Displaying the distinctive combination of narration and philosophy for which he is well known, this new book by Peter Sloterdijk develops a radically new account of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author takes seriously the historical and philosophical consequences of the notion of the earth as a globe, arriving at the thesis that what is praised or decried as globalization is actually the end phase in a process that began with the first circumnavigation of the earth Ð and that one can already discern elements of a new era beyond globalization.
In the end phase of globalization, the world system completed its development and, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions of life. Sloterdijk takes the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851, as the most expressive metaphor for this situation. The palace demonstrates the inevitable exclusivity of globalization as the construction of a comfort structure Ð that is, the establishment and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door.
Table of Content
First Part On the Emergence of the World System 1
1 Of Grand Narratives 3
2 The Wandering Star 15
3 Return to Earth 21
4 Globe Time, World Picture Time 27
5 Turn from the East, Entrance into the Homogeneous Space 33
6 Jules Verne and Hegel 36
7 Waterworld: On the Change of the Central Element in the Modern Age 40
8 Fortuna, or: The Metaphysics of Chance 47
9 Risk-Taking 50
10 Delusion and Time: On Capitalism and Telepathy 53
11 The Invention of Subjectivity – Primary Disinhibition and Its Advisers 57
12 Irreflexive Energies: The Ontology of the Headstart 66
13 Nautical Ecstasies 77
14 ‘Corporate Identity’ on the High Seas, Parting of Minds 81
15 The Basic Movement: Money Returns 84
16 Between Justifications and Assurances: On Terran and Maritime Thought 86
17 Expedition and Truth 94
18 The Signs of the Explorers: On Cartography and Imperial Name Magic 98
19 The Pure Outside 109
20 Theory of the Pirate: The White Terror 112
21 The Modern Age and the New Land Syndrome 116
Americanology 1
22 The Five Canopies of Globalization: Aspects of European Space Exportation 120
23 The Poetics of the Ship’s Hold 122
24 Onboard Clerics: The Religious Network 124
25 The Book of Vice-Kings 128
26 The Library of Globalization 131
27 The Translators 134
Second Part The Grand Interior 137
28 Synchronous World 139
29 The Second Ecumene 143
30 The Immunological Transformation: On the Way to Thin-Walled ‘Societies’ 149
31 Believing and Knowing: In hoc signo (sc. globi) vinces 155
32 Post-History 165
33 The Crystal Palace 169
34 The Dense World and Secondary Disinhibition: Terrorism as the Romanticism of the Pure Attack 177
35 Twilight of the Perpetrators and the Ethics of Responsibility: The Cybernetic Erinyes 187
36 The Capitalist World Interior: Rainer Maria Rilke Almost Meets Adam Smith 193
37 Mutations in the Pampering Space 211
38 Revaluation of All Values: The Principle of Abundance 223
39 The Exception: Anatomy of a Temptation 233
Americanology 2
40 The Uncompressible, or: The Rediscovery of the Extended 249
41 In Praise of Asymmetry 258
42 The Heavenly and the Earthly Left 263
Notes 265
Index 293
About the author
Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
40,569 Ebooks in this category
