Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming?
Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for
decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe
scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental
disasters, technological meltdowns-perennial subjects of
literature, film, popular culture, and political debate. Is this
preoccupation with catastrophe questionable alarmism or complacent
passivity? Or are there certain truths that can be revealed only in
apocalypse? In The Future as Catastrophe, Eva Horn offers a novel
critique of the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats
as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the
catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in
Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives
of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War's apocalyptic sublime, to
the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and
end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always
haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and
planned. Considering works by Lord Byron, J. G. Ballard, and Cormac
McCarthy and films such as 12 Monkeys and Minority Report alongside
scientific scenarios and political metaphors, she analyzes
catastrophic thought experiments and the question of survival, the
choices legitimized by imagined states of exception, and the
contradictions inherent in preventative measures taken in the name
of technical safety or political security. What makes today's
obsession different from previous epochs' is the sense of a
"catastrophe without event," a stealthily creeping process of
disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes
offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with
apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and
politically accessible.
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