One of the early important works by Virilio (first published in French in 1980), an influential French theorist and public intellectual, in which he further theorizes about the effects of the speed of contemporary life and media transmission on the consciousness of the postmodern subject. He considers this topic through a dizzying number of cultural and artistic references. Virilio becomes one of the key reference points in the discourse about postmodernity and images during the 1990s.