Hi everyone,

As we agreed, we’ll go with an excerpt from Paul Virilio’s book Art and Fear (Continuum, 2006). We’ll be reading the essay “Silence on Trial” (p. 35–49), which you can download from here: Virilio – Art and Fear – excerpts. “Silence on Trial” was originally published in French in 2000. I’ve included John Armitage’s introduction to the volume (optional), which might offer a useful opening into the essay.

Virilio’s writing is impressionistic and copious; he’s a critic—not a philosopher. (I [Eamonn] happen to think this isn’t a disadvantage) In case you are looking for more context, Armitage, who is one of Virilio’s most prolific exegetes in English, has written an OK volume called Virilio and the Media that aggregates a lot of his writing in one place and has a relatively useful glossary of terms at the end. You can also try his “Paul Virilio: An Introduction” in Theory, Culture & Society.

As ever, responses on any aspect of the reading are welcome. We were interested in drawing out the theme of surprise and/or humor by the end of the last meeting, so feel free to touch on that in relation to the target text or your own work/interests.

The next discussion group meeting will be online at 12 p.m. (New York) / 5 p.m. (London) on April 30th 2020; we’ll post the link to the Google Hangouts session closer to the time.

— Eamonn and Ezra

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Armitage, John. “Paul Virilio: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 5–6 (December 1, 1999): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050845.