Speed as metaphysics NIK WINCHESTER

The cover of a recent ECM anthology1 presents a photograph of an object, upon which is projected a statement from one of Paul Virilio’s texts (Bunker Archeology): ‘The Essential is No Longer Visible’. The object is tastefully shot and the image is pleasing in a decorous manner; however, it is the writing-projection that stays in the mind. When one reaches the end of The Virilio Reader, this kind of statement becomes both representative and symptomatic of the Virilian corpus. ‘The Essential is No Longer Visible’: as one lingers for a moment, the question arises: was the essential ever visible? What is it about essentiality that makes visibility a necessary quality? The statement has the appearance of provocation; Virilio litters his texts with ‘no longer’, ‘from now on’, etc., but his expressing of the erasing of a false concatenation is basically meaningless. This grandiosity of the Virilian text requires a somewhat sober consideration, the velocital historiography that inhabits the Reader hurtles at the speed of that which it describes. It remains for the reader to decipher the wake at a studied, and studious, leisurely pace. There is also the secondary question of the status of the Reader. Entering into such we inhabit a space with certain qualities, certain criteria and ques-tions from which to adjudge, it is not the univocal space of the quality of the writing itself (although this still retains an importance), but further, the selec-tion, the introduction (the impositions of the editor). Not only the question of the value of Virilio but also Der Derian, indeed the potentiality of a