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There is an increasing sense that capitalism may have broken time itself and now is rushing human society toward a catastrophic extinction event. But despite a substantial body of literature on capitalist temporalities and another on the ruptures in historicity that attended the French Revolution, there has not yet been an exploration of the fact that the two intersect in the figure of Georges Cuvier. He and his followers formed a school of “catastrophists,” who raised questions about the finitude of time and of the natural world. Their ideas were ultimately defeated, relegating catastrophism to the category of pseudoscience until it returned under a variety of different scientific, philosophical, and political guises in the 1980s. Since capital is predicated on future returns, capitalism on continual growth, and continual growth on unlimited natural resources, the lost “chrono-economics” of finitude and catastrophe offers a repressed alternative to the intellectual preconditions for industrial capitalism.

abstract:This article examines the case of modernity (as an enclosing device) and the impact its pervasive epistemological assumptions have on its subjects. In particular, I propose several heavily freighted examples from Cormac McCarthy's Child of God in order to foreground the ways in which the central character Lester Ballard's ideas arise from the social circumstances out of which he comes and from which he takes his cues. To do so, this article first contextualizes modernity and its system of social and official recursiveness where authenticity is compromised before moving to specific scenes from the novel. It examines three incidents of Ballard's actions, including his encounters with and encouragement by the legal system, his performances of hypermasculinity and the endorsement of rape culture, and his voyeurism before returning to the two accusatory quotations where the novel addresses the reader to clarify the position of our social responsibility.

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Different stages of volcanic island evolution are evident in the Cenozoic Lesser Antilles arc developed near the eastern edge of the Caribbean Plate. The early stage of seamount evolution is represented by the Kick-em-Jenny submarine volcano near the southern end of the arc. The volcanically active islands known as the Volcanic Caribbées are composed of a series of composite volcanoes and are examples of an emergent volcanic island stage. Those islands that were formerly active, known as the Limestone Caribbées, provide evidence that an erosional to submergent stage occurred in the northern part of the island arc during the Oligocene and Miocene epochs. Growth of the islands and underlying crust is dependent upon the magma production rate along the arc, which has for the last 100 ka ranged from less than 1 km³ to 40 km³. These differences in magma production and volcanic rock composition along the arc are attributed to the obliquity of plate convergence and the plate convergence rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]