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The French thinker Paulo Virilio is reputed for his poignant thesis concerning the discontents of human civilization, a view shared by many thinkers, among others, J. Baudrillard and B. Stiegler. This course intends to draw the attention on one particular theoretical aspect raised by Virilio, namely, the emergence of Modern and contemporary art as a violent event, a “pitiless art” generated by fear. Since the avant-garde, according to Virilio, representation stands under the spell of fear and disappearance. Like never before, the connection between art and war, violence and destruction was so dramatically disfigured, twisting and torturing the human form before making it vanish in abstraction and the blasting to bits of men. This is the simple and brutal logic that seems to have ruled the shattering of representation since then; this process continues to shatter the contemporary imaginary. Our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented "scientific" modes of destruction. Resisting any psychoanalytical association with of his interpretation, Virilio invites rather the reader to a historical and political urgent reflection on the phenomena. This leads him to claim that contemporary art is nothing else but “victimological” in its nature and status, it is “basically terrorist or terrorized.” Here, Virilio meets Baudrillard with his reflection on “the spirit of terrorism,” or“ Requiem for the Twin Towers,” as well as Mitchell in his vision of “Vital Signs /Cloning Terror.”
All this will be eventually brought into the discussion in view of assessing an important symptomatology of contemporary image and the strategies of its deception.
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Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991; Paul Virilio, Art and Fear. London: Continuum, 2003. (originally published in 2000 by Editions Galilee under the title La Procedure Silence, meaning "The Silence Trial"); J. Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Twin Towers,” The Baudrillard Reader, Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 192-197. J. Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” The Spirit of Terrorism, Verso 2002, pp. 3-34. J. Baudrillard, “The Evil Demon of Images,” The Baudrillard Reader, European Perspective, 2008, pp. 83-98. J. Baudrillard, “Apocalypse Now,” Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 2000, pp. 59-60. G. Deleuze, The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy. Plato and the Simulacrum, The Logic of Sense, Columbia UP, 1990, pp. 291-303. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Vital Signs /Cloning Terror”, What do pictures want?, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 5-27. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005) “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 309-335. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and other essays, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1969, pp. 115-154; Baldwin, Sandy, On Speed and Ecstasy: Paul Virilio's 'Aesthetics of Disappearance' and the Rhetoric of Media, Configurations - Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 129-148. |