One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness. In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what (...) are we to make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics? Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering. (shrink)

Building on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and other practitioners of the life of theory, Sloterdijk launches a posthumanist defense of philosophical inquiry and its everyday, therapeutic value.

The acclaimed philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity.

Peter Sloterdijk ist einer der wichtigsten zeitgenossischen Philosophen. Immer wieder hat er mit seinen Ideen offentliche Diskussionen angeregt. Peter Trawny, der Sloterdijk schon als Student gelesen hat, besuchte den Philosophen im Mai 2019 in einem kleinen Dorf in Sudfrankreich. Das Ergebnis dieser Begegnung ist ein Gesprach unter anderem uber das Verhaltnis von Philosophie und Biographie. Sloterdijk erlautert personliche Aspekte seines Denkens, die stets philosophische Bedeutung beanspruchen. An vielen Stellen hort der Leser das Echo einer einzigartigen (...) Land- und Ortschaft; eine heiter-gelassene Stimmung, die ernste Themen nicht vermeidet, ist uberall zu spuren. Und so wird schliesslich klar, was Philosophie nicht nur fur Sloterdijk ist. (shrink)

Was treibt die Menschheit voran? Entwickelt sie sich von Niederem zu Höherem? Orientiert sich Fortschritt an Lehren aus der Geschichte? Ist Geschichte als Progression der und in der Freiheit zu begreifen? Solche überkommenen Fragen und die korrespondierenden unpassenden Antworten blenden den Übergang von einer Generation zur nächsten aus, der zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts immer mehr gefährdet ist. Mit dem Gelingen oder Scheitern dieses Übergangsstadiums, in welchem teilweise kriegerische und mörderische, teilweise die Population ganzer Kontinente auslöschende Szenarien dominieren, steht der (...) Fortbestand der uns bekannten Zivilisation auf dem Spiel. Deshalb ist das neue Buch von Peter Sloterdijk eines von der äußerst pessimistischen Sorte: ein Schwarzbuch über kommende Generationen. Denn da in der Moderne die Traditionsfäden chronisch reißen und immerfort neue Vektoren den Zug in Kommende bestimmen, wandeln sich die Individuen zu "Kindern ihrer Zeit", Nachkommen "schlagen aus der Art". Da moderne Elterngenerationen selbst meist schon zivilisatorisch labil antreten, gerät die Formung ihres Nachwuchses zu einem unbeendbaren Match zwischen potentiell schrecklichen Eltern und potentiell schrecklichen Kindern.--. (shrink)

In this essential early work, the preeminent European philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary meditation on humanity's tendency to refuse the world. Developing the first seeds of his anthropotechnics, Sloterdijk develops a theory of consciousness as a medium, tuned and retuned in the course of technological and social history. His subject here is the "world-alien" in man that was formerly institutionalized in religions, but is increasingly dealt with in modern times through practices of psychotherapy. Originally (...) written in 1993, this almost clairvoyant work examines how humans seek escape from the world in cross-cultural and historical context, up to the mania and world-escapism of our cybernetic network culture. Chapters delve into the artificial habitats and forms of intoxication we develop, from early Christian desert monks to pharmaco-theology through psychedelics. In classic form, Sloterdijk recalibrates and reinvents concepts from the ancient Greeks to Heidegger to develop an astonishingly contemporary philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

In this new volume, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that we will never understand the 20th century if we focus on events or ideologies. Rather, he argues that the predominant motif of the 20th century is what Badiou called a passion for the real, which manifests itself as the will to actualize the truth directly in the here and now.

Der Mensch als Übender, als sich durch Übungen selbst erzeugendes Wesen - Rainer Maria Rilke hat den Antrieb zu solchen Exerzitien zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in die Form gefaßt: "Du mußt dein Leben ändern." In seinem Plädoyer für die Ausweitung der Übungszone des einzelnen wie der Gesellschaft entwirft Peter Sloterdijk eine grundlegende und grundlegend neue Anthropologie. Den Kern seiner Wissenschaft vom Menschen bildet die Einsicht von der Selbstbildung alles Humanen. Seine Aktivitäten wirken unablässig auf ihn zurück: die (...) Arbeit auf den Arbeiter, die Kommunikation auf den Kommunizierenden, die Gefühle auf den Fühlenden. Es sind die ausdrücklich übenden Menschen, die diese Existenzweise am deutlichsten verkörpern: Bauern, Arbeiter, Krieger, Schreiber, Yogi, Rhetoren, Instrumentalvirtuosen oder Models. Ihre Trainingspläne und Höchstleistungen versammelt dieses Buch zu einer vergnüglich-instruktiven Lektüre von den Übungen, die erforderlich sind, ein Mensch zu sein. (shrink)

Upon its publication in Germany in 1983, this author's book stirred both critical acclaim and consternation, attracting a wide readership. He finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal and institutional settings; his book is both a history of the impulse and an investigation of its role today, among those whose earlier hopes for social change have crumbled and faded away.

Von Peter Sloterdijk kann man zu Recht sagen, daß jeder seiner Aufsätze, jeder seiner Vorträge auch ein ungeschriebenes Buch ist.

Displaying the distinctive combination of narration and philosophy for which he is well known, this new book by Peter Sloterdijk develops a radically new account of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author takes seriously the historical and philosophical consequences of the notion of the earth as a globe, arriving at the thesis that what is praised or decried as globalization is actually the end phase in a process that began with the first circumnavigation of (...) the earth Ð and that one can already discern elements of a new era beyond globalization. In the end phase of globalization, the world system completed its development and, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions of life. Sloterdijk takes the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851, as the most expressive metaphor for this situation. The palace demonstrates the inevitable exclusivity of globalization as the construction of a comfort structure Ð that is, the establishment and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door. (shrink)

Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk, the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing how the history of Western civilization can be read as a suppression and return of rage.

Displaying the distinctive combination of narration and philosophy for which he is well known, this new book by Peter Sloterdijk develops a radically new account of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author takes seriously the historical and philosophical consequences of the notion of the earth as a globe, arriving at the thesis that what is praised or decried as globalization is actually the end phase in a process that began with the first circumnavigation of (...) the earth Ð and that one can already discern elements of a new era beyond globalization. In the end phase of globalization, the world system completed its development and, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions of life. Sloterdijk takes the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851, as the most expressive metaphor for this situation. The palace demonstrates the inevitable exclusivity of globalization as the construction of a comfort structure Ð that is, the establishment and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk, der Medienstar unter den deutschen Philosophen, hat wieder zugeschlagen. Nach seinem dreibändigen Mammutwerk Sphären legt er nun ein mit gut 400 Seiten relativ schmales Buch vor, in dem er der viel beschworenen und beschwätzten Globalisierung aus philosophischer Perspektive zu Leibe rückt. Sloterdijks Clou: Die Globalisierung ist gar nicht ein so neuartiges Phänomen, wie oft behauptet wird, sie begann schon mit den Entdeckungsfahrten von Kolumbus & Co. Und die heutigen Globalisierer - die um den Globus nicht mehr (...) segelnden, sondern jettenden Business-People - sind die rücksichtslosen Tatmenschen, die Entdecker und Eroberer unserer Tage, im Guten wie im Schlechten. Sloterdijk skizziert den "kapitalistischen Weltinnenraum" als vorläufiges Endprodukt der Globalisierung: Es ist die westliche Wohlstandskugel, deren Bewohner sich zwar den Gesamtglobus verfügbar gemacht haben, die aber schön unter sich bleiben wollen. Sloterdijk schreibt wie gewohnt auf sprachlich hohem Niveau, kann sich aber auch so manchen Kalauer nicht verkneifen. Insgesamt eine äußerst anregende Lektüre, die getAbstract.com jedem empfiehlt, der ein Phänomen tiefer verstehen will, das allzu oft nur rein ökonomisch abgehandelt wird. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the latent spatial philosophy in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, highlighting a key aspect of the Heideggerian oeuvre that has mostly been overlooked by commentators. It outlines the concept of an original spatiality of being that is opposed to the philosophies of space in both physics and Cartesian metaphysics. Through an elaboration of the essentially relational character of Da-sein, it is argued that Heidegger’s vocabulary in ‘Being and Time’ yields an onto-topology that shows Da-sein’s primary spatial embeddedness (...) in the world. Finally, the paper argues that Heidegger’s concept of spatiality remained cursory due to its residual existentialist focus. In this context, it attempts a re-evaluation of its intellectual trajectory within the realm of the Spheres project. (shrink)

Thinker on Stage is Peter Sloterdijk's audacious, empathetic reading of Friedrich Nietzche's first published work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Intended originally as a postscript to a new edition of Nietzsche's book, Sloterdijk's text grew and became a book in its own right. Sloterdijk characterizes Nietzsche as a centaur-a philologist/musician, a philosopher/poet; the possessor of multiple talents inseparable from one another-who, in consequence, led the life of an obscure outsider on the (...) fringes of organized cultural life. To Sloterdijk, Nietzsche is not a hairsplitting philologist behind a lecturn but rather a thinker on stage, enacting a psychodrama on the origins of tragedy in universal human suffering. Reaching beyond philology, and risking his career, Nietzsche used this stage to present a glimpse of Greek antiquity quite unlike that cherished in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Sloterdijk, in turn, uses his subtle reading of Nietzsche to make his own cultural evaluations. Above all, he finds in The Birth of Tragedy, and in Nietzsche's life, a refutation of the will to power, and a sign that Nietzsche-fragile, wounded, endangered, yet self-affirming-is our contemporary. Book jacket. (shrink)

A series of dialogues with the most exciting and controversial German philosopher writing today. Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the “enlightened false consciousness” of Habermasian critical theory. Two decades later, after spending seven years in India studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting renewed interest for his writings on politics and globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a three-volume archaeology of the human attempt (...) to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming from Semiotext. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological mutation, development media, communication technologies, and his own intellectual itinerary. Iconoclastic and provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and let themselves be “kidnapped” by contemporary “hypercomplexities”; they must forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological and global. Neither Sun nor Death is the best introduction available to Sloterdijk's philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative, as much at ease with current French Theory as with Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. (shrink)

The first volume in Peter Sloterdijk's monumental Spheres trilogy: an investigation of humanity's engagement with intimate spaces. An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self to the exploration of (...) world to the poetics of plurality. Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis. Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles. Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext. Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons. (shrink)

In this short book Peter Sloterdijk offers a genealogy of the concept of freedom from Ancient Greece to the present day. This genealogy is part of a broader theory of the large political body, according to which Sloterdijk argues that political communities arise in response to a form of anxiety or stress. Through a highly original reading of Rousseaus late Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Sloterdijk shows that, for Rousseau, the modern subject emerges as a subject (...) free of all stress, unburdened by the cares of the world. Most of modern philosophy, and above all German Idealism, is an attempt to reign back Rousseaus useless and anarchical subject and anchor it in the cares of the world, in the task of having to produce both the world and itself. In the light of this highly original account, Sloterdijk develops his own distinctive account of freedom, where freedom is conceptualized as the availability for the improbable. This important text, in which Sloterdijk develops his account of freedom and the modern subject, will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

Vol. 1: First published in German under the title: Sph'aren I. Blasen.

Im Sommersemester 1988 hatte Peter Sloterdijk die Stiftungsdozen­tur für Poetik an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt inne. Wie selbstverständlich ging er dabei aus von den Charakteristika dieser Poetik-Vorlesungen - und gelangte damit zugleich ins Zentrum seiner Reflexionen. »Wer von diesem Frank­furter Podium aus spricht, setzt sich in der Regel nicht aus, sondern blickt auf seine Aussetzungsgeschichte zurück. Man hat hier das Wort, weil man es anderswo schon einmal hatte. Man hatte es anderswo und früher, weil man es (...) nicht unterlassen konnte, sich auszusetzen, und weil man eigensinnig darauf bestand, sich hörbar und lesbar zu machen. Wir stoßen hier auf das Leitmotiv dieser Vorlesungen: wenn es in ihnen einen roten Faden gibt, dann entrollt er sich aus der Idee, daß die Poetik des Sichaussetzens als eine Poetik des Anfangens entwickelt werden muß. Ich will die Frage, wie man es anfängt, anzufangen, so darlegen, daß sie zugleich eine persönliche und allgemeine Antwort erlaubt.«. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk's essay on Friedrich Nietzsche and the benefits and dangers of narcissistic jubilation. For Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Nietzsche represents nothing short of a “catastrophe in the history of language”—a new evangelist for a linguistics of narcissistic jubilation. Nietzsche offered a philosophical declaration of independence from humility, a meeting-point of sobriety and megalomania that for Sloterdijk has come to define the very project of philosophy. Yet for all the significance of this language-event named Nietzsche, Nietzsche's (...) contributions have too often been elided and the contradictions at the root of his philosophy too often edited out. As Sloterdijk observes, “Never has an author so insisted on distinction and yet attracted such vulgarity.” Nietzsche Apostle, drawn from a speech Sloterdijk gave in 2000 on the hundredth anniversary of Nietzsche's death, looks at the ways in which Nietzsche has been branded over the years through selective compilation, and at the ways in which Nietzsche turned himself into a brand—a brand announced by his proclaimed “fifth Gospel,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For Sloterdijk, the focus should not be on the figure of Zarathustra or on the “will to power” often used as a kind of philosophical shorthand to sum up Nietzsche's work, but on Zarathustra's act of “speaking” itself. Nietzsche Apostle offers a brief history of self-praise and self-affirmation, an examination of the evolution of boasting, and a very original approach to Nietzsche, philosophy's first designer brand of individualism. (shrink)

Peter Sloterdijk turns his keen eye to the history of western thought, conducting colorful readings of the lives and ideas of the world's most influential intellectuals. Featuring nineteen vignettes rich in personal characterizations and theoretical analysis, Sloterdijk's companionable volume casts the development of philosophical thinking not as a buildup of compelling books and arguments but as a lifelong, intimate struggle with intellectual and spiritual movements, filled with as many pitfalls and derailments as transcendent breakthroughs. Sloterdijk delves (...) into the work and times of Aristotle, Augustine, Bruno, Descartes, Foucault, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Marx, Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato, Sartre, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. He provocatively juxtaposes Plato against shamanism and Marx against Gnosticism, revealing both the vital external influences shaping these intellectuals' thought and the excitement and wonder generated by the application of their thinking in the real world. The philosophical "temperament" as conceived by Sloterdijk represents the uniquely creative encounter between the mind and a diverse array of cultures. It marks these philosophers' singular achievements and the special dynamic at play in philosophy as a whole. Creston Davis's introduction details Sloterdijk's own temperament, surveying the celebrated thinker's intellectual context, rhetorical style, and philosophical persona. (shrink)

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida expressed two paradoxical convictions: he was certain that he would be forgotten the very day he died, yet at the same time certain that something of his work would survive in the cultural memory. This text by Peter Sloterdijk - one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy - makes a contribution of its own to the preservation and continuation of Derrida's unique and powerful work. In this brief but illuminating (...) text, Sloterdijk offers a series of recontextualizations of Derrida's work by exploring the connections between Derrida and seven major thinkers, including Hegel, Freud and Thomas Mann. The leitmotif of this exploration is the role that Egypt and the Egyptian pyramid plays in the philosophical imagination of the West, from the exodus of Moses and the Jews to the conceptualization of the pyramid as the archetype of the cumbersome objects that cannot be taken along by the spirit on its return to itself. 'Egyptian' is the term for all constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction--except for the pyramind, that most Egyptian of edifices, which stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that is built to look as it would after its own collapse. (shrink)

Studie over: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, één der vroegste geschriften van de Duitse filosoof F.W. Nietzsche (1844-1900).