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“Talking Weather from Ge-Rede to Ge-Stell.” In: Róisín Lally, ed., Sustainability in the Anthropocene: Philosophical Essays on Renewable Technologies. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. 51-64.

Disciplines

Continental Philosophy | Environmental Studies | Ethics and Political Philosophy

Abstract

Talking about the weather was until recently a clicM expression for time wasting, idle chatter, what Heidegger calls Gerede. Today's talk of global warming seems altogether different. Yet Heidegger's analysis of Ge-Stell also permits a complex reading of the mobilization of popular opinion, totalized as he knew this to have been in his own political era. Here it is useful to take up the question of its current totalization along with a reflection on today's "climatic regimes," as Bruno Latour has recently spoken of these. For his part, Peter Sloterdijk uses the language of atmoterrorism, and although his analysis draws on long-standing events from the twentieth century, he is virtually alone in so doing. And if Sloterdijk alludes to Luce Irigaray's Heidegger and the Forgetting of Air, Irigaray herself refers more to interiority-that is, yoga and breath. Indeed, most references to atmosphere, breath, are intimate affairs. If, in Minima Moralia, Adorno alludes to shame, the embarrassment not only of needing breath, of vulnerability and exposure, but also the awful pain that one is (still) able to breathe (this is the survivor's culpability), Sloterdijk' s reflections on what he calls "explication" ask us to review what we continue to take for granted. And Sloterdijk crosses academic and other lines by reminding us that the United States' use of drones for assassination (which became standard military practice with Obama) is a terrorist practice by definition. Weather militarization is on the same continuum.

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