Belgrade are quickly recast as the shock troops of Serbian sweeps through Bosnia. As for American Football, the Louisiana Superdome, site of the universal simulated siege of the Superbowl, becomes after Katrina the host of a real siege and the festering bodies of those displaced by a slow war of systemic neglect-one still broadcast with high ratings. Are such inversions, or "accidents" (including the consumption of Virilio's theory of the dromological accident becoming a form of "intelligence" for the tactical management of dromocracy) are not (just) the exceptions but also the rule?
In the years since the publication of Speed and Politics, there has developed a rich discourse around the political function of the "exception," and the architecture of the camp as a space of that exception. For Giorgio Agamben, the camp represents an extralegal territory, derived from its exceptional status as being both founded outside the normal juridical procedures of the State, and precisely through this exceptional character, embodying the State's sovereignty not only over laws, but over law and the authority that it realizes.10 The logic of the camp exceeds the normative productive link of power and resistance, revealing the exception as the real nexus of sovereign authority. Slavoj Zizek writes, in discussing Bahktin, that "what most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the Law that regulates the community's 'normal' everyday rhythms, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension ... "<sup>1</sup>1
Virilio's own theories of dromocracy and the modernity of accidents should be considered in relation to this discourse. He writes that "the precious lesson of the camp and the gulags has not been heeded, because it was erroneously presented not only as an ideological phenomenon, but also as a static one, an enclosure. Its absolute inhumanity is .. . the social bestiary of the immense biomass, proletariat subsumed under logistical demands" (98). In the camp, the administration of "bare life," of the metabolic vehicles of dromocratic modernity, is rendered in stark relief. There is also a softer repetition of this in the world's "special economic zones, " those extralegal logistical archipelagos that weave the flows of global commerce, and mobilize a new normative order in their image. But again, for Virilio the lesson is not the pretentious self-image of hyperefficiency that such networks communicate, but rather the exception that remains withi1 th� exception itself: the accident. The accident-within-the-accident emerges from the identifcation with the exception that Zizek names, perhaps in ways that Virilio might not himself recognize. Terrorism, for example, as well as the "state of emergency" of counter-terrorism, is neither entirely complicit with a symmetry of resistance to the law, nor ever possibly entirely outside it, but instead makes its claims over the sovereign exception to the law's authority to author. This is also the crux of the wonderment and awe provoked by the event of catastrophic failure. It is not only horrific, it is mesmerizing, and because it is, the accident is also a critical source of solidarity, a binding exception that is the real condition of acceptance. The carnival of atcidents is revealed as technolo-$\mathbf { g } \mathbf { \vec { y } } \mathbf { \vec { s } }$ own exceptional bacchanalia, staged at our expense and on our behalf.
22
I Speed and Politics