ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at resilience through its application to disaster sites; or rather, the ambiguous
position of resilience within disaster recovery. Given the temporality of resilience, such that it
focuses on enabling the recovery-to-come, resilience provides no steps by which something
broken can be made ‘resilient’ – rather it works through the anticipation and preparation for the
future. ‘Recovery’ is addressed in only the future tense. The chapter engages with this temporal
ambiguity, arguing that while resilience is symptomatic of neoliberal governmentality, as many
have suggested (Joseph, 2013; Walker and Cooper, 2011), it is also practically functionless with
regard to disaster. It is a chimera that provides the illusion of security by anticipatorily erasing the
prospect of disaster (and also retrospectively concealing its horror). Ironically then, despite the
centralisation of the disaster event within resilience policy the functionality of resilience is to erase
the potential emergency, through discursive containment within anticipatory contingency
planning and the retrospective narration of emergencies as stories about recovery. Resilience does
not confront the disaster event but rather provides a sophisticated chimera by which insecurity
can be ignored. To expose this functionality, it is necessary to explore that which we are supposed
to forget – disaster space in the present tense.
