The Paul Virilio Reader (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

If nothing else, the war in Iraq and the 1991 Gulf War have taught us much about media and technology as key players in how war is waged, packaged for public consumption, and exported in real time to the rest of the globe. A critic of the art of technology, Paul Virilio has keenly observed that media images quite often constitute a strategy of war and that accident is becoming indistinguishable from attack. For more than fifty years Virilio has offered incisive and provocative criticism on technology and its moral, political, and cultural implications. Yet until now, much of his work, originally published in French, remains elusive in full English translation. The Paul Virilio Reader collects for the first time English extracts reflecting the entire range of Virilio's diverse career. The book's introduction demonstrates that Virilio has produced an important―if controversial―"theory at the speed of light" that uncannily illuminates the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world that collapses time and distance as never before. The inventor of "dromology," which views speed as a defining concept for contemporary civilization, Virilio is noted for his proclamation that the logic of ever-increasing acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the contemporary world. Arranged chronologically, the Reader illustrates the development and interconnectedness of Virilio's work. Each extract is prefaced by bibliographical and contextual commentary, and the book includes an innovative guide to reading Virilio.

Literature & Fiction

VIRILIO, PAUL

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

"Virilio offers a cool, precise look at an impending future in which reality shall simply cease to exist. Highly recommended." ―Choice
Surveying art history as well as the technologies of war and urban planning, one of France’s leading intellectuals provides an introduction to a new "logistics of the image."

The Vision Machine (Perspectives)

Indiana University Press

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

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Indiana Univ. Pr

Phenomena such as urban rioting and media coverage of the Gulf War viewed as evidence of the contemporary acceleration of events.

A Landscape of Events (Writing Architecture)

Essays & Correspondence

Mit Pr

Writer and urbanist Paul Virilio is considered to be one of the most important and incisive contemporary critics of technology and its moral, political, and cultural implications. His latest catalogue, published to accompany an exhibition he has conceived for the Fondation Cartier in Paris, examines the philosophical issues raised by our confrontation with accidents and their impact on our world. Accidents capture our attention, surprise or shock us, disrupt or ultimately alter the course of our existence. Whether significant or insignificant, benign or disastrous, accidents always reveal something about ourselves and the systems we construct. For Virilio, to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck, to invent electricity is to invent electrocution. Accidents are consequently, in his view, inherent in all technological systems. This catalogue features over 200 illustrations, including press photographs, paintings, and engravings representing natural and industrial accidents from the past three centuries. It also contains reproductions of the works of the many artists included in the exhibit, most notably Lebbeus Woods, Nancy Rubins, Stephen Vitiello, Cai Guo Qiang, Bruce Conner, Tony Oursler, Jonas Mekas, and Jem Cohen. Paul Virilio has also invited visionary architect Lebbeus Woods and award-winning journalist Svetlana Aleksievitch to contribute texts to this catalogue. Distributed on behalf of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. 200 color illustrations.

Unknown Quantity

Arts & Photography

Thames&Hudson

The Original Accident

The future once promised the certainty of a better life for all but now it is full of uncertainty, danger and fear. Our lives are surrounded by the threats, imaginary or real, posed by terrorist outrages, natural catastrophes and disasters of all kinds. The future is overshadowed by the nightmare of an outmoded humanity overwhelmed by a catastrophe of its own making, a kind of catastrophic grand finale that would mirror the original accident - the Big Bang - that some scientists believe created the universe. 
A biting meditation on Progress technoscientific progress, at any cost and without any limits this book defines the ways in which postindustrial science has merged with out-and-out hyperterrorism to threaten the foundations of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian civilization, and the future of the planet with them, through innovation of mass catastrophes that are part and parcel of its panoply of inventions. Urging us to face up to the consequences of our brave-new-world technologies, Virilio calls for the creation of a Museum of the Accident to fight our habituation to horror and violence, and our daily overexposure to terror, in the name, not of some preventive war, but of a preventive intelligence that would help us deal with both natural and artificial disasters.

Science & Math

Polity

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Disaster

"The world of the future will be a tighter and tighter struggle against the limits of our intelligence", announced Norbert Wiener... On top of such confinement, today we are faced not only with the greenhouse effect of global warming but also that of incarceration within the tighter and tighter limits of an accelerating sphere, a dromosphere, where depletion of the time distances involved in the geodiversity of the Globe rounds off the depletion of the substances produced by biodiversity. An unanticipated victim of this geophysical foreclosure is science - not only biology but also physics, the "Big Science" now confronted by the space-time contraction of the known world and of knowledge once acquired here below. Whence the threat, still unnoticed, of an accident in knowledge which will double the accident of polluted substances and put paid to this crisis of reason denounced by Husserl, with the extravagant quest for a substitute exoplanet, a new "Promised Land" to be colonised as swiftly as possible; the climate necessary to the life of our minds, as much as to the life of our bodies, from then on, on this old Earth of ours, being like the fatal consequences of a long illness requiring hospitalisation.

Philosophy

"The world of the future will be a tighter and tighter struggle against the limits of our intelligence", announced Norbert Wiener... On top of such confinement, today we are faced not only with the greenhouse effect of global warming but also that of incarceration within the tighter and tighter limits of an accelerating sphere, a dromosphere, where depletion of the time distances involved in the geodiversity of the Globe rounds off the depletion of the substances produced by biodiversity. An unanticipated victim of this geophysical foreclosure is science - not only biology but also physics, the "Big Science" now confronted by the space-time contraction of the known world and of knowledge once acquired here below. 
Whence the threat, still unnoticed, of an accident in knowledge which will double the accident of polluted substances and put paid to this crisis of reason denounced by Husserl, with the extravagant quest for a substitute exoplanet, a new "Promised Land" to be colonised as swiftly as possible; the climate necessary to the life of our minds, as much as to the life of our bodies, from then on, on this old Earth of ours, being like the fatal consequences of a long illness requiring hospitalisation.

The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject

With around 645 million people expected to be displaced Ð by wars and other catastrophes Ð by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant by looking at the future of human settlement and migration through the evolution of the city. What he finds is an accelerating exodus from the city as we have known it, an exodus that reverses the desertion of the countryside for the city in the past. This exodus creates a circulating city of transients on the move that will remove us further and further from our native lands en route to the ultimate exile, beyond planet Earth itself Ð something the world's mad scientists have already been planning for some time. 
Exploring the shifts in scale involved in such population flows and the fraught and complex relationship between sedentary settlement and globalization, Virilio considers what the resultant loss of identity might mean, not only in terms of the exhaustion of biodiversity, but also in terms of the catastrophic elimination of temporal diversity, with the compression and fragmentation of time enabled by the nanotechnologies in an ever increasing acceleration of reality. This previously unimaginable prospect is brought closer by the accident of an instant that wipes out all distinction between past, present and future within the black hole of globalized interconnectivity.

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Books by VIRILIO, PAUL

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by VIRILIO, PAUL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Paul Virilio Reader (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

The Vision Machine (Perspectives)

The Vision Machine

A Landscape of Events (Writing Architecture)

Unknown Quantity

The Original Accident

The Original Accident

University of Disaster

University of Disaster

The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject