In this episode, my guest Italo Brandimarte discussed his journal article 'Breathless war: martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmosphere of empire.' Italo's article covers the use of poison gas by the Italian air force in the Abyssinian War. We covered the following questions:

1. Why do you think that the usual discussions of aerial warfare tend to split between the strategic, technical and the ontological plane on one hand, and the intimate, embodied and phenomenological on the other, and how does your use of concepts such as the 'envelope', the 'weather', and 'warfare beyond the human' in your analysis overcome this split?
2. Why was it that imperial Italy had come to frame its desire for imperial dominance so strongly through the frame of the weaponisation of the air in the Abyssinian war?
3. If the Futurist conception of aerial warfare resisted the full fusion of human subject and machine in the 'dissolution of the body as a locus of elemental sensing', what is different about modern drone warfare in which this seems to be the goal?
4. What is the relationship between Mussolini's use of poison gas in Ethiopia and the use of gas chambers by the Nazis?
5. When Italy is bombing Ethiopia, Italy sees aerial bombardment as the act of an advanced civilisation, yet when Nazi Germany bombs Europe, aerial bombardment is seen as a barbarian tactic. How are hierarchies of imperial dominance inscribed in the logic of: civilised=bomber, uncivilised=bombed?

Italo Brandimarte is a PhD Candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research is broadly concerned with the relations between the techno-scientific and the bodily dimensions of war and security, particularly with reference to racial and colonial violence. In his current project – provisionally titled ‘The Technology of Empire: War Experience and the Embodied Production of the International’ - Italo develops a theory of war experience that takes seriously the role of technology in the imperial history of world politics. Some of the findings from this research have been published in the European Journal of International Relations. His previous work on the politics of measurement in global counterterrorist surveillance has appeared in International Political Sociology.

---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hypervelocity/message