Histories of Violence

Biography

Paul Virilio was born in 1932 in Paris. The Second World War had a profound influence on him, and Virilio has commented many times that “war was his university”. To escape heavy fighting in Paris, a young Virilio and his family left to the Axis occupied port of Nantes in 1939, which was then bombed by Allied forces. He studied to be an artist at Ecole des Metiers d’Art and went on to work on stained glass windows in Parisian churches. In 1950 he converted to Christianity and shortly thereafter was conscripted into the French army during the Algerian War of Independence. After his service with the army, Virilio began a career in architecture, though he possesses no formal training in it. Phenomenology influences his work, and much of his work centres around urban spaces. In 1968 Virilio participated in the student protests in Paris, and began to teach at the Ecole Speciale de Architecture, becoming Director of Studies in 1973. In 1989, under the stewardship of Jacques Derrida, he became program director at the College International de Philosophie de Paris. He retired from teaching in 1998, and Virilio currently continues to write and works on a project to provide housing for the homeless in Paris.

While rejecting the label ‘cultural theorist’, Virilio’s work is frequently categorised as such by others. He forwards the idea that military technology is what drives history. This idea is related to term he coined, ‘dromology’, which refers to the new speed at which society operates, the speed of destruction, of economies, of communication, etc. For Virilo, the speed at which something happens changes the very nature of that event. In this way he uses the term crono-politics, juxtaposed to geo-politics, for example, as the dominant form of politics in the contemporary world. Virilio has a very sceptical take on technology, and believes that the use of technology to be everywhere at once creates a paradox where one is in fact nowhere at all. The effect of globalisation, the World Village, is in fact the ‘World Ghetto’. On the military industrial complex Virilio is even more damning. In his 1999 book, The Strategy of Deception, Virilio highlights the way in which the war over Kosovo was influenced over information dominance, and the various new technologies at play in the war. For him, the military see no qualms in creating crises required for the industry’s self perpetuation.