Coral and Catastrophe

Abstract

Drawing on Michaël Ferrier’s concept of the “coral writer,” this article uses the idea to think about catastrophe and the ways in which Ferrier writes unflinchingly about disasters, but never succumbs to hopelessness, preferring instead to think, as a coral writer, of the tenacious regeneration of natural things, human as much as non-human.

Keywords:

• Michaël Ferrier
• coral writer
• catastrophe
• disaster
• regeneration
• (non)-human

Notes

1 Raoul Hilberg. The Destruction of the European Jews [1961]. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

2 Cf. Samuel Beckett. Imagination Dead Imagine [1965]. In The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989. New York: Grove Press, 1995 and Georges Didi-Huberman. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz [2003]. Tr. Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

3 Cf. Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Giuglio Einaudi, 1986. Translated as The Drowned and the Saved by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage, 1989 and Paul Celan, “Aschenglorie.” In Atemwende: Gedichte, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1967. Translated as “Ashglory” by Pierre Joris.

4 Cf. Jean-François Lyotard. Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics. Stanford University Press, (Cultural Memory in the Present), 2001.

5 Dans les clapotements furieux des marées, Moi, l’autre hiver, plus sourd que les cerveaux d’enfants, Je courus ! Et les Péninsules démarrées N’ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Harvey

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University. His teaching and research explore the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse, the relations between art and philosophy, and how both of these dynamics may inform ethics. His most recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017), with French and Japanese translations forthcoming in 2021, and Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015). From 2001 until 2007, Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Harvey is currently writing a book on “semantic perversion” and conducting research for another on hopelessness as the basis of hope. His co-edition, with Kiff Bamford, and translation of Jean-François Lyotard’s Readings in Infancy was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.