The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Virilio introduces his understanding of "picnolepsy"-the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed. Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception-a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural-and still consummate-theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy"-the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.