Crisis as post-disaster narrative: Gothic speculation after the zombie disaster

Kuvaus

Crisis as post-disaster narrative: Gothic speculation after the zombie disaster
How do we think the unthinkable? The paradigmatic response to this unsettling question amounts to a silent metonymy: the inability to think the unthinkable disaster is displaced by the speculative narrative of the post- disaster crisis. Rather than an empirical condition, the crisis seems to refer to a Gothic speculation which subverts the binary foundations of human agency. Nevertheless, it is a subversion that enables agential imagination. The proposed paper argues that human agency survives the mute terror of the unthinkable by displacing it with the articulate horror of the “unimaginable.” Specifically, the speculative aftermath of the zombie disaster is the narrative gesture that turns a blank page on the subject’s commitments to the pre- disaster order. The endangered subject in crisis is above all an enduring object of narrative speculation. The speculative horror articulates not so much the limits of human agency as the imaginative horizon of the “human.” If we do live under the constant ‘surveillance’ of the future disaster, to put it in Blanchot’s terms, we stand narratively exposed to our present passivity. Conversely, the human subject survives the terror of its passivity by re-imagining its subjectivity through the horrors of a post-disaster scenario.

Aikajakso	27 lokak. 2021
Tapahtuman otsikko	Crises - Virtual Conference on Crises 2021
Tapahtuman tyyppi	Konferenssi
Sijainti	Jyväskylä, SuomiNäytä kartalla