What "theory" should be. Sloterdijk's departure point is the idea that the gas attacks at Ypres in 1915 were the beginning of modernity, understood as a condition of "explicitation" of that which had once been implicit, taken for granted. Suddenly, the very air we breathe could be taken away. This meant warfare was no longer the warrior attacking the other warrior, it was the organized project of removing the "enemy's" conditions of safe existence. Hence, carpet bombing, Auschwitz, terrorism and drone warfare. This also meant that suddenly air was something to be managed (smog warnings, the weather report), packaged (Duchamp's capsule of "Paris air"), feared (climate change, Fukushima). Sloterdijk's writing is powerful, and the terms he uses--"airquake," "black meterology"--incantatory. He argues that a world in which the air we breathe is no longer just the air we breathe is also a world in which violence cannot be contained, in which being in the world is being in the fire, the being in fear. Thus, modernity is the removal of all latency (also, and almost incidentally, the opening up of all new things to an exploitation that is inevitably both vicious and capitalistic--1995 US Defense Department report: Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025). It's a world in which you have to remove the enemy's humanity, because the things you are gonna do to him are things you can't do to a person (to avoid the very obvious present-day examples, consider Cold War Moscow, the "world base of all terrorism").

In a more positive (less utterly terrifying) light, it means that diving into context is the condition of the twentieth century, in which psychoanalysis and the death of God and linguistic relativity and quantum laws remove all certainty, with concomitant damage to the self. Thus postmodernism, the anti-explicit reaction. We cope? We try?

In short, everything is "air conditioned," which means everything is poisoned. And to live is an apprenticeship in mistrust; "the years of non-devotion begin." ( )