extent, each of the literary

responses to 9/11 by Barth, DeLillo, and Updike do something similar, recreating worlds that

lie at a distance to one another by amassing certain empirical facts. But DeLillo’s and Barth’s

work, unlike Updike’s, questions such a procedure towards universalism. Can we assume that

global encounters may end in a sense of universality? Can we use such procedures of

calculation to bring about the arrival of infinite, transcendent ideals? What happens, in other

words, when we try to globalize justice in the name of “infinite justice?” In his essay, “The

Violence of the Global,” Jean Baudrillard comments on a “deceptive similarity” between the

terms “universal” and “global.”28 He argues that the universalism of the Enlightenment has

shriveled into the globalization of “human rights, democracy and freedom” as “ghosts of a

vanished universal,” leaving only “the all-powerful global technostructure, set over against

singularities that are now returned to the wild and left to themselves.”29 By contrast with the

universal as a “culture of transcendence,” in the “virtual space of the global” there is only

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“the supremacy of positivity alone and of technical efficiency, total organization, integral

circulation, the equivalence of all exchanges.”30 It is in this sense that a certain

incalculability, untranslatability, and impossibility become important in our understanding of

how to proceed from singularity to universality, and towards an infinite justice that is always

yet to come.

1
Slavoj Žižek , Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates (London: Verso, 2002), p. 66.
2
Tom Ashbrook and John Updike, “John Updike”s Terrorist,” On Point Radio (June 13,
2006), accessed at http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/06/20060613_b_main.asp
3
Ashbrook and Updike, “John Updike’s Terrorist.”
4
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 141.
5
John Updike, Terrorist (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 10, 77.
6
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 11.
7
Derrida, Monolingualism, p. 65.
8
Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” The Late Derrida,
ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2007), p.
236.
9
Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility,” p. 243.
10
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), p. 16.
11
Ibid., pp. 238-239.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 134.
14
Ibid., p. 99.
15
Ibid.

14
16
Derrida reflects on this problem of the name, arguing that naming 9/11 by using the date
suggests the singularity of the event, turning it into “an ineffaceable event in the shared
archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar.” Giovanna Borradori
(ed.), Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 86.
17
DeLillo., p. 64.
18
“We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if
she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find
then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.” William
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience The Varieties of Religious Experience
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 55.
19
DeLillo, p. 113.
20
Ibid., p. 74.
21
John Barry, “The End of the World as He Knows It,” City Paper Online (April 7, 2004),
accesed at http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=6216.
22
John Barth, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Nights (New York: Houghton-
Mariner, 2005), p. 46.
23
Barth, Book of Ten Nights, 112.
24
Derrida, Monolingualism, p. 65.
25
Ibid., p. 68.
26
Barth, pp. 190-191.
27
Ibid., p. 196.
28
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (London:
Verso, 2003), p. 87.
29
Ibid., pp. 88, 92, 91.
30
Ibid, p. 92.

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