Vector Politics and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

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Cubitt, Sean. 2011. Vector Politics and the Aesthetics of Disappearance. In: John Armitage, ed. Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 68-91. ISBN 978-0745648781 [Book Section]

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Since the publication in 1975 of Paul Virilio′s Bunker Archeology, the range of Virilio′s critical works and their impact is now clear within a variety of subjects. Making astonishing interventions into art and architecture, geography, cultural studies, media, literature, aesthetics, and sociology, the momentous implications of which have yet to be entirely understood, Virilio is the cultural theorist for our troubled twenty–first century.
Responding to this growing interdisciplinary interest, Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies comprises Sean Cubitt′s critical overview of Virilio′s oeuvre, an important newly translated text by Virilio interrogating the impact of contemporary art, and eight other major original essays by noted scholars on the wide scope of Virilio′s writings, inclusive of Adam Sharr on Virilio and the architect Peter Zumthor′s Bruder Klaus chapel, and Nigel Thrift′s crucial assessment of Virilio′s City of Panic. Substantial coverage of Virilio′s essential texts such as The Information Bomb is presented alongside his hypermodern conjectures on television and speed, globalization, media, and representation. Navigating Virilio′s ′accident of art′, the ′aesthetics of disappearance′, and widespread cultural devastation, additional essays bring together considerations of financial adversity, war, calamity, and the apocalypse. Dazzling yet perceptive, these texts on the ′post–nuclear imagination′, terror, and dread are simultaneously creative and theoretical extrapolations from Virilio′s ′scenic imagination′ and companion essays to his most contemporary, highly original, and powerful books such as The Original Accident and The University of Disaster. Clearly introduced by the editor, Virilio Now is the preeminent single–volume on Virilio′s work and world available today.

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