Virilio Live

Edited by one of the leading Virilio authority's, this book offers the reader a guide through Virilio's work. Using the interview form, Virilio speaks incisively and at length about a vast assortment of cultural and theoretical topics, including architecture and 'speed-space', 'chronopolitics', art and technoculture, modernism, postmodernism and 'hypermodernism', the time of the trajectory and the 'information bomb'. His thoughts on Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, the performance artist Stelarc, the Persian War and the Kosovo War, are also gathered together.

I specialise in the cultural and media theory of Paul Virilio, the French contemporary philosopher and ‘critic of the art of technology’. Associated with various conceptions related to architecture, aesthetics, and new information and communications technologies in particular, Virilio is influenced by the continental philosophy or phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and numerous other critical theorists. Virilio’s work is unique and as a result shares very little in common with other contemporary cultural and media theorists, although he is often compared with other French thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Bernard Stiegler. Virilio has written well over twenty main works, inclusive of Speed & Politics (1986), Bunker Archeology (1994), War and Cinema (1989), The Art of the Motor (1995), Open Sky (1997), and, more recently, The University of Disaster (2010) and The Future of the Instant: Stop-Eject (2010).