/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11642334]

Where do I start with this funny looking guy?

[Anonymous No.11642377]

[Anonymous No.11642383]

>Where do I start with this funny looking guy?
hit the blunt

[Anonymous No.11642449]

>>11642377
gimme some more info on this book

[Anonymous No.11642484]

>>11642449
it's been a while since i read it, but i've read it at least twice (and may do so again now since you've reminded me of it).

you could almost say that sloterdijk is to nietzsche what zizek is to hegel-lacan, and he makes a good case for why you should be a big fan of nietzsche as well. the word 'anthropotechnics' will stick in your mind afterwards, life on a practicing and ascetic planet - that this really is, for better or for worse, Planet Discipline. he's also incredibly well-versed in the european continentals, but if you're under the impression that it's all just a literary theory shitshow with nothing to show for it you will be pleasantly surprised.

and the nice thing is that it's kind of like an introduction to the rest of his body of work also.

>All history is the history of immune system battles. It is identical to the history of protectionism and externalization. Protection always refers to a local self, and externalization to an anonymous environ ment for which no one takes responsibility. This history spans the period of human evolution in which the victories of the own could only be bought with the defeat of the foreign; it was dominated by the holy egotisms of nations and enterprises. Because 'global society' has reached its limit, however, and shown once and for all that the earth, with its fragile atmospheric and biospheric systems, is the limited shared site of human operations, the praxis of externalization comes up against an absolute boundary. From there on, a protection ism of the whole becomes the directive of immunitary reason. Global immunitary reason is one step higher than all those things that its anticipations in philosophical idealism and religious monotheism were capable of attaining. For this reason, General Immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of 'religions'. It demands that one transcend all previous distinctions between own and foreign; thus the classical distinctions of friend and foe collapse. Whoever continues along the line of previous separations between the own and the foreign produces immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves.

also b/c he makes jurgen habermas lose sleep at night.

[Anonymous No.11642507]

>>11642484
>>11642449

you'll want to read this too.

[Anonymous No.11642522]

>>11642484
ahhhh so hes another leftist

[Anonymous No.11642548]

>>11642522
what? jesus fuck no. when he published pic rel people were freaking out because they thought he was arguing for essentially the overman theory of statecraft. he's not a leftist.

>Up to this point Plato has presented his doctrine of the art of statesmanship entirely in pictures of shepherds and herds. He has chosen among dozens of misleading representations of this art the one true picture, the valid concept of the thing in question. But now that we have an adequate definition the dialogue switches to another metaphor not in order to undermine the previous accomplishment, but in order to force into the light the most difficult piece of human herding, the management of reproduction. The famous image of the statesman as weaver comes into play. The true, the real, basis for the art of the king lies not in the vote of the public, which gives or withholds trust from their rulers as it will. Nor does it lie in inherited privilege or recent accumulation of power. The Platonic master finds the reason for his mastery only in the expertise he has in the odd and peculiar art of breeding. Here we see the reemergence of the expert-king, whose justification is the insight about how, without doing damage to their free will, human beings can best sort themselves out and make connections. Royal anthropotechnology, in short, demands of the statesman that he understand how to bring together free but suggestible people in order to bring out the characteristics that are most advantageous to the whole, so that under his direction the human zoo can achieve the optimum homeostasis. This comes about when the two relative optima of human characteröwarlike courage and philosophical^humanistic contemplationöare woven together in the tapestry of the species.

>But because in their extremes both virtues can lead to distortions of the one, militaristic warmongering with its bad consequences, the other, quietism and privatization which can so stupefy the land that it falls into servitude without ever noticing it - the statesman has to exclude the inappropriate natures before he begins to weave the chosen ones into the fabric of the state. Only with the remaining noble and free natures will the good state be created. The courageous provide the heavier fibers, the moderates the softer ones.

source:
https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf

[Anonymous No.11642593]

>>11642522
he does, no doubt, make a pretty solid argument for what an actual theory of globalization would look like, but with the caveat that it means the opposite of domination by Pax Americana-style world tourism. people *are* different (and, i think we can say, the *more* different they are, the better - which, superficially, would seem to be the idea behind contemporary postmodernity, except that of course the adoration for difference is today compulsory, the moralizing implications of which being what nietzscheans are always good at detecting).

>The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth, spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a co-operative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism.

>Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn up now or never; they will encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.

this story is continued in his spheres trilogy. he really is one of the most interesting philosophers alive today. worth your time.

[Anonymous No.11642595]

>>11642484
imma brainlet tho and this seems a bit too heavy for me

[Anonymous No.11642640]

>>11642595
we're all relative brainlets tho. that's just how it is.

anyways good luck anon.

[Anonymous No.11642698]

>>11642640
I'm serious.
>From there on, a protection ism of the whole becomes the directive of immunitary reason. Global immunitary reason is one step higher than all those things that its anticipations in philosophical idealism and religious monotheism were capable of attaining

This means nothing to me.

[Anonymous No.11642759]

>>11642698
i mean i read this as a kind of nietzschean theory of psycho-politics, of culture. there is no Abstract Man outside of the one presented by advertising. health has huge psychological and philosophical implications for culture, which in turn shapes the direction of world history. it's his own statement about the meaning of politics, and i find it a pretty convincing one.

but keep in mind, these quotes are taken from the conclusion of that book. he's got a lot more to say on the way to that point. if you want to understand what he's talking about, you'll probably want to read and digest nietzsche first. the theory of immunization is something he works out in a huge three-volume series, so it's not like you should feel bad or anything for not immediately Getting It upon first glance on /lit/. it's the magnum opus of a pretty rare kind of thinker, and that too is set within the context of the 20/21C and all the other thinkers in there.

reading the continental guys takes a while. if you're really into it it's pretty great stuff. i remember the first time i read spengler and thought it was like a foreign language. now i just like reading him because he has such a wonderful style.

there's no need to feel like you're a brainlet because sloterdijk doesn't make perfect sense the first time you read him. shit, maybe you'll find at some point down the road that after doing a bunch of your own reading he *still* doesn't make sense to you because you just disagree with him, and have some unique or interesting idea of your own to contribute. entirely possible.

so don't be hard on yourself. that's my own thought, anyways.

[Anonymous No.11642910]

>>11642759
I haven't even started with the greeks yet.

[Anonymous No.11643004]

>>11642910
well, there you go. you've got at least one all-time classic to look forward to. the greeks are bosses. and nobody ever loved the greeks (well, some of the greeks, anyways) more than nietzsche.

one thing about sloterdijk is that he doesn't really seem to do a lot of name-dropping w/r/t other philosophers. he's read both foucault and deleuze and seems to admire both of them, but mostly everything that he's writing is coming out of his own perspectives, and with very different results. nietzsche is the guy he goes to the most. he likes heidegger a lot too (and so do i!) but it's not really like you will need to have a huge grounding in either of those guys before you can read and find something interesting in his work.

if you can get through CoCR you won't regret it. that's one of the major reasons to read sloterdijk, imho: the prevalence of cynicism and its effect on culture and thinking. more recently peterson has sort of begun doing this as well. maybe now things have changed so much that it's not even ironic cynicism, but even worse, the kind of militant cynicism we see everywhere. it's an outgrowth of the former, i think, but that in turn was an outgrowth of thought that came to fruition in the mid-20C: structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, semiotics, all the rest. which is a really fascinating story in itself, and an important chapter in the intellectual heritage of western (and global) civilization.

and so now it's 2018 and we're kind of suffering from reality deficiency as a result and a rage virus seems to spreading all over the world. philosophers don't always have the cures for these things, but they do have unique and insightful ways of looking at the problems. sloterdijk is more interesting than most in that regard because he actually does come fairly close to prescribing a solution (always a dangerous thing, in academia): that is, anthropotechnics. work on the man. and maybe work to build practices that make work on the man a cultural imperative their own. and other things.

i don't want to simplify or essentialize things or just bloviate endlessly with my own fuckface opinions, though. you'll reach your own conclusions. but when in doubt, always start with the greeks. have you read the stoics at all? epictetus, marcus aurelius, seneca, those guys? bearing in mind what nietzsche says about them (and that he basically picks fights with everyone, and not always in a fair way) they're worth reading also.

[Anonymous No.11643062]

>>11643004
I've only dabbled. Read some Seneca and Aurelius. Haven't buckled down and decided to get through the Greek and Roman canon in an orderly and organized fashion yet, but I'm planning to soon when I have more time.

My personality makes me want to be meticulous and utterly prepared for any eventuality in life, and this proclivity, probably counter-productively, extends into the study of really anything. So for example I can't confidently jump into Nietzsche or any other continental philosopher's work completely, unless I'm sure I have all the basics down, and that means all. I suspect this means I'm crippling myself by being too apprehensive to take on any major work, even if it's a bit prematurely.

[Anonymous No.11643109]

>>11643062
>My personality makes me want to be meticulous and utterly prepared for any eventuality in life, and this proclivity, probably counter-productively, extends into the study of really anything.

i know this feel. sometimes it's really helpful, but sometimes it can really drive you nuts.

>So for example I can't confidently jump into Nietzsche or any other continental philosopher's work completely, unless I'm sure I have all the basics down, and that means all.

for nietzsche especially you are going to have to suspend your natural inclination, i think. again, this is coming from a guy who shares that, or at least in part. but yeah, you are - i 100% guarantee you - never going to have all the basics down for nietzsche. speaking from personal experience, it not only ruins the fun of reading him, but also a major part of his project is destroying people who have this desire, and he's *really really good at it.*

so my advice is, just kind of appreciate what the guy does and don't fret too much about trying to nail him completely. come back and read him every now and again instead. with other guys, maybe the basics are more important. but with nietzsche it's like swimming against the tide.

>I suspect this means I'm crippling myself by being too apprehensive to take on any major work, even if it's a bit prematurely.

meh, maybe. or maybe you just like to do things when you're ready to them. no harm in that. it can leave you feeling somewhat out in the cold tho.

have you ever read pic rel? it's one of my favorites. kind of gives you an overview of a lot of the major thinkers and shows you how they all kind of connect to each other, historically speaking. good for maybe getting a sense of what it is that you want to read further into (or, perhaps, which areas or time-periods chronologically seem most interesting). the ending is a little bit new-agey but overall it's a really great introduction.

[Anonymous No.11643160]

>>11643109
That makes sense, and intuitively I've always understood that a natural part of the learning process is understanding things retroactively.

I haven't read that, but it seems worth looking into.

why are you so nice to me, anon-kun?

[Anonymous No.11643303]

>>11643160
>why so nice

i think it has probably has something to do with the glass bead game.

[Anonymous No.11644005]

bump

[Anonymous No.11645127]

>>11642334
The greeks.

[Anonymous No.11645533]

>>11642334
My favorite author. His latest book "What Happened in the Twentieth Century?: Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason" was just published.

[Anonymous No.11647049]

>>11645533
> Sloterdijk answers to critic

With literal tears whenever they call him a right-winger.

Dude is pathetic.

[Anonymous No.11647079]

>>11642522

[Anonymous No.11647164]

>>11645533
now that sounds interesting. have you picked up a copy yet?

[Anonymous No.11647181]

>>11642334
>>11642334
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-celebrity-philosopher-explains-the-populist-insurgency

Maybe this will be of interest for you. I'm not claiming it's a great article or anything, but it should at least make it clear that he's a human. Although, it is also important to not overstate biography, or "real" human details. It might just take the some of the monolithic theorist character out of reading him.

My advice when approaching any theorist (especially those who are constantly alluding/responding to the tradition in which they situate themselves) is to dive in, but not to kid yourself. Be sure of what kind of reading you are doing at any given moment, whether it be freewheeling associative reading, slow reading where you try to make sense of every element, etc., etc.

If you need to read Nietzsche to understand him, do so, and if you need to read the Greeks to understand Nietzsche, do so. However, try to maintain a through line in your reading. Reading the Greeks should tie into your desire to better read Nietzsche and in turn Sloterdijk. That way your study won't turn into a series of vast, separate tasks. Stay easy in your harness. The ideal model would be inventing calculus out of the necessity to solve something else, rather than just mindless self-imposed discipline. Provide yourself with good reasons to read the Greeks, because doing so is to be already reading Nietzsche, and in turn already reading Sloterdijk.

[Anonymous No.11647285]

>>11643109
saving.

[Anonymous No.11647296]

>>11647049

wait what?

[Anonymous No.11647399]

>>11647296
he's a cuck perpetually doing damage-control...one of his long-time research assistants now is one of the tops at AfD and again he pretends he had no idea

basically he's just Heidegger and doesn't want to admit it so he makes all these stupid, dishonest compromises. in other words he's a nazi but will role play as a jordan peterson for attention and he has no original philosophical ideas, only heidegger repeats

[Anonymous No.11647409]

>>11647181
> He gets excited about the profusion of philanthropic schemes emanating from Silicon Valley and sees in them an attractive model for the future.

he's a fucking retard

[Anonymous No.11647443]

>>11647399
sad if true, nothing worse than a man without balls.

[Anonymous No.11647451]

>>11647399
Please don't compare Sloterdijk to Memerson

[Anonymous No.11647456]

>Slaughterdyke

[Anonymous No.11647472]

>>11647399
Sounds like a lot of made up bullshit.

[Anonymous No.11647567]

>>11647181
>Provide yourself with good reasons to read the Greeks, because doing so is to be already reading Nietzsche, and in turn already reading Sloterdijk.
Unironically, really well spoken.

[Anonymous No.11647662]

>>11647181
>The ideal model would be inventing calculus out of the necessity to solve something else, rather than just mindless self-imposed discipline.

good post anon

[Anonymous No.11648352]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11648984]

>>11647164
It's still in the post =[

[Anonymous No.11649087]

>>11647472
look up Marc Jongen

[Anonymous No.11649338]

>>11647567
>>11647662
thanks dude(s)

[Anonymous No.11650043]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11650843]

The book about bubles

[Anonymous No.11650875]

>>11650843

[Anonymous No.11651458]

>>11650875
He's right though.

[Anonymous No.11651466]

>>11642449
it's one of the great tragedies of my being that i will never have the love of prime anna karina

[Anonymous No.11651517]

hi

[Anonymous No.11651591]

Given the current political climate in Europe he could probably come out as a full blown fascist and mostly get away with it.

[Anonymous No.11651691]

>Given the current political climate in Europe he could probably come out as a full blown fascist and mostly get away with it.

[Anonymous No.11651846]

>fascist

“Eighty-five years after the storms of steel of the German-French fronts, sixty-five years after the peak of the Stalinist mass exterminations, fifty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and just as long after the bombardments of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the swinging back of the Zeitgeist to the preference for middling circumstances is to be understood as a tribute to normalization. In this regard, it has an unconditionally affirmative civilizing value. Furthermore, democracy per se presupposes the cultivation of middling circumstances. As is well known, spirit spits what is lukewarm out of its mouth; in contrast, pragmatism holds that the temperature of life is lukewarm. Thus the impulse toward the middle, the cardinal symptom of the fin de siècle, does not have only political motives. It symbolizes the weariness of apocalypse felt by a society that has had to hear too much of revolutions and paradigm shifts. But above all it expresses the general pull toward the conversion of the drama of history into the insurance industry. Insurance policies anchor antiextremism in the routines of the post-radical society. The insurance industry is humanism minus book culture. It brings into shape the insight that human beings as a rule do not wish to be revolutionized, but rather to be safeguarded. Whoever understands this will bank on the fact that in the future contra-innovative revolts from out of the spirit of the insurance claim are most probable of all.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger

[Anonymous No.11652414]

>>11647399
>in other words he's a nazi

[Anonymous No.11653350]

>>11647567
>>11649338
Good posts should be praised when they are made, and bad posts ought to linger in neglect. Only way to make this board better.

>>11651846
Solid quotation. I'm lost at the last line:
>Whoever understands this will bank on the fact that in the future contra-innovative revolts from out of the spirit of the insurance claim are most probable of all

What's an example of this? Can someone elaborate?

[Anonymous No.11653763]

>>11653350
not that guy, but isn't it the basic idea of trying to extend a kind of therapeutic form of capitalism and its attendant psycho-politics across the entire world?

>The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

the thing that that passage suggests to me is what happens when those anxieties are no longer tranquilizable and the boredom no longer amusable. stress management, somatics. it could be that the kind of psychic insurance sloterdijk is referring to are the reactive desires for people to want to get from the state a means of insuring them against the guilt, anxiety, boredom or dread that come from a totalizing psychological domestication under a super-managerial state.

"humanism minus book culture" necessitates this kind of thing, tranquility engineering, somatics. it's a doomed project, but it doesn't mean that people won't try to do it anyways.

that's how i interpret it, anyways.

[Anonymous No.11654759]

Probably unnecessary bump. I have to step out, but I want to read this.

[Anonymous No.11655720]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11655843]

>>11653350
>Can someone elaborate?
My interpretation, putting it as simply as possible, is just that for the most part 'self-protecting' will be the primary preoccupation of the inhabitants of spheres ("society"/cultures).

>examples
AI takes blue collar jobs, therefore, truckers receive a pay compensation (maybe UBI) as a payout - but specifically as a protecting insurance.
Immigration brings crime, therefore, anti-immigration parties - but motivated by 'self-protection.'

I think Sloterdijk is arguing that these style of pushes are more likely now rather than the previous 20th century style of 'social "revolution" because it is moral'-style arguments.

>>11653763
>isn't it the basic idea of trying to extend a kind of therapeutic form of capitalism and its attendant psycho-politics across the entire world?
I don't think Sloterdijk is making a normative claim, more that he is observing that the West is both focused on self-pampering but also that Western wealth has formed in some a moral impulse to invite others to join us in the 'realm of pampering.'

> sloterdijk is referring to are the reactive desires for people to want to get from the state a means of insuring them against the guilt, anxiety, boredom or dread that come from a totalizing psychological domestication under a super-managerial state
Yes, I would interpret it more as 'the inhabitants of the West as regarding part of a sphere's responsibility to emanate self-reassuring waves of information' as a partner to the self-hypnosis of 'cultural' reproduction (Humanity's "chronic need for illusions" - Foams p811). Also, I don't think Sloterdijk regards "tranquility engineering," as you put it, as unsuccessful or imposed, more as a type of Western success that morally justifies the role of the state-as-part-of-the-sphere :

"I would go so far as to argue that with the start of pedagogical modernity in Romanticism, and fully with the entry into the quasi-total allomothering state of the twentieth century (augmented by a new media environment with a protective-pampering, animating and passivizing tendency), a historically unprecedented psychosocial ecology of the (allo)mother-child field emerged. - Foams p748

Or to put it crudely: the state is your mummy now.

[Anonymous No.11657284]

>>11642334
By getting him a comb.

[Anonymous No.11657303]

sloterdijk in 1987 was not only riding high in the academic world after publishing the critique of cynical reasonm, but he was also the NWA intercontinental champion.

[Anonymous No.11657822]

>>11655843
Any good secondary literature on Sloterdijk? I mean more the kind that helps a novice understand him, rather than hyper-specific phd dissertations.

[Anonymous No.11657902]

>>11657822
Sorry, no. I can't think of any secondary lit that is really helpful on getting into reading Sloterdijk other than (sorry to do this to you) "start with the Greeks" or just reading a lot until you are comfortable with dense, reference-laden and heavily textured work... The primary barrier to reading him in translation is his style and density rather than the ideas themselves - though they can be challenging too.

Ok, ^that^ was my first draft answer but I didn't like it.

You could also read his newspaper columns like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/01/17/social-pluralism/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.78ae21d94d4a
Some of his essays are published as very small books: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nietzsche-apostle
You could start here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254908459_In_Medias_Res_Peter_Sloterdijk%27s_Spherological_Poetics_of_Being

[Anonymous No.11657911]

>>11657902
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31Q9C2n1TI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_fsFwf0juk

[Anonymous No.11657923]

>>11657911
Or this maybe: http://download1.libgen.io/ads.php?md5=DDB46CBA5C0B29FA26D631D806D8E166

[Anonymous No.11657965]

>>11651466
Eh, there are plenty of art thots just like her.