CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 1

Originally published in English by ZKM. Revised material q 2012 Cultural Politics

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1571985

CELEBRATION: A WORLD of APPEARANCES

PAUL VIRILIO Interviewed by SACHA GOLDMAN

>
Paul Virilio is a renowned philosopher, urbanist, and critic of the art of technology. He is the author of, among many other books, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1977) and Bunker Archaeology (1994), Strategy of Deception (2000), Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy (2005), City of Panic (2005), The Original Accident (2007), The University of Disaster (2010), and, most recently, The Great Accelerator (2012). Sacha Goldman is a lmmaker and secretary-general of Collegium International. His latest work includes the lm Rememberemember. Wilsons Waco-Watermill-World (2011) about the work of US theater and opera director Robert Wilson.

Sacha Goldman: The current times are increasingly illegible. We need to establish a new reading matrix.

Paul Virilio: We are entering unpredictable times. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of speed to understand the landscape of events. Today, we are entering a time when celebration is going to replace celebrity. Let me explain: this is because history and celebrity go hand in hand. History, or the long run, is real celebrity; its the fame of Plato or Shakespeare. Simply put, since the nineteenth century and especially the twentieth, we have entered upon the acceleration of history. As everyone knows, Daniel Halevy revealed this in his book of 1947.1 Celebrity itself is entering a process of acceleration with the acceleration of history, and so celebrity is also entering what I have called the aesthetics of disappearance, in the same way as happened with the arts. With abstraction, and with cinema, art has moved into the aesthetics of disappearance. This is the age of cinematics. It is the age of what Ive called the energy of the visible, meaning, the real has become like images being unfolded in a lm, in a

61

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

CULTURAL POLITICS

sequence shot. And reality has been modied by this acceleration of history, to the point that it itself is accelerated. From now on, we are in the twenty-rst centurys acceleration of the real, that not only calls into question Braudel and the Annales schools notion of world history but also challenges the event-based history that we know through great events, such as May 1968, 191418. . . . History is accidental now, instantaneous, it cancels outand this is an event without reference or equivalentthe tripartite division of past, present, and future. It is an unparalleled event, an event without reference, which philosophy has not yet dared analyze. Without reference not just in the present, as [Francois] Hartog and others have claimed, a kind of present-ism. No, it is, rather, an instant for the sake of instantaneity. We live in the instant of the real, which is the acceleration of reality that completely effaces historicity. It is no coincidence that there has been much talk about memorial history, a law of memory, of identity. Its because historicity is disappearing. It is disappearing entirely, and celebrity, in turn, is ceasing to be, leaving only pure celebration. By celebration, I mean an industry of appearance and disappearance, with its automated procedures that dissociate the event that is the presence of a man or a woman, an artist or a genius, from his or her work or writing and its value. The work itself has become useless. Let me remind you of what a young man said on a reality TV show. He was asked what he wanted to do in the future. His response was: I want to do celebrity. He didnt want to become a Picasso, a Shakespeare, or a Godard. He wanted to do celebrity. And he had perfectly understood that celebration would allow him to become a celebrity without any works to his name. After the era of abstract, nongurative art comes the era of abstraction from the work and its merits, but also from the author. The work disappears: it is useless. The merits of the work, good or bad, are useless, and the author is useless too. Genius, hero, and historical gure are no longer. I repeat: the genius, the hero, the life-size historical gure are no more. Instantaneity has supplanted eternity. This is fundamental. Eternity was the domain of the spiritual. I dont mean the religious. It was also the domain of the Greek philosophers, with the immortality of the soul. Well, instantaneity has now replaced eternity. The eternity of the famous Immortals of the Academie francaise, which now must be dissolved immedi ately. Stop. Eject! SG: In the same vein, one of the largest commercial TV channels brought Aime Cesaire to meet the young winner of Star Academy, both being from Martinique, and Cesaire, ummoxed, asked him, Are you an academician . . . ? Becoming a celebrity is a preoccupation that has become an occupation, devoid of any authenticity.

62

A WORLD of APPEARANCES

63

PV: Occupation is a state. As victim, invader, or torturer. When you are occupied, you experience a phenomenon that psychologists and psychoanalysts call derealization, a kind of panic event. There is a panic of occupation, a kind of fear comparable to anguish. Not solely physical fear, but anguished fear. And today, reality occupies us and preoccupies us by its very acceleration. Hence the splitting of reality. We dont believe in it anymore. What Ive called a mono-atheism is in the works. Let me explain: monotheism is a belief in one god; it is the Jews, the Christians, or the Muslims. Monoatheism is a belief in nothing at all. It is not simply about not believing in Christ or Abraham or Muhammad; it is not believing in anything that might concern the Great All. Its not even nihilism; its sur-nihilism, as surrealism is to realism. And I think the relationship between celebrity and celebration is linked to this too. We cannot even believe in a genius anymore. We cannot believe in a hero, because we dont believe in anything at all. Atheists dont believe in God, but monoatheists dont believe in anything of the Great All. So the hero, the saint, the righteous are eliminated in this kind of totalitarian atheism. Something is being played out that the great Hannah Arendt did not deal with. Globalitarism goes much further than the totalitarianism that she analyzed to perfection. I am announcing the dawn of globalitarism, in other words, this nihilism, this sur-nihilism that no longer believes in any god or hero, prophet or great man or woman, or likewise, anything of the Great All. I think this is an event that calls into question history. And by challenging History, History with a capital H, the History that extends into the past and has a future, progress itself is called into question. I speak now only of progression, the movement of a here to a there. Therefore the era we live in is unparalleled; these are unprecedented times. The word unprecedented is a landmark word of our times. In my opinion, those who seek celebrity today have not understood that one now has to have been unknown to become a celebrity, one has to have been anonymous. There are already signs of this, and I will point some out. In chronological order, there was Henri Michaux, who was of course well known, but who ed representation, not in such a grandiose manner as those after him, but he did start to ee it. And you can sense this in his poetry. After the war, during the time of the surrealists, Henri Michaux, like Rene Char, is a man on the run, contrary to [Louis] Breton, contrary to the surrealists. And we can Aragon and Andre look next, for an example of this, at an American whom I very much appreciate, Thomas Pynchon. We have photographs of Pynchon when he was sixteen. He never gives interviews, and to me he is the greatest American writer alive today. There are others whom I adore, like Edgar Allan Poe, . . . but Pynchon is a man we know nothing about and will never get to know. Unless somebody takes his picture on his deathbed [or makes] a death mask. Here we have a sign. But we also have comparable signs in the sciences. For example, the great mathematician Grigori Perelman has just declined the

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

award of the Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics) and the Millennium Prize, along with the prize money that goes with it. He doesnt want it. To exist, it is enough for him to have resolved the previously unfathomable Poincare conjecture. This desire for anonymity is the sign of forthcoming celebrity, the aesthetic of disappearance of the great mathematician or poet or novelist. In my opinion, the same will be true of the politician soon. And then there will be a crisis of political representation, a crisis of representative democracy. If democracy is no longer representational, then it is abstract. And where or to what does an aesthetic of disappearance lead? To a super-monarchy? Yet I understand that the crisis of political parties, both left and right, is not a revolutionary sign. It is a revelationary sign. I use this word knowingly and hold to it. We will now be dealing in revelation. The days of revolution are over. I mean this. An event like this onehistory coming into question through the acceleration of realityis a major event, a singularity, as the physicists would say, a singularity of history. An unparalleled event. And so, those who think of themselves as celebrities are those who never will be again. Hence it is imperative to harbor a kind of humility or modesty. Humility is not just a Christian virtue. It is a necessity of being. I take the example of the great Stoic Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, the Great All. Marcus Aurelius the Stoic said, I have been everything and everything is nothing. Today the proposition is reversed. I am nothing but I can be everything. SG: Its as if there were an involuntary will to have done with things, a negation reex of reason, virtually a negationism. PV: Im interested in an emerging negationism that seems to be a trick of history: the negationism of the Blitzkrieg. There were two negationisms after the Occupation. There was the Shoah, in other words, extermination, the aim of which we know well. But another one is developing: the negationism of the Blitzkrieg, of lightning war, in other words, of the acceleration of history that would lead to the acceleration of reality we just spoke of. I take an example, as always, from World War II. When we speak of the Shoah, we are speaking of extermination, not occupation. My generation, however, thought of the concentration camps as deportation camps. We knew that there were gas chambers, but deportation was always in the foreground. Raul Hilberg speaks, in his book, of the destruction of the European Jews.2 Whats of interest here is the prominence he attaches to deportation, asserting that if the Nazis could have, they would have deported [all the way] to Madagascar. So the real critical move, that comes from the fascist futuristswe can speak more about this laterdeveloped during World War II in and through Italian, Mussolinian futurism, with [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti, with the Russian futurists, the Melnikovs . . . and with the Nazi futur-

64

CULTURAL POLITICS

A WORLD of APPEARANCES

ists. The extent to which we do not refer to the Blitzkrieg as futurist is astonishing. I myself was a victim of it in the exodus from the French cities,3 and we are now claiming it never happened, that the French didnt know how to ght, but that they still put up a good ght . . . Petain or whoever. No, it was the acceleration of history that destroyed Europe and destroyed the Jews of Europe, as Hilberg rightly notes. And yet there are no gas chambers anymore. However, deportation is just beginning. Sixty-three American cities are undergoing depopulation. Four hundred cities in Russia are being depopulated. We are heading toward the end of the era of the sedentary. The exodus from the cities is an extension of the exodus from the countryside in the nineteenth century. This is the time of the setting in motion of a great exodus. A closed-circuit exodus. No longer a linear one toward an imagined promised land, but a revolving exodus. And for this exodus, there exists an exceptional metaphor in the great circular accelerator at Geneva.4 So, you see, we cant speak of negationism without speaking of the acceleration of the real. Negationism denies reality. It doesnt simply deny crimes or the responsibility of such-and-such a people, the Germans, Petain, et cetera. It denies the real by accelerating it to the speed of light in the great ring, the great collider, that underground cathedral of Geneva. This speed ring is a perfect metaphor for the reality of a world too small for progress, running the risk of creating a black hole. SG: Like the myth of the Tower of Babel updated. By wanting everything, we get nothing. Its an industry of emptiness, like propaganda emptying of its content that which it is supposed to promote. PV: In the beginning, there was the propagation of the faith. Propaganda de. Its aim was to convert. But originally, the propagation of faith had nothing to do with propaganda. It was an apostolic mission. It will only later become proselytism, in other words, propaganda. This religious model was then appropriated by the Enlightenment philosophers, meaning that, from the Revolution onward, progress was accelerated. It accelerated machines, production, quantities, transportation . . . and speed became the propaganda of progress. In other words, speed became the proselytism of progress. It was impossible not to believe in progress. Thats where mono-atheism poses a number of big questions. We dont believe in God but we believe in progress, until the day we dont believe in that anymore either. The propaganda of progress leads to a dead end, a cul-de-sac. So its crucial to remind ourselves that the acceleration of time is the propaganda of progress. Time was circular in the past, a time of cycles, the time of the great religions in which time is circular, where it operates a return by way of metempsychosis. Our Judeo-Christian, Greco-Latin society, through the Enlightenment, invented linear time, running toward progress or eternity or eternal life. Today the question arises: what is the cycle of time

65

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

if accelerated to instantaneity, to the speed of light, that is, to the level of the great collision? Let me remind you that particle accelerators, as metaphors, have become colliders. Very interesting. We used to have a linear accelerator, but it has now become circular. This device on display in Geneva is a kind of cathedral of the future, of the crisis of thought, of time and of tempo. When I say the propaganda of progress, I mean that progress is inevitably propagation. Its obvious. In the same way as faith is propagated, so is progress. But things that are propagated are not necessarily propaganda. Trees or human beings can propagate themselves without being propagandist. Propagation has thus been perverted into propaganda. This is important since we are dealing with ideology here. And we know that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the centuries of the great ideologies and ideological wars. The propaganda of progress is linked to the development of the great ideologies: totalitarianism, be it fascist, Mussolinian, communist, or Maoist, Nazi, et cetera. This is important to me because I am a man of movement and speed. And so, one must keep in mind the dynamics were referring to here: the dynamic of progress that moves toward betterment in a straight line and all of a sudden loops back on itself. In a sense, this is the limit of both progress and the idea of propagation. Its a tremendously important event that we can discuss with physicists too, because its a complex accident, an integral accident. SG: Culture is transmitted through anonymous, rhizomatic channels. Celebrities without content emerge from an intensication of the process of celebration. The media conglomerate is a decisive actor in this process of overexposure. PV: Gods, kings, and emperors were celebrated through monuments, not the one who built them. Something has shifted today. Instead of celebrating the Master, God, or Genius, monuments have come to celebrate the architect. The media is a machine that is breaking down. The Internet will break down, as I say in The Information Bomb, and it will be an integral accident.5 SG: It is from the anonymous, from the minor that greatness ensues.
CULTURAL POLITICS

66

PV: The great known unknown is Kafka. He is certainly the most important writer of the twentieth century, but also the quintessential stealthy writer. Stealth is a key strategic element. Not to appear is to save ones life. And not to appear in literature, as Kafka wanted, is to save ones work. For me, Kafkas work exceeds literature proper because he is both the man of his private journals, of Metamorphosis, and of America, but he is, rst and foremost, an epistolary writer (like Flaubert, whom Kafka admired, and other great writers . . . Im

A WORLD of APPEARANCES

thinking of Pauls epistles, for example). So Kafka did not want to appear, even at the moment of his death. He withdrew absolutely by asking his literary executor to destroy all his writing. There is something here that goes a very, very long way, in that it raises, more than the question of celebrity, the question of the work itself. Is the work of art also destined to disappear? This is a question at the brink of nihilism, but it also stems from the times. When Kafka effaced himself, Europe was about to enter its most tragic period, the period of the Shoah, the time of extermination. Europe was to extinguish its greatness. Some have said that there can be no writing after Auschwitz, no painting, no poetry. But Kafka said it before. His was a prophetic understanding of what would happen, irreversibly, to literature. Here we connect up with Deleuze and Guattari on the question of a minor literature, at the point where they connect with Kafka. Celebrity used to be linked to history and to the author, the great author. First, to the creator, whom Nietzsche declares dead: the death of God, followed by the death of the author. In a way, Kafka pregures the death of the author. He is Nietzschean in announcing not the death of God but that of the author. There is something very powerful here in which Deleuze and Guattari generously nd hope by claiming that the future will spring from what is minor. Minor literature (minora) is in no way a desertion of greatness. To be minor is to lie in wait for what is to come, refusing the end. Refusing nitude, refusing the Great All, Hegels schone Totalitat. It is to take refuge in the minutely small, in the dot of the question mark. The story of minor literature is an old one, starting with the hermits, those who wanted to disappear into the desert. It continued with clandestine artists. There have been such artists throughout history: the Damned (les Maudits), painters and artistsand Kafka, the great known unknown. SG: One is not an artist by will alone. Paraphrasing the title of your book The Aesthetics of Disappearance, are we witnessing the disappearance of aesthetics in contemporary art?6 PV: There is an important point that was anticipated by abstract art in ` general and by musique concrete, which brings us back to the war and the postwar period. Art and culture were also victims of the war. Contemporary art is crippled; it is an art that was a victim of the war but does not admit it. Instead of stating, We were victims of a culture war (World War II was not just a political war but an ideological one), which was also an art war; instead of acknowledging itI am nothing now, I was injured, I am a disabled member of my culturecontemporary art, as represented by the New York school, contrary to the Paris school and the Europeans who stayed in Europe and continued to work, said, Its the future and its magnicent. Of course, it was magnicent to them! They were on the other side of the Atlantic.

67

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

Whereas the European artists who stayed and worked on the ground in occupied territoryFrance, Germanywere eliminated by, I would say, the vainglory of those who escaped the war, those who deserted Europe. I would remind you that some artists returned to join the Resistance. There werent many, but there were some. They came back from the Americas to do that. So art is a victim of war and continues to bear the scars to this day. Everything weve been saying is linked to this: the postwar illusion of success of the New York school, of those who did not suffer the tragedy, those who did not live through the Extermination. Something was played out here that, I think, is crucial to the history of art. The victors, the heroes of contemporary art, the great artists who found refuge in the United States, are in fact lost. However, those who were injured and acknowledge it in their work, in their poems, in their music, in their painting, or in their architecture (there arent many, but there are some)these stand with Kafka as signs of the future. I think this aspect is very important. The other aspect I see linked to the technological revolution is that art is now out of sight. When I used this as a title for my book, I pointed out that I wasnt referring to blindness.7 I meant an art that had strayed so far from history and reality that it had passed beyond: it no longer exists because it has reached farther than the eye can see. Because of its arrogance and the arrogance of those who triumphed in the postwar period, it and they are now out of sight. It costs a great deal, and the art dealers live off their backs. It could be that contemporary art is already dead and were just starting to understand it. So the art market is a market of death. SG: We have great unknowns in the present, protecting themselves by the anonymity of their pseudonyms. They are present in their absence. PV: There is, in fact, an atypical character who stands outside the norm and is part of this postwar history and the history of American art landing in Europe, and he is present to this day. Chris Marker is, for me, one of the greatest masters of images, an emblematic gure of the dissolution of celebrity. For celebrity was not eliminated, it dissolved. It is not a reverse revolution. The aesthetic of disappearance is a dissolution, not just a cinematic disappearance but a dissolution of the work itself rst and then of its author. But a man like Chris has not dissolved. He is alone. In dissolution, there is also solitude. And solitude goes hand in hand with genuine celebrity. The saint, the famous individual, or the prophet necessarily stands alone. He doesnt start a school. If he does, he is no prophet and he is no saint. The great Chris Marker is one of the important gures of our time. The last time I saw him, he was in full battle dress, wearing ranger boots, a helmet, and biker gear for the wheels he still sported at his

68

CULTURAL POLITICS

A WORLD of APPEARANCES

advanced age. All that was missing was for his helmet to be army issued. Im just thinking of this now because the people we carry close to us are so much part of us somehow that we dont notice these things. Thats a good illustration of greatness, I would say. To be part of you. They are such a big part of our lives that we dont think of them anymore. Its like the love of your life. She is so much part of you that at times you forget her. SG: We cant continue discussing celebrity and not ask, how does Paul Virilio t into this? PV: I run away from it. I havent been to claim the important medals theyve offered me in the United States. I ee celebrity. Not from some sense of modesty or humility, it should be understood, but because I dont believe in it. I am an atheist when it comes to celebrity. Simply because all my work discloses this impasse celebrity nds itself in. I dont want to make my way into that dead end. Theres a wall here, in La Rochelle, around the beltway. They call it the suicide wall. Because there are a lot of bikers around here dying in speeding accidents . . . no one talks about it for fear of inciting panic, so as not to turn it into an attraction. Well, people rush to see it anyway. Its become a metaphor, a symbol, a monument. SG: You left Paris, the megalopolis, years ago, to live in La Rochelle. Is this also a choice of the urbanist that you are? PV: I wanted to spend my last years on the edge of the world. And to me, the Atlantic coastline, the threshold of the ocean, is the last frontier of history. History is not just about centuries and events. Its also about places. And borders are historical sites over which wars have been waged, on which people have been massacred so that they could be invaded or destroyed. Yet I think these borders have lost their signicance because of the acceleration weve been speaking about. If proof be needed, we have it in the concrete of all the walls built after the Maginot Line or the Siegfried Line, which were the very basis for World War II. Walls fteen hundred kilometers long are being built on the US-Mexico border, built around Israel; they are even being built around Italian towns in the south. The Berlin Wall has fallen, only to crop up multiplied everywhere. So when we build walls, its that borders are about to disappear. However, the one border that will never disappear is the coastline. Its the last frontier of history. The beaches on the seashore are the end of history. In fact, my work began with the exodus from the cities and the Blitzkrieg that we referred to. The invasion and the Blitzkrieg ran aground in the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, on the beaches where I found them. To those who say, Thats odd for you whove spent so much time working on speed to have also worked on concrete, I say, No! Speed has ended in concrete, in inertia and useless, absurd

69

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

ideality. So its quite coherent for me to have worked on invasion and on the construction of the Atlantic Wall, or the West Wall as it was called. Because today that is where history is going to take place. On a coastline, we stand on the edge of the world, which is just where I wanted to spend my last days, at the oceans edge. SG: The nitude of the world, the foreclosed world, is slamming up against this last frontier, its own horizon. PV: There are two horizons: one horizontal, delineated by sea, and the other vertical, drawn by the sky. On the beach, you see both. Its the end of the world. Thats where I wanted to end my days. Because I believe in eternity. I dont believe in instantaneity. And here is where the door opens. The continental shoreline is the last frontier of history. Following the movement of humankind over millennia, since prehistoric times, since Neolithic times, we notice that people were rst lake dwellers, later settling around rivers, deltas, the Nile, the Rhone. . . . And today, the attraction to coastlines, to this particular horizon line, is worldwide. Two-thirds of the worlds population lives less than one hundred kilometers from a coast. People are increasingly being pulled toward the coast, the great oceanic coastlines. Across the ocean is America. But thats at the other end of the world. Somehow, the end of the world is linked to contact with water. It is linked to contact with the horizontal coastline, the ocean and its horizon line, but also to the vertical, the end of surfaces, the end of oceans and the beginning of a great atmospheric void, an interstellar emptiness. So here history comes to a close. Humankind, which emerged from the oceans through evolution, stepping out from the great liquid world, the great aquatic world, is now ocking back. Lands are not exactly being abandoned, but they are not really civilized either. People are attracted to the coast, to a limit, to the true frontier. State borders are disappearing one after the other. When fteen hundred kilometers of wall are built between Mexico and the United States, that means that border will disappear. However, the thresholds of continents will not. They are the ultimate borders between solid and liquid. Tomorrows history will take place between the dynamics of uidsocean uids, owsand the dynamics or mechanics of land. In other words, where the beach dives into the water, where the shore extends to the ocean oor. Thats why states are scrambling to claim territorial waters and plant ags on the ocean oor, as Russia has done at the North Pole. So we stand before the end of the world here, the nitude of the world. The historical world comes to a close with the populating of coastal areas, where the line of the coast is inscribed, the limit between earth and sea. As for the phenomena of submersion that seem inevitable with the melting of the poles and the rising sea levels, that too will play out here.

70

CULTURAL POLITICS

A WORLD of APPEARANCES

We can say that, just as national borders were the site of conict between nationshence the Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line, and frontier earthworksthe line of defense today will be drawn up against submersion, against the conict within a conict between the dynamics of uids and the mechanics of land masses. Hence perhaps a shift in terrain from geopolitics to meteo-politics. I believe that the future will bring a great ministry of Time and Weather, of weather with its meteorology and of time with chronopolitics, its rhythms and its ows. Its strange, but we nd it hard to conceive the beach as a threshold. We refer to it in relation to seaside resorts, water sports, swimming, while, in effect, its the last of frontiers, the last of all limits. Globalization ends at the edge of the ocean, the edge of the hydrosphere, where the conict between lithosphere and hydrosphere is played out beneath the atmosphere. Something is in play here that is the ultimate limit of history. Of a history that will plunge back into the ocean. The ocean of wavesand we know that humankind came from the seaand the ocean of ows, the ows from the sky, the owing of waves, and ows of information. It is a unique period in time when geopolitics is giving way to meteopolitics, in other words, to randomness, a vision that refers no longer solely to what is solid but also to uids and liquids. Another history will begin at the edge of the world. It is a history that is not sad but tragic, in that it raises questions that havent been posed since philosophical antiquity. To live the end of the world every day at every moment is an unparalleled experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is a much-abridged version of the original interview: Celebration: The World of Appearance, Paul Virilio in conversation with Sacha Goldman, rst published in Andreas Beitin and Peter Weibel, eds., Elmgreen and Dragset: Trilogy, exhibition catalog (Cologne: ZKMMuseum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2011). The text has been further revised by Cultural Politics. TRANSLATORS NOTES (The original translation by Lisa Damon was revised by Chris Turner, who is responsible for all the translators notes.) 1. The reference is to Halevys Essai sur lacceleration de lhistoire (Essay on the Acceleration of History ) (Paris: Fayard, 1948). 2. The reference is to The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961). 3. The reference is to the enormous population movement that occurred in France in June 1940 in response to the German invasion. It is estimated that around one-fourth of the French population was involved.

71

CULTURAL POLITICS

PAUL VIRILIO

4. 5. 6. 7.

Virilio is speaking about the Large Hadron Collider operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The reference is to The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000). The reference is to The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Phil Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991). ` The reference is to Lart a perte de vue (Art as Far as the Eye Can See) (Paris: Galilee, 2005).

72

CULTURAL POLITICS