Sloterdijk by Jean-Pierre Couture

Author:Jean-Pierre Couture
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

The apparent failure of the current form of the hyper-political incubator thus calls for a fundamental review of the motives underlying a human association that can measure up to the situation. In this regard, Sloterdijk's prescriptions vacillate between two distinct avenues that fully reveal the extent of his ambivalence toward the crises and hopes of hyper-politics. In a twofold movement of disaggregation and aggregation, Sloterdijk charts the two paths upon which hyper-political efforts could lead either to a return to the Small (which he presents as the rebirth of small-scale association) or to completely new large-scale constructions (which he identifies in a related work as the hopes of the European construction).11

Im selben Boot clearly favors the promises of the first path, which should serve as a clue to the political preferences of the coming spherology. In this connection, Sloterdijk takes his inspiration from Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection of tales depicting the tribulations of a group of survivors who withdrew from the city to protect themselves from the Florentine plague, which Sloterdijk describes as “a pedagogical treatise instructive of the relationship between regenerative gaiety and small-scale politics” (ISB 65). The theme of retreat is celebrated as a means of perpetuating human association in times when large cities fail to accomplish this elementary task: “By their disaggregation, superstructures reveal that they have practically nothing to offer to individuals who are making an effort to perpetuate life. It thus seems clear that when the opus commune disaggregates at larger scales, small units are the only framework likely to enable human beings to regenerate” (ISB 64). The fact of giving birth does not require Große Politik (Big Politics). The Epicurean act, consisting in recreating the enclosure of a healthy, sustainable microcity at the heart of deteriorating large-scale citizen life, thus combines with an Urpolitics – original political order – that humanity has maintained and honored for the greater part of its history.

Sloterdijk's ternary schematic, the elements of which are revisited and discussed in depth in the works making up the Spheres trilogy, reveals that large constructions can succeed only if they never forget to acknowledge the role of associative sub-entities. Indeed, the latter provide them with a credible existence so long as they are preserved and aggregated in a larger organizational order. The long history of spherical constructions, from the most intimate to the most global in nature, reveals that the secret of contemporary harmony also lies at some point on the boundary between aggregation and disaggregation.

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