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Nigel Armstrong & Tim Pooley, Social and Linguistic Change in European French, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 288pp., £62.00, ISBN 9780230219502

would suggest that John Armitage’s chapter on ‘The face of the figureless: aesthetics, sacred humanism and the “accident of art”’ not only taps into the spirit of the collection but provides the reader with really helpful landmarks by which to navigate the techno-scientific landscape of Virilio’s thought. Armitage draws attention to a central opposition at the heart of Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearance, namely the dehumanising effects produced by what Virilio calls ‘profane’ humanism (the dromosphere, desensitisation, the dematerialisation and virtualisation of art) and an alternative humanism that Armitage terms ‘sacred’ and which he defines as ‘a system of thought that rests on human values, interests, needs, and especially the welfare of humans’ (161). ‘Sacred humanism’ is a form of resistance to the disintegration of ethical and aesthetic markers and the ensuing loss of meaning in contemporary art/media culture. This opposition, although Armitage stresses the point that ‘the sacred’ emanates from within the profane, resonates to different degrees across the chapters of this collection. Joy Garnett uses it to structure her critique of techno-culture and in particular its closure of distance. Garnett explores alternatives (‘correctives’) to the dominant power of the dromosphere through germinative, creative and spatial processes and activities (painting, cooking and other ‘poetics of ephemera’ such as the ‘accident in art’) that not only acknowledge the ‘dogma of acceleration as a polluant’ (39) but also contribute to the deceleration of time, accentuate the particularity of a bodily/human function (hand–eye coordination for example) and introduce a process of critical and reflective duration. In his chapter ‘The production of the present’ Ian James also calls for a recognition of ‘sacred humanism’ in his challenge to the viewer to ‘seize hold of the technicities of cultural production in order to produce different economies of effect, to produce singularities and intensities of experience’ (240). Telecommunicative technologies are rapidly changing how we see and perceive the present. For decades, Paul Virilio has been at the forefront of debates on the impact of this technology on real-time consciousness and space– time consciousness. This collection of essays brings into sharp focus the pervasive nature of this technology across many aspects of our daily lives. There is much in these essays to satisfy the high theorist and researcher, and also the museum curator, painter and student of visual culture. As Sylvère Lotringer claims, this work is a ‘breakthrough in Virilio Studies’. I agree and it is long overdue.