Source brief · Virilio reference library
The book is not a treatise but an interview: Bertrand Richard puts questions, Virilio answers, and Richard's questions do real argumentative work, supplying the framing thinkers (Jonas, Dupuy, Bauman, Hassner, Wacquant, Kundera) against which Virilio positions himself. A reconstruction therefore has to track both voices, because several of Virilio's moves are concessions or refusals issued against a position the interviewer has set up. The volume opens with a preface by Richard, then runs three chapters: chapter 1, the genealogy and physics of fear under the Arendt epigraph; chapter 2, the turn from military to civil dissuasion; chapter 3, the program for what is to be done. Virilio speaks throughout as both planner and philosopher and insists on that double footing, reading the contemporary world as an architect who happens also to be a phenomenologist (pref., pp. 10–11).
The organizing claim is announced in the title and never abandoned: fear has become an environment rather than a localized event, and States are increasingly tempted to orchestrate and manage it. Virilio routes that claim through his life's subject, speed, so the argument is at bottom a claim about physics, kinetics, and what he calls the acceleration of reality. The brief preserves the book's three-part sequence; the comparative placement of these moves against the rest of the Virilio corpus belongs to the master reference document, not here.
Richard opens on a litany (climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread) and names the object: fear and fears, individual and collective, combining and reinforcing each other (the dynamic of fear itself) (p. 7). His framing move is historical reversal. Where becoming an adult once meant overcoming fear, and where fear once had a bad reputation, a sociological and moral flip-flop has turned it into a sign of wisdom, a tool of thought, a propaedeutics (pp. 7–8).
Richard enumerates the causes of the rehabilitation without examining them: the questioning of traditional values, the deconstruction of overarching narratives, the progress of individualist ideals, the collapse of the protective institutions (the Church, extended families, unions, the welfare State) (p. 8). Underneath sits a dual phenomenon: doubt about science and progress after the century's violence and the nuclearization of the world (he cites the Manhattan Project director after the first New Mexico explosion of July 1945, “Now we're all sons of bitches”)2, and the spread of Hans Jonas's thought, which makes fear a heuristic principle: to think the world appropriately one must start from fear, above all the fear of the planet's disappearance (pp. 8–9). The conclusion is the hinge of the book's premise: Once chimeric, fear has become a foundation; a principle of fear replaces faith as the cornerstone of attitudes toward existence (p. 9). Richard flags the moralist's worry (a return of obscurantism, contempt for an invasive precautionary principle) and names Jean-Pierre Dupuy, under Girard and Illich, recommending living in a state of constant fear (p. 10).
He then sets Virilio in place: a vision both well-rooted and off-center, rooted because he is a man of land, habitats, construction, off-center because he philosophizes as a planner (p. 10). The compressed thesis Richard attributes to him: if there is fear it is because the Earth is shrinking and space dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time, so that the administration of fear is politics without a polis (p. 10). The biographical note that will matter later: Virilio is this son of an Italian communist and a catholic from Brittany, after everyday words to translate Einstein's relativity and to show that shrinking time means killing space little by little (p. 11).
Richard worries the title sounds paranoid, Orwellian. Virilio answers genealogically: it echoes Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear3, set in blitzed London, whose protagonist fights the Fifth Column, Nazis disguised as ordinary Londoners fighting a merciless war against the British from the inside (p. 13). Virilio lived the ministry of fear as a child in Nantes after the Debacle; the Fifth Column (formed during the Spanish Civil War) turned every neighbor, priest and shopkeeper into a potential enemy, its message: “We are not there, but we are already among you” (p. 14). The Blitzkrieg supplies the kinetics: Nantes 1940, told the Germans were in Orléans one morning and hearing their trucks by noon, against a memory of the First World War as a war of attrition that stretched out endlessly; thirty years later a city falls in hours (p. 14).
From this Virilio extracts the two senses of administration of fear. First, fear is now an environment, a surrounding, a world that occupies and preoccupies us; once tied to localized, time-limited events (wars, famines, epidemics), it is now coextensive with a world limited, saturated, reduced: contagious stock crises, faceless terrorism, lightning pandemics, the France Télécom “professional” suicides. Fear is a world, panic as a “whole.” Second, States are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear; globalization having eaten their prerogatives (the Welfare State above all), they must persuade citizens of their physical safety, and so a dual health and security ideology arises that represents a real threat to democracy (pp. 14–15).
The Blitzkrieg is defined as a phenomenon that occupies in the blink of an eye, and Virilio generalizes it through his coinage: speed combines with technology to form a “dromosphere” (p. 16). The analogy is explicit and load-bearing: just as speed gave the Germans their 1940 domination, fear and its administration are now carried by real-time technology, especially the new ICT, accompanied by real propaganda, instanced by the media's coverage of the new creations presented by Steve Jobs, Apple's all-powerful CEO. Techno-scientific domination plus propaganda reproduces all of the characteristics of occupation, both physically and mentally (p. 16).
Collaboration and resistance both presuppose occupation, intellectual (a preoccupation) or physical; the war presents a trinity, Occupation / Resistance / Collaboration, within which alone fear is intelligible (p. 16). The childhood difficulty is that the enemy was seen daily, ate Lu cookies in the streets, bought meat at the same butcher, and the ones who were bombarding and killing us were in fact our allies (pp. 16–17). Greene's phrase is well chosen because it describes [fear] like a State: under occupation, fear is a public power imposing a false and terrifying reality (p. 17).
Why false? Because no one is inherently a collaborator or a resistance fighter, even though the moral reality imposed on us follows this bipartition; for a child, Reality first appears as a trick (pp. 17–18). Here Virilio makes the distinction he will repeat: not an “augmented” reality as the virtualists say but an accelerated reality, which is not the same thing; this gives fear a distorted relationship with Being-in-the-world, and he stakes his standpoint, I am a phenomenologist, on having grown up where adults could not be trusted (p. 18). Physical fear is documented concretely: France and not the Warsaw ghetto; occupiers “normal” until the head of the Kommandantur was assassinated in Nantes, after which reprisals turned violent (the prisoners executed at Châteaubriant, including Guy Môquet), a state of siege, a curfew at 4 p.m., then heavy Allied bombardment with truckloads of legless bodies, eviscerated torsos, decapitated heads driven to the Saint-Jacques Hospital. The summary line: The administration of fear is on both sides: it is an environment (pp. 18–19).
Individual courage is possible against individualized threat; under shelling and hostage-taking, fear becomes collective (Every building was shaking with fear), and a child cannot be courageous in collective terror except by embracing sacrificial ideologies like patriotism or the kamikaze, a thread resumed in chapter 2. What can be done with collective fear is a question of speed: the Blitzkrieg, then the war of the radio waves, whose speed took on importance with De Gaulle's call to arms on 18 June 1940, all in the same town (p. 19). Against Richard's invocation of Baudrillard's “viral process of indistinction”, Virilio locates the development of judgment in the micro-collectivity of the family, then the building or the town; the countryside, less controlled, is more in the resistance. The biographical evidence: Vertou, 1943–44, where he met members of the Resistance and sketched the anti-tank fortifications south of Nantes in his school notebook and passed them on (p. 20).
Asked whether the same phrase can cover both 1940 and a comfortable West, Virilio answers through Arendt, with a flat ranking the brief carries verbatim because the wording travels: “Hannah Arendt has had a much greater influence on contemporary thought than Martin Heidegger” (p. 21). He notes she worked with Günther Anders, her first husband, and cites The Origins of Totalitarianism4: “Terror is the realization of the law of movement” (p. 21). His reading converts the phrase into kinetics: terror is not merely psychological but physical… in the sense of physics and kinetics, related to the acceleration of reality; Arendt's law of movement is the law of speed, the gazelle outrunning the lion (p. 21).
The post-war sequence: a “balance” of terror between the blocs, a reciprocal immobilization, suspended speed; from wars of direct confrontation (Verdun, Stalingrad) to massive dissuasion with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; roughly forty years under that regime, Hiroshima having opened the space of cosmic fear (pp. 21–22). Against Dupuy's phrase that security is the “offspring of terror,” Virilio insists the balance was first a military balance on the arms industry and scientific complex; science was militarized in the First World War (chemical warfare) but only truly militarized with the H-bomb, an absolute weapon on a different level. Since Hiroshima the democracies, the USSR then Russia, and the world have lived under a military regime overshadowing political life, so democracy survives in an illusory and very partial manner (pp. 22–23). The absence of atomic war owes more to a miracle of history than the supposed virtues of mutual dissuasion: the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Arthur Schlesinger called it the most dangerous time in the history of humanity, two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock (invented in 1947 by physicists), and Robert McNamara's “We lucked out” (p. 23). Virilio defends the term military-industrial complex as Eisenhower's, not the conspiracist's: “I am not a conspiracy theorist; I only describe logics”; the missing word in the phrase is “scientific,” and no political philosophy emerged to counterbalance it (p. 24).
The diagnosis of philosophy's failure runs through one scene: the early-twentieth-century encounter in Paris between Bergson (theorist of duration) and Einstein (relativity), both Jewish, both geniuses, who could not understand each other, because Bergson read relativity from the feeling of immediacy and the experience of time rather than from physics (p. 24). The misunderstanding is glossed as a slippage between three words: the philosopher's “vif” [vivid, lively] and the physicist's “vite” [quick] and “vide” [vacuum]; temporal compression crushed the euphoria of progress, and phenomenology was caught short (p. 25). He places himself precisely: “I am a phenomenologist, a Bergsonian and Husserlian”, Bergsonian for the attention to the living, Husserlian for the attention to the Earth as the space through which we experience our body, invoking Husserl's posthumous text on the Earth that does not move5; Husserl asserted the inertia of being in the world, but today the inertia of the instant… dominates the inertia of place (pp. 25–26).
The pivotal formulation, carried in full because it is the conceptual core: “Phenomenology has been unable to explain that speed is not a phenomenon but the relationship between phenomena. Speed is relativity and relativity is politics!” (p. 26). Where ancient societies held varied and diverse chrono-politics (calendrical, liturgical, seasonal, civil or religious, professional), the twentieth century discovered the instantaneity offered by the absolute speed of waves, and at that moment philosophy was left behind (p. 26). The missing discipline is named with Deleuze and Guattari: the lack of a political economy of speed to follow the political economy of wealth is the great drama of political thought (p. 27). Dromology is given its definition and lineage: the science of movement and speed has therefore always been a musicology for me (his master Vladimir Jankélévitch was a musicologist), a question of rhythm… of chrono-diversity, not an Ancients-versus-Moderns quarrel about the TGV. The terminal line: Our societies have become arrhythmic. Or they only know one rhythm: constant acceleration. Until the crash and systemic failure (p. 27).
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