Seminary report: Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

As we proclaim in the last post, today was held the first reading-seminary for the 2015-2016 course. We have discussed a very famous book by Paul Virilio: Speed and Politics, and here we propose some key elements about our meeting:

• Virilio is quite close to Deleuze & Guattari when they talked about the Machine War and de nomads. In this sense, we can say speed is "smoothing" the territory as the Machine War does for Deleuze and Guattari. 
• In relation to Foucault, there is rather different: actually, Foucault talks about territory as a concrete place, a closed place. In this vein, Virilio is close to a Serre's conception from speed and movement as a flux.
• Virilio points out that to control is manage the movement. He we can hear echoes from our proposal of cinepolitics, 40 years before we think it.
• Finally, we leave here some considerations we can use in the future for our work:

About speed producers: What are they? The revolution (in a initial sense) starts on flows.

Alongside the classic dichotomies of social thought, we have to study another one: the station-movement: there are points that we arrive and others which those we starts, and flows.

Viruses are a war front. The policy is circulation organization (Agamben says it's organization / management of life, not circulation/movement)

The movement needs a vehicle: a materiality is needed in order to move.

 Photo Credit: Flickr, user Dennis Van Zuijlekom