Paul Virilio Quotes

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death.

In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.

Television is a media of crisis, which means that television is a media of accidents.

One can't even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex!

Television can only destroy.

The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet.

I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse.

Creation exists only in regard to destruction. Creation is against destruction.

I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand.

Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.

The Gulf War may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thanks to CNN and The Pentagon.

Today, the army only occupies the territory once the war is over.

For me, the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the war in Kosovo in 1999 are the prelude to the integral accident.

I always write with images. I cannot write a book if I don't have images.

Indeed, the truth, the reality of the Kosovo War, was actually hidden behind all the 'humanitarian' faces.

Nowadays, the tragedy of war is mediated through technology. It is no longer mediated through a human being with moral responsibilities.

The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.

In this way, history now inscribes itself in real time, in the 'live', in the realm of interactivity. Consequently, history no longer resides in the extension of territory.

'Cyberwar' has nothing to do with the destruction brought about by bombs and grenades and so on.

I am always concerned with ideas of territory and movement. Indeed, my first book after Bunker Archeology was entitled L'insecurite du territoire (1976).

As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.

The information bomb gives rise to the integral and globally constituted accident.

For me, then, territory and movement are linked. For instance, territory is controlled by the movements of horsemen, of tanks, of planes, and so on.

Concepts are mental images.

While the United States (US) can view the war as a success, Europe must see it as a failure for it and, in particular, for the institutions of the European Union (EU).

All future wars, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

What brought me to Christianity is Incarnation, not Ressurection.

Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of chronostrategy.

For me, Sun Tzu's statement that military force is based upon deception is an extraordinary statement.

The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there.

Because Man is God, and God is Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man - or Woman.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.

As I pointed out in The Art of the Motor and elsewhere, from now on we need two watches: a wristwatch to tell us what time it is and a GPS watch to tell us what space it is!

Look at the US, look at Russia. Both of these countries are immense geographical territories. But, nowadays, immense territories amount to nothing!

Now all we have to do to enter the realm of art is to take a car.

I am very interested in and that is what Sun Tzu in his ancient Chinese text calls The Art of War.

For the US, GPS are a form of sovereignty! It is hardly surprising, then, that the EU has proposed its own GPS in order to be able to localize and to compete with the American GPS.

GPS are everywhere. They are in cars. They were even in the half-tracks that, initially at least, were going to make the ground invasion in Kosovo possible.

May I remind you that the bombs that were dropped by the B-2 plane on the Chinese embassy  or at least that is what we were told  were GPS bombs. And the B-2 flew in from the US.

Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts.

Moreover, it is clear that the era of the information bomb, the era of aerial warfare, the era of the RMA and global surveillance is also the era of the integral accident.

The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.

The atomic bomb provoked a specific accident.

I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.

Despite the economic disaster that is Russia, there are still air shows taking place in the country.

Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.

Thus my research on dromology, on the logic and impact of speed, necessarily implies the study of the organisation of territory.