Here is a refreshing essay on the concept of "catastrophe", which is experiencing a resurgence of interest in recent years in the social sciences. Debray rule (nicely) to their account doomsayers and began to carefully distinguish between "good uses of the disaster" cheap Cassandras. What he emphasizes, finally, is what about the disaster, on a metaphysical level, can participate in some ecology of mind - dark omens are always accompanied by a brighter tomorrow (it is an antidote, one of the last bulwarks against bureaucratic realism). As always with Debray is bright is iconoclast, is scholar, it reads without hunger.
