I would like to depart from a modernist practice of pacifying a rupture in chronological time through the hypostasis of “crisis.” Crisis is the term used to name (and stabilize) a turmoil of unexpected events that breaks with the given order of things toward an unknown outcome. It evokes a sense of an external force breaching the status quo and disturbing the established order. This imaginary is one of necessity: the external force creating a rupture is both inescapable and unforeseen. Simultaneously, crisis functions as a term that seeks to contain the turmoil of the rupture—to name it, calm it, begin the process of making sense of it—and in doing so, tame its wildness and unpredictability. It thus bears witness to a belief in the necessary continuation of the status quo, of the already known. This belief is foundational to the logic of progress (and development). Hence, while the name crisis enables us to petrify chaos, it also provides points of orientation—an imaginary of dots rather than of lines (cf. Ingold 2007)—and ultimately allows for a sense of historicity to emerge. The name crisis is essential to the periodization of any history; in this sense, it conditions all history. There is a time before the revolution and after, before the war and after, before the atomic bomb and after. Today, however, the problem lies in the realization that what we are facing is not a crisis in this traditional sense, but rather a (climatic) catastrophe—a rupture that forecloses the future, in which there is no conceivable “after.” In this contribution, I would like to retrieve yet another possibility for understanding the name crisis, drawing on the conceptual tools of Alain Badiou’s philosophy (2005). Although it is not a simple operation, one might understand a crisis as the site of an event—an occurrence that potentially initiates a truth-procedure through the work of fidelity. In such a case, rather than taming the rupture by integrating it into a line of progression, the work of fidelity discovers new forms of life within the rupture and seeks to inhabit them (which is, undoubtedly, also a form of taming). In this sense, fidelity to the event is a persistent (and infinite) effort to enact spheres of exception (Agamben, 2005) from the status quo (and its transformations, developments, progressions), within which we may begin to practice what is deemed impossible in the currently dominant worldview.

References: Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. transl. K. Attell, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London Badiou, A. (2005) Being and Event. Transl. O. Feltham, Continuum: London – New York Ingold, T. (2007) Lines. A brief history. Routledge: London and New York