{"title":"Books by Peter Sloterdijk","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780231145237","title":"Rage and Time – A Psychopolitical Investigation","description":"While ancient civilizations worshipped strong, active emotions, modern societies have favored more peaceful attitudes, especially within the democratic process. We have largely forgotten the struggle to make use of thymos, the part of the soul that, following Plato, contains spirit, pride, and indignation. Rather, Christianity and psychoanalysis have promoted mutual understanding to overcome conflict. Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk, the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing how the history of Western civilization can be read as a suppression and return of rage. By way of reinterpreting the Iliad, Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, and recent Islamic political riots in Paris, Sloterdijk proves the fallacy that rage is an emotion capable of control. Global terrorism and economic frustrations have rendered strong emotions visibly resurgent, and the consequences of violent outbursts will determine international relations for decades to come. To better respond to rage and its complexity, Sloterdijk daringly breaks with entrenched dogma and contructs a new theory for confronting conflict.   His approach acknowledges and respects the proper place of rage and channels it into productive political struggle.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227581690229,"sku":"9780231145237","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780231145237_1f79d077-101b-43a1-baa3-de708adfa825.jpg?v=1786012483"},{"product_id":"9780231175333","title":"The Terrible Children of Modernity","description":"Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called “Germany’s most controversial thinker” by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity.   For Sloterdijk, modernity is defined by its need to break with the past. Moderns are perpetual rebels who seek to sever the ties of tradition and forms of inheritance that bind generations and eras together. With deep philosophical, historical, and literary range, he traces this antigenealogical experiment from the French Revolution onward, from Madame de Pompadour and Napoleon through Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, the Dadaists, and Deleuze. Acutely aware of the destructive potential of cultural discontinuities, Sloterdijk is no less critical of the “fathers” who condemn change than the “terrible children” who seek a drastic rupture with their predecessors. Equally concerned with the grand sweep of history and our current predicaments, he instead calls for new ways to live together in the intersubjectivity of the human condition. Incisive and daring, breathtaking in its scope, this account of youthful rebellion against tradition asks us to reimagine the ethics of genealogy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228746854773,"sku":"9780231175333","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780231175333_512e1fea-e432-4986-aec7-c44dd034bc57.jpg?v=1786012531"},{"product_id":"9780816615865","title":"Critique Of Cynical Reason","description":"In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise-polemical in nature, with a title that conscious and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work —appeared in West Germany. Pete Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960s. Sloterdijk finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture in personal and institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than. an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.   With Adorno and Horkeimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility \"well off and miserable at the same time,\" able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the kynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic —the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler's ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295083966837,"sku":"9780816615865","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780816615865_021d9479-c30e-4582-bddf-c882a56e91db.jpg?v=1786016223"},{"product_id":"9781509557493","title":"If You Have Never Thought Gray – A Theory of Color","description":"“You’re not a painter if you haven’t painted gray”, declared Paul Cézanne. The same could be said of philosophers: you’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray. This simple four-letter word signifies much more than a quasi-neutral color lying between black and white: we use the same word to describe moods, November skies, the hair of the elderly, the withered features of faces, dusty shelves, faceless bureaucracies, dreary politicians and hundreds of other things. This plain, unassuming word conceals a multitude of thoughts that we seldom pause to consider.    In this exceptionally original book, Peter Sloterdijk follows the grey thread through the history of philosophy, art, literature and politics, enabling us to see familiar things in new ways and highlighting features of our lives that would otherwise remain unseen. Beginning with Plato’s allegory of the cave which introduced the concept of gray into thought, Sloterdijk unfolds a chiaroscuro narrative which recognizes the power of grey as a metaphor for the indefinite, the indifferent, the ordinary, the intermediate and the neutralizing. We see the invention of photography and monochrome’s journey through modern art – from Malevich’s Black Square to Richter’s grey panel paintings – in a new light, and we see modern states and modern politics as full of grey zones, from the hidden spheres of the security services to the extraterritorial spaces that harbor illegal activities like money laundering and the drug trade.    A work of brilliance by one of the most creative philosophers writing today, If You Have Never Thought Gray will appeal to a wide readership interested in philosophy, art and politics, and to students and academics in philosophy, visual arts and the humanities generally.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":56301462192501,"sku":"9781509557493","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57685868609909,"sku":"9781509557486","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509557493.jpg?v=1792599087"},{"product_id":"9781503639003","title":"Out of the World","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this essential early work, the preeminent European philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary meditation on humanity's tendency to refuse the world.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDeveloping the first seeds of his anthropotechnics, Sloterdijk theorizes consciousness as a medium, tuned and retuned over the course of technological and social history. His subject here is the \"world-alien\" (\u003ci\u003eWeltfremdheit\u003c\/i\u003e) in man that was formerly institutionalized in religions, but is increasingly dealt with in modern times through practices of psychotherapy. Originally written in 1993, this almost clairvoyant work examines how humans seek escape from the world in cross-cultural and historical context, up to the mania and world-escapism of our cybernetic network culture. Chapters delve into artificial habitats and forms of intoxication, from early Christian desert monks to pharmaco-theology through psychedelics. In classic form, Sloterdijk recalibrates and reinvents concepts from the ancient Greeks to Heidegger to develop an astonishingly contemporary philosophical anthropology.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302234075509,"sku":"9781503639003","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781503639003_08ef4007-b8e2-4f9b-b36b-3f669105234a.jpg?v=1786021893"},{"product_id":"9781509547500","title":"Making the Heavens Speak – Religion as Poetry","description":"The idea of a connection between poetry and religion is as old as civilization. Homer consulted the Olympian gods on the fate of the fighters on the plain before Troy, and the poet made the heavenly ones speak. It was through poetry that the gods were brought within reach of human hearing. In the centuries after Homer, the Athenian stage became the setting where gods made their poetic interventions, resolving human impasses and contributing to the emotional synchronization of the public life of the city.    Sloterdijk argues that, as with the culture of the Ancient Greeks, all religions inscribe a kind of “theopoetry” at the heart of their cultural life and thought, even as they strenuously obscure these poetic origins through the cultivation and enforcement of orthodox norms. Sloterdijk also shows how, in conditions of religious pluralism, religions poetically reshape themselves to accommodate the demands of the religious marketplace.    This highly original study of the poetic devices that inform accounts of the otherworldly offers a new interpretation of religious practice and its theological elaboration through history, as well as a fresh perspective on our contemporary age in which collective life, interwoven with imaginative fabrications, is fraying under critical stress.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302585610613,"sku":"9781509547500","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509547500_7542cb5c-f2fc-4013-93dd-c0c4c68b4cbd.jpg?v=1786021895"},{"product_id":"9781584351870","title":"Foams","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe final volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated \u003ci\u003eSpheres\u003c\/i\u003e trilogy, on the phenomenology of community and its spatial peripheries.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e“So the One Orb has imploded—now the foams are alive.\"\u003cbr\u003e—from \u003ci\u003eFoams\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eFoams \u003c\/i\u003ecompletes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated \u003ci\u003eSpheres\u003c\/i\u003e trilogy: his 2,500-page “grand narrative” retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the \"Sphere.\" For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger's \u003ci\u003eBeing and Time\u003c\/i\u003e, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space—a shifting of the question of \u003ci\u003ewho we are \u003c\/i\u003eto a more fundamental question of \u003ci\u003ewhere we are\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this final volume, Sloterdijk's “plural spherology” moves from the historical perspective on humanity of the preceding two volumes to a philosophical theory of our contemporary era, offering a view of life through a multifocal lens. If \u003ci\u003eBubbles\u003c\/i\u003e was Sloterdijk's phenomenology of intimacy, and \u003ci\u003eGlobes\u003c\/i\u003e his phenomenology of globalization, \u003ci\u003eFoams\u003c\/i\u003e could be described as his phenomenology of spatial plurality: how the bubbles that we form in our duality bind together to form what sociological tradition calls \"society.\" \u003ci\u003eFoams\u003c\/i\u003e is an exploration of capsules, islands, and hothouses that leads to the discovery of the foam city.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eSpheres\u003c\/i\u003e trilogy ultimately presents a theology without a God—a spatial theology that requires no God, whose death therefore need not be of concern.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs with the two preceding volumes, \u003ci\u003eFoams\u003c\/i\u003e can be read on its own or in relation to the rest of the trilogy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303843017077,"sku":"9781584351870","price":36.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781584351870_79a398d7-b05b-4249-88e6-0104303cb8e9.jpg?v=1786023433"},{"product_id":"9781584351047","title":"Bubbles","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first volume in Peter Sloterdijk's monumental Spheres trilogy: an investigation of humanity's engagement with intimate spaces.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWritten over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312633655669,"sku":"9781584351047","price":32.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781584351047_1ef493f7-5e97-4062-8517-6256a67ace5a.jpg?v=1786023421"},{"product_id":"9781635902075","title":"Prometheus's Remorse","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their “metabolism with nature.” For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312691163509,"sku":"9781635902075","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781635902075_db584bd6-9304-45f1-8ad3-e174525ea7a6.jpg?v=1786023474"},{"product_id":"the-continent-without-qualities","title":"The Continent Without Qualities","description":"Europe has often been the target of criticism: Europe has lost touch with its core values, its leaders are indecisive and its citizens are confused, unsure whether they should be proud of their past or embarrassed by it – the litany of accusations is long, and the writers of obituaries have never been at a loss for words to describe the death of the Old Continent.   Many of these criticisms are exaggerated and misguided but, nevertheless, the time has come to rethink post-imperial Europe, assigning proper place to the burdens of its mixed history, including its colonial past, but also recalling its civilization-defining advances such as its singular culture of learning and inventiveness, its permanent revolution of the critical spirit, its management of pluralism, its ever-evolving organization of general welfare, its dissolution of hierarchies of social origin, and its promotion of dignified living conditions for all.   In this extraordinarily wide-ranging and erudite work, Sloterdijk opens up a few bookmarks in the Book of Europe. If Europe too often is a book rarely read by those whom it concerns, Sloterdijk's bookmarks help orient readers – teaching Europeans from the script that they themselves have written about where they stand with themselves and about their role within the whole. In Sloterdijk's view, the true Europe can be found wherever creative passions have overtaken those of resentment, and it will survive as long as creativity keeps resentment in check.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484357960053,"sku":"9781509570164","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509570164.jpg?v=1786266424"},{"product_id":"midwife-of-the-intellect","title":"Midwife of the Intellect","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57513454043509,"sku":"9791282216005","price":9.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791282216005.jpg?v=1787220209"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-sloterdijk.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}