in case you’re into Sloterdijk

Amazon just told me about THIS BOOK, apparently because readers like it who like The Quadruple Object and The Speculative Turn.

It would be interesting to do a study of where Sloterdijk has and has not caught on, and at what speed and among what groups.

In the U.S., at least until now, it’s safe to say that Sloterdijk never really caught on (I sense the same thing about the UK, but am not as well-informed there). People sort of knew of the existence of Critique of Cynical Reason, but by no means did it sell like hotcakes as it did in Germany. Then Sloterdijk completely dropped out of sight for a couple of decades in the U.S., though rumors would reach us occasionally that he had a TV show or that his new Sphären trilogy was going to be a must-read. (And in my corner of the intellectual world, Bruno Latour has been a Sloterdijk fan for quite awhile and has often spoken of his writings over the years.) Now that the first volume of Spheres is out in English, we’ll probably soon have an Anglophone “moment of truth” about Sloterdijk’s fate among readers here.

In continental Europe, Sloterdijk and Žižek often seem to be viewed as competing animals in the same ecosystem– the “irreverent theorist” ecosystem, I guess. It’s quite common on the continent to hear people weigh those two directly against each other, saying that they like one more than the other, or vice versa. In the Anglophone world that comparison never really comes up, simply because Žižek is about fifty times better known, and if a comparison is made it tends to be between Žižek and Badiou.

Well, let’s see where the new Sloterdijk surge goes. There has certainly been a shortage of German thinkers being read in the avant garde aisle in recent decades. But go back 80-90 years and it was almost all Germans.