Jean Richer is an architect-geographer and architect of the Bâtiments de France. A PhD student at the ACS laboratory of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais for a thesis on the architect and philosopher Paul Virilio, he participated in the critical edition of Paul Virilio's collection of essays The End of the World is a Concept Without a Future (Seuil, 2023).
LE FIGARO. - Paul Virilio's collection of 22 essays is entitled "The End of the World is a Concept Without a Future." Yet he was not a particularly optimistic thinker about changes in society. How would you describe its relationship in the future?
Jean RICHER. - He used to say, "You have to know how to look the jellyfish in the face." I don't think he was a pessimistic thinker; Rather, he was giving us a lesson in objectivity and finitude, considering that envisioning the end of things – not necessarily the end of the world – was a way of living happily in the present. But he was really occupied with serious matters, he was looking at what few dare to observe. This can be explained by the fact that Paul Virilio saw in the accident or in the catastrophic event that happens the possibility of revealing something about the fabric of which the world is made. It is in these moments that we can discover something important, ontological, about the world. If the disaster appears in some respects as a moment of lucidity, it is not precisely to give up. It pushes us to be careful observers of what happens in order to make the right decisions.
One of his main criticisms of modernity is that of acceleration. What does his vision of speed consist of? What are the dangers of acceleration according to him?
He is often compared to the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who has written extensively on acceleration, but I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing. Paul Virilio starts from the inaugural experience of the Second World War and the bombings he experienced in Nantes in 1943. He considers that the phenomena of speed are the prerogative of the military and observes a form of world domination in the art of war, going so far as to say that in peacetime one continues to be mobilized to use the same strategies, the same tools, as in wartime. On this basis, he analyzes the technological elements of progress as vehicles of speed that make us go faster and faster, as if we were waging war against time.
In addition, in addition to his Christian faith, he was very committed to the homeless and developed a whole reflection on those who are ejected from this world of instantaneous communication, this world of speed. For him, the dominance of speed creates a division between the included and the excluded. This is his famous neologism of dromology (study of the role played by speed in modern societies, editor's note): those who persist in participating in the race get away with it, but one wonders what happens to those who are ejected from it.
Since the dawn of time, man has had a relationship to the world that is determined by these relations of proportion, but speed, by crushing distances, makes space disappear. Let's go back to the metaphor of the car: the faster it goes, the less we perceive the distance travelled, and the greatest risk it poses to us is no longer the car accident but this loss of bearings.
Jean Richer
Speed, for Paul Virilio, is a phenomenon that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. In his first books, he even goes back to prehistoric times, but it is above all all the speed machines – railways, cameras – that make it possible to speed things up. The speed machine par excellence is the camera, more than the train or the car, because by producing images it allows us to go even faster, to have even faster communication.
In this process, he sees mostly mental harms. He wonders how long the human mind is capable of enduring such intense speeds. Can our psychic life survive at such great speeds before we go mad? It is important to remember that this acceleration is so dazzling that events are only passing before our eyes. In an article, he explained that the automobile was a good metaphor: behind our windshield we find ourselves at very high speed watching landscapes pass by without even understanding them. The bottom of his mind is that we are in a speeding vehicle, we see the events unfold in front of us and, sheltered behind our windshield, we feel comfortably seated, whereas if we stopped to look at the side of the road, we would understand how dramatic the crises that are unfolding are. Acceleration, in the end, is a comfort.
He also developed a way of thinking about space, which he said was tending to disappear... And reproaches the dominant ecology for not thinking about space and speed. What for?
Paul Virilio starts from the principle that our psychic life depends on our experience of the world, which passes through relationships of proportion, magnitude and dimension. Since the dawn of time, man has had a relationship to the world that is determined by these relations of proportion, but speed, by crushing distances, makes space disappear. Let's go back to the metaphor of the car: the faster it goes, the less we perceive the distance travelled, and the greatest risk it poses to us is no longer the car accident but this loss of bearings. As soon as you no longer have your bearings, all accidents are possible.
This is what he calls grey ecology: in addition to the pollution of water, air and land, we must take an interest in the pollution of time and distance. The space-time couple is completely linked: the more the velocities increase, the more time expands and the space shrinks. This results in a mental injury that creates blindness, a veil in front of our eyes that prevents us from seeing danger. Maybe we don't want to see the danger either, and we immerse ourselves in this speed with pleasure, almost with addiction, because it allows us to avoid reacting to things that are complicated.
With distances reduced to nothing with telecommunications, Paul Virilio believes that there is only one city, which he calls the "meta-city". In any case, there is only one city for the connected; Not for the excluded.
Jean Richer
In speeding, there is also a question of incarceration: the faster the car goes, the more you are a prisoner of your vehicle. If you exceed 150 km/h, you can't even imagine jumping out of the car. And Paul Virilio believes that the faster things go, the more human beings are incarcerated, the more they need prostheses, and the less autonomous they are. Finally, this incarceration isolates each individual and leaves no room for political ecology. We can find quite concrete examples in everyday life: we are made to feel guilty because we have to sort our garbage well or turn off the lights. It is typically an action of individual incarceration by which social issues are placed on the individual that should be dealt with at the level of the life of the city, the territories or the nation.
As early as 1995, he was talking about the emergence of teleworking, teleconsultations, etc. How did he view the advent of a digital civilization?
With distances reduced to nothing with telecommunications, Paul Virilio believes that there is only one city, which he calls the "meta-city". In any case, there is only one city for the connected; Not for the excluded. Virilio returns several times to urban riots, being very sensitive to the fate of those who are not included in this hyperconnection.
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But with the advent of digital civilization, he is most worried about the disappearance of imagination. The avalanche of poor images, this permanent aporia on telecommunications networks, raises the question of whether we still have the capacity to create images, and therefore the capacity to imagine. The current debates on generative artificial intelligence, which Paul Virilio did not know, raise the same question: that of our ability to imagine and create. If we delegate this to a machine, we can wonder if we are not harming our ability to create. And the instantaneous communications we are immersed in with social media are so fast that they can also keep us thinking.
His technocritical writings suggest that he was a conservative thinker. However, it is more in line with a left-wing political tradition. How does this fit into him?
Paul Virilio is in some ways very conservative; he quotes sulphurous authors such as Maurice Blanchot. But on the other hand, he is left-wing and Catholic at the same time. These two things are bothering him. He participated in the events of May '68 very voluntarily, and this brought about a fork in the road in his professional and intellectual life.
Secondly, are we necessarily conservative when we criticize progress? There was recently a manifesto about artificial intelligence that got a lot of attention. And there's something a little weird about technology: the slightest criticism is seen as a conservative counteroffensive. It's quite surprising! One can be tech-savvy and critical, precisely in order to orient technology differently.
Looking at each invention as an accident or its finitude is ultimately a pretty good solution to live in the present and avoid the occurrence of accidents.
Jean Richer
As far as Paul Virilio is concerned, one of his maxims, the most often quoted, sums up his vision of technical progress quite well: "when you invent the boat, you invent the shipwreck; When you invent the plane, you invent the crash." Every technology contains its own accident. Since he thinks that the origin of technological progress is military, it must therefore be harmful in his eyes.
He had converted to Christianity at the age of 18. What place does religion occupy in his thinking?
In one of his essays, Paul Virilio talks about Bernadette Soubirous, he has a somewhat messianic moment, and it ends just early, as if he didn't want to share his religious commitment. But his diaries are filled with apostolic quotations and reflections on his own faith. It was a faith that he lived every day. It can be compared to what happened in the journal Esprit: Catholic intellectuals who wrote in Catholic languages but never said so. There is something a little Jansenist about this approach.
But it is true that he wrote a work full of hope. He said, "I'm not a revolutionary, I'm a revealer." We find the idea of the Apocalypse: the Apocalypse should not be read as the end of the world, but as the end of a world and the revelation of the coming Jerusalem. For an urban planner, it's great, we have the image of a Miyazaki-like flying city landing on earth. It's the revelation of another world. In Virilio, there is this hope to find something better, to move towards a better society.
To return to the title, Virilio does not prophesy the end of the world but the end of a world?
Exactly, and this quote, taken from one of Paul's notebooks, is also a thumbing of the nose at collapsology. It is absolutely not a question of being a harbinger of bad news. Looking at each invention as an accident or its finitude is ultimately a pretty good solution to live in the present and avoid the occurrence of accidents.
The End of the World Is a Concept Without a Future, by Paul Virilio, Le Seuil, 2023, 1248 p.,
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