Accidents fascinate Paul Virilio. From the first train derailment to the crash of the stock market, accidents have served as a kind of diagnostic by which Virilio assesses the value and danger of new technologies. Television has become a "museum of accidents"; cyberspace ëan accident of the real". Globalization is a hoax, virtualization is the reality, and we are fast approaching the day of the ëbig accident", when virtual reality finally overpowers the real thing. Comprendez?
It is no accident - as French intellectuals before Virilio liked to say - that when Virilio's dromology (the study of speed) crashes head-long into semiology (the study of signs) the order of things starts to look precarious. Over a diverse career as professor of architecture, film critic, urbanist, military historian, peace strategist, and in the course of over a dozen books, Virilio has interrogated the integral relationships of security and territory, war and cinema, speed and politics, technology and culture, and left no prisoners: what stale thought he does not liquidate with corrosive intellect, he liberates with rhetorical excess. This makes for a difficult, sometimes frustrating, but almost always an inspiring read.
Accidents surrounded our interview. In 1976, I discovered Virilio when I wandered by chance into an Paris museum exhibition on "Bunker Archeology," Virilio's remarkable compilation of photographs, documents, and text on Hitler's Atlantic Wall. At the end of our interview, I discovered that twenty years ago we both had been attacked by street-fighters from the same neo-fascist party. We swapped war stories and compared scars at La Coupole Restaurant in Paris.
Der Derian: Is the author dead?
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