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Reviewed by:
  • Sloterdijk Now ed. by Stuart Elden
  • Jeffrey Champlin
Sloterdijk Now. Edited by Stuart Elden. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Pp. 212. Paper $22.95. ISBN 978-0745651361.

In Germany, Peter Sloterdijk occupies a high profile position as Dean and Professor of Philosophy and Media Theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, cohosts the television program Das Philosophische Quartett, and publishes prolifically. However, while visual artists and architects have responded enthusiastically to his use of spatial models such as the sphere and diagram, his work has yet to make a broad impact at US and UK universities. Thus, when the editor of this volume of essays, Stuart Elden, announces major forthcoming Sloterdijk publications in English (including the massive three volume Spheres project), he also highlights the need for more context in the English-language world to aid the translation of his work in a broader sense. This is important, because Peter Sloterdijk draws on thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger to address questions of humanity’s place in an age of technology, offering vast historical trajectories with cultural examples from a wide variety of sources.

This volume, Sloterdijk Now, succeeds as a compact and accessible introduction to the work of a thinker who has written a great deal for both specialist and generalist audiences. Elden’s introduction provides a concise chronological overview of Sloterdijk’s work from Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983) to Du mußt dein Leben ändern (2009) that will be helpful for those seeking initial orientation. The articles that follow cover a broad range of texts and topics and for the most part proceed as commentaries that establish internal connections while adding historical and cultural context. For example, Sjoerd van Tuinen writes that he intends “to demonstrate that, even if Sloterdijk’s earlier and later strategies for overcoming ressentiment appear difficult to reconcile, they all contribute to the single project of a ‘Scienza nuova of cosmopolitics’” (37). Literary scholars will be interested in Efraín Kristal’s article “Literature in Sloterdijk’s Philosophy,” which looks at the use of narrative in his philosophical project, his novel Der Zauberbaum, and his reading of Thomas Mann with Derrida. Of these three aspects, the first suggests particular promise for future investigation, especially in relation to Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on “storytelling” and the narratological concerns of post-Nietzschean French philosophers such as Lyotard. It also brings temporality back to Sloterdijk’s often explicitly spatial analyses in a compelling manner. Articles by Jean-Pierre Couture and Wieland Hoban are related in that they address Sloterdijk’s stylistic and performative gestures as a public intellectual. The two major debates that they parse seem unlikely to draw international interest since they arise from gestures particularly sensitive to German readers: the use of Nazi-tainted terminology to discuss biological ethics at the end of the 1990s and Sloterdijk’s more recent attack on the principles of social democracy. Nonetheless, these articles offer important orientation for contemporary discussions in Germany, [End Page 491] especially with regard to the afterlife of the debate between postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.

In an article that takes up Sloterdijk’s early work Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Babette Babich assumes a more explicitly critical stance and in doing so offers a particularly fine example of the path future engagement with his work might take. She notes how Sloterdijk employs an orthographic intervention to distinguish between the “cynic” of contemporary understanding who retreats into ineffectual complaint and the outrageous “kynic,” exemplified by Diogenes the “distance-creating mocker.” Diogenes brings the repressed back to the marketplace, disrupting economies of necessary decorum in the form of obscene insistence on base bodily functions such as defecation. Babich engages in subtle readings that draw out the masculine assumptions of Sloterdijk’s affirmation of the kynic, specifically in how he acts out through displays of thinly veiled virility. In response, she draws on the historical example of the woman cynic Hipparchia of Maroneia and an anecdote in Kritik der zynischen Vernunft of a woman exposing herself in Adorno’s seminar. She leaves open the question of how this version of cynicism reconfigures or supplements the blind spots in Sloterdijk’s theory.

Articles by Eduaro Mendieta...

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