Paul Virilio 1932 – 2018

Paul Virilio was a French philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist whose work made speed the central category of contemporary politics. Trained as an architect and shaped by his experience of total war and bombardment, he founded in Speed and Politics the discipline he called dromology, the science of speed and movement. War and Cinema, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and The Original Accident developed his thesis that every new technology arrives with its own characteristic catastrophe, and that political space and perception are increasingly governed by the logistics of vision and acceleration.

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in January 1932 of a Breton-Italian family; he spent the war years in Nantes, an experience that he later named as the source of his preoccupation with the urban and military landscape. He trained as a stained-glass artist at the École des Métiers d'Art and worked for a time alongside Henri Matisse, converted to Catholicism in 1950, and after military service in Algeria took up phenomenology under Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. From 1958 he carried out the photographic survey of the Atlantic Wall published as Bunker Archeology in 1975, and in the mid-1960s co-founded with the architect Claude Parent the journal Architecture Principe and the doctrine of the 'function of the oblique'.

He directed the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris from 1973 to 1989. His books include Bunker Archeology (1975), Speed and Politics (Vitesse et politique, 1977), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), War and Cinema (1984), The Vision Machine (1988), Open Sky (La vitesse de libération, 1995), Information Bomb (1998), The Original Accident (2005), and the late University of Disaster (2007).

Virilio called his project 'dromology', the study of speed and acceleration as the secret of modern political geography: the city is a fortress against incoming trajectories, the war machine is the original engine of technological development, and contemporary instantaneous communication produces an 'information bomb' whose accident is global. He died at La Rochelle in September 2018.