Sloterdijk

Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most challenging and contentious thinkers currently working within the European tradition. This is the first collection devoted to his work for English-language audiences and will act as an introduction to his work, set an agenda for engagement with his ideas, and relate his writings to a range of political, theoretical and practical contexts. Since his philosophical bestseller Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Sloterdijk has exercised an important influence over German and other European thought and recently interest in his diverse oeuvre has grown considerably. The past few years have seen a number of his books translated into English, with many more to come. The book seeks to do justice to the breadth of Sloterdijk’s work throughout his career, orientated around the central topics of cynicism, ressentiment, the posthuman, space and world, art and literature, language, social science and his role as a public intellectual. Contributors include Babette Babich, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Eduardo Mendieta, Marie-Eve Morin, Efrain Kristol, Wieland Hoban, Nigel Thrift, Jean-Pierre Couture, and Sloterdijk himself. An explicitly interdisciplinary project, Sloterdijk Now is a crucial introduction to the work of this central thinker, in its complexity, variety and notoriety. It is set to spark debate amongst students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

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 Rousseau's 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 Rousseau's 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.

In this short book Peter Sloterdijk clarifies his views on religion and its role in pre-modern and modern societies. He begins by returning to the Mount Sinai episode in the Book of Exodus, where he identifies the emergence of what he calls the 'Sinai Schema'. At the core of monotheism is the logic of belonging to a community of confession, of being a true believer – this is what Sloterdijk calls the Sinai Schema. To be a member of a people means that you submit to the beliefs of the community just as you submit to its language. Monotheism is predicated on the logic of one God who demands your utmost loyalty. Hence at the core of monotheism is also the fear of apotheosis, of heresy, of heterodoxy. So monotheism is associated first and foremost with a certain kind of internal violence ? namely, a violence against those who violate their membership through a break in loyalty and trust. On the basis of this analysis of the inner logic of monotheism, Sloterdijk retraces its historical legacy and shows how this account enables us to understand why we react so nervously today to all forms of fundamentalism – whether that of radical Islamists, the Catholic Pius Brotherhood or evangelical sects in the USA

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.

The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions ? Christianity, Judaism and Islam ? are shaping our world more than ever before. In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians, Jewish monotheism was born as a theology of protest, as a religion of triumph within defeat. While the religion of the Jews remained limited to their own people, Christianity unfolded its message with proclamations of universal truth. Islam raised this universalism to a new level through a military and political mode of expansion. Sloterdijk examines the forms of conflict that arise between the three monotheisms by analyzing the basic possibilities stemming from anti-Paganism, anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism. These possibilities were augmented by internal rifts: a defining influence within Judaism was a separatism with defensive aspects, in Christianity the project of expansion through mission, and in Islam the Holy War.

In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth – the myth of the return of religion. For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative 'You must change your life'. In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler. It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being.

In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.

The core of what we refer to as ‘the project of modernity’ is the idea that human beings have the power to bring the world under their control, and hence it is based on a ‘kinetic utopia’: the movement of the world as a whole reflects the implementation of our plans for it. 

But as soon as the kinetic utopia of modernity is exposed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems appear: things don’t happen according to plan because as we actualize our plans, we set in motion other things that we didn’t want as unintended side-effects. We watch with mounting unease as the self-perpetuating side-effects of modern progress overshadow our plans, as a foreign movement breaks off from the very core of the modern project supposedly guided by reason and slips away from us, spinning out of control. What looked like a steady march towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrollable and catastrophic syndrome of perpetual mobilization. And precisely because so much comes about through our actions, these developments turn out to have explosive consequences for our self-understanding, as we begin to realize that, so far from bringing the world under our control, we are instead the agents of our own destruction.

In this brilliant and insightful book Sloterdijk lays out the elements of a new critical theory of modernity understood as a critique of political kinetics, shifting the focus of critical theory from production to mobilization and shedding new light on a world facing the growing risk of humanly induced catastrophe.

In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk pursued an enlightenment of the Enlightenment in both its beginnings and the present. After God is dedicated to the theological enlightenment of theology. It ranges from the period when gods reigned, through the rule of the world-creator god to reveries about the godlike power of artificial intelligence. The path of this self-enlightening theology, which is carried out here by a non-theologian, must begin well before Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God, and it must move beyond this dictum to explore the present and the future.

Since the early 20th century we have seen how the metaphysical twilight of the gods, which has preoccupied philosophers and theologians, has been accompanied by an earthly twilight of the souls. The emergence of psychoanalysis, and more recently the development of the neuro-cognitive sciences, have secularized the old Indo-European concept of the soul and transferred many accomplishments of the human mind to computerized machines. What remains of the eternal light of the soul after the artificial lights have been turned on? Have the inventors of AI thrust themselves into the position vacated by the death of god? Perhaps the distinction between God and idols will soon re-emerge here for the citizens of modernity, only this time in a technological and political register. For them, theological enlightenment – which is completely different from an instinctive rejection of religion – will be a fateful task.

This new work by one of the most original thinkers today will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in religion, philosophy and critical theory today.