The volume makes one wager, and it is legible before any single extract opens: that a single line runs from the bunker photographs of the 1950s to the post-9/11 catalogue of the accident, and that the line is the increasing speed of things. Speed abolishes distance; the abolition of distance turns the accident from a local mishap into the general condition of a wired world; and the theorist's task becomes the disclosure of that condition before it completes itself. The editor puts the wager in his title, “Theory at the Speed of Light,” and rests it on the sequence itself. The epigraph states the whole arc in one breath.
This is an edited reader, not a treatise, and the edit is itself the argument. Redhead selects the twenty extracts and orders them by date of writing, and says why.
page 8
They are presented in the order in which they were written and originally published in French to show the development, and interconnectedness, of Virilio's work.
The reconstruction below holds that order, because the order is the volume's thesis: that the corpus is one continuous development rather than a series of subjects. The through-line it tracks is the one the title names and the extracts bear out, acceleration and speed, together with the cluster of virtuality concepts that speed organizes across the later work, disappearance, overexposure, trans-appearance, and polar inertia. Each entry reconstructs the extract's move-structure in paraphrase and carries its load-bearing formulations whole, at the pagination of the Reader in hand.
Reader: Steve Redhead, “Editorial Introduction: Theory at the Speed of Light,” pages 1–9.
The headnote does three jobs. It positions Virilio against Baudrillard, the pairing the volume never quite drops. Their fates run together, and the market pairs them, but the fame is asymmetrical.
page 2
Their fates, however, are often intertwined. As it happened, Baudrillard and Virilio were indeed the two French theorists chosen by New Left publishers Verso in 2002 for their mini series dedicated to the first anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001.
page 2
Virilio's celebrity, however, will never be of the same order as Baudrillard.
It names the apparatus a researcher should reach for, the Lotringer interviews, as the way into Virilio's spoken thought.
page 7
The nearest one gets to a Virilio ‘conversation’ is to read the whole of the various interviews with him conducted by Sylvère Lotringer.
And it supplies the single datum most useful for tracking development: the corpus contracts as it accelerates.
page 9
the cost was often prohibitive, especially given Virilio's tendency to produce shorter and shorter books.
Reader chapter 1, pages 11–13. Source: Paul Virilio, “Bunker Archaeology,” in Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, trans. George Collins (Besançon: Les Éditions de l'Imprimeur, 1997), English edition, pages xvii–xix. Piece written 1958.
A phenomenological reading of the German blockhouses of the Atlantic Wall as monuments emptied of function. The war-object detaches from the ground and the earth loses its density, so that the bunker reads as a carcass rather than a building.
page 12
the mass is no longer anchored in the ground, but centred on itself, independent, capable of movement and articulation. This architecture floats on the surface of an earth which has lost its materiality. Approaching one of these beach monoliths, it suddenly appeared to me almost animal in nature, an empty carcass, abandoned, toppled over into the sand, like the skin of a defunct species.
The closing turn does the conceptual work of the piece, converting the bunker into a program for an architecture keyed to the psyche rather than to the body's measure. This is the seed the whole corpus grows from: architecture detached from human proportion.
page 13
these primitive works announce a new architecture founded no longer on the physical proportions of man but on his psychic faculties, an urbanism in which, the elementary analysis of social reality finally overcome, habitat can finally unite with the secret possibilities of individuals.
Redhead's headnote supplies the biographical density and Virilio's refusal of the architect's title, quoting him directly.
page 11
He has said, ‘I don't like that culture. I love painting.’ He has also described himself as ‘a man of the theatre’, reminiscing that ‘as a kid I designed theatrical sets’.
Reader chapter 2, pages 15–18. Source: Virilio, “Cryptic Architecture,” in Virilio and Parent, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, trans. Collins. Written September 1965.
The earliest statement of the appearance/disappearance pairing that becomes a signature. Cryptic power is defined as the capacity to hold appearance and disappearance together in one continuum, drawing on an energy of concealment that runs through all living things.
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