two points

#on catastrophe & repetition:
catastrophe is often associated with the new -- as a specific manifestation of novelty -- not only because a catastrophe has to be, to a certain extent, a surprise, a Bang, a deus ex machina, a rupture from the Outside, but also because it often creates the conditions for the new, for rebirth, etc -- as in the example discussed in the class about the destruction of a city in an earthquake, fire, tsunami etc. enabling for new buildings to be built, bla bla bla.

so, to a certain extent, this 'novelty' aspect about catastrophe is opposed to repetition, to the old.

but there's this cool, well-known & almost cliche idea -- probably popularized by Deleuze's Difference et Repetition -- although it probably comes from Nietzsche's infinite return (Blanchot also talks about it in the eternal return) -- that repetition and the new (i.e. difference) are both two sides of the same coin -- that they manifest or effectuate themselves through each other. of course, psychoanalysis talks about this as well.

#catastrophe theory
i also forgot about 'catastrophe theory', a subfield in mathematics that used to be quite popular several decades ago -- although the field is pretty much dead now and is no longer an active topic in research among mathematicians.

i remembered about catastrophe theory, this because the mathematician Rene Thom, the big dick in this field, appears in the reading list.

i don't have much background in the topic, but i remember thom's main result being the geometric classification of catastrophes in 2 dimensions (or was it 3?). we normally associate the catastrophe, the disaster & the event with the unsayable and the unstructurable. but it turns out, using thom's result, that the kinds of catastrophes is actually finite. this, of course, relates to chaos theory bla bla bla.

i guess the study of catastrophes in mathematics & science has been replaced with the more general study of geometrical singularities -- black holes, cusp moments, hironaka's theorem about the 'resolution of singularities', bla bla bla.

but there's also the question of in what sense can catastrophes be understood to exist in space & time, and whether a geometric & algebraic approach is justifiable and, if yes, what is the truth-status of such articulations.