Bücher von Paul Virilio

Diese Neuausgabe von Paul Virilios erstem Werk, das bereits 1975 veröffentlicht und nun vom Autor durch ein neues Nachwort ergänzt wurde, zeigt die erschreckende Aktualität des Themas der "großen Einschließung".In jahrelanger Recherche- und Dokumentationsarbeit hat Paul Virilio die Bunkeranlagen des von den Nazis erbauten "Atlantikwalls" an der französischen Atlantikküste untersucht und präsentiert die Ergebnisse - Fotografien, Kriegsweisungen, Karten - im Rahmen von philosophischen Essays. "Wenn man die zur Hälfte vergrabene Masse eines Bunkers mit seinen verstopften Belüftungsanlagen und dem schmalen Schlitz des Beobachtungspostens betrachtet, dann schaut man in einen Spiegel und gewahrt das Spiegelbild unserer eigenen Todesmacht, unserer eigenen Destruktivität, das Spiegelbild der Kriegsindustrie. Der Bunker ist anwesender und abwesender Mythos zugleich geworden: anwesend als für eine transparente und offene zivile Architektur abstoßendes Objekt, abwesend in dem Maße, in dem sich die Festung von heute woanders befindet, unter unseren Füßen, von nun an unsichtbar."

Paul Virilio demonstrates how technology has made inertia the defining condition of modernity. An instantaneous present has replaced space and the sovereignty of territory - everything happens without the need to go anywhere.

Virilio and Lotringer revisit their prescient book on the invisible war waged by technology against humanity since World War II.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). Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007) and other books.