Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country
for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which
confronted headlong the ''enlightened false
consciousness'' of Habermasian critical theory. Two
decades later, after spending seven years in India
studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting
renewed interest for his writings on politics and
globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a
three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell
within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998;
Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming from
Semiotext(e). In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk
answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jurgen
Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological
mutation, development media, communication technologies,
and his own intellectual itinerary.Iconoclastic and
provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a
child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most
exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear
on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger.Like
Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that
contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and
let themselves be ''kidnapped'' by contemporary
''hypercomplexities''; they must forsake our present
humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at
once ecological and global.Neither Sun nor Death is the
best introduction available to Sloterdijk's
philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a
philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative,
as much at ease with current French Theory (Gilles
Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Gabriel Tarde) as with Heidegger
and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. |
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