The French novels discussed in this book crystallize how, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a ‘key inflexion point’ comes to pass at which the exponential growth rate of global capitalist activity is having ‘an exponential impact upon levels of environmental stress and distress within capital's ecology’ (Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, 253); in which ‘we are going from the revolutionary era … to the revelationary era,’ as ‘the Earth’ seems to become ‘too small for us’ (Depardon and Virilio, ‘Native Land Stop Eject,’ 22–23). Their underlying struggles are truly those of characters transitioning from the ‘preoccupation’ with the re-establishing of ‘“vanishing” existential spaces’ to ‘a coming to terms with existing in a networked, diverse, multipolar and densely populated world’ (Conley, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory, 8). Put more simply, the novels seem to be written primarily in response to what is, for Philippe Vasset, the overriding question animating his writing: ‘Comment habiter ici ?’ (Personal Interview). How to live in the murky here of deterritorialization and globalization, in which the relinquishing of that horizon harboring distances yet unconquered disorients the would-be Modern, or Post-Modern, for whom space is ‘no longer a setting in which heroic human beings move about’ (Conley, Spatial Ecologies, 4). Literature written upon such an impulse refuses the facile stagings of the global and seeks a new compass; it becomes a matter of global positioning: that is, a means of forging relationships to local geographies of increasingly globalized cognitive and ethical parameters.

The cultural theorists whose ideas have been central to this study insist that we must be wary of ready-made stagings of the global, since such stagings—or the anxieties that drive them—are easily manipulated by hegemonic forces. In today's world, commercial visual media hold us hostage as so many téléspectateurs [television viewers], employing, as Virilio puts it, their ‘huge arsenal of “weapons of mass communication”’ (Armitage, Virilio and the Media, 107) to promote the kinds of fear and borderline panic that drive up ratings. In a manifestation of the schizophrenia of globalized capitalism, such ‘cartographies de la terreur’ [cartographies of terror] (Despentes, Vernon Subutex 3, 131) are interspersed with beautifully filmed commercials insisting that corporate giants are preparing a bright tomorrow of ‘transparency, flexibility, continuity, [and] movement,’ (Augé, ‘Planetary Landscapes,’ 113).