A Century of Atmospheric Warfare: 1915-2015

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 23.04.2015 12:18, jochen "I read two or three sentences by Sloterdijk 
in 1983"  stremmel wrote:

> "If asked to say in a single sentence and as few words as possible 
> what, apart from its incommensurable achievements in the arts, the 
> 20th century introduced into the history of civilization by way of 
> singular and incomparable features, the response would emerge with 
> three criteria."
>
> That single sentence is representative for most if not all of 
> Sloterdijk's writing. He simply can't do it. But that he does well.

Huh? The quoted sentence is to introduce the one immediately to follow: 
"Anybody wanting to grasp the originality of the era has to consider: 
the practice of terrorism, the concept of product design, and 
environmental thinking." I don't know what your problem is. Except for 
the resentment ...

In original: "Sollte man mit einem Satz und einem Minimum an Ausdrücken 
sagen, was das 20. Jahrhundert, neben seinen inkommensurablen Leistungen 
in den Künsten, an unverwechselbar eigentümlichen Merkmalen in die 
Geschichte der Zivilisation eingebracht hat, so könnte die Antwort wohl 
mit drei Kriterien auskommen. Wer die Originalität dieser Epoche 
verstehen will, muss in Betracht ziehen: die Praxis des Terrorismus, das 
Konzept des Produktdesigns und den Umweltgedanken."

Sloterdijk's German is ten times better than Stremmel's.


>
>
> 2015-04-23 11:27 GMT+02:00 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com 
> <mailto:against.the.dave at gmail.com>>:
>
>     Terror from the Air
>     By Peter Sloterdijk
>     Translated by  Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran
>
>
>     According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a
>     specific day and place: April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France.
>     That day, the German army used a chlorine gas meant to exterminate
>     indiscriminately. Until then, war, as described by Clausewitz and
>     practiced by Napoleon, involved attacking the adversary's vital
>     function first. Using poison gas signaled the passage from classical
>     war to terrorism. This terror from the air inaugurated an era in which
>     the main idea was no longer to target the enemy's body, but their
>     environment. From then on, what would be attacked in wartime as well
>     as in peacetime would be the very conditions necessary for life.
>
>     This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war,
>     from World War I's toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz,
>     from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center.
>     Sloterdijk goes on to describe the offensive of modern aesthetics,
>     aesthetic terrorism from Surrealism to Malevich—an "atmo-terrorism" in
>     the arts that parallels the assault on environment that had originated
>     in warfare.
>
>     http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/terror-air
>
>     On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 2:27 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>     <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>     >
>     > http://aphelis.net/century-atmospheric-warfare-1915-2015/
>     >
>     >
>     -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>     > http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0210&msg=71069&sort=date
>     >
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