Becoming-Mineral: Desert Timescapes and Post-Neoliberal Geontopower in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Abstract

In the age of the Anthropocene, capitalism’s expansion and damage to the planet can ultimately be seen as “becoming extinction” (McBrien). This essay discusses post-neoliberal structurations of space, time, and consciousness by examining the “desert timescapes” featured in Don DeLillo’s philosophical novel, Point Omega (2010). The desert, placed at the novel’s heart, is analyzed as a prominent religious, aesthetic, and philosophical topos of the crisis of human subjectivity. Furthermore, the investigation of the conceptions in the novel of the “Omega Point” (as the ultimate point of consciousness toward which the universe is heading) reveals an interplay of transcendence and immanence about matter and human evolution and offers a geological perspective of “becoming-mineral.” Finally, this paper claims that the “desert timescapes” polychronic perspective challenges anthropocentrism and the ontopolitics of the neoliberal state, and paves the way for reflection on “geontopower” (Povinelli), Life and NonLife in a geophilosophical mode of planetary thinking. (PK)