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Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being

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Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being In Medias Res This book brings together a team of internationally renowned scholars in a series of critical reflections on the oeuvre of Peter Sloterdijk. Res Sloterdijk has in recent years Contributions by, among Peter Sloterdijk’S grown into one of Germany’s others, Sjoerd van Tuinen, most influential thinkers. Rudi Laermans, Peter Weibel SPherological His work, which is extremely and Bruno Latour. relevant for philosophers, PoeticS of Being scientists of art and culture, Willem Schinkel is associ- Schinkel & Noordegraaf-Eelens sociologists, political ate professor of sociol- scientists and theologists, ogy at Erasmus University is only now gradually being Rotterdam, the Netherlands. translated in English. This Edited by book makes his work accessible Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens Willem Schinkel & to a wider audience by putting is an economist and philo- Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens it to work in orientation sopher working at Erasmus towards current issues. University Rotterdam and Sloterdijk’s philosophy moves the Netherlands School of from a Heideggerian project Public Administration in to think ‘space and time’ to The Hague. a Diogenes-inspired ‘kynical’ affirmation of the body and a Deleuzian ontology of network-spheres. In a range of accessible and clearly written chapters, this book discusses the many aspects of this thought. AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS WWW.AUP.NL amSterdam univerSity PreSS Schinkel_def.indd 1-3 30-6-2011 12:45:42 In Medias Res In Medias Res Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being Edited by Willem Schinkel & Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens Amsterdam University Press The publication of this book is made possible by a generous grant from The Ver- eniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org). OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initia- tive to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggre- gating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. Cover illustration: Prefab/Nakagin Capsule Tower/Kisho Kurowaka © ananasamiami.com/mwarchitecture.blogspot.com Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 978 90 8964 329 2 e-isbn 978 90 4851 450 2 nur 730 Creative Commons License CC BY NC (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) W. Schinkel & L. Noordegraaf-Eelens / Amsterdam University Press, Amster- dam, 2011 Some rights reversed. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Table of contents 1. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction 7 Willem Schinkel & Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens 2. Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres 29 Christian Borch 3. “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference 43 Sjoerd van Tuinen 4. Disinhibition, Subjectivity and Pride. Or: Guess Who Is Looking? 67 Peter Sloterdijk’s reconstruction of ‘thymotic’ qualities, psychoanalysis and the question of spectatorship Robert Pfaller 5. Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic 83 Peter Weibel 6. Uneasy Places. Monotheism, Christianity, and the Dynamic of the Unlikely in Sloterdijk’s Work – Context and Debate 99 Laurens ten Kate 7. The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society 115 Rudi Laermans 8. In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit 133 A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground Yana Milev 9. A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk 151 Bruno Latour 10. Sloterdijk and the Question of Action 165 Erik Bordeleau 11. The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk 185 Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens & Willem Schinkel 5 Contributors 195 Index 197 6 in medias res 1. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction Willem Schinkel & Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens Peter Sloterdijk is a morphological thinker. He thinks morphologies and his thinking continually morphs. He is interested in life forms, in the forms of collec- tivity, and in the collective forms of individuality. He just as soon analyzes the intra-uteral life of the unborn child as he does the space of the apartment-dweller. He finds in Ficino’s rendition of the visual field just as many indications of a being-in-spheres as in the 15th and 16th century discovery of the sea as the primary medium of modern being. Sloterdijk’s work can be said to have a certain cosmo- gonic character. After the Fall, man stands naked and in need of inventing life forms that cover him, in which he can be immersed. The great metaphysical buildings of antiquity and Christianity were life forms providing existential shelter in the form of spheres of socio-spatial co-existence. But they have lost credibility, and we are back out in the open, naked. According to Sloterdijk, the topological message of modernity is: “that people are living beings, living at the edge of an uneven round body – a body which, as a whole, is neither a mother’s body nor a container, and which has no protection to offer”.1 In Sloterdijk’s diagnosis, if one could call it that, something of the existential despair of Pascal shines through: we realise we are afloat in a meaningless universe, crawling a tiny globe that has been dethroned, cast from centre to periphery. But there is also Voltaire’s scepti- cism and humour: the same situation can be described in terms of the Micromégas, arrogantly roaming the globe. Then again, there is in Sloterdijk a Nietzschean energy, a positive affirmation of this situation, and a continuous call to invent new ways of forming life. For like in Hannah Arendt’s conception of ‘natality’, being is a continuous coming-into-the-world (zur Welt kommen). In his recent work, that is accompanied by a constructive call: Sloterdijk turns Rilke’s ‘du mußt dein Leben ändern’ into the positive challenge of an existential acrobatics. The art of life is a morphological art, an acrobatic act of constituting collective spheres whilst balancing over a crevice on Nietzsche’s rope between animal and overman.2 And it is in such intermediary zones that new life forms come to be constituted through practice and training.3 In working through a range of exam- ples and exemplars drawn from history, from philosophy, from art and literature, 7 Sloterdijk has never sought to build a ‘systematic’ philosophy. Any autological closure in his work is likely to be undone in the next work, and Sloterdijk is rather a trainee trying new forms, new combinations, reaching out and philosophically embodying an ek-sistenz rather than a closed set of propositions. And yet there are definite recurring themes in his work. They are the existential acrobatics of a being that finds itself on a globe that, paradoxically, constitutes a horizontal plane of existence. This being finds the other at the same time as it finds itself, and it engages in the building of collective worlds, the constitution of socio- or psychospatial forms of immunization. Immunizations exist in cosmolo- gical and social forms, and they are optimized by cultural forms of what Sloterdijk calls anthropotechnics: forms of mental and physical training or exercise in the face of ambiguous risks.4 The title of his latest substantial work, Du mußt dein Leben ändern, is indicative of a call for the practices of the self that such anthropo- technics entail. Likewise, his small book on the three monotheistic religions deals with religion as forms of anthropotechnics, of building immunizing spheres that are currently contested.5 It is in such engagements with the key political questions of our age that Slo- terdijk continuously manages to produce new insights and to feed public debate with what Niklas Luhmann would no doubt have called ‘irritation’, in the very positive sense which resembles the German concept of Herausforderung. At times Sloterdijk’s interventions, which are never exclusively targeted at a public of pro- fessional philosophers, have given rise to heated debate in the public sphere. Such became clear for instance in the reactions, most notably by Jürgen Haber- mas, to Sloterdijk’s lecture Regeln für den Menschenpark. More recently, another in- heritor of the Frankfurt School style of thought, Axel Honneth, has fiercely en- gaged Sloterdijk in public debate in Germany. Below, we shall dwell on such public debate surrounding Sloterdijk a bit longer. For now, it goes to show that Sloterdijk’s work, and also the style of his work, repeatedly leads to irritation, which, again, we mean in the positive sense of being moved, having to respond. What this book attempts is not an academic overview of Sloterdijk’s work, relat- ing it to the philosophical traditions in which it might be situated. We are not interested in a hermeneutic form of Kaltstellung, of neutralizing Sloterdijk’s work by properly situating it in the ongoing canon of philosophy; for one, because his work is not situated (only) in philosophy. A second reason is that Sloterdijk’s work has a strong evocative character. It is meant to bring about new thoughts and practices. In line with this evocative character, we have chosen to ask specia- lists in various fields to relate aspects of Sloterdijk’s work to practical subjects and/or cases in the fields of philosophy, social, political and cultural theory and theology. Precisely because Sloterdijk uses so many perspectives and emphasizes the importance of training, of practice, this book engages with his work in a practical manner.
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