Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers S.
2 total works
Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th Century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death. In Virilio's vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. At the start of the 21st century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godless manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life. Virilio makes all the connections clear: between the way early 20th Century avant-gardes twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War; between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned and the "medical" experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; between the mangled messages of sensationalist advertising and terrorism. A brutal logic rules this shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented "scientific" modes of destruction.
"One of the most original thinkers of our time." - Liberation "Virilio writes on the edge of physics, philosophy, politics and urbanism" - New Statesman Desert Screen is a vision of future war. Paul Virilio identifies the Gulf War as a turning point in history, the last industrial and the first information war. Virilio argues that we live in a world of global spatio-temporal collapse, a world still exhausted from the geopolitics of the Cold War, a world in which the politics of military and media technology seem to preclude the possibility of negotiation and diplomacy.