Between the Wrong Side of Cybernetic Heaven and the Righteous Side of Human Hell: Nonbeing Quality of Cosmopolisâ Protagonist

Andriana Hamivka

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Chapter 6 Between the Wrong Side of Cybernetic Heaven and the Righteous Side of Human Hell: Nonbeing Quality of Cosmopolisâ Protagonist

In: Entanglements in the Age of the Posthuman

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Andriana Hamivka

Andriana Hamivka
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 100â116

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004741553_008

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Abstract

At the core of Cosmopolis (2003), by Don DeLillo, stands a day-long car journey of Eric Parker through New York. The limo represents his ideal of a futuristic microenvironment. Beyond mere anonymity, Eric believes that, as Randy Laist (2010) put it, the vehicle provides him with abstraction, as it distances him from the world physically. At the same time, it connects him to it through its complex televisual apparatus that permeates the interior of the limo. While he remains inside the car and under the umbrella of protection it offers, Eric can roam the city â through the poverty, turmoil and alterity of all kinds â without actually participating in it in any existential way. Eric can speculate about the future disappearance of everything, considering that inside his car everything has already vanished. As a piece of technology, the limousineâs main function is to convince him of a solipsistic detachment even from the possibility of exteriority. It seems like the outer reality is too imperfect and primitive for him to fit in. So, in Russel Scott Valentinoâs words (2007), his thought is divorced from his body. His capacity to see into the financial patterns along with somehow visionary powers to see things in the screens before they happen in material life make him conclude he would find authenticity in the digital environment. Trapped in the space of in-betweenness of real and virtual worlds, the protagonist is, thus, left in what Lacan calls âbetween two deathsâ (1992: 270): one â symbolic, another one â real, the space of nonbeingness. The final moment, with Benno standing behind Eric ready to shoot, leaves him in the limbo of nonbeing, between deaths, more than a human, less than a hyper-/cyber-human.

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Entanglements in the Age of the Posthuman

Series:Â Critical Posthumanisms, Volume: 8

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004741553

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 05 Dec 2025

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Chapter 6 Between the Wrong Side of Cybernetic Heaven and the Righteous Side of Human Hell: Nonbeing Quality of Cosmopolisâ Protagonist

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Chapter 6 Between the Wrong Side of Cybernetic Heaven and the Righteous Side of Human Hell: Nonbeing Quality of Cosmopolisâ Protagonist