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1 l l Acknowledgements Prgrace I would like to thank Lauren Osepchuk for her assistance A Wm, Of pictures and Smmds is rc lacm th Wa e*r with translation and correspondence, also Benjamin de i Of Objects (pmjgctil s and missilcg {ni tc h _ i . c n1 Vulpillieres, Mark Koontz and Max Statkievvicz for assis- Cimps Version Of an an Seeing Divinity eve . . . . , ` ? , Y tance with some thorny questions. William Arkcn assisted j ruling out accident and Surprise, the drivc is OD with some technical matters, and I am grateful to Martha ; for 3 general System Of muminatiun that Wm E7 Logmjs {Oy her evengracious ediIO1?l3l SUgg? Yl0I?1$ I extend l allow everything to be seen and known, at every special thanks to my editor Tristan Palmer for his fine moment and in every PlaceSugg stlom and Patlgnfie thmughOut Paul Virilio, War and Cinema; The Logistic; [UV Fimily, 1 am gi-aieiui to Paul Virilio not only for Sharing pm,,P ,m (1984) his dccennial reflections, but for having been ?there?, albeit . N t Y s y ' ? t ' l as a Itelelspcetator, ten years ago as a woicc in the wilderness, Three months ago, they Wemrpt Seeing ust But H VOICE m dm desert suddenly, they were, Something was different. I K A senior Pentagon official, 'US and British jets L Mlchasl D<>g?? 1? Strike Air?Defense Centers in Iraq?, New York Northampton, Massachusetts ? Tjmmx 17 February 200] n Time has been kind to one of its most corrosive critics, Paul Virilio. The acceleration of technological change, the collapse of politics into media event, the melding of war { and cinema, the threat of a networked accident, the oblit? eration of space itself: all these speed?eftects were diagnosed before their time by Virilio. Many of his most hyperbolic ? statements now seem tame compared to, say, a Wal] Street ? journal article on the volatility ofthe market, or a Pentagon l official speaking out on the national security threat posed by hackers. The Virilio corpus, a remarkable output of twenty ) major works in just over two decades, provides a litany for Vi vii

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1 i nascar senses Fomzvvonm l been a sort of island of the political in an ocean of servitude Sui`V? ll&I1C???lil effect, in the logistical era of way, and _ and tyranny in the ancient WO]-]d_ ` contrary to the strategic era that preceded it, the power of ____;_; 1 destruction has been transferred from the armed population 1 to weapons systems, mass killers excluding the mass of Today, even if God may still need men, war does not, or killers of the past: the soldiers of the second year of the just barely . . , as victims. Consider, for example, chemical 1 republican calendar,l4 the soldiers of Napoleon s old guard weapons or the neutron bomb, which eliminate humans, the 1 or the allied soldiers of the last two world wars, and this animal, but carefully preserve material objects. ln fact, the 1 beginning with the terrorist innovation of an atomic weapon metastasis so feared by the ancients has taken place. The 1 capable of precluding political war ecologically, by endan? n decomposition of the social (what Leonardo Sciascia called a gering the very survival of the human race. sicilianization, by virtue of the proliferation of clans, of l We enter thus into both a third era of war and a new sects) progresses as the enlarged family of the agrarian mode l stage of the city, or more exactly of the post-industrial ? of production gives way to the nuclear family of the urban meta?city. The relatively recent end of classical deterrence petite bourgeoisie, and finally to the contemporary form 1 between the East and West, with its geopolitical uncertaincommonly called rnonoparcntal. Thus, as the city increases ties, results in the urgent necessity of reinterpreting the through the course of thc ages, so the unity of the people i doctrines of military engagement, going all the way back to _ has decreased. Henceforth useless, or nearly so, as a ?produ? j the most distant origins of history. cer? (skilled or non?skilled worker . . or as destroyer` 1 If, as Michelet asserted, each epoch dreams the next, each (soldier, conscript . , .), the supernumerary man of the 1 conflict of historical importance tends to imagine that which enormous megalopolis is forced to give up his status as follows. We saw this with the First and Second World Wars V citizen to the dubious advantage of increasingly sophisticated leading into the era of

atomic deterrence; and we will see it substitute material; automated machine tools operated by tomorrow with the end of the equilibrium of terror and the remote control, or war machines automatically controlled l inauguration of a nuclear proliferation, the inception of a by computeizlg SUClCl? 1 I1?1L1ltipllC3tiOH of the ideterrence of the strong by ln this epoch militaryandustrial and scientific logistics 1 the weak, of which the Gulf crisis is a harbinger. prevail over strategic doctrines and truly political arguments g If weapons of obstruction were initially established by the ? war being no longer the continuation of politics by other V city state within its ramparts, and the ghetto within the means, according to Gorbachev. The era opens as weapons 1 limits of a reserved quarter, and if weapons of destruction, of instantaneous communication come to dominate, thanks from the age of artillery until that of the atomic bomb, to the rise of globalized information networks and tele- 1 were created to surpass the urban limit spread around its IO 1 11 l {