Diachronia

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of the world’s upheaval. By bringing into dialogue the Greek, biblical, and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here in seven chapter-essays, this work 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. This is the seventh and final installment. Regimes of Shaking: Patočka, the Puruṣa, and the Question of the Front in the Algorithmic Age Yet each regime possesses its own mode of shaking, within a line of thought inspired by J an Patočka (1907-1977). To grasp the full significance of such a claim, one must first situate the philosophical gesture of the Czech phenomenologist. A disciple of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Patočka did not think the world from the abstract comfort of an academic chair, but in the midst of the political upheavals and ideological saturation of the twentieth century. As co-founder and spokesperson of Charter 77 in Prague, an ethical civic initiative defending legality and human rights that ultimately cost him his life, he forged, in his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History , the radical concept of “shaking.” [1] Far from being a merely political reaction, shaking designates a transformation in the world’s relation to itself within historical experience. Before the shock, human beings inhabit the everyday “life-world” ( Lebenswelt ), governed by the concerns of survival, comfort, and technical management: a functional sphere where objects and social roles follow one another without any ultimate meaning ever truly being questioned. [2] Shaking occurs when this structure of practical self-evidences begins to crack. [3] The world does not disappear, but it ceases to be immediately intelligible as something self-evident, compelling human beings to move from mere biological subsistence toward naked spiritual existence. [4] For Patočka, this shaking is concretely rooted in the experience of historical catastrophe and extreme peril. His gesture directly inherits, while profoundly subverting it, the genesis of Heidegger’s Dasein , itself haunted by the trauma of the First World War. Heidegger’s concept of Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness, or the experience of finding oneself without a home) found its hidden historical grounding in the experience of the trenches, where the familiar world collapsed, yielding to the raw contingency of death. In both thinkers, catastrophe functions as a major phenomenological operator: it shatters the world’s usability. Faced with extreme danger, objects cease to serve their ordinary functions, routines collapse, and official discourses lose their veneer of truth. Heidegger’s Dasein then experiences anxiety before Nothingness, while the Patočkian shaken individual is thrust before his own radical finitude. In both cases, the world remains, but its immediate intelligibility has collapsed, wrenching the individual away from the reassuring chatter and tranquil certainties of the “They” ( Das Man ).[5] It is, however, in the outcome of this crisis that Patočka radically departs from his German master, introducing a decisive ethical bifurcation. In Heidegger, the escape from inauthenticity culminates in a monadic ontology: being-toward-death isolates Dasein , since no one can die in my place. Authenticity is attained through a sovereign, tragic, and solitary “resoluteness” ( Entschlossenheit ), in which the subject assumes its own destiny. It was precisely this primacy of pure decision, detached from any universal ethical demand, that historically enabled Heidegger to succumb to the illusion of a collective resoluteness embodied in a National Socialist destiny. By contrast, Patočka shows that catastrophe does not separate human beings but founds a paradoxical community. The paroxysm of violence engenders a leap beyond Force: the shaken individual is not simply one who experiences the physical fear of dying, but one who suddenly understands that war, technical organization, and conflicts of interest are empty idols. Because the victims of catastrophe share the same nakedness, they recognize one another as beings of freedom, forever withdrawn from the empire of Force. Hence, when this phenomenological insight is unfolded across different “cosmological regimes,” that is, the historical ways in which the world discloses and orders itself, it becomes evident that every epoch possesses its own ontological vulnerability. A regime is defined not merely by its tools or its internal crises, but by the specific trajectory of its shaking. In the cyclical regime, characteristic of mythical temporalities or saṃsāra , where stability rests upon cosmic repetition, shaking takes the form of the rupture of recurrence itself. It is the vertigo of a crack opening within the certainty of eternal return. In the eschatological regime, oriented toward a promise of salvation or linear fulfillment, shaking is embodied in the undecidability of the end, leaving humanity suspended before the void of an expectation deprived of its divine resolution. In the chaotic regime, where political and conceptual order strives to contain primordial forces, shaking manifests itself through the resurgence of the formless at the very heart of form, revealing the fundamental precariousness of all human constructions. [6] Within the contemporary algorithmic regime, characterized by the total calculability of reality and the aspiration to absolute technical control, the ultimate shaking lies in the excess of the unpredictable over the calculable. It is the precise moment when contingency shatters the illusion of cybernetic mastery. [7] It is when catastrophe or extreme peril shatters this final technical shell that the true metaphysical breakthrough occurs. Thrust before Nothingness, the individual joins with others to give birth to the “solidarity of the shaken.” Unlike conventional political alliances, which unite around material interests or against a common enemy, this solidarity brings together those who no longer have interests to defend, neither homeland, nor class, nor power, but only their naked dignity. The Patočkian shaken individual does not seek to master destiny or to bring history to a close through an act of sovereign power; rather, he keeps the wound of catastrophe open, drawing from it a universal ethical resistance. Ultimately, this encounter redefines the very meaning of the Sacred. The sacrifice of the shaken is never a utilitarian investment made for the sake of a future ideological victory; it stands instead as pure witness before the absurd, an act that opens the world rather than sealing it within dogmatic certainties. The structure of the sacrifice of the shaken, as Patočka unfolds it, a pure gift without calculation of reciprocity that opens the world instead of closing it, finds a profound resonance in the Vedic notion of yajña (यज्ञ), the cosmic sacrifice. In the Ṛgveda (X.90), the Puruṣasūkta hymn describes the creation of the entire world as the result of the sacrificial dismemberment of the Puruṣa (पुरुष), the primordial Cosmic Man: the cosmos comes into being not through an act of will or power, but through a total self-offering, leaving nothing behind and expecting nothing in return. [8] The sacrifice is not performed in order to obtain something. It is the very condition that makes the order of the world possible. The kinship with the sacrifice of the Patočkian shaken is striking: in both cases, what is offered is not a particular possession but existence itself, and the act carries a cosmological, not merely moral or political, significance. By refusing to negotiate existence on the plane of possession or power, and by courageously taking one’s stand on the plane of being, the shaken individual attains the “Life in Truth.” [9] He does not seek to restore an illusory “peace,” which is often nothing more than another name for passive technical mobilization, but rather to preserve the painful clarity acquired within the rupture itself. This phenomenological thread makes the solidarity of the shaken the only spiritual force capable of confronting the nihilistic night of modernity. Within Patočka’s ontology, the solidarity of the shaken finds its paradigm in the experience of the Front. It remains inseparable from the concrete proximity of death and from the wrenching away from everyday existence brought about by direct confrontation with finitude. In a hyper-digitalized world, however, the very structure of experience has been transformed: technology no longer merely administers survival, that “bare life” of which Agamben spoke. It now colonizes the very horizon of presence itself. The sacrifice of the Puruṣa presupposed a real dismemberment, an irreducible materiality of the offering. The digital, by contrast, tends toward disembodiment. The “solidarity of the shaken” thus risks dissolving into a mere “connectivity of the outraged,” where commitment no longer truly engages the body, but only its imaginary projection. Exposure to danger gives way to self-staging; a community of destiny is transformed into a mere aggregation of profiles. Within this context, the experience of the Front has not disappeared. It has shifted. It now consists in preserving zones of shadow, spaces of ontological opacity where existence escapes its own conversion into data, its reduction to quantifiable flows and exploitable information. The Front no longer lies solely upon the line of fire, but at the frontier where the irreducibility of the human is at stake before the total digitization of being: the body first transformed into image, then the image itself reduced to the circulation of a simulacrum devoid of hylomorphic thickness, stripped alike of its hylē and its potentia. What remains is no longer presence itself, but only its abstract and calculable trace. The Front thus becomes the site of resistance to absolute transparency. In Vedic India, Ṛta , the cosmic order of the world, was sustained through the irreducible enigma of sacrifice. Contemporary technical rationality, by contrast, seeks to abolish every zone of shadow, dissolving all mystery into the univocity of calculation. Where sacrifice opened a breach toward what exceeds human mastery, the algorithmization of reality aspires to seal that breach, reducing being itself to the horizon of predictability. The true Front of our age may therefore lie precisely here: in safeguarding whatever, in humanity and in the world, remains irreducible to every operation of calculation. Yet this project of closure bears within itself its own contradiction. As the promise of total mastery over reality expands, so too grows a proportional frustration born of the impossibility of abolishing the constitutive indeterminacy of existence once and for all. The more technology claims to neutralize the event, the more it collides with the irreducible residue that escapes its models. Absolute transparency thus becomes the horizon of a desire condemned never to be fulfilled. Out of this tension emerges a dynamic of acceleration in which the pursuit of control rushes headlong toward the very catastrophe it sought to avert. Such a perspective recalls certain intuitions of Indian thought concerning the Kali Yuga . The Dark Age appears there not merely as an era of decline, but as the moment when the contradictions of a historical cycle reach their point of saturation. Catastrophe is not an external accident interrupting the order of the world; it is the very fulfillment of a logic that has become incapable of limiting itself. Yet as it approaches, it is already, in a certain sense, surpassed. For the extreme proximity of dissolution simultaneously reveals the limits of whatever had claimed to establish itself as totality. Thus, the movement that seems to race toward final closure paradoxically encounters what it cannot absorb: a negative transcendence, a reserve of being irreducible to every formalization. Within the perspective of the Kali Yuga, the end is never an absolute end; it is the point at which the exhaustion of one form once again makes possible the emergence of another beginning. Catastrophe remains real, but it ceases to be ultimate. What is revealed, at the very heart of the foretold collapse, is not the definitive triumph of calculation, but its metaphysical impossibility. Where everything seemed destined to be reduced to transparency, shadow still remains; where being appeared fully convertible into information, an unassimilable remainder endures. It is perhaps in fidelity to that remainder that the true solidarity of the shaken may now be sought. [1] Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History , trans. Erazim Kohák, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996. The notion of “shaking” ( otřes in Czech) appears primarily in Essays V and VI , devoted to the wars of the twentieth century as limit-experiences, and is further developed through the complementary notion of the “solidarity of the shaken,” the ethical and political bond uniting those who have passed through the experience of the front and the imminence of death. Within the Sanskrit tradition, such shaking may be compared to the notion of saṃvega (संवेग), the sudden existential shock or awakening provoked by confrontation with suffering ( duḥkha , दुःख), impermanence ( anitya , अनित्य), or imminent death ( maraṇa , मरण). In Buddhist and Jain texts, saṃvega is precisely what shakes ordinary existence ( saṃsāra , संसार) and opens the way toward an authentic life. Yet saṃvega belongs within a soteriology: it marks a stage along a path leading toward liberation ( mokṣa , मोक्ष). Otřes , by contrast, possesses no such soteriological telos. It constitutes an ontological structure of historical existence rather than a moment within a spiritual itinerary. Put differently: saṃvega is an inner shock that liberates one from history; otřes is a collective shock that commits one to history. [2] The notion of Lebenswelt (“life-world”) occupies a central place in Husserl’s later phenomenology. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , trans. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, especially §§33-55. Patočka inherits this concept directly, yet radicalizes it by stripping it of its transcendental-subjective grounding and transforming it into a pre-personal and historical field of experience. [3] The expression “structure of practical self-evidences” refers to what Patočka, following Heidegger, describes through the regime of Verfallenheit (“fallenness”), namely the absorption of existence into the everyday world of the They ( das Man ). See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, §§35-38. [4] Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History , op. cit. This distinction structures the entirety of Essays V and VI , where Patočka articulates the passage from the first movement of existence, rooting ( Verankerung ), governed by survival and security, toward the third movement, the breakthrough ( Durchbruch ) into authentically historical existence. On the theory of the three movements of existence, see also Jan Patočka, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem , trans. Erika Abrams, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. [5] On the hidden historical grounding of Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit in the trauma of the First World War, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil , trans. Ewald Osers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; as well as Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time . On Unheimlichkeit itself, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , §§40 and 58. The decisive difference between Heidegger and Patočka concerns the status of catastrophe. In Heidegger, anxiety ( Angst ) before Nothingness remains a formal existential structure revealing the finitude of Dasein independently of any determinate historical content. Patočka, by contrast, refuses this neutralization: shaking ( otřes ) is irreducibly historical and political, bound to the wars of the twentieth century as singular and collective events. In doing so, Patočka concretizes Heidegger’s existential analytic. Where Heidegger conceives crisis as a universal ontological disclosure, Patočka understands it as a historically situated civilizational event bearing an ethical responsibility that formal ontology alone cannot assume. On this critical transformation of Heidegger by Patočka, see Étienne Tassin, “The Community of the Shaken,” in Jan Patočka: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Politics ; see also Paul Ricoeur, Preface to Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History . [6] On the chaotic regime and the tension between form and the formless in primordial cosmogonies, see Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil , trans. Emerson Buchanan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, especially the section devoted to myths of chaos and creation. Ricoeur analyzes what he calls the “myth of dramatic creation,” exemplified by the Babylonian Enūma Eliš , as a symbolic structure in which cosmic order emerges through struggle against primordial chaos. Tiamat , the power of the formless and undifferentiated waters, must be defeated and dismembered by Marduk for the ordered cosmos to come into being. Ricoeur’s central insight is that, within such a regime, evil is neither secondary nor accidental: it is co-original with creation itself, inscribed within the very structure of reality. Order never definitively conquers chaos; it contains and represses it without ever abolishing it. The resurgence of the formless within form is therefore a permanent structural possibility rather than a contingent accident. Ricoeur’s interpretation closely echoes Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in Primeval Times and the Eschaton ( Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit ), Göttingen, 1895, who first demonstrated the continuity linking cosmogony and eschatology in the Semitic traditions: the primordial chaos ( Tehom ) returns at the end of time as an eschatological threat. For a comparative reading extending to Vedic cosmogonies, where Vṛtra (वृत्र), the dragon of drought and obstruction, must be defeated by Indra in order for the waters and light to be released ( Ṛgveda I.32), see Jan Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets , and Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior . On the persistence of this structure in modern philosophy, see also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , especially the chapters analyzing the modern attempt, and ultimate failure, to eliminate the primordial anxiety of chaos by transforming it into a rationally solvable “problem.” [7] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time , Vol. I: The Fault of Epimetheus , trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; see also Antoinette Rouvroy, ”Algorithmic Governmentality and the Prospects of Emancipation” (originally published in French as La “gouvernementalité algorithmique et les perspectives d’une politique critique du web” ), which analyzes the limits of total calculability in the face of the irreducible contingency of reality. [8] Wendy Doniger (trans.), The Rig Veda: An Anthology , New York: Penguin Classics, 1981, X.90 ( Puruṣasūkta ), pp. 31-33. [9] “Life in Truth” is a central concept in Patočka’s philosophy. It designates a mode of existence that refuses to be reduced to adaptation to the demands of survival, utility, or social conformity, and instead assumes lucidly the truth of the human condition as disclosed in limit situations such as historical crisis, confrontation with finitude, or the collapse of self-evidences. It entails a displacement of existence away from the stabilizing regime of illusion toward an openness to truth, understood not as the possession of knowledge but as a risky exposure to what reveals itself through the shaking of meaning. Life in Truth should not, however, be understood as a stable condition opposed to life in untruth, but rather as the constitutive tension of shaken existence itself. Patočka’s lived experience is thus traversed by a continual movement of destabilization and renewal. Shaking does not simply lead to collapse or resignation; it opens the possibility of a conversion in the mode of existence, whereby the human being, torn away from the reassuring forms of everyday life, nevertheless remains exposed to the temptation of returning to closure. The shaken therefore inhabits an existential in-between, where truth is never possessed once and for all, but must continually be sustained against the pull of reassurance, forgetfulness, and the technical reduction of the world.

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. ⸻ [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 .

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of the world’s upheaval. Bringing together the Greek, Biblical, and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essay-chapters, the 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. What follows is the fifth part. From Tohu va-Bohu to Sodom: A Critique of “Political Science” The first eleven chapters of Genesis replay, as though in cascading succession, the struggle between structure and dissolution, between creation and rupture. Man leaves the Garden: a crisis of the bond. Cain kills Abel: a crisis of fraternity. The Flood: a cosmic catastrophe. Babel: a crisis of language and of the collective. At every stage, it is tohu va-bohu that creation represses without ever causing it to disappear. When Abraham appears, he enters into this history of crises. He is not its survivor; he becomes its witness, indeed its respondent. Before him unfold once again familial and political fractures, famine, sterility, war, and sacrifice. Yet only once does the full face of catastrophe stand revealed: the divine punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, as though all the tohu va-bohu of origins, contained since Bereshit , were there to find its final conflagration before contracting around a single man, Abraham, and a promise. The world was born from a disaster internal to God’s own work. Tohu va-bohu is its scar, the visible trace of a primordial disorder that the Word contained without ever abolishing. Before the world was spoken, it wavered. The earth was not nothingness; it was formless, trembling, still awaiting the Word that would summon it into existence. The Eternal did not create the world out of emptiness, but out of trembling. For creation does not erase the abyss; it domesticates it. This tohu va-bohu is not evil; it is the field in which God experiences Himself as Creator, a potentially inhabited chaos. Thus, between Nothingness and Being stretches the zone of beginning: there the divine Word traces its frontier and, from that which resists, brings form into being. Reality opposes its weight to Creation; God does not deny it, but orders it. And ever since, the world has remained fragile: at every moment it may come undone and fall back into its original chaos. Here the mystery of tohu va-bohu reveals itself: Creation is never complete; it begins anew with every breath. The world is sustained not by its own strength, but by the faithfulness of the Word that maintains it in being. Thus Scripture begins: “The earth was tohu va-bohu , and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). As the narrative advances toward the announced punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, it never explicitly names tohu va-bohu , yet its shadow becomes perceptible: fire and brimstone, overturning and sterility. What emerges is not chaos itself, but its memory; not creation unraveling, but the world recalling what it had been before it was ordered. To annihilate Sodom is to effect a regression toward the pre-Genesis, toward that “pre-creational beginning” where light had not yet divided the darkness. The plain of the Jordan, once exalted as the “Garden of the Lord,” undergoes an ontological metamorphosis: it becomes a desert of bitumen, a land of absolute barrenness. Here we witness chaos in its fullness. It is the withdrawal of the divine presence, giving way to a world undone. Sodom reenacts, as an inverted mirror, the paradox of Genesis: where blessing had ordered life, Judgment establishes emptiness. The use of the Hebrew verb hafakh (“to overturn,” “to upend”) to describe the city’s fall designates not merely an archaeological ruin, but a subversion of the cosmic order. What the Word had structured, the passage from chaos to order, wrath restores to the formless. Abraham stands upon the breach, between the cosmos that still endures and the returning chaos. His question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” is a metaphysical cry: can the Demiurge consent to seeing His own work become Tohu va-Bohu once more? The destruction of the cities of the plain is a reactivation of primordial emptiness, a “joyful de-creation” from which only the Patriarch’s prayer succeeds in distinguishing a return to absolute nothingness. Sodom is not merely destroyed; it is ontologically dissolved, returned to the cosmic draft, to primordial chaos, where light still hesitates to exist. Abraham saves humanity from total annihilation, not through the sheer force of prayer, but because he reminds God that a world requires a minimum of coherence. “I look upon the earth, and behold, it is Tohu va-Bohu ; and to the heavens, and their light is gone.” (Jeremiah 4:23) The vision of the prophet Jeremiah echoes the Sodomitic apocalypse. Here, the language of primordial chaos is no longer merely a cosmogony, but the very grammar of Judgment: when humanity corrupts the Covenant, the earth loses its foundation and once again sinks into the undifferentiated state of the first day. To think catastrophe, to think disaster: this is where the human passion for philosophy, mythology, and religion has never ceased to test itself. Two visions confront one another while simultaneously responding to each other: one cyclical, in which crisis and catastrophe are the pulsations of a cosmic respiration; the other linear, in which time advances toward a telos and eschatology becomes the necessary passage between crisis and fulfillment. Within this second regime, history replaces the cosmos: the end is no longer a beginning anew, but a revelation. From that moment onward, eschatology becomes immediately political, and political science, at its deepest level, is nothing other than an applied eschatology. In order to exist, every political project must invoke its own idea of catastrophe: an end to be averted, a disaster to be named. Whether it be the collapse of capitalism, ecological breakdown, or the dissolution of collective identity, politics is often grounded in this anticipation of the worst, not in order to accept it, but in order to provide itself with the very necessity of action. The tragedy of modern political science lies in its constant effort to repress, or at least conceal, its own eschatological background. By constituting itself as an empirical and rational discipline, devoted to the analysis of facts and to methodological neutrality, it sought to purify itself of every form of teleology. Yet, as Eric Voegelin demonstrated, modernity did not destroy religious structures of thought; it “immanentized” them. [1] What once belonged to transcendent salvation became a historical process: politics became the substitute for soteriology. Far from being abolished, eschatology was translated into the promise of progress, the utopia of reconciliation, or the horizon of complete autonomy. Hans Blumenberg, in response to this reading, saw in this immanentization not a corruption of theology but a legitimate reappropriation: modernity would thereby endow itself with its own narrative autonomy, relocating the myth of the end onto the plane of the human project. Yet this “self-assertion” ( Selbstbehauptung ) of reason, by denying the sacred from which it nevertheless proceeds, has had the effect of rendering the symbolic foundations of political action invisible. [2] Modern political science has remained dependent upon the aspiration to transfer to humanity the prerogatives of creatio ex nihilo once reserved for God. The merit of reflecting upon primordial catastrophe, that of Tohu va-Bohu and its recurrences, whether they appear implicitly in the narrative of Sodom or explicitly in Jeremiah’s prophecy, is to reveal that the God of the Old Testament creates not ex nihilo , but ex confusione . Creation is not the emergence of being out of nothingness, but an act of differentiation, of bringing order to a pre-existing reality. Chaos, therefore, is never abolished; it remains the latent matrix of being, always capable of re-emerging in different forms: catastrophe, judgment, or the loss of meaning. This Biblical Tohu Bohu corresponds, under a different regime of temporality, to the phase of return to the unformed within the cyclical temporality of Indian thought: the moment when name and form ( nāma-rūpa ) dissolve into the undifferentiated principle ( avyakta , “the unmanifest”). Tohu Bohu evokes chaos before creation; pralaya , by contrast, designates chaos after creation, that into which the world folds back at the end of each cosmic cycle ( kalpa ). In both cases, it is not a question of nothingness, but of a liminal state: form disappears, yet remains in potency. Within Biblical thought, Tohu Bohu represents a metaphysically negative disorder: it stands in opposition to light and to the creative Word; it is that which God contains, orders, and holds at bay. In Indian thought, by contrast, pralaya and avyakta designate states of pure potentiality: disorder does not stand in opposition to order; it constitutes its necessary reverse. Thus, in both traditions, disorder is never external to order, but rather its very condition. To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to recover the point of equilibrium at which every cosmology, whether theological or philosophical, reveals itself to be inseparable from the political: to govern the world is always to strive to preserve a fragile order poised upon the edge of primordial chaos. To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to perceive that disorder is not an accident of the world but its deepest dimension, the region where the possibility of meaning is endlessly reenacted. If every cosmology remains inseparable from the political, it is because it always entails a particular way of situating oneself before this depth: to preserve an order is already to negotiate with a ground that forever exceeds it. Modernity, however, sought to break this primordial pact. By separating the political from both the eschatological and the cosmological, by dissolving the former into administration and reducing the latter to the mathematics of numerical law, it displaced reflection from the question of origin to that of mastery. Governance aspired to become a science of calculation, forgetting that it had once arisen from a relationship to the abyss rather than to certainty. Yet whenever order begins to unravel, whenever crisis becomes the ordinary texture of the world, this repressed cosmological background resurfaces: politics rediscovers that it proceeds not from sovereign will, but from the fracture itself, from the vertigo of the groundless ground. And what if political modernity had mistaken the very nature of the drama? What if it had sought to ignore the depth of the indeterminate, of the undecidable, that place where decision itself loses its bearings? To say that crisis must be resolved, is that not already to misunderstand the fact that it no longer comes to an end? That it extends itself as the condition of the world, as the atmosphere of every present? Perhaps this is the true mark of all modernity: its essence is not novelty but prolongation; it has endured for millennia as a slow passage through the Kali Yuga, an Iron Age extended to the scale of consciousness. Notes [1] In The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Eric Voegelin develops his central thesis of the “immanentization of the eschaton.” Modern ideologies, while presenting themselves as rational and historical, reproduce structures of salvation inherited from religion by transferring them into human history itself. The promise of transcendent redemption is thereby transformed into a political project of total reconciliation, historical progress, or ultimate emancipation. This interpretation nevertheless differs from those of Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith. For Schmitt, political modernity remains structured by secularized theological categories, sovereignty, decision, exception, but the emphasis lies above all on the formal continuity between theological and political concepts. For Löwith, the modern philosophy of historical progress constitutes a secular transposition of Christian eschatology into the philosophy of history. Voegelin radicalizes this diagnosis: he sees in modernity not merely the survival of theological patterns but a “gnostic” reactivation of the promise of salvation, whereby humanity claims to accomplish within history what once belonged to transcendence. The problem therefore lies not simply in the secularization of religious concepts, but in the transformation of politics itself into an instrument of soteriology. Voegelin nevertheless tends to adopt a strongly pathologizing interpretation of Gnosticism, understood as a disorder of the spirit and a will toward self-deification leading, in his view, to the modern forms of totalitarianism. The immanentization of the eschaton thus appears as the catastrophic attempt to accomplish within human history a redemption that once belonged to transcendence, at the price of falsifying reality and closing experience to the order of being. By contrast, Jacob Taubes, while sharing Voegelin’s diagnosis that eschatological structures persist within modernity, refuses to regard them as either a mere spiritual error or a political pathology. In Occidental Eschatology (1947), eschatology is conceived not as illusion but as one of the deepest motors of Western history. The apocalyptic becomes the revolt of spirit against the tyranny of “the world as it is,” against every attempt by politics to establish itself as a definitive order. Taubes thus rehabilitates the revolutionary figure, from Paul the Apostle to Karl Marx, by way of Thomas Müntzer, as the bearers of an eschatological power of separation and judgment, keeping alive the flame of krinein against the closure of the established world. Defining himself as an “archaeologist of the apocalyptic,” Taubes is less concerned with restoring a transcendent order than with the negative force of messianism: a permanent power of destabilization preventing politics from closing upon its own idolatrous self-sufficiency. Where Voegelin seeks to restore a separate transcendence in order to reorder the city, Taubes sees in the revolutionary impulse the legitimate persistence of a hope irreducible to the finitude of politics. A politics deprived of every eschatological horizon would then risk becoming nothing more than the administration of nothingness. See Occidental Eschatology , especially Part II. [2] Hans Blumenberg argues that modernity inherited medieval and eschatological questions, such as the meaning and end of history, to which it was compelled to respond through heterogeneous means, most notably the idea of Progress. This structural displacement gives rise to the optical illusion of a substantial continuity with religion. Blumenberg designates this functional mechanism as “reoccupation” ( Umbesetzung ): new conceptual frameworks occupy systemic positions left vacant by the collapse of the theological order without thereby constituting its derivatives. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 65-71.

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of a world in upheaval. Bringing together the Greek, Biblical, and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essay-chapters, the 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. What follows is the fourth part. From the Cycle to the Irreversible Distinguishing crisis from catastrophe, or separating cosmic catastrophe from historical or individual catastrophe, indeed constitutes two impossibilities, or rather two blind spots, within traditional Indian thought. In this tradition, the cosmic does not stand in opposition to the historical; it unfolds within it. Catastrophe is not the exception of time, but its most intimate truth. The dissociation between crisis and catastrophe, as well as the gradual decosmization of disaster, is the product of a long genealogy specific to Western thought. It results from the intersection of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian legacies, followed by their reconfiguration in the modern era. It is, in fact, within the Judeo-Christian tradition that the conception of catastrophe as an absolute event becomes most clearly stabilized. The Flood in Genesis, the Apocalypse of John, and the Last Judgment all configure the same temporal structure: a linear, directional time endowed with a beginning and an irreversible end; a terminal event that not only reorganizes the world but closes it in order to inaugurate another order altogether, that of salvation and redemption. [1] It would therefore be reductive to claim that Judeo-Christianity separates terrestrial catastrophe from cosmic catastrophe. Rather, it maintains the relationship between them, but within a new hierarchy governed by the economy of one-way time. Earthly disaster is no longer conceived as one moment among others in the great cosmic cycle; it becomes the sign, the indication, or the prelude to an ultimate and universal catastrophe. The linearization of temporality introduces here a decisive mutation: evil, war, and destruction become charged with a teleological meaning. They no longer belong to the cyclical rhythm of nature, but to the dramaturgy of history. Such a transformation marks a profound break with the cosmologies of antiquity and, even more so, with the dharmic visions of India. In the latter, the ruptures of the world, wars, plagues, collapses, are always already inscribed within a cyclical order. They do not interrupt cosmic harmony; they constitute its inner pulse, its very respiration. Human disaster is never conceived as a definitive event, but as a necessary and transitory modulation of a broader equilibrium. Between the earthly plane and the order of the cosmos there exists no ontological fracture: both participate in the same becoming ( saṃsāra ), the movement of creation ( sṛṣṭi ) and dissolution ( pralaya ). By contrast, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, terrestrial catastrophe becomes a historical event, while cosmic catastrophe becomes a terminal event. The former translates guilt into the language of time; the latter resolves time itself into the absolute of revelation. What is at stake here is not their simple separation, but their tension within an oriented temporality, one in which the world possesses a beginning, a history, and an end. Catastrophe ceases to be the respiration of the cosmos and becomes instead the fulfillment of history. Thus emerges, within the genealogy of classical Western thought, whether Greco-Christian or modern, an eschatological structure of thinking: crisis calls for catastrophe as its culmination, and catastrophe, far from belonging to the infinite rhythm of becoming, designates the point of rupture, the closure of time. Indian thought, by contrast, will always conceive catastrophe not as terminal dissolution, but as a moment of regeneration, the twilight phase of a cycle destined to be reborn. Within an eschatological perspective, time is structured as an oriented line: beginning, development, fulfillment, and end. In this framework, crisis and catastrophe are not merely two modalities of disorder, but two different intensities related to an ultimate horizon. Crisis appears as a moment of tension internal to historical becoming, a point of decision that remains integrated within the continuity of the world. Catastrophe, by contrast, tends to be conceived as the irruption of an ending, not only of a particular order but potentially of the order of the world itself. Thus, their relationship is often understood within an eschatological logic: crisis becomes a threshold, whereas catastrophe becomes either the anticipated figure or the actual realization of the end. The fact that, within the Western tradition, the relationship between crisis and catastrophe is often structured by an eschatological matrix implies that these categories are invariably embedded in an intelligibility of oriented time, where the meaning of the present depends upon a horizon of ending. This, in turn, implies that every eschatology is immediately political, insofar as it produces a hierarchy of temporalities, interprets crises as signs, and orients action according to an anticipated end. Eschatology is not politics itself, yet it structures the very field of what can be politically conceived. Catastrophe derives etymologically from the Greek katastrophē , a term originating in Greek tragedy that designates the “final reversal,” the moment of irreversible resolution. It signifies not merely a rupture of equilibrium, but the destruction or collapse of an order of the world, often perceived as total, irreparable, or at the very least irreversible (world wars, genocides, ecological collapse). Although the catastrophic initially appears to belong to a spatial register, collapse, devastation, the dislocation of forms, as opposed to the decisional temporality proper to crisis, it paradoxically constitutes the very condition of possibility for a specifically Mediterranean, and later Western, intuition of time itself. For what catastrophe introduces is not merely a rupture within the world, but a transformation in the meaning of becoming: it inscribes time under the sign of irreversibility. Time no longer appears as the simple repetition of cycles or the return of identical configurations, but as an exposure to a loss that can never be entirely overcome. Even the recurrence of the seasons, although it preserves the appearance of cyclical return, now seems marked by this seal of irreversibility: return never reproduces the identical. Every beginning anew bears the trace of alteration, as though repetition itself remained subject to a deeper temporality of erosion, finitude, and non-reversibility. It is undoubtedly within the Greek, and more specifically Homeric, imagination that this tension between return and irreversibility first finds its dramatic expression. The Odyssey stands precisely at this point of transition, where the dream of complete return encounters the awareness of irrevocable time. Homerism has always represented a challenge to irreversibility. The experience of Odysseus, or Ulysses, lies at the intersection of the reversible and the irreversible: the entire work is organized around both the possibility and the impossibility of return. The Odyssey stages a logic of return: the return to Ithaca, the restoration of the household, the reestablishment of kingship, and final recognition. From this perspective, it still belongs to an ancient Mediterranean symbolic world in which the lost order remains capable of being recovered. Ulysses’ journey thus appears as a parenthesis destined to be closed; it inscribes within myth the possibility of repairing history. Yet, at a deeper level, this return bears the unmistakable mark of irreversibility. For Ulysses never returns to the same world: Troy has been destroyed, his companions are dead, time has passed through Ithaca, and he himself, transformed by experience, can no longer coincide with his own past. The Greek nostos [2] therefore does not signify the perfect restoration of the identical. It represents a return marked by loss, a survival rather than genuine reversibility. The Odyssey still preserves the cyclical form of return, but that cycle has already been fractured by the fissure of irreversible time. Even when the hero regains his home, something remains irrevocably destroyed: the continuity of time, the innocence of departure, the possibility of an untouched beginning. In this light, Ulysses’ return appears as the point of transition between two symbolic regimes: it still belongs to a civilization of the cycle, yet already reveals a temporality of alteration, in which every return bears the mark of the irreparable. The Odyssey could thus be understood as the final effort of a Mediterranean civilization to preserve the myth of return in a world where time is beginning to close itself upon irreversibility. It is for this reason that the sea occupies such a central role: it is the place of wandering and metamorphosis, the fluid space where the movement of return encounters its own impossibility, where wandering itself becomes the truth of the journey. Emmanuel Levinas, in his rereading of the figure of Ulysses, recognized in this tension one of the fundamental cleavages between Greek thought and Biblical thought. In Totality and Infinity , as in other writings, he contrasts the destiny of Odysseus with that of Abraham: on the one hand, the thought of return; on the other, the adventure of departure without return, the opening toward alterity. [3] For Levinas, Ulysses symbolizes the deep structure of Greek thought: to depart, to encounter strangeness, yet always to return home. Every detour ultimately remains capable of being reinscribed within the identity of the Same. Monsters, islands, temptations, and strangers punctuate a journey that, paradoxically, continually brings every form of otherness back within the sphere of the familiar. Alterity is traversed only to be ultimately reappropriated, transformed into an experience of the Same. Abraham, by contrast, embodies a radically different structure. He leaves his land, his household, and his genealogy without any promise of return. His movement is not circular but one of openness. He exposes himself to the unknown through a definitive rupture with origin. The Biblical experience thus becomes that of non-return: meaning no longer proceeds from restoration but from promise and responsibility. For Levinas, this opposition assumes the form of a distinction between two regimes of temporality: return and exodus. Ulysses embodies circularity and reappropriation, the economy of the Same; Abraham embodies departure without restitution, the asymmetry of alterity that itself becomes law. The former is rooted in totality; the latter opens toward infinity. From this perspective, crisis and catastrophe are distributed according to these two symbolic regimes. Ulysses’ universe is that of crisis: a provisional disequilibrium of order, a suspended moment preparing the return to normality. Even the most violent ordeals, loss, shipwreck, wandering, never shatter the structure of meaning. They are destined to be overcome and reintegrated through the logic of nostos . Crisis is, in this sense, a temporary disturbance of the Same. Abraham’s universe, by contrast, belongs to an altogether different regime: that of catastrophe as the experience of irreversibility. Here catastrophe is not a spectacular collapse but an ontological rupture in the relationship to the Same. It signifies the radical departure from the circle, the impossibility of returning to origin. Through this displacement, Levinas redefines catastrophe: it is no longer a destructive event but the structure of ethical non-return itself, the very condition of openness to the Other. Crisis still belongs to the sphere of mastery and the regeneration of meaning; catastrophe belongs to that of dispossession and responsibility. Between Ulysses and Abraham, what unfolds is the transition from a civilization of return to a civilization of irreversibility, from cyclical time to oriented time. The former seeks, through crisis, the possibility of restoration; the latter recognizes, in catastrophe, the condition of a meaning that no longer closes back upon itself. With Ulysses, the world can still recover itself; with Abraham, it is delivered through its opening toward infinity. Biblically, Abraham enters the narrative in Genesis , chapter 12. The preceding eleven chapters (Genesis 1-11) belong to what might be called Biblical prehistory: they recount the beginnings of the world, the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, the corruption of humanity before the Flood, the reconstruction around Noah, and the dispersion of humankind at Babel. Almost a succession of shipwrecks. A sequence of catastrophes, each one another failed beginning. The Biblical narrative itself opens upon a potential catastrophe: the tohu va-bohu , that primordial indeterminacy, a chaos not merely formless like raw matter, but already ravaged, a world that the creative Word must hold together and order. Even before creation itself, there is Bereshit (“In the beginning”), that in-between moment where catastrophe is already latent, where chaos calls for an order that God establishes without ever entirely abolishing it. [1] See Meaning in History ( Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History ), translated by George Weigel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. [2] In Ancient Greek, the term nostos (νόστος) designates, first and foremost, the return home after a long absence. In Greek literature, and particularly in The Odyssey, it refers to the often arduous journey through which the hero returns to his homeland, his household, and his loved ones after years of wandering. [3] See Totality and Infinity , translated by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, pp. 21-23 (Preface) and pp. 33-35 (beginning of Part I).

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, tracing them from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of a world shaken to its foundations. Bringing Greek, Biblical and Indian traditions into dialogue with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essays, this study follows a demanding yet essential line of inquiry: Is catastrophe a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our historical condition? What follows is the third chapter. The Kali Yuga, or Protracted Catastrophe Within this perspective, the political does not constitute an autonomous sphere of sovereign decision. Rather, it represents a transitional moment within a cyclical order in which destruction and recomposition coincide. Far from interrupting the cosmic course of things, political power is itself inscribed within it as a modulation of disorder and its overcoming. Yet the epics, foundational though they may be, cannot by themselves exhaust the Indian conception of catastrophe. They must be complemented by the doctrinal and cosmological weight of the Purāṇas , which extend the epic intuition by conferring upon it a systematic scope. These texts establish a genuine architecture of cyclical time, in which cosmology becomes at once myth, theology, and a metaphysics of repetition. From the nineteenth century onward, India’s encounter with colonial modernity gave rise to a profound reassessment of Hinduism. Several reformers, most notably the founders of the Brahmo Samaj and the Ārya Samaj , waged an intellectual campaign against the Purāṇas , holding them responsible for superstition, idolatry, and the country’s spiritual decline. [1] Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Brahmo Samaj , advocated a return to the rational monotheism of the Upaniṣads , which he opposed to the ritual proliferation and polytheism of the Purāṇas . Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī, founder of the Ārya Samaj , radicalized this position by calling for a complete return to the Vedas . In his view, only the Vedic religion, preceding all Purāṇic mythopoesis, embodied India’s primordial truth. Thus, to “depurāṇize” Hinduism meant to rationalize and purify it, reinserting it within a horizon compatible with science, morality, and modern reform. Yet Purāṇism found itself under pressure from both sides: challenged by reformers in the name of reason, and constrained by traditionalists in the name of order and liturgy. The Sanātanists, defenders of Sanātana Dharma , the Eternal Law, claimed to preserve tradition, yet their orthodoxy in fact sought to stabilize religion around a rigid and ritualistic canon, marginalizing the narrative and symbolic flexibility of the Purāṇic discourse. [2] Without explicitly rejecting the Purāṇas , they neutralized their cosmological force, reducing them to mere liturgical supports rather than matrices of meaning and becoming. Their conception of fidelity to tradition tended to freeze the universe into a fixed hierarchy, where ritual repetition prevailed over mythopoietic creativity. Between these two poles, Purāṇic thought, with its fluid imagination of cycles ( yugas ), dissolutions ( pralaya ), and rebirths ( sṛṣṭi ), was progressively silenced. Yet it embodied a wisdom of time and becoming of incomparable metaphysical depth: a vision of catastrophe understood not as rupture but as the immanence of the Kali Yuga within the very texture of temporality. It was precisely this intuition that thinkers such as Aurobindo Ghose, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan sought to rehabilitate, in opposition to both the Samajists and the Sanātanists . Through their work, the Purāṇas once again became a metaphysics of time, a grammar of cosmic becoming, and a poetics of order and chaos. [3] To do justice to the Purāṇic legacy is to recognize within it the imagination as a genuine mode of thought, capable of articulating the human condition to the cosmic rhythm of Sanātana Dharma . It is not an archaic residue to be overcome, but a symbolic intelligence of the world, in which the catastrophic ceases to be an accident and becomes the immanent essence of living time. The Kali Yuga, announced at the end of the Mahābhārata with the death of Kṛṣṇa, belongs fully to the Purāṇic vision of time. This age, inaugurated immediately after the god’s departure (traditionally dated to around 3102 BCE), corresponds to the Age of Iron, the era of moral disorder, spiritual dissolution, and the withdrawal of dharma . Justice, truth, and virtue survive only as residual traces, mere fractions of their original force, while greed, falsehood, and violence become the dominant principles governing the world. The Sūrya Siddhānta , the classical treatise on Hindu astronomy, places the beginning of this age at the very moment of Kṛṣṇa’s death, while the Purāṇic tradition assigns it a duration of 432,000 human years: a unit of time measured on the scale of the cosmos, within which human history dissolves into the breath of Brahmā. [4] From this perspective, the Kali Yuga does not designate a singular destruction of the world but rather a protracted catastrophe, a permanent state of crisis affecting the cosmic order. The bond between the human and the divine gradually unravels. Catastrophe thus becomes an ontological condition, the expression of the slow disintegration of dharma , with no immediate possibility of restoration. [5] The death of Kṛṣṇa does not bring the world to an end. Rather, it inaugurates the age of fundamental disorientation, an era without immediate redemption, marked by the confusion of values, the eclipse of transcendence, and the withdrawal of meaning. The Kali Yuga is the age of catastrophe, not because of a sudden cataclysm, but because of the duration of disorder itself, through that slow and continuous corrosion which dissolves the very foundations of dharma , prefiguring the great pralaya , the ultimate dissolution, while simultaneously preparing, through its own collapse, the genesis of a new cosmic cycle. The Kali Yuga is an age of essential sadness. Whatever one may do, a melancholy remains in the background, an ontological veil cast over the heart of the world. This sadness is neither emotional nor moral. It is more primordial than Spinoza’s beatitude and more ancient than Heidegger’s anxiety. It is the fundamental tonality of the dark age. Sadness first, then its successive metamorphoses: disguise, repression, denial. It survives within all things, hides beneath the world’s frenzy, conceals itself within the endless circulation of desires, yet is never abolished. For the Kali Yuga is also the age of duplicity. Its sadness is genuine, yet always already betrayed by its own disguises. Sincerity itself becomes impossible because, the very moment it is experienced, it is reabsorbed into the play of its own simulacra. The world thus lives in forgetfulness of its own suffering, a forgetfulness endlessly renewed, endlessly frustrated, and endlessly necessary. Finally, it is the age suspended between two forms of salvation: individual, inward salvation, sought through bhakti and self-knowledge ( ātma-jñāna ), and cosmic salvation, awaited in the descent of the final avatar, Kalki, who brings the cycle to its close and restores dharma . At the very heart of disorder unfolds this double expectation: that of inner awakening and that of cosmic regeneration. The Kali Yuga, in its melancholy and duplicity, thus becomes the theater of fallen consciousness, yet also the matrix of hope: that interval during which the divine has withdrawn only so that it may return. Within the Kali Yuga, dharma , the principle of balance, justice, and cosmic order, survives only in residual form. The world does not collapse through a single cataclysm; rather, it slowly disintegrates through the continuous erosion of harmony. As the final dissolution approaches, it seems both to unfold and to defer itself. Catastrophe is constantly announced, yet never fully consummated. There is no apocalypse, only the persistence of an unfinished ending. This vision finds a remarkable echo in Hesiod’s theory of the Five Ages of Humanity in Works and Days . After the Golden Age, the reign of justice and proximity to the gods, each successive age, Silver, Bronze, Heroes, and finally Iron, marks a gradual deterioration of the human condition: the fracturing of cosmic order, moral corruption, and the forgetting of virtue. [6] The Age of Iron, the last and most wretched of all, corresponds directly to the Kali Yuga: the age in which social bonds dissolve, cunning, violence, and greed prevail, and humanity, in Hesiod’s words, lives “without shame or justice.” [7] In both visions, catastrophe is not a sudden rupture but an irreversible process of decline. The world distances itself from the divine not through violent destruction but through the gradual erosion of measure, the weakening of truth, and the deterioration of the cosmic bond. Where Hesiod speaks of the loss of Dikē, divine Justice, the Hindu tradition speaks of the withdrawal of Dharma . Yet one essential difference separates them. For Hesiod, time is linear and tragic. The fall appears definitive, without redemption or return. In Indian thought, by contrast, the Kali Yuga is merely one phase within the cycle, destined to be followed by the return of the Satya Yuga, the Golden Age. Darkness prepares the light; decline prepares rebirth. Thus, Hesiod presents a moral catastrophe without regeneration, whereas Purāṇic Hinduism conceives a regenerative cosmic catastrophe. End and beginning become indistinguishable within the very breath of time. The world draws ever closer to dissolution, yet at the very instant catastrophe appears about to be fulfilled, it withdraws once more. Its truth is that of a perpetual twilight, in which destruction remains both inevitable and endlessly deferred. Yet these deferrals are also veils falling away, folds of time turning back upon themselves. Time withdraws and contracts until Kalki appears, not as a gradual transition nor as a post-apocalyptic resurgence, but as a leap, an irruption of the divine into exhausted matter, like lightning crossing the night of a dying world. Kalki does not destroy. He transforms dissolution into a new beginning. After all, he is the avatar of Viṣṇu, not of Śiva: the principle of preservation and continuity within the cosmos, who comes not to annihilate the world but to bring it once again into harmony with the living rhythm of dharma . [1] On the reinterpretation of Hinduism in the context of colonial modernity and the critique of the Purāṇic traditions, see Brian A. Hatcher, Hinduism in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2015), as well as David N. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism? Essays on Religion in History (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), both of whom examine the modern construction of “Hinduism” as a reformed and rationalized category during the nineteenth century. [2] On the emergence of the Sanātanist movement and its defense of Sanātana Dharma as an attempt to stabilize the Hindu tradition normatively in response to modernist reforms, see Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). [3] On the modernist and neo-metaphysical reinterpretation of the Purāṇic and epic traditions in response to the religious reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the debates between reformist movements such as the Ārya Samaj and defenders of so-called Sanātana orthodoxy, see, in chronological order: Aurobindo Ghose, The Life Divine (1914-1919) and Essays on the Gita (1922), where an evolutionary and cosmological reading of Hindu temporality begins to emerge; Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva (1918-1924), which reinterprets the Purāṇas as symbolic expressions of the cosmic rhythm of creation and destruction; and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (1923-1927) together with The Hindu View of Life (1926), in which the Purāṇic traditions are reread as philosophical expressions of a metaphysics of becoming. Although working within distinct intellectual registers, these authors collectively contributed to shifting the Purāṇas from the status of mythological and religious texts toward a speculative philosophy of time, order, and cosmic chaos. [4] See Alain Daniélou, The Myths and Gods of India (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, English original edition 1991; French edition: Flammarion, 1992), and Shiva and Dionysus (Paris: Fayard, 1979). [5] From this perspective, the Kali Yuga should not be understood as a singular eschatological event but rather as a lasting intensification of the distance separating the cosmic order ( dharma ) from the human condition, thereby echoing certain Schellingian intuitions concerning catastrophe as immanent to time itself. The bond between the human and the divine gradually unravels, not through a sudden rupture but through the slow erosion of the very conditions that sustain order. Catastrophe thus ceases to be an identifiable event and becomes instead the structure of becoming itself, a prolonged modality of history in which the disintegration of dharma knows no decisive threshold of immediate restoration. On this dialogue between Indian cyclical temporalities and German speculative philosophy, see Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World ( Die Weltalter ), French translation by Jean-François Courtine and Emmanuel Martineau (Paris: Aubier, “Bibliothèque philosophique,” 1992), especially the fragments devoted to the internal division of the Absolute and the temporalization of the primordial ground. [6] On the progressive degeneration of the metallic ages and the rupture of the cosmic order, see Georges Dumézil, Heur et malheur du guerrier (Paris: PUF, 1969). Dumézil emphasizes that the Age of Heroes constitutes a specifically Greek exception within a broader pattern of decline otherwise closely related to Indo-Iranian traditions. [7] Works and Days , French translation by Paul Mazon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, Collection CUF), verses 106-201; digitized edition, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), consulted on 14 May 2026.

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, tracing them from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of a world shaken to its foundations. Bringing Greek, Biblical and Indian traditions into dialogue with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essays, this study follows a demanding yet essential line of inquiry: Is catastrophe a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our historical condition? What follows is the second chapter. A Cosmology of Disorder The concepts of crisis and catastrophe have marked the conceptual history of modern politics as two major operators through which disorder has been rendered historically intelligible. The term crisis derives from the Greek krisis , whose original meaning is “decision” or “judgment.” In Hippocratic medicine, it designates the decisive moment at which the course of a pathological process turns toward one of two equally possible outcomes: recovery or death. Transposed into the political sphere, crisis thus denotes a regime of disequilibrium in which established forms of regulation are no longer capable of absorbing or neutralizing social, economic or symbolic tensions. It therefore has a dual function: it is revelatory, insofar as it lays bare the lines of fragility within an existing order; it is also productive, insofar as it calls for the reconfiguration of that order and the renewal of its principles of coherence. Crisis refers to a moment of suspended decision, an unstable interval within the unfolding of becoming, where determinations are provisionally held in abeyance while the outcome remains undecided. This Greek framework stands in marked contrast to the plurality of its counterparts, which are never true equivalents, within the Sanskrit tradition. Among these are saṅkaṭa (सङ्कट), denoting a critical situation, distress or a dangerous impasse; vipatti (विपत्ति), referring to adversity or impending disaster; and, in certain philosophical contexts, saṃśaya (संशय), expressing doubt or a structurally constitutive state of indecision. [1] Yet none of these terms fully captures the semantic density of the Greek krisis , understood as the immanent moment of decision in which judgment emerges from within indeterminacy itself. Another Sanskrit term, niṣkarṣa (निष्कर्ष), may nevertheless be invoked, not as an equivalent of crisis, but as its logical counterpart, a kind of inverted image of the Greek concept of krisis . Whereas crisis designates the open moment of decision, niṣkarṣa refers to the stabilized outcome of a process of discernment, the conclusion reached after passing through indeterminacy, in other words, meaning once the crisis of meaning has been resolved. [2] On closer examination, however, these Sanskrit notions illuminate certain dimensions of the critical as it manifests itself in lived experience, without making it either necessary or even possible to stabilize them within a strictly conceptual framework. For crisis is not merely a logical category or a schema of decision; it also belongs to an affective regime. It presents itself as hesitation, as the weakening of one’s grasp upon reality, as a relative loss of control, but equally as the effort to recover what is slipping away. It thus embodies a tension between powerlessness and the will to master what resists mastery. Crisis also possesses its own distinctive tonality: the anxiety provoked by time as it slips away, contracts or remains suspended, as though becoming itself were withdrawing from its own habitual coordinates. In politics, therefore, crisis does not merely designate a moment of rational transition. It is simultaneously the eruption of the political and the exposure of its most strained underside: a state of tension in which power discovers itself both energized by its own reconfiguration and weakened by what exceeds every stable form of control. Crisis both plays with and outwits catastrophe. The critical, a rudimentary attitude, almost a reflex of survival, disguises itself as relief: “I have not yet reached catastrophe.” In that displacement, it establishes itself as a position of relative respite, a way of postponing collapse by keeping it at a distance. Catastrophe, by contrast, presents itself as a kind of inverted festival of crisis: not a celebration, but an excess without a subject, a suspension of all points of reference, the world’s stark exposure to its own unbinding. It thus appears as the intensified reverse side of crisis. Whereas crisis still remains governed by the logic of management and thresholds, catastrophe exceeds every economy of control and postponement. The two great Indian epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa , each unfold, in their own way, a complex dynamic between crisis and catastrophe, yet neither offers an explicit conceptualization of the relationship. [3] Instead, this articulation emerges through a narrative, cosmological and ethical staging of disorder, in which disorder appears simultaneously as the suspension of decision and as the collapse of the world’s order. In the Mahābhārata , crisis first manifests itself as the obscuring of dharma , understood simultaneously as normative, cosmic and social order. Even before the outbreak of the Kurukṣetra war, the world has already entered a regime of disequilibrium: the law becomes unreadable, lineages contradict one another, duties collide, and hierarchies begin to disintegrate. The situation thus fully belongs to the register of crisis in the strongest sense of the term: a condition of structural indeterminacy in which judgment is both demanded and rendered impossible without transgression. Its paradigmatic expression is the figure of Arjuna, suspended in judgment on the battlefield, incapable of deciding without compromising the very order he is called upon to defend. [4] Yet crisis is never merely internal to a regime of decision. It is always already traversed by a catastrophic potentiality. The war of Kurukṣetra represents its absolute actualization, where the virtuality of disaster becomes embodied in an all-encompassing catastrophe: the near-total destruction of lineages, the collapse of structures of filiation, and the exhaustion of ordinary moral categories. [5] Disorder no longer merely suspends order; it dissolves the very conditions of its possibility. Within Indian thought, catastrophe belongs to the cosmic logic of the yugas . It is not the contingent event of ruin, but the decisive moment of a cosmic metamorphosis: the world must come undone in order to be reconfigured. The end of a cycle is never an absolute rupture, but the opening of a necessary recomposition, in which dissolution and regeneration follow one another according to the rhythm of cosmic temporality. The Mahābhārata illustrates this dynamic by presenting catastrophe not as closure but as the re-sedimentation of being. By destroying the old order, conflict prepares the rebirth of the world and the emergence of a renewed equilibrium of dharma . The war, despite its apocalyptic scale, becomes the vehicle of a cosmic restoration: a passage from decline to the reaffirmation of meaning. The Rāmāyaṇa , by contrast, offers a different modality of disorder and its resolution. Here, crisis does not take the form of a cosmic cataclysm but is condensed into Rāma’s exile, the symbol of suspended legitimacy. Catastrophe never fully erupts; it is displaced, deferred and contained. The narrative neutralizes disaster through its own structure. Rāvaṇa, the sovereign figure of disorder, embodies the temptation of chaos; his defeat marks the restoration of the continuity of dharma and the re-establishment of legitimate sovereignty. Thus, whereas the Mahābhārata makes catastrophe the matrix of a cosmic re-foundation, the Rāmāyaṇa stages its narrative domestication. Disaster is transformed into a process of purification and the reaffirmation of order. Crisis becomes a passage rather than an ending; destruction becomes the very principle of the world’s endurance. What fundamentally distinguishes the two great Indian epics is that crisis is never purely decision-oriented, nor catastrophe purely terminal. Both belong to the same cosmic regime, structured by the three dynamics that govern all worldly becoming: dissolution ( pralaya ), recomposition ( sṛṣṭi ), and cyclical repetition ( saṃsāra ). [6] Within the framework of dharma , as it structures the itihāsas ( Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa ), no stable separation exists between crisis and catastrophe, because the world itself is conceived as unfolding through cycles of disequilibrium and readjustment. The unraveling of dharma is therefore never absolute; it belongs to a broader economy of cosmic recomposition. Crisis corresponds to an internal instability of order, already permeated by the possibility of collapse, while catastrophe never signifies pure annihilation but rather the world’s reconfiguration, the reordering of meaning after disintegration. [1] On the philosophical uses of saṃśaya as a structure of doubt and indecision in the Indian traditions, see also Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2011). [2] Nadja Stchoupak, Luigia Nitti, and Louis Renou, Dictionnaire sanskrit-français (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1959). [3] Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), Chapter 9 (“Women and Ogresses in the Rāmāyaṇa ”), pp. 213-250; Chapter 10 (“Violence in the Mahābhārata ”); and Chapter 11 (“Dharma in the Mahābhārata ”), pp. 251-338. Doniger examines how both the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata stage the disintegration of dharma through wars, dynastic conflicts, and cosmico-political disorder. [4] On Arjuna’s suspension of judgment and the crisis of dharma in the Mahābhārata , see Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), especially the introduction and the chapters devoted to the Bhagavad Gītā , particularly the sections analyzing the opening dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, where the coordinates of the dharma collapse and the suspension of decision on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra are brought to the fore. [5] On the Kurukṣetra war as a total catastrophe and as the moment of the collapse of dharma , see in particular Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), pp. 75-82; D. D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 100-108; Irawati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 1969), pp. 7-32 and 95-120; and Bimal Krishna Matilal, Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), pp. 1-24. [6] Upinder Singh, Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021), chapter “Violence in Early Indian Tradition” and the sections devoted to the Mahābhārata , particularly Singh’s reading of the Kurukṣetra war as a moment of extreme intensification of political and cosmic violence rather than as a mere dynastic conflict. Singh emphasizes that the epic and normative sources do not construct a unified theory of violence, but instead reveal its central structural role in the imaginaries of power, kinship, and dharma . Read also: Crisis, Catastrophe and the Shaken World (1/7): Crisis and Catastrophe: Two Different Relations to Time

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, tracing them from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of a world shaken to its foundations. Bringing Greek, Biblical and Indian traditions into dialogue with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essays, this study follows a demanding yet essential line of inquiry: Is catastrophe a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our historical condition? What follows is the introductory chapter. Crisis and Catastrophe: Two Different Relations to Time Conceptually, crisis unfolds within a zone of ontological transition. It inhabits the precarious interval where meaning begins to waver, suspended between the operation of critique and the imminence of catastrophe. Although crisis and critique share the same etymological root in the Greek verb krinein , the act of sifting, discerning and deciding, they ultimately fulfil distinct functions within the logic of judgment. Crisis marks the moment when the equilibrium of a system, or of an existence, becomes unsustainable. Critique, by contrast, establishes itself as a reflective activity that seeks to transform this disequilibrium into a horizon of truth or an intelligible resolution. [1] The tragedy of every critique lies in its inevitable encounter with crises. It awakens only where something has already been torn apart. Conversely, every crisis bears within itself the spectral horizon of its own descent into catastrophe. Catastrophe may therefore be understood as a radically critical crisis: the point at which the capacity for discernment is overwhelmed by the irreversibility of disaster. So long as catastrophe remains imminent, krinein still stands watch. It is vigilance itself: a consciousness on guard, striving to detect the fracture before it becomes an abyss. It is the suspended moment of decision, when the distinction between salvation and loss remains genuinely possible. Once irreversibility arrives, however, krinein changes its very nature. It no longer distinguishes among possibilities; it seals destiny. It no longer determines the outcome; it merely acknowledges the closure of meaning. Between these two abysses, this etymological wanderer reminds us that thought resembles a tightrope walker poised upon a razor’s edge, striving to preserve a space for discernment precisely where everything appears to be rushing towards inevitability. Catastrophe suspends the continuity of ordinary existence. It interrupts the habitual sequences of meaning, causality and intelligibility. It produces a profound dislocation, that is, a loss of commensurability between the structures of experience and what actually comes to pass. The ordinary no longer holds together as a world; its fabric of continuity begins to unravel. Crisis, by contrast, does not suspend the ordinary. It holds it in suspension. Rather than interrupting continuity, it renders it undecidable, unstable and open. Crisis constitutes a regime of expectation internal to ordinary existence itself. The structures of the world still endure, yet without resolution, as though reality were maintaining its equilibrium while remaining incapable of reaching any immediate outcome. Crisis is prolonged tension rather than rupture. Catastrophe inaugurates an irreversible aftermath. Crisis, by contrast, defers that aftermath, suspending it without ever allowing it to become fully constituted. Catastrophe disarticulates the calendar itself. It ravages time as the very medium of experience, transforming it into a furious, unbound temporality. It invests the demonic, no longer understood merely as negativity, but as a mode of non-being that haunts the world. Catastrophe therefore does more than disrupt the periodization of history, whether narrative or scientific. It unsettles the very periodization of being itself, reaching into the articulation of time and existence. Different cosmological regimes generate different regimes of crisis, catastrophe and political action. Cosmological regimes are not merely metaphysical backdrops; they silently structure the very forms through which crisis, catastrophe and political action become intelligible. Within a stable cosmos governed by intelligible regularities and fixed hierarchies, as in certain ancient or theo-political cosmologies, crisis appears primarily as an internal imbalance: a disturbance affecting an order presumed capable of restoration, and therefore an invitation to repair rather than to re-found. By contrast, within the disenchanted universe of modernity, where nature is governed by impersonal laws and history remains radically open, catastrophe increasingly takes the form of systemic rupture: the collapse of meaning, the disintegration of institutional frameworks, and the emergence of irreversible contingencies. Political action is consequently transformed into the management of risk, the permanent anticipation of scenarios of failure, and even governance through emergency. Within eschatological or apocalyptic cosmologies, finally, crisis becomes structural and saturated with meaning. It ceases to be an accident and becomes a sign, while catastrophe is no longer merely destruction but the revelation of an ultimate end. Political action may therefore oscillate between withdrawal from the world, the acceleration of conflict, and the pursuit of salvation. Whether the world is conceived as a cyclical order, an impersonal mechanism, or an eschatological theatre profoundly shapes the ontological depth, temporality and political responses associated with crisis. Yet these cosmological regimes neither simply succeed one another nor strictly exclude one another. They overlap, intermingle and coexist as historical strata, giving rise to hybrid configurations in which crisis oscillates between restoration, management and revelation. It may even become the crisis born of fearing the loss of one’s own cosmological horizon and of yielding to that of another. [1] On the modern genealogy of the relationship between crisis and critique, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (German original: Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt , 1959; English translation, MIT Press, 1988). One of the foremost historians of concepts ( Begriffsgeschichte ), Koselleck argues that European modernity gradually transformed critique into an autonomous historical force. In his account, the critical thought that emerged from the Enlightenment no longer merely examined reality; it constituted itself as a moral and rational tribunal standing in judgment over the State, religion and the existing political order. Yet this emancipation of critique simultaneously generated a permanent crisis of political legitimacy. Modernity is thus characterized by a structural tension in which critique continually produces the very crises it seeks to resolve, opening a historical horizon marked by instability and by the expectation of a re-foundation of meaning. Where Koselleck understands critique as a constitutive dynamic of European modernity, that is, as a force internal to the political history of the Enlightenment and the modern State, Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Indian postcolonial historian whose work is rooted in both the Marxist tradition and Subaltern Studies, reveals its geo-historical limits. From his perspective, modern crisis is not the universal horizon of the political but a historically situated experience that Europe has tended to universalize by elevating it into the global norm of historical intelligibility. In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), Chakrabarty argues that the fundamental categories of modern historiography, including progress, secularization, crisis and critique, are not universal forms of historical intelligibility but conceptual constructions arising from Europe’s own intellectual and political experience. Chakrabarty’s position does not amount to a universalization of a “non-critical attitude.” Rather, it reconfigures the very conditions under which critique becomes possible. At the same time, it opens a genuine philosophical problem: how can the pluralization of rationalities be reconciled with the preservation of a shared horizon of judgment?