THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of intersection; the economic crisis, however, develops totally uncoincidentally within the mode of production and exchange of the capitalist economy itself, as one of its
steadily hardening contradictions. Nevertheless, both catastrophes have a deep­seated correspondence to one another, for both stem ultimately from a poorly
mediated, abstract relationship of human beings to the material substratum of their behaviour. There are some safeguards against the technological accident, they are
more prudent and also rather more knowledgeable than the helplessness with which the bourgeoisie faces economic crises, and the technological safeguards also
increase to some extent with improved testing of materials, sounding, and meteorology; but nature has not therefore become good friends with its caning master, and
diminished risk does not save the bourgeois­technological relationship to nature from abstractness. Even war technology, although it frankly rationalizes the accident (of
others), as a highly conscious technology of catastrophes to the disadvantage of the enemy, is abstract, merely canalizing. The atom bomb is of course the imperishable
glory of American Christianity, the radiance of its explosion has been compared with the light surrounding Grünewald's Christ on the Isenheim Altar, but the anxiety of
the engineer, apart from the political one, remains here more than ever. Even the synthetically manufactured catastrophe does not get any closer to nature, whose stellar
blast­furnaces it imitates, with extreme cunning. Thus bourgeois technology has chance formation everywhere in its horizon, chance formation from the blind,
uncontrolled, unmediated encounter of two merely external necessities. And this chance is not just the reverse of external necessity, it shows in the latter at the same
time that man is not only centrally little mediated with natural forces, but that the cause of nature itself is still unmediated with itself. Thus technological catastrophe also
implies every time the menacing Nothing, as definitive unmediatedness; in all cases of destruction this chaos gives a sample of what it can do. This was already evident
above, in the ‘foundation’ (cf. Vol. I, p. 310): ‘Nor does the dialectical usefulness of the Nothing conceal the completely anti­historical pre­appearance which the
Nothing has as downright destruction, as a den of murderers repeatedly opening up in history. ‘The underlying technological unmediatedness is not diminished even by
the — however astonishing — case of a superficial congruence. Whereby bourgeois­abstract calculation, which has been so powerfully developed as a mathematicalphysical
one, finds a corresponding stretch in nature itself, namely the mechanical one. As the theory­practice of modern industry proves, there is a portion of concrete
abstractness as it were in physical