Brief Notes on Sloterdijk and Universalization
The contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has earned his contentious reputation most notably from two separate polarities of his intellectual development. In the 1980s he emerged as a figure ripe for the inheritance of the Nietzsche-Heidegger lineage as one of Germany’s insightful yet uncomfortable provocateurs. The publication of the Critique of Cynical Reason in 1983 cemented his integration into such a genealogy. At the genesis of the new millennium, however, he would renew his stature with the inauguration of his spheres trilogy (Bubbles: 1998, Globes: 1999, Foams: 2004), enunciating “spherology” as his philosophical orientation for the twenty-first century. These two polarities represent—at least on their surface—a salient relocation of his theoretical commitments on the issue of “grand” or “meta” narratives. This post intends to highlight these divergences and to detect the moment of separation in Sloterdijk’s oeuvre.
There are two important dates in European philosophy leading up to 1983 that we should briefly meditate on: 1968 and 1979. The events now known simply as “May ’68” culminate in the failure to overthrow the French governmental and economic systems. The philosophical regimes (existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and especially structuralism) that dominated the post-war European academy became impoverished to what Deleuze designated as the “children of ’68.”[1] The resulting decade of European philosophy manifested radical revisions of the previously dominant theoretical traditions: Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production, Castoriadis’ Imaginary Institution of Society, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality uprooted phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and Marxist understandings of the contemporary cultural predicament. This period of emendation colloquially climaxes (at least if cultural studies syllabi are to be taken seriously) in 1979 with the publication of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. Here, Lyotard recapitulates Nietzsche’s death of God, Derrida’s différance, Kristeva’s intertextuality, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome into the compact thesis of postmodernity: “incredulity toward metanarratives.”[2] Whether Lyotard’s thesis is descriptive or normative remains disputed, and I have no investment in that particular discourse; however, what this definition of postmodernism illustrates is the resistance to homogenization that is realized in the post-68 epoch. I say “realized” because this disposition has been in its developmental maturation since at least 1882. It is no mistake that the figure who proclaims the death of God in Nietzsche’s parable is a madman:
‘I have come too early,’ he said then: ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.’[3]
Perhaps it did not take ninety-seven years for the rabble to see the lightning and hear the thunder. Perhaps it already occurred in 1968 when revolution slipped through the hands of the French masses, or in 1966 when Derrida announced the collapse of the center (effectively rendering Lévi-Strauss’ anglophone premiere stillborn), or in 1939 when Joyce displaced the metalanguage of the novel. In any case, this “tremendous event” that is first articulated in 1882 finds its expression in Lyotard’s thesis of 1979.
It is this frame of reference that characterizes much of European philosophy in the 1980s, including Sloterdijk’s work. Along with 1983’s Critique of Cynical Reason, it is advantageous to add 1989’s Infinite Mobilization into our consideration. The third chapter of the Critique of Cynical Reason, “Eight Unmaskings,” reflects on the modernist tendency to search for structures underneath appearance: whether it is the Enlightenment “unmasking” of scholastic theology, the Kantian “unmasking” of experience, or the Marxist “unmasking” of capitalism, modernity tends towards the decoding and unraveling of illusory structures. However, for Sloterdijk, the revolt against the apparent results in a new dogmatism. Here, one is reminded of Nietzsche’s remarks on Luther from Ecce Homo:
Luther, this calamity of a monk, restored the church and, what is a thousand times worse, Christianity, at the very moment when it was vanquished.— Christianity, this denial of the will to life become religion!— Luther, an impossible monk who, on account of his own ‘impossibility,’ attacked the church and—consequently—restored it.— The Catholics would have good reasons to celebrate Luther festivals, to write Luther plays.—Luther—and the ‘moral rebirth’![4]
There is no transvaluation in Enlightenment, only simple rearrangement or inversion. Yet, there is another issue with the Enlightenment tendency towards unmasking, which he problematizes in Infinite Mobilization. For Sloterdijk, modernity produces philosophies of action (the act of unmasking) that promise the expansion of mobility. “Mobility,” here, refers to the rationalization and organization of existence. For example, if we unmask the illusory structures of capitalism, we can then rationalize its existence and organize a plan around its demise. Sloterdijk is skeptical of this attempt to centrally plan the world through rationalization:
One idea has rooted itself in pre-modern ways of thinking more deeply than any other: nothing turns out the way it was planned. For even though man may propose, it is still the gods who dispose, whatever the case may be. The a priori of any Old World practical life experience is: if it happens as it should, it happens differently than it was planned. This experience cannot rid itself of the constant awareness that human plans and actions always move in the recesses of an insurmountable passivity. But with the advent of modernity, things happen in a new way – just as humans have planned. They do so because people in the West, monks, merchants, physicians, architects, painters, and cannon-makers – in summa geniuses and engineers – have begun to organize their way of thinking in an entirely new way; and (one would like to say, suddenly) a new kind of “praxis” joins this reorganization of thought as the technological counterpart of thinking and intervenes in the events of the world with a revolutionary impact. Modernity as a techno-political composite has unhinged the old familiar equilibrium between human power and powerlessness. Spurred on by a history-making amalgam of aggression and optimism, modernity promises us a world in which things turn out as planned because people are able to accomplish what they want – and if not, they are able and willing to learn. In modern times, it is the will to power of the can-do spirit that makes the world go around.[5]
For the lack of a more sophisticated term, one could identify Sloterdijk’s argumentation here as “postmodern,” insofar as he positions himself as against or heterogeneous to the backdrop of the metanarratives of modernity that replaced the prior dogmatisms. One should note, however, that unlike the typically technologized accounts of postmodernity found in Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Virilio, Sloterdijk seems to recess into a pre-modernism, one that highlights an anthropic finitude in relation to a Wholly Other as opposed to contemporary forms of cybernetic control.[6]
The publication of Bubbles in 1998 signifies a shift towards the construction of the type of “universalist history” that he emphatically dismantles in the 1980s (one that also topples over three-thousand pages no less). In an all too reductionist encapsulation, Sloterdijk’s spheres trilogy attempts to conceptualize subjectivity as enmeshed within a topology of spherical networks. For example, “bubbles” and “globes” represent two structures in the network: the former a “micro-spherology” of interior self-hood and the latter a “macro-spherology” of collective, coexistential formations. Sloterdijk achieves this thesis through sprawling and esoteric historiography, from animal magnetism to the immanence of the mother’s womb.
It appears at this juncture there could be no narrative more “grand” than what Sloterdijk is pursing in the spheres trilogy. If this is, as I have suggested, a “reformulation” of his philosophical orientation, where is the confrontation with his previous “postmodern” conception, either in Bubbles or the near decade long gap between it and Infinite Mobilization? The answer still escapes me (almost certainly because I do not read German), but he does justify grand narratives ex post facto in the opening chapter to In the World Interior of Capital. Here he defends a notion of “World History” that circumnavigates the sneer-worthy conception of the German Idealists and the caricaturized deployment of “postmodernism” as the relativity of “one narrative among many.” He agrees that World History cannot recess into the Eurocentric polity of old; rather, it must “conduct [itself] artfully as a quasi-science of totalizations and their metaphors, as a narrative theory of the genesis of the general, and finally as a meditation on being-in-situations – also known as being-in-the-world.”[7] Or, as he later says, “World history was the working-out of the earth as a bearer of cultures and ecstasies.”[8] The conditions of a universalist history, then, must counter the shallow linear determinism of Enlightenment “progress” in favor of not merely genealogy or historiography but narration. The “working-out of the earth as a bearer of cultures and ecstasies” is not a polymorphic enterprise; however, it is not the locus of semiotic capture either. For Sloterdijk, the issue is not a revitalization of teleology or “historical progress;” instead, it is about sketching the configuration of the networks of our being-in (the topology of spherical scaffolding inherited from Greek cosmology). In this sense, there does not appear to be such an emphatic “break” in the two polarities but an interconnectedness from the rejection of modernity’s mobilization to the narratological lucidity of immersion in metaphorical quasi-science.
[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995. Semiotext(e), 2007, 235.
[2] Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition. University of Minnesota, 1984, XXIV.
[3] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Vintage Books, 1974, 182.
[4] Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage Books, 1967, 320.
[5] Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization. Polity, 2020, 1-2.
[6] This also appears to be a position he reformulates for the new millennium in essays like “Rules for the Human Zoo” and “The Domestication of Being” (both included in the Not Saved collection), wherein he advances his notion of “anthropotechnics.” Here, Sloterdijk seems much closer to his French counterparts, such as Lyotard’s claim in “Can Thought Go on Without a Body?” that the human organism is itself already a technological device1, insofar as he traces the constituency of subjectivity to biotechnological construction
[7] Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital: for a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Polity, 2013, 6.
[8[ Ibid., 13.
C.f., Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Inhuman. Stanford University Press, 1991, 12.