Of Divine Warning: Disaster in a Modern Age

Political theorist Jane Anna Gordon and philosopher Lewis Ricardo Gordon here offer a theory of disaster with a connection to society's construction of disastrous or monstrous people. The authors establish a link between these two types of warnings'”disasters and monsters'”through what they call 'œsign continua'� and proceed to read this relationship in its manifestations from antiquity to modern times. Their analysis includes a critique of social dissolution and material infrastructural devastation by neoliberal and neoconservative regimes; a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankensteinas an anti-colonial novel in which the creature, a warning of the disaster, offers the prototypical grammar of postcolonial thought as exemplified in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks; an exploration of the dynamics of speech, with constructions of what they call 'œideal exceptions,'� under colonial and postcolonial circumstances, including those of post-apartheid South Africa and the U.S. presidential election of 2008; and an articulation of cultural disaster or cultures in ruins and the generational challenges they pose. This book will be of interest to readers across the humanities and social sciences concerned with the ongoing force of mythic symbols in social and political life. This book offers a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary society and its impact on the construction of social and political life. The theory is premised upon what the authors call 'œthe sign continuum,'� where disaster spreads across society through efforts to evade social responsibility for its causes and consequences. Phenomena generated by such efforts include the social manifestation of monstrosity (disastrous people and other forms of living things) and an emerging antipolitics in an effort to assert rule and order. A crucial development is the attack on speech, a fundamental feature of political life, as manifested by the increased expectations of categories of people whose containment calls for shunning and silence. The book closes with an exploration of the significance of the mythic motif of eliminating monsters before dawn and its collapse in nihilistic times, where such conflicts now continue beyond dawn.