| Paul Virilio
& Sylvère Lotringer
Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer
Translated by Mark Polizzotti
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. |
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). |
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