Virilio's wager, held across four decades and every genre he worked in, is that speed is the concealed substance of power, and that once it is treated as such the inherited categories of political thought stop describing anything. Production, class, the juridical State, the strategic decision: each is demoted to a surface effect of something prior, the management of circulation and the race between vehicles. What makes the corpus worth gathering whole is that it is not a set of separate theses but a single tendency restated under a changing set of names, dromology, picnolepsy, the logistics of perception, the vector, the war of Time, real time, endo-colonization, the integral accident, the information bomb, polar inertia, each name the same operation caught at a new scale, so that the concept a researcher needs is rarely confined to the book that coined it. This document gathers those recurrences into concept dossiers, each carrying every locus in full and page-anchored, so the passages that prove a concept are retrievable at speed without returning to the books.
The through-line the lexicon follows is the one the corpus itself lays out in order: from the concrete bunker and the fleet in being, through the perceptual lapse, the logistics of perception, and the automation of sight, to the nuclear vector at which political decision contracts toward zero, on through real time and the terminal inertia of telepresence, and out to the second deterrence, the integral accident, the information bomb, and the closure of a finite world. The comparative axis is internal: development, recurrence, and self-revision within one body of work. The dossiers show a shift by placing the earlier and later formulations side by side, both in full, rather than smoothing them into one thesis.
The corpus in scope for this version is seventeen texts spanning 1975 to 2012, listed with full editions in the bibliography: Bunker Archeology (1975), Speed and Politics (1977), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), War and Cinema (1984), The Lost Dimension (1984), Pure War (1983, with postscripts through 2007), The Vision Machine (1988), Polar Inertia (1990), The Art of the Motor (1993), Open Sky (1995), A Landscape of Events (1996), The Information Bomb (1998), Strategy of Deception (1999), The Original Accident (2005), The Great Accelerator (2010), and The Administration of Fear (2012), together with The Paul Virilio Reader (Redhead, ed., 2004) as a selection layer whose extracts are gathered under the concepts they state. The corpus is closed by The Administration of Fear (with Bertrand Richard, 2012), the late interview book in which the hyper-racism forecast is stated in Virilio's own words.
Chronology is load-bearing in this corpus, since the argument is itself a claim about acceleration: when Virilio said a thing is part of what it means. The seventeen texts in scope mark the stations of the single tendency across nearly four decades.
The head of the corpus, grown out of the Architecture Principe period and a twelve-year survey of the Atlantic Wall. Virilio reads the German bunker as survival machine, crypt, and funerary monolith, and finds in it the coalescence of vehicle and projectile, war already present in peacetime, and, in a late plate sequence he titles "An Aesthetics of Disappearance," the germ of the concept the 1980 book will carry. The phenomenological and architectural origin from which the later concepts grow.
The founding apparatus. Dromology is named and the whole book is its working-out: political modernity read off the history of speed, from the medieval fortress and the fleet in being to the tank and the war of attrition, ending at the nuclear vector, where the decision for war contracts toward the automation of deterrence and the state of emergency becomes permanent. The home of the largest number of the corpus's first statements.
The perceptual turn. The epileptic petit mal is de-pathologized into picnolepsy, the ordinary lapse in consciousness everyone stitches over, and generalized until reason, cinema, the automobile, and the screen all turn out to be engines for redistributing absence and manufacturing a false day. It ends where Speed and Politics ends, at de-localization and the war of time(s), reached from the side of perception rather than strategy.
The logistics of perception. Cinema and the conduct of war are shown to be one apparatus: the battlefield is first a field of perception, and "cinema isn't I see, it's I fly." Deception, the sight machine, and the derealization of the target track how winning a war becomes a matter of dominating the image before the terrain. The home of the logistics of perception that The Vision Machine will extend.
The overexposed city. Physical dimension gives way to the interface: the city's old boundaries of gate and facade are replaced by the screen and the instantaneous, and depth of field yields to depth of time. The architectural-critical strand, where the geographical is dissolved into the para-optical and the "lost dimension" is space itself.
The retrospective dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, which restates the corpus in Virilio's own explanatory voice and carries it forward. War has migrated entirely into its preparation; deterrence, sold as peace, turns inward on the domestic population as endo-colonization; and beneath the political argument runs the metaphysical one about death, the vanished question of God, and Virilio's stated Christian position. The 1997 and 2007 postscripts carry the thesis into infowar and the war on the cities, retitling the object Impure War. Because it is a transcribed interview, attribution by speaker matters, and the dossiers mark where a formula is Lotringer's compression that Virilio merely ratifies.
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