A profoundly extensive concept in Virilio's phenomenological critique of speed, his idea of the negative horizon pertains to the perversion of vision within the accelerated perspective. Introduced in Virilio's Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy (2005a [1984]), his notion animates simultaneously the forced negation and cinematic substitution through acceleration of the objective horizon of human sensible reality and a daring interrogation of the negative in its eff ective, aff ective and ontological topologies.

Virilio's revelation that speed is the new void culminates in the negative horizon of the desert, which facilitates the distorted quest for absolute acceleration and its surface visual eff ects: for not only does the desert serve the negative horizon of accelerated perspective as a refl ective surface but the surface itself becomes a compulsive or sought- after void wherein all visual extension dissipates and a luminous mirage of horizontal speed erupts as a corporeal, vertiginous, illusion. ‘At the height of desertifi cation,’ Virilio writes, ‘the fascination with the negative horizon amounts to exhausting the last resource of space: the void’ (NH, 146).

Questioning the harmful aspects of displaced perspective, Virilio concentrates on the results, infl uences and ontological topography of movement- power or the sometimes surprising relationships between speed and the void. Accordingly, his account of the negative horizon and of the accelerated dynamics of displaced perspective in the desert and elsewhere proceeds by a historical series (i.e. woman–horse–motor), a sort of zoophilous archaeology of movement- power, which Virilio utilises to illustrate the organisation of human cultures in an accelerated frame.