Customer Reviews

Virtuous War: Mapping The Military- Industrial-media-entertainment Network

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Few people have been able to translate the ideas of Virilio, Deleuze and Baudrillard into the realm of International Relations with much success. Pomo IR has often come across as self-indulgent and willfully obscure - a clique that writes for the converted...
But Der Derian - who has flirted with rather 'esoteric' writing styles in the past - has produced a book that steps outside the pomo area and gets out the safe confines of the campus for a trip around the sites where virtual warfare is being established.
The book is a pleasure to read (!) and comes across like Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential) writing about Virilio and virtuality - it is personal, sometimes darkly humourous, fascinating and warm...unusual in the cold, neutral world of IR theory (critical or 'mainstream').
The book is the clearest statement of Der Derian's project and clarified what I had always suspected - that he is concerned with developing a 'sociology of morality' (a global sociology that looks at the social production of indifference). In this sense, it is a useful continuation of the project that Zygmunt Bauman initiated in Modernity and the Holocaust and deserves to be read by people outside the IR camp...
Of course, many will argue that he fails to tackle the dynamics of virtual or postmodern capitalism (and Marx and the Marxist tradition is not really considered in his final musings on theory). But the book develops a powerful approach to the dangers of virtual death that can be appreciated by people coming from different angles...
This book is a great read...and it is great to see a critical intellectual in IR writing for a wider audience. I still would like more on what it mean would to accept Virilio's critique of dromocratic society: how would Der Derian and Virilio imagine alternative to virtual life and death....