[SLOT-1] SLOTERDIJK NOTES

[A] BUBBLES
Life is a matter of formthat is the hypothesis we associate with the venerable philosophical and
geometric term 'sphere' (Sloterdijk, Spheres Vol. 1, 10).
This notion of a vital spheric geometry, or geometric vistalism suggests that [1] life, the [2] formation
of spheres and [3] thinking are different expressions for the same thing (ibid., 11).
...[T]here was a second inscription above the entrance to the academy, occult and humorous, stating
that whoever was unwilling to become entangled in love affairs with other visitors in the garden of
theory should keep away (ibid.).
Thesis: ...love stories are stories of form, and...every act of solidarity is an act of sphere formation,
that is to say the creation of an interior (ibid., 12).
If I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this trilogy, it would be this: let no one enter who
is unwilling to praise transference and to refute loneliness (ibid., 13).
In our adulthood, we forget that the spirit, in its own way, is in space. Or perhaps one should say that
when people referred in former times to 'spirit,' what they meant was always inspired communities...
(ibid., 19).
Modern men exist for all eternity only on a ball, but no longer inside a ball (ibid., 24).
Men no longer look to the sky with existential longing, for the certainty that there is nothing more to
look for up there is in keeping with the spirit of advanced circumstances. For it is not cosmology that
tells people today where they stand, but rather the general theory of immune systems. ...after the turn to
the Copernican world, the sky as an immune system was suddenly useless (ibid., 25).
The body of humanity seeks to create a new immune constitution in an electronic medial skin (ibid.).
And yet it was...existentialist modernity that identified the reasons why it is less important for people
to know who they are than where they are. As long as intelligence is sealed up by banality, people are
not interested in their place, which seems given; they fix their imaginations on the ghost lights that
appear to them in the form of names, identities and business (ibid., 27).
...the greedy of recent days no longer ask where they are as long as they are allowed to be someone,
anyone (ibid.).
We are in an outside that carries inner worlds (ibid.).
A sphere is the place that humans create in order to have somewhere they can appear as those who
they are. (-) The sphere is the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humansin so far as they
succeed in becoming humans. ...humans...establish globes and look out into horizons (ibid., 28).
Modern notion of inspiration: People no longer want to receive their inspired ideas from some
embarrassing heavens; they are supposed to come from the no man's land of ownerless, precise

thoughts. Through their lack of a sender, they permit the free use of their gift (ibid., 31).
lft sl. 15
Chapter Four: The Retreat Within the Mother, Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology (sl.
134ff., pp. 269-289)
...[I]t was only after the notorious Neolithic revolution that the fascination with the womb could
develop into a world power. Only then...did those circumstances emerge that brought territorialism
upon humanity; only then did the earthbound identities begin to blossom; only then were humans
compelled to identify themselves by their place, their adhesion to territory, and finally their property.
[It] lured the previously nomadic human groups into the trap of sedentarism, in which they attempted to
prove themselves by simultaneously experimenting with rootedness and escape; thus begins the agrometaphysical conversation with useful plants, pets, household spirits and the gods of the fields and
meadows. It was only the early agricultural fixation on the soil that forced the epochal equation of the
mother world and cultivated, fertile space. The age of work as mother-management begins with
the settling of the earth, ...which from now on must chronically bring forth additional produce,
additional births, and a surplus of power. ...[T]wo things [appear]: a new spatial type, home, and a new
thought type, land lawnomos (ibid., 270). [The Neolithic revolution brought the womb-fixation, and
with it sedentarism, territorialism, property, and home. Law now appears, land law as the original
nomos, which will come to be written down. Space is mother-space, ground-soil to be cultivated; it
brings forth surplus and requires labor to be managed (thus there are now managers and the managed,
etc.).]
As the soil binds the living and the dead to itself equally, some start to believe that the mothers want
to keep their loved ones forever with them, and in a sense also within them. Now the hearth and the
landscape, the womb and the field, become synonymous. In what resembled a first experience of fate's
power, the settled populations in the early villages and towns are confronted by the necessity to identify
themselves through terms of lineage. Before the state became fate, fate actually meant relation to
territorialized dead. Just as fate means the inaccessible force of retribution, relation means the regulated
connection of the elder to the younger, and of the elder to their soil-rooted ancestors. In early
settlements, where being [Sein] consistently meant being related and existence [Dasein] meant being
descended from, people had to learn to say which womb they came from and in what relation they
stood to their mothers and soils. It is through this, the greatest transformation of thought forms in the
old world, that the Paleolithic religiosity of birth and life began to move towards the Neolithic,
already para-metaphysically shimmering religiosity of power and death. With the shift to the
genealogical compulsion of reason and allocation, the female womb, together with its portal and its
hallway [the womb and the cave], is subjected to an incalculable alteration of meaning: from now on, it
is no longer simply the / starting point for all paths in the world, but also becomes a term for the great
homeward journeys that must be undertaken for the sake of the now urgent search for ancestors, the
interrogation of the dead and rebirthin short, for the sake of self-identification [Alcmaeon's A=A,
joining beginnng to end, thus avoiding death?]. For the restless living, the womb becomes a place of
truth; it imposes itself upon their thoughts and wishes as the most intimate Yonder with which mortals
have any business; what awaits them there will never be any less than insight into their true selves. The
womb idea exudes the evidence that truth has a secret seat which can be reached through initiations and
ritual modes of approach. Hence by the end of the age of uterine compulsion, when the first
enlightenment was surfacing in the etiological philosophies of the Greeks, people would / descend to
the mothers in order to find among them, and within them, something they would later refer to...as
'knowledge.' (-) Mortals, those who are born, have their beginning and their end in caves of origin. One

day people will even call for the entire horizon to become cave-immanent, and the phenomenal world
will then have to become interpretable as an interior landscape. Not without reason did cultures of that
proto-metaphysical epochprimarily Babylonians and Egyptiansimagine the visible world as being
enclosed by great rings of water: where the mother motivates / thought, everything is inside. As
long as motherhood and gestation define the form of thought as such, there is no longer meant to be
any outside; for those who know, the only concern is to learn in what sense these mysteries of allimmanence apply. Whoever wishes to discover who they truly are...must, at least once in their life,
travel to the source that is the only place from which grown life can / understand itself (ibid., 271275). [Proto-state: The tribes are stuck to the fields that range around hearths and burial grounds. It is
one's fate (original instance) to be bound to this soil-lineage. But is there really a shift from a
Paleolithic birth and life emphasis to a Neolithic one of power and death?]
The female birth organ is now what Heidegger calls the inevitable. In the oldest world, being
reasonable meant...acknowledging one thing: whoever passes through the gate inwards must part with
his previous lifewhether in a symbolic death, as ritualized for initiations, or through the real thing.
Both deaths [symbolic and real] seem surmountable in the faith that dying, if the standard procedure is
followed, very much aids a return to the mother interior. (-) They...wish to tie the end of the search to
the beginning of life and reverse birth through radical struggles against themselves. (-) Wisdom is the
realization that even the open world is encompassed by the cave of all caves. (-) If this fight is won, the
insight into life before life, prenatal death, enables the striving for illumination to come / into itself
and this illumination naturally causes total darkening. Increasingly, ordinary dying also takes on
associations of return. ...[O]ne could speak of a fetalization of worldviews.... The equation of the grave
and the wombthe mysterious and evident spatial premise of all early metaphysical systems, which
know only immanencebegins its long reign over the imaginary realm of the post-Neolithic human
world; it would cast its spell on the thought and life of early cultures for no less than two hundred
generations.
It was only the ancient metaphysical systems of light and heaven that ended the womb's
monopoly of the discourse of origin, by granting a share of the origin function to the male as the
'transcendent' (ibid., 275-276). [Now we have (1) Paleolithic, (2) Neolithic, and (3) post-Neolithic
ancient metaphysical systems of light and heaven, metaphysics, ordinary death as male return,
radical immanence.]
Think here of Origen, at the headwaters of the Hellenization of Dogma: The majority of Western
philosophies were typological relatives of the holy eunuchs, for only those who understand the
principle of all-immanence in its strict form could see fulfillment in absorption by the One. The secret
of the highest metaphysicswhat was it based on if not logical incest? (ibid., 277).
Pithoi: In the ancient uteromorphic funerary urns of the Greeks, the pithoi, ...the para-metaphysical
equation of maternal womb and burial ground is palpable; they preserve the dead in a fetal squat. (-) In
Egypt, the noble dead had the image of the sky goddess Nut, the re-bearer, painted on the floors or lids
of their sarcophagi (ibid., 279).
The later metaphysical views see everything based on clearing, distance and concreteness (ibid.,
284).
Someone who was truly all the way inside could only affirm the basic monistic doctrines of the last
millennia.... The observing partial intelligence the cave entrance...here...the participating third part,
insists that whatever things the experimental mystic experiences in the cave can only be aspects of the
dyad. (-) ...[T]he union-mystical semblance...can be simultaneously respected and dethroned: interest in

the progress of the dual theory is satisfied without having to deny the insights of mystical monism.
Then the acute appearance of unity without a second element as a form of consciousness can even be
understood as the most revealing figure of the bipolar-spheric coalescence taking place in actu (ibid.,
286).

Lft sl 135
See p. 468, citation about senses of in in Aristotle's Physics.
Alcmaeon said that men die for this reason, that they cannot join the beginning to the end Kirk,
Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 346347.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Peter Sloterdijk. Spheres, Volume One: Bubbles. Micropherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011.