Negative Horizon is Paul Virilio's most original and unified exploration of the key themes and ideas running through his work and thought.  Provocatively and forcefully written, it sets out Virilio's theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal - and potentially destructive - role in contemporary global society.Applying this theory to Western political and military history, Virilio exposes a compulsion to accelerate, and the rise of a politics of time - encapsulated in the importance acorded to speed - over territorial politics of space.  Moving through human history from the cave paintings at Lascaux that depict the first hunters, through the domestication of animals and the building of the first roads, to the 'stealth technologies' deployed in contemporary warfare, Virilio shows how resistance to speed and movement has consistently been eroded, and the physical world adapted, in order to satisfy the urge to move further and faster.

Negative Horizon

Politics & Social Sciences

Paul Virilio

Philosophy

UNKNO

The Great Accelerator

In his latest book, Paul Virilio – the leading theorist of our obsession with technology, speed and power – rewrites ‘The Book of Exodus’, but the exodus he talks about is a closed-circuit exodus within a cramped world where reduction in human stocks will suddenly look like the only solution to the lockdown of history.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Polity

This text provides a history of visual perception and its (re)production. Surveying art history, as well as the technologies of war and urban planning, Virilio provides an introduction to a new "logistics of the image". "The Vision Machine" also traces the history of "regimes of the visual", from the era of painting, engraving and architecture, via the photogram and, more recently, infographics to synthetic imagery.

The vision machine (Perspectives)

Arts & Photography

British Film Institute

BFI Publishing

Virilio and Lotringer revisit their prescient book on the invisible war waged by technology against humanity since World War II.
In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the "accidents" that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the "accident"--both military and economic--has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, "local" accidents--like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s--escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. "Globalization," Virilio argues, is the planet's ultimate accident.Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d'Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War (1988) (his first in English) and The Accident of Art (2005), both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e). Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007) and other books.

Pure War

History

Military

Autonomedia

With this book Paul Virilio inaugurated the new science whose object of study is the "dromocratic" revolution. First to use the concept of speed as a definining concept for contemporary civilization, Virilio unveils his theories of dromodology here for the first time. Understanding the disappearance of power into a vector of speed where knowledge-power is eliminated to the benefit of moving-power, Virilio discovers the new terrain of "virtual" war long before its popularization in the Gulf War of the early 1990s. Building on the work of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radical politically than that of any of his French contemporaries. Speed as the engine of destruction....In these pages the reader surveys dromocratic aesthetics with its eloquent X-ray of speed flesh, speed wars, speed power, and speed fetishism. This work prevents the reader from becoming the "last man" drifting in all those "metabolic vehicles."

Speed & Politics

Americas

Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history."
First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides.
Contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Gunter Gebauer, Dieter Lenzen, Edgar Morin, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Paul Virilio

Looking Back on the End of the World

Edgar Morin

Jean Baudrillard

Gunter Gebauer

Dietmar Kamper

Dieter Lenzen

Gerburg Treusch-Dieter

Christoph Wulf

Literary

Semiotext

Log 13/14, a special double issue, examines the events and aftershocks of 1968 via the subsequent development of architectural and cultural movements over two generations. The 27 entries include: a reassessment of the collapse of the XIVth Triennale in Milan; renascent forms of Beaux-Arts planning in Paris; the semi-mythic origins of contemporary Dubai; NASA's attempt to design the perfect space suit; and the political potential of the building envelope today. Log also revisits seminal statements from Paul Virilio and Yona Friedman on the nature of the 1968 protests in Paris. Both a retrospective and a critique of past and present-day radical architectural and cultural paradigms, Log 13/14 includes essays and texts by: Jean-Louis Cohen; Peter Eisenman; Sylvia Lavin; Markus Miessen; Paola Nicolin; John David Rhodes; Lukasz Stanek; Robert Venturi; Anthony Vidler; and Alejandro Zaera-Polo among others.

Log 13/14

Peter Eisenman

Mark C. Taylor

Jean-Louis Cohen

Anthony Vidler

Yona Friedman

Sylvia Lavin

Bernard Tschumi

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Anyone Corporation

Summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact that accidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time.
Based upon a 1996 conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist Phillipe Petit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact that accidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time. Virilio argues that accidents have now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can no longer be confined to markers in history like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions: past, present, and future. But now, the hyper-concentration of time into "real time" reduces all trajectories to nothing. Consequently, an accident of time is bound to affect our entire being as well as the entire planet. And this is the hidden face of technical and scientific progress that Virilio is attempting to reveal, shrugging off any illusion we may have left about its alleged benefits.Globalization doesn't make the planet bigger, it signals the beginning of "the great confinement." Speed pollutes the distances of the world. After the "green ecology" (the pollution of nature), we are now experiencing another, more invisible and mental, kind of pollution: the "gray ecology." Soon, Virilio suggests, we are going to experience the end of the world―not the apocalyptic end, but the world as finite. The communication revolution, the attainment of absolute speed, is the reduction of the world to a virtual city in which democracy is no longer possible. This extermination of world-space is a cataclysmic event. For the first time, history has hit a cosmological limit.

Politics of the Very Worst (Foreign Agents)

Michael Cavaliere

Sylvère Lotringer

Semiotext(e) is pleased to announce Issue 2 of its occasional intellectual journal Animal Shelter, edited by Hedi El Kholti. Fleeting, ephemeral, nondigital, and nonhierarchical, Animal Shelter is, as Alex Gartenfeld wrote in Interview, "a loose collection of texts, sequenced like a mixtape"-focused yet eclectic. Gathered around a long conversation with philosopher Paul Virilio on "The Littoral as Final Frontier," conducted on the first day of the "flash crack" collapse of the European markets, issue 2 features fiction, artwork, poetry, conversations, and essays which orbit desublimation, digression, negative monument, catastrophe, shadows, horror, sexiness . . . Moyra Davey on writer's block, Walter Benjamin, and Jane Bowles. Bruce Hainley channels Paloma Picasso to jot some notes on Margie Schnibbe and the "explicit." Bifo on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes's Wide Shut, and the relation between irony and cynicism  an. An interview with Paul Virilio on seascape, inertia, and the Zynthia cyclone  . Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer on George Porcari's ambient photography  . Shlomo Sand and Sylvère Lotringer on contemporary Israel, myth, and the invention of Zionism. Alistair McCartney on early 90s bohemia in Hyde Park, Perth, Australia. Dodie Bellamy on queer subculture and the "Goldilocks syndrome." Veronica Gonzalez's short story on friendship, loss, and Los Angeles  . Rachel Kushner's short story that takes up pubescence, motorcycles, and Flaubert's lewd correspondence from the Nile. A rare short story by Eileen Myles on Winston Leyland's legendary 70s tabloid, Gay Sunshine. Other contributors include: Robert Dewhurst, Ben Ehrenreich, Matt Fishbeck, Paul Gellman, Slava Mogutin, Jed Ochmanek, John Pluecker, Michael Rashkow, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sarah Wang, and others.

Art Sex Literature: Issue 2

Dodie Bellamy

Chris Kraus

Moyra Davey

Eileen Myles

Franco Bifo Berardi

Shlomo Sand

hedi el kholti

Semiotext[e]

Social Sciences

AK Press

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Books by Paul Virilio