english_βροχή | Anansi Tactics

On the occasion of yesterday’s “deadly storm”: Notes toward an ontology of the flood

I.

In the opening pages of Political Theology, Carl Schmitt formulates a proposition that sounds simple but is explosive: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” Written in 1922, the sentence describes a logic that far exceeds its constitutional context. It does not speak merely of dictators and states of emergency. It speaks of the very structure of sovereignty: what determines who rules is not normality, but exception. Law holds only insofar as someone can suspend it.

What does this have to do with rain?

Everything.

Yesterday’s meteorological “state of exception”—the red alert, the emergency, the “extreme weather episode”—is not a natural phenomenon that merely happens to require a political response. It is precisely the point at which the structure of power is revealed. Who decides that this rain is a crisis? Who defines what counts as “normal” and what counts as “exceptional”? And above all: who has created the conditions under which rain becomes catastrophe? Yesterday, according to reports so far, the flood left behind two dead—and that, rather than closing the discussion, opens it.

II.

On November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, Lisbon was destroyed. Earthquake, tsunami, fire—30,000–60,000 dead. Churches collapsed on worshippers in the middle of the liturgy.

This devastation was not merely a tragedy. It was an epistemological rupture. Voltaire, in the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster and later in Candide, shatters Leibniz’s theodicy—the idea that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” Theodor Adorno would later write: “The Lisbon earthquake was enough to cure Voltaire of Leibniz’s theodicy.”

But Rousseau replied with something more radical: it is not nature at fault. It is human beings who built tall buildings on unstable ground, who packed populations into narrow alleyways. Nature sent an earthquake; society produced a catastrophe. This distinction—between natural phenomenon and social disaster—grounds an entire anthropological tradition that reaches all the way to the present.

III.

Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, articulate a thesis that journalism systematically refuses to grasp: there are no natural disasters. There are natural phenomena—earthquakes, floods, droughts—that become disastrous only when they meet vulnerable populations. Vulnerability is not a natural condition; it is a social construction.

“Disasters,” they write, “reveal and become expressions of the complex interactions between natural, biological and socio-cultural systems.” This means something concrete: a flood is not water. A flood is water plus buried streams, plus illegal construction, plus nonexistent flood defenses, plus cemented ground, plus decades of political choices that distribute risk unevenly.

IV.

Panagiotis Kondylis, in Power and Decision, describes the ultimate reality of the political: “The ultimate reality consists of existences—individuals or groups—who struggle for their self-preservation and, necessarily along with it, for the expansion of their power.” On this view, politics is not the management of interests but a field of conflict over survival and expansion.

But neoliberal governmentality has achieved something more insidious: it has severed the relation between cause and effect. The flood is not “caused” by political decisions—it simply “happens.” The dead are not “produced” by systemic neglect—they simply “are.” The language of technocratic management—“red code,” “extreme phenomena,” “climate crisis”—functions as a mechanism of concealment: it names the danger while never naming the responsible.

Kondylis would say: this is not an error—it is a strategy. The individualization of risk (“stay home,” “take precautions,” “you are responsible for your safety”) is a form of sovereignty: it shifts responsibility from the collective structure to the individual body, while preserving the power to intervene once the crisis becomes manageable as spectacle.

V.

Agamben, extending Schmitt and Foucault, introduces the concept of “bare life”—nuda vita. In Homo Sacer, he describes a figure of Roman law: the “sacred man” is someone who may be killed without this counting as murder, yet cannot be sacrificed to the gods. He exists both inside and outside the law—in a zone of indistinction.

“Bare life,” Agamben writes, “is no longer confined to a particular, isolated place nor limited to a specific category, but inhabits the biological body of every living being.”

What is a flood victim, if not a contemporary homo sacer? Their body is subjected to crisis management but is not truly protected by law. Their life is recognized as value only at the moment it is lost—as a statistic, as a “victim of an extreme weather event.” Until then, it is merely biological existence under emergency conditions.

VI.

There is an archive few people know. KEPY (the Center for Research and Education in Public Health) has produced an analysis of mortality data following Cyclone Daniel in September 2023. The official tally spoke of 17 deaths. Excess mortality recorded in the three months after the disaster was estimated at 335 people.

The discrepancy is not a statistical error. It is a political construction. Who counts as a victim of the disaster? The person who drowned during the flood, or the person who died three weeks later of pneumonia because their home had no heating? The farmer who lost their animals, or the one who took their own life when they realized compensation would never come?

The categorization of death is a biopolitical act. Sovereign power does not decide only who lives and who dies—it also decides how death is counted. It decides which death deserves to be recorded as “disaster” and which disappears into statistical routine.

VII.

Benjamin wrote: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Written in 1940, the sentence captures today’s climate condition with precision. “Extremeness” has become permanent. The “red code” repeats often enough that it has lost any exceptional character.

But here lies the political genius of the neoliberal regime: it preserves the language of exception even when exception has become structure. Every disaster is presented as “unprecedented,” every crisis as “unpredictable”—even when scientists have been predicting it for decades. The rhetoric of surprise conceals the systemic nature of catastrophe.

VIII.

Mandra, November 15, 2017. Twenty-four dead. 1,064 buildings destroyed. The town had been built over buried streams, without flood protection. The prosecutor called the disaster “the chronicle of a foretold crime.”

That phrase is the key. Not “tragedy,” not “natural disaster,” but crime—and foretold, at that. The judicial investigation ended with the conviction of three individuals for causing a flood—but no one for the deaths. The distinction matters: the system acknowledged that the flood was human-made, yet refused to connect the human-made flood with human deaths.

This disconnection is a legal technique, but also something deeper: it is the way sovereign power shields itself from the consequences of its acts. If the flood’s dead are “victims of nature,” then no one killed them. If they are victims of politics, then someone would have to be tried for homicide.

IX.

Schmitt, despite his ideological burden (he wore the Nazi uniform), understood something essential: sovereignty is not revealed in normality but in crisis. And crisis—the flood, the disaster, the “state of emergency”—is the moment when it becomes visible who really decides.

Who decides that flood-control works can wait? Who decides that urban planning may ignore streambeds? Who decides that a Wolt courier must work under a red alert while the minister stays home?

The answer is not a single person. It is a structure. But the structure has names, addresses, records of decisions. The climate crisis is not an accident—it is an outcome. And the flood is not nature—it is politics by other means.

X.

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, described how disasters become opportunities for neoliberal restructuring. But there is something deeper: disasters are not only opportunities for the neoliberal system—they are also its products. The climate crisis is the outcome of two centuries of industrial capitalism. The vulnerability of populations is the outcome of decades of disinvestment in public infrastructure. The repetition of catastrophe is inscribed in the system’s logic.

In this sense, every flood is simultaneously a natural phenomenon, a technical failure, a political choice, and a form of class violence. Rain falls indiscriminately—but death is distributed unevenly. Those who die are those who cannot “stay home” because they do not have a safe home. Those who die are those who must work even when the state tells them not to circulate. Those who die are those who live along streambeds, in basements, in shacks—where the water always ends up.

So rain is not water. It is a category. It is the point where the structure of power becomes visible, the distribution of risk, the organization of vulnerability. It is, in Schmitt’s terms, a state of exception—only now exception has become the rule.

And if indeed “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,” then every time a red alert is declared we must ask: who declared it? By what right? And above all: who created the conditions that make it necessary?

Rain is water. The flood is politics.

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Further reading (translated bibliography)