Part of Series

Spheres

Series · 3 books

By Peter Sloterdijk

An epic project in both size & purview, Sloterdijk's 3-volume, 2500-page Spheres is a late-20th-century bookend to Heidegger's Being & Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, self-described "student of the air," reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial & immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- & micro-space from the Greek agora to contemporary urban apartments, he's able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin & 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 & anthropogenesis. He describes Bubbles, Spheres' 1st volume, 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 his discourse, but to offer a spatial & visual "parallel narrative" to his exploration of bubbles. Written over the course of a decade, the trilogy has waited another decade for its English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes 2, Globes, & 3, Foam, will publish in coming seasons.

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Author

Peter Sloterdijk

Author · 35 books

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist, television host and columnist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical Reason. In 2001 he was named president of the State Academy of Design, part of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. In 2002 he began to co-host Das Philosophische Quartett, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key issues affecting present-day society. The Kritik der Zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason), published by Suhrkamp in 1983, became the best-selling philosophical book in the German language since the Second World War and launched Sloterdijk's career as an author. The trilogy Spheres is the philosopher's magnum opus. The first volume was published in 1998, the second in 1999, and the last in 2004.