Catastrophe arrives, traditionally, in the manner of an accident: from the Latin accidens, meaning accident or chance; from accido, to fall out, come to pass, happen, occur. The accident is, in short, that which happens to us: it comes from without, and takes us by surprise.3 “We are passive with respect to the disaster,” writes Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, “but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” To experience catastrophe is to enter into the condition of passivity. This passivity is directly linked to the externality of the catastrophe: that it appears to arrive from outside the system. That ...