Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In this essay I aim to reflect upon the cultural life of security in our contemporary moment. Doing so requires extending security beyond its essentially political functions, i.e., going beyond the currently dominant perspective according to which security is first and foremost an affective and ideological tool of legitimating states of exception. [1] The remarkable success of (in)security — understood as both a concept and a logic — is often explained by its presumed function to manipulate us into accepting untrammeled state power and the loss of civil liberties. If we are not satisfied with this explanation, we need an account of what security offers us on the level of the imagination. As I want to show in my reading of DeLillo, security holds out uses to the imagination that are much more complex and far‐reaching than an incitation for the desire of authoritarian leadership. [2]
Repository Citation
Voelz, Johannes. "The Future’s Epic Now: The Time of Security and Risk in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss3/9