Abstract
Discoveries are disclosures. They are the uncovering of hidden things, the manifestation of unseen qualities, the unravelling of an ascribed order. The universe that the human creature once thought it inhabits, does not exist. That creature, in its search for what it means to be human in the universe where the invisible is made visible, is vitalised not by the safe enclosure of Edenic comfort, but by the apocalypse of what the French urbanist Paul Virilio calls the integral accident. It is the accident that directs the universe. It is the accident that reveals the ubiquity of beginnings and endings. It is the accident that uncovers the universe as manifest not by design but by chaos. And it is the human creature engulfed, sublimated and scoured clean, that emerges reinscribed. That creature is a predator in the proving ground, a lover embraced by the universe. This paper is a meditation on the idea of accident and will ask, as Virilio suggests, if it is possible for the human creature to live in a world inscribed by chaos?</p>