ABSTRACT
The Great Catastrophe bears the traits of what in former times was ascribed to transcendent powers: it remains concealed, and yet it makes its presence visible through the “diffusely and ubiquitously growing realization that things cannot continue in this way”. Peter Sloterdijk discusses how the darkening which occurred in the twentieth century comes about when wonder “becomes terror-mimetic and transitions to meditation on the monstrous”. The radicalization of philosophy must be taken literally: after a period of forgetfulness of the question of Being, the twentieth century sees a forced return to the wondrous roots of philosophy only to find them blackened by the monstrosities of a century which irrevocably mutated their nature. Readers of the American author H. P. Lovecraft, once relegated to the outskirts of acceptability and nowadays rightfully celebrated, will not fail to recognize familiar overtones in the above cited passage.
