Concluding pages of Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air, trans Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles (2009):
The observation that life is always life-in-an-environment – and hence also against other environments – triggers a perpetual crisis of holism: humanity's old-fashioned propensity to submit to local totalities as if to benevolent loca gods is divested of all orientational value, since the surroundings have themselves become constructs, or are recognized as such. So, in the age of atmospheric toxins, strategies, and hidden agendas all such quasi-religious consenting to place one's trust in one's primary surroundings – be it nature, the cosmos, creation, homeland, situation, etc – takes on the guise of an invitation to self-harm. Advancing explication not only forces a semantic change in the meaning of naivety, it means that it becomes increasingly in-your-face, and even objectionable: the naïve, nowadays, is that which encourages sleepwalking in the midst of present danger. Having become aware of the primary and secondary greenhouse effects, living and breathing under open skies can no longer hold the same meaning as before. From the open-air homeland that mortals have had since time eternity, something uncanny, uninhabitable, unbreathable was withdrawn. Ever since Pasteur and Koch discovered the existence of microbes and had it established in scientific publications, human existence has had to be prepared to take explicit measures for symbiosis with the invisible – and all the more so to prevent and defend itself against microbiotic competitors that have now been identified with precision. As of the 1915 German gas attacks and their allied retaliations, the air totally lost its innocence; as of 1919, portions of it could be gifted as "ready-mades"; and as of 1924 it could be used as a means of executing delinquents. With the press' Gleichschaltung during the World War, civilian communication was attacked from the ground up: signs themselves became sullied and compromised by their involvement in warmongering deliria and psychosemantic arms races: the critiques of religion, of ideology and of language have declared vast parts of our semantic environments to be intellectually unbreathable zones – from thereon in, the only responsible thing to do seems to be to dwell in places that analysis has evacuated, reconstructed and re-approved for habitation. Even the Mona Lisa smiled differently after Duchamp planted the beard on her.
Under these conditions, immune systems become a subject for debate. When everything is latently able to be contaminated and poisoned, when everything is potentially deceptive and suspect, neither totality nor the possibility of being a Whole can any longer be inferred from external circumstances. No longer can integrity be thought of as something that is obtained through devotion to the benevolent surroundings, but instead only as the individual effort of an organism's concern with demarcating itself out from the environment. This paves the way for a new motif of thought without which the modern economy of ideas would be inchoate: namely, the idea according to which life insists less on its being-there, by its participation in the whole, but instead by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal of participation. To describe this as the fundamental thought for a post-metaphysical or differently-metaphysical civilization is not saying too little. Its psychosocial trace manifests itself in the shock of naturalism, a shock whereby the culture that sheds biological light on itself learns to pass from a fantasmatic ethics of universal, peaceful coexistence to an ethics of the antagonistic protection of the interest of finite unities – a learning process in which the political system has had a manifest lead ever since Machiavelli. Such an ethics can only be consolidated through a fundamental mediation on the sources of immunity.