Owain Leyshon (Raymond K Hessel) is a philosopher and writer based in Ireland. He focuses primarily on the phenomenology of technology and political philosophy, with a special interest in the ancient Greeks. Owain blogs regularly on Substack and a number of his essays have been published in the collection called Notes from the Pod.
Joshua Hansen is a US-based cultural theorist focused on hypermodernity and the rise of digital religion. His work aims to demystify contemporary technoculture and operates at the intersection of Academia, Science & the Internet. Hansen published his first book, Tractatus Anti-Academicus, in 2023.
It's been a while in coming but it was great to finally discuss French philosopher Paul Virilio's Pure War with Joshua and Owain. I'd been introduced to Virilio by their excellent recent course on his work in general. Virilio is perhaps best known as a theorist of speed and the speeding up of society through the appearance of ever faster technology, and of the inevitability of the accident bound up in the arrival of this new technology. His most famous quote is probably "when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash". Indeed, Virilio singles out military technology in particular as a leading vector in the acceleration of society. Or, to paraphrase Virilio, society accelerates at the speed of warfare, and this was the theoretical meeting point where I wanted to converge with Owain and Joshua for our discussion. The main theme emerging from our discussion in this episode was the position of nuclear weapons in Virilio's theorising. For Virilio, the ever increasing speed of military technology means that the four minute warning is all that's left of human agency. With the arrival of laser weapons - weapons that literally operate at the speed of light - and autonomous drones, the time frame for human decision making will will shrink to nothing and Pure War will finally be achieved: war which can carry on indefinitely without any human input. Pure War is also prefigured in nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), since a war that never begins never ends. We also discussed whether nuclear weapons have prevented world war III since their inception, moving to critique the so-called Realist school of MAD from a Virilian perspective, in that it just isn't realistic enough to believe that the continued existence of nuclear weapons over the longue durée won't at some point entail accidental nuclear war. Episode Questions: 1. Pure war = Infinite preparation for war. “The invention of the airplane was the invention of the air crash”. Q. Does the invention of nuclear weapons entail the inevitability of nuclear war in Virilio’s schema?
2. Endo-colonisation: an a-national military class opposed to its own civilian population colonises its own territory, leading to the non-development of civilian economies. Q. How are the militaries of the great powers a greater threat to their own populations than their supposed enemies
3. Nuclear Monarchy: nuclear weapons gives us a new humanism founded on destruction. The weapon present by "divine right" at the heart of our society. Yet the military man is not an intersessionist priest, he is an executioner because he does not care about death, only killing. Can Virilio's thought be used to counter nuclear annihilation?
4. Holy War: Nuclear war is Just War with technological characteristics, encouraging the complete release of apocalypse level violence. As Christians, can Virilio's fear that belief in an afterlife encourages war and Girard's notion that war arises from a mimetic spiral of violence due to lack of a belief in the Christ scapegoat, be reconciled?
