On Sloterdijk's Terror from the Air: The Book of (Political) Air Conditioning

Terror from the Air – originally published in 2002 in German under the title Luftbeben, or “Airquake” – constitutes a turning point in Sloterdijk's attempt to understand human cultures as atmospheric systems and his more general conception of politics as a subsection in the technique of climatology. Shaking to its core the metaphysical and ultimately fascist grounding of the notion of the human – think of the Blut und Boden, “Blood and Soil” ideology – Sloterdijk adds another chapter to his seminal Spheres project by defining our primary situation as being-in-the-air and affirming our collective responsibility for the environment we inhabit that such a situation entails. After Bubbles and Globes, Terror in the Air, which forms part of the third and last book of the Sphere Trilogy, Foams (Schäume, 2003), thus focuses on an essential climatic dimension of our being-in-the world, paving the way...