Longing for a Catastrophe:Cataclysmic Kairosand the Aesthetisation of Disasters from Pre-modernity to the Anthropocene

Abstract

In a famous scene of 2012, a catastrophic film directed by Roland Emmerich in 2009, the hero, Jackson Curtis, flies an aircraft over a collapsing landscape. This well-known visual element, re-elaborated in countless other disaster movies, may serve us as an anchorage for an argument debating the persistence of pre-modern ideas and schemes of imagination in the contemporary global culture. In this paper, I will strive to show how the Anthropocenic self-awareness remains rooted in secularised religious thought by re-elaborating the concept of kairos. This argument evoking the remote Mediterranean origins of the globalised Western culture will elucidate the paradoxical delectation in the images of global cataclysms that can be observed in such works as Emmerich’s 2012 and the cinematographic genre exemplified by this movie. The concept of kairos, constantly transcribed during its pre-modern and early modern history, will feed the aesthetic notion of the sublime, contributing to the creation of an ambivalent, yet extremely rewarding vision of disaster, a gate to a profoundly transformed existence,that enlivens the contemporary culture.