After Fukushima: The equivalence of catastrophes

After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes

Volumn , Issue , 2014, Pages 1-64

  Nancy, Jean Luc ^a   Mandell, Charlotte ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84923275049     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (20)

1. Zendegi va digar hichin English, Life, and Nothing More, 1991.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter from Rousseau to Voltaire, August 18, 1756, in Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. J. A. Leigh (Geneva, 1967), 4:37-50
3. translated by R. Spang: http://www.indiana.edu/~enltnmt/texts/JJR%20letter.html.
4. Adorno uses this expression, and explains it as "a culture that was rehashing its traditional values of truth, beauty and goodness as if nothing had happened" (Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002], 119).
5. According to the title of the book by Charles Morazé, Les Bourgeois conquérants, XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1957).
6. Thinking about catastrophe or catastrophes already, remarkably and painfully, has its "tradition," which stems at least from Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders, and which Paul Virilio ardently pursues, along with many others. I do not claim to add anything or even to join a continuity: I am content to punctuate the present moment. What's more, books on catastrophe or catastrophes-or disasters, in English-have become very numerous. Thus Annie Le Brun, recently republishing a 1989 text on the subject, can write: "Only twenty or so years had to pass for reflections on catastrophe, ever more specialized, to become almost a genre in itself, ranging from lament to how-to manual" (Perspective dépravée [Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 2011], 7). We will try to avoid lament as well as manual, complaint, and fascination, and above all the suspension of thought.
7. Paul Celan, "Stretto," in Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris, trans. Robert Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 68.
8. Text sent in French by its author. The Japanese text is published in Gendai-Shiso 39, no. 7 (Tokyo: Seidosha, May 2011): 34-37.
9. Ryoko Sekiguchi, Ce n'est pas un hasard (Paris: POL, 2011).
10. "The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man." Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W.Norton, 1961), 92.
11. ("Die Schicksalsfrage der Menschenart scheint mir zu sein, ob und in welchem Maße es ihrer Kulturentwicklung gelingen wird, der Störung des Zusammenlebens durch den menschlichen Aggressions- und Selbstvernichtungstrieb Herr zu warden. In diesem Bezug verdient vielleicht gerade die gegenwärtige Zeit ein besonderes Interesse. Die Menschen haben es jetzt in der Beherrschung der Naturkräfte so weit gebracht, daß sie es mit deren Hilfe leicht haben, einander bis auf den letzten Mann auszurotten." "Das Unbehagen in der Kultur," in Gesammelte Werke [London: Imago, 1972], 14:506.)
12. Günther Anders, Hiroshima ist überall: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki [Hiroshima Is Everywhere: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki] (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1995).
13. G. Anders, Le Temps de la fin (Paris: L'Herne, 2007), 115.
14. Interview with Jean-Claude Trichet in Le Monde, October 29, 2011.
15. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism'" (1949), trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, http://archive.org/details/HeideggerLetterOnhumanism1949.
16. Cf. Erich Hörl, "Die technologische Bedingung," introduction to the volume of the same name (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 28. We should, moreover, engage in questioning what is comprised by "science" (assuming we agree that this word can be used in the singular), what is ascribable to "technology," and in what respects it is or is not necessary to pair one with the other.
17. Cf. "De la struction," in Aurélien Barrau and Jean-Luc Nancy, Dans quels mondes vivonsnous? (Paris: Galilée, 2011),
18. A little while after I wrote these lines, I come across Haruki Murakami's speech when he received the International Prize of Catalonia in June 2011. Speaking of Fukushima, he referred to the Japanese culture of the ephemeral-"we cherish the cherry blossoms of spring, the fireflies of summer and the red leaves of autumn"-to contrast with the irremediable destruction "of ethics and values" (Planting Seeds Together: Collaborative Translation initiative inspired by Haruki Murakami's Catalunya International Prize speech on the senri no michi website: http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2728).
19. Jean-Luc Nancy, "War, Law, Sovereignty-Techne¯," in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 117.
20. http://www.sofrphilo.fr/?idPage=12&page=conference&numPage=1&idConference=39