The Culture of Disaster

“In this sweeping book, Marie-Hélène Huet analyzes some famous disasters and some lesser-known ones, natural ones and interiorized ones. But in both cases, she renders these events unfamiliar to us to better translate their enigmatic principle. Always elegant, she turns away from sensationalism, the hypervirulence of calamity to reveal instead disaster as the ‘endless terror’ that haunts and defies humanity and has been set to confront modernity.”

–Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University

“Marie-Hélène Huet flags us down with a peril advisory for our era. Probing relentlessly into the calamitous contours of post-Enlightenment thought, her book establishes a large and brilliant range of motion with which to measure a new sensibility and critical areas of desensitization, ethically and politically pitched. In many ways reaching toward the outer limits of human responsibility, Huet turns in a refreshingly pertinent, thoroughly unique tour de force. Brave and knowledgeable, The Culture of Disaster travels to the frontiers of sense-making, where things crumble, crash, and quake only to be recuperated by sense and voracious systems of meaning. I will carry this book with me as my special guide to the catastrophic tropes that rule our clouded horizon.”

–Avital Ronell, New York University

Marie-Helene Huet is the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French at Princeton University. She is the author of numerous books, including Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution and Monstrous Imagination.