Architecture is only a movie

After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie; an un-habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom for the fascination of the mobs, where the light of vehicular speed (audiovisual and automobile) renews the glare of solar light; the city is no longer a theatre (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights: they've returned to Ur (Our, light), believing now that the desert is without horizon.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 65

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

Art is the presentation of the illusion of the world

The world is an illusion, and art is the presentation of the illusion of the world.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) pp. 35-36

The desert of uncertainty and effort

The Hebraic tradition manifests two kinds of lack, expressed by two deserts, emerging one from the other, heart of everything, in its heart everything. One is named Shemama, despair and destruction, and the other is Midbar, which is a desert not of dereliction but instead a field of uncertainty and effort. The shemama is, rather, polarity of the City-State (City of Ur – Our, light), its desert is the tragical one of laws, ideology, order, as opposed to what could have resulted from wandering.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 27

The mind is a thing that lasts

To Descartes' sentence: "the mind is a thing that thinks", Bergson retorted: "The mind is a thing that lasts..." The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: it's our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 22

There is no longer a reason

Metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition – that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response 'for no reason' is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like 'Where do we come from?', 'Why do we exist?', we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies 'From nothing. For nothing' really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions – and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 110

Chance is a physical law

If from one throw to the next the dice imploded, or became flat or spherical, or if gravity ceased to operate and they flew off into the air, or on the contrary, were projected underground, etc., then there would be no aleatory sequence, and it would be impossible to establish a calculus of probabilities. Thus chance always presupposes some form of physical invariance – far from permitting us to think the contingency of physical laws, chance itself is nothing other than a certain type of physical law – one that is 'indeterministic'.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 99

Contradiction

Let us suppose that a contradictory entity existed – what could happen to it? Could it lapse into non-being? But it is contradictory, so that even if it happened not to be, it would still continue to be even in not-being, since this would be in conformity with its paradoxical 'essence'. [...] Such an entity would be tantamount to a 'black hole of differences', into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be other than it.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 69-70

Only unreason can be thought as eternal

It is perfectly possible to conceive of a time determined by the governance of fixed laws disappearing in something other than itself – it would disappear in another time governed by alternative laws. But only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute. Only unreason can be thought as eternal, because only unreason can be thought as at once anhypothetical and absolute. Accordingly, we can say that it is possible to demonstrate the absolute necessity of everything's non-necessity. In other words, it is possible to establish, through indirect demonstration, the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 62

A principle of unreason

The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 60

My thought of death

For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 57

The absence of any reason for my being

Even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. [...] For even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 56

Everything could collapse

Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 53

The meaning of scientific statements

How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin?

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 9-10