These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times

Leslie, Esther

doi:10.25620/e220615-1

Videohttps://doi.org/10.25620/e220615-1

Cite as: Esther Leslie, ‘These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times’, lecture presented at the symposium Heavier Than Air: Resisting the Military State, ICI Berlin, 15 June 2022, video recording, mp4, 45:11 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220615-1>

Lecture
15 Jun 2022

These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times

By Esther Leslie

Gas, made in the factories of future conglomerates IG Farben (Germany) and Imperial Chemical Industries (Britain), diffused from the battlefields of the First World War and seeped into dreams and thought. In Walter Benjamin’s concept, this gas of modern life re-synthesized, in retrospect, the apparent innocence of a photographic gaseous haze – which, in truth was a deposit of economic structure, political fantasy, a damp fog of imperial history that threatened to linger on – into a killing atmosphere on the Front, which in its way also threatened to persist, permeate, and poison the lamley declared after-war. What gases and deadly historical fogs surround people today in turbulent days of war and competition, of street control and protection of private property? What protections might a human adopt and adapt to see into and through the opaque atmospheric screens? Are new gases needed to neutralise the old ones or is the climate too much corrupted?

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and imbrications of politics and technologies, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and Deeper in the Pyramid (2018) and The Inextinguishable (2021), both with Melanie Jackson.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

Sam Dolbear
Flossie Draper

This event is partly supported by an Initiativstipendium from the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, who is supporting Sam Dolbear and Flossie Draper to explore the possibility of a publication of Gas gegen Gas in both German and English.

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:45:11
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/esther-leslie/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Symposium

Heavier Than Air: Resisting the Military State

The starting point is a novel entitled Gas gegen Gas (Gas against Gas) written by the chemist, editor, and translator Dora Sophie Kellner (1890–1960), which was serialized in a number of newspapers between 1930–32. The novel takes place between Berlin and a number of islands in the Adriatic Sea in the interwar years. It centres on two female protagonists, one of whom assists in the invention of a gas that might shield urban populations from the effects of chemical warfare: an antidote to chloroacetophenone, or tear gas. It is a work of ambiguous genre, suspended between capitalist crime novel, bourgeois family drama, and feminist sci-fi, born out of the traumatic events of the First World War, foreshadowing years of conflict to come.

Gas gegen Gas builds on a short piece of journalism, entitled ‘The Weapons of Tomorrow’ (1925), which was subsumed into Kellner’s husband Walter Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, though it is likely to be, at least partially, written by her. If this article describes in terrifying detail the body’s experience of contact with chemical gases, inflicted by a conspiracy of technology and the state, the novel is an attempt to map its technical, scientific, and political resistance.

Eva Weissweiler’s recent biography of Dora Sophie Kellner, Das Echo deiner Frage. Dora und Walter Benjamin — Biographie einer Beziehung (2020), has made Kellner’s intellectual career and this novel in particular more widely known in the German-speaking world. Over the past year, Sam Dolbear and Flossie Draper (who is also the great-granddaughter of Dora Sophie Kellner and Walter Benjamin) have collected and collated the novel’s installments from the three different periodicals in which they were printed and embarked on its first complete publication in both German and English.

This symposium will begin with a synopsis of the novel, followed by an exploration of its various themes. It aims to introduce the life and work of Dora Sophie Kellner and place the novel within its contemporary and subsequent historical contexts, particularly anti-war aesthetic and political currents in the 1920s; to consider the place of the city and the vulnerability of the body in the endurance of, and resistance to, war and state violence; to investigate the relationship between the technologies of war and colonialism, capitalism, and science, and the place of tear gas within the histories of riot, protest, and insurrection; and to explore histories of science fiction, questions of forensics, trauma, genre, and seriality, the possibility of an anti-militarist or feminist science, and the politics of breath and turbidity.