Crisis, Catastrophe and the Shaking of the World (6/7)

This essay offers a journey through the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of the world’s upheaval. By bringing together the Greek, Biblical and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it explores the ways in which civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to waver. Published here as a series of seven essay-chapters, this text follows a demanding yet essential thread: to understand whether catastrophe is a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our age. Here follows the sixth part.

Decision and War: Arjuna, the Epic Figure of the Mahābhārata, Confronting Carl Schmitt

To ward off catastrophe? It cannot be fought. It exerts its own gravity, haunts us, infiltrates the very forms of reason. To separate crisis from catastrophe? Perhaps that is no longer possible: the former has become a rhythm, the latter a horizon. What we call governing is thus reduced to a fragile art: remaining on the line of uncertainty where the world oscillates between its end and its beginning anew.

Schmitt’s thesis that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” elevates crisis into the moment of truth of the political. Yet this elevation can only be fully understood when situated within the broader horizon of catastrophe. For Schmitt, the state of exception never emerges as a mere accident affecting an otherwise stable order. It always unfolds against the backdrop of a real or anticipated threat of the collapse of the juridical and institutional order. Catastrophe thus fulfills an essential hermeneutical function: it provides the very condition through which crisis becomes intelligible, thereby justifying the necessity of a sovereign decision capable of preventing the dissolution of the political into anomie.^[1]

Within this perspective, the vocabulary of urgency, necessity, and existential peril serves not merely to describe an extreme situation. It helps constitute the stage upon which sovereignty can appear. Catastrophe becomes less an empirical event than a conceptual framing, a dramatic threshold where the political is reduced to its pure possibility. Far from being contingent, the exception functions as a dispositif continually returning law to its extra-normative origin: the act of deciding.

Such a dramaturgy nevertheless calls for critical distance. By identifying catastrophe as the founding moment of the political, Schmitt tends to naturalize a vision of the world in which collective survival is perpetually threatened, thereby legitimizing a capacity for decision without genuine limits. Such a framework obscures the possibility that legal orders may themselves incorporate mechanisms of internal resilience: graduated procedures, institutional safeguards, and exceptional norms specifically designed to prevent crises from degenerating into collapse. By presupposing that only a sovereign decision can avert catastrophe, Schmitt constructs a topology of the political in which the exception becomes the implicit keystone of all normativity.

Seen in relation to catastrophe, the Schmittian crisis therefore appears less as an objective fact than as a conceptual structure intended to legitimize a form of power that affirms itself through the suspension of the rule. The fragility revealed by the exception concerns not only the juridical order itself; it also affects the very mode of thought that transforms it into the instrument of sovereignty. By closely binding together decision and catastrophe, Schmitt offers a conception of the political grounded in extremity, at the risk of confusing the exception with the latent norm of collective life.

Giorgio Agamben carries this logic to its point of reversal. Arguing in Homo Sacer and State of Exception that the boundary between norm and exception has dissolved, he maintains that the state of exception is no longer an interruption but the contemporary paradigm of government.^[2] Schmitt’s sovereign, the concentrated figure of power, gives way to a diffuse administration of life in which “bare life” is exposed to a power capable of indefinite expansion. Catastrophe is no longer an external threat justifying decision, but a permanent structure of modern politics: a mode of biopolitical governance that generalizes emergency while blurring the very distinction between legality and illegality. In this way, Agamben shows that Schmitt’s thought, originally conceived to think the exception, paradoxically finds its fulfillment in a world where the exception itself has become the rule.

In The Endless Crisis: Essay on the Modern Experience of Time, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes argues that crisis possesses a constitutive ambivalence: it is both the temporal form proper to modernity, a world held in suspension and traversed by permanent transformation, and the paradoxical sign of the exhaustion of the political once that crisis becomes permanent. But if all temporality becomes indistinguishable from crisis, what remains of the decisive moment? Where Schmitt saw in the exception the original scene of sovereignty, Revault d’Allonnes instead diagnoses the dissolution of the bond that once united crisis and decision.^[3] Krisis, etymologically the moment of judgment, gradually slides into chronic inertia: instead of opening a space for intervention, it becomes the indeterminate background of a world governed by management.

This shift profoundly transforms the very structure of the political. Crisis is no longer a singular event calling for a sovereign act; it becomes an ordinary condition, monitored, quantified and administered through mechanisms of forecasting and optimization. In this form, it ceases to represent a critical threshold and becomes instead a logic of neutralization: crisis is anticipated, modeled and absorbed into technical protocols of regulation. The political is therefore no longer defined by its capacity to decide, but by its ability to stabilize continuously a world perceived as intrinsically unstable.

Within such a context, catastrophe comes to occupy the place vacated by crisis. Whereas crisis has been absorbed into the routines of government, catastrophe becomes the only form of event capable of reactivating the decisional gesture. Far from constituting an unpredictable rupture, it functions as a regulative horizon: a specter invoked to justify the exception, to reintroduce sovereign decision where the normalization of crisis no longer provides the opportunity for it. This reversal sheds light on the manner in which contemporary powers mobilize the possibility of collapse, whether climatic, sanitary, financial or security-related, in order to legitimize exceptional measures that have become integrated into the very normality of governance.

This development belongs to what may be called a bio-datapolitical paradigm: an architecture of power characteristic of the technoscientific age, in which the management of living beings and the management of data have become inseparably intertwined. The biological and the digital, life and information, now constitute the twin vectors of a rationality oriented toward anticipation, modeling and preventive regulation. The issue is no longer merely, as in Foucauldian biopolitics, the governance of populations. It is now the production of calculable environments, predictable behaviors and quantifiable risks. Technoscience is no longer an instrument placed at the service of politics; it has become the very condition of its possibility, its deepest infrastructure.

Biopolitics governs life; bio-datapolitics formalizes life into data in order to render it anticipable, modulable and algorithmically governable. This paradigm finds profound resonances in the cosmology of karman, in which every act (karman) is inscribed as an immanent trace and a power of persistence, accumulating within a causal continuity that exceeds the instant of its accomplishment. The subject thus appears less as an autonomous agent than as the nodal point of a chain of embedded causalities, traversed by integrated determinations that configure its possible futures. The world presents itself as a fabric of invisible yet operative correlations, in which the infrastructure of reality is conceived as the relational intelligibility of becoming: a socio-cosmic matrix where action, consequence and the disposition of existences articulate themselves according to a rationality that is at once normative, processual and profoundly stratified.^[4] Where Vedic thought articulated an operative ontology of the world through ritual, the digital age seems to establish a computational ontology of reality, in which the real is continually produced as the effect of calculation, modeling and optimization.

Within such an algorithmic universe, crisis loses its historical intensity. It is de-singularized, de-dramatized and reduced to a variable within adaptive systems oriented toward the continuous processing of weak signals, whether in public health, financial markets, climate or security. Politics is reduced to a permanent loop of adjustments, calibrations and preventive responses. Catastrophe, by contrast, acquires a paradoxical function: far from being merely the collapse that is feared, it becomes the imaginary mechanism through which the exception is naturalized, decisions are automated, and the logic of surveillance and control is indefinitely expanded in the name of emergencies yet to come.

To think the future of the political therefore requires re-examining the entanglement of crisis and catastrophe in light of algorithmic techno-capitalism. Not in order to surrender to an apocalyptic vision of the present, but to recover the possibility of a critique that refuses to be absorbed into the derealization of power, a power that governs less through decisions than through correlations, less through law than through calculation, and less through events than through their indefinite anticipation.

The encounter with the Bhagavad-Gītā, that philosophical and spiritual dialogue at the heart of the Mahābhārata, in which Krishna instructs Arjuna concerning action, duty and lucidity, makes it possible to shift decisively the way we think decision, crisis and catastrophe. Where Schmitt sees in crisis the justification for decisive power, the Indian text instead makes it the site of an inner teaching. The opening scene, in which Arjuna stands paralyzed before the symbolic collapse of the warrior order, is indeed a crisis, but not a Schmittian one. It requires no suspension of the norm. Rather, it reveals that action can never be grounded upon an external norm. Crisis is an inner catastrophe, the dissolution of all bearings, the impossibility of acting, which calls not for a decisionist sovereign but for a transformation of perception. Genuine decision arises not from the exception but from disidentification. Krishna teaches Arjuna that action must be free of appropriation (niṣkāma karma), that the subject of action is not the ego, and that only a non-egological vision of the order of the world (dharma) can render action just. Decision is therefore not rupture but understanding; not the suspension of the norm, but an intuition of reality. Where Schmitt maintains that the sovereign founds order through decision, the Gītā suggests instead that the cosmic order, ṛta and dharma, alone makes possible a decision that is not violence.^[5]

This reversal becomes even more profound when the Bhagavad-Gītā addresses catastrophe. In Schmitt and Agamben, catastrophe appears as the framework within which the political reveals itself: either as the horizon of exceptional power or as the diffuse norm of government. In the Gītā, however, it belongs to an entirely different order: it is internal, existential and cognitive. During the theophany (Chapter XI), the vision of Time, the destroyer of worlds (kālo ’smi lokakṣayakṛt), refers not to political collapse but to the cosmic truth of becoming, dissolving the illusion of sovereign mastery over the world. Faced with this ontological catastrophe, the issue is not to decide more forcefully, but to understand that every truly just decision presupposes a passage through fear and a reconfiguration of one’s relationship to action. Catastrophe, far from justifying sovereignty, becomes a pedagogy of detachment.

This rereading proves especially fruitful in relation to the contemporary condition. Whereas bio-datapolitics transforms crisis into the algorithmic management of the future, the Gītā proposes a different relationship to time: an intensified present aligned with dharma, where action depends neither upon the fear of catastrophe nor upon its governmental instrumentalization. The subject is no longer sovereign but processual, traversed by the guṇas, while agency itself can never be reduced to a reaction to weak signals.

Thus, in the light of the Gītā, sovereignty undergoes a profound requalification. True sovereignty is not the capacity to suspend the norm, but the capacity to detach oneself from oneself. It is not decisional but inward; not rooted in collapse, but in lucidity. Neither crisis nor catastrophe founds order: both merely reveal the illusions of the subject who believes himself to govern, as well as the limits of models that ground action upon urgency, fear or technological anticipation. The Gītā does not deny crisis; it transfigures it. It does not deny catastrophe; it cosmologizes it. It does not deny decision; it de-psychologizes it. In doing so, it opens a path that escapes both Schmittian decisionism, Agamben’s normalized exception, and the endless crisis of algorithmic governance: another conception of the subject, of time and of action, one that relocates the political toward a non-sovereign sovereignty.

Modern political thought has often inscribed action within a logic of rupture. For Schmitt, sovereignty manifests itself in the decision taken under conditions of exception, that is, in the capacity to decide when order itself appears to waver. This dramatic conception of the political makes crisis the moment of truth and catastrophe the horizon that justifies the suspension of norms. Yet such a philosophy of action, founded upon urgency, reaches its limits once crisis ceases to be an event and becomes a permanent condition. As Myriam Revault d’Allonnes has shown, late modernity transforms crisis into a diffuse temporal structure: it is no longer a decisive moment but an indefinite temporality, administered and absorbed into systems of anticipation to the point of obliterating the very possibility of decision. Within today’s bio-datapolitical framework, marked by the centrality of algorithmic models, political action gradually shifts from intervention to calculation, from deliberation to reaction to weak signals. The subject itself is configured as an operator of adjustment rather than as a genuine power of action.

It is precisely here that the Bhagavad-Gītā, especially when reread through Bal Gangadhar Tilak, opens a radically different philosophical perspective. The crisis that inaugurates the text, Arjuna’s paralysis before the symbolic collapse of the warrior order, has nothing Schmittian about it: it requires neither the suspension of the norm nor the emergence of a sovereign. Rather, it reveals an inner truth: action can be legitimate only if it has been wrested away from fear, calculation and appropriation.^[6] Tilak powerfully demonstrates that the Gītā teaches neither withdrawal nor renunciation, but a transformation of subjectivity that makes just action possible. Far from reducing politics to sovereign decision, he argues that action in accordance with dharma precedes every sovereign decision because it arises from an adequate relationship to reality. The agent does not act in order to avert collapse; he acts because his action participates in a cosmic order of which he is neither the master nor the center.

The Gītā thus transforms the very notion of crisis. Crisis is not a political threshold but a trial of perception. The true catastrophe is not external disaster but the inward collapse of the subject who discovers that action can no longer rely upon familiar points of reference. The theophany of Chapter XI, in which Krishna reveals himself as “Time become the destroyer of worlds,” does not constitute a political apocalypse; it unveils the ontological structure of becoming. It is not the world that collapses, but the illusion of the sovereign subject. In this sense, catastrophe is not the foundation of an exceptional decision: it is an event of truth dissolving the very idea of sovereignty understood as autonomous power.

This perspective stands in direct opposition to the contemporary logic of algorithmic governance. Whereas systems of prediction transform crisis into a variable of permanent management, the Gītā proposes a temporality grounded in the intensity of the present. To act according to dharma is to free oneself from the primacy of the future over the present, to break with the reactive dynamics of anxious anticipation. Tilak emphasizes that genuine action emerges precisely where the subject ceases to be determined by the fear of consequences: just action is not an effect of risk, but the expression of an inner alignment. Within the horizon of this philosophy, sovereignty is no longer the capacity to decide in urgency, but the capacity to free oneself from the affective and heuristic determinations governing reaction.

One then understands that the Gītā, especially as interpreted by Tilak, profoundly reconfigures the field of political philosophy. It shifts sovereignty from the register of decision to that of availability.^[7] It rejects the notion that crisis or catastrophe can found the political: both reveal only the illusion of a subject who believed himself master of order and capable of suspending its course. What the Gītā illuminates is that action owes nothing to rupture and everything to lucidity. It depends not upon collapse, but upon a deeper understanding of our place within reality. Far from justifying power through threat, it dissolves power into an ethic of non-appropriative engagement.

Thus the Gītā offers a major conceptual alternative to Western models of crisis and exception. It denies neither the world’s vulnerability nor history’s instability, but it refuses to make either the engine of the political. Instead, it proposes an ontology of action in which sovereignty ceases to be the exceptional gesture of a transcendent subject and becomes the manner in which a transfigured subjectivity assumes its place within the fabric of becoming. In this sense, it invites us to rethink the very possibility of action in a world saturated by crises and haunted by catastrophe: not by seeking to master the exception, but by learning to act without it.

This shift, however, becomes intelligible only if we recognize that every theory of government rests, whether explicitly or implicitly, upon an underlying cosmology.

To govern always means, in one way or another, to situate oneself within an implicit cosmology. Crisis can therefore be nothing other than a misalignment within the world itself; catastrophe, for its part, belongs not merely to the order of events but to a transformation in the very cosmological regime of reality.

The return to both the Biblical and the Sanskrit traditions is therefore of decisive importance, for it enables the reconstruction of the deepest layers of what may be called a political cosmosophy. By this we mean a way of thinking the political from within its cosmological foundations, situating it within a comprehensive conception of the order of the world (cosmos), of time and of becoming.

Political cosmosophy does not regard the political as an autonomous domain, reduced to institutions, sovereignty or norms. Rather, it understands it as a modulation of a more fundamental cosmic order, capable of unfolding according to different regimes: cyclical, eschatological, chaotic or algorithmic.

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^[1]Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 (orig. ed. 1922), p. 5.

^[2]See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

^[3]Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans fin. Essai sur l’expérience moderne du temps, Paris: Seuil, 2012, especially the Introduction.

^[4]In Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), Charles Malamoud demonstrates a decisive structure of Vedic thought: reality is not primarily constituted as an object of representation or contemplation, but as a field of effective operations traversed by ritual procedures that ensure both its transformation and its intelligibility.

Within this perspective, ritual cannot be understood as a secondary language signifying an already constituted cosmic order. On the contrary, it is a productive dispositif through which reality comes into being under differentiated forms. Malamoud’s analysis of cooking (pāka) plays a paradigmatic role here: it condenses a single logic of transformation simultaneously involving matter, form and meaning. Cooking, in this framework, designates not merely a technical operation but a genuine transmutation of reality in which the state of things, their symbolic status and their cosmological inscription are jointly reconfigured.

Vedic thought may therefore be understood as a form of operative ontology, insofar as being is never given as a stable substance but always as the provisional result of a set of regulated operations. This ontology unfolds through a differentiated continuity linking three mutually corresponding registers rather than opposing them: technical gesture as the material organization of action; ritual efficacy as the internal normative validity of that action; and cosmic transformation as the ontological correlate of the accomplished rite.

What emerges decisively from Malamoud’s work is that these levels do not belong to heterogeneous spheres, technical, symbolic and metaphysical, but to one and the same logic of the transitivity of reality. The Vedic world thus appears as a continuum of operations in which reality is never simply observed but continually produced, adjusted and stabilized through chains of efficacious gestures.

A rationality of action thus takes shape that refuses to separate knowledge from operation or technique from cosmos. The world is not an external object to be described but the internal correlate of a regulated praxis in which knowing and transforming coincide within a single operative economy of reality.

By extending Malamoud’s approach, it becomes possible to illuminate the contemporary regime of the operativity of reality in a new way. This structure enables us to think the contemporary mutation of the world as a transition from a ritual-symbolic operativity to an algorithmic and infrastructural operativity. Reality becomes a field of generalized calculability in which operativity no longer proceeds through ritual but through continuous technical dispositifs organizing in advance the very conditions of action, perception and decision. Algorithmic infrastructure no longer merely processes reality; it configures it, partitions it and renders it anticipable. It thus institutes a form of immanent ritualization grounded no longer in symbolic or sacred mediation, but in the automated repetition of computational sequences structuring behaviors and orienting conduct.

^[5]Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948, pp. 91-118.

^[6]Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Shrimad Bhagavad Gita Rahasya, or Karma-Yoga-Shastra, Poona: Tilak Bros., 1915 (English translation of the original Marathi), especially the sections devoted to the doctrine of karma-yoga and to the interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gītā as a teaching of selfless action (niṣkāma karma).

^[7]Nagappa K. Gowda, “The Sthitaprajna as the Foundation of the Nation: Tilak and the Gita Rahasya,” in The Bhagavadgita in the Nationalist Discourse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. The author analyzes Tilak’s interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gītā, showing how he transforms the figure of Arjuna into the ethical subjectivity of dharma.