Falling Man and the Aesthetic of Terrorism

This paper aims at analysing Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man as an influential example of post-9/11 literature. The novel, in describing the shattering impact of the destruction of the symbolic coordinates which determine our experience of reality, has undoubtedly contributed to define a “before and after 9/ 11” cultural scenario abruptly marked by the presence of new meanings, new attitudes, new spaces and new categories. This complex reframing of reality engendered a new approach to the role of art, and especially of literature, in the Western world. The paper will demonstrate that Falling Man can be read a site of political (re)configuration, in which the return to the link between the creative process and the issue of terrorism that runs through much of DeLillo's writing, leads to move beyond categories and notions taken for granted thus responding to a public need for a reconceptualisation in relation with the new paradigms of terror/horror. The paper will argue that the novel’s narrativization of terrorism has introduced, in the contemporary panorama, important suggestions that now allow us to identify both a new form of terrorism deeply connected with the emergent metamodern sensibility a new aesth-ethical notions better suited to describe contemporary violence.