This article explores the issues for contemporary critical practice raised by Paul Virilio's engagement with the future. Virilio's project is an ongoing attempt to theorize cultural, political, military and techno-scientific developments in terms both of the speed at which those developments occur and the different speeds which they impose on the modes and forms of existence. Virilio's work represents a key moment in the addressing of what I will call the aporia of speed confronting critical work today. This aporia concerns (...) the need for critical thought to move both slowly - with reference to traditional, established historico-critical interpretative frameworks - and quickly - at the ever-increasing speed of techno-scientific developments that call into question the very viability of those conventional interpretative frameworks. Virilio's engagement with the aporia of speed is necessarily an engagement with the future, for his effort to maintain a critical discourse at the 'leading edge' must encounter the mainstream discourses of a 'future perfect' that accompany, promote and even generate techno-scientific progress. At a more profound level, Virilio's work addresses not only these technophilic discourses but also the humanist conceptions of space, time and history that allow both celebratory and critical discourse to be articulated. My examination of Virilio's encounter with these fundamental conceptions focuses on his theorization of the tendency and the accident, for an understanding of these is crucial to understanding how his work engages with questions of space, time and history. Indeed, Virilio's work is best thought of, I will argue, as an ongoing series of 'tendential analyses' that privilege the accident over the 'substance' of any given techno-scientific development. But these tendential analyses do not posit alternative, more pessimistic accounts of the 'future perfect'. In his paradoxical theorizing of the accident as unforeseeable but nevertheless substantive and non-contingent, Virilio approaches the aporia of speed - the dual necessity and impossibility of critical thought. His work is not so much another futurological discourse as it is a discourse that tends toward an experience of the untimely. It is this tendency that is its most valuable contribution to the criticism of the future. (shrink)

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational (...) division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler. (shrink)