Virilio's wager is that the accident is not what befalls a technology from outside but what that technology secretly is. Invent the substance and you have already invented its catastrophe: the ship carries the shipwreck, the airliner the crash, the reactor the meltdown. If that is true, then the whole modern arrangement, which treats progress as a stream of benefits shadowed by regrettable and separable mishaps, has the metaphysics backwards, and the accident is the truth the substance was concealing all along. From this single inversion the book derives everything: a demand that we stop hiding catastrophes and instead exhibit them, in a "Museum of the Accident"; a periodization in which the local, situated accident of the industrial age (a ship in the North Atlantic on a certain night) gives way to a planetary "integral accident" carried at the speed of telecommunications; and a claim that after the accident in substances comes the accident in knowledge itself, which attacks not this or that habitat but rationality's power to anticipate.
The reconstruction below follows that through-line as it moves across the book's ten chapters: the invention thesis and its Aristotelian pedigree; the deliberate blurring of accident and attack in the media; the museological program and the synchronization of collective emotion that displaces the older standardization of opinion; the pairing of ecology (a symptom) with eschatology (a horizon); speed as the hidden variable, named dromology; and the final globalization of the accident into a foreclosed world with no outside. The book is repetitive by design, restating its core formulations in varied wording chapter after chapter; that recurrence is itself part of the argument, so every locus of a recurring formulation is captured in its own place below, and a recurrence map at the end lets the pattern be read across the book at a glance.
Read it also as a period document. Its present tense is the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Toulouse AZF explosion of 21 September 2001, the Madrid Atocha bombing of 11 March 2004, and the run-up to the US presidential election of November 2004; its recurring political object is the confusion, deliberately maintained by the "administration of fear," between the accident and the attack.
Paul Virilio. The Original Accident. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Originally published as L'Accident originel (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2005).
The book grew out of the exhibition Ce qui arrive ("Unknown Quantity"), which Virilio organized at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 2002–2003 and conceived as a prefiguration of a future Museum of the Accident (page 7). It runs to two parts and ten chapters: Part I — 1. Caution (pages 3–8); 2. The Invention of Accidents (9–14); 3. The Accident Argument (15–22); 4. The Accident Museum (23–30); 5. The Future of the Accident (31–37); 6. The Expectation Horizon (38–46); 7. Unknown Quantity (47–53). Part II — 8. Public Emotion (57–69); 9. The Original Accident (70–82); 10. The Dromosphere (83–101). All page references below are to this edition.
The book opens by naming two features that set the present against every prior civilization. The first is speed; the second, which follows from it, is the accident. Virilio takes both from a single sentence of Marc Bloch's and treats the pairing as the book's premise.
page 3"One feature, the most distinctive of all, pits contemporary civilization against those that have preceded it: speed. The metamorphosis occurred in the space of a single generation."
The historian Marc Bloch, noted in the 1930s, quoted by Virilio.
page 3"This situation involves a second feature in turn: the accident. The gradual spread of catastrophic events not only affects the reality of the moment but causes anxiety and anguish for generations to come."
The stakes of the whole book are stated here as a matter "of the utmost urgency": to make the accident an object of study and exhibition rather than something merely suffered. Everyday life has become a broken mirror in which what "crops up" does so ever faster and, at the limit, simultaneously.
page 3"From incidents to accidents, from catastrophes to cataclysms, everyday life has become a kaleidoscope where we endlessly bang into or run up against what crops up, ex abrupto, out of the blue, so to speak … And so, in this broken mirror, we need to learn how to clearly make out what crops up more and more frequently and, more to the point, more and more rapidly, in an untimely fashion, perhaps even simultaneously."
page 3"Faced with this state of affairs in an accelerated temporality that affects customs and moral standards and art every bit as much as the politics of nations, one thing stands out as being of the utmost urgency: to expose the accident in Time."
The move that governs the rest of the book is museological. Against the "admission of powerlessness" Valéry diagnosed, Virilio proposes to reverse the usual concealment and build a museology that exhibits the accident in every register, including the happy accident.
page 4"This admission of powerlessness in the face of the surging up of unexpected and catastrophic events forces us to try to reverse the usual trend that exposes us to the accident in order to establish a new kind of museology or museography: one that would now entail exposing the accident, all accidents, from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural catastrophes to industrial and scientific disasters, without avoiding the too often neglected category of the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup de foudre or even the coup de grâce!"
The Aristotelian pedigree of the thesis is stated here for the first time, and immediately turned into the invention series that recurs throughout the book. This is the load-bearing formulation of the entire work.
page 5"According to Aristotle, 'the accident reveals the substance.' If so, then invention of the 'substance' is equally invention of the 'accident'. The shipwreck is consequently the 'futurist' invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station."
Valéry is enlisted twice to convert the point about tools into a point about consciousness: awareness survives only as awareness of accidents, and function exists only outside consciousness.
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