Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today. Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned for his declaration that the logic of acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the modern world. However, Virilio's thought remains much misunderstood by many postmodern cultural theorists.
Born in Paris in 1932 to a Breton mother and an Italian Communist father, Virilio was evacuated in 1939 to the port of Nantes, where he was traumatised by the spectacle of Hitler's Blitzkrieg during World War II. After training at the Ecole des Metiers d' Art in Paris, Virilio became an artist in stained glass and worked alongside Matisse in various churches in the French capital. In 1950, he converted to Christianity in the company of 'worker-priests' and, following military conscription into the colonial army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), Virilio studied phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. Captivated by the military, spatial, and organizational features of urban territory, Virilio's early writings began to appear while he was acting as a self-styled 'urbanist', in Architecture Principe (Virilio and Parent, 1996), the group and review of the same name he established with the architect Claude Parent in 1963. Although Virilio produced numerous short pieces and architectural drawings in the 1960s, his first major work was a photographic and philosophical study of the architecture of war entitled Bunker Archeology (1994a [1975]). The creator of concepts such as 'military space', 'dromology', and the 'aesthetics of disappearance', Virilio's phenomenologically grounded and controversial cultural theory draws on the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and, above all, Merleau Ponty. After participating in the evenements of May 1968 in Paris, Virilio was nominated Professor by the students at the Ecole Speciale d' Architecture, and he later helped Jacques Derrida and others to found the International College of Philosophy. An untrained architect, Virilio has never felt compelled to restrict his concerns to the spatial arts. Indeed, like his philosopher companions, the late Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Virilio, like his current sympathetic adversary, Jean Baudrillard, has written numerous texts on a variety of cultural topics. Commencing with Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986 [1977]) before moving on to The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991a [1980]), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989 [1984]), Politics of the Very Worst (1999a [1996]), Polar Inertia (1999b [1990]), The Information Bomb (2000a [1998]) and, most recently, Strategy of Deception (2000b [1999]), the power of Virilio's cultural theory has only recently begun to be felt in the English-speaking world. This situation is probably due in no small part to the fact that, despite receiving several international speaking invitations weekly, he rarely leaves Paris and seldom converses in public outside France. Virilio retired from teaching in 1998. He currently devotes himself to writing and working with private organizations concerned with housing the homeless in Paris.
from the article Beyond Postmodernism? by John Armitage.
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