The wager of the book is that the decisive fact of the late twentieth century is not war fought but war prepared: that once the nuclear weapon arrives, war migrates entirely into its own preparation, the production of arms becomes the act of war, and the casualty is no longer the enemy across the border but one's own civilian population. Virilio calls this condition Pure War, and its logic is that a society at peace is a society already at war with itself, drained and deferred and governed by a military class that no longer needs to fire a shot to rule. That is the claim a researcher comes to this book for, and everything else is machinery built to carry it.
The machinery is a small set of moves that recur in every chapter. War, not commerce, is the origin of the city and the State. The history of war is the history of speed, which Virilio names dromology, so that political power is first a power of speed and only afterward a power of wealth. The nuclear weapon converts strategy into logistics and converts war from an event into a permanent state. Deterrence, sold as the guarantor of peace, is instead the instrument by which the military class colonizes its own population, a movement inward once outward conquest is exhausted, which he calls endo-colonization. Underneath the political argument runs a metaphysical one about death, about time and its disappearance, and about the vanished question of God, which Virilio states openly and in the first person as a Christian. The brief follows that architecture through the book's own order, from the 2007 preface that renames the object Impure War, through the fourteen chapters of the 1983 dialogue, to the 1997 and 2007 postscripts that carry the thesis into information war and the war on cities.
The form has to be registered because it governs what can be attributed to whom. This is a transcribed spoken interview, and it advances by Virilio's associative leaps and Lotringer's reformulations rather than by demonstration. Virilio describes his own procedure as working in staircases, abandoning a thought once it is suggestive enough rather than developing it, on the stated principle that the developments are the episodes and the tendency is what he is after. A consequence, visible throughout, is that a good number of the book's sharpest lines are Lotringer's compressions of Virilio's looser speech, which Virilio then ratifies with a single word. Where that happens the brief marks the speaker, because the difference between a formula Virilio originates and one he merely confirms is a real difference for anyone drafting from him.
Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later, new and updated ed., trans. Mark Polizzotti, with "Postscript, 1997" trans. Brian O'Keeffe and "Postscript, 2007" trans. Philip Beitchman, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e); distributed by MIT Press, 2008), ISBN 978-1-58435-059-0. The original interview is dated "Paris–New York, January–June 1982" (page 181) and was first published in 1983; the 1997 postscript ("Infowar") and the 2007 postscript ("War on the Cities," in two parts, "The New Bunkers" and "A Finite World") were added in later editions, the 2007 conversation conducted at La Rochelle on 19 June 2007 (page 238, note 22). The book is a transcribed dialogue: in the reconstruction below, Lotringer is the questioning voice and Virilio the responding voice. The 2008 edition opens with Virilio's own retrospective preface, "Impure War," and closes with Notes and an Index. All page citations that follow are to this edition.
The retrospective preface, written by Virilio alone for the new edition, frames the whole book as superseded in its object but confirmed in its logic. The epigraph states the reversal the preface will elaborate: the arms race won, and what it won with was terror.
The arms race of "Pure War" has exhausted not only the USSR, which imploded, but also classical "Great War," in favor of Terror and the terrorist imbalance that we are now experiencing. Nuclear Proliferation has been unleashed again, taking a turn towards Fractalization. War is dead, but Terror has replaced it.
Therefore:
After the classical and political "Great War," we now have the Asymmetrical and Trans-political War of groupuscules, groups, and other "paramilitaries." The aims of the Anti-City Strategy shifted from the Balance of Terror to Hyper-Terrorism (2001). The external "Theater of Operations" is no more: Metro-political Concentration has won out over Territorial Geostrategy. Geopolitics has faded in favor of Metropolitics. The Principle of Indetermination now reigns. Is Globalization Total War?
The historical periodization is Clausewitzian war giving way to something for which the older category no longer holds. Virilio dates the coinage and places it in Baudrillard's company.
It's crystal clear that after the Great War, which was classical and political, we are dealing now with asymmetrical and trans-political war. The first time I used this word was in Berlin, some thirty-five years ago. I was in the company of Jean Baudrillard at the time, and I ventured the idea that we were in danger of drifting toward transpolitics. Well, here we are.
The new combatants are not States, and their multiplicity is what breaks the old symmetry. This is the move that forces the retitling: what the book called Pure War has become its own impurity.
When you've called a war asymmetrical and transpolitical, it means that there's a total imbalance between national armies, international armies, world-war armies, and militias of all sorts that practice asymmetrical war. These could be little groups, neighborhood or city gangs, or "paramilitaries," as they're called; Mafioso of all types, without mentioning Al Qaeda terrorists, or others. This is what happened in Africa, with countries that have fallen apart; and it's happening right now in Latin America, in Colombia, for example, where the national army is powerless against the proliferation of gangs, mafias, paramilitaries, or guerrillas. In my opinion all of this is contrary to the concept of Pure War.
Today we need to think rather in terms of Impure War—I'm not sure it's being called that, surely not—but really the whole question of deterrence has changed in nature.
The consequence for deterrence is the preface's political payload. Deterrence no longer points outward at an enemy military; it points inward at a domestic population, and its legal expression is the security state.
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