[Reader-list] Paul Virilio: Panic City (blurb)

[Patrice Riemens]

Following on what Saskia Sassen wrote in nettime (*) on the aftermath of 
Mumbai 11/26, it might be nice to read what paul Virilio had to say as 
blurb/intro to his 2004 "Ville panique" book.

(*) Thread starts here:   http://tinyurl.com/6xer7y

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Place of the emergence of the political, the COSMOPOLIS is also where 
strategy, geopolitics and geostrategy merge in its walls, its towers, 
its road system, and its Maidans.

Since 2001 however, the nature of this geographic dimension to conflicts 
has been profoundly altered,, so much so that the METROPOLITICAL 
concentration now has superseded the nations' GEOPOLITICS of old.

The massive attack on New York has indeed inaugurated, after Hiroshima, 
the era of the "unbalance of terror", nullyfying not only the strategic 
importance of the number of adversaries on the battlefield, but also of 
the battlefield's expance itself.

By concentrating the shock and awe effect on the very denseness of the 
metropoles, the suicidal character of this type of attacks has ruined in 
one go both the _military_ nature of war, and the _political_ essence of 
the City.

This is an unprecedented historic event, where the known ennemy vanishes 
at the same time as the very possibility of whatever form of victory... 
since one cannot possibly win a war in which the so-called ennemy remains 
undefined.   

After the demise of the geopolitics of East vs West 'block' which rested 
on the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) doctrine, this fledgeling third 
millenium sees the sudden emergence of a new type of MASS KILLER, as the 
terrorist's suicide replaces the battlefield death of the citizen-soldier.

Without formal declaration of war, without flags and standarts, without 
assumed name, and more importantly, without battle(field), and in the 
absence of any kind of political programme, the _mass killer_, making use, 
of weapons of massive destruction, is able to extinguish all life in the 
City, and thereby closes the era of the geopolitics of the world war, in 
order to usher that of the globalisation of a _metropolitical terrorism_ 
where the loss of the territorial extension of nations as strategic asset 
is being 'compensated' by the critical mass of megametropolitan 
concentrations nobody is properly able to govern.

Paul Virilio,
Backcover of Ville panique - Ailleurs commence ici
Paris: Galilee, 2004