Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept

Hardcover, vi + 200pp, NOT ex-library. Clean and bright throughout, unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Issued without a dust jacket. -- A critical reexamination of the role of catastrophe in shaping modern intellectual, cultural and political discourse. Far from treating catastrophes as isolated or naturalized events, this volume conceptualizes them as historically operative phenomena - events that do not merely disrupt but catalyze paradigmatic shifts in thought, policy and collective imaginaries. The book assembles a set of interdisciplinary essays exploring how catastrophes have been imagined, narrated, instrumentalized and theorized across time, with a particular focus on Central European intellectual traditions, post-Enlightenment modernity and the political theology of crisis. The volume emerges in response to a renewed scholarly and public interest in catastrophic risk, intensified by global crises such as climate change, terrorism, pandemics and economic collapse. It situates this urgency within a genealogy that runs from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the Holocaust, the Cold War and into the Anthropocene. Throughout, the contributors interrogate how modern societies have attempted to control or interpret catastrophic events through administrative, scientific, theological and aesthetic frameworks - often oscillating between epistemic rupture and mythic continuity. Deborah Coen's essay opens the volume by juxtaposing narrative and instrumentation - "the storyteller and the seismograph" - to examine how seismic science and literary form converged in 19th-century Europe to produce new models for understanding disaster. David Bates explores catastrophe through cybernetic paradigms, focusing on mid-20th-century notions of order, plasticity and systemic collapse. Eva Horn, drawing from apocalyptic literature and visual art, tracks the emergence of the "last man" trope as a modern figure of existential finality. Historical catastrophes are reframed as loci of political and institutional transformation. Killen's contribution on industrial accidents in interwar Germany uncovers how labor risk became a crucible for modern state rationality and bureaucratic governance. Lebovic's chapter probes the conceptualization of a "permanent state of catastrophe" in the jurisprudential thought of German-Jewish judges, revealing catastrophe as an embedded condition of legal modernity. Further essays explore post-Holocaust trauma theory (Dagmar Herzog), Jewish theological approaches to eschatology (Martin Kavka) and the political use of catastrophe in late 20th-century climate discourse (Alyssa Battistoni & Matthias Dörries). One of the features of the volume is its critical engagement with climate catastrophe as both concept and cultural device. Battistoni analyzes the dual semantics of 'kata' (downfall) and 'streiphen' (turn), foregrounding the ambivalence of catastrophe as either apocalyptic collapse or revolutionary transformation. Dörries historicizes the term "climate catastrophe" in Germany and traces its migration from scientific discourse to public consciousness, illuminating how rhetorical strategies have shaped responses to global warming. Through case studies, theoretical analysis and historical contextualization, Catastrophes provides a robust toolkit for scholars of history, political theory, science and technology studies, and disaster humanities. Its insights into risk, trauma, epistemology and governance make it an essential contribution to contemporary debates on resilience, preparedness and the politics of precarity. In a time when catastrophe functions as both a real threat and a conceptual metaphor, this book challenges readers to rethink the ethical, philosophical and institutional frameworks that structure our understanding of crisis. It calls for a historicized awareness of how catastrophes are anticipated, managed and remembered - and how they condition the very possibility of the future.