In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Interlude I Waste, Weapons, and Religion (Underworld II) Technology is our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the only superpower on the planet. The materials and methods we devise make it possible for us to claim our future. We don’t have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the systems and networks that change the way we live and think. But whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead, ever more complex, connective, precise, micro-fractional, the future has yielded, for now, to medieval experience, to the old slow furies of cut-throat religion. Maybe this is a grim subtext of their enterprise. They see something innately destructive in the nature of technology. —Don DeLillo, ‘‘In the Ruins of the Future’’ As we have seen, Derrida demonstrates throughout ‘‘Faith and Knowledge ’’ the irreducible relationship between religion and science, that is, between the miracle and the machine. I would like to begin this second part of Miracle and Machine with just a few words about Don DeLillo’s Underworld, since it is precisely this relationship that motivates, inspires, or moves DeLillo’s novel from beginning to end. The novel in effect mushrooms out of its ground-zero setting in New York City’s Polo Grounds, that miracle moment immortalized by Giants announcer Russell Hodges (a name with thirteen letters) when Bobby Thompson (also thirteen letters) of the New York Giants hits a baseball off 噛13, Ralph Branca, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, into the stands on October 3—that is 103 10/3—1951 (four thirteens that, for anyone who is counting, do indeed add up to fifty-two) (see U 678).1 We then follow the unlikely voyage of that infamous memorabilia ball as it passes from one hand to another, finally coming to be owned by Nick Shay, the main protagonist of Underworld , who as a kid listened to the legendary baseball game on his portable radio in Brooklyn.2 By the mid-1990s, Shay has moved out west—just like the Dodgers and the Giants—and is living in Phoenix, in the desert, working as a dealer for a waste containment and disposal company. From the magic of baseball and that miracle year of the Giants, we seem to have come—or fallen—a mighty long way, from the sacred to the very profane, from heroism and belief to waste and trash. But if this really is a fall, the profane will not be without its own religion . It all depends on how you look at it, for in Underworld one man’s trash is another man’s religion. As Nick Shay says, ‘‘Waste is a religious thing’’ (U 88): ‘‘We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations ’’ (U 102). For Nick Shay, for Don DeLillo, it seems, we misunderstand our relationship to waste, our growing preoccupation, even obsession with it—that is, with our garbage, our recyclables, our sewage, our landfills, our nuclear materials, and so on—so long as we consider them a mere nuisance to be jettisoned, disposed of, recycled, or transformed . As Nick later speculates, deep down ‘‘maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard’’ (U 809). That’s because waste is, in some sense, just the underside of our inventions and teletechnology, not just the by-product but in many ways the main product of entire industries that do not just result in waste but aim at creating it through consumption, conspicuous and otherwise, and sophisticated machines of death and destruction. I am speaking, of course, among other things, of our contemporary arms industry, which produces everything from grenades and laser-guided missiles to nuclear weapons. It is no coincidence, then, that Nick Shay’s younger brother, Matt, works in weapons research and that one of his worksites is an isolated research lab in the desert, one of the privileged sites of religion and revelation (U 211), as Derrida recalls in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ but also, as we know, of nuclear technology. The first nuclear-bomb test site in New Mexico was thus called ‘‘Trinity’’ (U 529), and the desert around that area is still, we read in Underworld, a place of ‘‘awe and terror’’ (U 71). ‘‘This was the supernatural underside of the arms race. Miracles and visions,’’ says the narrator (U 452). As Matt’s wife, Janet, says...

Share