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Review of and quotes from Paul Virilio's The Aesthetics of Disappearance

A Compressed Review and Quotes from Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

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Paul Virilio’s ideas flow in The Aesthetics of Disappearance like rainwater in roadside channels. Raindrops (like ideas) come together in these channels and flow (like theories) towards an undisclosed final destination. There’s a (speed-)storm, but the roads are kept from flooding. Major thought systems are merely rinsed; they’re (disappointingly) left undamaged. Virilio’s picnolepsy, which is “the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed,” flows in roadside channels, proceeds through catch basins, travels through closed pipes, and where it ends up nobody knows… How do underdog theories survive? The book is read casually by a dilettante who remembers only this: the progressive increase in speed entails the progressive disappearance of consciousness. “For the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.”

Quotes from Paul Virilo’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

It’s our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

– Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

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

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

After the Vacation

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

After the vacation comes
the brain fog,
the arduous task to reaccept the status quo,
and the quicksand that gradually swallows you
back into the routine you escaped from.

Even though you’ve come back (refreshed) to conquer,
You’re procrastinating still, snoozing, postponing
the great battle.
The warrior’s armor waits for you in the closet.
Your heart still hasn’t synchronized with
the rhythm of the hammer striking the anvil.

But you must get up anyway.
So, you get up now.
You get out of bed.

There’s work to be done.

A cold shower,
then coffee.

You wear your armor.

The sun rises to meet a clear, blue sky
that appears to have never met dark, grey clouds.
But you remember the winter storms.
You remember every war you’ve won.

If God wills it,
you will win this one, too.

And when you’re done,
the boulder will rest on the top of the hill,
and it will never roll back down.


Quotes from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Quotes from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Here I am revisiting Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Here I am looking for death again — Thanatos, my old friend.
Does this mean that I will go back to reading books like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, etc.?
Does this mean that I will go back to saying that life is driven by death?
We shall see.
Maybe I’ll say, We are nothing but instances of self-conscious Death.
Later.
For now, I’ll be saving the quotes I like in a blog post and call it a day.
Outside, the birds are singing, and that’s where I need to be.

Quotes from Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Most of the unpleasure we experience is perceptual unpleasure.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

“Anxiety” describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. “Fear” requires a definite object of which to be afraid. “Fright”, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

We shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle