Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The
Aesthetics of Disappearance as a ''juncture'' in his
thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the
logistics of perception -- a logistics he would soon
come to refer to as the ''vision machine.'' If Speed and
Politics established Virilio as the inaugural -- and
still consummate -- theorist of ''dromology'' (the
theory of speed and the society it defines), The
Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding
of ''picnolepsy'' -- the epileptic state of
consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the
consciousness invented by the subject through its very
absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing
through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the
society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance
defines what it feels like to live in the society of
speed.''I always write with images,'' Virilio has
claimed, and this statement is nowhere better
illustrated than with The Aesthetics of
Disappearance.Moving from the movie theater to the
freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of
terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility
of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn,
Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference
points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to
Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its
extension of the ''aesthetics of disappearance'' to war,
film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's
follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This
edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary,
one of the leading theorists of modern visual
culture.Foreign Agents seriesDistributed for
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