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