Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction
- 2 Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres
- 3 “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference
- 4 Disinhibition, Subjectivity and Pride. Or: Guess Who Is Looking?: Peter Sloterdijk’s reconstruction of ‘thymotic’ qualities, psychoanalysis and the question of spectatorship
- 5 Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic
- 6 Uneasy Places. Monotheism, Christianity, and the Dynamic of the Unlikely in Sloterdijk’s Work – Context and Debate
- 7 The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society
- 8 In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit: A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground
- 9 A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk
- 10 Sloterdijk and the Question of Action
- 11 The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk
- Contributors
- Index
Where Surrealism Unleashes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction
- 2 Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres
- 3 “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference
- 4 Disinhibition, Subjectivity and Pride. Or: Guess Who Is Looking?: Peter Sloterdijk’s reconstruction of ‘thymotic’ qualities, psychoanalysis and the question of spectatorship
- 5 Sloterdijk and the Question of an Aesthetic
- 6 Uneasy Places. Monotheism, Christianity, and the Dynamic of the Unlikely in Sloterdijk’s Work – Context and Debate
- 7 The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society
- 8 In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit: A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground
- 9 A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk
- 10 Sloterdijk and the Question of Action
- 11 The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
Nunca sueño cuando duermo, sino cuando estoy despierto.
(Joan Miró)It is still funny. I have been living in Utrecht for three months now, and I still hesitate when somebody asks me what the hell I am doing in this city. It reminds me of the amazement some friends showed when I told them I was going to take a Dutch intensive course in Amsterdam in July. Then, the summer “Dutch: what for?” blossomed into the autumnal “and why Utrecht?”
I look around, searching for shelter, trying to answer as vaguely as possible, falling back on the catch-all answer to this question I have carefully developed through these months, longing for a twist in the conversation that saves me this anguish. Anguish of not knowing. Anguish of just feeling. I would like to tell them I do not really know, but when I look them in the eyes, I am certain they won't understand. They will just think I am a stupid little girl who is now accidentally in Utrecht, but who could as well be in Firenze, Birmingham, Warsaw, or anywhere in the States. They cannot understand there was something special about Utrecht, this city that sometimes seems more like a town. This vast town that struggles to be a big city. They won't understand that, remembering having read long ago about a Peace Treaty signed there – though ignoring how to pronounce its name, ignoring its history, its culture, its secrets – I ventured to discover what was hidden behind the name of this place: Utrecht. This was my first choice when I filled in the papers for my Erasmus scholarship. But is it still that special?
For those who expected a negative answer to the question, this essay is finished. For all the rest, I will be honest: you learn how to appreciate Utrecht once you are part of it. It is similar to what happens with Dutch people: you hate them in the beginning, yet you later turn out to be fond of them. There is a moment when you even kind of start fancying their sense of humor. No grudge, please. I will try to explain my experience and the conclusions I drew from it, so that you can decide later if you will forgive me.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Medias ResPeter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being, pp. 64 - 67Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012