Katastrofa, czyli na ruinach zadomowienia

Focusing on the concept of disaster, the author asks questions about a space for thinking and experiencing which emerges in the face of a catastrophe that either strikes directly, is heard of, seen or talked about, recurring in everyday life, through cultural texts and their transformations. The unfolding research leads to even more fundamental questions: Is a disaster an anticipation of something? Doesn’t it merely reveal what we are so eager to forget, having settled into our culture? The author refers to Freud’s concept of the uncanny (in German: Unheimliche). By putting it in the specific context of disaster, she studies it at its most radical, wondering what happens when this feeling of ‘being settled’ is turned into ruins. Can art penetrate the severity of disaster in the radical context of the post-catastrophic quality of Unheimliche? According to the article, culture must create a space offering a more relaxed approach to all that is human and to human community. This is for example the case of catastrophic texts. A story, a film or any other artistic production that visualises a disaster, even if only in the diminishing space of the familiar, the heimlich, provides some insight into the world of radical anxiety.