Leo Kim at Noema Magazine:
According to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the 20th century’s form of life also began with the air. Sloterdijk puts the moment at 6 p.m. on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, when a German regiment under the command of Col. Max Peterson unleashed chlorine gas in warfare for the first time. Previously, violence in war had been directed at the human body; this attack targeted the “living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu,” as Sloterdijk writes in “Terror From The Air.” “Instead of aiming at the soldiers … it targeted the air.” As troops were engulfed by this deadly atmosphere, they began to foam at the mouth, spit blood and die. What was once a background feature of the environment was thus “explicated,” transformed into a discrete resource that could be mobilized toward strategic ends.
Sloterdijk urges us to recognize how air is materialized as functional, extractable, manipulable, subject to human intervention. By situating the birth of the 20th century in this moment of terror, he suggests that we are not the inheritors of Boyle’s experimental worldview as much as Col. Peterson’s instrumentalized, manipulated, weaponized air.
more here.
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