It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.

This introductory chapter discusses the nature of explanation. It first distinguishes between the epistemic versus ontic conceptions of explanation; the former deems that explanations explain by subsuming a phenomenon under a general proposition while the latter regards explanations as physical entities residing and participating in the causal structure of the world. Using the example of entrepreneurial opportunities, the chapter describes how an ontological position plays a role in shaping an explanation. Explanation promotes understanding. However, tautological explanations, such as Barney’s (1991) explanation of competitive advantage based on firm resources, do not increase our understanding of the phenomenon in question. Then the chapter discusses the contrastive approach to explanation, showing that an explanation is necessarily incomplete. The discussion is followed by examining whether causal explanations have to be general and whether good explanations have to be interesting. The chapter ends with a brief description of the subsequent chapters of the book.

According to Heidegger, Being and Time engages in a “productive logic” that discloses the being of the entities in various fields by generating new concepts. However, he does not explain just how his productive logic operates. This chapter examines two of his typical practices that embody such a logic: verbalization (turning nouns into verbs, as in “the world worlds”) and the phenomenology of deficient modes (exceptions that prove the rule, such as being alone as a deficient mode of being-with). Verbalization invites us to form concepts that indicate the way of existing, or being actual, that distinguishes entities in a certain domain. The concept of a deficient mode challenges us to take a concept that is normally one of a pair of ontic opposites and transform it into an ontological concept that covers both opposites and describes fundamental features of a certain domain. In addition to explaining both of these forms of productive logic, the chapter considers and replies to several objections to these procedures.