Terror from the Air

According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a specific day and place—on April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France. That day, for the first time in the history of humanity, the German army used against the Franco-Canadian forces a chlorine gas meant to indiscriminately exterminate the enemy. This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war, from WWI toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz, from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center. But Sloterdijk doesn’t stop there, but goes on to evoke a cultural counter-offensive: “the offensive of modern aesthetics, from the Surrealists to Dalí, and Malevich to André Breton in their relation to the double emersion of the idea of the environment and of this terror “from the air.”