Home Archive Blog Shows Listings Subscribe Bulletin Digital About Contact Press Advertise Why? Register Log InTop of FormBottom of FormIssue 127Nov-Dec 2009Something in the AirINTERVIEWGerman philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks to Erik Morse about the 20th- and 21st-century phenomena of chemical warfare, designer ventilation and high-density urban living

The most celebrated and controversial German philosopher since Jrgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk has established an academic career confronting the darkest traditions of 20th-century European ideology. President and professor of the Staatliche Hochschule fr Gestaltung Karlsruhe in Germany, his first book,Kritik der zynischen Vernunft(Critique of Cynical Reason, published in 1983 and translated into English in 1988), remains the best selling philosophical work in the German language since World War II, but it was his controversial polemic on the language of genetic engineering and biopolitics in a lecture he gave in 1999, Regeln fr den Menschenpark (Rules for the Human Park), that brought him to international attention. It also marked the philosophers distinctive turn toward a Heideggerian approach to Postmodernity, identifying the question of Being as bound up with the technologies of architectonics and anthropogenesis.Between 1998 and 2004, Sloterdijk composed his magnum opus, the 2,400-pageSphren(Spheres) trilogy. In its three sections Bubbles, Globes and Foam Sphren narrates a Western history of macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment. With the technological advancements of the 20th century most represented, according to Sloterdijk, in the use of airborne terrorism and interior ventilation traditional maps of geometric space have been greatly redesigned, unveiling heretofore unexplored strata: atmosphere, environment and ecology. In a show of puffery, Sloterdijk declared that theSphrenproject was the rightful companion to Martin HeideggersSein und Zeit(Being and Time, 1927) and the book that Heidegger should have written. With Semiotext(e)s publication ofTerror From the Airin March this year translated fromLuftbeben: An den Wurzeln des Terrors(Air Trembling: At the Roots of Terror, 2002), the introduction toSphren III English-speaking readers have had their first glimpse of Sloterdijks opus on Postmodern space. This year Polity publishedGods Zeal: The Battle of Three Monotheisms, a study on the origins of conflict between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, andDerrida: An Egyptianwas published by Wiley.ERIK MORSEWhat role do you think literature plays in explicating what you call sphereology the study of the human need for interior space?PETER SLOTERDIJKIve always felt that there is a split in the European tradition between the language of philosophy and the language of art and literature that is based on the suppression of atmospheric knowledge. Similarly, until recent developments in space photography, conventional maps omitted information about the atmosphere. My ambition was to bring the atmospheric dimension back to the perception of the real. My essay Terror from the Air was extracted from Sphren. It is called Air Trembling in German, and is the introductory part of the third volume of the Sphren trilogy. Everything in these works is about the reconstruction of atmospheric perception.EMOne of the fundamental arguments in Terror from the Air is that classical warfare ineradicably changed with the German deployment of chlorine gas during the second battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. It is your contention that, with this first use of chemical warfare, a new kind of atmo-terrorism has been released upon the world, one in which the environment rather than the body is attacked. However, terrorism as a style of warfare has been present in the West as far back as the first encounters between European armies and indigenous or tribal groups: for example, night-time raids, camouflage and hit-and-run offensives. How are these examples distinct from the use of gas in the battlefields in 1915?PSIts only a technical difference. As Clausewitz [Carl von Clausewitz, 17801831, Prussian military theorist and strategist] demonstrated in his book, Vom Kriege [On War, 1832], in every war there is an element of excess, of monte aux extrme [rising to the extreme] every war accelerates towards something worse. In all kinds of war, the temptation is very strong not only to fight against the enemy one-to-one but to destroy its environment to make the fateful step from the duel to the practice of extinction. In the 20th century, monte aux extrme has developed a new technical means, such as chemical warfare. This is what I suggest in my essay on modern warfare.EMWho coined the term monte aux extrme?PSRen Girard. He published a book on Clausewitz, Achever Clausewitz [Finishing Clausewitz, 1997]. I think Girard is the most important theorist on the competitive behaviour of human beings.EMIn his book Le Part Maudit [The Accursed Share, 1949; published in English, 1991], Georges Bataille discusses life originating from the heat of the sun. How do you think the fear of weapons of mass destruction in the atomic age changed our traditional perception of the sun from life-giver to ultimate destroyer?PSI feel quite close to Bataille when he says that life on earth in general, and human life in particular, depends on this absurd generosity from the sun. However, his theories are affected by a certain blindness he ignores the positive aspects of the greenhouse effect (which I use here in the original sense of the term), without which the heat of the sun could not be absorbed adequately and the surface temperature of the Earth would be minus 15 to minus 18 degrees centigrade, which is unlivable for most biological life forms. So, emphasizing the positive aspects of the sun alone is an error if it is not combined with a discussion of the atmosphere. On the one hand, we have civilized and cultivated ourselves through the use of atmospheric modifications thanks to modern air-conditioning, but, on the other, employed atmospheric terrorism. The classical study of the sun, or heliology, makes the assumption that there is a strong analogy between God and the sun; the sun as the physical manifestation of God. But we have to take into account that the deepest ambition of the 20th century is the victory over the sun the title of one of the most important works of art, in my opinion, to come out of the Russian revolution a Futurist opera staged in 1913 by a group of artists called Soyuz Molodyozhi [Union of the Youth]. The production team included Aleksei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyushin, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kasimir Malevich. The opera explored the idea that the Earth will become a sun and, therefore, independent. This is the end-point of the atmospheric movement of modern times that as long as the Earth is dependent on an outside source, the dream of human autonomy will never be fulfilled. But if we succeed in creating an artificial sun on the surface of the Earth, then well become independent, a God-like race, the masters of the universe. And, at least symbolically, there is a link between the dreams of the Russian Revolution and the American physicists who managed through the Manhattan Project to create an artificial sun. The fire of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the only time this terrible weapon has been employed on the battleground, which proves the 20th century to be the age of atmospheric warfare. Nothing can be like it was before this is the connection between Hiroshima and Auschwitz and Ypres.EMMoving from Bataille to another 20th-century theorist who is of central importance to your work, Im interested in how you apply Gaston Bachelards myths of air, water and fire into sphereology.PSIn that he was one of the authors who privileged the rediscovery of the atmospheric, Bachelard certainly played a role in my thinking. In my younger days I read him, but when I wrote the trilogy, aside from a few quotations from his book Lair et les songes [Air and Dreams, 1943], he wasnt central to my thinking. Although we share a certain predisposition toward the phenomenological tradition and also a combination of the psychoanalytical and phenomenological aspects, the emphasis in my work is very different from his.EMDo you think the German and French academies have more respect for Bachelards work than the American academy, where he is not part of the philosophical canon?PSBachelard deserves respect as a classical author. I cannot comment on the politics of the American academy, but his writing should not be missing from the canon.EMMany recording and sonic technologies were developed in tandem with military research. Im curious if you think technologies such as magnetic tape, wireless transmission, radar and sonar contributed to an environment of atmo-terrorism where human speech becomes lost in the vast matrix of the airwaves.PSWe have created an artificial sound environment that has no parallel in the history of human societies. Until the 19th century, voices had to be produced and perceived in situ the source of sound had to be quite close to the receiver. It is only through radio technology that the phenomenon of long-range acoustic communication has been made possible and through sonospheric coherence that Postmodern reality is created. World War I was a print war the mobilization of soldiers could only be achieved through print technology, which is relatively close to radio technology, in that reading means to hear or hallucinate voices from different speakers for instance, you hear the voice of the German emperor who sent you to the Front. There is constant movement from the Gutenberg world to the radio world: the world of waves and the world of print are systematically linked by a common feature, which, to put it in classical terms, is actio in distans action at a distance.EMHow would you characterize the movement from print to communication via airwaves to the condition that Paul Virilio terms telepresence a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they are present, to give the appearance that they are present, or to have an effect at a location other than their true location. Is that yet another progression?PSIt is a kind of chain of causality. The Emperor in Rome will put his signature on a document that will be read on the periphery of the Empire, in, say, Alexandria. The distance from Rome to Alexandria is 2,000 kilometres but the soul of the reader, the receiver of this order, is prepared to perform exactly what the author has commanded. In this way, the world of the written commander prepares for the world of the airwaves.EMHow do we apply these rules for communication in the classical age to the so-called hypermodern period when the speed of the message has been accelerated to a point at which it appears omnipresent or telepresent?PSThe power of the message presupposes that the synchronization of the sender and receiver has been pre-established to prepare the receiver for a position of obedience towards the message. Now, the proliferation of communication has resulted in the weakening of the message.emIs there a direct link between the failure of the message and the way people now communicate in metropolises, apartments and skyscrapers, for example?PSCertainly. Urbanization is the main feature of contemporary culture. In the third volume of Sphren, I deal almost exclusively with the relationship between urban communication and the luxurious functions of modern life.EMDo you equate all forms of modern communication in urban space to a kind of advertising la Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk [known in English as The Arcades Project, Benjamins unfinished collection of notes assembled between 1927 and 1940 that reflect on the various lifestyles and dwellings of post-revolutionary Paris]?PSThe Sphren project is about the creation of a specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of existential space around themselves. Urban spaces are a humanized environment where nature is completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within cities that you might normally expect to feel in nature. In the third volume of Sphren, in a long chapter titled The Foam City, I try to describe these multiplicities of modern life in terms of foam-making all individuals are living in a specific bubble within a communicating foam.EMFor those readers who are unfamiliar with your theories of bubbles and foams, what do you see as the fate of the traditional house in this larger progression or digression of dwelling in the 20th century?PSMy foam city is a theory of living in an apartment. An apartment is obviously a place that contains the means of communication to link you with the outer world, yet it is also a spatialized immune system. It immunizes you against the influences of the outer world but it simultaneously links you to the Mitwelt [social world], which is a form of connected isolation a term coined by Thom Mayne, an American architect, in the early 1970s. Connected isolation could be a Heideggerian concept. It is probably one of the most profound concepts that has ever been developed within modern architectural theory because it contains a judgment on the modern way of life. I dont believe in Heideggers hypothesis of modern times as the time of homelessness. What I see is a transformation in all these traditional complaints about modern homelessness into a language of immunology. For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated into the language of general immunology because human beings, due to their openness to the world, are extremely vulnerable from a biological level, to the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and ritual levels. We are always trying to create and find a protective environment. The task of building convincing immune systems is so broad and so all-encompassing that there is no space left for nostalgic longings. This is an ongoing task that has to be performed and theorized with every technique that is available. There is no way back.EMIn this new foam city has Benjamins classical description of the flneur been made obsolete?PSI have quoted Benjamin in a very positive way. In some of the most interesting parts of Passagen-Werk, he develops the idea that the bourgeoisie of the 19th century created these artificial interiors. And so when the world became globalized, the bourgeoisie in their salons wanted to absorb everything that is exterior into this interiority. According to Benjamin, the art of the bourgeois form of life was, in the 19th century, the effort to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an interior that contains the totality. And that is what the arcades are all about. In the arcades, in the passage, the whole world of production the whole world of trading and exploring is neutralized and re-presented in the presence of the commodity. The commodities bring these outer totalities into the apartment of the bourgeoisie. Between the ocean and the apartment is the passage; the arcade where all these goods can be bought.EMYou have made the distinction in past interviews that between, for instance, 19th-century Paris and late 20th-century Los Angeles, there is a shift from the arcade to the shopping mall and the stadium, in the space of these ventilated hyper-interiors.PSYes. But between the modern shopping mall and the primitive arcade of the early 19th century, there was a step that is very symbolic. This is the London Crystal Palace, which is for me the major symbol of the Postmodern construction of reality. [A cast-iron and glass building designed by Joseph Paxton to house The Great Exhibition of 1851. It included 14,000 exhibitors from around the world, displaying examples of the latest developments in technology.] Because the power of interiorization here reached a kind of historic maximum, I chose it as the title for my most recent book on Postmodern capitalism: The Crystal Palace. In German the title is Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [the big interior of capitalism]. Weltinnenraum is a word borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke who, in a poem from 1914, created a vision of a fantastic space in which everything communicates with everything else. In his vision of pantheistic communication, everything is produced by psychic powers, whereas in the Weltinnenraum of capitalism, the communicative force is money.EMFinally, when you speak of a symbolic immunology, its difficult not to discuss a literal spreading of disease as well, such as the most recent phenomenon of the swine flu outbreak that was defined as a potentially global exterminator, particularly in cities. So you begin to see the results of space becoming more dense and people living in closer and closer quarters, where there is a rising fear of a single strain of disease or one weapon wiping out civilization.PSThat is quite correct. Because people feel very strongly that their private constructions of immunity are endangered by the presence of too many constructions of immune spheres which are pressed against each other and destroy each other. That is why in the United States there is a new type of discourse that encourages obscene forms of speech. For instance, the new term, toxic people, came from the USA and is invading Europe today. This means things are going wrong and the immune situation of Americans is collapsing.Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon: Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized (Omnibus Press, 2004) and, with Tav Falco, the upcoming Memphis Underground: A Dual Narrative of the Bluff City (Creation Books, 2010). His writing has been published in Arthur, Bomb, Bookforum, Filmmaker, Interview, Semiotext(e)s Animal Shelter and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

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Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsBOOKSJULY 19, 2013Against CynicismA philosopher's brilliant reasons for livingByAdam KirschPeter Sloterdijk has been one of Germanys best-known philosophers for 30 years, ever since the publication of hisCritique of Cynical Reasonin 1983a thousand-page treatise that became a best-seller. Since then Sloterdijk has been at the forefront of European intellectual life, contributing to public debates over genetic engineering and economics and hosting a long-running discussion program on television, all while publishing a steady stream of ambitious philosophical works. TheCritique of Cynical Reasonappeared in English many years ago, but it is only recently that Sloterdijk has begun to emerge on the American horizon.Bubbles, the first volume in a trilogy calledSpheres, his magnum opus, appeared here in 2011. Now it is followed byYou Must Change Your Life, another wide-ranging and challenging book. Along withRage and Time, which appeared in English in 2010, these volumes make it possible to begin to come to grips with Sloterdijk as a stirring and eclectic thinker, who addresses himself boldly to the most important problems of our age. Above all, he is concerned with metaphysicsor, rather, with what to do with the empty space that is left over when metaphysics disappearsalong with religion, faith in revolution, and the other grand sources of meaning that long gave shape and direction to human lives.Sloterdijk was born in 1947, making him just the right age to participate in the student movement of the 1960s. By the early 1980s, when he wroteCritique of Cynical Reason, the idealism and the world-changing energy of that movement had long since dwindled into splinter-group violence, on the one hand, and accommodation to the realities of capitalism and the Cold War, on the other. In that cultural moment, Sloterdijks diagnosis of cynicism was very timely. The dissolution of the student movement, he wrote, must interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into realism, of revolt into a clever melancholy.Despite its parodic Kantian title, SloterdijksCritiqueis not a work of theoretical abstraction; it is a highly personal confession of this generational world-weariness. As a philosopher, Sloterdijk is especially struck by the way he and his peers were able to master the most emancipatory and radical philosophical language, but utterly unable to apply its insights to their own lives and their own political situations. Coming afterCritical Theory, whose post-Marxist diagnoses of social ills are a key reference point and antagonist for Sloterdijk, younger thinkers have found themselves brilliant at diagnosis and helpless at cure. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference, Sloterdijk observes. The result is cynicism, which he defines in a splendid paradox as enlightened false consciousness: It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice.If we are to break out of this learned helplessness, Sloterdijk argues, we must ransack the Western tradition for new philosophical resources. Such ransacking is exactly the method of Sloterdijks thought, first in theCritiqueand then, on an even grander scale, inBubblesandYou Must Change Your Life. Drawing on very wide readingwider, the reader often feels, than it is deepSloterdijk excavates the prehistory of contemporary problems, and some of their possible solutions. In theCritique, he offers an extended analysis of the culture of Weimar Germany, in which he locates the origin of twentieth-century cynicismas well as describing the many sub-varieties of cynicism (military, sexual, religious), and doing a close reading of Dostoevsky, and cataloguing the meaning of different facial expressions. The effect on the reader is of being shown around aWunderkammer, where what matters is not the advancing of an argument but the display of various intellectual treasures.If the "cynicism" that Sloterdijk describes is a post-'60s phenomenon, the prescription that he offers is a return to '60s values.If the cynicism that Sloterdijk describes is a post-60s phenomenon, the prescription that he offers is a return to 60s values of spontaneity, passivity, and the wisdom of the body. But he does not describe these in the language of hippiedom; instead, and characteristically, he finds a grounding for them in the oldest regions of the Western philosophical tradition. The hero of his book is Diogenes, who was himself derided as cynicalliterally, dog-likeby the people of Athens. But there is a vast difference, Sloterdijk argues, between the exhausted cynicism of the late twentieth century and what he calls, using Greek spelling, the kynicism of Diogenes. When Diogenes defecated or masturbated in the street, when he slept in a bathtub, or told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunlight, he was employing a joyful language of radical bodily gestures to defeat the philosophers imprisoning language of abstract concepts. Neither Socrates nor Plato, Sloterdijk writes, can deal with Diogenesfor he talks with them ... in a dialogue of flesh and blood.Sloterdijk finds in Diogenes what many of his contemporaries found in Norman O. Brown, or in Zen, or for that matter in drugs and music: permission to turn off reason, objectivity, logocentric thinking, the head. After all, wasnt it enlightened Western reason that gave us the nuclear bomb? The bomb is not one bit more evil than reality and not one bit more destructive than we are, he writes in one of the books prose-poetic passages. It is merely our unfolding, a material representation of our essence.... In it, the Western subject is consummated. Behind Sloterdijks dark paean to the bomb, it is possible to detect those other Western abominations, Nazism and the Holocaust, which would have shadowed his upbringing in postwar Germany. The choice, he concludes, is between the bomb or the body, cynicism or kynicism. In our best moments, he writes almost mystically, when ... even the most energetic activity gives way to passivity and the rhythmics of living carry us spontaneously, courage can suddenly make itself felt as a euphoric clarity.... It awakens the present within us.InCritique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk charted a wholly individual path to a familiar spiritual position, a Romanticism of what Wordsworth called wise passiveness. This pattern is repeated in Sloterdijks later books: he is better at the forceful restatement of old problems than at the invention of new solutions. This might be regarded as an objection by certain kinds of philosophers, who see themselves as contributors to a technical process that produces concrete results. For Sloterdijk, whose greatest influences are Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is not at all disqualifying, for his goal is, as he writes inYou Must Change Your Life, a provocative re-description of the objects of analysis. Like a literary writerand he once told an interviewer that he thought of writing theSpherestrilogy as a novelSloterdijks goal is to restate our basic quandaries in revelatory new language, to bring them home to us as living experiences instead of stale formulas. The prison of reason, the need for transcendence, the yearning for an absent meaning: these have been the stuff of literature and philosophy and theology for centuries. In Sloterdijk, these old subjects find a timely new interpreter.If Sloterdijk had remained the thinker who wrote theCritique, he might not be terribly interesting to us today. There is already something period about the books distrust of the intellect (expressed in the most sophisticated intellectual terms), its romanticizing of kynicism, and the way it genuflects before the bomb. To compare it with his work of the last ten years, however, is to see how significantly Sloterdijk has evolvedboth in his response to the times and in the scope of his vision. What he saw in theCritiqueas the malaise of a disappointed generation becomes, inBubblesandYou Must Change Your Life, something much bigger and more profound. It is the plight of humanity after the death of God, which Sloterdijk follows Nietzsche in seeing as a catastrophe the true dimensions of which we do not yet fully appreciate. At the same time, the impatience with Marxism that is already visible in theCritiqueevolves into a full-throated defense of liberal capitalism, especially inRage and Time, which is largely an account of communism, and also Christianity, as ideologies driven by resentment and fantasies of revenge. (Here, too, the influence of Nietzsche is clear.)Another way of putting this is that Sloterdijk is a thinker of, and for, the postCold War world. If you were to sketch Sloterdijks understanding of history, as it emerges in his recent work, it would go something like this. From earliest times until the rise of the modern world, mankind endowed the world with purpose and time with directionality by means of religion, the belief in the gods and God. As that belief waned, the Enlightenment faith in progress, and the more radical communist faith in revolution, replaced transcendent purposes with immanent ones. But by the late twentieth century, and certainly after 1989, neither of those sets of coordinates any longer mapped our world. What Sloterdijk initially diagnosed as mere cynicism becomes, in his mature work, a full-fledged crisis of meaning, which can be figured as a crisis of directionality. Again and again he refers to Nietzsches madman, who asked: Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?So far this is a familiar, indeed a venerable, way of thinking about the problem of nihilism in liberal civilization. Sloterdijks originality lies in the way these old problems still strike him with undiminished force; and also in his refusal to remain passive in the face of them. The whole thrust of Sloterdijks thought is a rebuke to Heidegger, who mused, late in life, that only a God can save us. On the contrary, he insists, we must save ourselvesand, what is more, we can save ourselves. Salvation, for Sloterdijk, lies in just the area where Heidegger believed perdition lay: that is, in the realm of technology.Yet technology, for Sloterdijk, seldom has to do with machines. It is mental and spiritual technology that interests him: the techniques with which human beings have historically made themselves secure on the Earth. He does not analyze these strategies in terms of religion, which he sees as a vocabulary unavailable to us today. Rather, he re-configures them with metaphors from the realms of immunology and climatology, using language that sounds respectably scientific even when its actual bearing is deeply spiritual. He is especially fond of repurposing contemporary buzzwords to give them new dimensions of philosophical meaning, as with the term greenhouse effect. Considered spiritually, the greenhouse effect is not something to be deplored, but a necessity for human existence: To oppose the cosmic frost infiltrating the human sphere through the open windows of the Enlightenment, modern humanity makes use of a deliberate greenhouse effect: it attempts to balance out its shellessness in space, following the shattering of the celestial domes, through an artificial civilizatory world. This is the final horizon of Euro-American technological titanism.Here Sloterdijks old critique of the Enlightenment is turned inside out. Human beings need to breathe an atmosphere not just of oxygen, but also of meanings and symbols and practices. The decline of religion meant the fouling of humanitys old mental atmosphere, so that it is no longer breathable. But where Sloterdijk in theCritiquewanted to go backward to Diogenesin this resembling his antagonist Heidegger, who sought salvation in the pre-SocraticsSloterdijk inBubbles, from which this passage comes, believes that the only way out is forward. By using technological reason, we have found ways to air-condition our bodies; but we must also find a way to use our reason to build air-conditioning systems for our souls. Only our minds can save us.This leads to the central metaphor of SloterdijksSpherestrilogy, which appeared in Germany between 1998 and 2004. Spheres, he writes, are air-conditioning systems in whose construction and calibration ... it is out of the question not to participate. The symbolic air conditioning of the shared space is the primal production of every society. Law, custom, ritual, and art are ways we create such nurturing spheres, which for Sloterdijk are not so much topological figures as emotional and spiritual micro-climates: The sphere is the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humansin so far as they succeed in becoming humans.InBubbles, the only part of the trilogy so far translated into English, Sloterdijk writes primarily as a historian of art and ideas, using his eccentric erudition to come up with numerous depictions of such nurturing spheres in human culture. A painting of Giotto depicts two faces turned sideways, joining to create a new facean emblem of intimacy; Saint Catherine of Siena imagines the eating of her heart by Christ; Marsilio Ficino theorizes that love involves a mutual transfusion of blood, carried in superfine particles in the lovers gaze.It is no coincidence that many of these examples come from the iconography of Christianity, since religion has been mankinds best generator of spheres. What Sloterdijk hopes to do is to retrieve religions power to create intimacy while shearing it of its untenable dogmas. It will be advantageous for the free spirit to emancipate itself from the anti-Christian affect of recent centuries as a tenseness that is no longer necessary. Anyone seeking to reconstruct basic communional and communitary experiences needs to be free of anti-religious reflexes, he insists. In pointed contrast to Alain Badiouwho, on the basis of scattered statements in his books, seems to be Sloterdijks bte noirethere is no attempt here to harness the messianism and apocalypticism of Christianity for political ends. Sloterdijks ideal is not Pauline conversion but Trinitarian perichoresis, a technical word he seizes on: Perichoresis means that the milieu of the persons is entirely the relationship itself, he writes, envisioning love as a total mutual absorption.But if Sloterdijk is not a believer, then where does he think we can actually experience this kind of perfectly trusting togetherness? Where do we find a sphere that is wholly earthly, yet so primal as to retain its power even now? The answer is surprising, even bizarre. In a long section ofBubbles, Sloterdijk argues that the original sphere, the one we all experience and yearn to recapture, is the mothers womb. This is not, for him, a place of blissful isolation, where the subject can enjoy illusions of omnipotence; if it were, the womb would be only a training ground for selfishness and disillusion. Sloterdijk emphasizes instead that we are all in our mothers womb along with a placenta. The placenta is what he calls the Withour first experience of otherness, but a friendly and nurturing otherness, and thus a model for all future spheres of intimacy.This leads Sloterdijk to what he calls, not without a sense of humor, an ovular Platonism. There is a preexisting realm to which we long to return, but it is not in heaven. It is in the uterus, and since the uterus will always be with us (barring some remote but imaginableBrave New Worldscenario), so too will the possibility of genuine spheres. We need to recover, and give to one another, the trust that we once gave our placentas. Indeed, Sloterdijk argues that our cultures disregard for the postpartum placentawe incinerate it, instead of reverently eating it or burying itis both a cause and a symptom of our loneliness: In terms of its psychodynamic source, the individualism of the Modern Age is a placental nihilism.The reader who has no patience for this kind of thingwho finds the whole With concept New Agey, or unfalsifiable, or just wildly eccentricwill probably not get very far with Sloterdijk. This is not because placenta-ism is central to his thought. On the contrary, it is just one of the many provocative ideas that he develops and then drops in the course of the book, which reads less like a structured argument than a long prose poem. Sloterdijks strength and appeal come from the intuitive and metaphorical quality of his thought, his unconventional approaches to familiar problems, his willingness to scandalize. As a theorem, the With is easy to refute; as a metaphor, it is weirdly persuasive. It is another way of describing, and accounting for, the central experience of homelessness that drives all of Sloterdijks thought. Deprived of our With, he writes, the officially licensed thesis God is dead must be supplemented with the private addendum and my own ally is also dead.There is something hopeful about this supplement: if we cannot re-gain God, Sloterdijk contends, we can still re-gain the sense of having an ally. Indeed, the sphere concept is powerful because of the way it rewrites the history of religion in respectful but fundamentally secular terms. The need for spheresfor meanings, symbols, contextsis what is primary for human beings. That our most successful spheres have been religious ones is, for Sloterdijk, a contingent fact, not a necessary one.

Illustration by Charlie BearmanAn identical logic informsYouMust Change Your Life, in which Sloterdijk re-formulates his understanding of religion using a new geometrical metaphor: not the nurturing sphere, but the aspiring vertical line. (He barely mentions spheres at all in the new book, adding to the impression that his thoughts do not form a system but a series of improvisations.) IfBubblesmined religionand science and artfor images of intimacy,You Must Change Your Lifeemphasizes instead the human proclivity for self-transcendence, for constantly remaking and exceeding ourselves, for going higher in every sense. Just as he half-jokingly adopted the term greenhouse effect, Sloterdijk now seizes on the p.c. euphemism vertically challenged: This turn of phrase cannot be admired enough, he writes. The formula has been valid since we began to practice learning to live.The word practice is central to Sloterdijks argument here, and to his understanding of religion. We are living, he observes, at a time when religion is supposedly making a comeback around the world. The old assurance that all societies must inevitably converge on secularism is failing. For Sloterdijk, however, it is a mistake to think that what people are turning to is faith in the divine. Rather, the part of religion that still matters to us, for which we have a recurring need, is its practices: the technology, primarily mental and inner-directed, that allows us to reshape our ways of thinking and feeling. With typical bravado, he argues that no religion or religions exist, only misunderstood spiritual regimens.In fact, Sloterdijk argues, our time is characterized by a widespread embrace of training techniques, physical and metaphysical. In one chapter ofYou Must Change Your Life, in a typically counterintuitive stroke, he pairs the rise of the modern Olympic games with the spread of Scientology as examples of the invention of new types of spiritual-cum-athletic regimens. The sheer idiocy of the theology behind Scientology shows, for him, how irrelevant doctrines are to the contemporary appetite for religion. L. Ron HubbardsDianeticswas a spiritual technology before it was a church, and this kind of technology can be found at the heart of all religious traditions. If one looks to the heart of the fetish of religion, Sloterdijk writes apropos of Scientology, one exclusively finds anthropotechnic procedures.Anthropotechnics is another favorite term of Sloterdijks, because of the way it combines a technological meaning and a spiritual meaning. Genetic engineering and bionics are one kind of anthropotechnics, a way of working on human beings to improve them. But so too, he insists, are the exercises of Ignatius de Loyola, or the harsh training procedures of Buddhist monks. Fasting, memorization of sacred texts, hermitism, self-flagellationsuch practices actually transform the human being, building a new and higher inner life on the foundations of the old one.Much ofYou Must Change Your Lifeis devoted to a cultural history and typology of these kinds of training practices, passing freely between Eastern and Western traditions. When Jesus on the cross declares consummatum est, Sloterdijk says that we ought to see this as a victors cry, equivalent to that of a Greek athlete winning a race or a wrestling match. The phrase should be translated, he argues, not as a passive it is finished but as Made it! or Mission accomplished! For the conquest of death is the ultimate goal of all spiritual training, and the great foundersJesus, Buddha, Socratesare those who won the championship by dying on their own terms. This phenomenon is what Sloterdijk refers to as the outdoing of the gladiators by the martyrs.To identify religion as a form of competitive training is to reimagine history, and inYou Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk offers a mock-Hegelian account of the evolution of the human subject. In the beginning, he writes, all human beings lived in a swamp of habit and mass-mindedness. A few rare and gifted individuals lifted themselves up to the dry ground, where they could look back on their old lives in a self-conscious and critical spirit. This constitutes the true birth of the subject: anyone who takes part in a programme for de-passivizing themselves, and crosses from the side of the merely formed to that of the forming, becomes a subject.These pioneers in turn draw imitators after them, people eager to remake themselves in the image of the miraculous founders: Jesus has his Paul, Socrates his Plato. In the modern age, society attempts to universalize this experience of enlightenment, to awaken all the sleepers, but with uneven and sometimes disastrous effects. For humans live on a vertical, and the definition of a vertical is that there will always be a top and a bottom: The upper class comprises those who hear the imperative that catapults them out of their old life, and the other classes all those who have never heard or seen any trace of it.If this is elitismand it is, with a vengeancethen so be it. Egotism, Sloterdijk writes, is often merely the despicable pseudonym of the best human possibilities. Indeed, it is not hard to see that what Sloterdijk has written is a re-formulation and defense of the idea of thebermensch. The whole book could be thought of as a commentary on a single line of Nietzsches fromThus Spoke Zarathustra, which Sloterdijk repeatedly quotes: Man is a rope, stretched between beast andbermensch. Here is the original verticalor, as Sloterdijk also has it, a kind of Jacobs ladder, on which men ascend toward the heavens and descend toward the Earth.For a German thinker of Sloterdijks generation to rehabilitate the idea of the Superman might seem like a dangerous proposition. But in his hands the concept is totally disinfected of any taints of blond beastliness or the will to power. Indeed, the figures whom Sloterdijk cites as the supreme self-trainers, at the top of the human vertical, are Jesus and Socratesthe very ones Nietzsche despised as teachers of herd morality. It is central to Sloterdijks vision that, for him, supremacy is totally divorced from domination. He imagines that only self-mastery is what matters to human beings, that the training of the self is more noble and satisfying than control over others. If this is a blind spot, it is one that allows him to take his Nietzsche guilt-free.It is not hard to see what Sloterdijk has written is a re-formulation and defense of the idea of thebermensch.The image of the stretched rope appeals to Sloterdijk because it manages to sustain the idea of verticalityand also of hierarchy and valuein the absence of the divine. Like a snake charmer, Sloterdijk needs to make the rope of human existence stand straight without attaching it to anything on high. This is what he calls the problematic motif of the transcendence device that cannot be fastened at the opposite pole. The main intuition, and gamble, ofYou MustChange Your Lifeis that the human instinct for verticality can survive the relativizing of space in a godless world. What remains is a sort of highly intellectualized and sublimated vitalism: Vitality, understood both somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient between more and less, he writes. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant in this context.The line, then, like the sphere, becomes for Sloterdijk a substitute for metaphysics. Metaphysics, he says in an aside that captures his whole argument, really ought to be called metabiotics: it is life itself that aspires upward, even if space has no up or down to speak of. Even without God or thebermensch, it is sufficient to note that every individual, even the most successful, the most creative and the most generous, must, if they examine themselves in earnest, admit that they have become less than their potentiality of being would have required, he writes near the end of the book, revealing the deep Protestant roots of this conception of the conscience.One of the most appealing things about Sloterdijks philosophy is that, like literature, it leaves itself vulnerable. It does not attempt to anticipate and to refute all possible objections. And the objections toYou Must Change Your Life, as withBubbles, are not far to seek. For one thing, by conceiving of religion as an elite training regimen, Sloterdijk implies that a religion is justified only by its saints. Anyone who is not a saint is insignificant, and so the average persons experience of religious meaningswhether metaphysical doctrine or spiritual consolation or tradition or identity or communionis dismissed out of hand. This is false to the lived reality of religion for most people, and shows how tendentious Sloterdijks equation of religion with practice really is.Then there is the question-begging insistence that metabiotics, Sloterdijks discomfitingly biological philosophy, will do in the absence of metaphysics. It is certainly true that even non-believers continue to act as if there is such a thing as excellence, self-improvement, self-overcoming. But it is not certain that these salutogenic energies, as Sloterdijk calls them, are capable of sustaining themselves indefinitely in the absence of some metaphysical validation. Much of modern literature, from Leopardi to Beckett, suggests that they cannot. What is missing fromYou Must Change Your Lifeis an investigation of what happens when the vertical collapses, as it does sometimes for everyone, even believers. Sloterdijk needs to offer a psychology of depression to complement his psychology of aspiration. This is as much as to say that Sloterdijk has not solved the immense problems that he raises, even though he claims to know the way toward the solution. But maybe the philosopher does not need to solve problems, only to make them come alive; and this he does as well as any thinker at work today.Adam Kirsch is a senior editor atThe New Republicand a columnist forTablet, and the author most recently ofWhy Trilling Matters (Yale).

continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art.PastPresentFutureIssue 4.1 / 2014: 16-37Taking Up The Challenge Of Space: New Conceptualisations Of Space In The Work Of Peter Sloterdijk And Graham HarmanMarijn NieuwenhuisDOWNLOAD PDFABSTRACT: The arguably two most creative theoretical contributions on established understandings of space have recently been provided in Peter SloterdijksSpheres[Sphren] trilogy and in the works of Graham Harman. Their work reveals a strong Heideggerian presence which can be traced back to the importance granted to concepts such as Dasein (in the case of Sloterdijk) and tool-analysis (for Harman). Both authors employ the concept of space to challenge the authority of traditional understandings of metaphysics and subject-oriented ontology.This paper will analyse the role of space in their work and search for possibilities that could enable a conceptual synthesis. Such a preliminary investigation into the conceptual foundations of space should allow for a speculative reengagement with the long abandoned question of how space ontologically relates to being. The objective of this exercise, therefore, is to resume speculation about key concepts and ideas that have long been abandoned by the social sciences.INTRODUCTIONThis essay will argue that space is not an autonomous container in which things merely exist. Space is instead speculated to be an inseparable quality of objects that relate. This argument is therefore not the same as that conceded earlier by Leibniz in his 1715-1716 correspondences with Clarke. Leibniz, contra the Newtonians, argued that space was neither absolutist nor autonomous from objects. He famously argued instead for a relational space that was an order of co-existences (Leibniz 2001: 13)[2]. This order was consequentially characterised by distance and situations relative to positions. Casey (1997a: 362, original emphasis) describes Leibniz then, as the primary culprit for the modern loss of the particularity of place, the denial of infinitive space and for developing a new discipline of site analysis (analysis situs, a rigorous analytic-geometric discipline). The closing-off of the problem of space led to a so-called fallacy of the misplaced concreteness [of space] (Whitehead 1948). The way we experience space is not geometric. Neither is our knowledge of spacea priorito space itself. My small flat is for me not definable by the geometric measurements of its interior. It is instead my place of dwelling. It is historical, warm, cosy, and familiar; it is home. Focusing on its geometric measurement would deprive the room from what it is, or whatHeidegger (1996)called its worldhood. Lefebvre (1991), inspired by Heidegger, famously argues for a true space rather than a constructed truth of space. Our modern knowledge of space has however closed-off speculations of what space could be. The limiting of space, by our particular modern knowledge of it, has led to a depoliticisation of space. While the territorial trap (Agnew 1994) has received a lot of attention in the social sciences, the spatial trap has remained largely unaddressed.Sloterdijk and Harman take on a speculative understanding of what space is. The discussion that follows rests on the work of these two contemporary thinkers, who have effectively broken free from post-Kantian philosophies of access. Speculation is important for it allows for disclosure and, therefore, for the repoliticisation of space. The act of speculating playfully challenges the concreteness of knowledge and flirts with the possibility of contingency. Speculations on space are of particular relevance today, when the concreteness of space is imposed upon us through violent acts of regional, national and everyday bordering. Speculation about space is therefore not merely an intellectual tool to reintroduce its relevance in the social sciences. It is also of concrete importance to challenge the dominating and imposing modern knowledge of space.This article argues that both authors see space instead as inherently relational and non-relational (oranti-relational). This leads to the conclusion that space itself is not an entity on its own. Space lies instead at the mutual exteriority of objects that stand in a phenomenological relation. I will propose to analyse space from what has recently been described as a metaphysics of objects (see e.g. Harman 2002). Such a position entails a negation of the Kantian idea that human agency grants the only viable means for accessing reality. I will employ the work of Sloterdijk and Harman to allow for a discussion which returns to the fundamental question of what space is. This point will be elaborated on and consequentially used to argue for a speculative return to a revised form of realism.The papers position starts from the idea that every object existsinsomething andwithsomething. This Heideggerian-inspired notion is then used to challenge and replace traditional metaphysics with a flattened and relational ontology. Speculating about the potentiality of different forms of Being[3], other than humanDasein, allows us to think of other worlds that are independently constructed of human consciousness. This essay does however not entail a return to a raw version of scientific naturalism, for which reality is constituted by bare physicality, but wishes to commence from a phenomenological position that considers reality to be always of an intentional category. This idea of intentionality is in the work of the two authors removed from the idealism of an earlier phenomenology and replaced by a more object oriented mode of access.Contemporary discussions on space have been shaped and taken over by abstract discussions of, for example, the ill-defined phenomenon of globalisation. The emphasis on such abstractions symbolises a worrying trend to think of space as detached from objects and devoid of access. Peter Sloterdijk famously expressed the concern that discussions about the globe make little sense, because we never find ourselves outside of it. It is however not only the space of the globe which is always withdrawn from us. All spaces are both withdrawn and simultaneously always present in an allusive form. Space allows us to identify, classify and differentiate objects. Space is however also non-relational, because space does not allow us to ever fully grasp the objects in it. Space is in this article argued to belong to the world of phenomenology. Space allows for the coming into existence of worlds. Space is worlding. The capacity of space to world is not limited to human experience. Objects similarly world. There is a growing need to return to discussions that start from the small and the tangible to shed light on the relationship between Being and space. Speculations about the meaning of space could additionally help challenge historically constructed and socially embedded understandings of space. This essay therefore hopes to modestly contribute to a growing body of literature which proposes to return to the big questions or what Quentin Meillassoux (2011) calls the great outdoors from which philosophy and the social sciences originated.The thinkers I will be discussing in this paper both attempt to reengage with the prehistoric essence of Being and its relationship to space. Their work signifies (to different extents and purposes) a trend to move away from traditional post-Kantian philosophies in search of an alternative and progressive form of metaphysics. There are admittedly many differences between Sloterdijk and Harmans work which could make a comparative assessment of their understandings of space a challenging exercise. Their tone and style of writing, but also their theoretical origins and philosophical starting positions are largely diverging. One of the things they do share in common, besides the obvious spatial predisposition in their writings, is the great influence that HeideggersBeing and Timeenjoys in their work. The shared appreciation for what they both define as the greatest work of 20thcentury philosophy will therefore constitute an important component in this article. The mutual appreciation of both thinkers for the relational ontology of the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour is similarly of noticeable influence in their work. Both Harman and Sloterdijk not only employ Latourian terms and concepts, but also draw inspiration from his wish to pluralise the concept of world and to repopulate it with a larger number of both animate and inanimate actors.Peter Sloterdijk, the thinker discussed in the first section, has only recently been introduced to the Anglo-Saxon academic world[4], but has for some time already been a household name in continental philosophy. Sloterdijks seminal workSpheres[Sphren], on which this paper mainly draws, is characterised by its post-Heideggerian approach in enabling a more spatial understanding of ontology. His work is and should, according to him, be understood as the spatial companion to HeideggersBeing and Time. Graham Harman, whose Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is discussed in section two, comes from a very different theoretical tradition. Harman combines the clarity of writing characteristic of analytical philosophy with the ontological insights of earlier phenomenologists such as Husserl, Zubiri, Whitehead among others. Harman gained prominence as a founding member of the so-called Speculative Realism (SR) school. Harmans OOO rests on a revision of HeideggersBeing and Time, in which he, as with Sloterdijk, attempts to transcend Heidegger, to arrive at a potent and fertile form of realism. The third section of this article will attempt to pull the two thinkers closer together to allow for a critical engagement on the basis of their different conceptualisations of space. Such a dialogue will be translated into a preliminary synthesis, which will allow us to start speculating about the conceptual challenges that space poses to Being. The act of translation is admittedly not an exclusive constructive exercise. The section will therefore be careful not to lose sight of what might get lost in the making of such a synthesis. The conclusion will then summarise some of the main findings and reiterate the argument that space is inseparable from the Being of objects.SLOTERDIJK AND SPHEROLOGYTaking his inspiration from oriental philosophy, French post-structuralism and German critical theory, Sloterdijk is as much a thinker of everything (but never just anything) as an eclectic intellectual magpie, taking inspiration and ideas from a wide-range of intellectual sources in the German language and beyond, arranging them in new and surprising ways (Elden 2012: 3). Sloterdijk, however, reserves a specific role for phenomenologically-inclined thinkers who provide him with the possibility to discover and elaborate on the ontological dimensions of space or, in Sloterdijks own words, on the onto-topology of Being. As such, space, for Sloterdijk, is something that is simultaneously relational and ontological.Sloterdijk defines and studies spheres in a manner that is redolent of Edward Caseys profound, but oft neglected,Fate of Place(1997)andGetting Back into Place(2009). Sloterdijk allows spheres, as Casey does for places, a central role in the definition and possibility of Being itself. To be-there (Da-SeinorDasein) means for Sloterdijk always to be-with-something (Mit-Sein) and to be-in-something (In-Sein). The in and the with are for Sloterdijk therefore the essential ontological cornerstones for any being to be at all. This insight was also made by the young Heidegger, though he later changed directions and chose to ever more legitimise the specificity of humanDaseinin existential terms. Sloterdijk (as well as Harman) consequently considers his effort as a return to the young Heidegger for whom space was an essential element for the ontology of Being[5].The spatiality of Heideggers Dasein is composed of de-distancing (or de-severance orEnt-fernung)and orientation (directionality orAusrichtung). Malpas (2006: 91) takes the former to refer to the way in which specific things take on a certain relation to us from out of the larger structure in which they are situated. Heidegger (1996: 97) writes: De-distancing means making distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something disappear, bringing it near. Dasein is essentially de-distancing De-distancing discovers remoteness. I walk across the street towards the confectionery which allows me to become aware of the long, thin black liquorice on sale. Orientation by contrast refers to the way in which, in being involved in a certain task, I find myself already situated in certain ways with respect to the things and places around me (Malpas 2006: 91). For example, while eating, I have a fork on the left of me, a knife on the right and a plate in the middle. Heidegger (1996: 100, original emphasis) argues that Da-sein is spatial by way of circumspectly discovering space so that it is related to beings thus spatially encountered by constantly de-distancing. As being-in which de-distances, Da-sein has at the same time the character ofdirectionality.Every bringing near has always taken a direction in a region beforehand from which what is de-distanced approaches so that it can be discovered with regards to its place. De-distancing on the basis of orientation allows Dasein, in other words, to make sense of a withdrawn reality in which things exist objectively (but not ontologically) in the world (sein in). Objects are ontic, while Dasein is thought to be ontological. The latter is through its capacity of de-distancing and orientation, therefore, in-the-world (ie. Being-in) and world forming (orweltbildend).What recent philosophers referred to as being-in-the-world first of all, and in most cases, means being-in-spheres Spheres are air conditioning systems in whose construction and calibration, for those living in real coexistence, it is out of the question not to participate. The symbolic air conditioning of the shared space is the primal production of every society (Sloterdijk 2011: 46).A sphere is, in yet other words, as a world formatted by its inhabitants or as the spaces where people actually live. I [ie. Sloterdijk] would like to show that human beings have, till today, been misunderstood, because thespacewhere they exist has always been taken for granted without ever being made conscious and explicit(Sloterdijk in Kristal 2012: 153, original emphasis). Spherology offers then a theory of the minimalconditionsfor the initially impersonal process of creative self-organization which isolated and distanced the proto-hominids from their environment in what he [i.e. Sloterdijk] calls anthropogene islands or anthropospheres (van Tuinen 2009: 110).Heidegger showed that humans are thrown-into-the-world into its there, but for Sloterdijk this does not mean that we are immediately at home in the world. He argues that it is exactly this concept of being-at-home in the world that must be questioned, as to simply accept this condition as a fact would mean to fall back into the logic of container-physics that needs to be overcome. (Sloterdijk 2012: 37). Sloterdijk shows that we are not only able, but indeed compelled to make our own worlds. Without spheres humans would simply not be able to survive as a species. Being-in-the-world is for Sloterdijk thus first and foremost Being-in-a-sphere. Such spheres are however not singular, but always plural. Sloterdijk provides in his 2,500-page magnum opus (1998, 1999, 2004) a historical onto-anthropological understanding of how humans are to be understood topologically. Topology lies at the heart of spherology given that for Sloterdijk it is thetoposof man [which] is a far more determining aspect of human existence than theessenceof man (ten Kate 2011: 103). The topos is for Sloterdijk a condition of being in which ourDasein- to use Heideggers redefinition of human existence - is fully integrated, to the extent that theDaof ourDaseinis understood as fundamentally topical (ten Kate 2011: 105). Sloterdijk therefore challenges the still dominant philosophical tradition which started with Descartes and continuous to be of still great importance in discussions on the essence of human Dasein. The premise for Sloterdijks ontological anthropology is not grounded in theexistentialquestionwhatbeing is, but revolves instead around a relational onto-topology of the placeswhereBeing is made possible. TheDain Dasein forms as such the first sphere. It is also here that Sloterdijk breaks with Heideggers existentialism.Sloterdijks emphasis on space leads him to detach Heideggers notion of a house of Being from its original context of language. Sloterdijk proposes instead a literal reading of the house, which starts from the necessity of Being to interact with its surroundings. Sloterdijk agrees, in other words, with Heidegger that Being is thrown (Geworfenen) into the world, but only to part again ways with Heidegger to demonstrate that this original act is followed by the development and employment of what Sloterdijk describes as anthropotechnologies. Such technologies, of which language is only one, help construct the shell, housing or sphere (Ge-Huse) that translates into a Foucauldian-like biopolitics of self-domestication. This early sphere protects beings from the outside world and helps to transform mere ontic being into Being. Anthropotechnology is therefore considered to enable the Heideggerian clearing (Lichtung) from which Being-in-the-world becomes possible.Sloterdijk conceptualises spheres in different sizes and forms which he defines as thought-figures that possess a relational capacity to being. He chronologically analyses and discusses them according to their size and temporal evolution. The first volume ofSpheres(2011 [1998]) deals with the microspherology [Mikrosphrologie] of bubbles [Blasen]. The second volume (1999)[6]deals with the macrospherology [Makrosphrologie] of globes [Globen] and the third volume (2004) with the plural spherology [plurale Sphrologie] of foam [Schume]. The volumes could be read in a linear, chronological fashion in which humans first existed in the bubbles of the microsphere and later came to construct more complex macro-spheres. The last volume is a socially critical analysis of the recent emergence of so-called foam. The first volume ofSpheresis for this essay however the most relevant among the three, since it sets out the ontological presuppositions and foundations that will form the building blocks for the other two books.Bubbles are in the first volume described to be the micro-spherology of human beings. Human beings are, as Sloterdijk shows, always located in a bubble which protects them from the outside and allows them to be and remain alive. Bubbles are, in other words, the climatologically tuned spaces or spheres (greenhouses orTreibhuser) which allow beings immunity from the environment (um-welt). They are also, as briefly noted earlier, world-forming (weltbildend) in that humans adjust their spherological environment (Greenhouse effect orTreibhauseffekt). Sloterdijk discusses and describes bubbles and spheres in both material and in immaterial form (e.g. the uterus, the home, the polis, etc.). In the second volume of his trilogy he, in fact, attaches the concept of a sphere to the globe itself. However, he never departs from Heideggers fundamental idea that Dasein is situatedina somewhere andwithothers. He rather constantly deepens the importance of being-in. To be means for Sloterdijk and, as discussed in the next section, also for Harman, always to be-withsomething and Being-with something always takes placeinsomething. This forms the conceptual springboard for his genealogical assessment of the beginnings of spheres.Sloterdijks perhaps most widely discussed example of such a sphere is the relationship between the foetus and the placenta that make up the bubble of the uterus (the original sphere ordieUrsphre). The intimate relationship between the foetus and the womb is, according to Sloterdijk, the most intimate (and therefore closest to perfect) example of a bubble. The structural process which allows the two poles to merge into one sphere is what Sloterdijk, in Latourian language, defines as coupling[7]. We hold the opinion that through a theory of couplings, of genius and of complemented existence, we can save all there is to save from Heideggers interest in rootedness. (Sloterdijk 2012: 41).The reasons that Sloterdijk commences his spherology and pays special attention to the perfect symbiosis that takes place between the placenta (the original companion) and the foetus are plural. I will present here the two that I find most appropriate for the purpose of coming closer to Sloterdijks relational understanding of space. The first of which demonstrates and confirms the earlier suggestion that Sloterdijk is not so much looking for an answer to the question ofwhatmakes us human, but is rather more interested in the questionwherehumans are. Where comes for Sloterdijk before what. He therefore does not start his analysis from a position in which humans area prioripresented as the subjects worthy of investigation, but rather flattens the ground for a topological understanding ofwherehumans can come (and have historically come) into Being. Being is in Sloterdijks onto-anthropology removed from its revered position as an autonomous subject and effectively replaced by bipolar and multipolar relations that enable and constitute a sphere.Sloterdijk empirically demonstrates that within the womb (The inner-sphere of the absolute Mother or innenraum der absoluten Mutte),it is impossible to draw an epistemological distinction between the object and the subject. This is because the foetus does neither recognise the placenta nor the nobjects ([ie.] neither subjects nor objects) such as placental blood, intrauterine acoustics, and other medial givens [The] child develops [therefore] an identity not by recognizing itself at a distance in the mirror but through presubjective resonances (van Tuinen 2007: 281). This negative gynaecology (negative Gynkologie), Sloterdijk argues, embodies the perfect immersion of Being-a-pair[Paar-Sein] in a bubble, which ultimately bursts when the natal process commences.In terms of its dramatic content, what one generally calls cutting the [umbilical] cord is the introduction of the child into the sphere of ego-forming clarity. To cut means to state individuality with the knife. The one who performs the cut is the first separation-giver in the subjects history; through the gift of separation, he provides the child with the stimulus for existence in the external media. (Sloterdijk 2011: 388).The moment the child is thrown-into-the-World and has bid farewell to the placenta (primal companion or theUrbegleiter) is also the moment in which it will have to form new relationships and in turn create and dwell in new bubbles. The uterus is the (primordial) sphere responsible for creating the conditions in which the relation between the two objects literally comes to lifebeforethe foundation of subjectivity and the subject itself. Sloterdijks introduction of a pre-subjectivity therefore provocatively challenges the idea that philosophy should start from the premise of a subject-object dichotomy and flattens the metaphysical ground on which, as discussed in the next section, we also find the object oriented ontology of Graham Harman. Sloterdijk, in another vein, argues against the idea of the European metaphysical age that object and subject are divided. He (Sloterdijk 2004: 42) laments that they put the soul, the self and the human on one side, and the thing, the mechanism and the inhuman on the other... At the same time it denies to things and materials an abundance of characteristics that upon closer look they in fact do possess. If these traditional errors are corrected respectively, a radically new view of cultural and natural objects comes about.For Sloterdijk, as with Harman, objects do not exist anonymously from each other, but must instead always be understood in relation to other objects. They do not have an existence prior to, or independent from, these relations, but are also not reducible to a set of finite relations or qualities. The possibilities of Being are, if we would draw Sloterdijks ontology to its logical conclusion, infinite. The number of possible spheres is, in fact, as infinitive as the number of objects. Co-subjectivity and co-existence [Mit-Sein] are the norm in Sloterdijks post-human philosophy. Sloterdijk ridicules Cartesian notion of subjectivity and cogito when he writes that:Man is a thinking meteorite. Only in contact with what exists does his surrounding catch fire. Through my incandescence appears what exists and makes sense as a surrounding. I burn, and therefore, it can't be that there is nothing. If I burn, it is because I am here to co-exist with the rest of what is here (Sloterdijk in Kristal 2012: 160).The tragic and traumatic element in the bursting of the ur-bubble[8]forms the second component in Sloterdijks relational onto-topology. Sloterdijk contextualises this primordial separation, which forces the subject to confront the Big Outdoors, in both structural and historical terms. Sloterdijks structural analysis relies on and echoes Arendts (1998) notion of human natality in which the natal function of action works as the foundation of constant renewal. Sloterdijk however, blends this concept with his own philosophical anthropology to win our attention for the importance of the historicalwhereaboutsof the human. The longing for the perfect union in the bubble of the broken womb will, as we are told, throughout the subjects lifetime compel her to travel, create and dwell in many different spheres. Human beings are for Sloterdijk, in a Heideggerian sense, therefore quite literally life-enabling and animating architects and engineers. Being means for Sloterdijk therefore first and foremost the engineering and designing of architectural spheres that make possible and give meaning to existence[9].The interaction between objects in a place is, in other words, structurally and continually repeated throughout the beginning of time. It is however equally important to remember that Sloterdijk also here again refuses to draw a strict line between the subject and objects or between humans and things. Every object we confront or encounter is for Sloterdijk a relational act of immersion. He (Sloterdijk 2011: 92, 93) describes the insertion of a candy into ones mouth as the realisation that even [t]he most basic luxury food is suitable to convince me that an incorporated object, far from coming unambiguously under my control, can take possession of me and dictate its topic to me. He (Sloterdijk 2011: 94) follows this line of reasoning and consequentially poses the provocative question what it is that remains of the [enlightenment] dream of human autonomy once the subject has experienced itself as a penetrable hollow body?. The answer to this question leads back to the core of Sloterdijks spherology which is grounded in the idea that to be always means to be with-something and in-something. The reified individual or the fetish of individualism (latin:in-dividuusor indivisibility) is for Sloterdijk (as is the indivisibility of atoms for quantum mechanics) therefore a myth. The individual is for Sloterdijk and less explicitly (and politically) also for Harman relationally composed of smaller parts (as other objects). Sloterdijks discussions of spheres are, to briefly sum up, as much about the undertaking of the experiment to demonstrate to what extent the being-a-pair [Paar-Sein] precedes all encounters (Funcke and Sloterdijk 2005), as they are about exposing the myth of an autonomous individual subject. There are no individuals, only dividuals [Dividuen] humans only exist as particles, or poles of spheres. There exist exclusively pairs [Paare] and their extensions [Erweiterungen] (Sloterdijk 2001: 144, translated, see also Sloterdijk 2011: 83 ff.). These realisations are also of importance for Sloterdijks genealogical record of human relationships in spheres to which we will now shortly shift our attention, before moving on to Harmans OOO.Sloterdijk describes how the placenta in pre-modern times was respected across different cultures and religiously represented as the inseparable doppelganger of the foetus. The arrival of modernity (which Sloterdijk mockingly describes as the regime of placental nihilism) has, however, come to alienate the foetus from the placenta, which was consequentially excommunicated and banished from any form of philosophical consideration[10]. But where, as in the most recent part of the Modern Age, the With-space is annulled and withdrawn from the start through the elimination of the placenta, the individual increasingly falls prey to the manic collectives and total mothers - and, in their absence, to depression. (Sloterdijk 2001: 285). The loss of such intimacy between objects (for Sloterdijk a defining element of modernity) was replaced by the myth of an autonomous individuality. The analysis of the post-natal diversification of spheres does for Sloterdijk, however, neither start nor finish with the sphere-dependent and sphere-creating di-vidual, but is also constitutive of the genealogical foundations of the macro-spheres which he (1999) discusses in the second volume of his trilogy. The third volume (2004) deals with the breakup of spheres and the emergence of so-called co-isolated foams. I do not believe however, that an analysis of the last two volumes would contribute to a better understanding of the theoretical premise of Sloterdijks spatial ontology nor does this paper seek to undertake such an endeavour[11]. Neither of these volumes radically departs from the conceptual ontology presented in the first volume which shows that Being for Sloterdijk always means tobe-withsomething and tobe-insomething.The philosophical foundations of SloterdijksSpheresare, to shortly summarise, first and foremost grounded in a historical study of the need of Being to create interior spaces. Humans need to beinandwithsomething, but human bodies themselves are similarly theinsomething for another thing. Human animals flourish only in the greenhouse of their autogenous sphere (Sloterdijk 2011: 46). The capacity and necessity to create spheres in order to be is, of course, not reserved to humans alone, but could equally be applied to the realm of other animate and even inanimate entities. Every individual as much as every other entity is an aggregate. Space for Sloterdijk grants, in other words, the condition necessary for the existence of Being. It provides room, both literally and metaphorically, for whole species of spaces to grow and bloom, spaces of empire, spaces of capital, spaces of signal and communication, spaces of eros, spaces of dreams (Thrift 2012: 143). Space is, as Thrift (2012: 140) notes, thus understood gynaecologically as a set of envelopes or surrounds or shelters, self-animated spaces that give their inhabitants the resources to produce worlds. It is this faculty of space, to produce intentional realities for animate and imamate objects alike, that forms the phenomenological bridge between Sloterdijks theory of spheres and the object ontology oriented (OOO) philosophy of Graham Harman.OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGYGraham Harman is one of the four thinkers[12]who helped pave the early foundations of the so-called Speculative Realism (SR) school. The interdependence between the theories and research interest of its core members and the influence which especially Quentin Meillassoux has had on Harman OOO, compels me to shortly introduce the main philosophical principles of SR. Quentin Meillassoux is a former student of Alain Badiou whose writings inspired Meillassouxs (2011) now famousAfter Finitude. The work could be said to have served as a general introduction to the underlying principles of the school and will be discussed shortly in greater detail.Speculative RealismThe theme which unites the SR thinkers is their common discontent over the longstanding Kantian dominance in both the analytical and continental philosophical tradition. The realism that SR proposes is, however, not so much a return to a form of pre-critical realism, but rather a third road between realism and idealism. It openly attempts to speculate about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally (Bryant et al., 2011: 3).SR attacks the foundations of what is commonly known as the Kantian Copernican Revolution, which, unlike the name suggests, is argued to refer to the exact opposite of the decentring of human existence. Kant is said to have been among the first to make our access to the world dependent upon our knowledge of it. This form of so-called correlationism is, Meillassoux (2011: 118) argues, the exact opposite of the task pursued by the empirical sciences which aim to actually uncover knowledge of a world that is indifferent to any relation to the world. The task which SR sets upon itself is therefore nothing short of a challenging of the Kantian dualistic thinking.SR is, crudely summarised, centred on a revision of Kants inaccessible thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich).Meillassoux shows that the thing-in-itself is temporally outside human access. He uses the example of a fossil (the arche-fossil) to show that we cannot come to terms with things that temporally existed prior (ancestrally) to our knowledge of it. This supports his thesis that things not only exist temporally autonomous from human consciousness, but also independent from Kantian facticity. Harmans argument moves beyond Meillassouxstemporalcritique. He argues that correlationism not only fails to explain the existence of things before and after human temporality, but that it is also incapable of talking about realities that arespatiallyoutside of facticity. The correlationist seems no better able to account for the falling vase than for the ancestral formation of the earth (Harman, 2011c: 42). Herman notes that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point [and its omission inAfter Finitude] might be a candidate for the blind spot [of Meillassouxs work] (2011a: 89). Harman notes that things are perfectly able to exist in a reality that is unknown to us.Thinking about something is, according to SR, alwaysforme and relies thus on what Meillassoux describes as the correlationist cogito. The reality of the thing-in-itself is, in other words, constrained by the number of finite possibilities imposed by our human capacity to think. This means, bluntly put, that even though for mewe cannot think a tree existing outside thought, such a tree might exist nonethelessin spite of my not being able to think it (Harman, 2011c: 27, original emphasis). Harman elaborates on this point and shows that reality is in fact hidden or concealed; however, this does not mean that things do not exist but rather that our access to them is limited. Harman goes on to show that we do not need human Dasein to realise that reality is always concealed, and that it is not solely humans that are able to be-in-the-world.The world is not just Heidegger's "world," but always a world populated with distinct forests, atoms, and omens. For this reason, it is misleading to claim that only the world as a whole has primary reality, that its constituents are onlypotentiallythere. On the contrary, the parts of the world arereallythere, defending their private integrity even while besieged by the worldhood of the world. (Harman, 2002: 292, original emphasis).A vase might be falling in an unoccupied country house without anybody seeing it being destroyed into smaller shards of glass. Harman drives this point somewhat later home when he argues that even in the case of direct physical presencean entity outstrips the thought-world correlate in a manner that is never merely lacunary [in perceptual terms]. (Harman, 2011c: 43, original emphasis). Harman connects the idea of independent objects to the still largely unexplored depths of Heideggers philosophy of absence to that of the intentional world of presence described in Husserlian phenomenology.Tool-BeingTool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objectsis the product of Graham Harmans PhD dissertation (1999) which bears a similar title. The book contains a similar critique of contemporary philosophy as that of Meillassouxs (2011)After Finitude, but starts from a different philosophical premise and arrives at largely different conclusions. Harmans main philosophical influences in his search for an object-oriented metaphysics are the phenomenological protgs of Franz Brentano. He relies mainly on the works of Husserl, Twardowski, Whitehead and others, but also on Bruno Latour and, of course, the towering figure of Martin Heidegger. The last thinker provides him with the duality of the present-at-hand (vorhanden) and ready-at-hand (zuhanden) which he, on more than one occasion, identifies as the idea which made Heidegger the single pivotal philosopher of the twentieth century (Harman, 2002: 3, Harman, 1999: i). This widely cited philosophical concept has, despite embodying the central thread of Heideggers entire intellectual corpus, been almost universally misunderstood (Harman, 2002: 4). The reason for this will be discussed shortly. The other great influence on Harmans work is Edmund Husserl whose notions of accidents and intentional objects he employs alongside Heideggers tool-analysis[13]. The fusion of these two sets of concepts and thinkers helps him to combine Heideggers philosophy of absence with a philosophy of presence (Harman, 2011b: 35). The result is the materialisation of a unique quadruple structure (Figure 1). He places this structure, technically inspired by HeideggersGeviert(fourfold)[14], at the centre of each and every (animate and inanimate) object.

Figure 1: The theoretical sources of inspiration for Harmans fourfold structure[15].Harmans quadruple structure begins with Heideggers (e.g. 1996) tool-analysis, which is grounded in the idea of a reality composed of objects that are hidden from view. Harman describes the subterranean realm of objects as tool-being. An object is for him a unified entity which exists autonomously from its wider context and also from its own pieces (Harman, 2011b: 116). A real object (defined by its tool-being) is always concealed from other real objects and therefore absolutely non-relational. Harman complements Heideggers concept of the concealed nature of objects with the Husserlian notion of the intentional or, as Harman describes it, the sensual. Sensual objects are the intentional interpretations of concealed objects by intending objects. They enjoy a rich relational capacity which helps to constitute the reality of real, intending objects.Harmans resultant OOO must therefore be understood as a fourfold structure consisting of two dualisms at the centre of every object. The first dualism is of a Heideggerian origin and is grounded in the idea of concealed objects with equally withdrawn real qualities. The second dualism is inspired by the philosophy of Husserl and consists of sensual objects and equally sensual qualities that are abundantly visible in their sensuous present-at-handness. Reality can, according to Harman, be experienced as a result of the tension between real objects and their sensual translations. This tension is what for Harman constitutes space. He identifies however, three other, additional structural tensions: time, essence and eidos (Figure 2). We will for the purpose of this paper however primarily dwell on Harmans spatial tension which shares the same strong Heideggerian overtones that we identified earlier in Sloterdijks theory of spheres. First however we feel that we must explain why OOO rests on the foundational principle that real objects are inaccessible. This will allow us to further elaborate how this inaccessibility of the real (the real always hides) renders into the need to translate objects into a sensual form.Most analyses on Heideggers tool-analysis, as Harman (2002) demonstrates, proceed from a pragmatic philosophy in which present-at-hand and ready-at-hand are thought of as parts of a practical philosophy which concentrates on the tools themselves. Humanity is through its ability to emotionally and theoretically experience reality in such accounts raised above the experiential capacity of both animals and inanimate objects. Humanity is, in other words, singled out as the unique agency which is able to penetrate the ready-at-hand of tools and to reach into the subterranean realm of their present-at-hand.This ability to expose thezuhandenheitof an object and to return it to a projected world-in-itself is commonly said to be one of defining characteristics of the uniqueness of humanDasein. This is, according to Harman, however not how we should read Heidegger or as Harman notes himself: the tool-analysisdoes notserve to criticize the notion of independent objects, as if to champion instead a subjective human realm of gadgets. The concept of Dasein is not introduced in order to rough up the notion of a world-in-itself (Harman, 2002: 19, original emphasis). Dasein does, in other words, not lend humans a special capacity to access the world as it reallyis. This reading of Heideggers Dasein expresses a similar kind of criticism as the one voiced by Sloterdijk. The latter similarly intends to break with the hysteric-heroic subject that always believes itself to be the first to die and that remains miserably ignorant concerning its embeddedness within relations of intimacy and solidarity (Sloterdijk 2012: 40). Sloterdijk wishes to depart from the existentialism from which both the old and the young Heidegger suffered. Both thinkers express an eagerness to move beyond the reified character of Dasein and a desire to travel to a post-subject/ object philosophy. For Sloterdijk this means not asking the who question, but the where question. Harman (2002: 128) wishes to leave Dasein altogether and notes that the theme of Dasein is subordinate to the analysis of tool-being rather than the reverse [I]t means that the being of an entity makes only sense in terms of the general strife between its concealed execution and its luminous surface.Here we seem to have arrived at the thrust of how Harman intends to break with Heideggers existentialDaseinto pursue the phenomenology of Husserl. The true nature of objects is always receded from experience which means that any form of interaction with tool-being can only occur through an intentional mediation (or vicarious causation) in which only certain so-called sensual qualities of the object are encountered.Harmans notion of the sensual are closely related to Husserls phenomenological intentional objects, but are removed from Husserls concealed idealism. They could in fact be said to perform the role of Heideggers as-structure in which the Being of an object can only in a mediated form be experienced as a sensual object. The vicarious causation between a real object and a sensual one is, according to Harman, what constitutes space. Space is for Harman, as it is similarly for Sloterdijk, thus phenomenally understood as the relation which occurs at the exteriority of interacting objects. Space is the sensual as-structure that results from the relationship between objects. This mode of interaction is in Harmans account not reserved to human Dasein alone which, through its existential de-distancing and directionality, is supposedly able to make sense of the world. Space is for Harman instead the (present-at-hand) broken hammer. Heidegger is for Harman (2002: 55) therefore the [philosopher] of