701. VIRILIO.

The Aesthetics of Disappearance

701 VIRILIO, Paul. The Aesthetics of

Disappearance
VIRILIO, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. EUA,

Nova York: Semiotext(e), 1991.

Esttica; Espao

Paul Virilio

Principais publicaes

Paul Virilio um urbanista e

VIRILIO, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology.

cientista cultural francs. Ele

New York: Semiotext(e), 1977

mais conhecido pelos seus

textos sobre tecnologia, onde

VIRILIO, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. EUA, New

York: Semiotext(e), 1991

ela fala sobre a relao entre

velocidade e poder,
referenciando arquitetura, arte,
cidade e exrcitos.

VIRILIO, Paul. The Art of the Motor. EUA, Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1995
VIRILIO, Paul. Ground Zero. London: Verso, 2002

Picnolepsy
Virilio starts his book with the word picnolepsy, picno = frequent and lepsy = lapse, frenquent lapses. The
author tell us, that in the meantime, The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external
impressions. For the one who has a picnolepsy, the picnoleptic, the missing time never existed. It has simply
escaped.
To Virilio, everyone is or has been a picnoleptic, defining it a mass phenomenon and as a part of the sleeping
process complementing the paradoxical sleep or rapid-eye-movement sleep, the phase of deepest dreaming,
as a paradoxical waking (Is I wake or nor awaken?).
The picnolepsy is more common on children, but we adults make picnoleptic auto-induction to try to run away
of reality. Cassinos and lottos are auto-inductive picnolepsy that make easy for us to run away from our
realities.

The Picnolepsy Cassino

A nurse working at the Sunrise Hospital invented, for the amusement of the personnel, a casino of
death where you bet on the moment the patient will die. Soon everyone started playing: doctors,
nurses, cleaning ladies; from a few dollars the stakes went up to hundreds soon there werent
enough people dying (p.21)

Apate
The world is an illusion, and art is the presentation of the illusion of the world (p.35 and 36). Art show us what
we havent been looking at, listening to or felling. Art enter as a counterpart of science.
The scientific impassibility creates apatheia or apathy, creating a informed man that has a desert arount him.

Ornament
In the 19 century and 20 century, ornament lose his space in culture and in architecture. It started in men
wardrobe, passes by war uniform and them by the women wardrobe. Even woman itself became one of the old
ornaments that are seen as disposable. Woman has become one of those ornaments of older or exotic
cultures that modern man employs or renounces as it suits him, not inventing new uses for her, as Adolf Loos
remarks, he reserves and concentrates his inventive faculties for other purposes (p. 91).