The Aesthetics of Disappearance Paul Virilio, 1980 · a full-quote brief on the argument, part by part

Virilio's wager is that consciousness has never been the continuous stream it takes itself to be. It is riddled with absences, tiny departures from the world that the mind stitches over so smoothly it never registers the seam, and the whole history of technique, arriving at its pitch in cinema and in speed, is the history of how those absences get produced, supplemented, and standardized from the outside until the world itself is what disappears. He names the absence picnolepsy and builds outward from it: the epileptic petit mal de-pathologized into the ordinary condition of everyone, then generalized until reason, cinema, the automobile, the aircraft, the war machine, and the electronic screen all turn out to be engines for redistributing absence and manufacturing a false day in which nothing passes. The book appeared in 1980 as Esthétique de la disparition, written out of the late-1970s balance-of-terror moment, and it enters against two settled assumptions at once: that perception is a continuous givenness of the world, and that reason and the technical image carry us closer to the real. Virilio's counter-claim is that they do the reverse, that speed and light are not neutral media but loaded weapons, and that the terminus of the tendency is the disappearance of the body into speed and of consciousness into the screen.

This brief reconstructs the argument along Virilio's own structure, an introduction supplied for this edition by Jonathan Crary followed by four numbered parts and the endnotes, and carries the load-bearing formulations whole at every locus, so that the concept, its stakes inside the argument, and the passages that prove it are all retrievable at speed without returning to the book. The through-line to follow is the single tendency Virilio tracks under a dozen names: picnolepsy becomes the technical production of paradoxical wakefulness, which becomes the law of movement, which becomes the aesthetics of disappearance, ending in a world where duration is measured in intensity and matter and our presence in it face a final oblivion beyond the barrier of sound and soon of light. The recurring epigraph, from Paul of Tarsus, is the compression of the whole: the world as we see it is passing.

Front matter · this editionJonathan Crary's Introduction

The 2009 edition opens with an introduction Crary writes nearly three decades after the French publication, and its work is corrective: it exists to unseat the labels that had attached to Virilio by then. Crary's first move is a denial. He refuses the two categories under which Virilio is usually filed, and the refusal is the frame for everything the book is about to do.

This text in particular makes plain what has been obvious to any careful reader of Virilio all along: he never was or is a critic/historian of media or a philosopher of technology in the way these labels might apply to figures as disparate as Ellul, McLuhan, Kittler or Stiegler. Of course his work has been uniquely valuable to anyone interested in these areas but Virilio's guiding preoccupations lie elsewhere. To use quasi-Kantian terms, it is more accurate to see his work as a relentless examination of the conditions which make experience possible.

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

The Kantian echo is raised only to be turned against Kant. Where for Kant time is the condition that unites perception and thought into coherent experience, Crary reads Virilio's subject as the opposite operation, time as what pulls perception and its objects apart, and he places this nearer to Nietzsche and to the Foucault of the 1970s than to any philosophy of time in the line of Bergson, Husserl, or Heidegger.

Virilio's project is to uncover the role of time in the multiple and abyssal de-linkages of perception and its possible objects.

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

The load-bearing declining, the one Crary is most concerned a reader not miss, is that no lost natural relation to time is being mourned here. Picnolepsy is not a fall from some prior continuity; the fracture is original. This is the hinge on which Crary's whole reading of the concept turns, and it is stated flatly.

It should be stressed that Virilio is hardly proposing that prior to the industrial revolution, humans had some more "natural" relation to temporality. At the heart of Aesthetics of Disappearance is the insistence that experience as duration has always been constituted as de-synchronized and fractured. This is the importance of his thematic of "picnolepsy," his de-pathologizing of the epileptic "petit mal."

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

Crary lifts Virilio's own formula for what reason does with those absences and makes it the pivot of the reading, quoting the line the brief carries whole from Virilio's Part 1 below: the goal of reason is to redistribute the eliminations of picnolepsy methodically and to deny particular absences any active value. From there he expands the cinematic well beyond film history, treats the components of the cinematic machine as centuries older than the cinematograph, and reads the late-1970s text as already describing a permanent day, the 24/7 present that no longer passes. He closes, as Virilio himself does in Part 4, on the Hughes passage about the internment of bodies in a cell outside of time, which is carried in full at its own locus below.

Part 1Picnolepsy

The world as we see it is passing.Paul of Tarsus · epigraph to Part 1, page 17

1.1The lapse, named

Part 1 begins with a scene and withholds the name until the scene has done its work. The dropped cup at breakfast is the everyday symptom of a gap in consciousness so brief and so seamlessly repaired that the person it happens to never knows it happened. Everything in the book is built on this passage, so it is carried whole; the decisive claim is the last sentence, that for the sufferer the missing time did not merely go unnoticed but never existed.