From ancient tragedy to early modernity, the concept of catastrophe referred to the denouement of a drama; it was by definition unexpected: a turning point, a temporal rupture, even a revolution. Robin Wagner-Pacifici conceives events as symbolic breaks in the unremarkable continuity of everyday life, but that definition seems inadequate when our news cycle is flooded with a constant stream of new disasters. Many such tragedies are not finite insofar as they reflect the cumulative impacts of global warming and in the long run contribute to “slow death.” At the same time, violent regional conflict in Sudan, Putin’s war on Ukraine, and Netanyahu’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are not only unbearable to witness but also seemingly interminable. When catastrophe appears not as a finite exception but as a new norm, how might we reconceive this key historical-theoretical concept?

This question was a central concern of Walter Benjamin from his 1923 essay on “German Decline” to his late “On the Concept of History,” where he represented history itself as a single ongoing catastrophe. “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe,” writes Benjamin. “It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” Benjamin’s revolutionary pessimism demanded the critical disruption of this catastrophic continuity, a process he likened to pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of late capitalism. ​​In solidarity with Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno tasked critical theory with exposing the fragility of a social order which insists that catastrophe is necessary.

Despite the insights of this tradition in dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis, which conceived of trauma as a structure of repetition, an event-centric conception of catastrophe as a singular exception prevails. This seminar will explore processual approaches to theorizing catastrophe that illuminate our contemporary conjuncture of fast and slow disasters, from anti-migrant and racist carceral regimes to the “crisis ordinariness” of neoliberal precarity (Berlant). While Hayden White principally had the Holocaust in mind when he theorized “the modernist event,” which defies formal and perspectival unification, the challenge today is much more about grasping dispersed, peripheral, and structural “slow violence” (Nixon). Anthropocenic and “planetary” approaches (Latour/Chakrabarty) to the “hyperobject” (Morton) of climate change have, by now, successfully broken down the assumed finitude of catastrophes—a shift informed by postcolonial and indigenous understandings of settler violence and genocide as well as afropessimist emphases on the ongoing and structural anti-Black aftermaths of slavery. The organizers of this seminar invite presentations that draw upon various theoretical standpoints that help us to rethink the concept of catastrophe in light of the representational challenges and historical burdens of our moment.