3 Review(s)

French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. Gathered here in A Winters Journey are four remarkable conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Brausch look at a twentieth century characterized by enormous technological acceleration and by technocultural accidents of barbarism and horror. The dialogues in A Winters Journeystructured loosely around the dates 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1980chart Virilios intimate intellectual biography, from his childhood lived against the unstable backdrop of a heavily bombed, wartime Nantes to maturity in a crisis space that is neither entirely militarized nor yet fully civilian, but somewhere between the two. In the course of these conversations, Virilio and Brausch ultimately find hope that in understanding the events of the last century and the cultural responses spawned by them, we can create a more humane era that is more adept at handling the transformations of its technology and culture. A Winters Journey is a revealing and engaging look into the intellectual life and ideas of one of the most influential theorists of contemporary civilization. Virilio is an impressive commentator on the conditioning power of the mass media . . . He flits from image to image like a poet and usually builds to a profound climax. Guardian If Walter Benjamin had one true intellectual descendant who extended his inquiries into the second half of the twentieth century, this must be Paul Virilio. Lev Manovic