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Worlds, Engagements, Temperaments
Stuart Elden
Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most interesting, prolific and controversial thinkers currently working within European philosophy. Trained in philosophy, history and literature he was initially a freelance writer, but in the last decade has been Rektor of the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (State College of Design) in Karlsruhe, Germany where he has held a chair in philosophy and media theory since 1992. He first came to prominence with the philosophical bestseller Kritik der zynischen Vernunft in 1983, which was translated as Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988.1 Since this time he has exercised a considerable influence over German and other European thought, especially French and Spanish. In Germany he is a well-known media figure, co-hosting the television show ‘In the Glasshouse: Philosophical Quartet’, on the German ZDF channel, with Rüdiger Safranski since 2002. He is a regular newspaper columnist.
Yet in the English-speaking world his stature has been considerably less, in large part down to the lack of translations of his work. While the majority of his works are in Spanish and French translations, in English only Critique of Cynical Reason, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism and some shorter pieces were translated in the 1980s and 1990s. The lack of translations of some of his most important works has made it difficult to get a handle on Sloterdijk’s overall project and specific books. He is in danger of becoming more talked about than read. Yet even his critics recognize that he has something to say. In First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, for example, Žžek described him as ‘definitely not one of our side, but also not a complete idiot’;2 and in Living in the End Times as ‘the liberal-conservative enfant terrible of contemporary German thought’.3 Žžek has sought fit to attend to his writings in a number of places, also devoting pages to him in The Parallax View and Violence.4
This lack of translations has begun to be remedied over the past few years, with translations of several of his works, and many more to come. 2009 saw translations of five shorter books – God’s Zeal; Derrida, an Egyptian; Theory of the Post-War Periods; Terror from the Air; and Rules for the Human Zoo; with the more substantial Rage and Time and Neither Sun Nor Death following in the next couple of years. Translations are in progress for the three volumes of Sphären; Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals; and Du mußt dein Leben ändern.5 Rights to many of his other works have been sold. In just a few years then, Sloterdijk has become a major figure in Anglophone engagements with continental theory, quickly moving from a peripheral position to one of the most visible contemporary philosophers. He shares conference platforms with thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, and his standing has increased with a number of high profile lectures across the world, including visiting posts in New York, Paris and Zürich.
Yet Sloterdijk is a difficult, and even at times infuriating, thinker. His ideas can appear immediately accessible and applicable, only to prove difficult to pin down. He writes two main kinds of books – short, often polemical, interventions; and much longer, wide-ranging and often digressive examinations of large topics from a variety of angles. Kusters has tellingly likened Sloterdijk’s works to ‘the stations of the London Underground; easy to enter, to find your way through, and to exit again, but hard to conceive in groundwork or overall idea’.6 This is surely something anyone who has spent time with his work would agree with: it can be hard to discern an overall intention to his writings; much less a system that binds them all together. In part this is because many of his books – think Critique of Cynical Reason, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, Rage and Time, Sphären and Du mußt dein Leben ändern – take a particular topic as a lens through which to view human history and thought. Another book, another lens. This inevitably leads to the nagging feeling that the learning on display, while vast, is sometimes superficial. Another book, another angle that is seemingly crucial. Yet this is perhaps asking him to be something he would oppose. Sloterdijk privileges the literary over the structural; poesis over rigour. He is often more of a cultural critic than a mainstream philosopher, trading on a literary and intellectual tradition that has more in common with an earlier generation of German thought and post-war French theorists than recent Anglo-American philosophy. Sloterdijk arguably signs up to the claim of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? that the task of the thinker is to generate concepts. These concepts can then be deployed. Indeed, many of Sloterdijk’s later works are developments of themes and ideas outlined in schematic form in earlier writings.
His influences can similarly be difficult to trace. Explicitly indebted to, and engaging with, Nietzsche and Heidegger, he has also a profound debt to French thought. This included Foucault in his earlier works, although somewhat displaced by Deleuze and Derrida in more recent ones. He also stresses the importance of the work of Sartre (SV 45–8). But in his references he is closer to an intellectual magpie, taking ideas and inspiration from a wide range of sources, and arranging them in intriguing ways. Crucially these inspirations are not only from the European tradition but also outside, including the years he spent studying in India.7 Sloterdijk is perhaps best understood not as a philosopher in a narrow, academic sense, but as closer to a man of letters, a humanist and intellectual. To come to the world, as the title of one of his early books suggests, is to come to language (ZWK). Philosophy, for Sloterdijk, is a form of literature. He is often critical of the academic style of contemporary philosophy, and its lack of contemporary commitment. Nonetheless, his own modes of engagement can be peculiar. A charismatic and engaging lecturer, he sometimes acts in a deliberately provocative way – witness his recent arguments with Axel Honneth concerning taxation and the welfare state, not to mention the furor over his 1999 lecture on genetics where he crossed swords with Jürgen Habermas – only to feign astonishment at the reactions that followed.
This brief introduction provides an overview of Sloterdijk’s work, beginning with the engagement with Nietzsche and the work on the cynics; touching on his critique of political kinetics and the role of Europe; before saying rather more about the spheres project and the metaphysics of globalization; and then finally turning to the notion of anthropotechnics. These are not exhaustive, and do not entirely fit into neatly chronological categories, but the intention is to outline the main contours of his thought, before situating the chapters that follow.
Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason parodied Kant’s critical project, but the title was one that many others, Sartre included, had appropriated. In his final lecture course on the cynics from 1984, Foucault tells his audience that he’s been told about Sloterdijk’s recently published book. Foucault confesses that he’s not yet read it, but remarks that ‘no critique of reason will be spared us’, as there have been pure, dialectical, political and now cynical. He notes that he’s been given some rather differing assessments of the book’s interest.8 Foucault was in a sense right, as the book provoked widely divergent reactions.9 Sloterdijk’s project was to retrieve a more critical form of cynicism that would be faithful to original cynics like Diogenes, a form he calls kynicism. This differs from the disillusioned modern variant of cynicism which has sunk into a malaise, a state of enlightened false consciousness. It might appear to be comfortable but is in reality impoverished. Like many of Sloterdijk’s books it is wildly digressive, encyclopaedic and seemingly disordered.
Sloterdijk claimed that the book was situated on the left, but this was not the left dominated by the cultural Marxism of the then dominant Frankfurt school. Indeed, Sloterdijk proposed that instead the true critical theory in Germany came out of Freiburg, the place where Husserl and Heidegger had spent most of their careers (ET 143). Yet rather than Husserl, alongside Heidegger was another controversial German philosopher, Nietzsche. Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger would have been considered left-leaning, yet Sloterdijk, in common with French thinkers of a slightly earlier generation, thought they could be appropriated in more progressive ways. In the Critique he raises the prospect of ‘an existential Left, a neokynical Left – I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left’ (KZV 395; CCR 209); and elsewhere talks of a ‘Nietzschean Left’.10 Sloterdijk’s work is clearly a break with orthodox Left thought, and increasingly seems to bear little relation to that part of the political spectrum. As such, the kind of relation he has with other major contemporary European thinkers such as Žžek and Badiou with their return to Lenin and Mao is inevitably highly charged and fractious.
Sloterdijk’s writings have always had a profound debt to the arts, something he shared with Heidegger and Nietzsche and the first generation Frankfurt school of Adorno and Horkheimer, rather than the more rigid approach of the school’s post-war thinkers. Indeed, after the Critique, Sloterdijk’s next book was a novel, Der Zauberbaum, which in itself was a challenge to Habermas’s injunction to keep philosophy and literature separate, and the academic book that followed was explicitly on Nietzsche, ranging across his works but focused as a study of his Birth of Tragedy (DB; TS).11 Sloterdijk has periodically returned to Nietzsche’s work seeing him as a prophet of the human yet to come (ET; VGN; MT), a project which explicitly links to his interest in self-fashioning and anthropotechnics discussed below. Sloterdijk’s contribution is thus more in the way of reopening critical theory to a vibrancy that he felt was missing from the post-war tradition of the Frankfurt school. As both Babich and Couture below note, Sloterdijk felt that ‘the masochistic element has outdone the creative element’ in critical theory (CCR xxxv). His aim, in part, is to reverse this.
Rather than the claim that Sloterdijk is the ‘most French of the German philosophers’ (LHTC 320–1), he would doubtless describe himself as, like Nietzsche, a ‘good European’. A number of books followed over the next few years, including Eurotaoismus, which was subtitled ‘towards a critique of political kinetics’. He suggests that we need to move towards a politics, not of infinite movement or mobilization, but of lightness or levity, the conundrum of how beings who are condemned to act can be ‘still in the storm’ (ET 54).12 At the beginning of the 1990s he published a sequence of books that picked up these political or geopolitical themes, including Im Selben Boot and Falls Europa erwacht. The last was a rallying call for Europe, taken as a whole, to reclaim its place on the world stage, in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Both books proclaim a worldly or cosmopolitan ethics, suggesting that the world as a whole has to be taken seriously as the place of our mutual co-existence. This is a call for a post-imperial Europe, as one power among others on a global stage. This theme is picked up as a major theme in Weltfremdheit, especially the last chapter on cosmopolitan citizenship.
Many commentators on his work, authors in this volume including the editor among them, see Sloterdijk’s magnum opus as the three-volume Sphären.13 Žžižek described it as the ‘monumental Spheres trilogy’, and suggests that ‘far from advocating a return to pre-modern containment, Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call a “provincialism for the global era’’’.14 Like the Critique and some of Sloterdijk’s other works it is broadly conceived and the arguments supported by a wide range of references, texts and illustrations. The book can be seen in many lights, but one which has become common is to take Sloterdijk seriously when he contends that it should be understood as the counterpart to Heidegger’s Being and Time, as Being and Space (S I 345) which he later describes as ‘the great unwritten book of Western Philosophy’ (S II 59 n. 17). The spatial aspects of Heidegger’s thought have received periodic attention,15 but in Sphären Sloterdijk engages directly with Heidegger’s own texts only occasionally (S I 336–45; and see NG). Instead his focus is to take inspiration from the ideas and to work that through in extraordinary breadth and detail.16
For Sloterdijk, in distinction to Heidegger, the key concern is not so much being, das Sein, but rather being-with or being-together, Mit-sein. This is a question both of our relation to the world of things that do not share our mode of being, and the world of other humans, who do.17 Sloterdijk takes the Heideggerian idea of being-in-the-world and analyses the ‘in’ the way Heidegger expressly denied, as a spatial term, as a question of location, of where we are (WK 308; NSND 175–6).18 As Oosterling suggests, for Sloterdijk ‘Dasein is design’, and the focus becomes the interiors we inhabit.19 In an interview with Bettina Funcke, Sloterdijk suggests that when he began writing in the 1990s that there was ‘a voluntary spatial blindness because to the extent that temporal problems were seen as progressive and cool, the questions of space were thought to be old-fashioned and conservative, a matter for old men and shabby imperialists’.20 He suggests that the work of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, while now recognized as pioneering in these respects, did not initially have the impact that they have today. Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space was inspirational, and is frequently cited in Sphären, though he suggests that he resisted this influence.21 In this interview he suggests that Heidegger was the spark for his reflections.
I was also fascinated by a chalkboard drawing Martin Heidegger made around 1960, in a seminar in Switzerland, in order to help psychiatrists better understand his ontological theses. As far as I know, this is the only time that Heidegger made use of visual means to illustrate logical facts; he otherwise rejected such anti-philosophical aids. In the drawing, one can see five arrows, each of which is rushing toward a single semicircular horizon – a magnificently abstract symbolization of the term Dasein as the state of being cast in the direction of an always-receding world horizon (unfortunately, it’s not known how the psychiatrists reacted to it). But I still recall how my antenna began to buzz back then, and during the following years a veritable archaeology of spatial thought emerged from this impulse.22
Being is being-with; being-with is always to be in a world. Being-in-a-sphere, then, is the primary thought he seeks to examine in the project. Spheres come in a range of sizes. The book moves from the bubbles of the fi...
