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1 - Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2021

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Summary

Peter Sloterdijk is a morphological thinker. He thinks morphologies and his thinking continually morphs. He is interested in life forms, in the forms of collectivity, and in the collective forms of individuality. He just as soon analyzes the intra-uteral life of the unborn child as he does the space of the apartment-dweller. He finds in Ficino's rendition of the visual field just as many indications of a being-in-spheres as in the 15th and 16th century discovery of the sea as the primary medium of modern being. Sloterdijk's work can be said to have a certain cosmogonic character. After the Fall, man stands naked and in need of inventing life forms that cover him, in which he can be immersed. The great metaphysical buildings of antiquity and Christianity were life forms providing existential shelter in the form of spheres of socio-spatial co-existence. But they have lost credibility, and we are back out in the open, naked. According to Sloterdijk, the topological message of modernity is: “that people are living beings, living at the edge of an uneven round body – a body which, as a whole, is neither a mother's body nor a container, and which has no protection to offer”. In Sloterdijk's diagnosis, if one could call it that, something of the existential despair of Pascal shines through: we realise we are afloat in a meaningless universe, crawling a tiny globe that has been dethroned, cast from centre to periphery. But there is also Voltaire's scepticism and humour: the same situation can be described in terms of the Micromégas, arrogantly roaming the globe. Then again, there is in Sloterdijk a Nietzschean energy, a positive affirmation of this situation, and a continuous call to invent new ways of forming life. For like in Hannah Arendt's conception of ‘natality’, being is a continuous coming-into-the-world (zur Welt kommen). In his recent work, that is accompanied by a constructive call: Sloterdijk turns Rilke's ‘du mußt dein Leben ändern’ into the positive challenge of an existential acrobatics. The art of life is a morphological art, an acrobatic act of constituting collective spheres whilst balancing over a crevice on Nietzsche's rope between animal and overman. And it is in such intermediary zones that new life forms come to be constituted through practice and training.

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In Medias Res
Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being
, pp. 7 - 28
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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