Coming Full Circle: A Pamphlet on Ukraine, Education and Catastrophe

With Ukraine as its subtext, this pamphlet-like text considers the recent U-turns of global reality and the need for well-meant universalist (pamphilic) ends. Such ends impel reconsideration of the standard educational-philosophical view on national affect, state sovereignty and international relations. After indicating interconnections of these issues with ecological and nuclear catastrophe, I discuss the argument that post-humanist educational theory has failed to critique the full and inherent educational complicities in the current global situation. While I agree with such diagnostics, I argue that, instead of essentializing educational complicities, we may explore education as open to catastrophe in its double meaning of 'disaster' and 'radical turn'.

Keywords: Ukraine; Cyprus; Iraq; sovereignty; cosmopolitanism; justice; disaster; war; retrotopia

The recent, and ongoing, horrific events in Ukraine have alarmed, moved and mobilized the Western world. They are even reviving the term 'Western', the homogenizing operations of which have for some years now been questioned. In the first decade of the 21th century the term struck some theorists as too stereotyping. It evoked conformist action and consensus. It was deemed unfair to the plurality (real or imagined) of thought and the heterogeneity of the people within the 'West'.[1] The term's discursive operations relied too much on un-postmodern, meta-narrative generalizations. The Cold War echoes of 'the West' were annoying or disturbing in an era that promised post-nationalism, post-blocism, post-humanism, and post-isms of all kinds. But the Western 'We' is now coming full circle: from eager use, to mention in quote-marks, and back to use again. Of course, the alliances (e.g., NATO) of the West, now back to the foreground, and the arms race of friends and foes never stopped. They survived all post-Western and post-national logics in which much educational theory rejoiced in the late nineties.

A sense of cyclical time is also evoked by the broader picture of the world. Wars, their 'effects on the ground' and 'faits accomplis' have plagued localities all along, but the threat of a nuclear World War had appeared from the nineties onwards as too remote a possibility to preoccupy global publics, their education and their theories; yet, now it is again on the horizon. Despite futurist thought-experiments of theories (educational notwithstanding) fascinated with the prospects that globalization was seemingly opening for a seemingly post-ist world, the world is now (or, perhaps, again) coming full circle. The déjà-vu impression is strong, as if nothing happened after the post-war times that were promising a 'never again', even if that promise often came at the cost of a Cold-War 'delicate balance of terror'. With the war in Ukraine, the threat of a World War looms large and the specter of nuclear disaster is back again.

However, if the expression 'blessing in disguise' were not too Hegelian, and too gruesome and callous in the case of Ukraine and its catastrophe, it would aptly describe a positive though unintended theoretical consequence, another sense of coming full circle: talking about Ukraine, the West has rediscovered the value of state independence and territorial integrity along with the national and patriotic idiom. Sovereignty and the related cosmopolitan right, the principles of a state's independence, self-determination and democratic, majoritarian rule, have returned to fashion in the West's public sphere, perhaps also in the Western scholarly vocabulary. National sovereignty and its principles had largely fallen into academic disrepute because they had been associated with arbitrary use of state power and the ills of nationalism. Eager to avoid such pathologies most theory often equated all national/ethnic patriotic affect with chauvinism and jingoism. Sometimes, it even conflated nationalism, blocism, colonialism and many such things of which the causalities and effects, to be understood and scrutinized, require nuance and caution.

All the while, theory was sleepwalking the course to various invasions of countries, atrocities of related aggressive wars and violations of human rights. Now, in the case of Ukraine, the West seems fully awake and alert, though theory is still numbed or semi-conscious. Nevertheless, unlike Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus, who 'sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet' (Bauman, [4], p. 2), the West and its theory fail to see what connects Cyprus, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine. Concerning these examples, despite differences that do not allow hasty homologies, the link is their sovereignty being violated and their national territory invaded against international law, cosmopolitan justice and irenic problem-solving. Before mentioning how such catastrophes have been educationally-theoretically treated, I must explain that, in the context of invaded countries, I mean 'catastrophe' in the standard sense of 'disaster'. But because I will also use another, less known, meaning of catastrophe later, let me first indicate the long forgotten semantic doubleness of catastrophe.

Catastrophe now means disaster but initially meant radical turn and, from its ancient semantic origins, it has, for a long time, 'carried a theatrical meaning in English' (Aradau & Van Munster, [3], p. 4). In the ancient Greek tragedy catastrophe played a lead role (Solbakk, [16], p. 88). It meant 'an overturning', 'a sudden end'. The word derives from katastrephein: 'to overturn, turn down, trample on, come to an end'; 'katα means "down, against" and strephein means "turn"'. Although it occasionally denoted even then something negative, for instance, in the final part of the play, the final destiny of the main characters unravelling 'often – although not always – in the form of an unexpected fatal turn from bliss to misery' (p. 88), catastrophe literally has the normatively-neutral meaning of abrupt turn or radical change.

'Extension of the word catastrophe to mean 'sudden disaster' is first recorded in 1748' (Solbakk, p. 88). From the mid-twentieth century on, the older meaning, whose normative neutrality I have emphasized, has been forgotten and replaced by catastrophe's negative meaning, disaster, which importantly 'related to the lack of action: "UN calls for urgent action to prevent catastrophe in Cyprus" (The Times 1974)' (Aradau & Van Munster, [3], p. 4). In the example that this source gives, catastrophe means disaster that can be prevented or, at least, later mitigated (concerning Cyprus, by restoring rights and cosmopolitan law). In another example, catastrophe means a disaster that does not lend itself to control: '"Nuclear catastrophe" renders this meaning most poignantly. No longer situated in the processual development of time, catastrophe becomes associated with the radical moment of interruption', one that, unlike disaster, resists management (p. 4).

Invasions, military attacks on state sovereignty and their ongoing effects constitute the 'single catastrophe' that connects Ukraine and other places, catastrophe qua disaster. Concerning Cyprus, in the years that have passed since the Turkish invasion in 1974, lack of global action has perpetuated the disaster.[2] True, Turkey, the country that invaded and still illegally occupies one third of Cyprus, has repeatedly been decreed by the UN to withdraw its troops. But, being a prominent NATO member and ally of the major Western global players, Turkey has not faced adequate pressure and appropriate sanctions or any strong expectation to respect related UN resolutions, international right and the human rights of the almost 200,000 Greek-Cypriots who were expelled from their homes and have since the invasion become refugees. Instead of pressing Turkey, the West has gradually and conveniently rationalized its NATO-driven politics by reducing the problem from an international one of invasion and illegal occupation to a local, bi-communal conflict of two 'cumbersome', long-time enemies: Greeks and Turks. Local, colonized 'captive minds' (Alatas, [1]) have turned this twist into an educational directive, further reducing the problem from a global political challenge to a local collective-psychology issue to be dealt by 'educating' the locals to the merits of the rootless, unattached, Western neoliberal burgher (Drousioti, [5]).

As late as 2021, so close to the date of the invasion in Ukraine, the UN practically asked Cyprus to square the circle. The UN Secretary-General stated that 'to square the circle is an impossibility in geometry but it is very common in politics'.[3] I cannot see how common this has been in politics or which cases populate this commonality in the Secretary's mind and in the Western imaginary. To my knowledge, neither another notorious colonial 'divide and rule' legacy, the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, nor the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute, nor the Palestinian-Israeli problem have reached the status of a squared circle.

But what an interesting geometrical metaphor that is! And how fantastic it is to extract 'to square the circle' from its mathematical context to apply it to that of an invaded country! Squaring the circle, this mathematical impossibility now transferred to international politics, variegates the usual post-Bismarck pragmatist Western assumption that 'politics is the art of the possible'.[4] Politics concerning states of convenient exception such as Cyprus affords to be the art of the impossible. Had the West respected, and not trampled over (cata-strephein), its own principles of cosmopolitan justice, a solution to the Cyprus issue that would honour both communities and international right would have been much simpler. Instead of requiring the invaded country's squaring the circle, a better future would involve another sense of circle, that of cata-strophe qua radical turn. This strophe (a turn, in fact, a full U-turn, a turn ending in a full circle, a 'cata', radical, drastic, full strophe) should be of the international community towards consistent and principled cosmopolitan justice, and, especially, of the West, whose NATO invaded Iraq and the former Yugoslavia and turned a blind eye to Turkey's violation of rights in Cyprus. This more generative meaning of cata-strophe qua radical turn would set on course for all Cypriots the possibility of closure, another sense of 'full circle', and of a new beginning of living together, a future of building their own, affirmative, island utopia (qua good topos). This would have been easier had the world adopted a principled and consistent stance against Turkey's imperialism. However, given the current Western mindsets, this future is so unlikely that it does resemble squaring the circle and a utopia qua no topos. Cyprus will continue to expect the impossible and be expected to square the circle.

And what has the educational theory of 'squaring the circle' been? Since the nineties, theory has embraced tout court just any claim to post-nationalism as unquestioningly superior to just any particularist attachment or rooted existence. Peace education is often reduced to intercultural (deep-down homogenizing) ironing out of differences. In this culturalist, depoliticized guise, as a hegemonic ideology, theory has been transferred to conflict-ridden areas in the package of superficial and callous conflict-resolution recipes. It has been 'exported to Central and Eastern Europe' and specifically to Cyprus inter alia 'as a strategy for reconstituting subjectivities: from the model of homo nationalis to that of homo Europaeus' (Klerides, [7], p. 13)[5] or, more broadly, homo interculturalis (Klerides, [8]). To homo nationalis are attributed 'beliefs in national purity, longevity, and superiority', in my view, with no concern about stereotyping, homogenizing and incriminating all ethnic affect. To homo Europaeus/interculturalis are attributed 'cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for diversity' (Klerides, [7], p. 13) with no concern about whether these attributes are truly earned or merited. Thus, vis-à-vis conflict-ridden areas the globalist discourse/theory reduces all conflict to nationalist causes supposedly treatable through social justice measures (e.g., bio-communal rapprochement). The involved parties are reduced to splinters of ethnic archaism. The 'others' (some Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europeans) are lagging behind; they are inferior 'compared to Western Europe – the 'self'. The surest way for 'them' to redeem themselves from their inferior circumstances and return to progress is to adopt 'our' norms' that education will foster through successful transfers of the 'cosmopolitan moment' (Klerides, [7], p. 29). The global mobility of this education assists 'the troubled and unstable "others" to catch up with the innovative and advanced "self"'; the failure of those 'others' to get attuned 'could result in the perpetuation of disorder and conflict' (p. 29). From adopting 'our' norms for 'improvement' to membership in 'our' circles and 'our' supra-national organizations (NATO, EU, etc.) the distance is too short.

Improvement discourses were conveniently borrowed 'by the Council of Europe' whose mission acquired a new impetus with 'the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989–91' (Klerides, p. 17). The anti-national theoretical hegemony provided to the 'neo-empire' (Klerides et al., [9], p. 9) of the Council and of other supra-state organizations (often locally operating through NGOs) the narrative that would legitimize their penetration of the national. Simultaneously, this hegemony would 'become a pan-European "policyscape"' (Klerides, [7], pp. 16–17). It would claim the status of the best theory and 'practice in dismantling ethnocentrism [and] resolving conflicts' to be 'eastwardly promoted in and through the Council's various programs for democracy, stability, and reconciliation' (p. 20). Echoing a sense of invasion other than direct military attack, Nick Peim and Nicholas Stock aptly theorize 'education as an apparatus of biopower', a hyperobject that 'represents a monstrous and invasive infiltration'. 'As the dominant carrier of biopower', globalized education 'becomes an ontological monster, a synthetic hyperobject, enveloping everything in its specific vision of life' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 258). This encircling is, of course, variegated and relative to whether the (truly or supposedly) regressive local ideology is conducive to Western purposes. When convenient, any signs of chauvinism, even of fascism or neo-nazism, are ignored, and the local ideology is to return to Europe's political circles sanitized or exculpated and supported rather than targeted by the global Western media and globalized education.

Since the nineties, 'were one to look closely at Klee's drawing almost a century after Benjamin', as Bauman writes, 'one would catch the Angel of History once more in full flight'. However, the viewer might now see 'the Angel changing direction' and being 'caught in the midst of a U-turn': facing a future that is now feared, the angel is propelled to an idealized past (Bauman, [4], p. 2). The utopian hope and anticipation of a better future succumbs to a 'retrotopia' (Bauman's term) of nostalgic, unreflective romanticizations of the past that have led to resurgent, bad nationalisms and other such pernicious ideologies coming full circle. Such retrotopian tendencies are a risk threatening all places, but in some cases they have been met with equally 'retro' reactions. The reinvention of the former Eastern bloc region has sometimes involved ethnocentric, ultra-right wing, conservative utopianizations of an idyllic, pre-communist past and simultaneous utopianizations of European and Western belonging. The Western European reaction to them has been retro, evoking the encircling intentions of placing those places under the wings of EU and NATO and the time-honoured biopolitical, (neo-)colonial superiority and Eurocentric, downward gaze. To adapt Klerides' analysis, 'in the first years of transition from socialist rule', the related 'bitter disputes and conflicts' were viewed as 'threatening the region's 'return' to Europe'. It became 'a matter of urgent pragmatism for the Council [of Europe]' to speed up the 'return' to Europe by assisting the region to bring its theories and education 'in tune with European norms' (Klerides, [7], p. 21). In Peim and Stock's more general phrasing, it 'is particularly ironic' that education, which 'today represents the triumph of an utterly invasive and intractable biopower', has 'come to be represented as the grounds for reform, renewal and redemption' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 258).

Also ironically, a theory (educational and often poststructuralist) fascinated with ambiguities has missed many ambiguities of state and supra-state politics. It missed that a post-national state is nevertheless a state, facing all the risks of sliding into expansionism or illusions of grandeur that any political configuration, and not just the nation-state, might face. Even when anti-nationalist theory purportedly goes post- or de-colonial, it overlooks neo-imperial operations, how close the post-national may come to the imperial and how the national historically emerged inter alia through its opposition to the colonial. State sovereignty and political emotions that qualify and refine citizens' national affect become at best irrelevant to education and at worst totally incriminated. In evoking commitment to a place or a people, virtues such as loyalty are treated as politically suspect or remain non-theorized, despite educational theory's interest in virtue-ethics and virtue-epistemology having otherwise grown. Instead of complicating sovereignty à la Derrida, deconstruction has turned into a deconstructionism that sweepingly declared all justice related to statehood deconstructible. As Kalli Drousioti ([5]) convincingly shows, it is especially ironic that social constructionism considers all identities constructed and thus revisable, apart from the ethnic/national, which it considers static and essentially inimical to cosmopolitanism.

In other words, the years since the end of Cold War politics have been marked by multiple philosophical omissions and voids: other than momentary, philanthropic reactions to events that passed the filter of Western screens, there have been too few debates[6] concerning invasions, stateless people, jus ad bellum, the rights of those who suffered territorial attacks and of people who were turned into refugees. Such topics seemed irrelevant to political education, peace education, cosmopolitan education, global citizenship education, etc., in poststructuralist circles and outside of them. They concerned 'remote' others who had implicitly to be blamed for their situation if theory were to continue having the relaxed and self-indulgent self-understanding of having done everything perfectly. Hence the corresponding communities have been construed 'as ethnocentric, intolerant of difference, unstable, undemocratic, and educationally "retarded" or inferior' (Klerides, [7], p. 20), even when such terms are not openly used (for political correctness).

In a vicious circle, most education along with its theory reflected this spirit of the times while simultaneously feeding and reproducing it. Many theoretical approaches implicitly or explicitly delegitimized the interest in the cosmopolitan justice that concerns inter-state/international relations. They limited cosmopolitanism to a culturalist politics of 'good manners' in intercultural relations where the other is simply well spoken of. Ironically, this de-politicized, culturalist cosmopolitanism ended up in a methodological-nationalist narrowing of theoretical interest to social justice issues and tensions within the nation-state (e.g., matters of inclusion, hospitality, dialogue, distribution or equality within territoriality). Cosmopolitan right, international law and territorial principles such as self-determination and democratic majority along with sovereignty, human rights and claims to justice by invaded countries were post-modernly surrendered to regressive ideologies as 'their' turf. Or, they were complicated, interrogated, navigated, negotiated, queered, resisted, contested, problematized, deconstructed, etc., while the rights of the powerful citizens of powerful countries continued to be non-negotiable and inalienable.

The persistence of the Western 'we' has spiraled into a more and more homogenous and univocal public sphere and academic concordance. The 'politics of conflict and post-conflict management' increasingly rely on a controversialization of claims to justice manifested inter alia in the 'emphasis on the study of the past from a plurality of views' (Klerides, [7], p. 18). This plurality is partially and conveniently recruited only when the others' claims to rights need to be relativized and the victim and wrong-doer levelled.[7] The 'plurality of views' approach is activated when the invading force is an ally and must be given 'voice'. When the aggressor is an enemy, the switch from the 'plurality of views' approach to that of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' accusations is almost instantaneous.

The principled stance of condemning an invasion should not preclude critique of all the involved or affected parties, nor should it compel lack of nuance. Nuance as such has most intricate political operations: either missing or added it may controversialize something that should remain uncontroversial or consolidate something that should be controversialized. Consider such operations when revisionism is now uncritically used in the current global, Western, political vocabulary. Revisionism, a normatively neutral term, has, as an explanatory frame for the invasion in Ukraine, replaced the older explanatory and normatively loaded terms of expansionism or imperialism. Quickly, uncritically and virally dispersed, this euphemism obliterates all nuances necessary for discerning when the re-sketching of maps is justified by de-colonial historical genealogy and irenic implementation of majority and self-determination principles and when it is an outcome of expansionist aggression. Adding these nuances, returning to the principle that any attack on a state's sovereignty is imperialist no matter what else it might be, also invites caution. In the effort to condemn the clearly spelled-out state expansionism, one may forget the gap between an aggressor state's government and the citizens or culture of the state and hysterically incriminate the country as such rather than the country's policy. The educated skill in international politics that could mitigate such risks has been totally overlooked by the education of our times and its theory.

Cyprus, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, etc., form a chain, and this 'etc'. interestingly indicates an ominous continuity rather than cata-strophe as future transformation and rupture with the past. In Ukraine's case the chain seems broken; the Western world now feels free to use the word 'sovereignty' unreservedly, perhaps even uninhibitedly. After many years of other invasions in various localities having failed to sensitize educational theorists/philosophers concerning the dangers of deconstructing (instead of complicating) national identity, the Western world seems to be taking a U-turn. That is, the 'we' of Western visions of political configurations has also come full circle: from the Westphalian roots of the state and the late-modern apotheosis of sovereignty to the post-modern wholesale incrimination of the nation-state and now to sovereignty being again in fashion. Coming full circle concerning sovereignty could prove fruitful, since there has been a surplus of normativity that theory obliterated in its zeal to go post-national, though this should not be taken unconditionally, simplistically and unreflectively.

However, temporary awakenings after images of horror followed by a merry slumber is not unusual, and I do not claim any originality in registering this, since it has been recurrently registered by many people in the margins of the world empire. Still, it helps pose the question: how much redirection, cata-strophe, may be indicated in the new common cause of the West? The recent events in Ukraine could initiate a re-thinking that events such as Iraq failed to mobilize, but I think it unlikely that (post-, or post-post-)theorists will make the connection. If I may attempt some prediction, the interest in an invaded country and related territorial politics will remain emotivist, short-lived and circumstantial, guided by official narratives, media coverage and partial sympathies evoking Schmittean 'friend-enemy' alliances. The global political support may expire when the global balances of power will have surpassed the current situation. I will not be surprised if the Ukrainians will be asked in the future to square the circle.

Also possible is that the global public concern for Ukraine will last until the next point of interest. And theory may remember Ukraine only until the new post-post-post-ist project. In too single-tasked a manner hegemonic theory has so far gone where the current has drawn it: from the politics of difference to exclusive emphases on inclusion and now to post-humanist, single-focused interest in climate issues. Even when it turns multi-perspectival or polyprismatic it does this just to acknowledge 'the plurality of voices' and obtain from that acknowledgement the image of the democratic and progressive. It misses the interconnectivity of the perspectives, their synergies and tensions that reveal yet invisible or overlooked issues of (in)justice.[8] Ukraine could ruffle a few feathers since the detractors of territoriality would now face the dilemma of either a politically incorrect deconstruction of Ukraine or a deconstruction of their own views – if they are to have any minimal claim to consistency. A scholarly world which has incriminated all national identifications; based much of its self-understanding as postmodernist and post-Westphalian on 'deconstructing' national sovereignty and patriotic affect; and sleepwalked violations of international right and disintegrations of the UN now faces this challenge: to deconstruct Ukraine or to be deconstructed by it?

The wave of sympathy for Ukraine in the West, the global love for its people, conjures up the etymology of a pamphlet (pan + philos, loved by all/loving all, https://www.etymonline.com/word/pamphlet), which is obscured by the contemporary meaning of a pamphlet as a short, polemical and partisan text on a contemporary topic. The topic is not just popular (demo-philes); it is universally loved (pan-philes). Ukraine may become the metonymy for the normative task to think critically about invasions and educate for this discursive justice too, a metonymic status that Iraq, Cyprus, etc., never obtained in educational theory. To become metonymic an event needs first to become pamphilic.[9] But, for the metonymy to have some lasting consequence in global political imaginaries, the pamphilic positive political emotions for one victim must be turned into a pamphilic concern for all victims, maintained consistently and transferred to likely events, old or new. Beyond the emotivist, universal reaction of sympathy and all that philia connotes, also important is the well-meant principled universalism that enhances the public's or academia's ability to see the connections among cases and the interconnectivity of faces of justice. Such enhanced (in)sight helps avoid double standards and allow the metonymy (e.g., Ukraine) to deconstruct theoretical complacencies. Care should be for all, pan-philia shown not just for some. This universalism condemns crimes of war wherever they come from; it condemns the acts, not the people or the culture of a country. It aims to a future of global friendliness (pamphilikotis) of states, against ongoing uses of 'friendly' as a particularist predicate of some states (consider the term: friendly nations).

All these require the turn of the West and its others toward some self-critique, one as radical as a cata-strophe, that is still not in view and is highly unlikely: so far, there are no signs that the numbed West has at last realized what happened in Iraq and elsewhere and has not made the connections between its own unilateral preemptive strikes on pretexts of security and the use of the same rhetoric by an 'unfriendly' country against a Western ally. Nevertheless, such a U-turn would presuppose some sense of improvement (school improvement notwithstanding), a notion that has its own political complicities. 'We are stuck to the notion that we must improve ourselves, our society, our world, and that education is the necessary path to this ever-receding condition of fulfilment' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 259). However, can we avoid the normativity of improvement, and at what cost? The effort to avoid biopolitics, Eurocentrism and toxic humanism has this risk: to incriminate all improvement, and all educative moments. Besides, not being stuck to the notion of improvement would logically be an improvement too (an improvement from the condition of being stuck).[10] In my opinion, not being stuck to the hegemonic sense of improvement does not mean to abandon the notion, but to loosen the hegemonic grip or to show alternative meanings, namely, faces of the notion that the dominant signification has kept from view. Then again, an immediate objection would be that such nuances may condone education's becoming a 'master concept' that reflects 'faith in the fallen present order of things through its dual promises of individual and collective fulfilment and redemption' (Peim and Stock, p. 256). Distinguishing improvement qua adaptive 'learning' from the improvement that is deeply, thoroughly critical, original and uncompromising, and loosening the former's grip on today's world (if this could ever be attained), promises some redemption. The distinction, just as all sanitizations of tarnished terms, is untrustworthy. But the very expectation of trustworthiness may itself be problematic, having its own risks.

One such risk is that dismissals of any future redemption may empower retrotopias. 'The pendulums of the public mindset' are 'perform[ing] a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-too-obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-reinvesting them in the vaguely remembered past' (Bauman, [4], p. 6). The past is 'valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness. With such a U-turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares' (Bauman, p. 6). Certainly, not all blanket incriminations of normative notions (e.g., international law, or education/improvement in the case of Peim and Stock's article) resort to retrotopias; in fact, some could also vehemently attack retrotopics. Nevertheless, while portraying the future as a site of nightmare and catastrophe (qua disaster) most accurately, sweeping incriminations of normative terms (and of nuancing such terms), ironically divest cata-strophe (qua radical change) of resources, at the very moment that they extol radical transformation. For, the resources of cata/strophes (disasters and promising changes) have always been normativities, their ever renewed operations of nuancing and the utopics to which wholesale incriminations deal a blow.

Peim and Stock theorize the prospect of catastrophe/disaster most accurately. 'The instigation of the nuclear age marks a dramatic turn whereby human technologies begin to immediately impact on the ecosystem of the earth in an irreversible mode'. More inescapably than the steam engine, 'nuclear arsenals become monstrosities that can destroy whole worlds' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 253). Indeed, with the events in Ukraine, the world is witnessing another U-turn, that of the possibility of a catastrophe more imminent than the ecological: the nuclear. We are coming full circle on that too: nuclear arsenals preoccupied the world in Cold War times (Russell, 1959/2009), then they largely eclipsed from philosophy, educational discourses and the public sphere. But, now, biological, chemical, nuclear wars and related laboratories are in full view again. This coming full circle is alarming as much as it is illusive – illusive because there was never a real break from war (certainly non-nuclear) and conflict, it was only the big Western places that enjoyed peace and wrongly projected it on the whole world. Nor did the world (Western or other) and its theory prove pamphilic to cosmos (biota and non-biota). In reality, the nuclear industry and the corresponding science continued their 'progress' unabated.

While the theoretical world (Western and non-Western) overlooked the continuation of nuclear production and related scientific research, a disaster, which could at that stage be prevented through principled action, was taking place. 'Ecological catastrophe signals an unprecedented time of extreme crisis that involves changes to the geological structure of the earth affected by nuclear tests that will outlast any reasonable calculation of the lifespan of the human species' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 257). Peim and Stock remark that 'conventional wisdom' 'decrees education an essential force in saving the world'. They pertinently disturb this wisdom by showing that 'education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control',[11] not only 'impotent in combating ecological catastrophe', but also reproductive of the Anthropocene (p. 251).

Reflecting on the times, the time of education, and the complicities of education, its theory and the whole human world in ecological and other catastrophes, we may concur with Peim and Stock that 'there is no hiding place from education. Temporally, education is characterized by its ancient provenance beginning at the beginning of civilization itself' and 'by its interminable projection into a future that is completely unknowable' (Peim and Stock, p. 259). Yet, it is through education that the authors and their readers are able to view education as they do. This does not only affirm the authors' view of education as intractable, all-encompassing and inescapable; it also shows that education has a disclosing power, a possibility of cata-strophe, one that does not leave education's own, hegemonic thinking habits unaffected. I have already discussed some such habits concerning global justice, double standards and unqualified incriminations of normativities. Peim and Stock aptly critique another hegemonic habit that characterizes even post-humanist educational thought.

They argue that 'educational studies and philosophy of education' fail to recognize the 'contemporary condition of education' because of 'the idealist split between the fallen, manifest form of education and the supposedly unlocked potential it possesses' (Peim and Stock, p. 257). This condition reflects 'the very forces that have driven modernity' and effected 'the technological and social changes implicated in the great transformation' that reproduces the Anthropocene (p. 258). I agree with Peim and Stock's critique of our field, but not on the attributed causality because it implicitly grants our field that, though it has failed to critique education per se, it has critiqued the world and the fallen, manifest form of education. I doubt that our critiques have been sharp, thorough or genuine enough to unlock educational potentials for changes in global ethico-politics. The 'We' that shapes the 'we' of our field is too immersed in its world to turn verbal promises into practices, let alone critique the world 'cata-strophically'. Moreover, nothing secures that the educational potentials that could be unlocked would be for the better. This assumption rests on a hasty normativization of rethinking and of transforming. Even if theory and education were to unleash their most transformative critical energies, these would not necessarily be apposite or redemptive just because they promise a transformation, especially if they are too formalist/indeterminate concerning what transformation they speak for. Nor is cata-strophe inherently normative; it is ethically neutral, neither guaranteeing nor precluding the desirable and worthwhile direction.

'Education is symptomatic of the end of the world as opposed to a tool to combat it' (Peim and Stock, p. 252): what education? Education is a functioning institution; a critical-normative term (an ideal at variance with the institution); and a concept and phenomenon broader than the institution. None of these is reducible to the other. A critique of them should be nuanced to reflect this plurality and related interconnectivity. Thus, I agree that 'education is not a pure and redemptive concept that has been perverted into the form of the school' (p. 256) and find it important for contesting popular binaries such as 'learning vs education' that glorify education. But I disagree with the incrimination and identification of the concept of education with the current education worldwide. Both sides essentialize education and obfuscate its normative doubleness. Like many other human endeavours education is encircled by catastrophe qua disaster and qua promising change. Education as ideality involves cata/strophe, though not only in the negative meaning that catastrophe has in the current Western vocabulary and in Peim and Stock's paper. The inauspicious record of redemptive utopias which undermines their trustworthiness should not lead to essentializing mistrust of the future and educational failures to serve a better future.

'An object that inhabits spatio-temporalities like that of climate change, whilst also feeding off and harvesting bodies through the mode of biopower is one that we should be quick to challenge or combat' (Peim and Stock, p. 261). A recurrent (crypto)normative task that Peim and Stock set for the 'we' is 'to combat' education: a polemical term evoking a battle, and battles sometimes effect a catastrephein (destroying/destruction). This is a valuable contribution, especially now, given the growing tendency in our field to go post-critical and show love for the world, as if love were precluded by the critical. Peim and Stock convincingly argue that, instead of combating, theory aspires 'to consistently ameliorate, build upon, and consequently grow the hyperobject in question' (p. 261). They applaud efforts to 'step outside of education and look to the broader ontologies of the world around them' but what they call for 'is an interrogation of the object of education itself, a vital endeavour to be acted upon before (perhaps futile) attempts to move outside of it' (p. 257). To the doubt they insert concerning feasibility I would add doubt about the normative desirability of stepping outside of (a homogenized, non-nuanced) education. To their call for combat I respond with cata-strophe.

'Disaster' carries normative implications because 'to call an event a 'disaster' is to signal that it is worthy of immediate, serious human attention and purposive corrective activity' (Zack [17], p. 7). But what will count as 'corrective' reflects, in my view, dominant mindsets. Catastrophe qua disaster is per se normatively unclear as to what cata-strophe qua U-turn or radical change it may activate. The currently popular educational-philosophical normativization of rupture and transformation per se is just a postmodern wishful thinking. Taking Ukraine as a metonymy for a possible (though actually unlikely) U-turn of educational philosophy concerning global ethics/politics, I have wondered whether our field (or related fields) will be cata-strophic in front of yet another catastrophe qua disaster. Will academia think Ukraine through to theoretical and political implications for currently hegemonic and globally disseminated discourses? Will academia grasp education's relevance to egregious injustices that remain invisible and outside of its attention? Unfortunately, 'disasters and similar events do the political-philosophical work of providing justification for government authority in general or for extraordinary measures' (Sandin, [15], p. 20). Rather than witnessing a U-turn it is more likely to experience a nightmarish fortification of NATO as a Western project and an intensification of the arms race with even less public or academic protest.

Thus, in responding to the plea for combat with cata-strophe I also contest the kind of hasty normativization of cata-strophe that considers it generative of something worthwhile and possibly justifies, in retrospect and in its name, the amassed bodies of the Angel of progress in a Hegelian, modernist 'cunning-of-reason' logic or heterogeneity of ends. Consider, for instance, Kissinger's[12] view on cata-strophe: 'As Henry Kissinger pointed out in 1977, catastrophe was both a moment of fear and closure and a generative moment' (Aradau & Van Munster, [3], p. 6); a moment 'when an old order is giving way to a pattern new and unseen; these are times of potential disorder and danger, but also of opportunity for fresh creation'. That is, 'more than disaster or risk, catastrophe brings out the political issues that surround the invocation of imaginaries of the future' (p. 6). Kissinger's tout court positive normativization of catastrophe's generative energies is evident in his valorization of creation as alternative to danger and brings him close to current educational theorists fascinated with rupture and transformation per se. The risk is to miss the questions: what does this 'fresh creation' introduce into the world? How much pamphilia, and of what kind, does it accommodate? Worse, catastrophe qua disaster may get normalized through an utterly cynical modernism that sees the piled up wreckage hurled in front of the Angel's feet as the ticket for the imaginaries of the future.

'The etymological meaning of catastrophe as "overturning"' differentiates it from disaster (Aradau and Van Munster, p. 6). 'Whereas disaster and crisis are associated with undesirable events, catastrophe was a term associated with theatre: it referred to a moment in the progress of the play. In theatre, the moment of 'overturning' is integrated into a processual understanding of the spectacle' (p. 6). Education and its philosophy share various connections with theatre (Papastephanou [11]), cata-strophe being yet another. As a figure of time and eventfulness, catastrophe 'raises anew the question of temporality' (Aradau and Van Munster, p. 9) and so do (or should) education and its philosophy. However, even this should not be considered inherently positive. The moment of overturning may have been predetermined by a haunting past that indicates a likely future. The inauspicious record of humanity that, as we saw, challenges all innocent and trusting views on improvement recalls the etymology of disaster. Deriving from the Middle French dιsastre, which derives from Old Italian disastro (ill-starred), 'which again comes from the Greek pejorative prefix dys– (bad) + aster (star)' (Solbakk, [16], p. 88), disaster connotes an unfavourable temporality. But if this is true of disaster, it is also true of cata-strophe. What favours or blocks it is temporality, history, not ontology. To be radical enough critique should combat the essentialisation and ontologization of the ominous record of humanity that explain many, non-prevented disasters (and many more to come) as manifestations of hyperobject ontology.

'If we are to accept education as an apparatus of biopower, and to reiterate, this means education conceptually and wholly, and if we are to understand that this apparatus is that of a hyperobject, we can only foresee an end to humanity as we know it if we continue to allow it to be the combative tool against the apocalypse' (Peim & Stock, [13], p. 261, emph mine). To these conditionals I have responded that we can foresee the same end without assuming the turn of phrase that I have italicized. Given this prediction of the drama's catharsis, its cata-strophe, as an inexorable, final coming full circle, one wonders, 'what is the next course of action?' How are we to sever the 'tie with an object that we are always inside, reliant upon, and even treat as redemptive?' (Peim and Stock, p. 261). True, 'these questions call for further investigation' (p. 261); still, given all the complexities of nuance concerning the normative conditions of worthy cata-strophe, to Adorno-style negative dialectics effect, catastrophe qua disaster (and resignation to it) seems so much simpler. Yet it is not ontologically predestined.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.