Posts Tagged ‘Peter Sloterdijk’
Oh irony!: in this corner of the world we are heading toward recession and have to deal with obesity as a national health hazard.
But the belly is also an inter-landscape. It allows you to sublimate joy, frustration, fear, strength, desire.
Please send belly quotes if you have more.
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“The belly is the reason man does not so easily measure himself with God.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and interludes, #141, Beyond good and evil)
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My bronze Buddha belly in the bathtub
is getting pruned in the last foam
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I kiss my holy belly,
my little slurf in space
Both from: zonderlinge kruising tussen aap en priester, Cornelis van der Wal
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This sphere does not have the rational beauty of the geometrical body, but for that it has the great safety of a belly.(Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les reveries du repos. Quoted in Peter Sloterdijk, Sferen, p. 78I)
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the stomach contracts & ideally
approaches zero
Louis Armand, Strange Attractors
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“What if I went around with a belly, that would be a political disaster.” Hitler, quoted by John Lukacs, in The Hitler of history, p. 69
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‘Breavman why are paper bags full of white bread so ugly?’ ‘I’m glad you asked, Krantz. They are advertisements for the frailty of the body. If a junky wore his hypodermic needle pinned to his lapel you’d feel exactly the same disgust. A bag bulging with food is a kind of visible bowel. True Bolsheviks wear their digestive systems on their sleeves!” (Leonard Cohen The favourite game, p. 79)
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“I do believe that a writer works with his body. You live with your body, and the book is above all the book of your body. In my case the aphorism comes from a need to surround the words with whiteness in order to let them breathe.” (Edmond Jabes cited in Paul Auster Groundwork, 198)
Just watched the Peter Sloterdijk interview in Kluge’s ‘Nachrichten…Antike’. Stress here, once again, the inappropriateness of the word ‘interview’. The manner in which Kluge interacts with his interviewees makes things more interesting. Fun. But not only that.
Kluge’s unexpected interruptions, long-winded style of formulation, questions that at times are hard to distinguish from statements of fact, prompts, ad hoc associations, non sequiturs and so on vary from being intrusive, to steering toward a new topic, to interested, to inquisitive.
As mentioned in a post below, there is no sense of Kluge’s interviews being mainly uni-directive. With his unorthodox interview style, Kluge enters into an assemblage with his interlocutor, like two ends of a charged rod. Lines of flight lead away from the centre once an inroad loses its charm. Yet at the same time lines are drawn that traverse the whole history of ideas.
I’m afraid I might be posting about ‘Nachrichten der…Antike’ for a while to come (still have 8 hours to go). Am thinking of putting up a full transcription of the Peter Sloterdijk section sometime in the near future.
Am reading a theory book with a staggeringly diverse frame of reference. One reason I think I have always felt attracted to that style of writing is that you get to enjoy thinking about authors/topics you otherwise wouldn’t realistically have the time to read. There is also the perverse satisfaction of having the feeling that everything is being taken in, that a topic has been completely milked with nothing left to say about it (desperately suppressing the knowledge that there will always remain one more book to be written). Sort of a temporary antidote to the secret desire to read everything. The tracing of a transversal line through the whole encyclopedia of knowledge.
One author who is a master at this is the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Not surprising that he won the Sigmund Freud Prize for the style of his academic prose (2005), and two other prizes for his essayistic writing. His Sphären (a ‘morphological’ history of humanity) is a monumental philosophical work (spanning around 2500 pages) that includes references to just about any (sub-)discipline, religion, individual-of-interest you can think of. Including pictures on just about every third page. But apart from winning prizes, Sloterdijk’s style has also been criticized for being too convoluted and not suitable as academic register. Sjoerd van Tuinen uses most of the introduction to his short but very lucidly written monograph on Sloterdijk to introduce just this aspect of the philosopher’s work.
We are dealing with a synthetic-associative thinker who – in his at times megalomanic work – attempts to offer the reader insight into the most unlikely connections. His texts demand very undogmatic readers who are prepared to embrace a dynamic interpretation of the distinction between form and content, and allow themselves to be carried away by the current of an incomparable discourse that vacillates between theology and literature, psychoanalysis and politics, mythology and science, ingenious abstraction and banal jokes. (Sloterdijk: binnenste buiten denken, p. 13; my translation)
The above description could apply (if not quite as neatly) to the writing of Deleuze (an important inspiration for Sloterdijk), especially his books written in collaboration with Guattari (and then mainly Milles plateaux).
At the other end of that extreme there are the writers of spare, succinct prose, who use hardly any footnotes and get straight to the core of their argument. From recent reading, I’m thinking of Quentin Meillassoux in particular. Where Deleuze & Guattari might add notes as a means of legitimated digression and have endless bibliographies, Meillassoux’s recent Apres l’finitude (140 pages) has a mere two-page bibliography and only employs footnotes where strictly necessary.
Badiou doesn’t use footnotes at all because he reckons if they really want to know, people will look things up for themselves (think I remember that from somewhere in the introduction to (the translation of) Deleuze: clameur de l’etre. Now there’s an affirmative/Bruce-Lee-reading-attitude I can sympathize with. Especially since Google). His style – similarly to much Continental philosophy – is very important to the content, but unlike the flair, exuberance, or convolution of his (recent) contemporaries, Badiou writes in a sober and analytic tone. Badiou does not use irony, association, or wit, to stimulate a reader’s thinking; his syntax, for example, serves the very different purpose of being as unambiguous as possible, and to indicate the hierarchical importance of the parts of a sentence (cf. introduction Being and event).