"One of the world's leading philosophers shows how our preoccupation with motion and change is a defining feature of our modern, Western way of thinking"--
Like his previous writing, says Sloterdijk, the six essays here are subversive exercises against the absolutism of history and socialization. They consider the modern age as mobilization, the other change: on the philosophical situation of alternative movements, Eurotaoism, the fundamental and the urgent: the Tao of politics, Paris aphorisms on rationality, and after modernity. Specific topics include sketches towards an outline of a critique of political kinetics, the first alternative: metaphysics, the miscarried animal and the self-birth of the subject, dimensions of the credibility gap, geometry as finesse, and for an ontology of still-being. Distributed in the US by Wiley. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
The core of what we refer to as ‘the project of modernity’ is the idea that human beings have the power to bring the world under their control, and hence it is based on a ‘kinetic utopia’: the movement of the world as a whole reflects the implementation of our plans for it. But as soon as the kinetic utopia of modernity is exposed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems appear: things don’t happen according to plan because as we actualize our plans, we set in motion other things that we didn’t want as unintended side-effects. We watch with mounting unease as the self-perpetuating side-effects of modern progress overshadow our plans, as a foreign movement breaks off from the very core of the modern project supposedly guided by reason and slips away from us, spinning out of control. What looked like a steady march towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrollable and catastrophic syndrome of perpetual mobilization. And precisely because so much comes about through our actions, these developments turn out to have explosive consequences for our self-understanding, as we begin to realize that, so far from bringing the world under our control, we are instead the agents of our own destruction.In this brilliant and insightful book Sloterdijk lays out the elements of a new critical theory of modernity understood as a critique of political kinetics, shifting the focus of critical theory from production to mobilization and shedding new light on a world facing the growing risk of humanly induced catastrophe.