Spheres By: Peter Sloterdijk

Author: Wieland Hoban

An epic project in both size & purview, Sloterdijk’s 3-volume, 2500-page Spheres is a late-20th-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being & Time. Rejecting the century’s predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial & immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- & micro-space from the Greek agora to contemporary urban apartments, he’s able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin & 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 & anthropogenesis. He describes Bubbles, Spheres’ 1st volume, 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 his discourse, but to offer a spatial & visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles. Written over the course of a decade, the trilogy has waited another decade for its English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes 2, Globes, & 3, Foam, will publish in coming seasons.

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