Virilio's Virilio's Theory of Catastrophe, Apocalypse, Globalisation In Virilio's Virilio's view contemporary global society is a catastrophic society. This This much is evident from recent tets, such as The Information !omb "#$, %n&nown uantity "($, The )riginal Accident Accident "*$, and The %niversity of +isaster "$. These tets show how the epansive pro-ect of modernity has reached its limit in the light speed coloniation of terrestrial time and space by technology and media, and has now started to contract bac& towards a singularity of infinite density that is uninhabitable for embodied humans and only really liveable as virtual or spectral space. !eyond his consideration of the eorbitant notion of eo/planets eo/p lanets advanced by physicists such as 0tephen 1aw&ing "2$, who suggest that it will soon be time for humanity to vacate the ehausted eh austed planet in search of a new home, Virilio illustrates illustrates the catastrophic nature of what we might call completed modernity in his view of the recent economic ec onomic crisis. In a (334 5e 6onde 6on de interview with Gerard Curtois and 6ichel Guerrin entitled 'The Current Crash 7epresents the Integral Accident 8ar 9cellence' ":$, Virilio Virilio suggests that we should understand the economic crisis in terms of a catastrophe of modern or hyper/modern speed and an accident of global proportions waiting to happen. In this way he follows 1annah Arendt's view, which she eplains in her The )rigins of Totalitarianism Totalitarianism ";$, that progress and catastrophe are two sides of the same coin. This view also recalls
$ that ta&es place at the level of virtuality, virtuality, but is no less real in its effects. This tension between processes p rocesses of virtualisation, which Virilio Virilio "#3$ lin&s to the hyper/modern achievement of mediation, light speed, and instantaneity, and the catastrophe of the life world of embodied humanity, is important for the thesis I want to present in this chapter. This is because it allows me to show how Virilio Virilio recasts the secular idea of catastrophe in terms of the virtual, metaphysical, mystical, and ultimately theological idea of the Christian apocalypse. I believe this notion may be seen to lin& his wor& to both the messianic political theology of o f Arendt "##$, "##$, !en-amin "#($, and 1eidegger "#*$ and the contemporary return of religiosity to the centre of the political scene of global society. society. In other words, my view is that Viril Virilio's io's theory of the catastrophic nature of processes of virtualisation for embodied humanity / and his subse?uent hope that the careful interpretation or illustration of accidental events may reveal or illuminate the catastrophic other side of the modern or hyper/modern progress towards virtualisation thus enabling humanity to find a new way of living with technology / should be understood as a ?uasi/theological theory of post/modern apocalypticism comparable to those of Arendt, !en-amin, and 1eidegger, who hoped that a similar turn may occur in the future. 9ven reading his short 5e 6onde interview offers a glimpse into the way in which Virilio understands the recent economic crash. In my view the catastrophic financial crash is apocalyptic apo calyptic in Virilio's Virilio's terms not simply because of its effects on large numbers of people who have lost their homes. This is a condition which we must understand first individualistically, in terms of the personal catastrophe for the individuals
involved@ second socio/politically, through the idea that globalisation has produced the forced liberation of people from their environment and led to the emergence of a world of flows@ and third phenomenologically/eistentially, insofar as this event realises the theory of humanity torn from its environment, made homeless, and cast out into an alien world. !ut the crash is apocalyptic not simply for these reasons, or because of the ways that it can be seen to reveal the completion or limit of the light speeds of globalisation and hyper/modern mar&etisation in the collapse of these forms into chaos. 7ather, I would suggest that beyond these mar&ers, which may be seen to locate the event as a secular catastrophe, we should regard Virilio's ta&e on the financial crash as truly apocalyptic in nature because of the ways in which he understands the location of the crash on the virtual, tetual, and metaphysical level of signs and information. That is to say that I thin& we should see Virilio's apocalypticism in the ways in which he imagines the virtuality or tetuality of this catastrophe of signs as an esoteric tet inviting the revelation of the destructive capacity of hyper/modernity for humanity and suggestive of the idea that we must use this revelation to discover some new form of technological society habitable for embodied human beings who cannot but live in the world. !ut what is it that the apocalyptic economic crash reveals in Virilio's view 7eading the 5e 6onde interview through the lens of his wider thought I would suggest that for Virilio the apocalyptic crash reveals the destructive capacity of progress, and in particular progress towards virtualisation. In his view it is this process of virtualisation that signals the emergence of a ?uasi/ theological spectral body that denatures, dehumanises, and alienates humanity from itself in a state of pure or perma war where everybody is aware of the precariousness of their situation. 1ere precariousness is understood in both socio/economic terms of a position in the labour mar&et and phenomenological/eistential terms of a torn relation to the life support systems of the terrestrial environment itself "#$. It is on the basis of these catastrophic effects that Virilio suggests that the futurism of the hyper/modern utopia of speed needs to be critically re/thought. %nfortunately, we &now that this is highly unli&ely to happen without severe catastrophic effects because from the point of view of neo/liberal capitalism, the hegemonic socio/economic system of the empire of speed which remains the great blind/spot of Virilio's thought, violent crashes and accidental events are ultimately productive in ways illustrated by 0chumpeter's "#2$ theory of creative destruction and more recently Blein's "#:$ analysis of disaster capitalism. Although I would ris& the claim that the capitalist view of the productivity of violence, destruction, and catastrophe may be sha&en by accidents that threaten the coherence of the socio/ economic system or certainly the environmental life support system itself, it is not at all clear that this is the case and that capitalism will reform its practices when it loo&s li&e the world is about to end. This is because the high priest of neo/liberal economics, 6ilton =riedman "#;$, would regard the total collapse of the socio/economic system in apocalyptic terms, as an opportunity to re/boot the system in a more successful, more efficient form, rather than as a wa&e up to reform the mode of production in a general sense. In this respect, I thin& we must remain cautious of Virilio's "#4$ Augustinian theory of apocalyptic hope, which parallels Girard's "#>$ view that the contemporary world is balanced somewhere between the mimetic war of all against all and an apocalyptic turn that will usher in a new mode of being together. As iDe& "(3$, !adiou "(#$, and Bro&er "(($ eplain, and Virilio &nows all too well, contemporary capitalism is itself an apocalyptic world/less form rooted in metaphysics, science fiction, and the &ind of ?uasi/theological mysticism that +er +erian "(*$ finds at the heart of the American military/
industrial/media/entertainment networ& and the related pro-ect of virtuous war. As such, and because we must understand that post/modern capitalism may well not only survive, but also profit from the end of the world, we should recognise the importance of Virilio's "($ notions of critical space. $ and the university of disaster "*3$ as attempts to present a theory of the institutionalisation of the criti?ue of the globalised empire of speed that may tip the apocalyptic balance against the world/less mysticism of neo/liberal post/modern capitalism and towards the humanitarian demand for a more liveable world where technology wor&s for humans, rather than the other way around. Against what he calls the twilight of place "*#$, which condemns humanity to, at best, a life on the move and, at worst, the living death of a disembodied and spectral eistence, Virilio shifts into reverse through the idea of critical space that can institutionalise the Ancient 0ocratic call to 'Bnow Thyself'@ such a call has been disappeared by the culture of speed that leaves no time for reflection, but remains hidden, a &ind of unconscious supplement in our world of light speed tra-ectories and velocities, awaiting the moment when time seems to stop and critical thought is possible once more. A&in to the =reudian logic of unearthing the hidden unconscious other side of psychic life, Virilio's "*($ notions of the critical space of the museum of accidents and the university of disaster see&s to reveal the other side of the modern commitment to progress and development. =ollowing Aristotle, who suggested that the accident reveals the substance and in doing so inspired western thin&ers from Eietsche, 1eidegger, =reud, +eleue, and +errida to thin& through a theory contrasting the system and its others, Virilio eplicitly ta&es the case of the accident and suggests that it has the potential to reveal the substance or truth of the modern temptation to progress, speed, and totality "**$. Apart from revealing this substance, as the violence and destructiveness of modernity, especially in its hyper/active phase, it may be that what Virilio's "*$ apocalypse would also reveal would be the need for humanity to learn a sense of humility. To accept that it is not divine, but rather a limited earthbound species that cannot live without resistance or gravity. The parado of this situation is, of course, that it is precisely humanity's limited nature, the fact that we are not Gods, that has led us to reach for the s&ies only to plunge bac& down to earth li&e Icarus, the tragic figure par ecellence of Gree& mythology.
5i&e Eietsche "*2$, who was well aware of humanity's tragic nature, Virilio &nows that we will always try to touch the s&y. In this respect I do not see him in any way as anti/modern, even though it is possible that his criti?ue of the ecessive nature of the empire of speed may epress itself in a form of social and cultural conservatism that is not easily reconciled with his radical criti?ue of technology. Instead I believe that his problematic resides in the hubristic forgetting of tragedy that has evolved through hyper/modernity and the need to rehabilitate the Ancient idea of humanity as a tragic creature of the limit that is made necessary and possible by the apocalyptic culture of post/modernism. This culture simultaneously and paradoically mar&s the moment when we run into the limit of terrestrial time and space and forget about our earthbound limited nature. In this respect my focus is less on Virilio's conservatism or his desire to restrict humanity@ rather I am interested in what I perceive to be his concern to maintain the eperience of the limit in a global age where we simultaneously inhabit a state of global fullness and completion and precisely for that reason have no sense of that truth. It is this parado, this conflation of the destructive potential of completed modernity and the total inability of humanity to understand this condition as a sign of the limitation and potential end of its own eistence, primarily because of its location or immersion in a vorte of information that screens out critical thought and &nowledge, that forms the basis of Virilio's apocalypse and necessitates the creation of institutions able to thin& through the end times in order to pull us bac& from the brin&. 1erein resides the meaning of Virilio's "*:$ idea of a politics of the very worst and his notion of the accident as an inverted miracle able to radically re/orient our relation to the world and technology. II Virilio's Eotion of Catastrophic 6odernity =or Virilio "*;$ modernity must be understood as a catastrophic epoch which has led to what he calls a 'toposcopical disaster' characterised by humanity's inability to properly perceive the phenomenological reality of the environment that functions as its life support system. Against this catastrophic condition / which he tells us leads to the psychopathological condition of the planet man who falls into megalomania by virtue of his inability to understand his relation to the totally mediated virtual world that has been condensed to the infinite density of a singularity by the light speeds of new media technology / Virilio eplains that we need to find a new form of art suitable for illustrating our condition and illuminating our apocalyptic situation. "*4$ =rom this insight I thin& we can ma&e two points. =irst, it is methodologically significant that Virilio discusses the redemptive ?uality of art, rather than critical theory, because what this illustrates is his view that comple theoretical constructions are unli&ely to impact upon a high speed society where &nowledge and thought have been more or less destroyed by an ecess of information and communication. The value of art is, therefore, that it ma&es an emotional, rather than cognitive, impression upon the audience and causes them to feel, rather than necessarily theoretically comprehend their situation in an epoch where theoretical comprehension has been, at best, marginalised, and at worst, foreclosed by the light speeds of new technology. $ foregrounds this methodological approach in his wor& because he has the tendency to eplain the ways in which his own wor& leaps from idea to idea without necessarily wor&ing out the connections between theories and concepts. The effect of this procedure is, therefore, to give
the reader first, an impression and second, an invitation to wor& bac&wards through the theoretical connections present in his wor&.
events that is fed to passive tele/viewers, but rather the eistential realisation of the catastrophe ta&ing place now, the endless catastrophe pushing humanity and the world to the very edge of eistence, is the apocalypse. This is the true moment of revelation, that would change our relationship to both technology and the world forever, and demand us to actively reformulate our way of living in the world on the basis of that revelatory eperience. If this revelatory eperience, this apocalyptic moment, is the ob-ective of Virilio's thought, I thin& that we should read his wor&s as a history of the catastrophic nature of modernity, hyper/ modernity, and the emergence of the post/modern moment of globalisation when time and space are ehausted and there is nowhere else to go. As catastrophe piles upon catastrophe in a totally mediated, totally inter/connected world where everything impacts upon everything else, Virilio's "2$ wager is that we will wa&e up to the catastrophe of modernity realised or post/modernity and change our situation. 0hifting into reverse, and considering his now classic 0peed and 8olitics ":$, Virilio shows how modernity and the obsession with speed and progress began with the =rench 7evolution. In his view the 7evolution destroyed the immobility of the feudal universe that had reigned more or less unchanged since Aristotle considered the idea of the great chain of being, and inaugurated a society and social form ordered by the principle of futurity and modernisation. This new society was formed on the basis of science, reason, technology, and democracy and was eventually meant to reach its final destination in a utopia of techno/scientific reasoned virtue. 1owever, as iDe& ";$ has shown in his essay on 7obespierre's famous 'Virtue and Terror' speech, the revolutionaries, who Virilio calls dromomaniacs, &new that their new society of speed, movement, and progress could never succeed without overcoming or simply crashing through whatever obstacles lay in its path. In this respect iDe& highlights 7obespierre's insight that virtue was always bound to terror, that virtue was in fact impossible without terror, in much the same way that Virilio foregrounds the terminal relationship between speed and war, to show how the history of modernity, the epoch of speed, has always been about the violent overcoming of obstacles and limits through terrorist ballistic technologies. This much is evident when we consider what Virilio "4$ calls pure war, his term for eplaining the thin or even invisible line separating war from peace in modern society. Consider the principal site of modernity, modernisation, and speed, the city, which Virilio ">$ regards as a site of 'habitable circulation'. If we thin& about the city, which 6umford "23$ tells us is the originary site of human sociability and civiliation, through the wor&s of the Italian =uturist artist %mberto !occioni and the German sociologist Georg 0immel, we enter a completely different scene to the foundational city painted by 6umford. In !occioni's The City 7ises "2#$ or 0immel's The 6etropolis and 6ental 5ife "2($ we are presented with the image of the city as a place of enormous energy and vitality, but also abstraction, alienation, and violence. In both cases Virilio's "2*$ view that the modern city is governed by a dictatorship of movement is appropriate. There is no resting place, or hiding place, in either !occioni or 0immel. 6oderns are fatally eposed to speed and must learn to ad-ust to the new epoch.
Theweleit "22$ in his two volume psychoanalytic study of the proto/Eai =rei&orps para/military group that terrorised (3s. $, was himself concerned with the movement and the progress of men through life. In his political science he imagined society as smooth 9uclidean space populated by atomised men or precise 'sub-ectiles' bound by the rules of the road set out by the 5eviathan and epected to follow these rules on pain of death. =or 1obbes, life was a race, and a struggle for power, where power refers to the difference between the relative speeds of men. In the contet of this situation, the rule of the 5eviathan was meant to legislate against fatal collisions. These would, in the state of nature, lead to catastrophic accidents between men, resulting in the end of one of their tra-ectories through life, immobility, and as a conse?uence, death ":3$. !eyond Virilio's ":#$ location of the emergence of modernity, the epoch of speed, in the event of the =rench 7evolution, it may well be that we should also thin& about the ways in which 1obbes' theory of the state as traffic cop from the mid/#;th century also contributed to the origin of the new society of movement, dynamism, and progress. 1ere, we may also consider how 1obbes' wor& built upon the new physics of Galileo and the theory of inertia that posited a universal law of movement and undermined the Aristotelian orthodoy that imagined a universe of order, stasis, and organisation, and regarded all movement as progress towards this natural end point. Given the radical brea& between the ancient/medieval physics based upon Aristotle's thought and Galileo's new modern paradigm that 1obbes too& as a model of the endless dynamism of early capitalist society, it is possible to see the =rench 7evolutionary brea&, which ushered in the society of the epoch of totalitarianism, as an attempt to rediscover the ancient notion of a telos that the 0partans and 8lato had sought to defend against 1erodotus' ":($ notion of history, and combat the revolutionary conditions later represented by !occioni and 0immel. In this way, it is possible to construct an historical time/line eplaining the emergence of the current catastrophic empire of speed that Virilio believes has reached its limit and started to burn out under conditions of globalisation. This time/line would run from the historical destruction of 0parta and 8lato's related utopian city outlined in The 7epublic ":*$, evolve through Aristotle's
theory of movement towards natural ends, ta&e in the destruction of Aristotle's theory by Galileo and the new modern physics and 1obbes' political science of society as a race, before reaching 6ar and the anti/capitalist reaction to the new violent society of speed. This anti/capitalist turn may in turn be related to the totalitarian attempts to re/discover a modernist version of the ancient utopia of stasis, leading finally to a consideration of the rise of post/modern neo/liberal capitalism in the wa&e of the collapse of the totalitarianisms that has liberated speed from all ideas of limitation. The central point about the end of this time/line is, of course, that the post/modern neo/liberal liberation of speed from all ideas of limitation, where ideas of limitation refer to either utopian ends or social speed limits such as trade regulations meant to govern the movement of capital, is evidence of the hubris and the forgetting of tragedy that Eietsche, 1eidegger, and Virilio all see as the core problematic of the modern society of nihilism, technology, and speed ":$. In each case I thin& it is possible to argue that Eietsche and 1eidegger, and now Virilio, recognise that the inability of humanity to appreciate the necessary phenomenological resistance of the world upon its movement and speed will produce catastrophic conse?uences in the form of the emergence of a last man bored by a technological world that he can no longer relate to and that completely prohibits his continued movement through space. This is, of course, the famous theory of inertia that Virilio ":2$ employs to show how the empire of speed has started to collapse into a society of immobility and stasis characterised by walls, borders, camps, and prisons that he generalises through the ideas of global foreclosure, incarceration, and loc& down. In this new global crash culture, where the ideology of global capitalism tal&s about freedom of movement and wor&s off the idea that increased proimity in a society where it is impossible to evade the other will lead to more love, sharing, and community, Virilio's "::$ point is that reality is defined by surveillance, suspicion, paranoia, security, hatred, petty -ealousy, revulsion towards the other, and ultimately pure war. This, then, is the catastrophe of the empire of speed without limits. This is the catastrophe awaiting a revelatory moment to transform it into an apocalyptic event that may enable us to enact radical, revolutionary, change. The challenge remains, of course, to find some way to produce this apocalyptic moment, to produce this moment of revelation, through artistic endeavour and critical thought in a society of speed where everything is reduced to the status of information, communication, and commodity to be echanged and passed on. In other words, there is no apocalyptic moment in the empire of speed because the empire of speed is defined by what we might variously call following Bro&er ":;$ and $ points out, death is distributed across the system. In this vision of the new capitalist world, mortality invades every aspect of life in the form of a death drive that compares to Virilio's concept of pure war ";3$ which shows how war is no longer contained in a discrete event, but rather eists everywhere, nowhere, and is at the same time never and always on. =or Virilio ";#$ this death drive is eplained by America's attachment to the idea of the frontier, or what he calls, citing Hac&son, the frontier effect, which has led the land of the free towards a form of nihilism set on the destruction of the environment for the sa&e of development, modernisation, progress, and creation of what +eleue and Guattari ";($ call
smooth space. That is to say that the American determination to con?uer or overcome obstacles, to create smooth space suitable for the speed of movement for capital and human flows, in many respects reproduces 1obbes' capitalist metaphysics of legalised movement in real space. It is this innovation that transforms the phenomenological world of embodied eperience into a metaphysical or virtual abstraction that humans, or perhaps we should say those post/humans plugged into the networ& society, eperience through inter/face with technology. Virilio's ";*$ America, the land of 1obbesian materialist metaphysics realised, is for this reason comparable to !audrillard's ";$ Eietschean land of fascinated banality. It eists as a land of deserts, a featureless landscape, a smooth 9uclidean space, that has come to define post/modern globalisation as a catastrophic space awaiting the arrival of its apocalypse. $ theory of virtuous war. +er +erian's theory eplains a mode of pure war, slimmed down in terms of its understanding of political compleity in order to meet the needs of speed, so that the world is divided along the lines of Carl 0chmitt's "43$ violent friend J foe dichotomy where the virtuous chosen people face off against the evil others who are set to burn in 1ell in an apocalyptic fight to the death, and transformed into a media abstraction by high technology, which virtualises reality, ma&ing the environment subordinate to the smooth spaces of the map. =or +er +erian "4#$, America, the land of apocalyptic virtuous war, the mode of pure war that fuses a theological belief in virtue with a high tech commitment to virtuality, was always fated to ta&e this road. It
was, after all, named after Amerigo Vespucci, the great cartographer/eplorer, and has always been the land of maps and the refusal of the world. III Virilio's Apocalypticism In his piece )n 9actitude in 0cience "4($ Horge 5uis !orges tells us thatK ...In that 9mpire, the Art of Cartography attained such 8erfection that the map of a single 8rovince occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the 9mpire, the entirety of a 8rovince. In time, those %nconscionable 6aps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struc& a 6ap of the 9mpire whose sie was that of the 9mpire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the 0tudy of Cartography as their =orebears had been, saw that that vast 6ap was %seless, and not without some 8itilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of 0un and
liberation of man from the flesh in what Bro&er "44$ calls the humiliation of the flesh. !ut in the emergence of this catastrophic condition, Virilio finds a potential apocalyptic turning point, a moment of redemption that could save humanity from the fate of 6engele, the great sadistic artist of corporeal manipulation who refused the reality of the miserable human body. 1owever, Virilio's theory / which suggests that apocalyptic revelation in the desert that is simultaneously the end and the beginning of the world may re/establish our relationship with our own fleshy bodies, our fellow humans, and the environment that surrounds and supports us / seems to run counter to the dominant hegemonic understanding of the logic of Christian apocalypticism, precisely in the way in which it spins the idea of the liberation of the flesh towards notions of humiliation and cruelty "4>$. As such, I thin& we must conclude that contrary to the Christian fundamentalism of the American right, which we might suggest has simply made eplicit a theological commitment to virtuality present in modernity from the beginning, Virilio's theory of speed and apocalyptic crashes turns off a materialist version of Christianity that folds the standard Eietschean ">3$ interpretation of the religion as a 8latonism of the masses committed to the destruction of the body, bac& into an idea of Christianity as a theory of the revolutionary potential of the poor and the miserable who eperience their bodies and live through corporeal embeddedness in the world. In many respects, then, Virilio reads Christianity and the Christian apocalypse against the contemporary fundamentalist grain, and, a&in to iDe& ">#$, understands the idea of God's sacrificial offering up of Christ as a &ind of integral accident, or event, that could allow humanity to pass through the desert of mutilation, cruelty, and virtuality in order to return to their bodies, each other, and the world provided by their ma&er. In conclusion, then, I thin& that Virilio's thought revolves around a criti?ue of the modern, hyper/ modern, and post/modern empire of speed that has defined the west perhaps from 1erodotus' ">($ discovery of history or 1obbes' ">*$ notion of the state as traffic cop, and certainly since the =rench revolution and the epoch of the totalitarian 'dromomaniacs' right up to our contemporary globalitarian society characterised by the deserter or planet man who is always on the move without really going anywhere. In Virilio's ">$ view, the globalitarian society, which is defined by media light speeds that mean that departure and arrival collapse into one moment of infinite density, is a &ind of utopian non/place, a blac& hole, symbolised by what he calls 'the inertia of the dead centre'. Inside this blac& singularity, comprised of a vorte of information, communication, and spectral bodies, suicide and pure war are the principal epression of what Virilio ">2$ calls the logic of disappearance that can eplain socio/political catastrophes from the dirty war in Argentina, the Bhmer 7ouge in Cambodia, the American bombing campaigns in Bosovo and Ira?, and the contemporary Islamic suicide bomber. In each case, Virilio's wor& shows that it is possible to discern a re-ection, revulsion, and will to overcome the phenomenological constraints of reality, so that in Argentina and Cambodia entire populations were disappeared, in Bosovo and Ira? the wholesale destruction of territory, city, and body was enabled by a myopic focus on the abstract geography of the map, and in the case of the Islamic suicide bomber, the body is eploded in the name of some superior metaphysical version of reality. 0imilar eamples abound throughout the history of modernity, ta&ing in 1obbes' ">:$ abstract vision of early capitalist space, !occioni's image of man in motion, and the totalitarians' utopian theory of some pure future defined by either a lac& of class or racial diversity, to enable
us to understand that the problem of modernity, hyper/modernity, and post/modernity resides in the inability of humanity to recognise the necessity of the resistance of the world and the tragic conse?uences that follow from this necessary feature of eistence. In Virilio's ">;$ view, the principal effect of the modern inability to recognise resistance and respect limits has been a crepuscular dawn, a twilight of space and time, where the obsession with speed and movement has led to the collapse into a culture of bun&erisation, suffocation, and incarceration, at the very limits of terrestrial space and time. 7eading the signs of the end times, such as media immediacy, everyday war, bun&erisation, information overload, and the transformation of humanity itself into code, Virilio ">4$ discerns the desertification of the world and the coming of a potentially revolutionary moment that would allow humanity to find its feet and live through territory, community, and its own body once more. !ut before this can happen, before we can transform the catastrophe that &eeps piling rubble upon rubble in front of our fascinated eyes, Virilio ">>$ understands that we must employ our scenic imagination in order to found a truly apocalyptic mode of representation that can shoc& us out of our stupor where catastrophes, disasters, and accidents are not only normal, but also an essential part of our obsession with speed and events. This is, then, the essential problem of Virilio's apocalypse. 1ow is it possible to translate catastrophe into apocalypse in a society that is obsessed with catastrophe, where everything is endlessly on the move, and there is no time for thought and reflection Apart from putting his faith in apocalyptic representation, Virilio also suggests the institutionalisation of the critical imagination in a museum of accidents "#33$ and a university of disaster "#3#$ in the hope that these negative monuments to the modernist obsession with speed / which would include the great wor&s of Gericault, Goya, and 8icasso, as well as representations of and references to the Titanic, Chernobyl, > J ##, and Ira? / may come together to reveal the catastrophic substance of modernity in a froen moment, thus enabling us to re/humanise the world in order to save ourselves as an embodied species. This, then, is Virilio's apocalypticism, the critical imaginary capable of translating the everyday catastrophe of modernity that has led our world to the point of infinite density into an apocalyptic sign that may enable us to overcome our technological thirst for annihilation and re/thin& our phenomenological being as bodies embedded in society and world. Eotes /////////////////// "#$ 8aul Virilio, The Information !omb F5ondonK Verso, (333. "($ 8aul Virilio, %n&nown uantity F5ondonK Thames and 1udson, (33*b. "*$ 8aul Virilio, The )riginal Accident FCambridgeK 8olity, (33:. "$ 8aul Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster FCambridgeK 8olity, (33>b "2$ 8aul Virilio, '0top 9-ect' in Eative 5andK 0top 9-ect eds. +epardon and Virilio F8arisK =ondation Cartier, (33>, #;;/(*;.
":$ 8aul Virilio, 'The Current Crash 7epresents the Integral Accident 8ar 9cellence' 5e 6onde, #4th )ctober, (334. ";$ 1annah Arendt, The )rigins of Totalitarianism FEew Lor&K 1arcourt, #>;*. "4$ *4/#>3, 9ds. 1oward 9iland and 6ichael <. Hennings. FCambridge, 6assK 1arvard %niversity 8ress, (33* *4>/3#. ">$ Eaomi Blein, The 0hoc& +octrineK The 7ise of +isaster Capitalism, FEew Lor&K 6etropolitan !oo&s, (33;. "#3$ Virilio, '0top 9-ect', #;;/(*;. "##$ Arendt, The )rigins of Totalitarianism. "#($ !en-amin, ')n the Concept of 1istory' *4>/3#. "#*$ 6artin 1eidegger, The uestion Concerning Technology and )ther 9ssays F5ondonK 1arper 8erennial, #>;;. And 6artin 1eidegger, EietscheK Volume I M II F5ondonK 1arper Collins, #>>#. "#$ 8aul Virilio, 8ure >4. "#2$ Hoseph 0chumpeter, Capitalism, 0ocialism, +emocracy F5ondonK 1arper, #>:(. "#:$ Blein, The 0hoc& +octrine "#;$ 6ilton =riedman, Capitalism and =reedom FChicagoK Chicago %niversity 8ress, (33(. "#4$ 8aul Virilio , The %niversity of +isaster. "#>$ 7ene Girard, 'The 9vangelical 0ubversion of 6yth' in 8olitics and Apocalypse ed. 1amerton/Belly F9ast 5ansingK 6ichigan 0tate %niversity 8ress, (334, (>/2#. "(3$ 0lavo- iDe&, =irst as Tragedy, Then as =arce F5ondonK Verso, (33> "(#$ Alain !adiou, The 5ogic of . "(($ Arthur Bro&er, The
"($ 8aul Virilio, 'Critical 0pace' in The Virilio 7eader ed. +er +erian F)fordK !lac&well, #>>4, 24/;*. "(2$ +rew !ur&, 'Introduction' in 8aul Virilio Grey 9cology ed. 1ubertus von Amelunen FEew Lor&K Atropos 8ress, (33>a, 8g #2/(2. "(:$ 8aul Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents FCambridge, 6assK 6IT 8ress, (33#. "(;$ 8aul Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster FCambridgeK 8olity, (33>b. "(4$ Hean !audrillard, The 9cstasy of Communication FEew Lor&K 0emiotetFe, #>44 . "(>$ 8aul Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents FCambridge, 6assK 6IT 8ress, (33#. "*3$ Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. "*#$ 8aul Virilio, City of 8anic F)fordK !erg, (332, ##*/#*. "*($ 8aul Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents FCambridge, 6assK 6IT 8ress, (33#. And Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. "**$ 7oss 1amilton, AccidentK A 8hilosophical and 5iterary 1istory. FChicagoK Chicago %niversity 8ress, (334. "*$ Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. "*2$ =riedrich Eietsche, The !irth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of 6orals FEew Lor&K Anchor !oo&s, #>44. "*:$ 8aul Virilio, 8olitics of the Very >>b. "*;$ Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. "*4$ 8aul Virilio, Art and =ear F5ondonK Athlone, (33*a. And 8aul Virilio, %n&nown uantity F5ondonK Thames and 1udson, (33*b. "*>$ 8aul Virilio, 8ure >4 "3$ Gerhard 7ichter, Thought/ImagesK =ran&furt 0chool ;; . "($ Virilio, %n&nown uantity. "*$ Virilio, Grey 9cology.
"$ Virilio, 'Critical 0pace', 24/;*. "2$ Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents. 0ee also Virilio, Art and =ear, Virilio, %n&nown uantity and Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. ":$ Virilio, 0peed and 8olitics. ";$ 0lavo- iDe&, 7obespierreK Virtue and Terror F5ondonK Verso, (33; "4$ 8aul Virilio, 8ure >4. ">$ Virilio, 0peed and 8olitics. "23$ 5ewis 6umford, The City in 1istoryK Its )rigins, Its Transformations, and Its 8rospects FEew Lor&K 1arcourt 8ress, #>:4 . "2#$ Christine 8oggi, Inventing =uturismK The Art and 8olitics of Artificial )ptimism F8rincetonK 8rinceton %niversity 8ress, (33>. "2($ Georg 0immel, 'The 6etropolis and 6ental 5ife' in 0immel on Culture eds. =risby and =eatherstone, F5ondonK 0age, #>>;, #;/#4;. "2*$ Virilio, 0peed and 8olitics. "2$ 9rnst Hnger, 0torms of 0teel F5ondonK 8enguin, (33. "22$ Blaus Theweleit, 6ale =antasiesK Volume IK 4;. Also Blaus Theweleit, 6ale =antasiesK Volume IIK 8sychoanalysing the 4>. "2:$ Arendt, The )rigins of Totalitarianism. "2;$ Virilio, 8ure $ Thomas 1obbes, 5eviathan F5ondonK 8enguin, (334. ":3$ Thomas 0pragens, The 8olitics of 6otionK The ;*. ":#$ Virilio, 0peed and 8olitics. ":($ 1erodotus The 1istories F)fordK )ford %niversity 8ress, (334.
":*$ 8lato, The 7epublic FEew Lor&K !asic !oo&s, #>>#. ":$ Bro&er, The >>a. "::$ Virilio, 8ure $ Ibid. ";3$ Virilio 8ure 4;. ";*$ 8aul Virilio, 'The Twilight of the Grounds' in The +esert ed. Thesiger, +epardon, Bhemir, and Virilio, F5ondonK Thames and 1udson, (333, #3(/##>. ";$ Hean !audrillard, America F5ondonK Verso, #>4>. ";2$ 8aul Virilio, )pen 0&y F5ondonK Verso, #>>;. ";:$ Tim 5a1aye And Herry !. Hen&ins, 5eft !ehindK A Eovel of the 9arth's 5ast +ays FCarol 0tream, I5K Tyndale !oo&s,#>>4 . ";;$ Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. ";4$ Ibid. ";>$ +er +erian, Virtuous >>, *(2. "4*$ Ibid.
"4$ Virilio 'The Twilight of the Grounds', #3(/##>. "42$ Ibid. "4:$ +ale !. 6artin, The Corinthian !ody F5ondonK Lale %niversity 8ress, #>>>. "4;$ Virilio, 'The Twilight of the Grounds', #3(/##>. "44$ Bro&er, The $ Arthur Bro&er, !orn Again Ideology, FVictoriaK Ctheory !oo&s, (33:. ">3$ =riedrich Eietsche, !eyond Good and 9vil F5ondonK 8enguin, #>>3. ">#$ 0lavo- iDe& and Hohn 6ilban&, The 6onstrosity of ChristK 8arado or +ialectic FCambridge, 6assK 6IT 8ress, (33>. ">($ 1erodotus The 1istories. ">*$ 1obbes, 5eviathan. ">$ Virilio, )pen 0&y. ">2$ Virilio, 8ure :$ 1obbes, 5eviathan. ">;$ 8aul Virilio, Crepuscular +awn FEew Lor&K 0emiotetFe, (33(. ">4$ Virilio, 'The Twilight of the Grounds' , #3(/##>. ">>$ Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents. 0ee also Virilio, Art and =ear, Virilio, %n&nown uantity, and Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. "#33$ Virilio, 5andscape of 9vents. "#3#$ Virilio, The %niversity of +isaster. //////////////// 6ar& =eatherstone is 0enior 5ecturer in 0ociology at Beele %niversity, %B. 1is areas of specialism are social and political thought and psychoanalysis. 1is current research focuses on notions of utopia and dystopia in social and political thought and he recently published a monograph on this topic entitled Toc?uevilles Virus F7outledge. 1e is currently wor&ing on the second volume of this study, entitled 8lanet %topiaK %topia, +ystopia, and Globalisation, which
will be published by 7outledge in (3##. Apart from his focus on utopia in social and political theory, he is also interested in urbanisation, particularly in relation to processes of globalisation. Fc CTheory. All rights reserved. N CTheory. All 7ights 7eserved
