Product Description

A critique of information technology and the global media.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167502 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Paul Virilio taught Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the basics of nomadology and he is the only post-modernist who has the stature to intelligently go beyond Jean Baudrillard's hip extremism. He is the most important of the new wave of French social critics focusing his ire on the destructive, anti-democratic essence of speed (he has learned well the lessons Heidegger bequeathed to continental theorists from Adorno onward). His "dromadology", politics of the critique of speed, dominates his ever increasing number of texts. A hugely challenging read, that seems sometimes to give succour to the faux sophisticated scientific critiques of continental philosophy by the likes of Alan Sokal et al, Virilio is, counter to this claim, essential. Open Sky, a text that opens with the hugely pessimistic aphorism: "One day the day will come when the day does not come", further entrenches the belief that Virilio's combination of erudition, pessimism, science fiction, Christianity and post-Situationist critique is the one style out there that really could help us all to come to terms with the disorienting rapidity of social change and the totalitarian stench barely masked by the cheap utopian perfume of universal internet access, digital TV and the whole of downloadable culture.

Open Sky's drunken mix of paranoia, Nietzschean conceit and genuine, gentle, ethical concern feels closer to a truth about our perceived social situation, where the ground of space and time has collapsed, than our post-critical wariness feels comfortable with. Supping in the same bar as Virilio soon becomes a necessity. Only an urbanist of his stature can explain both the city's ubiquity and its imminent disappearance; it sometimes seems only Virilio can explain the horrible truth behind the dystopic propaganda of modern life. --Mark Thwaite

Review
"One of the most original thinkers of our time." Liberation"