Bubbles

by Sloterdijk, Peter; Hoban, Wieland

• ISBN13: 9781584351047
• ISBN10: 1584351047
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-14
• Publisher: Semiotext

Summary

An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described "student of the air," reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling--identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings--or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an "archeology of the intimate." Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual "parallel narrative" to his exploration of bubbles.Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.

Author Biography

Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001. He has been cohost of a discussion program, Das Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Note	p. 9
Introduction: The Allies; or, The Breathed Commune	p. 17
Preliminary Reflections: Thinking the Interior	p. 83
Heart Operation; or, On the Eucharistic Excess	p. 101
Between Faces	p. 139
On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere
Humans in the Magic Circle	p. 207
On the Intellectual History of the Fascination with Closeness
Thought Transmission	p. 263
The Retreat Within the Mother	p. 269
Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology
Nobjects and Un-Relationships	p. 291
On the Revision of Psychoanalytical Stage Theory
The Egg Principle	p. 323
Internalization and Encasement
"In Dasein There Lies an Essential Tendency towards Closeness."	p. 333
Heidegger's Doctrine of Existential Place
The Primal Companion	p. 343
Requiem for a Discarded Organ
The Black Plantation	p. 397
A Note on Trees of Life and Enlivenment Machines
Soul Partitions	p. 413
AngelsùTwinsùDoubles
Spheric Mourning	p. 459
On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What Is Missing
On the Difference Between an Idiot and an Angef	p. 471
The Siren Stage	p. 477
On the First Sonospheric Alliance
Illiterate Truths	p. 521
A Note on Oral Fundamentalism
Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong	p. 533
Closer to Me Than I Am Myself	p. 539
A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside
Matris in gremio	p. 619
A Mariological Cricket
Transition: On Ecstatic Immanence	p. 625
Notes	p. 633
Photographic Credits	p. 664
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.