A Century of Atmospheric Warfare: 1915-2015
Kai Frederik Lorentzen
lorentzen at hotmail.de
Thu Apr 23 10:28:23 CDT 2015
No, I meant your German.
And the middle name I gave you refers to the small quantity of your
Sloterdijk reading.
So what's this about?
Certainly not about the content of Sloterdijk's thinking in which you
never showed any interest.
There are parts of his work - the idea of replacing taxes by charity on
a larger scale, or his Nietzschean glimpses at the biotechnological
breeding of humans ("Regeln für den Menschenpark") - which make me
frown, but Sloterdijk's overall project - to add something like /Being
and Space/ to Heidegger's Being and Time (and thereby to reconcile
Heidegger's thinking with modern urbanity) - is important and exiting.
Reading Sloterdijk makes you smarter. And it's fun!
To question Sloterdijk's competence for language makes no sense to me.
You don't have to enjoy each and every neologism he creates, but the
enormous creativity of the language is one of the reasons that
Sloterdijk is also read among architects and artists. And - in contrary
to someone like Habermas - he is heavily debated in France. In the year
2005, Sloterdijk got honored with the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific
Prose. It's the most important prize for scientific prose in the
language we call Deutsch.
http://www.deutscheakademie.de/de/auszeichnungen/sigmund-freud-preis/peter-sloterdijk/urkundentext
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 23.04.2015 15:33, jochen stremmel wrote:
> Sorry. "Sloterdijk's German is ten times better than Stremmel's."
Make that: ... Stremmel's English.
The English of Sloterdijk's translators is better than Sloterdijk's
German: "as few words as possible": simple and elegant; "einem Minimum
an Ausdrücken": would you write that, Kai? I don't think so. A-and for
the record, that middle name Kai gives me, is no quote of mine. <
>
> 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/
>> >
>> >
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0210&msg=71071&sort=date
>> >
>> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0210&msg=71069&sort=date
>> >
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150423/d7035ee4/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list