Esthetique de la disparition was written in the late 1970s and published in 1980 by Éditions Balland of Paris. It is just now being published in English, so it offers the reader a window to another–in some ways simpler–time, the bipolar world of the Cold War, when everyone knew with certainty their loyalties, their friends, and foes. But the book is also timely, offering us an opportunity for thinking our relationship with time, as our world rushes forward at breakneck speeds that conceal the absences and discontinuities that preserve our sense of reality, and undergird the metaphysics of presence that rules our everyday lives.

This work stands firmly within the tradition of phenomenology of perception, though Virilio would use the term “logistics.” Its main theme is the discovery, at the heart of the phenomenon of temporal duration, multiple fractures and de-synchronizations that are a fundamental aspect of the phenomenal disclosure. Virilio’s treatment of speed and film discloses how it is the unacknowledged absences that serve up the phenomena of presences, as the temporally-enduring events that they are experienced to be. Perception itself is shown to compose a patchwork of discontinuous realities, a fabric composed of breaks, deficiencies, and dislocations of perceptions.

The meditation on speed and light and their effects on our sense of reality is fascinating indeed. Drawing extensively upon the example of cinema, Virilio demonstrates how human perceptions are supplemented, altered, and redeployed by the cinematographer’s manipulations of the forces of speed, displacement, and luminosity. However, the book’s phenomenal explorations are far more profound in their implications than simply satisfying philosophical curiosity. In challenging the integrity and completeness of our experiences of event and duration, Virilio is challenging the certainty of the logical and rational thought that composes the stable foundations of Western science and philosophy. The goal of reason, Virilio argues, has always been “to deny to particular absences any active value.” Virilio puts the absences back in our calculations of presence.

A particularly compelling part of the book is Virilio’s treatment of Howard Hughes. Given the fact that Hughes is offered as a personification of the juncture of the forces of speed (in Hughes’ obsession with contests of flight speed) and luminosity (his power within the movie industry) whose overlapping influence, now more than in the 1970s, configures our perceptions of reality and automatizes our human associations, Hughes’ later years of life–self-incarcerated in bleak isolation outside both time and human connection, watching and rewatching endless screenings of Ice Station Zebra–stands as a gloomy prophecy of our own futures under the authoritative spell of electronic automatism. 

The Aesthetics of Disappearance has more socio-critical force today than it would have hoped to enjoy in the seventies, precisely because of the turn for the worse that our automated societies have taken. This work could be read as a virulent attack upon the direction our cellphoning, texting, twittering, Facebook-addicted modern societies are headed, as mothers and lovers and globalized employees slip deeper into their endlessly looping and meaningless “second lives” in cyberspace.

Virilio’s treatment of time in this work is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of time as endlessly repetitious, discontinuous, irreducibly plural, and reversible. His extended meditation on the absences that undergird our experiences of reality resonates with Jacques Derrida’s concept of difference, while his concern with how experiences of reality are integrally shaped by strategic relations of power suggests Foucault’s genealogical studies of the various fields of forces and power-knowledge and their effects on individual and collective experiences of truth and reality.

A comfortable Sunday read this book is not. But it is worth braving the dark waters of Virilio’s prophetic bleakness to rethink our lives as they move forward into the third millennium under the all-embracing and all-else-effacing fascination of technology. He warns: “Reconciliation of nothingness and reality, the annihilation of time and space by high speeds substitutes the vastness of emptiness for that of the exoticism of travel” (p. 119). Like Hughes, we don’t need to go anywhere to be right where we always are, trapped in the timeless loop of Ice Station Zebra, as our lives become ever more invaded by technology and our children are left to raise themselves.

© 2009 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., SAC (Dip.), North Carolina A&T State University

Keywords: philosophy