On the Assembly of Things

Perhaps here is a more “correct” definition of vital …

The terror of our times consists in the emergence of a knowledge of modernized elimination that passes through a theory of the environment, the strength of which is that it enables the terrorist to understand his victims better than they understand themselves. (16)

Attacks on ecologically dependent vital functions: respiration, central nervous regulation, and sustainable temperature and radiation conditions. (16)

The precise sense of the word terrorism presupposes an explicit concept of the environment, the reason being that terror involves the displacement of destructive action from the ‘system’ (here: the enemy’s body) onto his ‘environment’—in this case at hand: the air milieu in which enemy bodies moves, subject to their own breathing reflex. (22)… the malign exploitation of the victim’s life-sustaining habits.

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