THE LIMITS OF THE SPHERES

Abstract

The paper, on the one hand, presents a reconstruction of the origin and development of the concepts of “anthropotechnics” and “homeotechnics” in Peter Sloterdijk’s thought, of the anthropological basis of his social philosophy, and of the question of subjectivity addressed in his book You Must Change Your Life (2009). On the other hand, it investigates with a critical aim the different forms of otherness that Sloterdijk theorizes in his philosophical works and the possible solipsistic implications of this concept.

Keywords:

• anthropotechnic
• homeotechnic
• practice
• otherness
• solipsism

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This reconstruction will be confined to Sloterdijk’s thought: it will not be a matter, therefore, of reconstructing which authors and theories have played a role, as sources, in the theorization of Sloterdijkian concepts, but rather of outlining the path of theoretical development that has led Sloterdijk, during its production, to determine the salient features of such concepts.

2 I will use the term “deconstruction” in the present paper not in a strictly Derridean sense, but following the interpretation of this concept that Sloterdijk himself provides in Derrida, an Egyptian: “Once multifocality is taken as a point of departure, all theory moves to the level of second-order observation: one no longer attempts a direct description of the world, but rather re-describes – and thus deconstructs – existing descriptions of the world” (7).

3 Iwona Janicka points out: “The relations between microspheres are based on imitation and contagion […] Sloterdijk claims: ‘in social foam there is no “communication” […] but instead only interautistic and mimetic relations’” (76). This paper represents an interesting example of how, although the author is well aware of the most problematic points in Sloterdijk’s philosophy, it is possible to use his “conceptual arsenal” to build a theory that allows us not only to analyze phenomena different from the ones the author has investigated, but also to envisage social and ethical models not to be found in Sloterdijk’s work. I will come back to this point later. Cf. note 16.

4 In this particular sense, it is possible to identify some specific parallels between the concept of allotechnics in Sloterdijk and that of technique expounded by Martin Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Cf., for example:

The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. (16)

5 Sloterdijk discusses these categories extensively in his God’s Zeal (92–95) in relation to the internal logic of monotheistic discourse. However, as a subject that Sloterdijk applies both to the history of mentalities and to culture, the categories in question can be generalized: they could be understood as a way of interpreting all reality based on the (supposed) dichotomy that exists between entities placed on the side of the subject (= being) and entities placed on the side of the object (= non-being). The fact that (allo-)technique has been the dominant way of interpreting technique in the part of the world where monotheism is the dominant religious conception supports this thesis.

6 In the original German text, Wozu Drogen? Zur Dialektik von Weltflucht und Weltsucht, there is a play on words between “Weltflucht” and “Weltsucht,” which are impossible to fully translate into English. “Weltsucht” evokes both the “search for the world” and “addiction to the world.”

7 Sloterdijk carefully uses the expression “something that can be neither avoided nor mastered” to define its reach (“Rules for the Human Park” 211) [“das Unumgängliche, das zugleich das Nichtbewältigbare ist” (“Regeln für den Menschenpark” 330)].

8 The limits of the employment of these techniques on humans should be the subject of an in-depth bioethical analysis because the specter of eugenics and human enhancement always hovers over them. Jürgen Habermas’s book The Future of Human Nature, immediately following the controversy with Sloterdijk, represents an attempt to reflect on the issues raised by the anthropotechnical debate (although there is no mention of it as such).

9 “A while ago, I suggested distinguishing between heterotechnics and homeotechnics – with the first based on violating and outwitting nature, and the second based on imitation nature and pursuing natural principles of production in artificial contexts” (Sloterdijk, “The Anthropocene” 20) (Sloterdijk uses here the variant “heterotechnics” to designate what prior was “allotechnics”).

10 Sloterdijk had already analyzed this topic in his Ph.D. dissertation on autobiographical literature in the Weimar Republic Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung: Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre.

11

In other words, the spheres that humans construct for themselves – remembering that such spheres are always constructed “not according to free choice […] but under preexisting, given and handed-down conditions” – are a form of de-severence, enabling access to that which is remote, allowing us to safely approach and internalize externalities, or to distance ourselves from those that we cannot. (Sunderland, “Ontological Co-belonging” 140)

12 “How can we remain attentive to the consistency involved in sphere-building without reducing it to mere attempts at adapting to, at enduring ambient pressure?” (Duclos 53).

13 I believe that this is a crucial point which distinguishes my interpretation from others, like the one presented in Dario Consoli’s Introduzione a Peter Sloterdijk (e.g., 190–91). Consoli interprets the original spherological relationship as the mother–fetus relationship (i.e., an intersubjective one). As I have tried to point out above, the relationship occurring at the nobjectual level is between the fetus and the nobjects (because the mother can be present in this phase only through her nobjectual supplements): “a language of sharing, of solidarity, of going out of oneself and meeting the other” (190; my translation) can be given only as the result of an original relation with the other. If instead the other is only sought in order to compensate for the loss of nobjectual realities, and if the other is not yet given in the most crucial phase of subjectivation, then it seems difficult to conceive of such a “language of sharing.”

14 “Spheres are air conditioning systems” (Sloterdijk, Spheres I 46).

15 There is no English translation of this work, but a good resumé of Sloterdijk’s position can be found in the interview titled “What Does a Human Have that He can Give Away?”

16 Within a less critical framework, yet one still focused on the same issues, Henk Oosterling has pointed to the need to integrate Sloterdijk’s ethic of gift-giving into a more intersubjective theory (365–76). Without referring to the idea of “thymotic communities,” Iwona Janicka has put forward an interesting anarchist interpretation of Sloterdijk’s spherological project. For Janicka, with his theory of the Spheres, on the one hand, and with the emphasis on the concept of homeotechnics as cooperation with nature, on the other hand, Sloterdijk can be taken as a reference thinker for an anarchist thought that requires a philosophical-anthropological theory as its foundation (78). Janicka’s hypothesis is particularly interesting in relation to Sloterdijk’s expression “thymotics communities,” which would fit well with an anarchist context. Probably, it is precisely the vagueness of this concept that ensures its productive potential, despite its intrinsic shortcomings: for it can be defined and reinterpreted from different perspectives precisely because of its lack of definition.

17 For example, Sloterdijk has ended the Spheres trilogy without a pars construens. Sloterdijk himself must be aware of this lack because at the end of Spheres III he has inserted a fictional dialogue in which readers await the author in the hope of asking him some questions about the book, but he never shows up (801–27). Another example is the end of the essay “The Plunge and the Turn”: “Perhaps these two statements give us the code word for a maneuver yet to be attempted: follow the star, reach the earth” (48).

18 The German word “Übung” literally means “exercise.” Following the official English translation, I will use the word “practice,” but also ask the reader to keep in mind that the meaning “exercise” (mostly physical exercise) is even more appropriate.

19 On this topic, see Couture 45.

20 Despite his attempt to explain the anthropotechnical side of Indian (You Must Change Your Life 260–70 and 277–81) and Japanese philosophy (281–84), Sloterdijk’s “big anthropotechnical narrative” remains a Eurocentric one: there is no mention, for example, of African or Pre-Colombian anthropotechnics, and the historical, geographical, and ethnic specificities of the cultures he discusses aren’t taken into account. Also in the Spheres trilogy, traces could be found of “an unwitting but potent Eurocentrism”: see Thrift 126.

21 The only mention of a parent–child relation in You Must Change Your Life leads to a sort of evolutionary-pedagogic foundation for human verticalism:

In its relationship with its mother, every infant experiences a pre-symbolic and supra-spatial Above to which it looks up before it learns to walk. Fathers and grandparents are likewise “up there,” long before the child begins to build towers from blocks and place one piece on top of the others as the uppermost […] The “looking up” of children to their parents and adults in general, especially to cultural heroes and transmitters of knowledge, gives rise to a psychosemantic system of co-ordinates with a pronounced vertical dimension. One could almost describe the world of the early psyche as monarchic. (113–14)

22 Cf. also on this topic Crary.

23 Sloterdijk has recently continued this dialogue in a new book: Sloterdijk, Polyloquien.

24 Eduardo Mendieta describes (in a positive way) this tendency of Sloterdijk’s theory as “hyper-humanism” [Überhumanismus] (75–76).

25 Pier Aldo Rovatti, unlike myself, concluded his critical paper with a positive reflection on Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics (17–18). According to his viewpoint, Sloterdijk’s theory of anthropotechnics should be appreciated for its ironic tone and linguistic innovations, because these serve as provocations to rethink the philosophical vocabulary. In a less critical way, but always highlighting the problems inherent to the political and social perspectives of Sloterdijkian theories, see Morin 69.