ABSTRACT
As the title attests, this chapter examines problems of disaster, ruin, and permanent catastrophe. It is a reflection of what is at stake in a society that ignores the problems raised from the first chapter through the seventh—namely, the responsibility human beings have for human existence or human reality. Colonization, after all, is an effort to impose upon human reality a logic of degrading existence for the sake of being. This, the author argues, is a disaster that ruins humankind into an additional logic of value as permanence. This logic entails a paradoxical catastrophe as a failure not to live permanently but to live as deserving life even in the face of its impermanence. The path taken here is through outlining the theory of disaster offered by the Jane Anna Gordon and the author in their book Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age—namely, their idea of sign continua, wherein disaster is a sign that continues from one sufferer to another—and then moving into an analysis of culture in ruins, in which at first colonization and then arrogant governance impose a form of conservatism in which the future is foreclosed to the young through which they are no longer afforded youth and possibility. This is, in effect, a clue to the disaster wrought by the philosophical anthropology born from colonization in which being and Being—a theme under critique in discussions of theodicy throughout the book—attempt to colonize or cover over reality. This is revealed not only in the rationalizations of institutions of dehumanization inherited from colonial mentalities but also in deluded notions they offer of a nature that is supposed to be concerned with human existence as revealed in the ongoing fallacious logic of conquest in the face of pandemics such as COVID-19, the disease born of the novel coronavirus.
