The Original Accident 1st Edition

Having exhausted my nerves on various occasions reading 'The Information Bomb', 'Open Sky' and 'Negative Horizon', I continue to subject myself to the hysterical ravings of this irrascible luddite. While many of the proposals put forth in this book are sober and sound- the idea of 'inventing accidents' is a clever twist on Marxist dialectics, as is Virilio's impassioned plea for a science of accidents, the moral urgency of which is obscured by a style overloaded with silly neologisms - the hyperbolic conservatism of it all strikes me as rather distasteful. Note the many references to 'our democracies', 'the legitimate state' and the 'democratic process', all of which are redolent of Lyotard's odious obsession with radical evil, the desperate paranoia of Milner and Agamben (true to form, Virilio has his own post-Heideggerian take on the fatal, irrevocable moment when everything started to go wrong), the blithe apologetics of the New Philosophers. To exacerbate matters, Virilio would have us believe that the destructive drive towards hyperspeed and technological innovation are now fully autonomous, having unfettered themselves from the lash of their cruel taskmaster, Capital. There is a tragic, ahistorical anthropology here, one that pillories the latent excesses of hubristic man, all of which have been given free rein in a resolutely anthropocentric universe that verges upon total disintegration. Augustine without a hope of salvation or reprieve. What, then, is left for us to do, if not to salvage the sodden scraps of communal being (the electoral order, which Virilio seems to endorse without reservation, despite his admission of its 'spectacular', mediatized nature) in a bid to apply the brakes on Enlightenment Reason? Now that we are all aboard the shipwreck of disaster, we can hope for nothing more than a miraculous clinamen that will bend, however slightly, the fatal course of its trajectory. Virilio, in the last reckoning, is Jurgen Habermas on a mix of barbiturates and amphetamines.

COURS