Peter Sloterdijk:

Of the 1,087 names listed in the index at the end of the gigantic Spheres trilogy a suspicious hole sucks up the space after the much cited Rilke.  

Rimbaud is glaringly absent somehow, and I can’t imagine that I have discovered an unintentional lapse by the author, yet one has to read only thirty pages into Illuminations to find the three forms that organize each respective volume.

As follows:

Foams (Spheres III): Rimbaud writes, “—Well up, pond,—Foam, roll on the bridge and above the woods;—black cloths and organs,—lightning and thunder,—rise and roll;—Waters and sorrows, rise and revive the Floods.”

Globes (Spheres II): Rimbaud writes, “Further down, the sewers. At their sides, nothing more than the thickness of the globe. Maybe gulf of azure, wells of fire.  Perhaps at those levels moons and comets, seas and fables meet.”

Bubbles (Spheres I): Only slightly less direct because the word “bubble” is missing, but nevertheless clear when it is understood that this first volume is written for the elimination of loneliness, or said in the opposite direction, the victory of intimacy.  Rimbaud writes, “Around your forehead crowned with small flowers and berries, your eyes, precious spheres, are moving [...] Your heart beats in that belly where the double sex sleeps. Walk at night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh and that left leg.”

III.

What we are undertaking here is a weak reading—Blessed are the meek?—a degenerate variant of the “close reading” all my professors were wild about.

Let me add a word about poor reading.  In my open letter to Habermas, I pointed to the phenomenon, evident in the remarks of the journalists he had encouraged to attack, of the emergence of new links between opportunism and poor reading. At stake is not a loss of irony, [...] but competition.  Here, too, we are dealing with an “influence of competition in the domain of the mind,” [...]  Weak reading is a weapon that is used in an increasingly open way by the participants in this competition for attention.  I am not speaking now of the incapable, but rather of those who, if they wanted to, could do otherwise.

I’m thinking that should have worked its way into the title here. The “referendum” idea is a holdover from my initial pitch that is becoming increasingly, if anything, more like Brexit where the people really didn’t understand what they were voting for/against. Understood quite little. 

My favorite had to be thrown out for certain reasons:

Peter Sloterdijk: The Bastard Who’s Still B— My Ex Wife

which could have made the Rimbaud part make a little more sense.

IV.

If you’re thinking we’re taking our time to get going here, you’re not wrong. The problem is the book, the review of which is the premise of this piece, is still in the mail. So this week I’m reading all the other stuff I already have, and I keep telling myself, Ya, ya that’s good, that will go in the piece! and I don’t want to forget it, so I allow myself to cheat a little bit and put it in here before the real work. With plenty of opportunity left for snipping here and snapping there.

V.

As much is made in Bubbles about the construction of interiors in the process of shifting the existential question from the What of subjectivity to the Where; and the exquisite animation of these intimate spaces in the spherological genie—the Bachelard of Poetics of Space; and finally seeing that on my meager theory shelf there is only a single book written by a woman; here is the inimitable Alice Notley with a contribution to the topic at hand from the opening pages of her book of poetry, Mysteries of Small Houses. Excerpted from the middle:

Cool down, night, dark

Staring at the ceiling

This neutrality of being is hard to describe

Pink their bedroom blue mine

And in the dark core that?

a black peach

with a black peachpit

House breathes around it walls respire

I’m my real body 

Black peach breaks open

It’s fallen it’s ripe

“P” is for prognosticate

In a matter of two and a half pages this poem, appropriately titled “House of Self,” sees nearly every formulation at the beginning of spherology.  

The “neutrality of being” that is hard to describe contains the first notion about sharing and reciprocity.  It is haunted by the individualistic hole at the core, the “black peachpit.” There is something technical to be said here about givenness in Heidegger whom I have not, will not read.

That the “walls respire” indicates the liveliness of all of the physical, and invisible forms that encase us (perhaps a mirroring effect), and the primacy of the breath. This much is clear at the outset of Bubbles that begins with “a somewhat heterodox reading of the biblical story of Creation” and the exchange between God and Adam of mutually constitutive exhalations, supposedly.

“‘P’ is for prognosticate” is a statement of the relative straightforwardness of the project’s orientation towards the future and the ongoing process of globalization. Spherology is decidedly meliorist, though the author himself, in private, might not agree.

The strongest case is taken in the four lines that end the poem, the final stanza:

I am

what I asked for

I’m speaking

I speak like this.

Everything before receives a flick of the wrist that spins it all towards style. The poet speaks, but doesn’t she, in fact, merely scare-quotes “speak” in and of the silent material of the page.  Language performs a pantomime, and the reader is none the wiser because they naturally and automatically fill in the blanks.  If I’ve read the end of Spheres correctly (a fictional three-way dialogue between a theologian, macro-historian, and literary critic discussing the work fait accompli) there is a similar inevitability about the poetics Peter employs. That’s what his writing-performance is about at one end: the impossibility of an escape from hyperspacialization and the futility of an evasion of the super-object/super-globe. Here anxiety is a matter of transference in the maximalist aesthetics. A strange, bastardized—again—transference with the ultra-stylized text itself.  

Yes, at the end of the dialogue the literary critic gets the last word. So do many of the doomed characters of the classic tragedies. Fighting unbeatable shadows. “Cool down, night, dark / Staring at the ceiling” refers us back to the play of light we all at one point observed as children on the cusp of falling asleep, when doing so involved nothing to be troubled about.

“Fur Pas’ Shadow” Hannah O’Brien 2016

VI.

The closest thing to a relationship I have with Kant:

And I’m not even sure if on the right is an actual anime character, or some nonsense AI creation.  I even asked in a comment where I came across the image. The only answer was a laughing emoji.  

I can appreciate that a deeper level of engagement on this point might be required for certain projects. Though this is not that. Then why bring it up?  

For years in my twenties, like any other insufferable white theory-bro, I was reading and proselytizing with the zeal of the new convert, and found my statement of purpose in the introduction of Critique of Cynical Reason, where Sloterdijk is at his most Kantian, I’m guessing. His mission statement (below) was substantial and clever enough to jailbreak the psychological hardware that the good people at bootcamp had fitted me with, as a teenager!  The object lesson was an oversized army green sea-bag heavy on my shoulders packed with everything I owned—the flight to South Carolina when they let us board first because we were in our dressiest dress uniforms.

The Sailor’s Creed “governs virtually all aspects of a Sailor's existence while in the Navy” according to the dot-mil site. What we seem to refuse to acknowledge is that that “while in” is a strange, if not outright deceiving, qualifier as if somehow you could undo such a level of reformatting. (The extended computer/mind metaphor is admittedly crass, but totally apposite given how the recruit is treated by its commander/user.) Truly, no matter how long and far you’ve traveled since then, or how much heartache and therapy you’ve been through, there is no undoing such a thing. “Governing” is a euphemism for a permanent bondage to The Mission.  The problem being that once they discharge you, you have to make up your own, which is something forboden and something you’re routinely conditioned not to do while you’re in. This explains why it is common for veterans to long for an opportunity to re-enlist once they discover how vacuous civilian life to be.  

Point being, at that time ten or so years ago, still fresh out of the service, I needed a particularly lofty and comprehensive mission statement and found it here at the beginning of Sloterdijk’s public career:

The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bizarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the beginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceivably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language.  Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?

Sign me up! I said, just as eager and naive as when I had taken the oath to defend our country against its enemies. I hadn’t learned a thing, though I did claim to understand the basics of the categorical imperative—

Foreign and domestic, that is.

VII.

In an earlier draft I used this heading for an original poem. Some kind of dissimulation, which, being coded by the conventions of lyric poetry, I imagined as a kind of key to unlock the center of my reflections. I cringe now thinking about the pretentiousness, though somehow all poets possess some amount of this impulse. It came about because I had taken, again, one of Peter’s passages at face value:

As far as the literary and genre status of my undertaking is concerned, I toyed with the idea of presenting the Spheres project as a novel up until the last minute. Doing so would have given me the advantage of leaving the hierarchy of discourses open [...]  The privilege of the author of a novel is that he does not have to ground his knowledge. He does not have to excuse himself [...]

I am intrigued by this question about genre and hierarchy, but for a bona fide novelist such a statement is laughable—to recycle his term.  I will insist that Peter could never have written a novel even despite or perhaps because of his rhetorical sensibilities. It is furthermore absurd to consider what he means by “up to the last minute,” when drafting the Spheres trilogy must have taken at least a couple years. What would have been the last minute? How so?

“Groundlessness” is a key term for him and for me. It describes the most important aspect of the philosopher of rhizomes whom Peter has inherited most from. The pedigree is clear by a redescription of Foams as a book of “pluralistic vitalist intensities” if such a mouthful could be admitted. This school—ignoring its masters who refuse to acknowledge their pupils as their own—erects its gate coextensive with the gate of Hell. It might read:

The Tree is dead, long live the Tree!

VIII. & IX.

I slough off the malaise of my thirty-fifth birthday last week, now closer to forty. You Must Change Your Life, Peter’s book on ethics, sits half-read on a side table in my new, outrageously spacious apartment between the mountains north of DTLA. But half-read is easily the full length of other more reasonably sized books, and it’s spacious because for the last year I lived in a shoebox in Boyle Heights, which in retrospect was probably an illegal arrangement, not even a window. Note to self: Never again move in the middle of drafts. Instead of finishing the work I had considered critical research for this project, I bury myself in housework to keep the new place immaculate. Grocery store runs everyday for the rotating menu my kids deserve.  Hospitality with women who I’ll never get close enough to to fuck (I don’t believe in extramarital sex anymore).  

Though I think I’ve got the gist of the book. Another anti-foundationalist provocation.  The idea is that radicals, geniuses, perhaps even what we now call “influencers” walk a vertical tightrope that has nothing securing it at the top end. The Nietzsche that encourages us to create the very ground we walk on as we step off into the Void.

Among the insults contained in Change Your Life is the author’s assertion that neither religions nor true conversions exist at all. Only spiritualized communities of practitioners who come and go as the winds of invention blow. An ever evolving ascetic is the ideal. An obvious question about ends—maybe I didn’t get there, but I can predict with near certainty that the author more or less scoffs. To what end? indicates that the one asking still unironically believes in telos, which means they’re an idiot. So be it.

“There’s only so much time,” my friend reminds me. “What are you going to spend your time doing?”  There was a church father who was torn by a hypothetical he posed to himself that involved choosing between Cicero and Christ. I forget his resolution, but the point is in the asking. The same friend told me about that. He is a truly good man.

X. - XII.

Prometheus’s Remorse is a little pocketbook-esque war machine. Like Nietzsche Apostle the previous Sloterdijk title in the “Intervention Series” (number 16 and 36 respectively), both texts were born as live orations that bleed into the category of occasional poetry.  If the context is lost in translation the reader of the English nevertheless gets a strong sense of the tone of the evening.  Which is, despite an apparent contradiction, squeamishly playful—as if the games he plays are at once liberating by means of an arch condescension, but also conducted with a mortal wound that will kill him soon enough. It is the same in all of the works discussed here. He is king of the neo-Romanticisms since Y2K, the artist struggling against reality, a reprise of the young Keats singing himself into oblivion in the hill country:

[...] All hail delightful hopes!

As she was wont, th’ imagination

Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone,

And they shall be accounted poet kings

Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.

O may these joys be ripe before I die.

I don’t really know what the theoretical portions are about, the first four sections. A revision of Marxist theory of labor, but I don’t know enough about Marx to verify any of it. The book is about the world economy in the transliterated sense of “a household.” From which waste and emissions lead to the existentialist crisis about the environment.

One would best assess the work by its practical recommendations. Which are much closer to the genre of science fiction. Ex: the passage about harnessing the energy a human produces on a jog.  Okay—the hackneyed saying about the sci-fi of today and the reality of tomorrow.  

The author also suggests political devolution and the end of megalopolises.  Check, check.  I’m not uninterested.  In certain circles a suggestion is defined as a subtle command.  I’m sorry, sir, I cannot follow that order on account of my fatigue—no, not my digi-blue fatigues, my emotional/spiritual/physical disgust at life itself.

XIII.

XIV.
Fourteen represents a double perfection, two sevens, a fortnight.  

If an Ancient as ancient as Prometheus receives a package of screentime with your eyes on it, so also ought Yaweh of the ancient Jews. If, as Wikipedia cites, the Greeks attribute to Prometheus the creation of man from clay, one is already in Hebriac territory.  

The sixth day in Genesis is the day of humanity, the seventh rest. If as one expert claims, the creation account is best understood as a “calendar narrative” a unique form specific to the genre Torah, Moses’s intention in the construction of the narrative was to inform seasons of worship for the Israelites according to the agricultural rhythms of the Levant. Observance of holy days and religious festivals were thereby rooted in a work/rest cadence and remembered for the several previous redemptive works of Yaweh towards his people.  

An additional application, somewhat more speculative (though at one point in church history this was more popular) is the claim that in the New Testament period, by way of the sabbath rest reassigned to the eighth day (another way of saying the first day, ie. Sunday) we live now in an entire epochal time of Yaweh’s rest pending the resurrection of his creatures. Such a belief would have a way of reforming everything going on our little planet at the moment.  We would no longer struggle in works of righteousness for salvation, that is all over.  We only trust in the divine operations on the cross and in the tomb—in one sense quite passive.  

(I am absolutely certain that if the language of “salvation,” “righteousness,” etc. is foreign to your final vocabulary, as is the case for most readers I’m guessing, or if such words are even offensive, they are nonetheless applicable. Translate these terms into whatever system you have constructed for yourself in order to achieve your sense of security in the face of death, or annihilation, or nothingness and there you go. Or just read Kierkegaard. If you’re alive enough to read, you have this in one form or another.)

The intimate coupling, the vertical striving, the conspicuous consumption, everything Sloterdijk is taking the mask off of above demonstrates just how plastic we are; how much we can receive.  However, if one takes his efforts in the macro-progressive direction he intends, as in the French Revolution when the new government attempted (and failed) to recast the week as a ten day metric unit, there are specific immovables to what is now considered an unfashionable antique. I mean Nature.

Red, blue, and white, a strange palette for a bloom indeed.

The clouds thicken to such an extent that they call into question the very

existence of the world as hitherto known to gods and human beings.