ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Virilio’s work continues some of the concerns developed by Guy Debord, and other radical thinkers from the 1960s, on the ‘technologies of separation’ that create increasingly fragmented and alienating urban environments. Virilio continues to focus on these concerns but examines, in particular, the way that war and endo-colonization transforms cities. The chapter shows that Virilio encourages people to think about how they experience the city, prompting them, the increasingly ‘terminal citizens’, to think about their relations to otherness and difference in cities of panic. The panic symptom of a veritable looping of the imaginary, the ‘siege psychosis’ that is today smiting people’s minds, is the first sign typical of a ‘foreclosure’ that is temporal, and, let’s hope, temporary, in this experiment, this life-size ‘test’, of globalization. The ‘overexposed city’ attempts to make all activity and movement transparent to the policing and security services.
