John Armitage

Luxury has been associated with superficiality, consumerism, and meaninglessness throughout the history of serious philosophical thought. How could something so obviously about the external possibly be existentially significant or even a profound concept? Luxury Philosophy carves out alternative modes of understanding the luxurious, arguing that the negative characterization by 18th- and 19th-century philosophers of luxury as dissatisfaction or as an...

In books such as The Aesthetics of Disappearance, War and Cinema, The Lost Dimension, and The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio’s examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy. Virilio and the Media presents...

Since the publication in 1975 of Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, the range of Virilio's critical works and their impact is now clear within a variety of subjects. Making astonishing interventions into art and architecture, geography, cultural studies, media, literature, aesthetics, and sociology, the momentous implications of which have yet to be entirely understood, Virilio is the cultural theorist for our...

John Armitage shows how the ideas and theories of continental philosophers Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille, Gadamer, and Adorno play an important role in the understanding of luxury practices, revealing the actual and potential extent of modern and contemporary critical luxury studies. Discussing contemporary case studies representing luxury, including the longing for luxury perfume, the transgression of superyachts, and the consumer...