Routinising Catastrophe: Camus's The Plague and the Order That Follows Crisis

Routinising Catastrophe: Camus’s The Plague and the Order That Follows Crisis Ajay Kumar* Shambhu Sharan Sharma** Catastrophe is commonly understood as a rupture of ordinary life. Albert Camus’s The Plague, however, shows that rupture does not remain exceptional once it acquires duration. Oran’s commercial habits are first interrupted by the epidemic, but the interruption gradually develops its own schedules, classifications, procedures and forms of adaptation. The plague therefore does not abolish routine; it produces an emergency recurrent order. Reading Camus alongside Weber’s account of routinisation and Foucault’s plague town, this paper distinguishes the ordering of catastrophe from the ethical practices that resist it. Administration can preserve life while also converting singular persons into cases and numbers. Rieux and the sanitary teams answer the same crisis through repeated practices of care. A colonial qualification drawn from Said further shows that the ordinary world interrupted by plague was never neutral. The ethical question is consequently not whether life will be recurrently organised after crisis, but what the resulting order sustains, whose lives it makes visible, and whether it remains open to correction. Recovery restores neither innocence nor final safety; it renews ordinary life under the knowledge of continuing vulnerability. *Research Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Veer Kunwar Singh University, Ara | ICPR Fellow **Research Supervisor, Department of Philosophy, Veer Kunwar Singh University, Ara