ABSTRACT
The University of Disaster appears to displace the Museum of the Accident in Virilio’s arsenal of provocative interventions; and there appears to be a strong ‘family resemblance’ in Virilio’s conceptual world between these interventions. The author suggests that in work on the Vietnam war people see an emerging recognition of the way bureaucrats become captured or seduced by the war-machine: yet the implications of Hans Morgenthau, one of the key figures in the development of the discipline of international relations, and the political theorist Hannah Arendt become sidelined in a discipline that becomes increasingly technocratic. Der Derian begins Virtuous War with some stories about his grandfathers, one of whom was an Armenian who fought in ‘one of the many lost nationalist causes’ of the First World War. The world of fantasy in which those who govern us live inevitably begets failure in action; for the facts are what they are, and they are not to be trifled with.
