| Paul Virilio & Sylvère
Lotringer
Pure War
| We tried to reveal a
number of important tendencies: the question of speed; speed
as the essence of war; technology as the producer of speed;
war as logistics, not strategy; endocolonization; deterrence;
ultimate weapons; Pure War. |
The publication of Pure
War in 1983 introduced Virilio’s thought to
the United States, and has since remained one of the most
influential and far-reaching essays of our time.
Pure War names the invisible war that technology is waging against
humanity. For Virilio, the foremost philosopher of speed, the “technical
surprise” of World War I was the discovery that the wartime
economy could not be sustained unless it was continued during peacetime.
As a consequence, the distinction between war and peace ceased to
apply, inaugurating the military-industrial complex and the militarization
of science itself.
In this dazzling dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Virilio
displays, for the first time, the entire range of his reflections
on the effects of speed on our civilization. Every new invention
casts a long shadow that we are loathe to acknowledge in the name
of progress: the invention of automobiles inaugurated car-crashes;
the invention of nuclear energy, Hiroshima and Chernobyl. But the
technologies of instant communications have invented another kind
of accident: the extermination of space and the de-realization of
time. Instant feedback is shrinking the planet to nothing, and “globalization” is
its ultimate accident. |
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