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Issue 127 Nov-Dec 2009

Something in the Air

INTERVIEW

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks to Erik Morse about the 20th- and 21st-century
phenomena of chemical warfare, designer ventilation and high-density urban living

The most celebrated and controversial German philosopher since Jrgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk
has established an academic career confronting the darkest traditions of 20th-century European
ideology. President and professor of the Staatliche Hochschule fr Gestaltung Karlsruhe in Germany,
his first book,Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason, published in 1983 and
translated into English in 1988), remains the best selling philosophical work in the German language
since World War II, but it was his controversial polemic on the language of genetic engineering and
biopolitics in a lecture he gave in 1999, Regeln fr den Menschenpark (Rules for the Human Park), that
brought him to international attention. It also marked the philosophers distinctive turn toward a
Heideggerian approach to Postmodernity, identifying the question of Being as bound up with the
technologies of architectonics and anthropogenesis.
Between 1998 and 2004, Sloterdijk composed his magnum opus, the 2,400-page Sphren (Spheres)
trilogy. In its three sections Bubbles, Globes and Foam Sphren narrates a Western history of
macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment. With the
technological advancements of the 20th century most represented, according to Sloterdijk, in the use
of airborne terrorism and interior ventilation traditional maps of geometric space have been greatly
redesigned, unveiling heretofore unexplored strata: atmosphere, environment and ecology. In a show of
puffery, Sloterdijk declared that the Sphren project was the rightful companion to Martin
Heideggers Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and the book that Heidegger should have written.
With Semiotext(e)s publication of Terror From the Air in March this year translated from Luftbeben:
An den Wurzeln des Terrors(Air Trembling: At the Roots of Terror, 2002), the introduction to Sphren
III English-speaking readers have had their first glimpse of Sloterdijks opus on Postmodern space.
This year Polity published Gods Zeal: The Battle of Three Monotheisms, a study on the origins of conflict
between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and Derrida: An Egyptian was published by Wiley.
ERIK MORSEWhat role do you think literature plays in explicating what you call
sphereology the study of the human need for interior space?
PETER SLOTERDIJKIve always felt that there is a split in the European tradition between the
language of philosophy and the language of art and literature that is based on the suppression of
atmospheric knowledge. Similarly, until recent developments in space photography, conventional maps
omitted information about the atmosphere. My ambition was to bring the atmospheric dimension back to
the perception of the real. My essay Terror from the Air was extracted from Sphren. It is called Air
Trembling in German, and is the introductory part of the third volume of the Sphren trilogy. Everything
in these works is about the reconstruction of atmospheric perception.
EMOne of the fundamental arguments in Terror from the Air is that classical warfare
ineradicably changed with the German deployment of chlorine gas during the second battle
of Ypres on 22 April 1915. It is your contention that, with this first use of chemical warfare,

a new kind of atmo-terrorism has been released upon the world, one in which the
environment rather than the body is attacked. However, terrorism as a style of warfare has
been present in the West as far back as the first encounters between European armies and
indigenous or tribal groups: for example, night-time raids, camouflage and hit-and-run
offensives. How are these examples distinct from the use of gas in the battlefields in 1915?
PSIts only a technical difference. As Clausewitz [Carl von Clausewitz, 17801831, Prussian military
theorist and strategist] demonstrated in his book, Vom Kriege [On War, 1832], in every war there is an
element of excess, of monte aux extrme [rising to the extreme] every war accelerates towards
something worse. In all kinds of war, the temptation is very strong not only to fight against the enemy
one-to-one but to destroy its environment to make the fateful step from the duel to the practice of
extinction. In the 20th century, monte aux extrme has developed a new technical means, such as
chemical warfare. This is what I suggest in my essay on modern warfare.
EMWho coined the term monte aux extrme?
PSRen Girard. He published a book on Clausewitz, Achever Clausewitz [Finishing Clausewitz, 1997]. I
think Girard is the most important theorist on the competitive behaviour of human beings.
EMIn his book Le Part Maudit [The Accursed Share, 1949; published in English, 1991],
Georges Bataille discusses life originating from the heat of the sun. How do you think the
fear of weapons of mass destruction in the atomic age changed our traditional perception
of the sun from life-giver to ultimate destroyer?
PSI feel quite close to Bataille when he says that life on earth in general, and human life in particular,
depends on this absurd generosity from the sun. However, his theories are affected by a certain blindness
he ignores the positive aspects of the greenhouse effect (which I use here in the original sense of the
term), without which the heat of the sun could not be absorbed adequately and the surface temperature of
the Earth would be minus 15 to minus 18 degrees centigrade, which is unlivable for most biological life
forms. So, emphasizing the positive aspects of the sun alone is an error if it is not combined with a
discussion of the atmosphere. On the one hand, we have civilized and cultivated ourselves through the use
of atmospheric modifications thanks to modern air-conditioning, but, on the other, employed
atmospheric terrorism. The classical study of the sun, or heliology, makes the assumption that there is a
strong analogy between God and the sun; the sun as the physical manifestation of God. But we have to
take into account that the deepest ambition of the 20th century is the victory over the sun the title of
one of the most important works of art, in my opinion, to come out of the Russian revolution a Futurist
opera staged in 1913 by a group of artists called Soyuz Molodyozhi [Union of the Youth]. The production
team included Aleksei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyushin, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kasimir Malevich. The
opera explored the idea that the Earth will become a sun and, therefore, independent. This is the endpoint of the atmospheric movement of modern times that as long as the Earth is dependent on an
outside source, the dream of human autonomy will never be fulfilled. But if we succeed in creating an

artificial sun on the surface of the Earth, then well become independent, a God-like race, the masters of
the universe. And, at least symbolically, there is a link between the dreams of the Russian Revolution and
the American physicists who managed through the Manhattan Project to create an artificial sun. The fire
of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the only time this terrible
weapon has been employed on the battleground, which proves the 20th century to be the age of
atmospheric warfare. Nothing can be like it was before this is the connection between Hiroshima and
Auschwitz and Ypres.
EMMoving from Bataille to another 20th-century theorist who is of central importance to
your work, Im interested in how you apply Gaston Bachelards myths of air, water and
fire into sphereology.
PSIn that he was one of the authors who privileged the rediscovery of the atmospheric, Bachelard
certainly played a role in my thinking. In my younger days I read him, but when I wrote the trilogy, aside
from a few quotations from his book Lair et les songes [Air and Dreams, 1943], he wasnt central to my
thinking. Although we share a certain predisposition toward the phenomenological tradition and also a
combination of the psychoanalytical and phenomenological aspects, the emphasis in my work is very
different from his.
EMDo you think the German and French academies have more respect for Bachelards
work than the American academy, where he is not part of the philosophical canon?
PSBachelard deserves respect as a classical author. I cannot comment on the politics of the American
academy, but his writing should not be missing from the canon.
EMMany recording and sonic technologies were developed in tandem with military
research. Im curious if you think technologies such as magnetic tape, wireless
transmission, radar and sonar contributed to an environment of atmo-terrorism where
human speech becomes lost in the vast matrix of the airwaves.
PSWe have created an artificial sound environment that has no parallel in the history of human
societies. Until the 19th century, voices had to be produced and perceived in situ the source of sound
had to be quite close to the receiver. It is only through radio technology that the phenomenon of longrange acoustic communication has been made possible and through sonospheric coherence that
Postmodern reality is created. World War I was a print war the mobilization of soldiers could only be
achieved through print technology, which is relatively close to radio technology, in that reading means to
hear or hallucinate voices from different speakers for instance, you hear the voice of the German
emperor who sent you to the Front. There is constant movement from the Gutenberg world to the radio
world: the world of waves and the world of print are systematically linked by a common feature, which, to
put it in classical terms, is actio in distans action at a distance.
EMHow would you characterize the movement from print to communication via airwaves
to the condition that Paul Virilio terms telepresence a set of technologies which allow a

person to feel as if they are present, to give the appearance that they are present, or to have
an effect at a location other than their true location. Is that yet another progression?
PSIt is a kind of chain of causality. The Emperor in Rome will put his signature on a document that will
be read on the periphery of the Empire, in, say, Alexandria. The distance from Rome to Alexandria is
2,000 kilometres but the soul of the reader, the receiver of this order, is prepared to perform exactly what
the author has commanded. In this way, the world of the written commander prepares for the world of the
airwaves.
EMHow do we apply these rules for communication in the classical age to the so-called
hypermodern period when the speed of the message has been accelerated to a point at
which it appears omnipresent or telepresent?
PSThe power of the message presupposes that the synchronization of the sender and receiver has been
pre-established to prepare the receiver for a position of obedience towards the message. Now, the
proliferation of communication has resulted in the weakening of the message.
emIs there a direct link between the failure of the message and the way people now communicate in
metropolises, apartments and skyscrapers, for example?
PSCertainly. Urbanization is the main feature of contemporary culture. In the third volume of Sphren, I
deal almost exclusively with the relationship between urban communication and the luxurious functions
of modern life.
EMDo you equate all forms of modern communication in urban space to a kind of
advertising la Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk [known in English as The Arcades
Project, Benjamins unfinished collection of notes assembled between 1927 and 1940 that
reflect on the various lifestyles and dwellings of post-revolutionary Paris]?
PSThe Sphren project is about the creation of a specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the
meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of
existential space around themselves. Urban spaces are a humanized environment where nature is
completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within
cities that you might normally expect to feel in nature. In the third volume of Sphren, in a long chapter
titled The Foam City, I try to describe these multiplicities of modern life in terms of foam-making all
individuals are living in a specific bubble within a communicating foam.
EMFor those readers who are unfamiliar with your theories of bubbles and foams, what
do you see as the fate of the traditional house in this larger progression or digression of
dwelling in the 20th century?
PSMy foam city is a theory of living in an apartment. An apartment is obviously a place that contains
the means of communication to link you with the outer world, yet it is also a spatialized immune system.
It immunizes you against the influences of the outer world but it simultaneously links you to the Mitwelt
[social world], which is a form of connected isolation a term coined by Thom Mayne, an American

architect, in the early 1970s. Connected isolation could be a Heideggerian concept. It is probably one of
the most profound concepts that has ever been developed within modern architectural theory because it
contains a judgment on the modern way of life. I dont believe in Heideggers hypothesis of modern times
as the time of homelessness. What I see is a transformation in all these traditional complaints about
modern homelessness into a language of immunology. For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated
into the language of general immunology because human beings, due to their openness to the world, are
extremely vulnerable from a biological level, to the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and ritual
levels. We are always trying to create and find a protective environment. The task of building convincing
immune systems is so broad and so all-encompassing that there is no space left for nostalgic longings.
This is an ongoing task that has to be performed and theorized with every technique that is available.
There is no way back.
EMIn this new foam city has Benjamins classical description of the flneur been made
obsolete?
PSI have quoted Benjamin in a very positive way. In some of the most interesting parts of PassagenWerk, he develops the idea that the bourgeoisie of the 19th century created these artificial interiors. And
so when the world became globalized, the bourgeoisie in their salons wanted to absorb everything that is
exterior into this interiority. According to Benjamin, the art of the bourgeois form of life was, in the 19th
century, the effort to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an interior that contains the
totality. And that is what the arcades are all about. In the arcades, in the passage, the whole world of
production the whole world of trading and exploring is neutralized and re-presented in the presence
of the commodity. The commodities bring these outer totalities into the apartment of the bourgeoisie.
Between the ocean and the apartment is the passage; the arcade where all these goods can be bought.
EMYou have made the distinction in past interviews that between, for instance, 19thcentury Paris and late 20th-century Los Angeles, there is a shift from the arcade to the
shopping mall and the stadium, in the space of these ventilated hyper-interiors.
PSYes. But between the modern shopping mall and the primitive arcade of the early 19th century, there
was a step that is very symbolic. This is the London Crystal Palace, which is for me the major symbol of
the Postmodern construction of reality. [A cast-iron and glass building designed by Joseph Paxton to
house The Great Exhibition of 1851. It included 14,000 exhibitors from around the world, displaying
examples of the latest developments in technology.] Because the power of interiorization here reached a
kind of historic maximum, I chose it as the title for my most recent book on Postmodern capitalism: The
Crystal Palace. In German the title is Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [the big interior of capitalism].
Weltinnenraum is a word borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke who, in a poem from 1914, created a vision
of a fantastic space in which everything communicates with everything else. In his vision of pantheistic
communication, everything is produced by psychic powers, whereas in the Weltinnenraum of capitalism,
the communicative force is money.

EMFinally, when you speak of a symbolic immunology, its difficult not to discuss a literal
spreading of disease as well, such as the most recent phenomenon of the swine flu
outbreak that was defined as a potentially global exterminator, particularly in cities. So
you begin to see the results of space becoming more dense and people living in closer and
closer quarters, where there is a rising fear of a single strain of disease or one weapon
wiping out civilization.
PSThat is quite correct. Because people feel very strongly that their private constructions of immunity
are endangered by the presence of too many constructions of immune spheres which are pressed against
each other and destroy each other. That is why in the United States there is a new type of discourse that
encourages obscene forms of speech. For instance, the new term, toxic people, came from the USA and is
invading Europe today. This means things are going wrong and the immune situation of Americans is
collapsing.
Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon: Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized (Omnibus Press,
2004) and, with Tav Falco, the upcoming Memphis Underground: A Dual Narrative of the Bluff City
(Creation Books, 2010). His writing has been published in Arthur, Bomb, Bookforum, Filmmaker,
Interview, Semiotext(e)s Animal Shelter and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.

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BOOKS

JULY 19, 2013

Against CynicismA philosopher's brilliant reasons for living

By Adam Kirsch

eter Sloterdijk has been one of Germanys best-known philosophers for

30 years, ever since the publication of his Critique of Cynical Reason in 1983
a thousand-page treatise that became a best-seller. Since then Sloterdijk has
been at the forefront of European intellectual life, contributing to public
debates over genetic engineering and economics and hosting a long-running
discussion program on television, all while publishing a steady stream of
ambitious philosophical works. The Critique of Cynical Reason appeared in
English many years ago, but it is only recently that Sloterdijk has begun to
emerge on the American horizon. Bubbles, the first volume in a trilogy
called Spheres, his magnum opus, appeared here in 2011. Now it is followed
by You Must Change Your Life, another wide-ranging and challenging book.
Along with Rage and Time, which appeared in English in 2010, these volumes
make it possible to begin to come to grips with Sloterdijk as a stirring and
eclectic thinker, who addresses himself boldly to the most important problems
of our age. Above all, he is concerned with metaphysicsor, rather, with what
to do with the empty space that is left over when metaphysics disappears
along with religion, faith in revolution, and the other grand sources of
meaning that long gave shape and direction to human lives.
Sloterdijk was born in 1947, making him just the right age to participate in the
student movement of the 1960s. By the early 1980s, when he wroteCritique of
Cynical Reason, the idealism and the world-changing energy of that
movement had long since dwindled into splinter-group violence, on the one
hand, and accommodation to the realities of capitalism and the Cold War, on
the other. In that cultural moment, Sloterdijks diagnosis of cynicism was
very timely. The dissolution of the student movement, he wrote, must
interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into
realism, of revolt into a clever melancholy.

Despite its parodic Kantian title, Sloterdijks Critique is not a work of

theoretical abstraction; it is a highly personal confession of this generational
world-weariness. As a philosopher, Sloterdijk is especially struck by the way
he and his peers were able to master the most emancipatory and radical
philosophical language, but utterly unable to apply its insights to their own
lives and their own political situations. Coming after Critical Theory, whose
post-Marxist diagnoses of social ills are a key reference point and antagonist
for Sloterdijk, younger thinkers have found themselves brilliant at diagnosis
and helpless at cure. Because everything has become problematic, everything
is also somehow a matter of indifference, Sloterdijk observes. The result is
cynicism, which he defines in a splendid paradox as enlightened false
consciousness: It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not,
and probably was not able to, put them into practice.
If we are to break out of this learned helplessness, Sloterdijk argues, we must
ransack the Western tradition for new philosophical resources. Such
ransacking is exactly the method of Sloterdijks thought, first in
the Critiqueand then, on an even grander scale, in Bubbles and You Must
Change Your Life. Drawing on very wide readingwider, the reader often
feels, than it is deepSloterdijk excavates the prehistory of contemporary
problems, and some of their possible solutions. In the Critique, he offers an
extended analysis of the culture of Weimar Germany, in which he locates the
origin of twentieth-century cynicismas well as describing the many subvarieties of cynicism (military, sexual, religious), and doing a close reading of
Dostoevsky, and cataloguing the meaning of different facial expressions. The
effect on the reader is of being shown around a Wunderkammer, where what
matters is not the advancing of an argument but the display of various
intellectual treasures.

If the "cynicism" that Sloterdijk describes is

a post-'60s phenomenon, the prescription
that he offers is a return to '60s values.

If the cynicism that Sloterdijk describes is a post-60s phenomenon, the

prescription that he offers is a return to 60s values of spontaneity, passivity,
and the wisdom of the body. But he does not describe these in the language of
hippiedom; instead, and characteristically, he finds a grounding for them in
the oldest regions of the Western philosophical tradition. The hero of his book
is Diogenes, who was himself derided as cynicalliterally, dog-likeby the
people of Athens. But there is a vast difference, Sloterdijk argues, between the
exhausted cynicism of the late twentieth century and what he calls, using
Greek spelling, the kynicism of Diogenes. When Diogenes defecated or
masturbated in the street, when he slept in a bathtub, or told Alexander the
Great to get out of his sunlight, he was employing a joyful language of radical
bodily gestures to defeat the philosophers imprisoning language of abstract
concepts. Neither Socrates nor Plato, Sloterdijk writes, can deal with
Diogenesfor he talks with them ... in a dialogue of flesh and blood.
Sloterdijk finds in Diogenes what many of his contemporaries found in
Norman O. Brown, or in Zen, or for that matter in drugs and music:
permission to turn off reason, objectivity, logocentric thinking, the head.
After all, wasnt it enlightened Western reason that gave us the nuclear bomb?
The bomb is not one bit more evil than reality and not one bit more
destructive than we are, he writes in one of the books prose-poetic passages.
It is merely our unfolding, a material representation of our essence.... In it,
the Western subject is consummated. Behind Sloterdijks dark paean to the
bomb, it is possible to detect those other Western abominations, Nazism and
the Holocaust, which would have shadowed his upbringing in postwar
Germany. The choice, he concludes, is between the bomb or the body,
cynicism or kynicism. In our best moments, he writes almost mystically,
when ... even the most energetic activity gives way to passivity and the
rhythmics of living carry us spontaneously, courage can suddenly make itself
felt as a euphoric clarity.... It awakens the present within us.

n Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk charted a wholly individual path to

a familiar spiritual position, a Romanticism of what Wordsworth called wise

passiveness. This pattern is repeated in Sloterdijks later books: he is better at
the forceful restatement of old problems than at the invention of new
solutions. This might be regarded as an objection by certain kinds of
philosophers, who see themselves as contributors to a technical process that
produces concrete results. For Sloterdijk, whose greatest influences are
Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is not at all disqualifying, for his goal is, as he
writes in You Must Change Your Life, a provocative re-description of the
objects of analysis. Like a literary writerand he once told an interviewer
that he thought of writing theSpheres trilogy as a novelSloterdijks goal is to
restate our basic quandaries in revelatory new language, to bring them home
to us as living experiences instead of stale formulas. The prison of reason, the
need for transcendence, the yearning for an absent meaning: these have been
the stuff of literature and philosophy and theology for centuries. In Sloterdijk,
these old subjects find a timely new interpreter.
If Sloterdijk had remained the thinker who wrote the Critique, he might not be
terribly interesting to us today. There is already something period about the
books distrust of the intellect (expressed in the most sophisticated intellectual
terms), its romanticizing of kynicism, and the way it genuflects before the
bomb. To compare it with his work of the last ten years, however, is to see how
significantly Sloterdijk has evolvedboth in his response to the times and in
the scope of his vision. What he saw in the Critique as the malaise of a
disappointed generation becomes, inBubbles and You Must Change Your Life,
something much bigger and more profound. It is the plight of humanity after
the death of God, which Sloterdijk follows Nietzsche in seeing as a catastrophe
the true dimensions of which we do not yet fully appreciate. At the same time,
the impatience with Marxism that is already visible in the Critique evolves into
a full-throated defense of liberal capitalism, especially in Rage and Time,
which is largely an account of communism, and also Christianity, as ideologies
driven by resentment and fantasies of revenge. (Here, too, the influence of
Nietzsche is clear.)

Another way of putting this is that Sloterdijk is a thinker of, and for, the post
Cold War world. If you were to sketch Sloterdijks understanding of history, as
it emerges in his recent work, it would go something like this. From earliest
times until the rise of the modern world, mankind endowed the world with
purpose and time with directionality by means of religion, the belief in the
gods and God. As that belief waned, the Enlightenment faith in progress, and
the more radical communist faith in revolution, replaced transcendent
purposes with immanent ones. But by the late twentieth century, and certainly
after 1989, neither of those sets of coordinates any longer mapped our world.
What Sloterdijk initially diagnosed as mere cynicism becomes, in his mature
work, a full-fledged crisis of meaning, which can be figured as a crisis of
directionality. Again and again he refers to Nietzsches madman, who asked:
Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all
directions? Is there still any up or down?
So far this is a familiar, indeed a venerable, way of thinking about the problem
of nihilism in liberal civilization. Sloterdijks originality lies in the way these
old problems still strike him with undiminished force; and also in his refusal
to remain passive in the face of them. The whole thrust of Sloterdijks thought
is a rebuke to Heidegger, who mused, late in life, that only a God can save
us. On the contrary, he insists, we must save ourselvesand, what is more,
we can save ourselves. Salvation, for Sloterdijk, lies in just the area where
Heidegger believed perdition lay: that is, in the realm of technology.
Yet technology, for Sloterdijk, seldom has to do with machines. It is mental
and spiritual technology that interests him: the techniques with which human
beings have historically made themselves secure on the Earth. He does not
analyze these strategies in terms of religion, which he sees as a vocabulary
unavailable to us today. Rather, he re-configures them with metaphors from
the realms of immunology and climatology, using language that sounds
respectably scientific even when its actual bearing is deeply spiritual. He is
especially fond of repurposing contemporary buzzwords to give them new
dimensions of philosophical meaning, as with the term greenhouse effect.
Considered spiritually, the greenhouse effect is not something to be deplored,
but a necessity for human existence: To oppose the cosmic frost infiltrating
the human sphere through the open windows of the Enlightenment, modern
humanity makes use of a deliberate greenhouse effect: it attempts to balance

out its shellessness in space, following the shattering of the celestial domes,
through an artificial civilizatory world. This is the final horizon of EuroAmerican technological titanism.
Here Sloterdijks old critique of the Enlightenment is turned inside out.
Human beings need to breathe an atmosphere not just of oxygen, but also of
meanings and symbols and practices. The decline of religion meant the fouling
of humanitys old mental atmosphere, so that it is no longer breathable. But
where Sloterdijk in the Critique wanted to go backward to Diogenesin this
resembling his antagonist Heidegger, who sought salvation in the preSocraticsSloterdijk in Bubbles, from which this passage comes, believes that
the only way out is forward. By using technological reason, we have found
ways to air-condition our bodies; but we must also find a way to use our
reason to build air-conditioning systems for our souls. Only our minds can
save us.

his leads to the central metaphor of Sloterdijks Spheres trilogy, which

appeared in Germany between 1998 and 2004. Spheres, he writes, are airconditioning systems in whose construction and calibration ... it is out of the
question not to participate. The symbolic air conditioning of the shared space
is the primal production of every society. Law, custom, ritual, and art are
ways we create such nurturing spheres, which for Sloterdijk are not so much
topological figures as emotional and spiritual micro-climates: The sphere is
the interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humansin so far as they
succeed in becoming humans.
In Bubbles, the only part of the trilogy so far translated into English, Sloterdijk
writes primarily as a historian of art and ideas, using his eccentric erudition to
come up with numerous depictions of such nurturing spheres in human
culture. A painting of Giotto depicts two faces turned sideways, joining to
create a new facean emblem of intimacy; Saint Catherine of Siena imagines

the eating of her heart by Christ; Marsilio Ficino theorizes that love involves a
mutual transfusion of blood, carried in superfine particles in the lovers gaze.
It is no coincidence that many of these examples come from the iconography
of Christianity, since religion has been mankinds best generator of spheres.
What Sloterdijk hopes to do is to retrieve religions power to create intimacy
while shearing it of its untenable dogmas. It will be advantageous for the free
spirit to emancipate itself from the anti-Christian affect of recent centuries as
a tenseness that is no longer necessary. Anyone seeking to reconstruct basic
communional and communitary experiences needs to be free of anti-religious
reflexes, he insists. In pointed contrast to Alain Badiouwho, on the basis of
scattered statements in his books, seems to be Sloterdijks bte noirethere is
no attempt here to harness the messianism and apocalypticism of Christianity
for political ends. Sloterdijks ideal is not Pauline conversion but Trinitarian
perichoresis, a technical word he seizes on: Perichoresis means that the
milieu of the persons is entirely the relationship itself, he writes, envisioning
love as a total mutual absorption.
But if Sloterdijk is not a believer, then where does he think we can actually
experience this kind of perfectly trusting togetherness? Where do we find a
sphere that is wholly earthly, yet so primal as to retain its power even now?
The answer is surprising, even bizarre. In a long section of Bubbles, Sloterdijk
argues that the original sphere, the one we all experience and yearn to
recapture, is the mothers womb. This is not, for him, a place of blissful
isolation, where the subject can enjoy illusions of omnipotence; if it were, the
womb would be only a training ground for selfishness and disillusion.
Sloterdijk emphasizes instead that we are all in our mothers womb along with
a placenta. The placenta is what he calls the Withour first experience of
otherness, but a friendly and nurturing otherness, and thus a model for all
future spheres of intimacy.
This leads Sloterdijk to what he calls, not without a sense of humor, an ovular
Platonism. There is a preexisting realm to which we long to return, but it is
not in heaven. It is in the uterus, and since the uterus will always be with us
(barring some remote but imaginable Brave New World scenario), so too will
the possibility of genuine spheres. We need to recover, and give to one
another, the trust that we once gave our placentas. Indeed, Sloterdijk argues

that our cultures disregard for the postpartum placentawe incinerate it,
instead of reverently eating it or burying itis both a cause and a symptom of
our loneliness: In terms of its psychodynamic source, the individualism of the
Modern Age is a placental nihilism.
The reader who has no patience for this kind of thingwho finds the whole
With concept New Agey, or unfalsifiable, or just wildly eccentricwill
probably not get very far with Sloterdijk. This is not because placenta-ism is
central to his thought. On the contrary, it is just one of the many provocative
ideas that he develops and then drops in the course of the book, which reads
less like a structured argument than a long prose poem. Sloterdijks strength
and appeal come from the intuitive and metaphorical quality of his thought,
his unconventional approaches to familiar problems, his willingness to
scandalize. As a theorem, the With is easy to refute; as a metaphor, it is
weirdly persuasive. It is another way of describing, and accounting for, the
central experience of homelessness that drives all of Sloterdijks thought.
Deprived of our With, he writes, the officially licensed thesis God is dead
must be supplemented with the private addendum and my own ally is also
dead.
There is something hopeful about this supplement: if we cannot re-gain God,
Sloterdijk contends, we can still re-gain the sense of having an ally. Indeed,
the sphere concept is powerful because of the way it rewrites the history of
religion in respectful but fundamentally secular terms. The need for spheres
for meanings, symbols, contextsis what is primary for human beings. That
our most successful spheres have been religious ones is, for Sloterdijk, a
contingent fact, not a necessary one.

Illustration by Charlie Bearman

n identical logic informs You Must Change Your Life, in which

Sloterdijk re-formulates his understanding of religion using a new geometrical

metaphor: not the nurturing sphere, but the aspiring vertical line. (He barely
mentions spheres at all in the new book, adding to the impression that his
thoughts do not form a system but a series of improvisations.)
If Bubbles mined religionand science and artfor images of intimacy, You
Must Change Your Lifeemphasizes instead the human proclivity for selftranscendence, for constantly remaking and exceeding ourselves, for going
higher in every sense. Just as he half-jokingly adopted the term greenhouse
effect, Sloterdijk now seizes on the p.c. euphemism vertically challenged:
This turn of phrase cannot be admired enough, he writes. The formula has
been valid since we began to practice learning to live.
The word practice is central to Sloterdijks argument here, and to his
understanding of religion. We are living, he observes, at a time when religion
is supposedly making a comeback around the world. The old assurance that all

societies must inevitably converge on secularism is failing. For Sloterdijk,

however, it is a mistake to think that what people are turning to is faith in the
divine. Rather, the part of religion that still matters to us, for which we have a
recurring need, is its practices: the technology, primarily mental and innerdirected, that allows us to reshape our ways of thinking and feeling. With
typical bravado, he argues that no religion or religions exist, only
misunderstood spiritual regimens.
In fact, Sloterdijk argues, our time is characterized by a widespread embrace
of training techniques, physical and metaphysical. In one chapter of You Must
Change Your Life, in a typically counterintuitive stroke, he pairs the rise of the
modern Olympic games with the spread of Scientology as examples of the
invention of new types of spiritual-cum-athletic regimens. The sheer idiocy of
the theology behind Scientology shows, for him, how irrelevant doctrines are
to the contemporary appetite for religion. L. Ron Hubbards Dianetics was a
spiritual technology before it was a church, and this kind of technology can be
found at the heart of all religious traditions. If one looks to the heart of the
fetish of religion, Sloterdijk writes apropos of Scientology, one exclusively
finds anthropotechnic procedures.
Anthropotechnics is another favorite term of Sloterdijks, because of the way
it combines a technological meaning and a spiritual meaning. Genetic
engineering and bionics are one kind of anthropotechnics, a way of working on
human beings to improve them. But so too, he insists, are the exercises of
Ignatius de Loyola, or the harsh training procedures of Buddhist monks.
Fasting, memorization of sacred texts, hermitism, self-flagellationsuch
practices actually transform the human being, building a new and higher
inner life on the foundations of the old one.
Much of You Must Change Your Life is devoted to a cultural history and
typology of these kinds of training practices, passing freely between Eastern
and Western traditions. When Jesus on the cross declares consummatum
est, Sloterdijk says that we ought to see this as a victors cry, equivalent to
that of a Greek athlete winning a race or a wrestling match. The phrase should
be translated, he argues, not as a passive it is finished but as Made it! or
Mission accomplished! For the conquest of death is the ultimate goal of all
spiritual training, and the great foundersJesus, Buddha, Socratesare those

who won the championship by dying on their own terms. This phenomenon is
what Sloterdijk refers to as the outdoing of the gladiators by the martyrs.
To identify religion as a form of competitive training is to reimagine history,
and in You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk offers a mock-Hegelian account
of the evolution of the human subject. In the beginning, he writes, all human
beings lived in a swamp of habit and mass-mindedness. A few rare and gifted
individuals lifted themselves up to the dry ground, where they could look back
on their old lives in a self-conscious and critical spirit. This constitutes the
true birth of the subject: anyone who takes part in a programme for depassivizing themselves, and crosses from the side of the merely formed to that
of the forming, becomes a subject.
These pioneers in turn draw imitators after them, people eager to remake
themselves in the image of the miraculous founders: Jesus has his Paul,
Socrates his Plato. In the modern age, society attempts to universalize this
experience of enlightenment, to awaken all the sleepers, but with uneven and
sometimes disastrous effects. For humans live on a vertical, and the definition
of a vertical is that there will always be a top and a bottom: The upper class
comprises those who hear the imperative that catapults them out of their old
life, and the other classes all those who have never heard or seen any trace of
it.
If this is elitismand it is, with a vengeancethen so be it. Egotism,
Sloterdijk writes, is often merely the despicable pseudonym of the best
human possibilities. Indeed, it is not hard to see that what Sloterdijk has
written is a re-formulation and defense of the idea of the bermensch. The
whole book could be thought of as a commentary on a single line of
Nietzsches from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Sloterdijk repeatedly quotes:
Man is a rope, stretched between beast and bermensch. Here is the
original verticalor, as Sloterdijk also has it, a kind of Jacobs ladder, on
which men ascend toward the heavens and descend toward the Earth.
For a German thinker of Sloterdijks generation to rehabilitate the idea of the
Superman might seem like a dangerous proposition. But in his hands the
concept is totally disinfected of any taints of blond beastliness or the will to
power. Indeed, the figures whom Sloterdijk cites as the supreme self-trainers,

at the top of the human vertical, are Jesus and Socratesthe very ones
Nietzsche despised as teachers of herd morality. It is central to Sloterdijks
vision that, for him, supremacy is totally divorced from domination. He
imagines that only self-mastery is what matters to human beings, that the
training of the self is more noble and satisfying than control over others. If this
is a blind spot, it is one that allows him to take his Nietzsche guilt-free.

It is not hard to see what Sloterdijk has

written is a re-formulation and defense of
the idea of the bermensch.

The image of the stretched rope appeals to Sloterdijk because it manages to

sustain the idea of verticalityand also of hierarchy and valuein the absence
of the divine. Like a snake charmer, Sloterdijk needs to make the rope of
human existence stand straight without attaching it to anything on high. This
is what he calls the problematic motif of the transcendence device that cannot
be fastened at the opposite pole. The main intuition, and gamble, of You
Must Change Your Life is that the human instinct for verticality can survive
the relativizing of space in a godless world. What remains is a sort of highly
intellectualized and sublimated vitalism: Vitality, understood both
somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient
between more and less, he writes. It therefore contains the vertical
component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional
external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant
in this context.
The line, then, like the sphere, becomes for Sloterdijk a substitute for
metaphysics. Metaphysics, he says in an aside that captures his whole
argument, really ought to be called metabiotics: it is life itself that aspires
upward, even if space has no up or down to speak of. Even without God or

thebermensch, it is sufficient to note that every individual, even the most

successful, the most creative and the most generous, must, if they examine
themselves in earnest, admit that they have become less than their potentiality
of being would have required, he writes near the end of the book, revealing
the deep Protestant roots of this conception of the conscience.
One of the most appealing things about Sloterdijks philosophy is that, like
literature, it leaves itself vulnerable. It does not attempt to anticipate and to
refute all possible objections. And the objections to You Must Change Your
Life, as with Bubbles, are not far to seek. For one thing, by conceiving of
religion as an elite training regimen, Sloterdijk implies that a religion is
justified only by its saints. Anyone who is not a saint is insignificant, and so
the average persons experience of religious meaningswhether metaphysical
doctrine or spiritual consolation or tradition or identity or communionis
dismissed out of hand. This is false to the lived reality of religion for most
people, and shows how tendentious Sloterdijks equation of religion with
practice really is.
Then there is the question-begging insistence that metabiotics, Sloterdijks
discomfitingly biological philosophy, will do in the absence of metaphysics. It
is certainly true that even non-believers continue to act as if there is such a
thing as excellence, self-improvement, self-overcoming. But it is not certain
that these salutogenic energies, as Sloterdijk calls them, are capable of
sustaining themselves indefinitely in the absence of some metaphysical
validation. Much of modern literature, from Leopardi to Beckett, suggests that
they cannot. What is missing from You Must Change Your Life is an
investigation of what happens when the vertical collapses, as it does
sometimes for everyone, even believers. Sloterdijk needs to offer a psychology
of depression to complement his psychology of aspiration. This is as much as
to say that Sloterdijk has not solved the immense problems that he raises,
even though he claims to know the way toward the solution. But maybe the
philosopher does not need to solve problems, only to make them come alive;
and this he does as well as any thinker at work today.
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist
forTablet, and the author most recently of Why Trilling Matters (Yale).

continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new

thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory,
biopolitics and art.
Past
Present
Future
Issue 4.1 / 2014: 16-37
Taking Up The Challenge Of Space: New Conceptualisations Of Space In The
Work Of Peter Sloterdijk And Graham Harman
Marijn Nieuwenhuis
DOWNLOAD PDF
ABSTRACT: The arguably two most creative theoretical contributions on established
understandings of space have recently been provided in Peter Sloterdijks Spheres [Sphren]
trilogy and in the works of Graham Harman. Their work reveals a strong Heideggerian presence
which can be traced back to the importance granted to concepts such as Dasein (in the case of
Sloterdijk) and tool-analysis (for Harman). Both authors employ the concept of space to
challenge the authority of traditional understandings of metaphysics and subject-oriented
ontology.
This paper will analyse the role of space in their work and search for possibilities that could
enable a conceptual synthesis. Such a preliminary investigation into the conceptual foundations
of space should allow for a speculative reengagement with the long abandoned question of how
space ontologically relates to being. The objective of this exercise, therefore, is to resume
speculation about key concepts and ideas that have long been abandoned by the social
sciences.

INTRODUCTION
This essay will argue that space is not an autonomous container in which things merely exist.
Space is instead speculated to be an inseparable quality of objects that relate. This argument is
therefore not the same as that conceded earlier by Leibniz in his 1715-1716 correspondences
with Clarke. Leibniz, contra the Newtonians, argued that space was neither absolutist nor
autonomous from objects. He famously argued instead for a relational space that was an order
of co-existences (Leibniz 2001: 13)[2]. This order was consequentially characterised by distance
and situations relative to positions. Casey (1997a: 362, original emphasis) describes Leibniz
then, as the primary culprit for the modern loss of the particularity of place, the denial of
infinitive space and for developing a new discipline of site analysis (analysis situs, a rigorous
analytic-geometric discipline). The closing-off of the problem of space led to a so-called fallacy
of the misplaced concreteness [of space] (Whitehead 1948). The way we experience space is
not geometric. Neither is our knowledge of space a priori to space itself. My small flat is for me
not definable by the geometric measurements of its interior. It is instead my place of dwelling. It
is historical, warm, cosy, and familiar; it is home. Focusing on its geometric measurement would
deprive the room from what it is, or what Heidegger (1996) called its worldhood. Lefebvre
(1991), inspired by Heidegger, famously argues for a true space rather than a constructed
truth of space. Our modern knowledge of space has however closed-off speculations of what
space could be. The limiting of space, by our particular modern knowledge of it, has led to a
depoliticisation of space. While the territorial trap (Agnew 1994) has received a lot of attention
in the social sciences, the spatial trap has remained largely unaddressed.
Sloterdijk and Harman take on a speculative understanding of what space is. The discussion
that follows rests on the work of these two contemporary thinkers, who have effectively broken
free from post-Kantian philosophies of access. Speculation is important for it allows for
disclosure and, therefore, for the repoliticisation of space. The act of speculating playfully
challenges the concreteness of knowledge and flirts with the possibility of contingency.
Speculations on space are of particular relevance today, when the concreteness of space is
imposed upon us through violent acts of regional, national and everyday bordering. Speculation
about space is therefore not merely an intellectual tool to reintroduce its relevance in the social
sciences. It is also of concrete importance to challenge the dominating and imposing modern
knowledge of space.
This article argues that both authors see space instead as inherently relational and nonrelational (or anti-relational). This leads to the conclusion that space itself is not an entity on its
own. Space lies instead at the mutual exteriority of objects that stand in a phenomenological
relation. I will propose to analyse space from what has recently been described as a
metaphysics of objects (see e.g. Harman 2002). Such a position entails a negation of the
Kantian idea that human agency grants the only viable means for accessing reality. I will employ
the work of Sloterdijk and Harman to allow for a discussion which returns to the fundamental

question of what space is. This point will be elaborated on and consequentially used to argue for
a speculative return to a revised form of realism.
The papers position starts from the idea that every object exists in something
andwith something. This Heideggerian-inspired notion is then used to challenge and replace
traditional metaphysics with a flattened and relational ontology. Speculating about the
potentiality of different forms of Being[3], other than human Dasein, allows us to think of other
worlds that are independently constructed of human consciousness. This essay does however
not entail a return to a raw version of scientific naturalism, for which reality is constituted by bare
physicality, but wishes to commence from a phenomenological position that considers reality to
be always of an intentional category. This idea of intentionality is in the work of the two authors
removed from the idealism of an earlier phenomenology and replaced by a more object oriented
mode of access.
Contemporary discussions on space have been shaped and taken over by abstract discussions
of, for example, the ill-defined phenomenon of globalisation. The emphasis on such
abstractions symbolises a worrying trend to think of space as detached from objects and devoid
of access. Peter Sloterdijk famously expressed the concern that discussions about the globe
make little sense, because we never find ourselves outside of it. It is however not only the space
of the globe which is always withdrawn from us. All spaces are both withdrawn and
simultaneously always present in an allusive form. Space allows us to identify, classify and
differentiate objects. Space is however also non-relational, because space does not allow us to
ever fully grasp the objects in it. Space is in this article argued to belong to the world of
phenomenology. Space allows for the coming into existence of worlds. Space is worlding. The
capacity of space to world is not limited to human experience. Objects similarly world. There
is a growing need to return to discussions that start from the small and the tangible to shed light
on the relationship between Being and space. Speculations about the meaning of space could
additionally help challenge historically constructed and socially embedded understandings of
space. This essay therefore hopes to modestly contribute to a growing body of literature which
proposes to return to the big questions or what Quentin Meillassoux (2011) calls the great
outdoors from which philosophy and the social sciences originated.
The thinkers I will be discussing in this paper both attempt to reengage with the prehistoric
essence of Being and its relationship to space. Their work signifies (to different extents and
purposes) a trend to move away from traditional post-Kantian philosophies in search of an
alternative and progressive form of metaphysics. There are admittedly many differences
between Sloterdijk and Harmans work which could make a comparative assessment of their
understandings of space a challenging exercise. Their tone and style of writing, but also their
theoretical origins and philosophical starting positions are largely diverging. One of the things
they do share in common, besides the obvious spatial predisposition in their writings, is the
great influence that HeideggersBeing and Time enjoys in their work. The shared appreciation

for what they both define as the greatest work of 20th century philosophy will therefore constitute
an important component in this article. The mutual appreciation of both thinkers for the relational
ontology of the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour is similarly of noticeable
influence in their work. Both Harman and Sloterdijk not only employ Latourian terms and
concepts, but also draw inspiration from his wish to pluralise the concept of world and to
repopulate it with a larger number of both animate and inanimate actors.
Peter Sloterdijk, the thinker discussed in the first section, has only recently been introduced to
the Anglo-Saxon academic world[4], but has for some time already been a household name in
continental philosophy. Sloterdijks seminal work Spheres [Sphren], on which this paper mainly
draws, is characterised by its post-Heideggerian approach in enabling a more spatial
understanding of ontology. His work is and should, according to him, be understood as the
spatial companion to Heideggers Being and Time. Graham Harman, whose Object-Oriented
Ontology (OOO) is discussed in section two, comes from a very different theoretical tradition.
Harman combines the clarity of writing characteristic of analytical philosophy with the ontological
insights of earlier phenomenologists such as Husserl, Zubiri, Whitehead among others. Harman
gained prominence as a founding member of the so-called Speculative Realism (SR) school.
Harmans OOO rests on a revision of HeideggersBeing and Time, in which he, as with
Sloterdijk, attempts to transcend Heidegger, to arrive at a potent and fertile form of realism. The
third section of this article will attempt to pull the two thinkers closer together to allow for a
critical engagement on the basis of their different conceptualisations of space. Such a dialogue
will be translated into a preliminary synthesis, which will allow us to start speculating about the
conceptual challenges that space poses to Being. The act of translation is admittedly not an
exclusive constructive exercise. The section will therefore be careful not to lose sight of what
might get lost in the making of such a synthesis. The conclusion will then summarise some of
the main findings and reiterate the argument that space is inseparable from the Being of objects.
SLOTERDIJK AND SPHEROLOGY
Taking his inspiration from oriental philosophy, French post-structuralism and German critical
theory, Sloterdijk is as much a thinker of everything (but never just anything) as an eclectic
intellectual magpie, taking inspiration and ideas from a wide-range of intellectual sources in the
German language and beyond, arranging them in new and surprising ways (Elden 2012: 3).
Sloterdijk, however, reserves a specific role for phenomenologically-inclined thinkers who
provide him with the possibility to discover and elaborate on the ontological dimensions of space
or, in Sloterdijks own words, on the onto-topology of Being. As such, space, for Sloterdijk, is
something that is simultaneously relational and ontological.
Sloterdijk defines and studies spheres in a manner that is redolent of Edward Caseys profound,
but oft neglected, Fate of Place (1997) and Getting Back into Place (2009). Sloterdijk allows
spheres, as Casey does for places, a central role in the definition and possibility of Being itself.

To be-there (Da-Sein or Dasein) means for Sloterdijk always to be-with-something (Mit-Sein)

and to be-in-something (In-Sein). The in and the with are for Sloterdijk therefore the
essential ontological cornerstones for any being to be at all. This insight was also made by the
young Heidegger, though he later changed directions and chose to ever more legitimise the
specificity of human Dasein in existential terms. Sloterdijk (as well as Harman) consequently
considers his effort as a return to the young Heidegger for whom space was an essential
element for the ontology of Being[5].
The spatiality of Heideggers Dasein is composed of de-distancing (or de-severance orEntfernung) and orientation (directionality or Ausrichtung). Malpas (2006: 91) takes the former
to refer to the way in which specific things take on a certain relation to us from out of the larger
structure in which they are situated. Heidegger (1996: 97) writes: De-distancing means making
distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something disappear, bringing it near.
Dasein is essentially de-distancing De-distancing discovers remoteness. I walk across the
street towards the confectionery which allows me to become aware of the long, thin black
liquorice on sale. Orientation by contrast refers to the way in which, in being involved in a
certain task, I find myself already situated in certain ways with respect to the things and places
around me (Malpas 2006: 91). For example, while eating, I have a fork on the left of me, a
knife on the right and a plate in the middle. Heidegger (1996: 100, original emphasis) argues
that Da-sein is spatial by way of circumspectly discovering space so that it is related to beings
thus spatially encountered by constantly de-distancing. As being-in which de-distances, Da-sein
has at the same time the character of directionality.Every bringing near has always taken a
direction in a region beforehand from which what is de-distanced approaches so that it can be
discovered with regards to its place. De-distancing on the basis of orientation allows Dasein, in
other words, to make sense of a withdrawn reality in which things exist objectively (but not
ontologically) in the world (sein in). Objects are ontic, while Dasein is thought to be ontological.
The latter is through its capacity of de-distancing and orientation, therefore, in-the-world (ie.
Being-in) and world forming (or weltbildend).
What recent philosophers referred to as being-in-the-world first of all, and in most cases,
means being-in-spheres Spheres are air conditioning systems in whose construction and
calibration, for those living in real coexistence, it is out of the question not to participate. The
symbolic air conditioning of the shared space is the primal production of every society
(Sloterdijk 2011: 46).
A sphere is, in yet other words, as a world formatted by its inhabitants or as the spaces
where people actually live. I [ie. Sloterdijk] would like to show that human beings have, till today,
been misunderstood, because the space where they exist has always been taken for granted
without ever being made conscious and explicit (Sloterdijk in Kristal 2012: 153, original
emphasis). Spherology offers then a theory of the minimal conditions for the initially impersonal
process of creative self-organization which isolated and distanced the proto-hominids from their

environment in what he [i.e. Sloterdijk] calls anthropogene islands or anthropospheres (van

Tuinen 2009: 110).
Heidegger showed that humans are thrown-into-the-world into its there, but for Sloterdijk this
does not mean that we are immediately at home in the world. He argues that it is exactly this
concept of being-at-home in the world that must be questioned, as to simply accept this
condition as a fact would mean to fall back into the logic of container-physics that needs to be
overcome. (Sloterdijk 2012: 37). Sloterdijk shows that we are not only able, but indeed
compelled to make our own worlds. Without spheres humans would simply not be able to
survive as a species. Being-in-the-world is for Sloterdijk thus first and foremost Being-in-asphere. Such spheres are however not singular, but always plural. Sloterdijk provides in his
2,500-page magnum opus (1998, 1999, 2004) a historical onto-anthropological understanding of
how humans are to be understood topologically. Topology lies at the heart of spherology given
that for Sloterdijk it is the topos of man [which] is a far more determining aspect of human
existence than the essence of man (ten Kate 2011: 103). The topos is for Sloterdijk a condition
of being in which our Dasein - to use Heideggers redefinition of human existence - is fully
integrated, to the extent that the Da of our Dasein is understood as fundamentally topical (ten
Kate 2011: 105). Sloterdijk therefore challenges the still dominant philosophical tradition which
started with Descartes and continuous to be of still great importance in discussions on the
essence of human Dasein. The premise for Sloterdijks ontological anthropology is not grounded
in theexistential question what being is, but revolves instead around a relational onto-topology
of the placeswhere Being is made possible. The Da in Dasein forms as such the first sphere. It
is also here that Sloterdijk breaks with Heideggers existentialism.
Sloterdijks emphasis on space leads him to detach Heideggers notion of a house of Being
from its original context of language. Sloterdijk proposes instead a literal reading of the house,
which starts from the necessity of Being to interact with its surroundings. Sloterdijk agrees, in
other words, with Heidegger that Being is thrown (Geworfenen) into the world, but only to part
again ways with Heidegger to demonstrate that this original act is followed by the development
and employment of what Sloterdijk describes as anthropotechnologies. Such technologies, of
which language is only one, help construct the shell, housing or sphere (Ge-Huse) that
translates into a Foucauldian-like biopolitics of self-domestication. This early sphere protects
beings from the outside world and helps to transform mere ontic being into Being.
Anthropotechnology is therefore considered to enable the Heideggerian clearing (Lichtung)
from which Being-in-the-world becomes possible.
Sloterdijk conceptualises spheres in different sizes and forms which he defines as thoughtfigures that possess a relational capacity to being. He chronologically analyses and discusses
them according to their size and temporal evolution. The first volume ofSpheres (2011 [1998])
deals with the microspherology [Mikrosphrologie] of bubbles [Blasen]. The second volume
(1999)[6] deals with the macrospherology [Makrosphrologie] of globes [Globen] and the third

volume (2004) with the plural spherology [plurale Sphrologie] of foam [Schume]. The
volumes could be read in a linear, chronological fashion in which humans first existed in the
bubbles of the microsphere and later came to construct more complex macro-spheres. The last
volume is a socially critical analysis of the recent emergence of so-called foam. The first
volume of Spheres is for this essay however the most relevant among the three, since it sets out
the ontological presuppositions and foundations that will form the building blocks for the other
two books.
Bubbles are in the first volume described to be the micro-spherology of human beings. Human
beings are, as Sloterdijk shows, always located in a bubble which protects them from the outside
and allows them to be and remain alive. Bubbles are, in other words, the climatologically tuned
spaces or spheres (greenhouses or Treibhuser) which allow beings immunity from the
environment (um-welt). They are also, as briefly noted earlier, world-forming (weltbildend) in
that humans adjust their spherological environment (Greenhouse effect or Treibhauseffekt).
Sloterdijk discusses and describes bubbles and spheres in both material and in immaterial form
(e.g. the uterus, the home, the polis, etc.). In the second volume of his trilogy he, in fact,
attaches the concept of a sphere to the globe itself. However, he never departs from
Heideggers fundamental idea that Dasein is situated in a somewhere andwith others. He rather
constantly deepens the importance of being-in. To be means for Sloterdijk and, as discussed in
the next section, also for Harman, always to be-with something and Being-with something
always takes placein something. This forms the conceptual springboard for his genealogical
assessment of the beginnings of spheres.
Sloterdijks perhaps most widely discussed example of such a sphere is the relationship
between the foetus and the placenta that make up the bubble of the uterus (the original sphere
or die Ursphre). The intimate relationship between the foetus and the womb is, according to
Sloterdijk, the most intimate (and therefore closest to perfect) example of a bubble. The
structural process which allows the two poles to merge into one sphere is what Sloterdijk, in
Latourian language, defines as coupling[7]. We hold the opinion that through a theory of
couplings, of genius and of complemented existence, we can save all there is to save from
Heideggers interest in rootedness. (Sloterdijk 2012: 41).
The reasons that Sloterdijk commences his spherology and pays special attention to the perfect
symbiosis that takes place between the placenta (the original companion) and the foetus are
plural. I will present here the two that I find most appropriate for the purpose of coming closer to
Sloterdijks relational understanding of space. The first of which demonstrates and confirms the
earlier suggestion that Sloterdijk is not so much looking for an answer to the question
of what makes us human, but is rather more interested in the questionwhere humans are.
Where comes for Sloterdijk before what. He therefore does not start his analysis from a
position in which humans are a priori presented as the subjects worthy of investigation, but
rather flattens the ground for a topological understanding ofwhere humans can come (and have

historically come) into Being. Being is in Sloterdijks onto-anthropology removed from its
revered position as an autonomous subject and effectively replaced by bipolar and multipolar
relations that enable and constitute a sphere.
Sloterdijk empirically demonstrates that within the womb (The inner-sphere of the absolute
Mother or innenraum der absoluten Mutte), it is impossible to draw an epistemological
distinction between the object and the subject. This is because the foetus does neither
recognise the placenta nor the nobjects ([ie.] neither subjects nor objects) such as placental
blood, intrauterine acoustics, and other medial givens [The] child develops [therefore] an
identity not by recognizing itself at a distance in the mirror but through presubjective
resonances (van Tuinen 2007: 281). This negative gynaecology (negative Gynkologie),
Sloterdijk argues, embodies the perfect immersion of Being-a-pair [Paar-Sein] in a bubble,
which ultimately bursts when the natal process commences.
In terms of its dramatic content, what one generally calls cutting the [umbilical] cord is the
introduction of the child into the sphere of ego-forming clarity. To cut means to state individuality
with the knife. The one who performs the cut is the first separation-giver in the subjects history;
through the gift of separation, he provides the child with the stimulus for existence in the external
media. (Sloterdijk 2011: 388).
The moment the child is thrown-into-the-World and has bid farewell to the placenta (primal
companion or the Urbegleiter) is also the moment in which it will have to form new relationships
and in turn create and dwell in new bubbles. The uterus is the (primordial) sphere responsible
for creating the conditions in which the relation between the two objects literally comes to
life before the foundation of subjectivity and the subject itself. Sloterdijks introduction of a presubjectivity therefore provocatively challenges the idea that philosophy should start from the
premise of a subject-object dichotomy and flattens the metaphysical ground on which, as
discussed in the next section, we also find the object oriented ontology of Graham Harman.
Sloterdijk, in another vein, argues against the idea of the European metaphysical age that
object and subject are divided. He (Sloterdijk 2004: 42) laments that they put the soul, the self
and the human on one side, and the thing, the mechanism and the inhuman on the other... At
the same time it denies to things and materials an abundance of characteristics that upon closer
look they in fact do possess. If these traditional errors are corrected respectively, a radically new
view of cultural and natural objects comes about.
For Sloterdijk, as with Harman, objects do not exist anonymously from each other, but must
instead always be understood in relation to other objects. They do not have an existence prior
to, or independent from, these relations, but are also not reducible to a set of finite relations or
qualities. The possibilities of Being are, if we would draw Sloterdijks ontology to its logical
conclusion, infinite. The number of possible spheres is, in fact, as infinitive as the number of

objects. Co-subjectivity and co-existence [Mit-Sein] are the norm in Sloterdijks post-human
philosophy. Sloterdijk ridicules Cartesian notion of subjectivity and cogito when he writes that:
Man is a thinking meteorite. Only in contact with what exists does his surrounding catch fire.
Through my incandescence appears what exists and makes sense as a surrounding. I burn, and
therefore, it can't be that there is nothing. If I burn, it is because I am here to co-exist with the
rest of what is here (Sloterdijk in Kristal 2012: 160).
The tragic and traumatic element in the bursting of the ur-bubble[8] forms the second
component in Sloterdijks relational onto-topology. Sloterdijk contextualises this primordial
separation, which forces the subject to confront the Big Outdoors, in both structural and
historical terms. Sloterdijks structural analysis relies on and echoes Arendts (1998) notion of
human natality in which the natal function of action works as the foundation of constant
renewal. Sloterdijk however, blends this concept with his own philosophical anthropology to win
our attention for the importance of the historical whereabouts of the human. The longing for the
perfect union in the bubble of the broken womb will, as we are told, throughout the subjects
lifetime compel her to travel, create and dwell in many different spheres. Human beings are for
Sloterdijk, in a Heideggerian sense, therefore quite literally life-enabling and animating
architects and engineers. Being means for Sloterdijk therefore first and foremost the engineering
and designing of architectural spheres that make possible and give meaning to existence[9].
The interaction between objects in a place is, in other words, structurally and continually
repeated throughout the beginning of time. It is however equally important to remember that
Sloterdijk also here again refuses to draw a strict line between the subject and objects or
between humans and things. Every object we confront or encounter is for Sloterdijk a
relational act of immersion. He (Sloterdijk 2011: 92, 93) describes the insertion of a candy into
ones mouth as the realisation that even [t]he most basic luxury food is suitable to convince me
that an incorporated object, far from coming unambiguously under my control, can take
possession of me and dictate its topic to me. He (Sloterdijk 2011: 94) follows this line of
reasoning and consequentially poses the provocative question what it is that remains of the
[enlightenment] dream of human autonomy once the subject has experienced itself as a
penetrable hollow body?. The answer to this question leads back to the core of Sloterdijks
spherology which is grounded in the idea that to be always means to be with-something and insomething. The reified individual or the fetish of individualism (latin: in-dividuus or indivisibility)
is for Sloterdijk (as is the indivisibility of atoms for quantum mechanics) therefore a myth. The
individual is for Sloterdijk and less explicitly (and politically) also for Harman relationally
composed of smaller parts (as other objects). Sloterdijks discussions of spheres are, to briefly
sum up, as much about the undertaking of the experiment to demonstrate to what extent the
being-a-pair [Paar-Sein] precedes all encounters (Funcke and Sloterdijk 2005), as they are
about exposing the myth of an autonomous individual subject. There are no individuals, only
dividuals [Dividuen] humans only exist as particles, or poles of spheres. There exist

exclusively pairs [Paare] and their extensions [Erweiterungen] (Sloterdijk 2001: 144,
translated, see also Sloterdijk 2011: 83 ff.). These realisations are also of importance for
Sloterdijks genealogical record of human relationships in spheres to which we will now shortly
shift our attention, before moving on to Harmans OOO.
Sloterdijk describes how the placenta in pre-modern times was respected across different
cultures and religiously represented as the inseparable doppelganger of the foetus. The arrival
of modernity (which Sloterdijk mockingly describes as the regime of placental nihilism) has,
however, come to alienate the foetus from the placenta, which was consequentially
excommunicated and banished from any form of philosophical consideration[10]. But where, as
in the most recent part of the Modern Age, the With-space is annulled and withdrawn from the
start through the elimination of the placenta, the individual increasingly falls prey to the manic
collectives and total mothers - and, in their absence, to depression. (Sloterdijk 2001: 285). The
loss of such intimacy between objects (for Sloterdijk a defining element of modernity) was
replaced by the myth of an autonomous individuality. The analysis of the post-natal
diversification of spheres does for Sloterdijk, however, neither start nor finish with the spheredependent and sphere-creating di-vidual, but is also constitutive of the genealogical
foundations of the macro-spheres which he (1999) discusses in the second volume of his
trilogy. The third volume (2004) deals with the breakup of spheres and the emergence of socalled co-isolated foams. I do not believe however, that an analysis of the last two volumes
would contribute to a better understanding of the theoretical premise of Sloterdijks spatial
ontology nor does this paper seek to undertake such an endeavour[11]. Neither of these volumes
radically departs from the conceptual ontology presented in the first volume which shows that
Being for Sloterdijk always means to be-withsomething and to be-in something.
The philosophical foundations of Sloterdijks Spheres are, to shortly summarise, first and
foremost grounded in a historical study of the need of Being to create interior spaces. Humans
need to be in and with something, but human bodies themselves are similarly thein something
for another thing. Human animals flourish only in the greenhouse of their autogenous sphere
(Sloterdijk 2011: 46). The capacity and necessity to create spheres in order to be is, of course,
not reserved to humans alone, but could equally be applied to the realm of other animate and
even inanimate entities. Every individual as much as every other entity is an aggregate. Space
for Sloterdijk grants, in other words, the condition necessary for the existence of Being. It
provides room, both literally and metaphorically, for whole species of spaces to grow and bloom,
spaces of empire, spaces of capital, spaces of signal and communication, spaces of eros,
spaces of dreams (Thrift 2012: 143). Space is, as Thrift (2012: 140) notes, thus understood
gynaecologically as a set of envelopes or surrounds or shelters, self-animated spaces that give
their inhabitants the resources to produce worlds. It is this faculty of space, to produce
intentional realities for animate and imamate objects alike, that forms the phenomenological
bridge between Sloterdijks theory of spheres and the object ontology oriented (OOO)
philosophy of Graham Harman.

OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

Graham Harman is one of the four thinkers[12] who helped pave the early foundations of the socalled Speculative Realism (SR) school. The interdependence between the theories and
research interest of its core members and the influence which especially Quentin Meillassoux
has had on Harman OOO, compels me to shortly introduce the main philosophical principles of
SR. Quentin Meillassoux is a former student of Alain Badiou whose writings inspired
Meillassouxs (2011) now famous After Finitude. The work could be said to have served as a
general introduction to the underlying principles of the school and will be discussed shortly in
greater detail.
Speculative Realism
The theme which unites the SR thinkers is their common discontent over the longstanding
Kantian dominance in both the analytical and continental philosophical tradition. The realism
that SR proposes is, however, not so much a return to a form of pre-critical realism, but rather a
third road between realism and idealism. It openly attempts to speculate about the nature of
reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally (Bryant et al., 2011: 3).
SR attacks the foundations of what is commonly known as the Kantian Copernican Revolution,
which, unlike the name suggests, is argued to refer to the exact opposite of the decentring of
human existence. Kant is said to have been among the first to make our access to the world
dependent upon our knowledge of it. This form of so-called correlationism is, Meillassoux
(2011: 118) argues, the exact opposite of the task pursued by the empirical sciences which aim
to actually uncover knowledge of a world that is indifferent to any relation to the world. The task
which SR sets upon itself is therefore nothing short of a challenging of the Kantian dualistic
thinking.
SR is, crudely summarised, centred on a revision of Kants inaccessible thing-in-itself (das
Ding an sich). Meillassoux shows that the thing-in-itself is temporally outside human access. He
uses the example of a fossil (the arche-fossil) to show that we cannot come to terms with
things that temporally existed prior (ancestrally) to our knowledge of it. This supports his thesis
that things not only exist temporally autonomous from human consciousness, but also
independent from Kantian facticity. Harmans argument moves beyond
Meillassouxstemporal critique. He argues that correlationism not only fails to explain the
existence of things before and after human temporality, but that it is also incapable of talking
about realities that are spatially outside of facticity. The correlationist seems no better able to
account for the falling vase than for the ancestral formation of the earth (Harman, 2011c: 42).
Herman notes that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point [and its omission inAfter
Finitude] might be a candidate for the blind spot [of Meillassouxs work] (2011a: 89).
Harman notes that things are perfectly able to exist in a reality that is unknown to us.

Thinking about something is, according to SR, always for me and relies thus on what
Meillassoux describes as the correlationist cogito. The reality of the thing-in-itself is, in other
words, constrained by the number of finite possibilities imposed by our human capacity to think.
This means, bluntly put, that even though for me we cannot think a tree existing outside
thought, such a tree might exist nonetheless in spite of my not being able to think it (Harman,
2011c: 27, original emphasis). Harman elaborates on this point and shows that reality is in fact
hidden or concealed; however, this does not mean that things do not exist but rather that our
access to them is limited. Harman goes on to show that we do not need human Dasein to
realise that reality is always concealed, and that it is not solely humans that are able to be-inthe-world.
The world is not just Heidegger's "world," but always a world populated with distinct forests,
atoms, and omens. For this reason, it is misleading to claim that only the world as a whole has
primary reality, that its constituents are onlypotentially there. On the contrary, the parts of the
world are really there, defending their private integrity even while besieged by the worldhood of
the world. (Harman, 2002: 292, original emphasis).
A vase might be falling in an unoccupied country house without anybody seeing it being
destroyed into smaller shards of glass. Harman drives this point somewhat later home when he
argues that even in the case of direct physical presence an entity outstrips the thought-world
correlate in a manner that is never merely lacunary [in perceptual terms]. (Harman, 2011c: 43,
original emphasis). Harman connects the idea of independent objects to the still largely
unexplored depths of Heideggers philosophy of absence to that of the intentional world of
presence described in Husserlian phenomenology.
Tool-Being
Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects is the product of Graham Harmans PhD
dissertation (1999) which bears a similar title. The book contains a similar critique of
contemporary philosophy as that of Meillassouxs (2011) After Finitude, but starts from a
different philosophical premise and arrives at largely different conclusions. Harmans main
philosophical influences in his search for an object-oriented metaphysics are the
phenomenological protgs of Franz Brentano. He relies mainly on the works of Husserl,
Twardowski, Whitehead and others, but also on Bruno Latour and, of course, the towering figure
of Martin Heidegger. The last thinker provides him with the duality of the present-at-hand
(vorhanden) and ready-at-hand (zuhanden) which he, on more than one occasion, identifies as
the idea which made Heidegger the single pivotal philosopher of the twentieth century
(Harman, 2002: 3, Harman, 1999: i). This widely cited philosophical concept has, despite
embodying the central thread of Heideggers entire intellectual corpus, been almost universally
misunderstood (Harman, 2002: 4). The reason for this will be discussed shortly. The other great
influence on Harmans work is Edmund Husserl whose notions of accidents and intentional

objects he employs alongside Heideggers tool-analysis[13]. The fusion of these two sets of
concepts and thinkers helps him to combine Heideggers philosophy of absence with a
philosophy of presence (Harman, 2011b: 35). The result is the materialisation of a unique
quadruple structure (Figure 1). He places this structure, technically inspired by
Heideggers Geviert (fourfold)[14], at the centre of each and every (animate and inanimate)
object.

Figure 1: The theoretical sources of inspiration for Harmans fourfold structure[15].

Harmans quadruple structure begins with Heideggers (e.g. 1996) tool-analysis, which is
grounded in the idea of a reality composed of objects that are hidden from view. Harman
describes the subterranean realm of objects as tool-being. An object is for him a unified entity
which exists autonomously from its wider context and also from its own pieces (Harman,

2011b: 116). A real object (defined by its tool-being) is always concealed from other real
objects and therefore absolutely non-relational. Harman complements Heideggers concept of
the concealed nature of objects with the Husserlian notion of the intentional or, as Harman
describes it, the sensual. Sensual objects are the intentional interpretations of concealed
objects by intending objects. They enjoy a rich relational capacity which helps to constitute the
reality of real, intending objects.
Harmans resultant OOO must therefore be understood as a fourfold structure consisting of two
dualisms at the centre of every object. The first dualism is of a Heideggerian origin and is
grounded in the idea of concealed objects with equally withdrawn real qualities. The second
dualism is inspired by the philosophy of Husserl and consists of sensual objects and equally
sensual qualities that are abundantly visible in their sensuous present-at-handness. Reality
can, according to Harman, be experienced as a result of the tension between real objects and
their sensual translations. This tension is what for Harman constitutes space. He identifies
however, three other, additional structural tensions: time, essence and eidos (Figure 2). We
will for the purpose of this paper however primarily dwell on Harmans spatial tension which
shares the same strong Heideggerian overtones that we identified earlier in Sloterdijks theory of
spheres. First however we feel that we must explain why OOO rests on the foundational
principle that real objects are inaccessible. This will allow us to further elaborate how this
inaccessibility of the real (the real always hides) renders into the need to translate objects into
a sensual form.
Most analyses on Heideggers tool-analysis, as Harman (2002) demonstrates, proceed from a
pragmatic philosophy in which present-at-hand and ready-at-hand are thought of as parts of
a practical philosophy which concentrates on the tools themselves. Humanity is through its
ability to emotionally and theoretically experience reality in such accounts raised above the
experiential capacity of both animals and inanimate objects. Humanity is, in other words, singled
out as the unique agency which is able to penetrate the ready-at-hand of tools and to reach into
the subterranean realm of their present-at-hand.
This ability to expose the zuhandenheit of an object and to return it to a projected world-in-itself
is commonly said to be one of defining characteristics of the uniqueness of humanDasein. This
is, according to Harman, however not how we should read Heidegger or as Harman notes
himself: the tool-analysisdoes not serve to criticize the notion of independent objects, as if to
champion instead a subjective human realm of gadgets. The concept of Dasein is not
introduced in order to rough up the notion of a world-in-itself (Harman, 2002: 19, original
emphasis). Dasein does, in other words, not lend humans a special capacity to access the world
as it really is. This reading of Heideggers Dasein expresses a similar kind of criticism as the one
voiced by Sloterdijk. The latter similarly intends to break with the hysteric-heroic subject that
always believes itself to be the first to die and that remains miserably ignorant concerning its
embeddedness within relations of intimacy and solidarity (Sloterdijk 2012: 40). Sloterdijk wishes

to depart from the existentialism from which both the old and the young Heidegger suffered.
Both thinkers express an eagerness to move beyond the reified character of Dasein and a desire
to travel to a post-subject/ object philosophy. For Sloterdijk this means not asking the who
question, but the where question. Harman (2002: 128) wishes to leave Dasein altogether and
notes that the theme of Dasein is subordinate to the analysis of tool-being rather than the
reverse [I]t means that the being of an entity makes only sense in terms of the general strife
between its concealed execution and its luminous surface.
Here we seem to have arrived at the thrust of how Harman intends to break with Heideggers
existential Dasein to pursue the phenomenology of Husserl. The true nature of objects is always
receded from experience which means that any form of interaction with tool-being can only
occur through an intentional mediation (or vicarious causation) in which only certain so-called
sensual qualities of the object are encountered.
Harmans notion of the sensual are closely related to Husserls phenomenological intentional
objects, but are removed from Husserls concealed idealism. They could in fact be said to
perform the role of Heideggers as-structure in which the Being of an object can only in a
mediated form be experienced as a sensual object. The vicarious causation between a real
object and a sensual one is, according to Harman, what constitutes space. Space is for Harman,
as it is similarly for Sloterdijk, thus phenomenally understood as the relation which occurs at the
exteriority of interacting objects. Space is the sensual as-structure that results from the
relationship between objects. This mode of interaction is in Harmans account not reserved to
human Dasein alone which, through its existential de-distancing and directionality, is
supposedly able to make sense of the world. Space is for Harman instead the (present-at-hand)
broken hammer. Heidegger is for Harman (2002: 55) therefore the [philosopher] of tools and
space. Let us, however, not get ahead of ourselves and so briefly return to the debate on the
inaccessibility of the autonomous real object. The idea of a flattened ontology without existential
anthropocentrism (an ontological difference without metaphysics as Sloterdijk (in van Tuinen
2011: 49) writes) challenges the historically long-privileged position of the human cogito vis-vis that of other animals and even inanimate objects.
Human agency, Harman (1999, 2002) writes, is through its earlier refuted ability to
makewithdrawn things visible not able to move an inch closer to the thing in-itself, but rather
provides its own translation of the thing. An apple remains, even if we would subtract it from its
accidental (sensuous) qualities, for us only an apple and not a weighty companion as it might
be for the apple tree. What we see is, in other words, a Husserlian intentional object from
which we create our own, intended human world. Harman calls these specific versions of real
objects sensual objects because they exist only in relation to the perceiver [while] the real is
whatever withdraws from that relation. (Harman, 2011a: 110).

This makes humans in fact not very different than, lets say, dogs that similarly experience the
object (that we perceive as) car through a specific intentionality from which a sensual version
of the object emerges. It is unlikely that the sensual object for the dog will be the sensual carobject that it is for us. What remains for us (and all other animate and inanimate entities) is, in
other words, a caricature of the (subterranean) object which will always make visible only
some of its qualities. There is for Harman no reason why humans should be considered to
enjoy a privileged point of access to the real objects that constitute reality[16]. There is for him
therefore neither a possible justification for a division between object and subject. Harman does,
in other words, not deny that reality exists (as some correlationists might argue), but instead
proposes the idea that we can access it only through an intermediation that creates our intended
version of it.
If all relations are really on the same footing, and all relations are equally inept at exhausting
the depths of their terms, then an intermediate form of contact between things must be possible.
This can only take a sensual form, since it can only encounter translated or distorted versions of
other objects (Harman, 2011a: 120, original emphasis).
The ensuing democratisation of access to reality[17] means that objects will, if made present-athand, instead always be experienced through their specific, sensuous qualities. All objects
are for other animate and inanimate objects therefore Latourian translations. This leads to the
result that different worlds, alongside the human one, now start to become possible, but also
that the reality is something that we can openly speculate about but not deny. This means that
Harman in fact proposes an extreme form of realism from which multiple, overlapping worlds
exist alongside each other.
Objects must then, as we have already hinted at, have two kinds of qualities: real qualities which
are autonomous and invisible and other qualities that Harman describes as sensual (e.g.
colourful, soft, hard etc.) which do not recede from appearance but allow objects to be
experienced. The former are for Harman entirely non-relational and remain withdrawn in the
object itself (for which Haman uses the classical concept of essence)[18]. The latter, in contrast,
are responsible for generating a specific tension with the (always) concealed real object from
which these qualities radiate. Tensions (Figure 2) are in fact what make objects sensually
visible for other objects to experience. They therefore form an important pillar for
understanding Harmans object-oriented philosophy as they constitute the relations from which
reality gets translated for all entities.

Figure 2: The Four Tensions in Harmans quadruple structure (Essence, Space, Time and
Eidos)[19]
The fact that sensual qualities can make objects visible comes forth from their ability to relate to
other objects. Harman (2005: 164) describes sensual qualities therefore as the glue of the
universe Instead of God intervening in every interaction in the world, qualities as a whole now
take on this formerly divine mission, and serve as the sole conduit between one entity and
another. It is only through sensual qualities which reside in tension within the interior or real
object that objects are able to connect and relate to their outside.
The sensual translation of real objects is, as we have seen before, the result of an intention
which is responsible for bringing into life the sensual object (or sensual vicar) that mediates
between two real objects. The confrontation between a real object through a sensual mediation
is what we earlier described as vicarious causation. The causation is vicarious because real
objects are inexhaustible and thus need to be experienced phenomenally (or sensually). The
metaphor of translation is neither entirely accidental. A lot of the original message gets

normally lost in its execution, but the act of translating also holds a certain transformative power.
It creates a world of meaning. This means that the real object is, as a result of its encounter with
an intending (or translating) object, first separated from its original surroundings and parts and
later reintegrated to constitute a sensual object. This new sensual object is, as I will demonstrate
more empirically, also a real object because it fulfils the requirement of autonomy and unity to
define it as such.
Causation between object works however not only constructively upwards, but also
constructively downwards. The separating of sensual notes from real objects exposes in fact
an indefinite (or maybe even infinitive) regress. The peeling of the onion helps to expose the
many relations that make up reality, but never quite manages to confront the concealed
essence of all these layers. The peeling of reality has thus also a transformative function in
which objects are sensually experienced, but remain forever hidden. This process of ontological
fissure of sensual objects is the principle act of what Harman describes as allure[20]. Allure
splits objects from their notes while preserving or even inaugurating the connection between
them (Harman 2005: 254). Alluring is not confined to human objects, but is also what
(constantly) occurs between other animate and inanimate objects. Without allure causation
would be impossible, and the world would be made up of frozen and isolated monads. But even
this could not happen, since without allure the levels of the world would never communicate, and
without communication no object could ever be built up out of parts, meaning that nothing would
have any specific qualities in the first place (Harman 2005: 245). Allure is therefore an entirely
relational process. It allows impregnable objects to communicate with each other in their sensual
form.
Imagine walking across a residential street and becoming aware of a multi-storey house. One is
consciously or unconsciously forced to accept this house as an incomplete, concealed
translation of the real entity. This perceiving of objects, such as the house, is however
conceptually different from the act of allure. The former translates objects into qualities or
notes. Perceiving the house means therefore taking the door of the house as an integral
quality of the house or experiencing the house as the integral quality of the street. Allure refers
instead to a downwards conversion of notes into sensual objects from which the olive-green
door or the Gaudi-like house becomes ipso facto the object of analysis, admiration or nostalgia.
Allure is that furnace or steel mill of the world where notes are converted into objects. (Harman
2005: 179). Allure does not, however, merely mean separation, but also enables a new relation
(e.g. between me and the door). The act of alluring reveals reality therefore in its sensual form.
[A]llure is a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing's
unity and its plurality of notes somehow partially disintegrates. (Harman 2005: 143). Allure
harbours therefore strong spatial connotations. Space is thus not a container nor an
autonomous entity, but rather the active tension that lies between the interior of relating objects.

The gradual deconstruction of the house, as the act of allure, allows for a process of dedistancing between the intending real me and the sensual house which at this point now starts
to withdraw from the intended reality. I am now engaging myself with the new intentional objects
that are no longer sensual notes but objects (e.g. the olive-green door, the dirty grey curtain
etc.) for and in themselves. The tension between the real object and its associated sensual
qualities is constitutive of space. Space is therefore, according to Harman, the exteriority of
objects that relate sensually. It provides a concrete form to non-relational real objects and is
relationally constitutive of the emergence of new sensual objects. It is therefore, on the one
hand, entirely relational and, on the other hand, entirely anti-relational. I might stand on the
other end of the road and see my friends house. Space becomes in this instance relational.
Upon crossing the road and facing the house, I am unable to come to terms with the real,
withdrawn house. Space is in that instance non-relational. This interplay of relation and nonrelation is precisely what we mean when we speak of space (Harman 2011a: 100).
Through the act of allure we separate the intended house from its relationship of its
neighbouring buildings, the street, passing cars and other sensual objects that we think, as we
walk by, are not part of the sensual house. Harman describes this process in which
connections between sensual objects are partly dammed to prevent the total fusing of reality as
buffered causation.
A buffer zone is formed from which I am prevented to access the real object, but can start
intending its sensual spatial form. Such buffers are constituted by what Harman calls black
noise which helps to effectively distribute and channel the sensual qualities, notes and
underlying relations into a specific sensual object. The structuring capacity of black noise allows
objects to become sensually visible for me. The resultant house is however, not merely a schism
of human consciousness, as many traditional phenomenologists have argued, but instead a real
object which will continue to be real even after and before (or completely without) human
presence.
Reality is, in other words, made accessible through the black noise on the interior of objects in
which accidental notes are buffered. Black noise does however not construct reality (because
space does), but rather allows it to be experienced in its sensual form. It is the tension between
sensual qualities within the sensual object. If space is the constructive and performative
relationship between objects, time is that which only resides in the interior of sensual objects. It
grants objects to take a concrete sensual form in one instance. Think for example about a frozen
pizza. The frozen pizza is the sensual object which hosts time. Time allows for the tension
between the sensual object (the pizza) and its accidental features (the pizzas frozenness). The
way we experience time is not progressively or linear, but through the accidental qualities of the
sensual object. [T]here is a separate time on the interior of every object that exists, in which the
internal notes of those objects are showered with a varying succession of different floodlights,

strobes, confetti, and glitter, while nonetheless remaining the same. Time is the strife between
an object and its accidents or contiguous relations. (Harman 2005: 250).
Time can, however, never affect the real object. It is for that reason also non-relational. It is
composed of the fluctuating sensual qualities that make up the appearance of the sensual
object. Time is according to Harman therefore [t]he black noise: not the condition of possibility
of this noise, nor the ecstatic structure through which humans encounter it, but simply this noise
itself (Harman 2005: 250). Time belongs therefore to the subjective experience of the sensual,
while space is what is constitutive of changes in reality. This leads Harman to conclude that
[t]he mere flow of time changes nothing, and what we are measuring when we measure
progression are changes in the actual regime of objects, also known as changes in space
(Harman 2005: 252). Space is therefore the Heideggerian experience of the concealed real
object.
Harmans (2002: 253) conclusion that space is made up of quanta, because space is the
absolute mutual exteriority of objects resembles Sloterdijks dyadic structure of spheres. The
technical functioning of Harmans allure and Sloterdijks dynamic process of coupling share a
number of interesting commonalities. The former and the latter are in basic agreement that a
space or sphere is inseparable from the exteriority of an object that is constituted through the
vicarious interaction between the poles of objects. Being means for Sloterdijk, as we have
seen, first of all Being-a-pair. Coupling (the relational act of Being-a-pair) is therefore always
primary to the individual. Allure is the causal effect of two interacting objects from which a third
object emerges. Reality is therefore entirely relational and non-relational. Both authors also
distance themselves from subject oriented metaphysics and embrace an ontological theory of
space that is composed of objects. [A]ll relations must be viewed as objects, since if a relation
is real then it has a reality inexhaustible by any interpretation of it or any collision with it, no
matter how fleeting these events may be. (Harman 2005: 165). All these real entities form
connections with other object through a vicarious mode of causation in which worlds are
constituted. All reality therefore occurs in the interior of objects. All objects are within other
objects which means that objects are first and foremost vicarious relations and that relations are
in turn objects. After all, the space in which objects meet must already be a unified space if
things are able to meet within it. (Harman 2005: 193). It is now perhaps time to elaborate more
firmly on such conceptual commonalities, without neglecting some of the ontological differences
between Harmans OOO and Sloterdijks Spherology.
SEARCHING FOR A COMMON SPHERE
Bridging the two thinkers and their respective conceptual understandings of space will help us in
reopening the discussion of the relationship between objects and space. Speculating about the
ontological space we encounter in everyday life helps to challenge the concrete abstraction of
space that has come to dominate all aspects of social life. It helps to overcome the

shortcomings of the Leibnizian relational model of space, in which space is reduced to an order
of positional relations. By speculatively decentring space from mental facticity we can disclose
(and potentially repoliticise) the problem of space. Both Harman and Sloterdijk have, through
different roadmaps, attempted to read Heideggers Being and Time in a spatial context. For
Sloterdijk (in Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens, 2011b: 12) this translates into the observation
that Dasein shares strong spatial connotations and that in Heideggers work lie the seeds of a
revolutionary treatment of Being and space. Harman (2011a: 100) moves altogether away
from human Dasein and replaces it with a more comprehensive analysis of tool-being which for
him is actually about space, not about time as he [ie. Heidegger] wrongly contends. The idea
that Heidegger is a spatial thinker, shared by both authors, comes at least partially forth from
Heideggers emphasis that Dasein means both Being-in and Being-with. For Harman (2005:
253) this translates into the observation that space is made up of quanta, because space is the
absolute mutual exteriority of objects. The exteriority of objects helps objects to translate each
other into sensual images of these respective objects. The simultaneous withdrawal of real
objects from one another and their partial contact through simulacra is space itself. (Harman
2010: 162). Space is thus also always the space of a specific interior [S]pace forms the
inside of objects. (Harman 2005: 250, 251). Space for Sloterdijk instead refers to the sphere in
which Being-in is always realised alongside a Being-with. Sloterdijk and Harman share, in other
words, the Heideggerian premise that space is as much relational (ie. Being-with), as it closes
relations off (ie. Being-in). It reveals and conceals. The vicarious relation between withdrawn
objects enables for the sensual world-forming capacity that Heidegger initially uniquely
reserved to human Dasein. Space for Sloterdijk creates subjectivity. The sphere allows for and
is constitutive of life. Space for Harman creates instead the sensual translation of the always
withdrawn object. The arrival of object subjectivity means for Harman however, simultaneously
also the neglect of other possible subjectivities and relations.
This concept of worlding is for neither author however singular, as Heidegger alludes to, but
rather infinitely plural. The world is [is in the case of Sloterdijk] not an object for thinking
subjects but rather a continual snowfall of events which are held in place by what spaces it is
possible to construct and breathe in, what interiors it is possible to make possible. The relations
possible in Sloterdijk are positive. I mean by positive that they create worlds (in the plural).
Those worlds are, however, limited to the still subject-centred intentionality of humans. Sloterdijk
is, after all, primarily interested in those spatial relations that inform human life and make it
possible. Harman very similarly opens a box of infinitive potentialities - a word which he dislikes
for its opposition to actuality - from which an entire new post-metaphysical understanding of
the world(s) arises. Access to the world is for Harman, more than for Sloterdijk, no longer
restricted to human Dasein alone. Access to the world is democratised and consequentially
opened to other objects. I will return to this difference shortly.
Space is for neither author geometrically fixed. Space has become instead a relational and an
ontological force. For Sloterdijk, space is the primordial capacity of objects to be comprised and

connect to other objects. For Sloterdijk, every sphere seems, in fact, an object that is organised
along dyadic, triadic and/ or multi-polar structures. Space is, in other words, the result of the
inherent capacity of objects to form relations with other objects that can only occur in and
concurrently give rise to a new object (ie. sphere). The Being-with and Being-in creates an
ontological trinity in which neither space nor object comes first, but all are instantaneously and
existentially interdependent (ie. marriage/ husband/ wife, taste/ candy/ mouth, nest/ tree/ bird
etc.). It makes for Sloterdijk in this Latourian framework little sense to differentiate between
objects and subject, materials and souls etc. This is similarly, but perhaps less metaphorically,
described in Harmans OOO in which space can only be created through the interaction
(allure) between objects and their sensual qualities. The hammer can for me only exist in its
sensuous hammer-like quality from which I create my (own) objectified world. The falling
hammer will, in turn, however, encounter me in the form of a soft physical obstacle (my thumb).
The hammer thus exists and relates in its own specific sensual world. The result of this relational
process of allure, between the object-me and the object-hammer, is the creation of a space
which lies in the exterior of both objects. For Sloterdijk this form of coupling between objects
creates a sphere in which the hammer is both with me and in (and therefore constitutive of) a
sphere. Both Harman and Sloterdijk seem therefore in basic agreement that spheres (or space)
are located at the exterior of dyadic (or multi-polar) objects. These objects form in turn the
interior sphere (or space) of other multiple polar objects[21]. The workings of space are for
spherology and object-oriented ontology therefore similar.
Their ontological premises are however different. The latter preoccupies itself with the
intentionality of all objects with the purpose of unravelling the mysteries of tool-being, while the
former largely explores spheres as the specific intentionality of a human agency. Exploring this
divergence is important if we wish discussions to depart from the prevalent ontic knowledge of
the world and move towards the direction of a speculative form of realism that could provide a
more ontological reading of space. In the remainder of this essay I will attempt to understand
what causes this difference. This is not to lead to a full reconciliation between the two thinkers.
The objective is not a complete synthesis. Too much of Harman and Sloterdijks labours would
get lost in the forceful forging of such a project. I will instead argue for a more modest
conceptual synthesis between the thinkers respective readings of the ontological functionality of
space.
The ontological rift between Harmans withdrawn tool-being and Sloterdijks Being-in/ Beingwith is an admittedly difficult one to bridge. This comes forth from the autonomous nature of
objects in Harmans work and Sloterdijks wish to rescue the latent existentialism in Heideggers
Dasein. The split stems from an ontological divide as to what Being refers to. Being for Harman
is forever withdrawn and entirely without relations. For Sloterdijk Being means to be-in and with
others. Being is for Sloterdijk therefore inherently relational. Human Being (Dasein) remains
moreover, and relatedly, for Sloterdijk unique in that it is able, as mentioned earlier, to demarcate
and master the environment for the production of incubators (greenhouses). Sloterdijk time and

again refers to the capacity of humans to create worlds. It therefore would seem that Sloterdijk
refers to zuhanden instead of vorhanden when he refers to the importance of spheres for human
Daseins uniqueness. However, Sloterdijk (2000: 26) explicitly refutes the claim that he uses
something merely ontic for determining what he considers to be ontology. He perhaps does
this most vocally in his untranslated Die Domestikation des Seins: Die Verdeutlichung der
Lichtung (The Domestication of Being: For a clarification of clearing). Here (2000) he
elucidates in so-called "paleo-anthropolgical terms how he set humans apart from other
animals. The text paves the foundation for his Spheres trilogy, in that it shows how human
production of spheres plays a fundamental role for the establishment of what we identified
earlier as ontological difference (ontologische Differenz). It is through these, earlier discussed,
worldly spheres that humanity cuts itself off from the environment (umwelt) and thus
differentiates itself from other animals which remain restricted to the demarcated limits of the
en-vironment (um-welt). Human Dasein is ontological for the reason that it creates its own,
enclosed worlds independent of the restrictions from the en-vironment.
It would seem unwise and unproductive to painstakingly critique Sloterdijks historical ontoanthropological project via Harman. Harman could argue that other objects are similar to
humans world-forming (weltbildend), and subsequently suggest that the dichotomy between
nature and society is a false one. It would be equally imprudent to counter Harmans withdrawn
tool-being from a spherological position. Sloterdijk would want to pursue the argument of the
human animals unique capacity to insulate itself from the environment and to create worlds of
its own. A complete synthesis between the two thinkers would therefore be difficult to realise.
Too much of their individual labours would get lost in such a translation. What would be more
useful, at least for our purposes, is to instead concentrate on their understanding of the
ontological necessity of the production of space to create worlds. It is in the acknowledged
importance of spacing (or worlding) in which the two thinkers find a common ground.
The middle ground is situated in their respective emphasis on the intentionality of space. The
account of Sloterdijk seems to identify objects in their intentional form in which they are
presented for something. The sensual quality that makes something-in-general become a
hammer (for us) cannot exist without a relation that confronts or makes the withdrawn object
present itself as the specific sensual object that is the hammer. Sloterdijks divisibility of
objects seems, in other words, to refer to sensual objects rather than to the real, withdrawn
objects themselves. He does not raise questions (and is perhaps neither interested) about the
hammers Being or what lies outside the intentionality of Dasein. This is confirmed by the fact
that Spherology is first and foremost an onto-anthropological theory that starts from Heideggers
early ontology in which the existential powers of human Dasein are central. Sloterdijk is, in other
words, not interested in answering the who question of the later Heidegger. He is instead more
interested about the where of Being and what Heidegger (1996) called Daseins spatiality of
the world [Einrumung]. Sloterdijks Being-in-the-world (or in-the-sphere) is therefore presented
in equally intentional terms as the sensual worlds described by Harman. But while the former

is dedicated to analysing the intentionality of humans, the latter provides a broader and more
technical framework for understanding the sensual relations between all objects.
The emphasis on worlding allows us, in turn, to reintegrate Harmans OOO, given that the
sensual world is for both authors that which allows for the mediation between objects. The
materials used to build a house are intentionally used by the engineer according to their specific
(sensual) qualities that permit her to build a place of dwelling (or sphere). This worlding process
leads for Sloterdijk to subjectivity and for Harman to the concealment of the real object.
Sloterdijk is, again, not interested in what might get lost in translation in the process of clearing
(Lichtung). He is instead interested in how objects are used to create anthropological spheres.
Harman does not deny the potency of the sensual relations between objects, which he writes
are responsible for the creation of an infinite number of new worlds, but shows awareness that
these simulacra tell us little about the real objects underneath these worlds, whereas Sloterdijk
refrains from engaging with other forms of Being.
Objects are for Harman as for Sloterdijk thus composed of (but not limited to) relations between
their parts or qualities. It is however equally true that any relation must count as a substance.
When two objects enter into a genuine relation, even if they do not permanently fuse together,
they generate a reality that has all of the features that we require of an object. Through their
mere relation, they create something that has not existed before, and which is trulyone (Harman
2005: 85, original emphasis). This relation between two objects is, as mentioned before, not
established directly, but has to occur vicariously. The vicarious relation between the notes of
relating objects serves as the glue that constitutes the universe.
Let us shortly return to the earlier embryological example to illustrate this more empirically. The
fertilisation of the ovum by the spermatozoa results in the creation of the zygote. The relation
between the first and second object is entirely of a sensual kind. The real objects remain instead
entirely withdrawn from the relation. It is however through the vicarious relation between them
that a third, autonomous object arises. This third object has an identity and a depth that
belongs to neither of its parts [equally objects], and which is also irreducible to all of its current
effects on other entities, or to the knowledge we may have of it. Sloterdijks study of how the
dyadic relationship between the foetus and the placenta shape the uterus is another
demonstration in which we see the emergence of third object (the uterus). This third object is
formed in the space (or sphere) from the mutual exteriority of the first and second object. The
foetus and the placenta remain, in their turn, autonomous real objects despite now being parts
of and standing in a vicarious relation to the uterus. Space allows for, or maybe is, the relation.
Space is not the object; it is the mutual exteriority of objects.
Harmans observation that objects are, but not exhaustively, composed of relations means that
objects relate to other objects through the sensual world. Sloterdijk (2010) has Human Dasein in
mind when he argues that [a]ll being-in-the-world possesses the traits of coexistence. The

question of being so hotly debated by philosophers can be asked here in terms of the
coexistence of people and things in connective spaces. This could however equally be said for
other objects (inanimate and inanimate) that constantly and vicariously relate to other objects.
The real object itself does not relate. The hammer presents itself rather to me in its sensual form
(as the hammer). The thing, which I sensually call hammer, remains instead withdrawn and
unknowable. The sensual world is flooded with relations. These relations are characteristically
intrinsic to the sensual. Sensual objects are constantly both in and with other objects in space.
They relate constantly. Sloterdijk leaves the subterranean realm of objects unaddressed. His rich
spherology is primarily, if not exclusively, interested in the sensual process of human (or
Daseins) worlding. It is through the sensual realm from which his onto- anthropology is made
possible. The question, which I will leave unaddressed for someone else to pick on, is whether
we can equally (yet differently) speak of an paleo- anthropology of dogs, elephants or maybe
even rocks. These categories were according to earlier Heideggerians described as ontic beings
that either were worldless (weltlos) or poor in the world (weltarm). It seems increasingly
difficult to think that we can continue to undervalue these objects along purely ontic-ontological
lines.
The Heideggerian message that the world itself is too big to access in its entirety forms the
phenomenological foundation for the writings of both authors. They start their respective
analyses from the common need of objects to translate or subjectively appropriate the world.
From this process numerous worlds alongside the real, withdrawn world come into existence.
Sloterdijk limits himself mainly to the worlds (or spheres) in which human Dasein dwells and is
made possible. Harman subtracts the idealism embedded in Heideggers Being-in further still
and replaces it with a democratised Being-in that grants the emergence of worlds sensually
experienced by both humans and non-human entities.
CONCLUSION
This article was written with the objective of challenging the silence in the social sciences on the
fundamental question of the nature of space. The silence of the misplaced concreteness of
space has led the acceptance of space as static positions in a nexus of relations. (Leibniz in
Casey 1997b: 183). The exercise of speculating about what could constitute space rather than
descriptively talking about spaces as sites and things that happen in space was undertaken
through a comparative assessment of the work of two influential contemporary thinkers. Their
analysis starts from a Heideggerian position which refuses to accept traditional metaphysics and
consequentially transcends Heideggers own thinking. The produce of their labours demands a
radical revision of traditional metaphysics and allows for a return to a very concrete, albeit
somewhat strange, form of realism. An endorsement of a flattened ontology does, however,
not necessarily mean that we now have to consider stones on the same phenomenological
footing as humans. I would rather propose a Latourian-Sloterdijkian post-metaphysical approach
on the basis of ontological difference. This difference is for both authors embedded in the

relational capacity of space. It is not the relation itself. The sensual notes of objects are
responsible for the relation between withdrawn objects. Space is the result of that relation. The
relational capacity of space, which in the writings of both thinkers comes to the fore as the stuff
that shapes worlds, makes them what I would like to call natal thinkers.
The first section discussed the work of Sloterdijk and paid special attention to his spherology.
The theory of spheres has in this article been described as an ontological analysis of the
necessary spatial (or spherological) conditions for Being to be possible. Spheres is first and
foremost a work about the human necessity to construct an interior space (or sphere). Spheres
are for Sloterdijk the product of two exterior spaces that form one interiorised space. Sloterdijk
describes an onto-topology which departs from traditional metaphysics and does, therefore, not
ask the question what Being means is but where Being is. Space is for Sloterdijk, in other
words, not something that is merely created by humans, but that which always lies at the
exterior. Being-in-a-sphere is therefore perhaps also not only an exclusively human-specific
quality, because his post-humanism is dedicated to blur the rigid demarcations between the
subject and the object, the soul and body and the animate and inanimate. There is some room
for manoeuvre in Sloterdijks unique palaeoanthropology. The possibility of thinking about a nonhuman world and the use of a pre-epistemic framework bring Sloterdijk into the maelstrom of
Harmans thoughts. Harman proposes a more radical, flattened ontology in which humans are
objects just like the books, coffee mugs and pens on my table. Humans are in Harmans
account, as in Sloterdijks, irreducible objects through which new vicarious relationships (and
thus new objects) can emerge. Objects exist, in other words, in tension with their sensual
qualities that help constitute the space of new objects. Space is for Harman therefore similarly to
be found at the exteriority of connecting objects.
This article has described a form of realism which provides space the purpose of giving form
and life to an otherwise withdrawn reality. Space facilitates for Sloterdijk Human Dasein. Dasein
is, as Harman shows, however, not able to come to terms with reality as such. Dasein instead
helps to spatially interpret and construct an intentional reality in a manner similar to the toolbeing of other objects. The meaning of Being translates subsequently into its always
sensualbeing-with and being-in another object. The resultant sphere is not only essential for
human Being but also for all other forms of Being.
NOTES
[1] The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on an
earlier draft of this paper. The author is also grateful to Alex Sutton (University of Warwick) for
his comments on a draft of this paper.
[2] I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is: I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions (Leibniz 2001: 13)

[3] I will capitalise Being when explicitly discussing ontology and use a lower case when
referring to ontic existence.
[4] Sloterdijks works have in two different periods been translated into English. The first of which
were published in the 1980s and consisted of SloterdijksCritique of cynical reason Peter
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
and Thinker on stage: Nietzsche's materialism Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's
Materialism (Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 1989).. The so-called second
coming of Sloterdijk Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, "Being-with as Making Worlds : The
Second Coming of Peter Sloterdijk," Environment and planning D : society and space 27, no. 1
(2009). in the late 2000s and early 2010s resulted in the translation of seven other books which
embedded a much stronger spatial resonance. The recent attention to Sloterdijk resulted in his
invitation to talk at the Tate Modern in London on Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised
Immunity (in early 2012) and in dedicated issues in Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space Stuart Elden, Eduardo Mendieta, and Nigel Thrift, eds., Special Issue: The Worlds of
Peter Sloterdijk - Volume 27, Issue 1 (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,2009).
and Cultural Politics Sjoerd Van Tuinen, ed.Cultural Politics, Special Issue on the German
Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk - Volume 3, Issue 3 (Cultural Politics,2007).. Two further edited
volumes S. Elden, ed. Sloterdijk Now (Cambridge: Polity Press,2012); Willem Schinkel and
Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, eds., In Medias Res - Peter Sloterdijks Spherological Poetics of
Being (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,2011). were published with Sloterdijk at the
centre of attention.
[5] Earlier efforts to spatialise Heideggers work have also been made by, for example, Malpas
Jeff Malpas,Heideggers Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2006).
Sloterdijks effort, however, is arguably the most detailed and sustained analysis of the
relationship between Being and space in Heideggers writings.
[6] The German publication of Volume II was published in 1999 but remains as of yet
untranslated in English. The third volume was published in German in 2004 but has similarly at
the time of writing not yet been published in English.
[7] The first Spheres book is therefore, as Sloterdijk notes, a general theory of the structures
that allow coupling P. Sloterdijk and Jean-Christophe Royoux, "Foreword to the Theory of
Spheres," in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York (NY) and
Berlin: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005).: 224.
[8] Sloterdijk metaphorically compares this medical intervention with the biblical expulsion from
the Garden of Eden as the primal spherological catastrophe [sphrologische Urkatastrophe].
Sloterdijk keeps on returning to the creation of dyadic and/ or multi-polar spheres in different
artistic forms and historical contexts throughout his work on spheres.

[9] This is also the reason why Bruno Latour Bruno Latour, "A Cautious Prometheus? A Few
Steps toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk) " in Keynote
lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society Falmouth, 3
September 2008 (Cornwall2008).: 9; also Bruno Latour, "A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps
toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk," in Medias Res: Peter
Sloterdijks Spherological Poetics of Being, ed. Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth NoordegraafEelens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). awarded Sloterdijk with the title THE
philosopher of design No contemporary philosopher [Latour argues] is more interested in
materiality, in engineering, in biotechnology, in design proper, in contemporary arts, and in
science more generally. For Sloterdijk it is, in other words, the manufactured materiality of the
world to which we should focus our attention if we wish to understand dasein.
[10] Sloterdijk P. Sloterdijk, Spheres - Volume I: Bubbles Microspherology (Los Angelos (CA):
Semiotext[e], 2011). eloquently demonstrates how in different cultural contexts the placenta
used to be honoured as the twin of the foetus. The onset of modernity is for Sloterdijk however
one of clinical nihilism in which the placenta is thrown away as residual waste whilst the foetus
is singularised. The initial co-subjectivity was in other words replaced by the myth of an
autonomous individuality.
[11] For a detailed and critical analysis of the genealogical evolution of global spheres see
especially Morins Marie-Eve Morin, "Cohabitating in the Globalised World: Peter Sloterdijk's
Global Foams and Bruno Latour's Cosmopolitics," Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 27(2009); M-E. Morin, "The Coming-to-the-World of the Human Animal," in Sloterdijk
Now, ed. S. Elden (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
[12] The other members are Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant. The
term Speculative Realism has recently become less prominent as the philosophies of the
original members have started to diverge.
[13] Husserl employs the idea of accidents to describe the overabundant richness of an
objects appearance. These accidents do not exhaust however the objects reality. An apple
does, for example, not stop being an apple if it would not have the accidents of being red, sweet
and perfectly round. There exists for Husserl, as for Harman, therefore a tension between the
objects accidents (its qualities or adumbrations) and the unified object (or the particularity of the
apple). This does not mean however that there is a Heideggerian concealment of the apple at
work in Husserls notion of accident but rather that the apples accidents (or adumbrations) help
us intending the object as the apple for us.
[14] Heideggers Geviert is a notoriously ambiguous concepts. Harman explains it as consisting
of two dualisms. In the first dualism we find that objects bothare something in general and
something specific. The second dualism shows that the same object is both concealed and

visible. Harman radicalises this concept and argues that the object is something in general and
something specific but that its specificity changes upon the relations that it forms with other
objects. This difference between Heidegger and Harman also means that Harman reject the
idea that access to objects is solely restricted to a human agency.
[15] Reproduced with courtesy from Graham Harman.
[16] Harman does write that humans possess a more sophisticated range of abilities than other
objects to relate to other objects. He however argues that all such relations between objects
should be conceptualised on equal footing if we wish to come to an honest and truthful form of
metaphysics. Harman invokes Whiteheads notion of prehension (here referring to the act of
relating) to substantiate the claim that [a]ll relations are on exactly the same footing. This does
not entail a projection of human properties onto the human world, but rather the reverse: what it
says is that the crude prehensions made by minerals and dirt are no less relations than are the
sophisticated mental activity of humans. Instead of placing souls into sand and stones, we find
something sandy or stony in the human soul Graham Harman, The Quadruple
Object (Winchester
Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2011).: 46.
[17] This is also the theme of Levi R. Bryants The Democracy of Objects Levi R. Bryant, The
Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor (MI): Open Humanities Press, 2011) and his proposal for a
flat ontology which contains some interesting similarities (and an equal amount of important
differences) with Harmans own work on OOO.
[18] The real qualities of real objects are those withdrawn features that make sense of what
otherwise would be a giant nothing or an indistinguishable and non-differentiable totality. They
exist in tension with the object which ultimately results into what Harman calls the essence of
the object. These [real] qualities are not the same as the real object itself, and hence it lives in
a kind of permanent strife with them, which is precisely what we mean by essence (Harman,
2010: 15). The stone-like or roof-like real qualities which unify the essence of the houseness
and treeness are not what constitutes the house but are, reversely, the qualities that are
embedded in the essence of house. The real qualities of real objects allow, in other words, for
the Leibnizian monadic essence to be something specific.
[19] Reproduced with courtesy from the author.
[20] This term pinpoints the bewitching emotional effect that often accompanies this event for
humans, and also suggests the related term allusion, since allure merely alludes to the object
without making its inner life directly present Graham Harman, "On Vicarious Causation,"
in Collapse Vol. Ii: Speculative Realism, ed. Robin Mackay (Oxford: Urbanomic, 2007).: 215.

[21] There seems to be sometimes explicit and at other times implicit evidence that the works of
both authors start from the ad infinitum of the irreducibility of objects. This hypothesis in turn is
validated by modern theoretical physics which similarly argues for the infinitive divisibility of
space. Both authors also seem to agree that although regress is possible infinitively, it is less
certain that the same works in the opposite direction.

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