The Devil in Dr. Virilio

Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car.

— J.G. Ballard Crash

The Accident of Art, by Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, is a literate and provocative discussion in interview format that permits the reader to feel like an eavesdropper at a stylish and cerebral Parisian cafe. Like Gilles Deleuze’s admiring observations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical piece, “Crack-Up,” their conversation “proceeds at different rhythms and at several speeds” and the myriad of topics traversed ends up resembling various lines, large and small, broken off and starting again, in a cracked windshield. But the totality of the political observations and apercus Lotringer elicits from Virilio is clear enough: art is an “integral catastrophe,” its successes have led to its loss of focus, and it is time to take the time to slow down in order wrestle and vanquish the false idols of modern nihilism. Sound religious? It is.

It is also fair to speak of the politics of this book on art because for many French intellectuals who came of age in the tumults of May ‘68, politics was about art. Without a revolutionary class-for-itself, men and women of the New Left — like the Frankfurt School a generation earlier, whom they rediscovered — gambled on art as a subversive and transformational force in society. The most profound critiques of hegemonic blocs and dominant ideologies were heavily influenced by aesthetic categories of apperception. No doubt taking political refuge in art was “beyond the pleasure principle”: There is a perverse reassurance in affirming the validity of Walter Benjamin’s insights that in the “age of mechanical reproduction...sense perception has been changed by technology,” and that “self-alienation has reached such a degree that [Mankind] can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Illuminations 242).

Thus for many politics has been understood as art by other means — and not simply the more banal argument that art is politics by other means. Seen from this perspective, in these postmodern times, faced with a non-transcendent art that simply recycles and recombines past forms and themes, the political spectacles in Western capitalist societies are a kind of kitsch. Virilio would wrest Western political thought from the clutches of contemporary aesthetics and return it—so it would seem—to its proper foundations in Christian humanism.

Virilio argues that the modern, profane world is too fast, and the speed of information and communication systems has brought about our fall from grace via a “logistics of perception” facilitated by “optical machines” that “pollute” time and space with their instantaneity and omnipresence. And the displacement and disfiguration of art that began with the modern avant gardes — Dada, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and later—Viennese Actionism—have a metonymic relation to terrorism — because, presumably, the “accident of art” is integral, total, delocalized, and terrorism is, after all, our epoch’s spectacular form of iconoclasm (16–17, 25). These modernisms are the ungodly cause and effect of this pitiless process of desacralization in the modern age. The twentieth century has waged war on art and disfigured it almost beyond redemption(18–22). “Now anything goes” (40). But Virilio has not lost faith completely, “My logic here, don’t forget, is also the logic of Augustine: as long as there is anxiety, there is hope” (60). Martin Heidegger, another major influence on Virilio, cites Holderlin: “But where danger is, grows/The saving power also.”

The devil in Virilio is undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom existence is (still) bearable only as long as it is an aesthetic phenomenon (The Gay Science #107) and who, after all, had the hubris — and sense of humor — to announce “the...