Paris, 1990. On the square in front of the new Opera House at the Bastille. A group of teenage kids on Rollerblades were entertaining the passing crowd by performing jumps over wooden crates. One guy had constructed a waist-high jump from the crates and had retreated about 15 metres away to get a sufficient runup for the jump. His friends stood close by on either side of the pile of wooden crates. A crowd milled around. The jumper commenced his run and quickly accelerated to an all-out sprint, preparing for what would be the most ambitious jump of the day. At a certain point, however, just past the point of no return (a point perceived too late), he aborted the jump and veered to the left of the crates, ploughing at full speed into one of his unsuspecting friends, who was knocked unconscious by the impact. The crowd looked on briefly, and then drifted away. For me, this incident and my reaction to it illustrates the difficulties that Virilio confronts in his ongoing attempt to theorise technology in terms of speed. My initial response to the jumper's decision to abort the jump and select the body of his friend as a comfortable buffer to break his fall was one of moral condemnation. The principle of self-sacrifice before the sacrifice of one's 'friend' came righteously to mind. But it soon occured to me that I was perhaps far too harsh and far too hasty in judging the decision made by the jumper, for he was under pressure, the pressure of having to think quickly, very quickly, under speed. A doubt arose in my mind as to whether I, in my static frame of reference, could use that framework to make a critical or ethical judgement about the decision made by the jumper in his fast-moving frame of reference, in which things rushed toward him at an accelerating rate. This doubt did not lead me to completely absolve the jumper from any responsibility for his decision. But it did lead me to question the possibility of relying on my static and pre-established critical framework to interpret this speedy event. That is to say, it led me to what I would call, after Jacques Derrida, the aporia of speed. The aporia of speed is formulated by Derrida in his 'No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)' as the impossible but unavoidable requirement to move at once both quickly and slowly in the interpretation and critical evaluation of social, political and technological changes in the 'Nuclear Age'. Derrida associates the slow movement of interpretation and criticism with the careful analysis of phenomena in terms of existing historical and critical frameworks. The quick movement that he regards as equally necessary in this task is that which attempts to keep pace with how these developments have exceeded the limits of those existing interpretative frameworks. Both the thematic and formal elements of Virilio's questioning of technology, as well as their complex interplay, struggle with this impossible task of moving both quickly and slowly. That is, Virilio's work evidences an encounter with this aporia, and his work can be understood to play out a permanent vacillation over the critical relation between the questions "how to think of speed?" and "how to think at speed?". This vacillating nature of Virilio's work challenges their coherency and at times leads to contradiction. But this is, I would propose, what is most interesting and most valuable in Virilio's project, for in its lack of a stable and consistent theoretical basis and formal consistency can be glimpsed the aporia of speed that renders all critical work problematic today. In terms of stylistic elements, the rapidity of Virilio's critical analyses is the most apparent aspect of his attempt to address the aporia of speed. He executes fast-moving analyses of contemporary phenomena and historical developments so as to outline what he sees as the major tendencies inherent in them (more on 'the tendency' below). His writing privileges a sketching-out of these tendencies rather than the detailed analysis and interpretation of the various developments which in combination constitute those tendencies. For the most part, his books are collections of essays, many of which are published individually prior to their appearance together in book form. While they maintain more or less a thematic consistency, the essays in a book by Virilio do not come together to build a homogeneous, linear argument as so many chapters of a single study. Each essay moves quickly from one idea to the next, from consideration of one phenomenon to another without an extensive analysis or interpretation of either. Furthermore, the thematic linkage between two ideas or phenomena is often evoked in such a way in a text by Virilio as to challenge traditional modes of interpreting such linkages. Virilio's curious use of metaphors is constitutive of this mode of unconventional evocation. As such, his refiguring -- perverting even -- of many commonly accepted metaphors is a central aspect of the speed of his texts and thus of his engagement with the aporia of speed.   Virilio uses metaphors as a means of the rapid derailing of the conventional understandings of things. We will see this in the following sections of this paper where his mobilisation of the figures of the tendency, the accident and the journey will be examined. In Virilio's texts, the metaphoric vehicle is pushed to crash velocity, as it were, in the attempt to challenge the traditional apprehension of the metaphoric tenor. It becomes a metaphoric projectile. This 'dangerous driving' of the metaphoric vehicle is consistent with Virilio's fast-moving, schematic characterisations of the major tendencies immanent in contemporary phenomena. These 'projectile' metaphors pervade Virilio's texts; let me name but a few -- the 'suicidal state' as the image of the fully-developed techno-logistic political formation (Essay on Territorial Insecurity), the new swimming pool where one swims on the spot as a figure of the 'polar inertia' (itself a metaphor) progressively immobilising the masses in the wake of their (modernist) vehicular mobilisation (Polar Inertia), the fighter pilot in his cockpit evoking the becoming-invalid of the postmodern prostheticised human subject (Polar Inertia), the land speed-record attempts in the desert as an emblem of the disappearance of the social in the acceleration of vehicular displacement (The Negative Horizon), the 'cinematic derealisation' brought on by the technical transformation of warfare this century (War and Cinema), the momentary lapses of consciousness called picnolepsy which figure for Virilio both the fragmentary nature of consciousness and the exacerbation of that fragmentation in the era of contemporary technics (The Aesthetics of Disappearance), television as the 'third window' in the history of the domicile which 'window' fractures the traditional mode of dwelling in proximity to one's neighbours because it faces beyond the perceptible horizon (The Lost Dimension), and the 'information blitz' of the Pure War era, a no less aggressive penetration into the conventional space-time of peace and social-political agency than the military blitzkrieg of total war (Popular Defence & Ecological Struggles). In each case the metaphoric operation is executed rapidly, tendentially, the text proceeding onto a more or less brief evaluation of the ramifications of accepting such a recasting of historical/cultural phenomena before going on to pose another metaphoric challenge to critical concepts and categories. This metaphoric invention is a key to Virilio's attempted reinvention of criticism. Metaphoric invention, Aristotle reminds us, is the best method of apprehending the new, the unforeseen: "strange words simply puzzle us; ... ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh". In "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy", Derrida explains Aristotle's claim that the metaphor is able to induce this apprehension by setting forth a hitherto undiscovered resemblance between the vehicle and the tenor. It is a process of "learning by resemblance, of recognizing the same", according to the classical formulation. The invention of a new metaphor mediates between the too strange (neologism) and the too familiar ('ordinary') linguistic usage via the invention of this new resemblance. Mediation is crucial -- it is a question of (re)inventing a relation between two linguistic elements in order to reanimate a critical apprehension of the new, the 'something fresh'. It is a question of relation. Through his enduring focus on speed (speed and politics, speed and war, speed and vision, speed and space-time), Virilio has not ceased to approach this question of relation. For the question of speed is the question of relation. This question of relation has become crucial in the era of modernity. Since Einstein's overturning of the Newtonian absolutes of time and space in favour of the absolute character of the speed of light, scientific knowledge (and humanism more generally after it) has confronted the relativisation of traditional certitudes. Virilio, proceeding from his conviction that today "we are living in nothing less than the sphere of Einstein's relativity", has extended this confrontation by introducing the question of speed in so many areas of inquiry. In Polar Inertia he insists on the importance of maintaining an interrogative relativism, citing the failure of much contemporary astro-physics to do so. The cosmos is a 'dromosphere', he argues, using one of the neologisms he has coined around the notion of dromos (ancient Greek for speed-race). By this he means that the cosmos is only knowable in and through speed. That is, it is lit up by and at the speed of light: Light can be called the shadow of absolute speed, or, more exactly, the speed of light rays (geometric optics) can be called the shadow of the light of the speed of electro-magnetic waves (ondulatory optics). Splitting thus the luminescent energy on one side into light and on the other side into the speed of diffusion of the so-called light, we would be led to recognise in the end that speed allows us to see, but above all that it allows us to see 'light' before even the objects (phenomena) that the latter illuminates in its turn. This description of light as the 'shadow of absolute speed' is the latest development of the metaphor of the 'light of speed' that Virilio employs frequently in his texts. Speed, or the absolute relation of the speed of light, lights light. Light and what it illuminates becomes, in this formulation, a shadow of this speed. This figure of the universe as dromosphere, lit up by speed and visible only in, or as, its shadow, emblematises Virilio's own questioning, relativising perspective. The dromosphere is the figure of a universal posing of the question of relation. Inasmuch as the question of speed is the question of relation and of relativism, Virilio's figure also figures his own metaphoric projections. For, as I was just saying, the metaphor proceeds -- that is, moves forward -- by inventing a relation between two linguistic elements. The relation is crucial for arriving at new understandings, new notions. When this arrival of the new occurs it is always precipitous, surprising, quick. This is so despite or because the metaphor is a mediation between already existing linguistic elements -- and here the aporia of speed can be glimpsed just beyond or before Virilio's quest for new understandings. In Virilio's metaphorics this mediation is pushed to the point of begging the question of the relation between the existent and the new. Metaphoric invention, then, is always a type of reinvention. Virilio's figure of light as the shadow of speed figures his own questioning, relativising efforts to 'reinvent' in this fashion the conventional interpretations of the real. In the remaining sections of this essay we will examine three of Virilio's refigurings that are central to his efforts in this regard. Virilio's engagement with the aporia of speed is borne by these refigured metaphoric vehicles.   The tendency and the accident are interrelated elements and figures in Virilio's texts. Virilio gives a number of brief, suggestive descriptions of his project in Pure War. One of these is drawn from Winston Churchill's statement that "in ancient warfare, the episodes were more important than the tendencies; in modern warfare, the tendencies are more important than the episodes". Following on from this, Virilio describes himself as a writer trying to reach the tendencies in his account of phenomena: I work in staircases -- some people have realized this. I begin a sentence, I work out an idea and when I consider it suggestive enough I jump a step to another idea without bothering with the development. Developments are the episodes. I try to reach the tendency. Tendency is the change of level. The tendency is the elusive element, the faintly perceived movement of the event, something which will have future consequences not clearly perceived when the event is seen as a development that has led to the present. To posit the presence of an unnoticed tendency in past events is to recast the historical interpretation of those events, challenging the established sequence of the salient and substantial elements of a particular historical development. The jump from one step in the staircase to another attempts a refiguring of the historical chain of cause and effect, undoing its apparent continuity and reinventing it in a parallel but heterogeneous enchainment. Virilio's jumps are suggestive; they work with absences, with the gaps between the levels of different ideas, different developments. Virilio's project -- with its leaps from one state of affairs to a qualitatively different state of affairs -- relies on these absences, these gaps in the tracks of historico-critical interpretation and the accidents that happen as interpretation jumps tracks across these gaps. Virilio's interest in the accident is succinctly elaborated in Pure War: The riddle of technology...is also the riddle of the accident. I'll explain. In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress -- a vision a la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe....I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don't think there will be a neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and its accident -- substance being both the object and its accident. The negative side of technology and speed was censored. Through a kind of punning procedure where the modern, everyday sense of the term accident as mishap is substituted for the classical, philosophical notion of the accident as attribute or quality, Virilio refigures the relations between what is considered to be essential and what peripheral to technological 'advance'. In doing so Virilio proposes not just to remove the censorship of positivism by acknowledging the 'specific accident' of a given technology. At a more profound level, he calls for a rethinking of technological development so as to address the substance-accident 'inversion' through which the accident is not only a regretable contingency but becomes something 'every technology produces, provokes, programs'. This notion that every technology programs an accident is paradoxical: a program would be that which would want to implement a process or operation in a controlled way. It could be argued, however, that the development of a program would need to anticipate any possible diversions, mistakes or accidents that could happen to interfere with its execution. As such, any program would need to plan or project any foreseeable accidents so as to avoid, control or eliminate them. But Virilio wants to insist on the importance of considering -- necessarily after the fact -- the unforeseeable accident that eluded this process of elimination as every bit as 'substantial' to the technological development. This is why war and military developments are so crucial for Virilio. For instance, as a technical development of the military, the tank was specifically designed during World War I with the 'negative side of technology and speed' in mind. "What are war machines?", Virilio asks in an interview with Chris Dercon: "They are machines in reverse -- they produce accidents". I would argue that this explains to a significant extent Virilio's focus on theorising war as a central aspect of modernity. War not only provides a major impetus for the development of new technologies of speed (it is, he says, the 'laboratory of modernity'). The war machine, in its reversal of the commonsense notion that machinery is essentially productive, promotes this 'negative side of technology' which Virilio argues is a central aspect of all technologies. This negative side, he says in another interview (with Florian Rötzer), is always there, doubling the side of 'productive reason'. In privileging the accident over the substance Virilio sees himself as a theorist of this hidden negativity, correcting the Western metaphysical tradition's denial of 'military intelligence': "When Aristotle says there is no science of the accidental, he puts into motion the process of denying the negative". Returning to the tank, Virilio discusses how it was meant to re-mobilise the violent speed of the arms of destruction which had fallen into the stagnation of the absolute war of the trenches. In doing so, however, absolute war, which remained a strategic/political form of warfare (albeit a desperate, extreme form), became total war. This transformed the earth beneath the tracks of the all-terrain armoured vehicle, making it disappear so that it was annihilated -- and along with it the traditional political parameters of warfare in the 'total mobilisation' of the warring nations' armed forces and economic potentials. Total war and the correlative disappearance of the traditional conception of the territory of the warring States is, in Virilio's sense, the necessary accident of the tank. But not only of the tank -- the 'technical surprise', that is, the technical accident, of trench warfare had already 'progammed', in a perverted Virilian sense, the 'discovery' of the wartime economy, itself a necessary element of total war. The wartime economy enabled the rapid and massive deployment of tanks upon the success of their initial trialling in battle. The tank, then, is best understood as a crucial link in the tendential enchainment of inventions and accidents that contributed to total war. These accidents were never, Virilio suggests, easily distinguishable from the substantial technological developments in the chain. The essence of the tank is understood as the consubstantial relation between 'both the object and its accident'. The accident is unforeseen; when it happens, it changes everything suddenly. But Virilio's notion of the accident considers it essential to a given technical development. As such, its unforeseeabililty would need to be foreseeable. For instance, a vehicular accident violently and unexpectedly (the two are identical) breaks the journey. It postpones the arrival at the destination or perhaps even eradicates the original destination by necessitating new journeys. Such is the situation with our rollerblader. The threat of the accident is the threat to the possibility of achieving a rational, homogeneous, linear development. While the accident will come to be incorporated in a narrative which will assimilate it after the fact to a sequence of events (the 'original' journey started, the accident happened, new journeys/a delayed journey resulted), the accident will always have been experienced as the irruption of another temporality, other to the anticipated continuity of the journey. In the accident, time is, 'momentarily' at least, 'out of joint'. The accident is this spatio-temporal/conceptual disjunction. Its advent can never be questioned as such even if it allows -- and necessitates -- the commencement of questioning. This questioning may discover a certain substantial development in and through which the accident is explained, and this is so also for Virilio's own refigurings of technological developments as tendencies leading to and from certain accidental processes. But the accident will always be outside the temporality of these interpretations. It will have been that which interrupts their journey and promises others.   If today, as Virilio warns, speed threatens to overshadow the light of knowledge and interpretation altogether, then his metaphorical, tendential, accidental texts also allow us to glimpse the possibility of and for critical thinking. This possibility consists precisely in taking as one's point of departure the darkening of critical thought in the imminent end of the journey. For the end of the journey, the eradication of its duration is, as we saw earlier, the 'accident' of the successive revolutions in transportation and communication technologies. "Loss of the story of the journey and thus of the possibility of any interpretation of it is doubled", says Virilio in La vitesse de libération [Escape Velocity], "by a sudden loss of memory, or rather, by the promise of a paradoxical immediate recall linked to the omnipotence of the image". The paradox of this immediate recall arises from its im-mediacy. For this recall would be the function of the most intense mediation of the real, realtime mediatisation, yet it would eradicate the delay, the distance and the duration which allow and are constitutive of the interpretation and re-membering of events. If this is the danger of modern technical advance, the accident of its tendency, then it is also what mobilises Virilio to attempt what he calls trajectif analysis, in the wake of the crisis of the dialectics of the subject and the object. But analysis of the trajet could never be a return to conventional historical interpretative models or 'stories'; one must imagine the end of the trajet rushing closer, like our rollerblader as he passes the point of no return, trying desperately to calculate what his journey will have been in the face of its unforeseeable, yet necessary, detour.