Title: 9/11 as a Hyperobject: A Rereading of Falling Man

Abstract: The 9/11 terrorist attack in the United States, an unexpected and urgent political event, can be taken as the hyperobject ontologically. In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the fractured sense of time experienced by Alzheimer’s disease patients reflects human’s failure of temporal perception, embodying the temporal undulation of the hyperobject; performance art, through bodily enactment, reveals the ungraspability that humans face when trying to comprehend the nonlocality of the hyperobject; the distortion and misreading of soundscapes reveal how the viscosity of the 9/11 event as a hyperobject traps Muslim sounds in an inescapable entanglement. DeLillo deconstructs the monolithic official political discourse in the novel and reveals the cognitive predicament of the postmodern subject in public crises. Although it is hard to get close to the essence of the 9/11 event as a hyperobject, humanity can learn to cope with its aftermath by reflecting constantly amid failures and setbacks.

Keywords: Falling Man, hyperobject, Alzheimer’s disease, performance art, soundscapes

Authors: Heping Qi, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China; Zeming Hu, School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.003