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... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

Paul Virilio

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Paul Virilio
Age: 86 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 4
Died: 2018
Died: September 10
Architect
Art Theorist
Exhibition Curator
Painter
Philosopher
Photographer
Sociologist
Urban Planner
Writer
Paris
France
Every
Cast
Things
Casts
Blinding
Surface
Hiroshima
Shadow
Photographed
Became
Recording
Beings
Flash
War
Immediately
Film
Literally

More quotes by Paul Virilio

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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.
Paul Virilio
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Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory. And localisation is an inherent part of that territorial control.
Paul Virilio
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From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye's function being the function of a weapon.
Paul Virilio
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France and Germany were opposed to a maritime blockade of the Adriatic Sea without a mandate from the United Nations (UN). So, what we witnessed in Kosovo was an extraordinary war, a war waged solely with bombs from the air.
Paul Virilio
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You cannot dissociate birth from death, creation from destruction, good from evil. Thus any art is a form of drama standing between the two extreme poles of birth and death, just like life is drama. This is not sad, because to be alive means to be mortal, to pass through.
Paul Virilio
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For me, Sun Tzu's statement that military force is based upon deception is an extraordinary statement.
Paul Virilio
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The atomic bomb provoked a specific accident.
Paul Virilio
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Let us put it this way, techno-scientific intelligence is presently insufficiently spread among society at large to enable us to interpret the sorts of techno-scientific advances that are taking shape today.
Paul Virilio
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Under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers.
Paul Virilio
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Concepts are mental images.
Paul Virilio
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The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice.
Paul Virilio
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If we consider my latest book, Strategie de la deception, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon.
Paul Virilio
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There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.
Paul Virilio
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Technologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny - microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance.
Paul Virilio
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It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.
Paul Virilio
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In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.
Paul Virilio
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There can be no doubt about this. It even held true for the soldiers involved in the Kosovo War. For the soldiers stayed mostly in their barracks! In this way, polar inertia has truly become a mass phenomenon. And not only for the TV audiences watching the war at home but also for the army that watches the battle from the barracks.
Paul Virilio
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As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.
Paul Virilio
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However, the Kosovo War took place in orbital space. In other words, war now takes place in 'aero-electro-magnetic space'. It is equivalent to the birth of a new type of flotilla, a home fleet, of a new type of naval power, but in orbital space!
Paul Virilio
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Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.
Paul Virilio