"The history of the twentieth century has been marked by incredible violence and catastrophe. These events not only affected the material and historical conditions of life, but had profound conceptual implications. Over the last fifty years, all the traditional artistic and theoretical fields, from philosophy to law, history, and literary theory, have been transformed.

Indeed, one might speak of a catastrophic turn in the realm of thinking and in the concepts and the problems that various theoretical discourses must face.".

"From within this existential and conceptual revolution, the present book examines what is arguably the most profound and complex narrative of disaster in modern literature - Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Melville's novel, the book claims, identified and explored ahead of its time - in a gesture that Walter Benjamin famously called the literary work's "secret appointment with a future moment"- perhaps in an unparalleled manner, the crucial implications of a new thinking of disaster, a thinking that necessarily has to do with a new thinking of the literary."--BOOK JACKET.