Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later by Paul Virilio, ISBN-13: 978-1584350590

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Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later by Paul Virilio, ISBN-13: 978-1584350590

[PDF eBook eTextbook]

• Publisher: ‎ Semiotext(e); New edition (April 25, 2008)
• Language: ‎ English
• 256 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 1584350598
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1584350590

Virilio and Lotringer revisit their prescient book on the invisible war waged by technology against humanity since World War II.

In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. Speaking with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the “accidents” that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication. In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the “accident”—both military and economic—has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, “local” accidents—like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s—escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. “Globalization,” Virilio argues, is the planet’s ultimate accident.

Paul Virilio was born in 1932 and has published a wide range of books, essays, and interviews grappling with the question of speed and technology, including Pure War, Speed and Politics, Lost Dimension, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and The Accident of Art, all published by Semiotext(e).

Sylvère Lotringer is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University.

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Roussel, Marguerite Duras, and Paul Virilio. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is also the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton and other books.

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