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L' Administration De La Peur
Chaos climatique, paniques boursières, crise économique, périls techno-scientifiques. menaces pandémiques, suicides " professionnels "... L'énumération des peurs contemporaines est sans fin. Effet de loupe médiatique? Construction paranoïaque? Fantasme? Pour Paul Virilio, il y a bien de quoi avoir peur. Car le monde est plein comme un oeuf, qu'on y accélère toujours plus les flux en y contractant l'espace et que la peur devient l'objet d'une véritable gestion politique, les Etats étant tentés de substituer un globalitarisme sécuritaire à la traditionnelle protection des individus contre les risques de la vie.
118 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Paul Virilio
126 books278 followersPaul Virilio was a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
June 9, 2013
In 90 short pages, this interview with Virilio captured in words everything that I couldn't express that causes my anxiety and unease about the postmodern world. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the speed of information, helpless by your inability to act on it, and overwhelmed by its unending nature, this book will let you know why. The only thing it doesn't know: if there's anything we can REALLY do about it.
August 17, 2014
Interesting Q & A with a dromologist re: relationship of speed and society. Uninhabitable speeds of technology have unexpected and disruptive consequences, possibly in spite of the facile nature with which people interact with social media. Instantaneous, total communication has not necessarily put an end to history, but made it merely complementary to the ability for a social group to communicate certain ideas at a certain rate of speed. Virilio sees shared, emotionally-charged civic unrest, entertainment, or non-localized workspace as a sort of destruction of boundaries that demand answers to questions of privacy.
The ability for the whole world to experience an event together creates a form of panic, albeit a controlled panic. He likens it to a circuit, wherein the Arab Spring protester, the OWS squatter, the weekend warrior are trying to inhabit a cogent relationship with a society it is trying to escape...and come back to his or her own identity changed, as though one were using experience as a sort of gate that expands into a tunnel that eventually spits one out at the front door of the more tolerable version of one's life.
Virilio imagines that people explore the concept of identity like tourists. The cybernetic geography is fluid, the architecture completely imaginary. Because of this freedom, there will be an ever-tightening noose of surveillance on the population, in order that the old leaders of our world may at least subordinate what it does not understand. Internets. Tubes. Maps. The government doesn't like the idea that it's not even remotely capable of being the relevant disseminator of mythos, of history. It's no longer centralized, but atomized, granular and invisible. Surveillance poisons the well.
The ability for the whole world to experience an event together creates a form of panic, albeit a controlled panic. He likens it to a circuit, wherein the Arab Spring protester, the OWS squatter, the weekend warrior are trying to inhabit a cogent relationship with a society it is trying to escape...and come back to his or her own identity changed, as though one were using experience as a sort of gate that expands into a tunnel that eventually spits one out at the front door of the more tolerable version of one's life.
Virilio imagines that people explore the concept of identity like tourists. The cybernetic geography is fluid, the architecture completely imaginary. Because of this freedom, there will be an ever-tightening noose of surveillance on the population, in order that the old leaders of our world may at least subordinate what it does not understand. Internets. Tubes. Maps. The government doesn't like the idea that it's not even remotely capable of being the relevant disseminator of mythos, of history. It's no longer centralized, but atomized, granular and invisible. Surveillance poisons the well.
April 7, 2022
Virilio and a buddy swap dark jargon in an interview edited for unclarity. Crushing but prescient French dread, put to words in 2012, but presaging the COVID pandemic of 2020 to ??? with alarming precision. Well, not precision exactly because I (nor you, let’s be honest) understand WTF half of what they’re saying means. BUT constricted time, the brutality of instantaneity, the sense of loss of human rhythm, all facilitated by technological progress for its own sake, this all resonated with me big time, like “dude, that’s what I’ve been saying!” And especially so what with quarantines and WFH and Zoom and Teams, etc, etc. Don’t say Virilio didn’t tell you so. Even if he told you in postmodern code.
May 9, 2026
Ever since I left Instagram, I've noticed how social media and the internet more broadly is increasingly driven by Fear. At one time, there used to be an easy 'us versus them,' a clear source of the fear and a way to fight it; but now, fear is unrelentingly constant, coming from every direction at once, over and over and over. Virilio likens the contemporary's ubiquitous fear to the Blitzkrieg, the Lightning War of the Nazis. Speed is the name of the game; as Virilio writes, "the industrial revolution produced standardization and the computer revolution produced synchronization." Thus, the traditional tripartite delineation between past, present, and future blurs until they're nearly indistinguishable. All of the art and literature of the past is immediately available to us. Streaming gives us instant access to basically any movie or show ever made.
We as humans are not computers, and as a result we need more time to process things. The hyperactive pace of our lives doesn't allow us to process things, and thus we get traumatized, or at the very least anxious. Virilio's metaphor of a war is superficially helpful (describing it like an informational bomb going off, rather than an atomic one), but it leaves out the obviously reciprocal nature of things. Virilio gets stuck at the fact that there is no clear delineation between "Occupation, Resistance, and Collaboration;" the easy solution is that, like Byung Chul Han points out, we are all simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. We are all so enmeshed in the systems we critique that we can't really meaningfully critique them. We all took part in building our own prison, gleefully trading convenience and security at the cost of our freedom and privacy.
It may have not been obvious in 2012, but in 2026, social media has been unmasked as little more than the trojan horse of Big Brother. Given that it has nothing left to offer the average person, I'm shocked to see anyone still on social media, and I would wager that it's going to die off in the next decade or so, since there's nothing sustainable there (maybe it'll be a survivorship bias thing where the only people who survive/thrive are those who avoid social media). But calling it a war, as Virilio does, misses the main point: we love being oppressed; nay, we love oppressing ourselves! Rather than a war (which implies intentional violence, even if there's a lot of collateral damage), the more accurate metaphor would be an abusive relationship. Most people have had social media for 10-20 years, and that's enough time for us to firmly believe the sunk cost fallacy, that we have to keep using it in order to save those digital friendships. The thing is, you really don't.
As people have pointed out in terms of dating, you should never date from a place of desperation, of codependency and need; rather, you should date out of an overflow of confidence and love. Of course, it's hard to break the cycle and enter that flow state, but it's so worth it. The only way I was able to do this was to practice being picky and having high standards. If people mistreated me, I tapped out right away. I don't have the patience for someone to fix their personality and become kinder. I do, however, have the patience for basically everything else. We should do the same with technology.
What many of us experience when using social media is an abusive love/hate relationship, an addiction with decreasing returns and ever worsening side effects. Almost all extremely new media and technology has this same effect, and that, I would argue, is the real root of our fear. Virilio wrote about the informational bomb exploding "each second, with the news of an attack, a natural disaster, a health scare, a malicious rumor." But it's not the type of information that we are overloaded with; rather, it's the fact that we are overloaded with information at all. As I mentioned above, we need time to process things, which is why I almost always take a day or two before writing reviews. Another way to put it is that we need time to digest things. But the way that Virilio focuses on the content rather than the form betrays his ignorance of McLuhan's "the medium is the message;" there is no way to "save" social media by sanitizing it or making it intellectual/spiritual/whatever. Social media itself must die, or we must divorce ourselves from it.
Virilio's last quote above continues, stating that the information bomb "creates a 'community of emotions,'" meaning that we are shifting "from a democracy of opinion to a democracy of emotion." This is very true, but when he fixates only on Fear, he misses the strong accompanying roles of Lust and Humor. Thus, it shouldn't be "a democracy of emotion" but "of emotion(s)," namely those canonical (?) three (maybe there's more?). Given that the internet has turned into an algorithmic extremity machine, the three each have their own toxic logical endpoint: fear turns into the rage of witchhunts and also the paranoia of conspiracy theories; lust turns into all forms of greed, avarice, jealousy, pride, and gluttony; humor turns into both the most extremely cute puppies and the most extremely offensive comedy.
As far as I can tell, it's this straining extremity which holds the machine together right now, a centripetal force despite the lack of any center or unifying structure. It's disorienting to try to navigate the post-modern landscape until you realize that speed itself is all that's holding things together. Algorithms are built on a capitalistic competition-based framework; thus, extremity itself gets sifted out and chosen by algorithms, which are just hyper-accelerated popularity contests. This sort of thing technically was inevitable, but we've merely sped it up, like fast-forwarding a tape to the point of annoying silliness.
Virilio was right to point out that we humans are used to a certain tempo and rhythm, whereas technology, in its obsession with "progress" and "efficiency" has made the world unlivably fast-paced. Most people are separated from the seasons, from the traditional ebbs and flows of community life, and sometimes are even separated from the weekly rhythm of weekend and weekdays. Thus I gave this a low rating, not because Virilio was wrong, but because he was only partially right, in a way which became outdated before I even had a chance to read this text. Virilio refuses to abandon an outdated metaphor (that of warfare, even if Hobbesian, which is insufficient), whereas the relationship view is the only way I can clearly understand things moving forward. On two fronts, Bung Chul Han once again wins out as probably the best theorist alive (both for his notion of self-oppression, and for his work in the Agony of Eros).
We as humans are not computers, and as a result we need more time to process things. The hyperactive pace of our lives doesn't allow us to process things, and thus we get traumatized, or at the very least anxious. Virilio's metaphor of a war is superficially helpful (describing it like an informational bomb going off, rather than an atomic one), but it leaves out the obviously reciprocal nature of things. Virilio gets stuck at the fact that there is no clear delineation between "Occupation, Resistance, and Collaboration;" the easy solution is that, like Byung Chul Han points out, we are all simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. We are all so enmeshed in the systems we critique that we can't really meaningfully critique them. We all took part in building our own prison, gleefully trading convenience and security at the cost of our freedom and privacy.
It may have not been obvious in 2012, but in 2026, social media has been unmasked as little more than the trojan horse of Big Brother. Given that it has nothing left to offer the average person, I'm shocked to see anyone still on social media, and I would wager that it's going to die off in the next decade or so, since there's nothing sustainable there (maybe it'll be a survivorship bias thing where the only people who survive/thrive are those who avoid social media). But calling it a war, as Virilio does, misses the main point: we love being oppressed; nay, we love oppressing ourselves! Rather than a war (which implies intentional violence, even if there's a lot of collateral damage), the more accurate metaphor would be an abusive relationship. Most people have had social media for 10-20 years, and that's enough time for us to firmly believe the sunk cost fallacy, that we have to keep using it in order to save those digital friendships. The thing is, you really don't.
As people have pointed out in terms of dating, you should never date from a place of desperation, of codependency and need; rather, you should date out of an overflow of confidence and love. Of course, it's hard to break the cycle and enter that flow state, but it's so worth it. The only way I was able to do this was to practice being picky and having high standards. If people mistreated me, I tapped out right away. I don't have the patience for someone to fix their personality and become kinder. I do, however, have the patience for basically everything else. We should do the same with technology.
What many of us experience when using social media is an abusive love/hate relationship, an addiction with decreasing returns and ever worsening side effects. Almost all extremely new media and technology has this same effect, and that, I would argue, is the real root of our fear. Virilio wrote about the informational bomb exploding "each second, with the news of an attack, a natural disaster, a health scare, a malicious rumor." But it's not the type of information that we are overloaded with; rather, it's the fact that we are overloaded with information at all. As I mentioned above, we need time to process things, which is why I almost always take a day or two before writing reviews. Another way to put it is that we need time to digest things. But the way that Virilio focuses on the content rather than the form betrays his ignorance of McLuhan's "the medium is the message;" there is no way to "save" social media by sanitizing it or making it intellectual/spiritual/whatever. Social media itself must die, or we must divorce ourselves from it.
Virilio's last quote above continues, stating that the information bomb "creates a 'community of emotions,'" meaning that we are shifting "from a democracy of opinion to a democracy of emotion." This is very true, but when he fixates only on Fear, he misses the strong accompanying roles of Lust and Humor. Thus, it shouldn't be "a democracy of emotion" but "of emotion(s)," namely those canonical (?) three (maybe there's more?). Given that the internet has turned into an algorithmic extremity machine, the three each have their own toxic logical endpoint: fear turns into the rage of witchhunts and also the paranoia of conspiracy theories; lust turns into all forms of greed, avarice, jealousy, pride, and gluttony; humor turns into both the most extremely cute puppies and the most extremely offensive comedy.
As far as I can tell, it's this straining extremity which holds the machine together right now, a centripetal force despite the lack of any center or unifying structure. It's disorienting to try to navigate the post-modern landscape until you realize that speed itself is all that's holding things together. Algorithms are built on a capitalistic competition-based framework; thus, extremity itself gets sifted out and chosen by algorithms, which are just hyper-accelerated popularity contests. This sort of thing technically was inevitable, but we've merely sped it up, like fast-forwarding a tape to the point of annoying silliness.
Virilio was right to point out that we humans are used to a certain tempo and rhythm, whereas technology, in its obsession with "progress" and "efficiency" has made the world unlivably fast-paced. Most people are separated from the seasons, from the traditional ebbs and flows of community life, and sometimes are even separated from the weekly rhythm of weekend and weekdays. Thus I gave this a low rating, not because Virilio was wrong, but because he was only partially right, in a way which became outdated before I even had a chance to read this text. Virilio refuses to abandon an outdated metaphor (that of warfare, even if Hobbesian, which is insufficient), whereas the relationship view is the only way I can clearly understand things moving forward. On two fronts, Bung Chul Han once again wins out as probably the best theorist alive (both for his notion of self-oppression, and for his work in the Agony of Eros).
February 15, 2025
No creo que Virilio sea uno de los filósofos ineludibles del siglo ni nada por estilo. Eso sí, tampoco es un charlatán como Byung Chul Han.
Me ha sorprendido para bien porque tiene tesis muy interesantes y su crítica de la actualidad es bastante lúcida, sin ser algo profético o hipercertero.
Me ha sorprendido para bien porque tiene tesis muy interesantes y su crítica de la actualidad es bastante lúcida, sin ser algo profético o hipercertero.
August 17, 2023
Virilio is always a fascinating read. I am never let down by his ideas or how he presents them. He has this manic-acceleration quality to his writing - in this case his speaking - which is hard to mitigate while reading. As usual, he covers a multitude of topics, issues, concepts, theories, and ideas, all with a distinctly unique style. short book I won't try to summarize, it's the reading of it that provides the intellectual value and emotional punch.
March 8, 2026
Virilio at his most noided. I think the first and second sections are only becoming more prescient by the day, though I do think the final section veers off course and isn't quite as engaging as the first two thirds. Still a read I would consider essential to understanding modern society and politics, though.
April 28, 2013
An excellent interview - the notion of fear and terror as something propagated by immediacy and the speed at which things (like communication) occur. Well worth reading.
June 5, 2013
Such a thought provoking book. I do wish I was just a little bit brighter though. I'm not sure I was intellectually up to the task of fully appreciating this.
December 25, 2019
This is the most paranoid Virilio text ever. His opinion on progress is always interesting to read, which somehow raises more questions on the relation between speed, acceleration and progress.
February 28, 2024
"The faster we go, the more we look ahead in anticipation and lose our lateral vision. Screens are like windshields in a car: With increased speed, we lose the sense Of lateralization which is an infirmity in our being in the world, its richness, its relief, its depth of field. ... Screens have become blind."
"... the most reasonable hells are created for the best reasons in the world. Public health and security end up devouring everything. From this perspective, "hyper-interactive" children are a sign of this situation. There have always been hyperactive children. Today, they are panic signs. They are pushed aside even though they are in unison with the mad rhythm of the world."
"Getting carried away has taken the place of enthusiasm, and reaction, action. We are in the fit of rage along with a lack of verbalization, a deficit in the mastery of language."
Hard to believe this was written over ten years ago already. Really excellent points that warn of the dangers to come should we stay the current course.
"... the most reasonable hells are created for the best reasons in the world. Public health and security end up devouring everything. From this perspective, "hyper-interactive" children are a sign of this situation. There have always been hyperactive children. Today, they are panic signs. They are pushed aside even though they are in unison with the mad rhythm of the world."
"Getting carried away has taken the place of enthusiasm, and reaction, action. We are in the fit of rage along with a lack of verbalization, a deficit in the mastery of language."
Hard to believe this was written over ten years ago already. Really excellent points that warn of the dangers to come should we stay the current course.
January 12, 2026
“Michel Foucault located the emergence of the imprisonment phenomenon in the 18th century with the development of asylums and prisons. I think that the real imprisonment is just ahead. The mass claustrophobia that takes hold of peoples is one of the reasons for the great ecological panic, which is characterized in part by the fear that the planet is incapable of guaranteeing our development. That is why movement, escape, exodus become permanent phenomena. The only solution now is to move constantly or flee definitively.”
November 23, 2018
Virilio's theme of the compression of space and time with speed, and a theory of relativity for politics. Speed is anathema for reflection leaving only emotion in the present.
"This first regime consisted of the standardization of products and opinions. The second, current regime is comprised of the synchronization of emotions, ensure the transition from a democracy of opinion to a democracy of emotion" (p.31).
"This first regime consisted of the standardization of products and opinions. The second, current regime is comprised of the synchronization of emotions, ensure the transition from a democracy of opinion to a democracy of emotion" (p.31).
February 5, 2018
Everyone should read this.
March 16, 2023
I liked the exploration of the phenomenology of speed and its affective connotations, but apart from that found it a bit boring.
October 20, 2023
you know when you buy a book and just wait for the perfect time to read it? and how sometimes that takes years? yeah <3
January 24, 2025
the Litany Against Fear reference
January 29, 2025
It was a bit of a hard read but it’s real and I think it should be talked about a lot more
February 20, 2025
Verbose? Yes. A quick read? (Ironically) Yes.
Do you ever feel constricted by time and instantaneity? Read this book.
Do you ever feel constricted by time and instantaneity? Read this book.
April 16, 2025
This book was just bar after bar after bar 🔥 soooo many things I want to say but I’m def going to need time to digest it.
May 24, 2025
A highly readable exploration of hegemonic government’s relationship with perpetuating and utilizing fear.
January 27, 2026
What he said... it made me run.
January 14, 2017
A fascinating little read, this is transcription of an interview of Paul Virilio by Bertrand Richard, looking at the fear as a result of globalisation, hyper-capitalism and the acceleration of reality. It's a very dense book and I expect it would help to have a background in the subject matter (something I don't have), but there's plenty of food for thought. I found the discussion of rhythms particularly interesting, and the idea that we need to develop a political economy of speed.
March 20, 2015
I don’t always get my book recommendations from Warren Ellis, but when I do, it’s often something like this, a 90-page interview from 2007 with philosopher/cultural theorist/urbanist Paul Virilio, in which he explains how fear has become an environment, generated in part by globalization and the acceleration of technology and everyday life, to the point that governments and leaders now find themselves in a position to manage that fear rather than do anything to alleviate it. Like most books from Semiotext(e), it’s written at a highly intellectual level to the point of being buried in philosophic academia. You have to be the equivalent of a philosophy professor (or at least a philosophy major) to understand half of it – so in that sense it’s not very helpful or practical in terms of identifying solutions to the overall problem. Still, there are some interesting ideas here, so at least it’s thought-provoking enough to get a discussion started, which is never a bad thing.
July 13, 2015
This is the second book I've read by Paul Virilio. The first was "War and Cinema". What I liked about the other book was it's introduction and conclusion, I found the body of the book to be a bit scattered and I felt like Virilio had a hard time proving anything or making a finite case for anything. It seemed more like a random dumping of facts. I found this book to be even worse. As an interview, the interviewer posed certain questions to Virilio, and he would somehow go off on all sorts of tangents, and I had a hard time connecting how the prior sentence would lead into the following one. All of the ideas and phrases are there, and it's very stimulating to read, but it was such a slog to get through that I feel as if I haven't really gained anything from reading it. I wish I somehow could have filtered out this book, because it seems like everything could be there, if it just wasn't so hard to detangle.
September 9, 2011
Grand old man of urban studies, war and accelerated culture, Paul Virilio is still producing new books at the ripe old age of 79 - though he was actually 78 when this one came out in 2010. It is still only available in French, published by Textuel in Paris, at the moment and not scheduled to be translated into English as yet. This new volume is a series of conversations with Bertrand Richard (who keeps his words to a minumum) and is chock full of everything from Virilio's views on Facebook to his usual diet of war technologies (for example, the Manhattan project), the spreading 'fear' of the title and the horrendous, catastrophic state of the planet we inhabit. In case you are wondering, the title originates from playing with a book title from author Graham Greene - suitably another confused and haunted Catholic like Paul Virilio.
May 6, 2013
I agree that speed and magnitude are significant in contemporary society, and that studying it through these lenses can illuminate something insightful, I don't think they are the factors that determine the world in which I want to live. Virilio seems to claim that we should operate at a more appropriate speed, rather than critically rethink society as a whole. Calling himself "revelationary" rather than "revolutionary" positions him very comfortably in this world as a an armchair academic.
August 29, 2014
Easiest to understand of all Virilio I have read. Straight forward interview that allows the reader to both see the simple answers to all questions asked but also get a sense of how the intelligentsia attempts to pick apart and analyze his thoughts and ideas. Central thesis is how we are moving toward instantaneous global affect and that may not be a good thing. I tend to agree and hope we find a way to slow down and truly understand life rather than speed ahead to the next accident. Highly insightful and truly enjoyable.
April 17, 2016
An interview of Paul Virilio conducted by Bertrand Richard. These are comments on how globalization and technology are speeding up the world, and this changes how humans experience fear. His overall judgment is that there used to be a cultural assumption that fear is childish and undesirable, but today, politicians and media professionals send the message that we should all be afraid all the time.
March 14, 2012
A meaningful and accessible interview of Paul Virilio by Bertrand Richard, Virilio provides further insight into his concerns around globalization, technology, and the production of fear at the speed of light through the dromosphere. A need for a university of disaster and a studying of chronopolitics of instantaniety is further reinforced.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews