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Chapter 2 (Part 7)
In Grant's estimation, technological society is plagued from within by the "great darkness" ensuing from the knowledge, in the midst of the necessity and chance of contemporary science, of being able to recur to a more ancient account of justice; while being unable to forget the question "of what it means to say that justice is what we are fitted for." [36] Which is to intimate that we, the survivors of the post catastrophe of the Kantian dilemma, live in that impossible division, between the enucleation of the horizon by the technological "will to nothingness," and the remembrance of an account of justice that can only be thought in the language of technical willing, as an "ethical value" so impugned by Nietzsche as yet another "condition of preservation." Now, I have privileged the contribution of Grant to an understanding of technological society as a more measured way of making the point that Virilio's religious dissent is simultaneously the singular strength and fatal flaw of his perspective. It is his strength because, beyond the inscribed skepticism of Baudrillard, and in a rupture more striking than Foucault's redoubling to excess of the "limit experience" or Derrida's "spurs," Virilio is the one French thinker who laments absence. In his thought, an ethical recourse to absence is raised to a level of political dissent and ethical critique, all the more remarkable for its general rarity in the intellectual scene. Indeed, Virilio can write The Aesthetics of Disappearance because all his texts have focused on "absented" subjects: from the absented city of Bunker Archeology and the absented bodies of Speed and Politics to the absented (human) vision of Cinema and War and The Sight Machine. If Virilio can think with such poetic eloquence and political passion about absented history, it is the political reward for his deliberate turning back to a more ancient religious account of justice, all the more politically persuasive for its lack of theological articulation in his thought. Nevertheless this is also the fatal weakness of his perspective because, like Grant before him who said that in the end he could not accept Nietzsche and so turned back to the certitudes of Christian faith, Virilio never solves the civilizational dilemma of the "morally good will." Indeed, it might be said that Virilio's vision of technological society is the morally good will in full force. There is simultaneously a hyper-critique of the nihilism of the war spirit at work in the politics (social contract theory), in the ideology (instrumental activism) and in the ethics (improved utilitarianism as bourgeois common sense) of technological liberalism; and an ennobled moment of remembrance of the "absences," first marginalized, then exterminated, by the technological dynamo. That Virilio does not provide an ethical means of resolving the impossibility of "thinking justice" within technology, or of transgressing the closed horizon of dromology, does not diminish the importance of his theoretical oeuvre. His lasting importance as a philosopher of speed may be, in fact, to show clearly the limits and possibilities of pragmatic naturalism in the postmodern condition. The limits in the sense that, like his classical predecessors in the Greek enlightenment, Virilio's seminal concept - the dromocratic state - must of necessity result in a historical sterility: a social totalization which, precisely because of its absence of thought about the civilizational contradiction of the Kantian dilemma, cannot be thought outside the closed horizon of a technological conception of justice; and which, moreover, because of its ethical inability to think technology as seduction will not countenance the possibility that the virtual technology of the "sight machine" is always acceptable to the last man as the emblematic form of freedom, the final reconciliation of justice and technology.
(Technologically) beyond his time because he is so (ethically) behind his time, a primitive Christian in a cyber-Rome, Virilio's recourse is to the ancient method of lament. A lament for the loss of politics:
For Baudrillard, the disappearance of politics is positive. For me it is totally negative.
I don't believe in explanations. I believe in suggestions, in the obvious quality of the implicit. Being an urbanist and an architect, I am used to constructing clear systems, machines that work well. I don't believe it's writing's job to do the same thing. I don't like two-and-two-is-four- type writing. That's why, finally, I respect Foucault more than I like him. [38]
A lament, ultimately, for the violent suppression of a measured vision of the good qua good in the name of cynical power: "As a Christian, I do the opposite. I say no. It's the abomination of desolation. On the contrary, we have to turn back in the name of a belief that death doesn't exist, that there is an afterlife, we must not only refute Holy War, but the notion of a Just War." [39] Or as Grant, Virilio's true counterpart in the New World, in, that is, the continent where the dialectic of European enlightenment was first practically realized as its autochthon, has said:
Our present is like being lost in the wilderness, where every pine and rock and bay appears to us as both known and unknown, and therefore as uncertain pointers on the way back to human habitation. The sun is hidden by the clouds and the usefulness of our ancient compasses has been put into question. Even what is beautiful - has been made equivocal for us both in detail and definition. [40]
But then, Grant died an unrepentant Christian and a political Straussian. And perhaps one day it might be written of Virilio that, like a larger community of religious thinkers before him, including Grant but also extending to Ellul and Etienne Gilson, the Christian turn in his thought meant that he could not finally follow Nietzsche in understanding cynical power on its dark side, where it mutates into the ambivalent sign of seduction. That point where the cynical power of the dromoscopy would suddenly exhibit a fascinating moment of imminent reversibility all speed, all inertia; all crash aesthetics, all lament for justice absented. Here, dromocratic culture is just what Bataille intimated: a violent imposition, and the deepest language of freedom. Baudrillard called this paradox "seduction," Foucault spoke of a "power without roots," Bataille spoke of "excess," Barthes talked about a fatal "sign slide," and even Lyotard, more pragmatic than most, intimated the inherent reversibility of experience. But, of course, this would be to say that dromology is both decay and freedom; and thus to admit to the necessary reversibility of radical skepticism and justice as alterities in human experience. It would also be to claim that dromocratic violence and the will to justice are flip sides of the same sign system, and to agree with Bataille that no one has ever really been interested in coherency, that dromocratic violence can be so seductive because of its privileging of self-cancellation, self-exterminism, and self-disappearance. Here, Bataille's "excess" would be Virilio's "speed"; that point where the dromocratic war machine would be theorized as operating under the schizoid signs of seduction and abandonment. That Virilio cannot go this far does his perspective no dishonour. He is, after all, a theorist of a more classical stamp, one who would forsake the moment of creative regeneration provided by sacrificial violence for the sake of maintaining a line of demarcation across the vicissitudes of human experience. In the end, with and against Kant, he insists on the impossibility of thinking justice within the horizon of technical violence. That his vision of dromocratic politics can be so deeply original in theorizing the invisible, virtual horizon of the sight machine; that he has so much to say about the war spirit as the dynamic language of possessed individualism, may imply that, like the priest who has lost his faith but still dispenses it to others in a final gesture of sacrifice, Virilio's exercise of the "morally good will" makes of him the last and best of all the saints.
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