How would it be if what we take for human advance were simply a technological progress that literally leaves us out of its equations? What if progress is not humanity striking out bravely towards the future, but an ultimately destructive force? In a remarkable tour d’horizon, Paul Virilio paints a bleak picture of current scientific, cultural, social and political values. Art has succumbed to the techniques of advertising and in politics, the battle for hearts and minds has become a mere convergence of opinion. TV ratings have triumphed over universal suffrage. The events of September 11 reflect both the manipulation of a global sub-proletariat and the delusions of an elite of rich students and technicians who resemble the ‘suicidal members of the Heaven’s Gate cybersect’. And, in this post-humanist dystopia, we are morally rudderless before the threat of biological manipulations as yet undreamt.
About the series: Appearing on the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these series of books from Verso present analyses of the United States, the media, and the events surrounding September 11 by Europe’s most stimulating and provocative philosophers. Probing beneath the level of TV commentary, political and cultural orthodoxies, and ‘rent-a-quote’ punditry, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Žižek offer three highly original and readable accounts that serve as fascinating introductions to the direction of their respective projects, and as insightful critiques of the unfolding events. This series seeks to comprehend the philosophical meaning of September 11 and will leave untouched none of the prevailing views currently propagated.
The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new . . .
«Kanskje finnes det for latteren ennå en fremtid!», skriver Nietzsche i åpningen av Den muntre vitenskapen. Med satire og skarpe iakttakelser legger han blant annet . . .
Hvorfor gjør vi feil? Og hvorfor i all verden fortsetter vi å gjøre de samme feilene gang på gang? Vi tenker i ett av to . . .
«The planet is sick. Human beings are guilty of damaging it. We have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world. Distrust . . .
Virilio’s exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology. “Civilization or the militarization of science?” With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as . . .
With this book Paul Virilio inaugurated the new science whose object of study is the «dromocratic» revolution. Speed and Politics (first published in France in . . .
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer’s comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguishedSynthesizing thirty years . . .
«Verden er min forestilling.» Med denne påstanden innleder Schopenhauer sitt hovedverk fra 1818. Alt som kan erkjennes, er objekt for et subjekt. Omvendt gjelder det . . .
Michel Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive . . .
In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of . . .
Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of . . .
There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the «optically correct» is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, . . .
“One day the day will come when the day will not come.” Bleak in its analysis of the social destruction wrought by modern technologies of . . .
Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and it has become clear–in part from David Reich’s own . . .
‘Hinsides godt og ondt’ er en hyllest til livet og kreativiteten og på mange måter et endelig farvel med metafysikken. I åpningen sier Nietzsche at . . .
Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality—Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on . . .
A trenchant critique of new techniques of waging war, and its reduction to images on a screen Written with his characteristic flair, Virilio’s latest book . . .
With around 645 million people expected to be displaced Ð by wars and other catastrophes Ð by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant . . .
The underlying premise of all of Virilio’s work is that we must analyzespeed and acceleration throughout history and see it as constitutive of historicalepochs. Continual . . .
An analysis of how Mitterand came to power in France and how political power seduced the French Left and became a simulacrum. First published in . . .