Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction
- 2 Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres
- 3 “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference
- 4 Disinhibition, Subjectivity and Pride. Or: Guess Who Is Looking?: Peter Sloterdijk’s reconstruction of ‘thymotic’ qualities, psychoanalysis and the question of spectatorship
- 5 Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic
- 6 Uneasy Places. Monotheism, Christianity, and the Dynamic of the Unlikely in Sloterdijk’s Work – Context and Debate
- 7 The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society
- 8 In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit: A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground
- 9 A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk
- 10 Sloterdijk and the Question of Action
- 11 The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk
- Contributors
- Index
10 - Sloterdijk and the Question of Action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction
- 2 Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres
- 3 “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference
- 4 Disinhibition, Subjectivity and Pride. Or: Guess Who Is Looking?: Peter Sloterdijk’s reconstruction of ‘thymotic’ qualities, psychoanalysis and the question of spectatorship
- 5 Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic
- 6 Uneasy Places. Monotheism, Christianity, and the Dynamic of the Unlikely in Sloterdijk’s Work – Context and Debate
- 7 The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society
- 8 In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit: A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground
- 9 A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk
- 10 Sloterdijk and the Question of Action
- 11 The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
We still do not think at all decisively enough about the question of action.
HeideggerReach the threshold
Rests
Remains.
DaodejingBy way of introduction: Therapeutics vs. politics in the work of Sloterdijk
1. In this preliminary study we propose the development of some central issues in Sloterdijk's thought, taking the question of power and its political elaboration as our central theme. In his seminal Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk establishes a crucial polemical distinction that takes on a programmatic value: “Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter”. Stigmatizing “the psychological naïveté of the old concept of politics”
and stating that, “the depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the modern”, Sloterdijk gradually develops a theory of therapeutics that can be described as the most determining feature of his work.
2. For Sloterdijk, therapeutics literally encompasses the domain of politics or, to put it another way, Sloterdijk seeks to counter the universality of politics with a “generalized therapeutic concern” that “queries the individual as to his capacity to endure his innate cosmopolitanism”. For Sloterdijk, therapeutic theory is from the outset located in a cosmopolitical context, and the apparent strangeness of the expression “innate cosmopolitanism” merely anticipates the later development of his “theory of the spheres” and his remarks on immunitarian processes.
3. So initially – in other words primarily in Critique of Cynical Reason and Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism – we see the development of a theory that interprets politics in the general context of a radical critique of metaphysics and subjectivity. For example, where revolutionary politics traditionally raizes partiality to the value of truth in order to constitute itself as a subject of unilateralized action, Sloterdijk advocates “deneuroticizing politics”:
Let me put it this way: during the plunge from the body of the mother into late capitalism, the pain of individuation accumulates for which late capitalism as such cannot be held responsible – however close this reflex may be and as numerous as the discourses may be that tell us, in the course of the instinctive search for the guilty party, where he can be found.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Medias ResPeter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being, pp. 165 - 184Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012