Airquakes

Abstract

In this excerpt from the introduction to volume three of Sphären (Spheres), subtitled Schäume (foam), Sloterdijk argues that what makes the 20th century uniquely singular and creative is its invention of what he calls here atmosterrorism, the assault not on the body of the enemy, but on his or her environment. This terrorism of the atmosphere is to be understood as a human-made form of quake that turns the enemy's environment into a weapon against them. Living organisms, among them humans, simply cannot not breathe, and it is this double negative that is at the heart of atmoterrorism. Weaving a fascinating narrative that links the development of insecticides and pesticides to the first use of poisonous gas during World War I, to the development of the gas chamber as the tool of supreme punishment in the United States, to the eventual convergence of putative humane killing and disinfection and delousing into the mobile and stationary gas chambers of extermination used in the Nazi concentration camps. Terrorism, argues Sloterdijk, reveals the essence of war, the will to exterminate the enemy, with the difference that the former expands the extermination of the enemy to the very world that enables the enemy to exist. In the 20th century, atmoterrorism leads to the exterminism of total war.