29-09-12, 10:15 AM
|
 |
Sir Héctor, American Hero
|
|
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Buenos Aires
Posts: 1,447
Rep Power: 29
|
|
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.
Terror from the Air
Quote:
|
...it is essential to bear in mind that all terrorism, in its very procedual principle, is generated by atmoterrorist means.Terrorism takes the form of an assault on the enemy's a cute environmental living conditions, starting with a poison attack on the human organism's most immediate environmental resource: the air he breathes. In this it can be seen that what -since 1789 and even more so since 1915- has been known as la Terreur and more generally as terror were, with naive brutality and insidious cunning, already anticipated in the various other modes of inflicting violence on the life world conditions of human existence -one thinks here of the poisoning of drinking water, examples of which can already be found in antiquity, of contamination attacks on defended fortresses, of assault troops torching and smoking out cities and shelters, of spreading horror stories and the like. All the same, such comparisons miss the essential point. For it is crucial to insist on identifying terrorism as a child of modernity, in so far as its exact definition was forged only after the principle of attacking an organism's, or a life-form's, environment and immune defenses was shown in its perfect technical explication. And this first came to pass, as mentioned above, on April 22, 1915 when the contents of 5700 gas cylinders were released in a light wind blowing from Bixschoote to Langemarck, taking with it a chlorine gas cloud from the German lines to the French trenches. In the evening hours of that day, a hand jumped on the clock of ages, marking the end of the vitalistic, late-Romantic modernist phase and the beginning of atmoterrorist objectivity. No caesura of equal profundity has occurred on this terrain since. All the great disasters of the 20th century, like those of the early twenty-first, belong without exception to the history of explication, begun that same April day on the Western front as French-Canadian troops, surprised by the whitish-yellow gas cloud creeping over them from the northeast, fled the front-line in panic, coughing and screaming in retreat.
|
|
Similar Threads
