File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0110, message 127


From: "Fuller" <fuller-AT-bekkers.com.au>
Subject: Re: terrorism
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 21:57:34 +0800


Here is an excerpt from a book called "The Possessed Individual" by Arthur
Kroker.
----------
Virilio's war spirit can take its place on the stage of contemporary
political history with such triumphant energy, because it sums up in one
brilliant theoretical concept - dromology - the double sign of presencing
and absence, which is surely the epochal consciousness of the postmodern
condition. Here, the will to dromocracy, to the bestiary of "bodies without
wills" possessed by the exterminatory logic of the war machine functions
according to the principle of "alterity": putting into presence the restless
"will to will" so eloquently prophesied by Nietzsche and Heidegger as the
"perspectival simulacra" at the disappearing centre of cynical power; and
eliminating from the human condition the varied forms of rememberance, from
that of bodies with wills to time and history. Here, dromocratic
intelligence is the form which cynical reason takes in the age of
enlightened false consciousness. The dynamic mastery of social and
non-social naturein the language of technological willing, in the name of
the freedom of the greater conveniences, is a bestiary for all those "bodies
without wills." Consequently, dromatic intelligenceconsists essentially in
"eating the globe" (the investiture in nuclear strategies of deterrence),
"eating politics" (where politics must be overcome by the war machine
precisely because the political implies limits on the will to will), "eating
bodies" (all the "civilian soldiers" become dromocratic holograms), and
"eating time" (the dromocratic world is that of "chrono-politics" and
fractal space where the possessed individual is infinitely permeable as a
"metabolic vehicle" demanding to be pirated). Or, as Virilio states,
dromocracy can find its moment of cyclical completion in the coupling of
"Holy War" and the "Just War," that moment when the "warrior of the Holy War
and the technician of nuclear war" discover common surcease in sacrificial
violence.
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