Imagining the "Unheard-Of" in Contemporary Cinema

Inspired by Jacques Derrida's essay "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)" and its call for an openness to the "unheard-of" of disaster, the article investigates how disaster is imagined in contemporary cinema. Specifically, the essay sets up a three-fold typology constructed around the different ways in which a cluster of disaster films released between 1998 and 2011 conceive the dynamic between a cataclysmic event and the risk of dramatic changes in the politico-historical trajectories of the imagined human communities impacted by said event. While such taxonomy first of all offers insights into the internal landscape of the disaster film genre itself, the essay takes as its underlying premise the intuition that fictional narratives about disaster also has a significant bearing on our common sensibility for disasters and thus, ultimately, on the politics of disaster