Melencolia Illa Heroica: Françoise Proust, Walter Benjamin and `Catastrophe in Permanence’

Andrew Gibson

Origin: Static Issue 07
Content: Text

This essay draws on Françoise Proust’s work on Walter Benjamin to argue the crucial importance of a radical heresy for our times: what the present culture thinks of as catastrophe has no major bearing on thought. Catastrophe is not a question of singular manifestations of destructiveness — acts of terror, natural disasters, epidemics — at least, insofar as these supposedly prove by contrast the persistence of a non-catastrophic rule. Catastrophe is everywhere and permanent. The exception has become the rule. Catastrophe remains, in permanence, because of historicity. This becomes fully apparent with the onset of modernity. Modernity massively accelerates the production of catastrophe. We confront modernity as a radical paradox in which the fatum prevails as such precisely because of the absence of all foundations. Modern progress ceaselessly confirms itself in place as an indefinite work of ruination, not least when it hopes to put paid to that work. Only truth resists catastrophe in permanence: truth, that is, the exception to the exception which lays bare a normative injustice. Truth is the province of the victim. But we can identify with truth via the melancholia that puts the future under a taboo, seeks to pay our debt to the sufferings of the past, and thus to instruct the continuous catastrophe. It is the past that lies before us. The essay closes with an account of Cristian Mungiu’s film Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (2007), as offering a compelling image of catastrophe in permanence.

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Contributor:

Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London and Carole and Gordon Segal Professor of Irish Literature at Northwestern University for 2008. His many books include Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (Routledge, 1999), Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in `Ulysses’ (Oxford University Press 2002, paperback 2005), James Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2006) and Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford, 2006). Current projects include The Strong Spirit: The Writings of James Joyce 1898-1914, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2009) and Intermittency: An Anti-Schematics of Historical Reason (Edinburgh University Press).