Reviews for Sphären

The average rating for Sphären based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-25 00:00:00 KEN ERRARA Spheres in its first volume revealed itself to be less an analysis of Dasein's spatiality, as was expected, than a virtuoso display replete with all the connotations of excess and indulgence such a descriptor confers. The premise, announced at the book's onset, is simple enough: to be-in-the-world is to always-already be-with, a fundamental and pre-egological existentiale rather than (as Heidegger implied) one posterior to thrownness. The dyadic bubble motif which constitutes the volume's title is thus to be understood as the topology of this all-pervading ontological structure. But given that the notion of a paired subjectivity encompassing both human and non-human agents is more indebted to the legacy of Spinoza than that of phenomenology, the entire "spherological" project may be more accurately described as an exegesis of affect. (It should then be no surprise that Bruno Latour lauded the book, for it fits nicely into the "affective" / "posthuman" / "object-oriented" school of thought). Notwithstanding an ostensible avowal to the spirit of Heidegger, Sloterdijk brazenly eschews the fractal, outward-spiraling, and largely self-contained style of Being and Time for an eclecticism bordering on the absurd. What comprises the book's 600 pages is a dizzying, often bizarre, occasionally ingenious reading of the dyad relationship throughout world art and religion, running a gamut of scholarship domains from early Modern natural history, pop-art, Eastern mysticism, avant-garde poetry, theology and'most prominently'an intersection of psychoanalysis and esotericism (a combination which this reader admittedly has little inclination towards). Sloterdijk's historiographical brushwork is, even by the standards of continental theory, broad, and several chapters, particularly those in the book's middle dealing with "negative gynecology" and the primordial fetus-placenta dyad, are to be admired for their sheer audacity alone, a judgment perhaps extensible to the overall project.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-08 00:00:00 David Dove Sloterdijk's Spheres is more like a brainwashing flood than it a patient argument for identifiable conclusions. But this is just what it must be, if Sloterdijk's final aim is to overcome cynicism. No argument can possibly succeed - what is required instead is a radical change in vision, a conversion to newfound meaning. Spheres are above all expressions or institutions of love. He states his central thesis in the introduction to the trilogy: "I will develop, more obstinately than usual, the hypothesis that love stories are stories of form, and that every act of solidarity is an act of sphere formation, that is to say the creation of an interior" (I, 12). And "solidarity" here means, as he later explains, "the power to belong together" (I, 44-5). I have a longer account of my view of Sloterdijk's work on my blog here: