Real time disaster effect

This article mobilizes a phenomenological, comprehensive approach to explore the effect of a disaster striking the everyday lives, at a time of peace, of a group of precarious French persons, and at a time of war, of a group of refugees (ex-Yugoslavia 1991-1995). As insecurity increases, the relation to sleep, food, body, objects, time and space, is altered (sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently): the effect of the disaster produces a narrowing of time perceived as the real around the present, or even the single instant. It may also produce a powerful feeling of de-affiliation, leading to a form of peculiar loneliness when social bonds fade away, which is shared to varying degrees by the persons living in precariousness in times of peace, and the refugees in time of war.