A Seafloor for the Disaster

Abstract:Across discourses and genres, stories of climate change often follow a race-against-time plot, as if confronting environmental disaster meant accepting the terms of the disaster film genre. The objective of this article is to elucidate some of the anxieties these terms manage, in particular, anxiety provoked, paradoxically, by the stability of the earth even in the worst-case scenarios—even, for example, in the case of the total uninhabitability of the earth for human beings. Within the framework of the race-against-time plot, the earth cannot appear as simultaneously stable and uninhabitable; uninhabitability can appear only as a breakdown of stability. Through readings of Sylvia Wynter, Jules Michelet, Jules Verne, and Lars von Trier, who takes the disaster film genre to its limit in Melancholia, this article elaborates an alternative to this splitting, starting from the seafloor, whose primal uninhabitability for human beings is unaffected by the wells that now puncture it and the cables that now cross it. Of course, there is a difference between the disastrous uninhabitability caused by capitalist production and the uninhabitability that precedes it primordially, but the latter is part and parcel of the stability that holds even in the worst-case scenarios. That this limit cannot be destroyed does not mean that there is any limit to how far the desire to destroy it can go. Rather, it helps account for the inextinguishability of the destructive desire, the acknowledgment of which, a condition for change, cannot happen within the terms of the race-against-time plot.