The Accident Waiting to Happen

<p>Catastrophe arrives, traditionally, in the manner of an accident: from the Latin <em>accidens</em>, meaning accident or chance; from <em>accido, to fall out, come to pass, happen, occur</em>. The accident is, in short, that which happens to us: it comes from without, and takes us by surprise. “We are passive with respect to the disaster,” writes Blanchot in <em>The Writing of the Disaster</em>, “but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” To experience catastrophe is to enter into the condition of passivity. This passivity is directly linked to the externality of the catastrophe: that it appears to arrive from outside the system. That we are <em>not just passive with respect to the catastrophe, but surprised by it</em>, follows necessarily, I have said, from this externality, but also from the peculiar relation of catastrophe to temporality: for it is not enough to say that the catastrophe happens swiftly or suddenly: the catastrophe, rather, is <em>a suspension of temporality itself</em>…</p>