More Than a Catastrophe / No More a Catastrophe

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of today’s most important, prolific, and celebrated French thinkers. With a duly acknowledged debt to Derridean deconstruction, Nancy has gone further to give us postdeconstructive perspectives on community, freedom, existence, sense, touch, the world, and religion. In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Nancy takes into account a contemporary phenomenon with a global social, economic, political, and ecological impact: the 2011 nuclear fallout in Fukushima, Japan. The incident was one of the catastrophic aftermaths of a major earthquake that struck the region, one that did not spare the nuclear plants located there. Underlying Nancy’s account is also one of Karl Marx’s principal themes: that money works on the principle of general equivalence—a principle that, in light of today’s world of global or globalized capital, can be said to apply almost everywhere and to almost everyone and everything. It is in that light that Nancy in this text argues that global capitalism is threatening to make every catastrophe in the world homogeneous, if not equivalent, to another. Nancy’s engagements with Marx and an actual event in the world initially give the impression that his moves here will parallel the later Jacques Derrida, who took on Marx and began to be invested in philosophical reflections on current political events, including the issue of nuclear power. Yet Nancy’s postdeconstructive trajectory in After Fukushima eventually demonstrates a different take on Marx and nuclear politics.

Derrida’s (2007) intervention on nuclear politics, published as “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” was written originally as a lecture for the Nuclear Criticism colloquium organized by the journal Diacritics at Cornell University in 1984. The year is indicative of the world picture that formed the backdrop to Derrida’s intervention: the world in the midst of the Cold War, where both the United States and the Soviet Union were caught up in a nuclear arms race, arming themselves with nuclear weapons capable of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and reducing all forms of diplomacy to the principle of nuclear deterrence or dissuasion. The world then seemed to have no other horizon than an apocalyptic one, which, for Derrida, also encompassed the possible obliteration of every possible archive. It was against that horizon of “remainderless destruction” that Derrida mobilized his critique in “No Apocalypse, Not Now” (407).¹

By 2012, the year After Fukushima was published in France, the Cold War had long ended. The geopolitical context in which Nancy’s book is situated is therefore clearly a different one. That does not mean that the world has been freed from the threat of nuclear catastrophe. To the contrary: civilian nuclear energy has become somewhat a norm as a means to supply power to almost every major city in the world; and with the installations of nuclear plants in those cities, a nuclear catastrophe with global impact has become an always imminent possibility. As early as 2002, the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy had highlighted that what binds the growing normalization of both civilian nuclear power and the sense of imminent nuclear catastrophe is some form of “equivalence”—one that ties the notion of catastrophe as possible to its necessary occurrence precisely because it is possible. It is that “equivalence” that marks the twenty-first century as “the time of catastrophes” (Dupuy 2002: 86, 13).² What is “terrible” about such a perspective of catastrophe, Dupuy continues, is that “not only one does not believe that [the catastrophe] will happen while one has all the reasons for knowing that it will happen, but also that once it happens it appears as arising from the normal order of things,” hence rendering its occurrence as “banal” (84–85).

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe can be said to be a catastrophe that we had every reason to know would happen: Was it not precisely an accident waiting to occur once a nuclear plant was built on a precarious site...