More Than a Catastrophe No More a Catastrophe

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of today’s most important, prolific, and celebrated French thinkers. With a duly acknowledged debt to Derridean deconstruction, Nancy has gone further to give us postdeconstructive perspectives on community, freedom, existence, sense, touch, the world, and religion. In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Nancy takes into account a contemporary phenomenon with a global social, economic, political, and ecological impact: the 2011 nuclear fallout in Fukushima, Japan. The incident was one of the catastrophic aftermaths of a major earthquake that struck the region, one that did not spare the nuclear plants located there. Underlying Nancy’s account is also one of Karl Marx’s principal themes: that money works on the principle of general equivalence—a principle that, in light of today’s world of global or globalized capital, can be said to apply almost everywhere and to almost everyone and everything. It is...