Since the publication in 1975 of Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, the
range of Virilio's critical works and their impact is now clear within a
variety of subjects. Making astonishing interventions into art and
architecture, geography, cultural studies, media, literature,
aesthetics, and sociology, the momentous implications of which have yet
to be entirely understood, Virilio is the cultural theorist for our
troubled twenty-first century.
Responding to this growing interdisciplinary interest, Virilio Now:
Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies comprises Sean Cubitt's
critical overview of Virilio's oeuvre, an important newly translated
text by Virilio interrogating the impact of contemporary art, and eight
other major original essays by noted scholars on the wide scope of
Virilio's writings, inclusive of Adam Sharr on Virilio and the architect
Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus chapel, and Nigel Thrift's crucial
assessment of Virilio's City of Panic. Substantial coverage of
Virilio's essential texts such as The Information Bomb is presented
alongside his hypermodern conjectures on television and speed,
globalization, media, and representation. Navigating Virilio's 'accident
of art', the 'aesthetics of disappearance', and widespread cultural
devastation, additional essays bring together considerations of
financial adversity, war, calamity, and the apocalypse. Dazzling yet
perceptive, these texts on the 'post-nuclear imagination', terror, and
dread are simultaneously creative and theoretical extrapolations from
Virilio's 'scenic imagination' and companion essays to his most
contemporary, highly original, and powerful books such as The Original
Accident and The University of Disaster. Clearly introduced by the
editor, Virilio Now is the preeminent single-volume on Virilio's work
and world available today.
