At the turn of the century one academic commentator called Paul Virilio ‘perhaps the most provocative French cultural theorist on the contemporary intellectual scene’. This statement is probably just as true today as we approach with trepidation what Slavoj Zizek has called ‘the new dark ages’. Virilio’s enigmatic positions (though often inconsistent) still do not receive the accolades they deserve. Virilio’s important work on mass global migration over the last decade has been prescient beyond belief. Books like Native Land: Stop Eject with photographer Raymond Depardon from 2009 emphasise Virilio’s illuminating insights into the ‘shrinking of the world’ and what he calls the ‘world’s old age’ and a world ‘in transit’. We need, I think, to have in our armoury, however problematic it may be in the actual application, the work of the octogenerian Paul Virilio as our guide to the ‘trajectories of the catastrophic’. This is an era of what I call post-catastrophe – it is a dangerous modernity, more than at any time since the 1930s, the decade when he was born.
Paul Virilio is one of the theorists whose life and work my forthcoming book Theoretical Times features, alongside Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard. As part of this book I have worked on a side project which is the Passwords (or main key concepts) of the theorists. Paul Virilio’s Passwords (like the Badiou and Zizek ones) is a guide to the singular ideas and mode of thinking of Paul Virilio. The direct inspiration is Passwords, Virilio’s late friend Jean Baudrillard’s short book published by Verso in 2003. Baudrillard, in the translation from his original French language Mots de Passe book from 2000, reflected on a dozen of his own concepts – the object, value, symbolic exchange, seduction, the obscene, the transparency of evil, the virtual, the perfect crime, impossible exchange, duality, and so on. The idea of the Virilio Passwords is similar but with me as commentator. A dozen or so key concepts. The same with Badiou and Zizek.
In this side project the idea is to explain Paul Virilio’s multiple concepts by way of a concentration on a few, and to provide simultaneous ‘link’ entries to explore the background of Virilio’s life and work. The entries are intended to be short, snappy and incisive in the style of the work of Virilio himself who often capitalises his concepts in the style of a tabloid newspaper. It is a novel design. The entries cover ideas from the whole of Virilio’s career and publications, off and online, from well known books to articles and interviews in rare and obscure magazines and catalogues and on the internet.
This innovative side project aims to be accessible but rigorous on the key concepts created by Paul Virilio. His work has been seen in recent years to be even more relevant to our current condition than ever before and Paul Virilio, born in France 1932, is still producing new and provocative output to add to his large back catalogue. 2009 saw publication of a new edition of Bunker Archeology, a self-illustrated photographic book on the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall which Virilio first started writing about and photographing in 1958. Bunker Archeology was initially published in French in 1975. In the same year of 2009 Virilio called for a ‘grey ecology’ in the collective project L’Ecologie Grise, now published as Grey Ecology in English with Paul Virilio as main protagonist. Later key Virilio books The University of Disaster and The Futurism of The Instant were published in English in 2010 and 2011 respectively and another two, The Great Accelerator and The Administration of Fear, in 2012. In 2011 A Winter’s Journey was published – a new translation of four fascinating dialectical interviews with Marianne Brausch from the 1990s which range from the 1950s to the end of the century across all aspects of technological acceleration, speed and politics, and all with integral connections to Virilio’s own life.
Paul Virilio’s concepts are relevant now in a way that could not have been foreseen even a decade ago. The ‘catastrophic’ condition of the post-GFC world has seen his work rocket to international fame, albeit late in his life. A short film featuring Paul Virilio was shown at the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. A year earlier an international symposium in San Francisco in the autumn of 2008 entitled ‘Trajectories of the Catastrophic’ was dedicated to a critical appraisal of the work of Paul Virilio. Virilio’s idiosyncratic tracing of the ‘trajectories of the catastrophic’ over the last fifty years has chimed with the world we now inhabit – what I call a ‘claustropolitan’ world of economic downturn, ‘impure war’ in Iraq, Gaza, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, ‘globalitarian’ new depression and apocalyptic predictions of ‘accelerated’ world climate catastrophe. We certainly live today in Virilio’s instantaneous culture. More than ever in human history we inhabit the ‘now’. But it is an instant present which is catastrophic and claustropolitan – a ‘university of disaster’ in the pithy, pregnant phrase of Paul Virilio. The accelerated communication of the twenty-first century (Twitter, iTunes, iPad, Facebook, Google etc) is also ‘Virilian’, truly a world devoid of ‘solids’. Time for an update of my popular book The Paul Virilio Reader, first published by Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press in 2004. In the intervening years the world has caught up with Paul Virilio.
