Crepuscular Dawn

The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevotriggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box.The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including theaccident of science. And it is on the way.In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in obliquearchitecture, believing that time had replaced space as the most important point of reflectionbecause of the dominance of speed.We were basically on the verge of converting space time into spacespeed... Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome, and the possibility of anotherhumanity: a humanity which is no longer extra-territorial, but extra-human.Crespuscular Dawn expandsVirilio's vision of the implosion of physical time and space, onto the micro-level of bioengineeringand biotechnology. In this cat-and-mouse dialogue between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio,Lotringer pushes Virilio to uncover the historical foundations of his biotech theories. Citingvarious medical experiments conducted during World War II, Lotringer asks whether biotechnologyisn't the heir to eugenics and the "science for racial improvement" that the Nazis enthusiasticallyembraced. Will the endocolonizataion of the body come to replace the colonization of one's ownpopulation by the military?Both biographical and thematic, the book explores the development ofVirilio's investigation of space (architecture, urbanism) and time (speed and simultanaeity) thatwould ultimately lay the foundation for his theories on biotechnology and his startling declarationthat after the colonization of space begins the colonization of the body.