Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Viriliois a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and "philosopher of speed". He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
CountryFrance
follows history landscape since
For God, history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really follows sequentially since everything is co-present.
dream eye blind-spots
There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.
technology negativity progress
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
winning matter messages
Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.
names voice waiting
The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice.
viruses
Images contaminate us like viruses.
eye weapons balloons
From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon.
ifs
How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?
military class knowing
All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness.
together tribes regions
Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.
reality light world
Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.
losing speed natural
While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.
war shadow film
... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.
war university
War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.