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Epilogue Miracle and Mass Delusion (Underworld IV) As we have seen, Derrida’s ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ ends and then ends again. The first twenty-six sections, presumably presented by Derrida at the conference in Capri, seem to have called for a long post-scriptum, and that post-scriptum, at the moment of the signature, seems to have called for the concluding paragraph we have just looked at in such detail. But, like every text that demands to be read, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ requires not just faithful imitation and repetition but displacement and translation . It calls for a countersignature, for a testimony that runs the risk not of verifying or elucidating the text but of leading it astray or leading it to be forgotten. Such is the risk this book has run by introducing, twice interrupting, and now concluding a reading of Derrida’s ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ by means of a few reflections on Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Like all literature, as we saw in the previous chapter, Underworld is related to the experience of the miracle, to the experience of a testimony that is equivalent to asking someone to believe in you as they would believe in a miracle. But Underworld is a novel not only of but about the miracle. It is a novel whose very theme is the miraculous and the everyday, the miracle of the everyday and the miracle that suddenly disrupts the everyday. The penultimate section of the novel, ‘‘Part 6: Arrangement in Gray and Black (U 657–782),’’ returns us to the time frame of the opening sequence, that is, to the days immediately following that famous baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers spoken of in the Prologue. Set in Brooklyn from fall 1951 to summer 277 1952, this part of the novel features a high school science teacher, Albert Bronzini, who finds the miraculous in the streets of Brooklyn but believes God to be ‘‘a mass delusion’’(U 683); it features Nick Shay, the main character, accidentally discharging a shotgun in a Brooklyn basement, in a kind of underworld, causing him to be sent to a reformatory for teenagers and then a Jesuit halfway house; finally, it features many stories of faith and belief, including several around the figure of Nick’s mother, Rosemary, so close to Rosary, who works for a lawyer by day and beads sweaters at night (U 755, 757).1 It’s enough for Rosemary to get by, materially and spiritually, but it seems that she, like everyone else, is looking for something more. As the narrator puts it, ‘‘sometimes faith needs a sign. There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything’’ (U 757). Well, in the following section of the novel, an Epilogue entitled Das Kapital (783–827), that sign comes, and it comes—as in the Prologue —to someone named Edgar. Recall that in the prologue to Underworld , a reproduction of the Pieter Bruegel painting The Triumph of Death drifts down from the upper decks of the Polo Grounds into the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, who is at once fascinated and repelled by its scenes of horror, death, and decay. Hoover, we learn later in the novel, is obsessed with purity and driven in both his professional and private life by a fear of infiltration and contamination (U 560). Familiar with the details of modern weapons technology, he knows that pathogenic bacteria are ‘‘every bit as destructive as megaton bombs. Worse, in a way, because the sense of infiltration was itself a form of death’’ (U 557). And so he dreams of being interred in ‘‘a lead-lined coffin of one thousands pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and vandals. . . . Leadlined , yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout’’ (U 577–78). In the terms of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ Hoover dreams of a body that would remain safe and sound, indemnified and invulnerable, protected from every outside contaminant, fortified by the phantasm—for it is a phantasm—that the body is not already and from the beginning parasited from within by all kinds of germs and bacteria . He’s a real case, this J. Edgar, a limit case for a law of purity and contamination. As Dominique Laporte succinctly put it in his infamous History of Shit, ‘‘The...

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