Consistent with Virilio's authorial strategy of employing phenomenology as a source of political and aesthetic metaphor, decomposition serves as the nexus of a series of intertextual references on globalisation, catastrophe and the post- humanist ‘de- centring’ of the self. Following Paul Valery's comments reproduced in Virilio's Open Sky (1997 [1995]: 144) that the ‘individual of the scientifi c age is losing his capacity to experience himself as a centre of energy’, Virilio asserts in his seminal later text Crepuscular Dawn (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 161) that ‘the rapidity of a phenomenon liquidates you’. In no other work does Virilio so display his credentials as a phenomenologist; the entirety of this text serves as an extended commentary on Merleau- Ponty's observation that ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’ (OS, 28). With globalisation and dromoscopy as a catastrophic collapse towards an infi nitely dense and claustrophobic centre of spatial and temporal instantaneity, the ontological annihilation of temporal duration, Virilio metaphorically redeploys speed- politics as psychosomatic trauma: ‘Decomposition is everywhere, everywhere. What is decomposing is the geographical space, the psychophysical and psychophysiological space of being. It aff ects at once the big territorial body, the small animal body and the social body’ (CD, 165).

Virilio divides the speed- traumatised decomposing body into three forms: the territorial (which equates to the classical notion of the state), the social (socius) and the ‘animal’, or the phenomenological.