Politics & Power Quote by Paul Virilio

Virilio flips Clausewitz on his head with a move that feels less like a clever remix than a warning flare. If modern war once clarified political aims through violence, Virilio argues that modern politics now rides on catastrophe: the accident not as an interruption of the system, but as its signature output. Call it the “integral accident” because it isn’t a freak glitch at the margins; it’s baked into the design. Invent the ship and you invent the shipwreck. Build the nuclear plant and you preinstall Fukushima as a possibility. Expand the network and you guarantee the blackout, the crash, the viral cascade.

The intent is diagnostic and accusatory. Virilio’s target isn’t just governments that exploit emergencies; it’s the entire techno-political arrangement that produces emergencies at scale and then uses them as leverage. Accidents become governance tools: they reorder budgets, justify surveillance, redraw borders of the permissible. “By other means” lands with a cold cynicism: the means have changed from armies to systems, from battlefields to infrastructure, logistics, screens, and speed.

Context matters: Virilio is a theorist of dromology, the politics of acceleration. As power migrates into real-time technologies, decision-making shrinks toward reflex. In that compressed tempo, the accident is no longer an anomaly to be managed after the fact; it becomes the event that makes politics legible, actionable, and governable. The subtext is bleak: the future doesn’t need declared wars if it can keep producing “accidental” states of exception on demand.