At the beginning of winter I was steeped in Arendt, now I’m tarrying with Virilio. Two similarities between their analyses of Hitler’s regime keep coming up: the creation of a society of total illusion and a state that constantly sabotages itself by excessive waste. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt continually underscores the role of propaganda […]
Here’s a small sampling of passages in Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema where I saw fit to make a marginal note about Donald Trump. Some are more suggestive than others, and the passages aren’t meant to create a 1:1 correlation between the subject matter and Trump (e.g. sometimes they suggest important differences or flag an […]
Paul Virilio, born in 1932, spent his early life on the northern coast of France. His childhood, growing up alongside the Second World War, was marked by routine bombings, as Nantes became a Nazi occupied port. Like many other postmodern theorists, the French experience of the war and subsequent French political problems, like the Algerian […]
Lately I’ve been reading up on Paul Virilio, French philosopher of technology, who started as a stained-glass artist and now practices as an architect designing public housing for the poor in Paris. A truly model Catholic philosopher. In particular, I’ve been mulling over a church he designed with Claude Parent, dedicated to St. Bernadette in […]
Dean Dettloff 