The Aesthetics of Disappearance — Paul Virilio

From the slender (111 pages) 1980 book:
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What happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance.

He treats light like a shadow of time.

Any man who seeks power isolates himself and tends naturally to exclude himself from the dimensions of others; all techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance.

Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your brain as softly as light. It seems that each buries the preceding, but none has really perished. [Baudelaire]

Paul of Tarsus said that "reason resembles death."

Little by little the rational hoarding, as an expectation of the advent of what is left and a factor of non-surprise, turns our contemporaries into these characters afflicted with fly-catcher memories where whole masses of useless facts are glued together. [Conan Doyle]

You might think of Marcel Proust's reflection on the subject of the Marquise de Sévigne: "She does not present things in a logical, causal order, she first presents the illusion that strikes us." In the sequence of the arrival of information, Proust designates for us the stimulus of art as the fastest, since there nothing yields to sentiment, but on the contrary, everything begins with it.

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

To deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which for us is not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence.

We might also note that the great inventions are events in the order of consciousness more than in science.

Film is truth 24 times a second. [Godard]

[Language] is a component of the body like any other.... Words are micro-organisms, living dust that the electronic revolution only assembles and orders, right up to the differentiated levels of meaning. [William Burroughs]

The development of high technical speeds would thus result in the disappearance of consciousness as the direct perception of phenomena that inform us of our own existence.

The idea of time can be reduced to a point of view: duration is made of transitory instants just as a straight line is made of points without depth. [Guyon]

Time and space seem infinite to us only when they don't exist. [Roupnel]