Escaping nihilism

The great challenge, in fact, will be escaping nihilism. Nihilism is no revelation, it's just "Viva la muerte!" I believe that there's a hope beyond hope – Saint Paul's phrase – in finitude, in the magnitude of poverty. I believe there is something of the unknown, a terra incognita in the logic of poverty.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 224-225

The field of freedom shrinks with speed

Speed allows for progress in space, only progress in space has been identified with progress in time, in history. And that is really an abuse of language. We know very well that progress in space is not necessarily progress in time. The fact of going faster from Paris to New York doesn't make the exchanges any better. It makes them shorter. But the shortest is not necessarily the best. There again it's the same illusory ideology that when the world is reduced to nothing and we have everything at hand, we'll be infinitely happy. I believe just the opposite – and this has already been proven – that we'll be infinitely unhappy because we will have lost the very place of freedom, which is expanse. All current technologies reduce expanse to nothing. They produce shorter and shorter distances – a shrinking fabric. Now, a territory without temporality is not a territory, but only the illusion of a territory. It is urgent that we become aware of the political repercussions of such a handling of space-time, for they are fearsome. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 82-83

No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77

As if the end of history were the end of duration

History as the extensiveness of time – of time that lasts, is portioned out, organized, developed – is disappearing in favor of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration in favor of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 60

Death is an interruption of knowledge

Death is an interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And it's because there is an interruption of knowledge that a time proper to it is constituted. The rhythm of the alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness is "picnolepsy", the picnoleptic interruption (from the Greek picnos, "frequent"), which helps us exist in a duration which is our own, of which we are conscious. All interruptions structure this consciousness and idealize it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 47-48

The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks

In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress – a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash. I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don't think there will be a neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and the accident – substance being both the object and its accident.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 46

Duration is the proper of man

Transpolitics is the beginning of the disappearance of politics in the dwindling of the last commodity: duration. Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics, requires time. Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 42

Politics is first and foremost the polis

Urbanist and politician, etymologically speaking, are the same thing. Involvement in a political ideology has obscured the fact that politics is first and foremost the polis.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 17

A Luddism of the human machinery

There is a whole Luddism to be invented, a Luddism of
the human machinery
that feeds Capital.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space"

Politics of the whatever singularity.
Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being.
Freeing spaces frees us a hundred times more than any "freed space".
More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of my potentialities.
The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the offensive. In the circumstances, the moments and the places where we seize
the circumstances, the moments and the places
of such an anonymity,
of a momentary halt in a state of simplicity,
the opportunity to extract from all our forms the pure adequacy to the presence,
the opportunity, at last, to be
here.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

A subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself

A subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth. But as he is himself a finite configuration of the generic procedure from which a truth results, one can equally sustain that a subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself, "himself" meaning the infinite of which he is the finite.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p. 98

Making a hole in knowledge

An irrevocable step forward has been made through the critique of earlier concepts of the subject, which is thoroughly based on the notion that truth is not a qualification of knowledge nor an intuition of the intelligible. One must come to conceive of truth as making a hole in knowledge.

Alain Badiou, 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Topoi 7 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) p.94

The time for civilisation is past

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records – this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing – for art – to meet. This is what we are here for.

Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine, 'Uncivilisation – The Dark Mountain Manifesto' on The Dark Mountain Project, http://dark-mountain.net/ (15/03/2015)