Source brief · Virilio reference library
The book is not a treatise but an interview: Bertrand Richard puts questions, Virilio answers, and Richard's questions do real argumentative work, supplying the framing thinkers (Jonas, Dupuy, Bauman, Hassner, Wacquant, Kundera) against which Virilio positions himself. A reconstruction therefore has to track both voices, because several of Virilio's moves are concessions or refusals issued against a position the interviewer has set up. The volume opens with a preface by Richard, then runs three chapters: chapter 1, the genealogy and physics of fear under the Arendt epigraph; chapter 2, the turn from military to civil dissuasion; chapter 3, the program for what is to be done. Virilio speaks throughout as both planner and philosopher and insists on that double footing, reading the contemporary world as an architect who happens also to be a phenomenologist (pref., pp. 10–11).
The organizing claim is announced in the title and never abandoned: fear has become an environment rather than a localized event, and States are increasingly tempted to orchestrate and manage it. Virilio routes that claim through his life's subject, speed, so the argument is at bottom a claim about physics, kinetics, and what he calls the acceleration of reality. The brief preserves the book's three-part sequence; the comparative placement of these moves against the rest of the Virilio corpus belongs to the master reference document, not here.
Richard opens on a litany (climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread) and names the object: fear and fears, individual and collective, combining and reinforcing each other (the dynamic of fear itself) (p. 7). His framing move is historical reversal. Where becoming an adult once meant overcoming fear, and where fear once had a bad reputation, a sociological and moral flip-flop has turned it into a sign of wisdom, a tool of thought, a propaedeutics (pp. 7–8).
Richard enumerates the causes of the rehabilitation without examining them: the questioning of traditional values, the deconstruction of overarching narratives, the progress of individualist ideals, the collapse of the protective institutions (the Church, extended families, unions, the welfare State) (p. 8). Underneath sits a dual phenomenon: doubt about science and progress after the century's violence and the nuclearization of the world (he cites the Manhattan Project director after the first New Mexico explosion of July 1945, “Now we're all sons of bitches”)2, and the spread of Hans Jonas's thought, which makes fear a heuristic principle: to think the world appropriately one must start from fear, above all the fear of the planet's disappearance (pp. 8–9). The conclusion is the hinge of the book's premise: Once chimeric, fear has become a foundation; a principle of fear replaces faith as the cornerstone of attitudes toward existence (p. 9). Richard flags the moralist's worry (a return of obscurantism, contempt for an invasive precautionary principle) and names Jean-Pierre Dupuy, under Girard and Illich, recommending living in a state of constant fear (p. 10).
He then sets Virilio in place: a vision both well-rooted and off-center, rooted because he is a man of land, habitats, construction, off-center because he philosophizes as a planner (p. 10). The compressed thesis Richard attributes to him: if there is fear it is because the Earth is shrinking and space dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time, so that the administration of fear is politics without a polis (p. 10). The biographical note that will matter later: Virilio is this son of an Italian communist and a catholic from Brittany, after everyday words to translate Einstein's relativity and to show that shrinking time means killing space little by little (p. 11).
Richard worries the title sounds paranoid, Orwellian. Virilio answers genealogically: it echoes Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear3, set in blitzed London, whose protagonist fights the Fifth Column, Nazis disguised as ordinary Londoners fighting a merciless war against the British from the inside (p. 13). Virilio lived the ministry of fear as a child in Nantes after the Debacle; the Fifth Column (formed during the Spanish Civil War) turned every neighbor, priest and shopkeeper into a potential enemy, its message: “We are not there, but we are already among you” (p. 14). The Blitzkrieg supplies the kinetics: Nantes 1940, told the Germans were in Orléans one morning and hearing their trucks by noon, against a memory of the First World War as a war of attrition that stretched out endlessly; thirty years later a city falls in hours (p. 14).
From this Virilio extracts the two senses of administration of fear. First, fear is now an environment, a surrounding, a world that occupies and preoccupies us; once tied to localized, time-limited events (wars, famines, epidemics), it is now coextensive with a world limited, saturated, reduced: contagious stock crises, faceless terrorism, lightning pandemics, the France Télécom “professional” suicides. Fear is a world, panic as a “whole.” Second, States are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear; globalization having eaten their prerogatives (the Welfare State above all), they must persuade citizens of their physical safety, and so a dual health and security ideology arises that represents a real threat to democracy (pp. 14–15).
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