Violins and Virilio: The Exhilaration of Erotic Escalation and a Treatise on Slowness

04/26/2021

The Drifters’ song “This Magic Moment” is defining as is “Twilight Time” by The Platters. I’m escalating. Speed is not just the defining characteristic of the present like Virilio says. Rather, it is inherent to tension which is a part of the everyday. Virilio believes that “[s]lowness can be a means of resistance”.[1] Now by ‘slowness’, Virilio means it in the way of “slowness as intensity,” e.g. “gestures in slow motion had an unimaginable grace”.[2] Eroticism and mysticism are two of the only methods of resistance to post-modernity, as they are the undoing of post-modernity. But eroticism is fast. It is quick and dirty. It isn’t quick in terms of the speed at which it is done. Erotic and transgressive acts can happen at any speed. The most sensual of moments can happen at the slowest pace and the freakiest act can happen at the fastest pace. One thing is constant: the pace of the heart is fast, and no matter how slow you go, the intensity is so high, and the tensions so strong that only a fast notion could break the tension: a kiss. The kiss can be slow, it can be fast, it can happen at any speed but it will be a magic moment. A mystical magic of inner experience.

Bibliography

Virilio, Paul, and Sylvere Lotringer. Crepuscular Dawn. SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2002.

References

[1–2]: Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2002), 66.