The wager of the book is that the decisive fact of the late twentieth century is not war fought but war prepared: that once the nuclear weapon arrives, war migrates entirely into its own preparation, the production of arms becomes the act of war, and the casualty is no longer the enemy across the border but one's own civilian population. Virilio calls this condition Pure War, and its logic is that a society at peace is a society already at war with itself, drained and deferred and governed by a military class that no longer needs to fire a shot to rule. That is the claim a researcher comes to this book for, and everything else is machinery built to carry it.
The machinery is a small set of moves that recur in every chapter. War, not commerce, is the origin of the city and the State. The history of war is the history of speed, which Virilio names dromology, so that political power is first a power of speed and only afterward a power of wealth. The nuclear weapon converts strategy into logistics and converts war from an event into a permanent state. Deterrence, sold as the guarantor of peace, is instead the instrument by which the military class colonizes its own population, a movement inward once outward conquest is exhausted, which he calls endo-colonization. Underneath the political argument runs a metaphysical one about death, about time and its disappearance, and about the vanished question of God, which Virilio states openly and in the first person as a Christian. The brief follows that architecture through the book's own order, from the 2007 preface that renames the object Impure War, through the fourteen chapters of the 1983 dialogue, to the 1997 and 2007 postscripts that carry the thesis into information war and the war on cities.
The form has to be registered because it governs what can be attributed to whom. This is a transcribed spoken interview, and it advances by Virilio's associative leaps and Lotringer's reformulations rather than by demonstration. Virilio describes his own procedure as working in staircases, abandoning a thought once it is suggestive enough rather than developing it, on the stated principle that the developments are the episodes and the tendency is what he is after. A consequence, visible throughout, is that a good number of the book's sharpest lines are Lotringer's compressions of Virilio's looser speech, which Virilio then ratifies with a single word. Where that happens the brief marks the speaker, because the difference between a formula Virilio originates and one he merely confirms is a real difference for anyone drafting from him.
Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later, new and updated ed., trans. Mark Polizzotti, with "Postscript, 1997" trans. Brian O'Keeffe and "Postscript, 2007" trans. Philip Beitchman, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e); distributed by MIT Press, 2008), ISBN 978-1-58435-059-0. The original interview is dated "Paris–New York, January–June 1982" (page 181) and was first published in 1983; the 1997 postscript ("Infowar") and the 2007 postscript ("War on the Cities," in two parts, "The New Bunkers" and "A Finite World") were added in later editions, the 2007 conversation conducted at La Rochelle on 19 June 2007 (page 238, note 22). The book is a transcribed dialogue: in the reconstruction below, Lotringer is the questioning voice and Virilio the responding voice. The 2008 edition opens with Virilio's own retrospective preface, "Impure War," and closes with Notes and an Index. All page citations that follow are to this edition.
The retrospective preface, written by Virilio alone for the new edition, frames the whole book as superseded in its object but confirmed in its logic. The epigraph states the reversal the preface will elaborate: the arms race won, and what it won with was terror.
The arms race of "Pure War" has exhausted not only the USSR, which imploded, but also classical "Great War," in favor of Terror and the terrorist imbalance that we are now experiencing. Nuclear Proliferation has been unleashed again, taking a turn towards Fractalization. War is dead, but Terror has replaced it.
Therefore:
After the classical and political "Great War," we now have the Asymmetrical and Trans-political War of groupuscules, groups, and other "paramilitaries." The aims of the Anti-City Strategy shifted from the Balance of Terror to Hyper-Terrorism (2001). The external "Theater of Operations" is no more: Metro-political Concentration has won out over Territorial Geostrategy. Geopolitics has faded in favor of Metropolitics. The Principle of Indetermination now reigns. Is Globalization Total War?
The historical periodization is Clausewitzian war giving way to something for which the older category no longer holds. Virilio dates the coinage and places it in Baudrillard's company.
It's crystal clear that after the Great War, which was classical and political, we are dealing now with asymmetrical and trans-political war. The first time I used this word was in Berlin, some thirty-five years ago. I was in the company of Jean Baudrillard at the time, and I ventured the idea that we were in danger of drifting toward transpolitics. Well, here we are.
The new combatants are not States, and their multiplicity is what breaks the old symmetry. This is the move that forces the retitling: what the book called Pure War has become its own impurity.
When you've called a war asymmetrical and transpolitical, it means that there's a total imbalance between national armies, international armies, world-war armies, and militias of all sorts that practice asymmetrical war. These could be little groups, neighborhood or city gangs, or "paramilitaries," as they're called; Mafioso of all types, without mentioning Al Qaeda terrorists, or others. This is what happened in Africa, with countries that have fallen apart; and it's happening right now in Latin America, in Colombia, for example, where the national army is powerless against the proliferation of gangs, mafias, paramilitaries, or guerrillas. In my opinion all of this is contrary to the concept of Pure War.
Today we need to think rather in terms of Impure War—I'm not sure it's being called that, surely not—but really the whole question of deterrence has changed in nature.
The consequence for deterrence is the preface's political payload. Deterrence no longer points outward at an enemy military; it points inward at a domestic population, and its legal expression is the security state.
Deterrence is no longer aimed only at the military sector, but essentially at the civilian population; from which we get The Patriot Act, Guantanamo. We can cite similar phenomena in other countries; and, of course, the terrorist disequilibrium. The deterrence of Impure War aims at resisting this disequilibrium; however, reestablishing a balance has become impossible with the proliferation of asymmetrical enemies. There is, in my opinion, an enormous threat to democracy in every single country; not only in totalitarian countries, of the East, South, North, or elsewhere, but also in democratic countries, in Europe as well as The United States.
He dates the anti-city strategy to the Second World War, names its massacres, and reads the present as its displacement into terrorism, whose only battlefield is the metropolis.
Let me remind you that the anti-city strategy began with the Second World War, with the bombardments of Guernica, Oradour, Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The anti-city strategy was one of the strategies invented during the Second World War. It established the balance of terror, since nuclear missiles, East and West, were targeted on cities. Today, what we're witnessing is a displacement of this anti-city strategy: from the balance of terror to hyper-terrorism. It's especially interesting because hyper-terrorism only knows one battlefield: the city. Whether Madrid, New York, or London, the battlefield is the city.
The failure of a conventional army against an irregular force is the sign of the transition. The Tsahal in Lebanon supplies the emblem, and Virilio relishes the caricature that names it.
The failure of Tsahal in Lebanon is truly extraordinary. The Tsahal is one of the great armies of the Middle East, one of the best equipped, motivated, and supported, yet this army was "trashed," so to speak, in an asymmetrical war against the Hezbollah. Someone called it, furthermore, "a failed war," a stunning nomenclature. Before, wars were won and were lost, now there are failed wars and successful ones; that we're calling defeat failure and victory success is truly astounding.
I remember an extraordinary little caricature in a French newspaper; I really should have cut it out: it depicted the Tsahal tanks stopped in the middle of a city in ruins and a sign with a city map, with an arrow indicating "You are here." The tank commander had stepped down to see where he was. I found that an extraordinary illustration of the madness of the day, I'd call it, of a powerful army, flush with its victory in the Six Day War. The Six Day War was still classical war. It still was geopolitics.
Geopolitics belongs to battlefields with names; its supersession is metropolitics, the city as unit and target.
Geopolitics meant battlefields, Verdun, Stalingrad, the Normandy Landings. Today geopolitics is fading in favor of what I've called metropolitics, insofar as it concerns the city—or rather the metropolis, since London, Madrid, and New York are quasi capitals, not to mention Paris, where attacks against the Eiffel Tower were brewing.
The hinge of the preface is scalar. Globalization does not enlarge war, it miniaturizes the unit capable of waging it, until a single person is equivalent to Total War. The World Trade Center is offered as the proof, computed as a yield.
The war that grows out of Globalitarianism produces a change in scale. Globalitarianism brings us back to the smallest common denominator: one individual equals Total War; and when I say one, it could be ten as well. . . Just look at the World Trade Center, eleven men brought in twenty-eight hundred dead, just about as many as at Pearl Harbor, with its carriers, Japanese torpedo planes, etc. Exactly the same yield. The cost/efficiency ratio was quite amazing!
The name he gives the resulting condition is the international civil war, reported as something he said to Baudrillard on the day.
I even said to Baudrillard at the time of the World Trade Center attack: "This is the start of the International Civil War." Until now we've had national civil wars: The Spanish Civil War, the Paris Commune, but today this will be our first worldwide civil war.
Pure War is not thereby abolished. It persists underneath the new impurity as the button that can still be pressed, and the preface closes on that doubling.
This is what we're up against with when we raise the question of Pure War. Pure War is still around, it's still possible to press the button and send out missiles—Korea can do it, Iran can do it, and so can others; but in reality the real displacement of strategy is in this fusion between hyper-terrorist civil war and international war, to the point that they're indistinguishable.
The chapter runs the topic strip from the city and politics through fortress Europe, bunker archeology, the origin of the city, logistics, chronopolitics, the City of Dead Time, Total War, the technical surprise of the war economy, and closes against sociology. Its work is to establish the foundational inversion: war, not commerce, makes the city. Virilio opens by refusing the philosophical and sociological register in favor of the urbanist's, and makes the urbanist a political thinker by etymology.
I am first of all an urbanist. But the relation to the city, for me, is immediately a relation to politics. Furthermore, urbanist and politician, etymologically speaking, are the same thing. Involvement in a political ideology has obscured the fact that politics is first and foremost the polis.
The biographical root of the war-interest is given at once, and it is a childhood catastrophe, not a theory.
I'm someone who became interested in war through personal history. As a child I suffered the war; the destruction of the city of Nantes when I was ten was a traumatic event for me. My earliest studies were of military architecture in the Second World War. For ten years I looked for elements of the "European Fortress," and that's how I became aware of the space of war, of the spatial dimension of Total War.
The disciplinary claim follows: against the majority view that the city crystallizes out of mercantilism, Virilio takes the minority position that war comes first and commerce after.
There are two great schools of thought on urban planning: for one, the origins of the crystallization of the city, of urban sedentariness is mercantilism; for the other—the minor one, with Philip Toynbee—it's war, commerce only coming afterward. Obviously I find myself in the minority, which claims that the city is the result of war, at least of preparation for war.
He distinguishes war proper from the pre-State "tumults," and enlists Clastres: it was the tumult of the tribes that held off the State, and the State once constituted made war into an organization.
Of course there were millions of casualties from the Neolithic Age until the war of the City-State, but these casualties are what the Ancients called "tumults"; they are devastation, things which do not yet have the status of war. Moreover, I agree with Pierre Clastres in saying that it was the "tumult" of the tribes, or if you prefer, the guerrillas, that prevented the coming of the State. When the State was constituted, it developed war as an organization, as territorial economy, as economy of capitalization, of technology.
Lotringer states the thesis flatly and Virilio converts it into the term that will run through the book.
Lotringer: The general phenomenon is not the economy; it's war.
Virilio: Let's call it logistics. Logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will then become simply economy, to the point of replacing political economy.
The governing maxim of ancient war is the brake, and the wall is what settles a city into permanence. This is the seed of the whole speed-argument: defense is slowness.
In ancient warfare, defense was not speeding up but slowing down. The preparation for war was the wall, the rampart, the fortress. And it was the fortress as permanent fortification that settled the city into permanence. Urban sedentariness is thus linked to the durability of the obstacle.
Commerce is downstream of war, and needs no city. The image is the beach as first marketplace.
The first marketplace was the beach. The Phoenicians pass by in boats (same thing for caravans), they leave an object on the beach, and later they come back to see if anyone has taken it, if anyone has put something else in its place. That's what commerce is: "The caravan passes."
Lotringer: Commerce doesn't need a city.
Virilio: Commerce comes after the arrival of war in a place, the state of siege, the organization of a glacis around an inhabited area, etc. It doesn't need the city—the city in the sense of sedentariness, the mineralization of a building. Mercantilism is even the opposite of sedentariness: it's the stop-over, the rest between two flows.
The great periodizing move of the chapter is from geopolitics to chronopolitics. Geography measured space; the postwar vectors dissolve space into time, and the airplane window over the pole is the emblem of a city relocated into travel-time.
Today we're in chronopolitics. Geography is the measuring of space. Now, since the vectors of the post-Second World War period, geography has been transformed. We have entered into another analysis of space which is linked to space-time. What we call azimuthal equidistant projection is the geography of time. Geography of the day by speed, and no longer a geography of the meteorological day.
Already now, when you come back to Paris from Los Angeles or New York at certain times of the year, you can see, through the window, passing over the pole, the setting sun and the rising sun. You have dawn and dusk in a single window. These stereoscopic images show quite well the beyond of the geographical city and the advent of human concentration in travel-time. This city of the beyond is the City of Dead Time.
He locates his reception in the French military itself, and diagnoses the absence of a war culture in France as censorship.
I am read seriously by the French military. I have met General Buis and Admiral Sanguinetti, as well as the director of the Hautes Études de Défense Nationale, Xavier Sallentin, who criticized me sharply.
In Anglo-Saxon countries, war culture is available to everybody. In London or Berlin you can find practically any book devoted to the military question, including the most recent. In France, war culture doesn't exist, it's censored. The military question is not part of university studies, probably because France is a country in which politics and the military have always been very close.
The decisive historical marker is Clemenceau's line, which Virilio treats as an epitaph for political intelligence as such.
It goes back to the end of the First World War which was, let's not forget, the first Total War—not the Second. At that moment Georges Clemenceau made a key statement: "War is too serious to be confided to the military." That was the last political statement by a French politician (there have been others elsewhere in Europe). It is there, in the economy of war, in the involvement of the economy of European societies in war, that the coherence of the political discourse dissolves and that strategy definitely replaces this type of reasoning.
The technical surprise of the First World War is the origin story of the military-industrial complex: peacetime production could not meet military consumption, and the wartime economy had to be invented.
Let's not forget that World War I was the first truly technical war in Europe (in the United States, of course, there had been the Civil War, which was already a Total War). After several months of trench warfare—that is, of position warfare, since the armies could no longer move—they realized that their current war production, the traditional production foreseen during peacetime, could no longer meet the demands of military consumption (in the number of shells fired, of bombs, planes, etc.). And this on both sides, for Germany as well as for the Allies. This was the "technical surprise," as it was called, of World War I. So all of a sudden, there was a tragic revision of wartime economy. . . . This wartime economy was a formidable discovery, which in reality announced and inaugurated the military-industrial complex.
The chapter closes on the perversion of the civilian and the polemic against sociology, and Lotringer supplies the naming Virilio ratifies with one word.
The notion of "civilian" becomes perverted. It loses its meaning. People often tell me: "You reason in a political way, like the Ancients." It's true. I don't believe in sociology. It's a mask. Sociology was invented in order to forget politics. For me, all that is social, sociology, doesn't interest me. I prefer politics and war.
Lotringer: It [is] a Copernican revolution in the relations of strategy to politics.
Virilio: Absolutely.
The chapter replaces sociology with myth as the analytic instrument, then traces the arc from tactics to strategy to logistics and the arrival of the nuclear bomb. Virilio grounds the method in Dumézil and Duby, and defends myth over sociology on the ground that myth grasps tendency, citing Churchill.
Myths have an analytical capacity that cannot be denied. By comparison sociology seems a surface effect. What interests me is tendency. As Churchill wrote: "In ancient warfare, the episodes were more important than the tendencies; in modern warfare, the tendencies are more important than the episodes." Myth is tendency.
The three orders are read as still-operative tendencies, priest, warrior, and peasant surviving as overlays rather than castes.
We find priests, warriors, and peasants in contemporary society with overlays that cause the priest to be no longer simply a preacher, and the warrior no longer simply a soldier, but also a military engineer, or the engineer of advanced techniques. The peasant is also the proletarian, but the proletarian is also the professor, insofar as teaching has been discredited, etc.
Lotringer turns Barthes against himself, and the formulation is his, not Virilio's: where myth immobilizes for Barthes, Virilio uses it to set thought in motion.
According to Roland Barthes, the function of myth is to immobilize the world. You do just the opposite: you use mythology to get a hold on current transformations and to set thought in motion.
Eisenhower is the pivot from strategy to logistics, and the machine he builds becomes a State within the State, chosen not for generalship but for command of the war discourse.
Why Eisenhower? It's not that he was a great war leader, but that he was a man of the war discourse. He was the only one to use the new concept, which was logistics.
The three phases of military knowledge are laid out as a sequence, tactics from the hunt, strategy from the polis, logistics from the war economy, culminating first in the technical surprise and then in the qualitative surprise of the bomb.
There are three phases of military knowledge. The tactical phase is the first, since it goes back to hunting societies. Tactics is the art of the hunt. Strategy appears along with politics—politics in the sense of polis, the Greek city—the strategist who governs the city, the organization of a theater of operations with ramparts and the whole military-political system of the traditional city. . . . Around the 1870's, the war economy suddenly appears. . . . All of this culminates, as we have seen, in the technical surprise of the First World War. Finally we have the great surprise, no longer technical but scientific, a surprise of another kind: the advent of the nuclear bomb. It's no longer a quantitative problem that surprises the military staff, and thus the states; now it's a qualitative problem: the ultimate weapon. Logistics takes over.
Logistics is defined against common misunderstanding, traced through Jomini and Abel Ferry to the coupling of munitions and transport.
Logistics is a word that people don't understand. It is a term that comes from the Prix de Rome, logiste, "competitor," and which was used by Henri Jomini, Clausewitz's theoretical adversary. In his treatise on war, Jomini has a large chapter which is the first to appear on logistics. . . . But subsistence isn't everything: logistics is not only food, it's also munitions and transportation. As Abel Ferry said, "The munitions problem runs parallel to the transportation problem." The trucks bringing ammunition and the flying shells bringing death are coupled in a system of vectors, of production, transportation, execution.
The Pentagon's own definition is the one Virilio treats as decisive, because it folds peace into war.
"Logistics is the procedure following which a nation's potential is transferred to its armed forces, in times of peace as in times of war."
The a-national military class is defined here as a class rather than a caste, diffuse and unlocatable, and tied to the nuclear condition.
When I say "the military," I don't mean a military caste. On the contrary, what occurs with the triumph of logistics is a class, something more diffused, less definable. An a-national military class, insofar as war today is nuclear or is not at all.
The disavowal that recurs across the book is planted here by Lotringer's question, quoting Virilio back to himself: "I am not an anti-militarist, I'm worse." Virilio's answer refuses anti-militarism as a kind of racism against a class of men, and separates the men from the war-intelligence.
The anti-militarist is a racist. He is someone who attacks man. One is anti-militarist the way one is anti-priest. One sees a cassock and one spits on it; one sees a uniform, same thing . . . . I find that ridiculous. I am against military intelligence, I am not against men of war. Why? Because I've known them, they're the same! . . . So my opposition to war is an opposition to the essence of war in technology, in society, in the philosophy of technology, etc. . . . I am not against the military as people are against priests, I'm against the intelligence of war that eludes politics.
The soldiers themselves are disappearing into the automation of the machine, and the Falklands supplies the case: "Fire and forget," the crews reduced to witnesses of missiles that act on their own.
The proof is that they are disappearing, too! They're disappearing in the technology and automation of the war-machine. Look at the war of the Falkland Islands, it's very revelatory. Take the captain of the "Sheffield" and the pilot of the "Super Étendard." The pilot answers to the slogan of the Exocet missiles: "Fire and forget." Push the button and get out of there. You go home, you've seen nothing. . . . On the other side there's the "Sheffield" captain who says: "In this war, everything happens in a few seconds, we have no time to react." . . . "The missiles go by themselves. We are finished. . . ."
The civilian is already conscripted without knowing it, and the class's power lies in that non-recognition.
All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it. And some of us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.
The membership of the class is then extended past soldiers to everyone who reasons within the technological logic, which is what lets Virilio identify the technocrat with the military class.
Let's say that it includes all who contribute, directly, or indirectly to organizing this Pure War. Of course it's the strategists who work at this ideology of the unacceptable, the engineers of armament. And it's just as much the multinationals which invest in an apocalyptic—officially apocalyptic—perspective, on the economic level. . . . So what I call the "military class" includes all those who reason within this technological logic.
The so-called "technocrats" are very simply the military class. They are the ones who consider rationality only in terms of its efficiency, whatever the horizon. The negative horizon's apocalyptic dimension doesn't strike them.
The chapter's decisive definition of Pure War arrives through a commercial threat, not a military one: Esso to the national railway. War is what operates before it is declared.
When Esso tells the French national train company: "We'll stop delivering containers, materials, gasoline, oil, refining products, unless you guarantee us trains with 4000-ton capacity running at an average of 100 km/hr"; when Esso threatens to make do with trucks, it's already war. Pure War, not the kind which is declared.
For a long time now, we've been hearing about permanent revolution. Now we can say that Pure War is permanent war.
The chapter ends by naming technology as the new Nature, an unanswerable riddle that the scientists refuse to let anyone interrogate, and Lotringer supplies the name for Virilio's own work.
Science and technology came from man's questions about Nature. It was from this revealed knowledge about the riddle of Nature that technology was produced. Since then—for about a century now—the riddle of science and technology has tended by its development to replace the riddle of Nature.
It is our Nature. And there are no scientists or technicians to answer this riddle. More than that, there aren't any because they refuse; because the scientists and engineers, claiming to know, don't allow anyone to inquire into the nature of technology. And so the riddle of technology becomes more fearsome, or at least as fearsome, as the riddle of Nature.
The chapter runs from Heidegger through deterrence, the end of politics, State terrorism, and transpolitics, to the demand that speed be politicized. Virilio opens by ratifying the epistemo-technical name and routing the question of technology through Heidegger, with the pointed observation that Heidegger reached it by way of fascism.
"Epistemo-technical" is a very good word. The question of technology, as Heidegger said, is to question. Heidegger began to do it, we have to recognize, and perhaps he did it precisely because he knew the question of technology through futurism, in other words, fascism.
He answers the charge that he is a defender of technology and war by tracing his authority to biography rather than credential: the wars raised him.
As a child, I was terrorized by war. As I say in my preface to L'insécurité du Territoire, war was my father and my mother. I didn't do it on purpose: one doesn't choose one's parents. Later I fought in the Algerian War, as a draftee. I'm not bragging about it; quite the contrary, it's tragic. But both these wars initiated me into a profound understanding of the military phenomenon. War was my University.
The load-bearing inversion of the chapter is the reversal of Clausewitz. Peace is not the cessation of war but its continuation, so that deterrence is Total War carried on by the means of peace.
No, but in fact, the Second World War never ended. Legally, furthermore, it's not finished. It hasn't been put out. There's no state of peace. It isn't over because it continued in Total Peace, that is in war pursued by other means. You know Clausewitz's statement: "War is politics by other means." I would say that the Total Peace of deterrence is Total War pursued by other means.
What journalism still calls war is downgraded to interstate delinquency, the modern equivalent of the tumults, and renamed State terrorism.
War in the journalistic sense is national delinquency elevated to the scale of an extremely important conflict: the Six Days' War, the war between Iran and Iraq. It's the equivalent of the "tumults," as ancient societies called them. We can no longer even speak of wars, they are interstate delinquencies. It's State terrorism.
War today is either nuclear war or nothing. Sure, there are still thousands of dead all over the place, but we have passed into a dimension other than that of real war, a dimension comparable to what I've called a great delinquency. States act like individual terrorists: there have been numerous examples since 1969.
The dated origin is the 1969 Israeli raid on Beirut Airport, and the pattern runs through the Falklands to a general condition: the decline of war into deterrence, which does not stop conflicts but multiplies acts of war without war.
Because it was the great beginning, the attack by Israeli paratroopers on Beirut Airport. The paratroopers destroyed planes and went home. And these acts of war without a war, the equivalent of terrorist acts by one state against another, haven't stopped since. All the way to the taking of the Falklands by General Galtieri. . . . That's State terrorism. The proof is that during the two and one-half months that the Falklands war lasted, there was no declaration of war. . . . And I think this is an important dimension—not of war, but of the decline of war into the art of deterrence. The art of deterrence, prohibiting political war, favors the upsurge, not of conflicts, but of acts of war without war. It's the endemism of these acts which is now corrupting the entire world.
Lotringer formulates the reflexive turn and Virilio agrees: the State can meet terrorism only by becoming terrorist.
At the same time, this phenomenon constitutes a transfer of war-machines from the urban guerrillas to the State-machine proper. As if the State could no longer react to terrorism except by becoming a terrorist itself.
Transpolitics is then defined, and its whole force lies in Virilio's insistence, against Baudrillard, that the term is not neutral or productive but the name of a loss. The commodity that dwindles is duration, which is the medium politics requires.
Transpolitics is the beginning of the disappearance of politics in the dwindling of the last commodity: duration. Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics, requires time. Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it. For me, transpolitics is the beginning of the end. That's where my understanding of it radically differs from Jean Baudrillard's: for him it's positive. For me, it's totally negative. I fight against the disappearance of politics. . . . technology no longer portions out matter and geographical space (as was the case in ancient democratic society), but . . . technology portions out time and I would say: "The depletion of time."
The depletion of time terminates in the automation of the nuclear decision: when the time of response drops to nothing, the political decision of war becomes an electronic one.
Given that in the coming months the time of response will have dropped to nothing, in the case of nuclear war there will no longer be any political decision of war. There will be an electronic decision.
The bomb is not the novelty; the vector is. Explosive power is old, but absolute speed of delivery is new.
You have to realize that between the explosive power invented by the ancient Chinese and that of the atomic bomb, there really isn't much difference. The difference is in the vectors, in the carriers of destruction. Now we possess vectors of absolute speed, carriers of absolute destruction . . . .
The chapter's positive program is to politicize speed, both technological and metabolic, on the ground that to drive is already to be driven.
We must politicize speed, whether it be metabolic speed (the speed of the living being, of reflexes) or technological speed. We must politicize both, because we are both: we are moved, and we move. To drive is also to be driven. To drive a car is also to be driven by its properties.
And it closes on the couple that will recur through the book, speed and wealth, with the diagnosis that only the violence of wealth has been recognized.
Speed is not considered important. Wealth is talked about, not speed! But speed is just as important as wealth in founding politics. Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth. The two form an absolute couple. People say: "You are too rich," but no one ever says: "You are too fast." But they're related. There's a violence in wealth that has been understood: not so with speed.
The chapter opens on the concept of the accident and closes on the definition of dromology, by way of picnolepsy, the montage-structure of consciousness, the fragmentation of the great narratives, nuclear death, and Virilio's account of his own method. Speed is first defined as violence, through the fist and Napoleon.
Speed is violence. The most obvious example is my fist. I have never weighed my fist, but it's about four hundred grams. I can make this fist into the slightest caress. But if I project it at great speed, I can give you a bloody nose. You can easily see that it's the distribution of mass in space that makes all the difference. Moreover, as Napoleon said, "Force is what separates mass from power."
The accident is defined as the inversion of the Aristotelian relation of substance and accident, and made specific to each technology: every invention invents its own catastrophe.
In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress—a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash.
He proposes the Hall of Accidents beside the Hall of Machines, and states the maxim that raises the accident to the level of a first principle.
Every technology, every science should choose its specific accident, and reveal it as a product—not in a moralistic, protectionist way (safety first), but rather as a product to be "epistemo-technically" questioned. . . . I believe that the accident is to the social sciences what sin is to human nature. It's a certain relation to death, that is, the revelation of the identity of the object.
Interruption is the productive category. Death is the largest interruption, and picnolepsy the smallest, and both are interruptions of knowledge that constitute the time proper to consciousness.
In fact, all interruptions interest me, from the smallest to the largest, which is death. Death is an interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And it's because there is an interruption of knowledge that a time proper to it is constituted.
The rhythm of the alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness is "picnolepsy," the picnoleptic interruption (from the Greek picnos, "frequent"), which helps us exist in a duration which is our own, of which we are conscious. All interruptions structure this consciousness and idealize it.
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