Peter Sloterdijk: Bubbles: Volume I: Spheres: Microspherology (1998/2011)

“An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk’s three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Rejecting the century’s predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling–identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.

Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings–or as the book’s original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk’s discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.”

Originally published as Sphären I. Blasen by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1998.

Translated by Wieland Hoban
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2011
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584351047, 9781584351047
664 pages

review (Brian Dillon, The Guardian)

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François Laruelle: The Concept of Non-Photography (2011) [English]

Myriads of negatives tell of the world, speaking among themselves, constituting a vast conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express the real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Nevertheless, this real cohabits intimately with negatives, with clichés as embedded in our lives as they are imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an ungraspable identity that only shines – and sometimes very faintly – through something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret.

The Concept of Non-Photography develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’.

Translated from French by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, United Kingdom, and Sequence Press, New York, 2011
ISBN 0983216916, 9780983216919
143 pages

review (Catherine Kron, DisMagazine)

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Isabelle Stengers: Power and Invention: Situating Science (1997)

Explores the interplay between science, society, and power.

One of the most penetrating and celebrated thinkers writing about the philosophy of science today, Isabelle Stengers here provides a firsthand account of the meeting of science and history. Concerned with the force and inventiveness of scientific theories, this work offers a unique perspective on the power of those theories to modify society, and vice versa.

Foreword by Bruno Latour
Translated by Paul Bains
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Theory Out Of Bounds – Volume 10
ISBN 0816625174, 9780816625178
249 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)