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PAUL VIRILIO
 2-2〇05
Go2
躍

Paul Virilio
Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

STEVE REDHEAD

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

 © Steve Redhead, 2004

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Apollo and Optima Display by

Koinonia, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 1927 5 (hardback)

ISBN 0 7486 1928 3 (paperback)

The right of Steve Redhead to be

identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction i

i Remember Virilio 11

2 Accelerated modernity 37

3 Dangerous modernity 71

4 Critical modernity 105

5 Forget Virilio 135

Bibliography 163
Index 167
For Laura and Ellie Redhead
 Acknowledgements

In memory of Derek Wynne, a colleague and friend for over twenty-

five years. Thanks, also, to Anouk Bélanger, Tara Brabazon,
Michael Bracewell, Adam Brown, Alain Ehrenberg, Rick Gruneau,
Alan Hunt, Greg Keefe, Melanie Latham, Patrick Mignon, Justin
O'Connor, Hillegonda Rietveld, Mireille Silcott, Beverley Skeggs
and Gary Wickham for various forms of inspiration, help, support
and sustenance during the Virilio 'project'. A 'big shout' going out,
too, for the Gallimard bookstore on Boulevard St-Laurent in
Montreal, Canada, and the RIBA bookshop at CUBE (Centre for the
Understanding of the Built Environment) in Manchester, England.
Last but not least, thanks to numerous students and staff at the
Culture of Cities project in Montreal and Toronto, Canada, and at
the School of Media, Communication and Culture, Murdoch
University, Perth, Western Australia.
'Things have become so accelerated that processes are no longer
inscribed in a linear temporality, in a linear unfolding of history/
Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
Introduction
2 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

Paul Virilio, so-called high priest of speed, has been dropping "logic
bombs' on us for over thirty years. In these highly idiosyncratic
tales of accelerated culture, or what we have called accelerated
modernity in the pages of this book, the speed of mass communica­
tions as well as the speed of 'things' is what counts. In this scenario
we have all become historians of Virilio's instant present, where
immediacy, instantaneity and ubiquity rule. But this is not the
whole story of either Paul Virilio or accelerated culture.
Paul Virilio is now in his eighth decade. He recently retired from
his only academic position as Professor of Architecture at the
Special School of Architecture in Paris, France, a post he had held
since the late 1960s. On retirement he was nominated Emeritus
Professor. Armed with his senior citizen card, he moved from Paris
to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France, a considerable
upheaval for someone like Virilio who suffers from claustrophobia
and rarely travels. He retired, he said at the time, to write a book on
'the accident', a project he had had in mind for over ten years. His
haphazard progress towards academic life through the 1950s and
1960s was unusual to say the least and, as we shall see in this book,
included a period where he spent his time photographing the
wartime German bunkers and a spell where he trained as a stained-
glass painter. His ultimate claim to international fame is that he has
over many years developed a theory of speed, technology and
modernity which, whatever its flaws, is worth taking seriously,
even if it is ultimately jettisoned by its once enthusiastic users. This
theorising of speed and modernity alone marks him out as a major
contemporary thinker.
There are conflicting interpretations of Virilio's theorising in the
articles written about his work but essentially Virilio's contention
is that the speeding-up of technologies in the twentieth and now
twenty-first centuries, especially communications technologies like
the internet and e-mail, have tended to abolish time and distance.
Speed, for Virilio, has had a largely military gestation. The way in
which mass communication has speeded up at the same time has
meant, in his view, that old-fashioned industrial war has given way
to the information bomb or information war. As military conflict
has increasingly become 'war at the speed of lighf 一 as he labelled
the first Gulf War in the early 1990s — the tyranny of distance in
 Introduction 3

civilian as well as military life has almost disappeared. However,

this does not mean that there is no deceleration or slowness. Inertia,
or what Virilio termed 'polar inertia', has set in for even the
supersonic air traveller or high-speed train devotee. As we have
noted, Paul Virilio eventually left his post in academia to write a
long-planned book on what he has called the accident, a concept
which has become more prevalent in his thinking over the last
decade. It is often reflected upon in his discussion of different
aspects of the body of his ideas in interview (1998a, 1999a, 2000a,
2000b, 2001a, 2002). It is also an idea which encapsulates some of
his most specific pronouncements about speed, technology and
modernity. The accident, however, is a very specific term in Virilio's
work and suffers in the translation from the French. There is a
philosophical dimension to the concept as we shall discover in later
chapters in this book. Moreover, the everyday use of the word in
English is not really what Virilio has in mind. Suffice to say here
that technologies contain within them the capacity to self-destruct.
Planes crash, for example. Skyscrapers collapse. And so on.
Virilio predicted the onset of a situation in global culture where
there would be an 'accident of accidents': the "global accident' or
the "total accident', even the "Great Accident7; that is, an accident
occurring everywhere at the same time. An example of Virilio's
notion of the accident is the attack on the World Trade Center on 11
September 2001, where he perceived "a fatal confusion between the
attack and the accident* where the "attack and the accident become
indistinguishable'. Speaking to Sylvère Lotringer in Paris in May
2002, some nine months after the event, Virilio noted that "the door
is open' with what he called "the great attack7. For him, 'September
ii opened Pandora's Box'. In 'this new situation', according to
Virilio, 'New York is what Sarajevo was' when "Sarajevo triggered
the First World War'. Virilio proclaimed that New York was yan act
of total war', 'the attack in the first war of globalisation'. This
example of the accident as a new form of warfare is appropriate for
a snapshot of the potential application of Virilio's ideas to the
analysis of a media event. However, care must be taken. We shall
pursue this theme in more depth later in this book but '9/11' fits the
framework of Virilio's idea of the accident of accidents, although
not necessarily in the way it might appear at first sight. For Virilio
 4 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

the new communication technologies such as satellite, digital and

other broadcasting mechanisms have changed the world in such a
way that what was once a local accident or an event situated in time
and space is actually global, occurring everywhere at the same
time. Thus, the spectacle of two of the world's tallest buildings
burning, and subsequently collapsing, killing almost 3,000 people,
was not simply a local, catastrophic event but a global 'accident'
shown 'live' to billions of people around the world at the same
moment. Almost everyone, everywhere, all over the earth was
watching live on either television or computer screens. Virilio calls
the virtual territory created by this broadcasting of a live event the
"city of the instant'.
So speed kills. But in Virilio's book speed also enables us to see,
and foresee. It changes our 'logistics of perception', our way of
seeing, our vision thing. Let us take a more prosaic example, culled
from popular culture, although Virilio, it should be noted, rarely
takes notice of 'low' culture at all. Consider the case of the
speeding-up of sport in modernity. The spectator at a Premiership
professional soccer match in England at the beginning of the twenty-
first century is witnessing a spectacle which is highly accelerated
in all sorts of ways compared even to a match played at the
beginning of the Premiership itself only a decade earlier. Ten years
ago such matches in England were played at a very high pace in the
first half and then, after everyone had had a breather at half time,
proceeded to speed up until around three-quarters of the game had
been played. This in itself was in great contrast to the way Football
League First Division games had been played for over 100 years. In
'modern' soccer culture, essentially since the 1960s, technological
changes in the sort of footwear worn, the ball used, the shorts and
shirts chosen, grass (or other surface) played on, and floodlighting
employed, not to mention training regimes for players, have had
the overall effect of speeding up the process of the game to the
extent that there is now literally no stopping for ninety minutes. A
spectator at a Premiership match today consequently watches,
from an inert, sedentary position in a seat (mostly!), an accelerated,
and accelerating, spectacle flash by in a blur like the lightweight
ball itself. This sporting spectacle is beamed around the globe 'live'
t0 watching millions, be they in Singapore airport or a suburban
 Introduction 5

house in Montreal, by virtue of the global communications revo­

lution also ushered in since the increasing ubiquity of television in
the 1960s. Moreover, the way the spectator watching 'live' at the
stadium actually sees the speeding spectacle is conditioned by
decades of watching such matches 'live' on television, sofa-surfing
in the sedentary comfort of his or her armchair. At many grounds,
too, the spectator can watch 'live' (with slight delay) replays of the
action on giant screens at one end of the ground just in case
'nodding-off*, or what Virilio refers to as 'picnolepsy', has occurred.
The example we have cited of Premiership soccer in England would
thus far fit the notion of an accelerated culture found in very
different language and different instances in the work of Paul
Virilio. But this is a cautionary tale too, because there is in fact no
inexorability about the process we have described. For instance,
top league professional soccer in other countries — say Argentina,
Japan, Italy or Spain — is not necessarily as fast as the Premiership
in England. Soccer style, culture, tradition and tactics in these
other countries determine a slower pace of the spectacle even
though the same technological changes we have mentioned persist.
Moreover, the 'live' televising of English Premiership soccer matches
around the globe is often subject to delay, not only the slight
'digital delay', which means a fractional time of delay in the arrival
of a signal or message, but the organisational delay of broadcasters
in other countries showing 'live' matches delayed by a few minutes,
hours or even days to fit in with domestic television schedules ('as
live', as they are referred to in the industry). The point of this
cautionary tale is partly to underline the familiarity of much of
what Virilio has been telling us about speed, technology and
modernity for more than the last thirty years. But it is also to serve
as a warning that all might not be as it seems in this supposed
accelerated culture of the instant present.
This book serves as the first single-authored introduction to Paul
Virilio. It is also a critical review of his work in the context of the
literature available to date in English but with reference to the full
works of Virilio in French. It is the first book to consider the whole
of Virilio's oeuvre in the original French and its various translations
into English. The Bibliography at the end of the book includes
selected bibliographical work of, and on, Virilio. Much of the
6 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

extraneous material in the Bibliography, such as interviews and

critical commentary, is used throughout the book in order to build
a picture ofVirilio's life and work. Virilio is the author of numerous
books and hundreds of articles and reviews, not to mention various
collaborations and forewords or introductions to other authors*
works, so a comprehensive bibliography would be outside the
scope of this book. But the Bibliography in this book can be used as
a guide, or a directory, to the most important works by Virilio. It
also covers the most revealing interviews with Virilio and the
sharpest critical commentaries. As can be seen from the Biblio­
graphy, only three of Viriliozs many single-authored major texts
remain fully untranslated from French into English.
Aimed at readers across a number of academic disciplines and
areas of interest throughout the world, the book seeks to situate
Paul Viriliozs writing and thinking in the pantheon of critical
thought. It aims to be an accessible and introductory book but also
an intellectually rigorous text in its approach to the whole of
Viriliozs life and thought. Even though Virilio promises in his
writings to create an overarching system of thought, in fact much
of his contribution to knowledge is fragmented. Even notions such
as zdromologyz (the study of speed) and zdromocracyz (a society of
speed), which might have fulfilled such a grand plan, framework or
model for zVirilianz thought to be poured into, remain tentative.
Therefore this book creates and develops new concepts such as
accelerated modernity, dangerous modernity and critical modern­
ity which are generated out of the work of Virilio as well as others
working in related fields. These concepts help to place Virilio in
contradistinction to theorists and figures to whom he has been
unhelpfully compared, such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard
and Noam Chomsky. They also highlight contradictions and non-
sequiturs in Viriliozs body of work as well as the insights he has
made.
Chapter i considers the reasons in general why we might need to
remember Paul Virilio as a major contemporary thinker in the
future. In pinpointing these reasons it tells the outline story of
Viriliozs life, work and career. Born in France in the early 1930s and
growing up in the context of the German military forces' domin­
ance of the country during the Second World War, Virilio became a
 Introduction 7

committed Christian at the age of eighteen. The chapter concen­

trates on the 1950s and 1960s, a period which has often been
neglected in previous assessments or discussions of Virilio. In the
1950s Virilio scoured the northern French coastal beaches for the
German bunkers remaining from the Second World War. He photo­
graphed them in their hundreds and wrote about their architectural
and technological significance in an embryonic theory he called
'bunker archaeology' and later 'cryptic architecture'. Unlike many
of the other French theorists of his generation, he began his studies
in a personalised, informal way, but the work was to influence his
thinking in the academy for the rest of his life. However, in Virilio's
unusual trajectory his academic period did not start until the end of
the 1960s when he was in his late thirties. In the 1960s, as well as
studying at the university of the Sorbonne in Paris, and further
becoming a painter of stained glass, he joined forces with an older
professional architect, Claude Parent. Although he never qualified
as an architect, Virilio and Parent were a potent practical and
theoretical force and their ideas shook up established French, and
other cultures', thinking on architecture for a time. Then May 1968
occurred and nothing was quite the same again for Virilio. Much of
this period 一 the 1950s and 1960s - of Virilio's personal and political
biography has remained as forgotten as the German bunkers which
prompted the journey in the first place. Chapter 1 contextualises all
of this personal history and looks ahead to the rich publishing
future of Virilio's next three decades.
Chapter 2 considers Virilio's place as the 'high priest of speed'.
The chapter shows that this can be slowness or fastness, and
moreover that instantaneity and ubiquity are key processes in the
disappearance of time and space which Virilio predicts. Looking at
the development in chronological order of his French and English
publications and interviews on speed, the chapter sets Virilio*s
ideas in a more theorised and fluid picture of what this book calls
accelerated culture, or accelerated modernity. Virilio did not
register an 'epistemological break' in his work and much of the
work from the 1950s and 1960s discussed in Chapter 1 is shown to
be coterminous with the continuing interest in the body and speed
which he pursued for the next three decades. There is considerable
development of the ideas as Virilio's academic and intellectual
8 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

career goes forward. The chapter pursues both critical and appre­
ciative commentaries on Virilio, as well as various interviews with
him over the years, in order to assess the overall value of what
Virilio has self-labelled as dromology and the speeding-up of
processes such as military technology.
Chapter 3 introduces the notion of dangerous modernity to look
at the consequences of the accelerated modernity introduced and
considered in Chapter 2. Theorists like Francis Fukuyama and
Noam Chomsky are distinguished from Paul Virilio in assessing
what is happening at the end of what Virilio refers to as 'a world'
(rather than the world): in other words the twentieth century of, in
his pertinent phrase, /hyperviolence,. Paul Virilio has written about
many media events in his long career as a public intellectual but, as
we have noted, the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Center twin towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington,
provide a showcase for his thinking better than any other. They
highlight his favourite topics of architecture and speed. In fact, he
did write at the time about the unsuccessful attempt in 1993 to
blow up the World Trade Center. He was even employed as a
consultant following that first attack. Virilio has had the chance to
speak and write about the '9/11' events briefly and obliquely
(2001b, 2002, Virilio 2002a, Virilio 2003b), even contributing to a
technical engineering analysis on French radio of the collapse of the
twin towers, but this chapter devotes itself to looking at how some
of Virilio's ideas fit into the understanding of such an event using
what we know about the tragedy itself as a case study. Again,
critical and appreciative commentaries and interviews with him on
past events are used to interweave Virilio's sporadic thinking on
such matters with the actual unfolding of '9/11'. Virilio's notion of
the accident is the theme for the chapter, and the reader unfamiliar
with any of Virilio's work can glimpse how he might be 'used' in
analysis of media events. Whether we think he should be so 'applied'
is another matter. In any case, in this chapter Paul Virilio is revealed
to be most prominently of all a media theorist of sorts and an
interpreter of what he has come to call the global or total accident.
Chapter 4 considers Virilio the art, film, dance, photography,
theatre and television theorist in the context of the notion of critical
modernity. Critical modernity is actually a concept which has been
 Introduction 9

written about by Virilio's erstwhile architectural partner, Claude

Parent, but it is adapted and reworked in this chapter to assess the
usefulness of Virilio's aesthetic, cultural and political theories.
Frequently Virilio has been seen as falling within the camp of post­
modernism or postmodernists. This chapter reviews such critical
commentary and compares Virilio with another French theorist who
has been labelled in a similar vein across a variety of disciplines 一
namely Jean Baudrillard. Virilio's political, religious and philoso­
phical positions are explicated and taken into account, while what
he has written and said about modernity and postmodernity,
modernism and postmodernism are hauled over the coals. Critical
and appreciative commentaries and interviews with Virilio are once
again used to place Virilio in a continuum of critical thinking on
modernity. This book argues for Virilio to be seen as a modernist.
Chapter 5 asks whether we should in fact forget Paul Virilio.
Something of an overall assessment of his strengths and weaknesses
as a theorist is made in this chapter. Virilio's 'traces' are seen to be
everywhere in disciplines across the academy, and even his
connection to popular culture, a subject on which he has had little
to say over the years, is plotted. Acceleration rather than globalisa­
tion is seen to be Virilio's personal prediction for the twenty-first
century in one of the most heated conflicts amongst major contem­
porary commentators today. A number of other academic and
political debates are cited as the reader is reminded of the gaps in
Virilio's thinking when compared with many younger contemp­
orary social and cultural theorists across the globe. The question
whether we must forget Paul Virilio as well as remember him is
answered after a fashion, and the chapter recalls the early Virilio in
the work of the late Virilio, for better or worse.
For the first time then, in the light of all the considerable output
of Paul Virilio, this book offers a unique, rounded historical por­
trayal of Virilio as an intellectual figure. It is less important that we
know he has suffered from asthma, has a daughter, is grey and
balding, rarely watches television or has never qualified as an
architect, so a Virilio life story will have to wait for another day.
For the time being, reading the myriad texts of Virilio (including
his many 'live' conversations) helps to situate him in a continuum
of public intellectuals from France as well as elsewhere. Paul
1 。Paul Virilio： Theorist for an Accelerated Culture
Virilio, whatever our ultimate judgement of his worth, has
undoubtedly earned his place in a list of contemporary social and
cultural theorists and commentators. Compared to his compatriot
Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio is still perhaps not as prominent in
such lists as he might be. That is unlikely to remain the case for
long.
 CHAPTER ONE

Remember Virilio
12 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

Paul Virilio was born in Paris, France in 1932. Paris remained his
home for most of his adult life although he moved to the Atlanctic
coast at La Rochelle on retirement. His father was an Italian
communist from Genoa who was an illegal alien in the country and
his mother was a Catholic from Brittany. The family lived in the
North Atlantic region during the Second World War and in many
ways Virilio has dedicated his life and work to an analysis of the
unfolding of the consequences of the violence and speed of that
terrible conflict. For thirty years from 1969 he was a Professor of
Architecture in Paris in the wake of the events which have come to
be known as 'May '68', where students and workers in many
countries, especially France, rose up and for a brief moment
threatened the social order of Western capitalism. It has taken a
good many years but today Virilio is at last regarded as a significant
contemporary thinker, although what he has actually said and the
order in which he said it remains a mystery to many who use his
name. There are all kinds of different and surprising influences
on his life and thought which help to explain his unique place as
a critical thinker: for instance, in this chapter we will consider
religion, war, contemporary architecture and French postwar
politics.

Christianity
At the age of eighteen Paul Virilio became a Christian and a Catholic
'militant', and he has long proclaimed his religious faith openly. 'I
am a Christian* is a frequent unambiguous statement in interviews,
without any apparent concern for the approbation of fashionable
interviewers, sceptical critics or even erstwhile followers. In an age
when political leaders such as George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush and Tony Blair actively promote themselves as Christian
believers whilst unleashing massive military operations against
Afghanistan, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, which Virilio himself
has criticically analysed and frequently condemned in the strong­
est terms, labels such as 'Christian' and 'religious* have become
m句or battlegrounds in themselves. Paul Virilio has had no time at
all for the religion-driven "new world order* initiated by the
Christian George Bush, former CIA chief, nor the version of it
 Remember Virilio 13

carried on by the self-proclaimed Christians Tony Blair and Bill

Clinton. Virilio has sharply analysed what he called the "secular
holy war* with its Tundamentalisf 'duty to intervene' conducted
by NATO in the Balkans in the 1990s. He has also unmasked, in his
words, 'the tragi-comic infantilisation' of the century's end which
involved Bill Clinton and 'Monicagate', a media event which had
the consequence of denuding the US president of power and
authority to such an extent that Virilio wondered aloud whether he
had "not already been discreetly removed from office' for the last
couple of years of his second term as the military personnel mocked
him. Virilio was acutely aware that this infantilisation involved a
scenario where 'like the child in the playpen' the war leader 'wants
to try out everything, show off everything, for fear of otherwise
seeming weak and isloated'. End-of-the-century American techno­
logy, in the form of 'smart' cruise missiles, F 117s and B52 bombers,
has been used in Virilio's eyes as if 'the world were a toy or a war
game'. The twenty-first century has started in exactly the same
manner, with the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan even extending
the 'war game' with the development, and use, of new military
technologies to blow up mountains and caves where Islamic funda­
mentalist fighters were thought to be hiding. Virilio could not have
been more critical of this kind of Christianity.
As Virilio has said, 'the ironic outcome of techno-scientific
development' like the cruise and other missiles employed against
Bin Laden, Saddam, Milosevic and others is a 'renewed need for the
idea of God'. Paul Virilio's Christian beliefs - emphasising 'Incarna­
tion not Resurrection* - echo the tradition of theologians Jacques
Ellul and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, proponents of a Christian
existentialism. For Canadian theorist Arthur Kroker, this tradition
of Christian dissent, especially where it operates - as Kroker sees it
—against the totalitarianism of technology, can be seen as a positive
aspect to Virilio's religious conviction. Others are less generous and
see it as Viriliozs Achilles* heel, especially in his theoretical formu­
lations, even if they would grant him some political exemptions for
opposition to the "new world order*. Still others would attack
Virilio for his Catholicism and the anti-statism which goes along
with it. The state and power are, as we shall see in this book,
problematic concepts in Virilio*s work.
 14 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

Although we shall argue in this book that Virilio does not

believe in anything after modernity — postmodernity, for instance
-death, in its many forms, holds almost an obsessive interest for
him. His religious beliefs underlie this interest but death is also a
pervasive concept in Virilio's work. 'Picnolept', for example, in
Virilio's theoretical vocabulary stands for a state of temporary
'death' or sub-epileptic unconsciousness, a kind of checking-out
for a moment before consciousness reigns again. Human life in the
modern condition is interrupted by these tiny deaths, before the
ultimate death, in Virilio's vision. But because of Virilio's religious
faith, even this death is not real for human beings. Neither -
despite news to the contrary for much of the twentieth century 一 is
God 'dead'. For Virilio, 'God has come back into history through
the door of terror'; contrary to Nietzsche, he has maintained that
'God isn't dead':
Personally I'm at odds with this question of death. Why? Because
on the one hand I'm a Christian, thus I don't believe in death, but in
the soul's immortality; on the other hand, I don't want to use this
faith with respect to those who don't share it. And finally because I
don't believe that faith should be an instrument: that would be the
worst kind of belief, from which you get the Holy War, religious
terrorism, etc. So my return to death is a reflection of disap­
pearance, on the final outcome, on the end, on the fact that what IS
will cease to exist, on interruption. Whence, PICNOLEPSY, little
death, etc ... My way of approaching death is both physical and
metaphysical. I'm faced here with a problem of writing because I
can't hide the fact that I'm a Christian (I don't see why I should hide
it, for me it's essential) but on the other hand I don't want to use
this 'advantage' to challenge things that are common to believers
and non-believers alike. (Virilio 1997a: 128-9)
Virilio, curiously, still sees himself as a 'materialist of the body'
amidst his religious conviction. For him, zMan is God, and God is
Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man - or Woman. So to
separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.' In most senses,
however, Virilio is an idealist rather than a materialist in the
philosophical sense. He has never been a Marxist, or any kind of
historical materialist, and his philosophical training at the uni­
versity of the Sorbonne in Paris was phenomenological and centred
 Remember Virilio 15

on the psychology of perception. zIdealismzz in the sense of wanting

a better, reformed world, has also driven Virilio on since his youth
and has persisted in his later years.
Personally Virilio has always been interested in deeds of social
reform. He has, for instance, sat on the French commission con­
cerned with housing the poor, chaired by Louis Besson, for over a
decade. Individually, too, Virilio has for a long time been inspired
by the Abbé Pierre and the movement of worker-priests. The Abbé
Pierre is a popular French priest who campaigned for the poor and
who met in the 1950s another of Virilio's influences, the scientist
Albert Einstein. The Abbé Pierre, however, eventually became
controversial in France because of his backing of a revisionist view
of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews in the Second World War.
The worker-priests' movement consisted of an attempt by the
Catholic church to, in a sense, "reclaim the working class' after the
Second World War by sending priests to work in the factories. The
Christian religion, then, has ever since that period of his youth
been dominant in Paul Virilio's life in terms of his strong personal
faith and his active concern for the homeless and the poor. His
work for the homeless, the sans-logis, began as long ago as the
winter of 1954. He has ever since been on a 'uoyage d'hiuer' and
eventually was involved in creating a social service for the home­
less. However, as we have indicated, the philosophical aspects of
religion, and the conception of the human being in religion, are
more complex as far as Virilio is concerned.
In actuality Virilio has a concept of death as accident, or as
interruption of knowledge, which spreads throughout his work,
not just in his own religious faith. For example, his notion of the
consciousness of the human subject under God, and moreover of
death itself, is not necessarily a conventional one. The concept of
the 'picnolept' has marked out his thinking. Although he has
eschewed the pyschoanalytical thinking of his fellow countryman
Jacques Lacan and all other practitioners of what he regards as a
kind of black art, he does conceive of human subjectivity in theor­
etical terms, however crude this may seem when compared to the
sophisticated and dense thought systems of many other French
theorists. Essentially, his main idea of the modern condition for the
human 'subject' has been one of 'picnolepsy', which is best
16 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

understood in laypersonzs language as a kind of micro-sleep or a

momentary lapse of consciousness or temporary 'disappearance'. In
fact, although mentioned in his short discourse on religion and
death, 'picnolepsy' is quite generally applied, in a more secular way,
in his writing and thinking on speed and modernity, on war and
technology, and on what he has conceived of as the aesthetics of
disappearance. For example, he has recalled that:
In The Aesthetics of Disappearance ... the main idea is the social and
political role of stopping. The break taken for sleep has been
worked on a lot for psychoanalysis, but I have absolutely no
confidence in psychoanalysis. In fact, all interruptions interest me,
from the smallest to the largest, which is death. Death is an
interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And ifs 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 idealise it... Epilepsy is little death
and picnolepsy, tiny death. What is living, present, conscious here,
is only so because there's an infinity of little deaths, little accidents,
little breaks, little cuts in the sound track, as William Burroughs
would say, in the sound track and the visual track of what's lived.
And I think that's very interesting for the analysis of the social, the
city, politics. (Virilio 1997a: 39-40)
It is ironic perhaps that a theorist known and celebrated for his
interest in accelerated culture and speed of and in modernity
should so frequently remind us of the importance of stopping,
interruption and partial death. The link between these poles 一 of
inertia and absolute speed - does not disappear from Paul Virilio's
theoretical landscape and is ever present in his thinking.

War baby
For Virilio, looking back on his life, 'war' not religion was his most
lasting influence. War — the Second World War — was his 'father'
and 'mother', as he has said in interview. War, where 'death liter­
ally fell from the skies', baptising 'by fire', was his 'trauma' and
'birth'. He was 'formed by war', experiencing 'the war in Nantes, a
 Remember Virilio 17

city with armament factories and a submarine port, which was

destroyed by air raids'. He even began to write, as a ten-year-old
boy, about the 'destruction' of the city, keeping a notebook of the
times, of 'war and the city'. In his phrase, 'war was my university',
echoing the attitudes of some writers towards the Spanish Civil
War. In fact, Virilio 'fought in the Algerian War, as a draftee' but
in a number of ways it was the Second World War, especially in
France and even more specifically in the North Atlantic region,
which was to have a lifelong and demonstrably profound effect on
'Paul Virilio' the cultural theorist as well as the man. Seven years
old at the beginning of the conflict, Virilio has frequently des­
cribed himself in English and even when speaking in French as a
'Blitzkrieg baby' or a 'war baby'. He exclaimed, in conversation
with fellow countryman Philippe Petit, 'Si je travaille sur les
questions militaires, comme André Glucksmann ou Alain Joxe,
c'est parce que je suis un WAR BABY' (original version, Virilio
1999: 94). To work on 'military problems' because he was a 'war
baby', like such 'intellectuals of defense' as the political author and
academic Alain Joxe (with whom he later worked from the late
1970s in Joxe's "Sociology of Defense' group) and the "New Philo­
sopher' André Glucksmann, obviously made eminent sense to
Virilio. He has also recalled that the pyschological effect was that
he 'was terrorised by war'. 'As a child I suffered the war: the
destruction of the city of Nantes when I was ten was a traumatic
event for me', he told long-time interviewer Sylvère Lotringer in a
series of early 1980s interviews for Semiotext(e), the New York
publishing venture which brought Virilio to an English-speaking
audience for the first time. He talked in these fascinating and wide-
ranging Lotringer interviews about what he called 'pure war', or
the way in which war continued after 'total war' had ended.
Legally, too, Virilio has argued that the Second World War has 'not
finished,. It has not 'been put out'. In Viriliozs language, 'there's no
state of peace7. The Second World War is not over for Virilio
because 'it continued in Total Peace, that is in war pursued by
other means'.
So gripped was Virilio by this legacy of the Second World War
that for ten years from the 1950s he began studying military
architecture and 'looked for elements of the European Fortress'.
18 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

Paul Virilio, still in these pioneering early studies apparently an

obsessive young man in search of the meaning of the warfare which
had so traumatised the population of his region, devoted himself in
the 1950s and early 1960s to compulsively researching the brutalist
architecture of the Second World War German bunkers. This gave
rise to what was to become a distinct Virilian trope: a veritable
"bunker archaeology*, which was to extend beyond the book of the
same title and dominate his thinking at least until the mid 1970s. In
fact, Bunker Archéologie, or Bunker Archaeology in English trans­
lation, was first published as an illustrated book in French in 1975,
but a very short, personal, pioneering piece, first written in 1958,
saw the light of day in 1966. Virilio began his research into the
bunkers in 1958 - the date of a supposed revelation he had on a
beach in Normandy — and he saw 'the blueprint of the blockhouse*
as 'strangely reminiscent of Aztec temples'. The project of the
'architecture of war' had begun for Virilio, and it led in later life to
his works being 'read seriously by the French military7. He started
in this 1950s project to look at war as a military 'space'. Virilio has
admitted that he had no social sciences background, no training in
the "sociology of war' or the 'history of technology'. His 'war'
experience was mainly 'living' it through the Second World War
and its aftermath (and a brief time as a draftee later on in the
Algerian War). The German bunkers, and the systematic photo­
graphs he took of them, were the start of a career for Virilio,
concentrating on military space. As he has intimated, it was more
than the object of study that interested him:
It's not by chance that I studied the Atlantic Wall. I didn't study
the blockhouses, I studied their position. I studied the wall, the
circle of blockhouses, everything that happens between the
continental space and the maritime space. Later I went to see the
Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line, but after the Atlantic Wall: I
never would have wanted to go beforehand. It's because I was
interested in the coastal region. For me the coastal region is an
amazing thing, a marvellous interruption, an interface as they say.
I've always thought in terms of breaks, in terms of either/or, in
terms of the dividing line of waters — those places where things are
exchanged, transformed. (Virilio 1997a: 115)
 Remember Virilio 19

Thus for Virilio the archaeology of the bunker implied more than
an aesthetic interest in military relics. It was already an architec­
tural and design interest, which was to be transformed into what he
called a theory of the 'oblique', or the inclined plane, during the
1960s. The "end of verticality' and the 'end of horizontally', which
Virilio proclaimed in the 1960s as part of his architectural theory
revolution, were first touched on in these early explorations of
'bunker archaeology' and its various associated practices. The more
general forays into what he came to call the 'function of the oblique'
became subsequently much more emphatic in the urban Parisian
architectural milieu of the 1960s but the rural seaside photographs
he took of the German bunkers contained many of the seeds of this
later work. Such military bunker themes have 'obliquely' infused
Virilio's later theoretical writings in other areas. Put simply, Virilio
used the military architecture of the bunkers and developed,
dialectically, a way of ending the right angle (the horizontal and
vertical meeting point) and replacing it, architecturally, with an
incline, or the oblique. Paul Virilio has explained that:
Since 1958 I had been studying not only the blockhouses of the
Atlantic Wall and the Siegfried and Maginot lines, but also the
military spaces of what was known as 'Fortress Europe', with its
rocket-launching sites, air-defence systems, autobahns and radar
stations. This was an archaeological study, and a personal one,
motivated by the desire to uncover the geostrategic and geopolitical
foundations of the total war I had lived through as a young boy in
Nantes, not far from the submarine base of Saint-Nazaire. For me, the
architecture of war made palpable the power of technology — and
the now infinite power of destruction. (Virilio and Parent 1996: 11)
Once again, the personal was the inspiration for the theoretical.
Virilio had escaped with his family from the Gestapo in Nantes in
1941, partly owing to what he later called in his theoretical writing
the 'cryptic architecture' of his family home. The architectural
archaeology he began in 1958, stimulated by these childhood mem­
ories of German invasion and the military architecture which went
with it, ended formally in 1965. By then he had not only completed
the initial bunker archaeology project in France but from 1960
onwards had made several field trips to Germany to consult
archives and to study the anti-aircraft shelters of the major German
20 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

cities and the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Such interests have
sustained his work on war and technology throughout his life. For
instance, books on the Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia
over Kosovo in the 1990s drew on ideas first formulated in his
'bunker archaeology' period. Books and an exhibition were given
over to the extensive studies he made up and down the Atlantic
Wall which had produced his idiosyncratic photographs of thou­
sands of German bunkers. This work may have been borne out of
almost a hobby but the deep legacy of the 'early' work, visual and
written, never really leaves Virilio. A full English translation of this
1950s bunker project was not available to scholars until 1994, by
which time all kinds of wild interpretations of Virilio and his
cultural significance had been ventured. This English translation,
Bunker Archaeology (Virilio 1994b), was in any case taken from the
second, revised, expanded version of Bunker Archéologie, pub­
lished in 1991 in France rather than the 1975 original. In fact, as we
can see with hindsight, the bunker archaeology period was long-
lasting.
Today we are in a position to see more clearly the impact of the
'total warz of the Second World War on Virilio's thinking in what­
ever sphere he was to subsequently interrogate in his theoretical
work or his teaching, be it architecture, photography, cinema or
contemporary art. As Virilio was to say much later in his 'war
career', the 'essence of war' and the 'essence of cinema' are related,
and the only question is how much.

Architecture cryptique
As well as photographing thousands of German bunkers, by the
early 1960s Virilio had trained as a painter and an artist in stained
glass. He went to study at the Ecole des Metiers dzArt in Paris, the
city where he was born and which remained his home until the end
of the twentieth century. He was at this time working as a painter,
mainly in order to earn a living, and, among other work, produced
designs for Braque, at Varengeville, and Matisse, at Saint-Paul-de-
Vence. Virilio has said that he has continued to approach every­
thing as a visual artist and has gone so far as to admit that he always
writes zwith images 一 I cannot write a book if I donzt have images7.
 Remember Virilio 21

It was this aesthetic perspective which was to pervade all that

followed in Paul Viriliozs subsequent academic career despite efforts
by many commentators and critics to pigeonhole his position in
specific social or human sciences. The erasure of his original aes­
thetic background in many of the surveys of Virilio's work to date
over the years is nevertheless understandable. He did indeed take
the opportunity while in Paris in the early 1960s to study philoso­
phy at the university of the Sorbonne, where he became passionate
about architecture and the psychology of form, taking courses by
the likes of the sociologist Raymond Aron, the existentialist philo­
sophers Vladimir Jankelevitch and Jean Wahl, and, most signifi­
cantly, the influential French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. Virilio has said that he was a "follower of Gestalttheorie, and
that he audited Merleau-Ponty's late lectures before he died in
1961. Merleau-Ponty's perspective in particular does not really
fade from Viriliozs work. The Husserlian phenomenology, which
Merleau-Ponty promoted, based its philosophy in bodily behavi­
our and perception. It reappears often in Virilio's writing and is the
source of criticism from those who see in his work a tendency to
put forward an idealist, as opposed to a materialist Marxist
position, which needs 'standing on its head'. Virilio has himself
openly admitted that he has been a 'man of the percept as well as
the concept'.
In this brief biographical scenario Virilio might seem to fit the
trajectory of so many other French 'philosophers' of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, but actually he differs considerably.
The intellectual figures with whom he is regularly bracketed fre­
quently had highly academic careers that went uninterrupted over
decades from their youthful student days. While these intellectuals
were moving and shaking in their universities, Virilio, as he has
plaintively noted, simply "made paintings'. Virilio's 'bunker man'
period was followed by a painting and stained-glass training and
practice that were distinctly unusual. Although he was eventually
a full-time academic for a long period - for all of thirty years in fact
—Virilio's trajectory was very different to that of the French
theorists with whom he has often been compared and contrasted,
such as Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard or Michel Foucault. In
Virilio's case, too, apart from the brief philosophical interlude at
22 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

the Sorbonne, his previous and subsequent work was not really
produced in any discourse resembling 'philosophy7.
For one thing, as distinct from other French theorists who have
become key contemporary thinkers, Paul Virilio became immersed
in the then less-than-fashionable world of 1960s French archi­
tecture. Eventually developing it formally as his academic profess­
ion as a Professor of Architecture, Paul Virilio was awarded the
Laureate of the Grand Prix National de la Critique Architecturale in
France in 1987. As the Director of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture
in Paris, a post which essentially stemmed from 1972 when he was
made co-director, he was Professor of Architecture for three decades
and eventually President of the Ecole for many years. He retired
from the Special School of Architecture only at the close of the
1990s when he was in his late sixties. Curiously, however, he never
formally qualified as an architect at any time. His later role at the
Special School of Architecture was as an architecture theorist and
teacher, a trainer of architects, as he has noted, for the real world.
Virilio's architectural adventures began as early as the beginning
of the 1960s. In 1963 he formed the 'Architecture Principe' group
with Claude Parent, an architect, Michael Carrade, a painter, and
Morice Lipsi, a sculptor. The aim was to investigate and promote a
new kind of architectural and urban order. The group lasted until
1968-9 when Claude Parent and Paul Virilio fell out over Virilio's
participation in the momentous and, as far as he was concerned,
long-lasting events of 'May '68'. As for the journal/magazine
entitled Architecture Principe, only Claude Parent and Paul Virilio
put their signatures to the short articles in the publication which
constituted its permanent manifesto. From fragile beginnings, nine
numbered issues of Architecture Principe were published between
February and December 1966, as well as a final number ten, an
anniversary issue in September 1996, thirty years later. Each of the
original 'Architecture Principe' (literally Architecture (in) Principle,
but essentially urging architecture to begin again) manifestos had a
specific title. These were: 'The Oblique Function', 'The Third Urban
Order', 'Potentialism', 'The Nevers Worksite', 'Habitable Circula­
tion', 'The Mediate City', 'Bunker Archaeology', 'Power and Imagin­
ation', and 'Blueprint for Charleville'. These themes made up the
first nine issues, all published in the mid 1960s. 'Disorientation or
 Remember Virilio 23

Dislocation* was the title of the tenth and last issue in 1996. By
today's publishing standards the magazine's issues were short on
word length but high on rhetoric and conceptual innovation. For
instance, issue seven of Architecture Principe, xBunker Archaeology',
was published in September/October 1966. It comprised the short
essay by Paul Virilio, entitled "Bunker Archaeology', which
actually dated from 1958. This was followed by another short essay
from Virilio written in September 1965, entitled 'Cryptic Architec­
ture', which contained enigmatic statements such as (in English
translation from the original French of the manifesto) 'cities are
episodic and cerebral, they are a permanent and genetic crypt',
'cryptic architecture is thus an infra-architecture' and "cryptic
energy, itself indissociable from the survival of all living species'.
"Architecture Cryptique" was the label Paul Virilio used in the early
to mid 1960s for the theoretical ideas spawned by his "bunker
archaeology*. Claude Parent*s contribution to issue seven was only
slightly more than three short paragraphs. He proclaimed, several
years before Virilio actually gained an academic post, that "Paul
Virilio is a reader of reality. He holds the university chair of the
real; he is not in the analytical domain, but is a creator. In the
present he is hunting for future portents. He sifts, chooses, gathers.*
Parent went on in this brief, bizarre, but strangely accurate eulogy
to describe Virilio as a *man of faith* and 'in a state of permanent
disequilibrium* who 'in order to triumph over original sin* has *us
discover today the masterpieces of an ancient world of terror*.
With phrases like these, and with manifestos in their back pockets,
the hip young(ish) gunslingers of the oblique of the mid 1960s were
making their mark.

Oblique spaces
Virilio had met a figure of some stature in Parent and the latter was
initially the senior partner in the relationship. Claude Parent was
by the early 1960s a noted and controversial figure in French
architecture. He had become interested in 'architectural utopias* in
the 1950s and did indeed go on to develop certain links with other
"utopists*, but by the early 1960s he was becoming disillusioned
with their kind of architectural thinking. Parent has recalled in
24 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

interview that when the two of them met initially in 1963 Paul
Virilio had no architectural training, and that *when Virilio came to
buy an apartment* in Paris 'he was a painter of stained glass'.
Parent said that 'Virilio knew an extraordinary amount about his
craft'. But Virilio 'also had a real instinct for architecture - an
instinct reflected in his impulsive decision to buy that apartment',
his old friend and colleague has remembered. In point of fact,
Claude Parent was the architect of the apartment building! That
real-estate 'moment7 was how they originally paired up. Claude
Parent and Paul Virilio subsequently began to collaborate on
architectural projects in France in 1963 and carried on doing com­
missioned work until the late 1960s.
The painter of stained glass and the emerging architect proved
to be a productive team. For instance, Virilio and Parent built the
church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay in Nevers between 1964 and
1966. This was the pair's first practical project based on their
unique 'function of the oblique' theory, which, as we have seen,
had itself developed from ideas first generated by Virilio around
'bunker archaeology' and 'cryptic architecture'. The theory of the
'function of the oblique', which Virilio saw as the most important
work of the Architecture Principe group, had its origins in the
concepts of disequilibrium and motive instability. Accordingly,
Virilio and Parent set the first structure to be built based on the
theory of construction on an incline. The church of Sainte-
Bernadette was a brutalist, menacing building deriving from the
architecture inspired by the German bunkers, which Virilio had
seen as themselves embodying an architecture of disequilibrium
some years prior to this joint architectural venture. It symbolised
much for the architectural duo. For the professional architect
Claude Parent, it expressed 'our anger with the architecture and
society of the time'. The three years' work on the church of Sainte-
Bernadette and the completion of its construction preceded the
development of the experimental theories in the Architecture
Principe journal. Parent has recalled that the 'decision to apply this
language' of the German bunkers 'to the form of the church came at
a late stage in the project's development' so 'the formal references
to bunkers should therefore be seen as a secondary element'. Paul
Virilio, despite not being an architect and effectively 'hanging out'
 Remember Virilio 25

in his friendzs office each day, was the one in the partnership who
had the radical ideas, according to the later testimony of Parent.
Virilio, he stated:
had an admirable, and legitimate, ambition to make architecture
and he contributed to the project in a very real way. It was Virilio
who said that we should put a slope on the floor planes of the
church ... The challenge of working together on a real, concrete
project inspired a fundamental breakthrough - the first application
of the function of the oblique. The military vocabulary of the
bunkers dominated our early projects 一 the church as well as the
cultural centre in Charleville. Virilio saw the bunker as the apotheosis
of twentieth-century architecture. (Virilio and Parent 1996: 51)
The urban theorist and planner in Virilio was beginning to take
shape. The military vocabulary of the German bunkers was always
linked to the exploration of 'total warz and 'pure warz but it was
also always connected to the city and the future of city planning for
Virilio. Moreover, Virilio saw zthe cityz as the "result of warz or zat
least of preparation for warz. However, the first building venture
illustrating the 'function of the oblique7, despite being more or less
achieved, did not exactly open the floodgates for the Virilio/Parent
architectural partnership. Virilio had, as we have seen, prepared
some stained-glass windows for churches and through this zsacred
artz link managed to secure the Sainte-Bernadette construction
commission for himself and Parent. Further projects with Parent for
a cultural centre in Charleville and a house in Saint-Germain-en-
Laye were never actually built. The December 1966 issue (number
9) of Architecture Principe was entitled ZA Blueprint for Charleville'
because that is exactly what it remained: a blueprint. But even­
tually another Parent/Virilio collaboration, namely the Thomson-
Houston Aerospace Centre in Vélizy-Villacoublay, did come to
fruition.
Theoretically the partnership of architectural ideas blossomed.
In 1965 and 1966 Virilio and Parent presented papers to various
conferences and seminars. Those given at Lyons, Locarno, Bologna
and Lurs were collected together as the November 1966 issue
(number 8) of Architecture Principe. The pair clearly collaborated
personally, politically and theoretically in this period too, and not
merely on the jointly authored magazine manifestos. For example,
26 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

in June 1966, at Folkestone across the Channel in England, they

were part of a panel on experimental architecture at a symposium
organised by the International Dialogue of Experimental Architec­
ture (IDEA). The intervention by Parent and Virilio, a presentation
on 'oblique cities' delivered by the two Frenchmen dressed all in
black, bizarrely led to audience uproar still remembered thirty
years later by those present. The presentation was provocative, in
both form and content. If their intention was to provoke trouble in
England, the idea succeeded and they were duly booed off the stage
and given a Nazi or 'Hitlerian salute' by those they were address­
ing. Audience memory suggests that their choice of all-black
clothes (this was, after all, the year of the emergence in New York of
the Andy Warhol-influenced rock group the Velvet Underground)
rather than the psychedelic garb worn by other symposium
participants probably alienated the other architects present. But
the fact is that Parent and Virilio were not just disrupting the
conference by the way they looked: they were talking about the
futuristic possibility of 'oblique cities' all across the globe. Perhaps
the extent of the radicalism of Virilio and Parent in the context of
the architecture theory, and indeed practice, of the period should
not be forgotten. It is clear with the benefit of over three decades of
hindsight that the Folkestone incident symbolised the break they
had made with previous ideas. The 'horizontally' of the pre-indus­
trial era and the 'vertically' of the modernist, industrial epoch
were, for Parent and Virilio, to be transformed by the 'oblique' of
the post-industrial. Looking back, the fact that they were seen as
outsiders in 1966, and treated with suspicion and hostility, is hardly
surprising.
Architecturally the relationship would eventually come to a
close. The Thomson-Houston Aerospace project, assisted by Virilio's
good relationship with the engineer, turned out to be their final
completed collaboration. This came to an end in the period of 1968-9
because of a new project to construct a full-scale experimental
model of the 'function of the oblique7. The grandly named project,
'The Pendular Destabiliser no. 1', which Virilio and Parent intended
to inhabit for some weeks to test the equilibrium and habitability of
buildings on an incline, and to determine the best choice of angles
for the different living spaces, was in the process of being built at
 Remember Virilio 27

the university of Nanterre in 1968. It was an experimental structure

which was raised twelve metres from the ground to isolate it from
the outside world. yNo telephone, no post, no means of communica­
tion 一 except for a little hole in the wall that we could talk to each
other through* was how Parent recalled "The Pendulum Destabiliser
no. iz as it was envisaged in its design. This 'psycho-physiological'
experiment was curtailed not because of the impracticability of
experimental living on inclined slopes, but because of wider
political and cultural events in France. This just happened to be
May 1968, and Nanterre's campus was where the spark was lit for
the spectacular 'May '68' events in France, an upheaval which
politically separated the previously close architectural colleagues.

May '68
In some ways May 1968 was the highpoint of Situationism, a creed
with which Paul Virilio and Claude Parent were rather misleadingly
associated by interpreters of their radical experimental architec­
ture. In reality, Virilio and Parent were more comparable to figures
like Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century who prepared an
architectural plan of zthe Panopticon', an ingenious, not to mention
oppressive, grand scheme for, as Bentham put it, "grinding rogues
honest', which was too ambitious in its architectural vision and was
never actually built in the form in which it was conceived. The
'function of the oblique' can be compared in some senses to the
Panopticon on these grounds. Its vision in theory was never pro­
perly realised in practice. Curiously, too, just as Bentham's design
was described as his 'haunted house' and compared to the architec­
ture and plan of management of the Gulags, Virilio and Parent's
'oblique spaces' were similarly 'compared to the prisons of the
Bolshevik secret police, which had skewed cells and ceilings so low
that it was impossible to stand'. Perhaps appropriately in view of
the comparison of the two theorists separated by almost two
centuries, Virilio uses the term 'panoptical' in his later work too and
describes satellite and other electronic surveillance of the globe as if
the whole world were now an electronic panopticon.
May 1968, with its students' and workers' uprisings and its riot
police, saw the beginning of the end for the architectural partnership
28 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

which had flourished for five or six years around the 'function of
the oblique'. Situationism, and its effect on left-wing politics in
France, was effectively at the centre of the disagreement between
Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, a disagreement that ended their
work together. Parent has remembered that he was 'upset that the
political climate had so corrupted a friend of six years'. But other
conflicts were surfacing too. For instance, both Virilio and Parent
were anti-militarist but their critique of militarism was different
and Parent has noted that Virilio "did have a certain respect for the
power of a collective organisation to achieve extraordinary, almost
magical results that are beyond the power of the individual'. Parent
also was 'not a practising Christian'. Perhaps most damningly, in
1968 Parent did not believe 'the function of the oblique' theory to
have a 'political agenda'.
According to his later testimony looking back on the whole
affair, the more conservative Parent plainly thought that the
politics of 'May '68' were 'idiotic'. He has said that he did not even
know what 'Situationist' meant at the time, whereas Virilio evi­
dently threw himself into the 'spontaneous' situation with gusto.
Parent has reminisced that:
Virilio's experience of the time was very different. He was close to
the hub of things. He wrote an article ... and he joined the group
occupying the Odeon. When I went to see him, I was told that he
was now calling himself "Comrade Paul'. Those people all took
themselves very seriously, forming "revolutionary committees' and
"sub-committees'. I have no stomach for that kind of thing ... I
don't like that mob mentality ...he was very much involved in the
movement as a whole. He said it was something he'd been dreaming
of all his life 一 1789 revisited. All the same, he was no fool. The day
the police stormed the Odeon and drove everyone out with their
batons, he wasn't there. He'd gone home to take a bath. (Virilio and
Parent 1996: 55)
Parent was right that as far as May 1968 is concerned, Paul Virilio
'was very much involved in the movement as a whole' although he
was not in fact aligned with any group in particular. He has in
interview expressed some sympathy for the 'Paris Commune',
street resistance of an earlier era in his home city. He has noted, 'I
feel rather close to the Communards, even if as a Christian I can't go
 Remember Virilio 29

along with their practice of slaughtering priests/ Furthermore, his

assessment of Leon Trotsky was that he 'was a first-rate figure on
matters of warz. Essentially, before and after May 1968, Virilio has
consistently maintained a non-Marxist political stance. He has,
however, on occasions shared something of the outlook of the ultra­
leftist Italian Autonomist (or Autonomia) movement which sought
to develop Marxism in a particular way in the modern world. For
Virilio they 'failed in a Marxist perspective, according to which
you have to change your life'. But the 'autonomists invented
questions* and Virilio at the time responded to that, at least for a
while. In any case Virilio believes, he has said, that 'only the
movements which were able to cease, to stop by themselves before
dropping dead' have really existed, and the Autonomists in his
view managed to do that. Virilio has claimed not to 'believe in
revolution* but in *revolutionary resistance* and "popular defence*.
He has clearly pointed to the events of May 1968 as underlining his
position at the time:
I remember the speeches in the Richelieu Amphitheatre of the
Sorbonne, before the taking of the Odeon Theatre at the very begin­
ning of May *68. I went in: the place was packed. I heard a guy,
probably a communist, say 'I read on the walls of the Sorbonne:
"Imagination comes to power!** That*s not true, it*s the working
class!* I answered: 'So, comrade, you deny the working class
imagination.' It was pretty clear, one referring to a horde able to
take power like a mass of soldiers, and the other (me) referring to
the active imagination — the autonomists. On this level, at the time, I
acted like them. (Virilio 1997a: 82)
So despite Parent's suspicion that Virilio was probably 'at the time
much influenced by the Situationists', by his own admission it was
the Autonomists who were more influential. As far as the Auto­
nomists were in favour of 'the will to autonomy* as 'the will to get
away from cultural and political conformity' Virilio has said that
his work was in the same direction. Nevertheless, the Autonomists,
particularly the Italian political scientist Toni Negri and others
whom Semiotext(e), especially, went on to publish alongside Virilio
in their various lists in the 1980s, differed considerably in practical
political activity in the 1970s compared with anything Virilio
became involved with in the context of the events of May 1968. In
30 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

any case, as Parent recalled many years later, Paul Virilio always
'was a great reader' and his reading included all kinds of social and
cultural analysis, from the the Situationists and Autonomists at one
end of the spectrum to the likes of J. K. Galbraith at the other. He
very much went with the flow of May 1968, as many others did
without holding for evermore to its political roots. Whatever the
precise cause of the political split which meant that they could no
longer work together, 1968-9 was effectively the end for Virilio
and Parent, and to a large extent the architectural movement they
had founded.
Although 'May '68' symbolically put an end to the partnership -
theoretical and practical - of Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, the
outriders of 'architecture beginning again' did continue for a while,
although independently of each other, with some further develop­
ment of the ideas surrounding the theory of 'the function of the
oblique'. Parent, for instance, continued to explore "the oblique' in
a whole series of practical architectural projects, designing an
oblique house in 1969, an oblique pavilion in 1970 and several other
urban projects in the 1970s. As for Virilio, he has emphasised that:
After I became co-director of the Ecole Spéciale d' Architecture in
Paris in 1972, my teaching concentrated on the development of
technical research into the organisation and the precise morphology
of oblique volumes. Several student theses were devoted to this
theme, but after a few years the overwhelming difficulties of
building an oblique habitat led us to abandon this work which
seemed to offer no practical benefit to young architects starting out
in the working world. (Virilio and Parent 1996: 13)
The pair of architectural radicals whom the French architectural
press of the 1960s had misleadingly labelled 'post-Corbusians' had
finally given in to the more prosaic demands of the 1970s. In the
context of the Architecture Principe group, Parent and Virilio's
work was seen to 'subvert modernism's quest for stable founda­
tions', and the two of them in harness put into practice Virilio's
idea of a 'negative, critical aesthetic' where the 'vocabulary of the
bunker was intended to create a repellent architecture that would
overrun established perceptions and provoke a response from the
user, in the same spirit as the Situationists'. 'Situationism' and even
'anarchism' may have been some of the rather excessive post-hoc
 Remember Virilio 31

labelling and interpretation of Paul Virilio's behaviour and political

and cultural stance in May 1968, and there is no doubt that the
older and more cautious Parent perceived such tendencies at the
time in the actions of Virilio. Nevertheless, within a year Virilio had
been nominated as a professor, and a more respectable future, one
of training 'young architects starting out in the working world',
beckoned as the euphoria of the late 1960s faded across the globe,
especially in Virilio's home country of France. "Consumer society*
was to proliferate with a vengeance after 1968. Virilio has spoken
little about 'May '68' in interviews since that time but looking back
in the early 1980s with Sylvère Lotringer he recalled that:
All of '68 was against the consumer society. All the youth move­
ments (there are many names for them) at the end of the 60s in the
West were, to my mind, signs of the danger of gluttonous consump­
tion. The exaggeration of consumption was pointing toward some­
thing fearsome, even though it remained diffused. Not that the
students themselves (most of whom were middle class) had been
against a relative development of consumption: but they understood
that its excesses were leading towards collapse. In this consumption
beyond all limits, there was a proliferation of collapse and of
Western civilian society's nondevelopment. (Virilio 1997a: 151)

After z68
Remembering Paul Virilio's 1950s and 1960s past is more than just a
useful exercise in excavation of biographical details, although it is
most certainly that too, because it helps to set Virilio in context in a
way not achieved in previous writings about him. Most con­
siderations of Virilio's life and work to date have not had much to
say about Paul Virilio in the 1950s and 1960s, and where that
period is mentioned, it is almost in footnote form as if the 1970s and
beyond were where Virilio's work really started. There has been
little attempt to provide the kind of chronology set out here and
even less suggestion that from the 1950s and 1960s we can see more
clearly where Virilio's trajectory has been and where it has been
going ever since. The partnership of Virilio and Parent, although it
did not endure, was a formative period in his life and work. After
the five-year collaboration with Parent, interestingly, Virilio
32 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

mainly worked alone. A new phase would, however, open up, one
which would spawn many books and essays. Virilio the
international writer and intellectual was about to be created. In
1969, Paul Virilio has recalled, he began writing the first chapters
of a book he was to publish in full several years later as L'Insécurité
du Territoire (Virilio 1993b).
For the newly politically enthused Virilio, nothing would be the
same again after 1968, although his global reputation took a long
time to be fully established. Made Professor of the Ecole Spéciale
d*Architecture in Paris in 1969, he became its co-director with
Anatole Kopp in 1972, its full director in 1975 and eventually its
President in 1990, leaving in 1999 with the title Emeritus Professor.
Alhough Architecture Principe no longer existed as a group and a
magazine/journal after his serious falling-out with Parent (apart
from the return in 1996 when they produced the special thirtieth
anniversary issue, number 10), Virilio's place as a public intellec­
tual in France meant that he was asked to be on the editorial boards
of a number ofjournals as well as to contribute articles on a range of
subjects over the next thirty years. Virilio actively participated in
the running of ventures such as the journal Critiques, the progres­
sive Christian magazine Esprit, the leftist journal Cause Commune,
and the magazine of the Pompidou Centre Traverses, which he
edited with Jean Baudrillard (with whom he is often misleadingly
bracketed in a more general political and theoretical sense). La
Pourissement des Sociétés, a collection of extracts from the pages of
Cause Commune between 1972 and 1974, was produced by an
editorial team including Paul Virilio and the sociologist and writer
Georges Perec in 1975.
By the mid 1970s the world that Virilio had begun to view afresh
in the 1950s and 1960s was upon us. What the media labelled as
'terrorism' and Virilio had already started to call 'state terrorism' or
'interstate delinquencies' was by then gathering pace and changing
Virilio's focus. In 1975 the first edition of Virilio's first book, the
French language Bunker Archéologie, was published. In this period,
once again with the help of Georges Perec, Virilio created the
'Collection L'Espace Critique' at the Paris publishers Galilée and
edited the series from 1973. Much of Paul Virilio's book output in
French since 1977 has been in this well-known imprint with its
 Remember Virilio 33

famous cool, supposedly 'sexy', modernist, cream 'hard' book

covers, red title lettering and black author names. Some of Virilio's
intellectual friends in Paris, such as Jean Baudrillard and Félix
Guattari (with whom he founded the free radio station Radio
Tomate in 1979), regularly had their books published in the 'Espace
Critique' series in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of these books found
their English translations as Semiotext(e) 'little black books' out of
New York, as Virilio's have done. In Virilio's case most English
readers have only seen his writing in this American format and
never in the elegant design of Galilée's 'Collection L'Espace Critique',
which seems to scream 'Danger, serious intellectual at work', and
ends up in sections labelled 'brainy stuff* in the independent
bookshops of the world.

Intellectual imposture?
To the extent that Virilio is taken seriously by an English-speaking
audience, and not ridiculed along with other Trench theory', there
has also been strong reaction to his work. In the twenty-first-
century English-speaking world Virilio is regarded, and remem­
bered, mainly as the "high priest of speed'. But Paul Virilio is not
only this. More generally he is seen as one of France's leading con­
temporary intellectuals and in the last few years his large body of
work has started to be discussed throughout the world. The French
media have called him 'one of the most original thinkers of our
time'. He is certainly one of the most noted French theorists of
contemporary culture and has been so for more than thirty years.
He has been a city planner, urbanist, architectural theorist, home­
lessness campaigner, art curator, film critic, museum exhibitor,
military historian, free radio activist and peace strategist, among
many other roles. He was founding member of the Centre for Inter­
disciplinary Research in Peace Studies and Military Strategy
(CIRPES) and later joined Alain Joxe's Sociology of Defense group
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1990
he became programme director at the Collège International de
Philosophie headed by Jacques Derrida. Paul Virilio has been des­
cribed as a 'brilliant, complex and wonderfully idiosyncratic
thinker', 'one of the leading French theorists addressing late
34 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

twentieth-century media culture* and, perhaps most aptly, 'the

emblematic French theorist of technology7. At the same time, in
some of the most vitriolic criticism of his work, Paul Virilio has
been labelled 'post-science' or 'science friction' and a representa­
tive of 'unthinkingness'.
Most notoriously, the natural-science-based 'prankster* duo
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devoted a short chapter to Virilio in
their poorly conceived Intellectual Impostures (Sokal and Bricmont
1999), a book-length critique of French theorists of what they call
'postmodernism* in general and *philosophical* writers like Paul
Virilio in particular. In the course of a supposed wholesale
demolition of what they mistakenly call *postmodern philosophers*
abuse of science*, the writing of Paul Virilio was labelled "pseudo­
scientific verbiage* and "diarrhoea of the pen*. The essence of their
critique - of the other theorists attacked in the book as much as of
Virilio alone - was the French postmodern philosopher*s alleged
failure to understand the elementary physics with which the
writing is often peppered. In fact, as Virilio has asserted in inter­
view, he does actually *have a formal scientific education* which is
*why physics and military sciences kept* him "busy for a long time*.
This, in Virilio*s estimation, is in sharp contrast to, for instance,
Jean Baudrillard, another of Sokal and Bricmont*s hate-figures.
Unlike Baudrillard, Paul Virilio can claim to be able 'to take a
detour through physics'. In the 'intellectual impostures' chapter on
him written by Sokal and Bricmont, Virilio was specifically singled
out for, among other sins, confusing 'acceleration* (the rate of
change of velocity) with 'speed', as well as the allegedly poor
quality of much of the language of the English translation of his
work. However, if we are serious about getting to the bottom of the
significance, or otherwise, of the long life and work of Paul Virilio,
it is actually to poetics not physics that we should look for an
intelligent guide to Virilio — what Sean Cubitt (Cubitt 2001) has
called, in relation to Jean Baudrillard as well as Paul Virilio, the
'poetics of pessimism'. This present book endorses such a cultural
approach to French theory, including that of Virilio. Whether it
pins down Virilio categorically is questionable. Virilio himself has
agreed that he paints 'a dark picture because few are willing to do
it', although he does not actually wear the badge of 'pessimist' too
 Remember Virilio 35

well. The question for him surrounds the issue of belief, or other­
wise, in technological progress:
The same idealism that caused the catastrophes and the ravages of
the twentieth century is resurfacing today. I am definitely not
against progress, but after the ecological and ethical catastrophes
we have seen, not only Auschwitz but also Hiroshima, it would be
unforgiveable to allow ourselves to be deceived by the kind of
utopia which insinuates that technology will ultimately bring
about happiness and a greater sense of humanity. (Virilio 1999: 79)
By no means does this book give a wholesale endorsement of Paul
Virilio's work, and there are many important reservations to be
entered about his positions. However, unfortunately for Sokal and
Bricmont, these reservations are not registered in the "intellectual
impostures7 critique.

Reading Virilio
In the context of the Sokal and Bricmont text, our scientific heroes'
attention to the actual writing of Paul Virilio, as opposed to
mistranslations or the myriad (mis)uses and misinterpretations of
Virilio in all kinds of disciplines, is an important lesson. Accord­
ingly, this present book seeks to 'read' the texts of Virilio, in
French and English translation, and not to rely on what we might
like to think Paul Virilio has said and written over the years. There
is no substitute for reading, and re-reading, Virilio. He is an
important, innovative contemporary cultural thinker and he will
be read and interpreted long after his own death.
The task of reading Virilio has been made easier by the fact that
much of his French-language writing is now available in English
translation. This is thanks especially to the Semiotext(e) editors Jim
Fleming and Sylvère Lotringer (and various translators) at Colum­
bia University, New York, who have published English editions of
Virilio's work in their 'little black books' - both "Double Agents'
and 'Foreign Agents' series - and in single-issue volumes. Verso,
Sage and University of Minnesota Press, among other publishers,
have put out various texts in English and extended the interest in
Virilio's four decades of commentating on many diverse topics. In
addition, a number of significant interviews are available in
36 Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture

English translation in which Virilio looks back on his earlier work,

muses on world events and comments on his contemporary writ­
ings. Paul Virilio's work, although becoming much more available
than hitherto in the international academy and beyond, is per­
vasive in influence but as yet, even if properly acknowledged,
relatively poorly understood, and there is only a relatively limited
literature on Virilio. This is partly because until recently the entire
back catalogue of his work was difficult to obtain. However, that
can no longer be used as such an easy excuse when reading and
using Virilio. Still, what seem to be wilful misinterpretations
persist. One of his most straightforward and readable works,
Strategy of Deception (2000a), a book about military intervention
and justice in the highly accelerated and sometimes dangerous
modern world, was reviewed not long ago in a serious English
newspaper by a writer (let us leave him or her nameless) who
thought:
One wouldn't want to eat an entire plate of ripe Camembert every
day although it's a nice occasional treat. Similarly with the ultra­
French conceptualist Virilio. Here he is again with a small but fierce
volume about NATO's war in the Balkans ... You too can make
Virilio at home: mix equal parts Foucault, Baudrillard and
Chomsky, add eight cloves of garlic and blow up with two sticks of
dynamite. Then start typing.
Sadly for this critic, Paul Virilio is really nothing like Michel
Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky, however they are
mixed. In the pages of this book such comparisons with Virilio's
intellectual peers are questioned, and detailed scrutiny of Virilio's
thinking and writing is undertaken alongside other such thinkers
of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. As this book makes
abundantly clear, there are reasons why it might be good to 'forget'
Virilio as we have learnt to forget Foucault (at Jean Baudrillard's
insistence) and to forget Baudrillard (at his own insistence). But
there are also many reasons why we should remember Virilio too.
 CHAPTER TWO

Accelerated modernity
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
Garish
Gallias
[So spelled in the first column; but in the defining columns of the Dictionary,
the s is doubled. Follow copy.]
Gamboled, -ing
Gamut {p133}
Gang (Min.)
[If written Gangue, follow copy.]
Gantlet
[A military punishment.]
Gasteropod
Gargoyle (Arch.)
Gauge
Gault
Gauntlet
[A large glove of mail.]
Gayety
Gayly
Gazelle
Genet
Gerfalcon
Germane
Germ
Ghibelline
Gibe
Gimbals
Gimlet
Girasole
Girt (v.)
[Girth (n.)]
Glair
Glamour
Glave
Gloze
Gnarled
Gore
Good-by
Good-humor
Gormand
Governor
Graft, -ed
Grandam
Granddaughter
Granite
Graveled, -ing
[The l in graveling should not be doubled.]
Gray, -ish, etc.
Grenade
Grenadier
Greyhound
Grewsome
Griffin
Grisly
[If written Grizzly, follow copy.]
Groats
Grogram
Grommet
Grotesque, -ly
Groundsel
Groveler, -ing
Group (v.)
Guaranty
[If written Guarantee, follow copy.]
Guelder-rose
Guelf
[If written Guelph, follow copy.]
Guerrilla
Guilder (coin)
Guillotine
Gulf
Gunwale
Gurnard
Gypsy
Gyrfalcon
Gyves

H.
Hackle
Hagbut
Haggard
Haggess
Ha-ha
Haik
Hake
Halberd
Halibut
Hallelujah
[But if written Alleluia, or Halleluiah, follow copy, to avoid “correcting.”]
Halloo
Halidom
Halyard
Handicraft
Handiwork
Handsome
Handsel
Handseled
Harbor, -ed, etc.
Harebell
Harebrained
Harem
Haricot
Harrier
Harry
Haslet
Hasheesh
Hatti-sherif
Haulm
Haul
Haunch
Hautboy
Hawser
Headache
Hearse
Hectoliter
Hectometer
Hegira
Height, -en, etc.
Heinous, -ly, -ness
Hematite
Hematology
Hemistich
Hemorrhoids
Heretoch
Hermit, -age
Herpetology
Hexahedron
Hibernate
Hiccough
Hinderance
[If written Hindrance, follow copy. See remark under Foundery, in loco.]
Hindoo, -ism
Hip (Pom.)
Hipped-roof {p134}
Hippogriff
Hippocras
Ho
Hoarhound
Hockey
Hodge-podge
Hoiden, -ish
Holiday
[If written Holyday, follow copy.]
Hollo
Holster
Hominy
Homeopathy
Homonym
Honeyed
Honor, -ed, etc.
Hoop (v.)
Hoopoe
Hornblende
Horror
Hostelry
Hostler
Hough
Housewife
Howdah
Howlet
Hummock
Humor
Hurra
Hydrangea
Hypæthral
Hyperstene
Hypotenuse
Hyssop

I.
Icicle
Illness
Imbibe
Imbitter
Imbrue
Imbue, -ed, -ing
Immarginate
Impanel, -ed, -ing
[Wb. has also Empaneled, -ing, etc., in his first column under E. One way is
enough; but to avoid changes in author’s proof, compositor had better follow
copy.]
Imparlance
Impassion
Impeach
Imperiled
Implead
Imposthume
[See Aposteme.]
Impoverish
Imprint
Incase
Inclasp
Inclose, -ure, etc.
Increase
Incrust
Incumbrance
[But Wb. prefers Encumber for the verb.]
Indefeasible
Indelible
Indict (Law)
Indictment
Indite, -er
Indocile
Indoctrinate
Indorse, -ed, -ing
Indorser, -ment
Induce, -ment
Inferior
Inferable
Inflection
Infold
Infoliate
Ingraft, -er, -ment
Ingrain
Ingulf
Inkle
Innuendo
Inquire, -er, -y, etc.
Inscribe
Inscroll
Insnare
Install
Installment
Instate
Instill
Instructor
Insure, -ed, -ing
Insurer, -ance
Intenable
Intercessor
Interior
Inthrall
Intrench
Intrust
Inure
Inurement
Inveigle
Inventor
Inwheel
Inwrap
Inwreathe
Isocheimal
Ixolite
 J.
Jacobin
Jaconet
Jail, -er, etc.
Jalap
Jam (Min.)
Janizary
Jasmine
Jaunt, -y, -ily
Jean
Jenneting
Jeremiad
Jetsam
Jetty
Jeweled
Jewelry
Jointress
Jonquil
Jostle
Jowl {p135}
Judgment
Jupon
Just
[A mock encounter on horseback.]

K.
Kaffer
Kale
Kayle
Keelhaul
Keelson
Keg
Kenneled, -ing
Khan
Kiln (n.)
Kilogram
Kiloliter
Kilometer
Knob
Koran
Kyanite

L.
Labeled, -ing
Labor, -ed, -ing, etc.
Lachrymal
Lac (coin)
Lackey
Lacquer (n.)
Lacquer, -ed, -ing
Lagoon
Lambdoidal
Landau
Landscape
Lantern
Lanyard
Lapsided
Larum
Launch
Leaven
Lecher, -y, -ous
Lecturn
Ledgement
[Sic; the retention of e after g seems somewhat remarkable.]
Ledger
Leger-line
Leggin
Lemming
Lettuce
Leveled, -ing, -er
Libeled, -ing, etc.
License
Lickerish
Licorice
Lief
Lilac
Linguiform
Linnæan
Linseed
Linstock
Liter
Lithontriptic
Llama (Zoöl.)
Loadstar, -stone
Loath (a.)
Lode (Min.)
Lodgment
Logogriph
Longiroster
Louver
Lower
Luff
Lunet
[A little moon, or satellite. Obsolete.]
Lunette
[A detached bastion, etc.]
Lunge
Lustring
Lye

M.
Macaw
Maccaboy
Maggoty
Maim
[Mayhem, Law.]
Mal (prefix)
[Here, in Wb., first column, appears “Mall,” followed by “or Maul”; but, since
Maul also appears in first column, both as noun and verb, we omit Mall, as not
preferable to Maul.]
Malkin
Mamaluke
Mamma
Mandatary (n.)
Manikin
Maneuver
Mantel (Arch.)
Mantel-piece
Marc (coin)
Magaron
Marquee
Marque (letter of)
Marquess
[Till of late, marquis was the usual spelling, but it is now to a great extent
superseded by marquess, except in the foreign title.—Smart.]
Marshal
Marshaled, -ing
Martin (Ornith.)
Martinet (Naut.)
Martingale
Marveled, -ing, etc.
Mark
Maslin
Mastic
Matrice
[If written Matrix, follow copy.]
Mattress
Mauger
Maul (n. and v.)
Mayhem (Law)
Meager, -ly, etc.
Merchandise {p136}
Meter
Mileage
Milleped
Milligram
Milliliter
Millimeter
Milrea
Misbehavior
Miscall
Misdemeanor
Misspell
Misspend
Misspent
Misstate
Mistletoe
Miter, -ed
Mizzen
Mizzle
Moccasin
Mode (Gram.)
Mocha-stone
Modeled, -ing
Modillion
Mohammedan
Mohawk
Molasses
Mold
Molt
Moneyed
Mongrel
Moresque
Morris
Mortgageor (Law)
Mortgager
Mosque
Mosquito
Mullein
Multiped
Mummery
Murder, etc.
Murky
Murrhine
Muscadel
Muscle (a shell fish)
[If written Mussel, follow copy.]
Musket
Mustache

N.
Nankeen
Narwal
Naught
Negotiate, -or, etc.
Neighbor, -ing, etc.
Net (a.)
Neb (Orn.)
Niter
Nobless
 [If written Noblesse, follow copy.]
Nomads
Nombles
Nonesuch
Novitiate
Nylghau

O.
Oaf
Ocher
Octahedron
Octostyle
Odalisque
Odor
Offense
Olio
Omber
Omer
Oolong
Opaque
Opobalsam
Orach
Orang-outang
Orchestra
Oriel
Oriflamb
Orison
Osier
Osprey
Otolite
Ottar (of roses)
Outrageous
Oxide
Oyes

P.
Packet
Painim
Palanquin
Palestra
Palet
Palmiped
Panada
Pander
Pandore
Pandour
Panel (Law)
Paneled, -ing
Pantograph
Papoose
Paralyze
Parceled, -ing
Parcenary
Parlor
Parol (a.)
Parquet
Parsnip
Parrakeet
Partible
Partisan
Pasha
Pashalic
Pask
Patrol (n.)
Paver
Pawl
[Peaked
We insert this word as of the first column, because Picked (in Wb. first col.)
has definitions not applicable to Peaked.]
Pean
Peart {p137}
Pedicel
Peddler
Pedobaptist
Pemmican
Penciled, -ing
Pennant
Pentahedral
Peony
Periled, -ing
Peroxide
Persimmon
Persistence
Pewit (Orn.)
Phantasm
Phantom
Phenomenon
Phenix
Phial
[But if written Vial, follow copy.]
Philter, -ed
Phthisic
Piaster
Picked
Picket
Pie
Piebald
Piepoudre
Pimento
Pimpernel
Pinchers
Pistoled, -ing
Placard
Plaice (Ichth.)
Plain
[Plane, in some senses.]
Plane-sailing
Plaster
Plait (v.)
Plat (n.)
Plethron
Pliers
Plow
Plumber
Plumiped
Pluviometer
Point-device
Poise
Polacca
Pole-ax
Poltroon
Polyhedron, -drous
Polyglot (n.)
Polyp
Pommel
Pommeled, -ing
Ponton
Pony
Poniard
Porgy (Ichth.)
Porpoise
Portray
Porteress
Possessor
Postilion
Potato
Potsherd
Powter (Orn.)
Pozzolana
Practice (v.)
Præmunire
Prænomen
Predial
Premise
Pretense
Pretermit
Pretor
Profane
Protector
Programme
Protoxide
Prunella
Pumpkin
Puppet
Purblind
Purr
Purslane
Putrefy
Pygmy
Pyx
 Q.
Quadroon
Quarantine
Quarrel (an arrow)
Quarreled, -ing
Quartet
Quaterfoil
Quay, -age
Questor
Quinsy
Quintain
Quintet
Quoin

R.
Rabbet (Carp.)
Rabbi
Raccoon
Raddock (Orn.)
Ramadan
Rancor, -ous, -ly
Ransom
Rare (adj.)
Rarefy
Raspberry
Rattan
Raveled, -ing
Raven (plunder)
Raze, -ed, -ing
Rasure
Real (coin)
Rearward
Recall
Recompense
Reconnoiter
Redoubt
Referable
Reflection
Reglet
Reindeer
Re-enforce
Re-install, -ment
Relic
Remiped {p138}
Renard
Rencounter
Rennet
Replier
Reposit
Resin
Rosin
[The resin left, after distilling off the volatile oils from the different species of
turpentine.]
Resistance, etc.
Restive, -ly, -ness
Retch (to vomit)
Reveled, -ing, -er
Reverie
Ribbon
Reversible
Rigor, -ous, etc.
Risk
Rivaled, -ing
Riveted, -ing
Roc (Orn.)
Rodomontade
Rondeau
Ronyon
Roquelaure
Rotunda
Route
Ruble (coin)
Ruche
Rummage
Rumor, etc.
Rye

S.
Sabian
Saber, -ed, etc.
Sackbut
Sainfoin
Salam
Salep
Salic
Saltpeter
Samester
Sandaled
Sandarac
Sandever
Sanskrit
Sapajo
Sapodilla
Sarcenet
Sat
Satchel
Satinet
Sauer-kraut
Savanna
Savior
[Saviour
We insert this as of first column, it being in universal use when referring to
Christ.]
Savor
Scallop, -ed, -ing
Scath
Scepter, -ed
Scherif
[Preferring this form to Cherif, we insert it here. Both spellings appear in Wb.
first column.]
Schist
Schorl
Sciagraphy
Scion
Scirrhosity
Scirrhus
Scissors
Sconce
Scot-free
Scow
Scrawny
Scythe
Seamstress
Sear
Secretaryship
Sedlitz
Seethe
Seignior
Seigniorage, -ory.
Seine
Seizin
Seleniuret
Sellender
Selvage
Sentinel
Sentry
Sepawn
Sepulcher
Sequin
Sergeant
Set (n.)
Sevennight
Shad
Shah
Shawm
Shampoo
Shard
Sheathe (v.)
Sheik
Sherbet
Sherry
Shill-I-shall-I
[But if written Shilly-shally, follow copy.]
Shore (n.)
Shorl
Shoveled, -er, -ing
Show
Shrillness
Shriveled, -ing
Shuttlecock
Shyly, -ness
Sibyl
Sidewise
Silicious
Sillabub
Simoom
Siphon
Siren
Sirloin
Sirup
Sizar
Skein
Skeptic
Skillful, -ly, -ness
Skill-less
Skull (cranium) {p139}
Slabber
Sleight
Slyly, -ness
Smallness
Smolder
Smooth (v. and a.)
Snapped (imp.)
Sniveler, -ing
Socage
Socle
Solan-goose (n.)
Solder, etc.
Soliped
Solvable
Somber
Somersault
Sonneteer
Soothe (v.)
[Sorel]
Sorrel
Souchong
Spa
Spelt (n.)
Specter
Spew
Spinach
Spinel
Spiritous
[Spirituous is the more common form. Follow copy.]
Spite
Splendor
Sponge
Sprite
Spirt
Spunk
Staddle
Stanch
Stationery (n.)
Steadfast
Steelyard
Stillness
Stockade
Story (a floor)
Strait (n.)
Strengthener
Strew
Strop (n.)
Stupefy
Sty
Style
Styptic
Subpœna
Subtile (thin)
Subtle (artful)
Successor
Succor
Suite
Suitor
Sulphureted
Sumac
Superior
Suretyship
Surname
Surprise, etc.
Survivor, -ship
Swainmote
Swale (v.)
Swap
Swart (adj.)
Swathe (bandage)
Swiple
Swob, -ber, etc.
[But if written Swab, Swabber, etc., follow copy.]
Swollen
Syenite
Symploce
Synonym
Syphilis

T.
Tabard
Tabbinet
Tabor, etc.
Taffeta
[If written Taffety, follow copy.]
Taffrail
Tailage
Talc
Tallness
Tambour
Tambourine
Tarantula
Tarpaulin
Tasseled, -ing
Tasses
Taut (Nav.)
Tawny
Tease
Teasel
Teetotal
Tenable
Tenor
Tenuirosters
Terror
Tetrahedron
Tetrastich
Theater
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