A French version of this piece was originally published in Libération on 18 September 2014.

 

“It is useless to laboriously interpret disaster movies in terms of their relation to an ‘objective’ social crisis or even to an ‘objective’ phantasm of disaster,” wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1981. “It is in another sense that (…) it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script.” In its Saturday, 13 September edition, the French daily Libération devoted several columns of its paper to the analysis of apocalyptic films, which reflect our anxiety in the face of pandemics. The Ebola virus epidemic which is raging in several western African countries calls for a more radical critique.