Arendt, Byron, and De Quincey in Dark Times.

This article begins as an improvisation on terms developed in Hannah Arendt's collection Men in Dark Times. Dark times for Arendt signal disastrous conditions under which life and the ideas about such a life remain invisible or obscure. Lives led under dark times are marked by a resistance to public declaration and display, and they are intelligible only in terms of privation. Dark times are thus hopeless and intransigent; while they are a state of emergency for Arendt, this paper aims to think differently about the non-pathological and transformative effects produced by disaster - that is to say, how catastrophic events in texts by De Quincey and Byron are denatured or flattened out to the point where disaster expresses new relational forms of non-destructive dark life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]