Sjoerd van Tuinen

Air Conditioning Spaceship Earth: Peter Sloterdijk's Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

This paper explores the convergence of anthropology and ecology in the recent work of Peter Sloterdijk. Firstly, it is argued that Sloterdijk proposes an important new interpretation of Heideggerian Gelassenheit for which I propose the English word ‘relief. The concept of relief rests on the substitution of ontological difference by what I propose to call ‘natal’ or ‘natural’ difference. Secondly, I will develop the significance of these concepts in relation to complexity theory and cybernetics, focusing on a key subject in the Sphären trilogy—insulation—and on a key subject in Sloterdijks essays on Heidegger—homeotechnics. Thirdly, it will be shown how the concepts of relief and natal difference can be further developed into an ethico-aesthetic paradigm for experimentation with new technologies, based on a reinterpretation of the Gestell as total work of art. Finally, by relating Sloterdijks work to that of Michel Serres, it will be demonstrated why, for Sloterdijk, this paradigm finds its exemplary modal in the spaceship.

Critique Beyond Resentment: An Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk's Jovial Modernity

This essay serves as an introduction both to this special issue and to the works of Peter Sloterdijk. It starts out from the opposition between the critical and the affirmative projects in modern philosophy. It is my intent to demonstrate how Sloterdijk displaces this opposition in favor of what I propose to call a “jovial modernity” and a post-Heideggerian philosophy of Gelassenheit or “relief.” After a general outline of the Spharen -project, I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijk’s development of Ernst Junger’s critical concept of “mobilization” and show how his engagement with critical theory has gradually transformed from an aesthesis of the event, through a Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values” – generosity instead of resentment as motivating force of critique – or “retuning” of Heidegger’s concept of the Lichtung , into a “poetical” and “global” constructivism. This is followed by the unraveling of three layers that have constituted the 1999 scandal following Sloterdijk’s reply to Heidegger’s letter On Humanism : Sloterdijk’s actual text on humanism and Bildung in the age of genetic engineering; the scandal and the mass-medialization of philosophical critique; and the hypermorality of the last, but still all too dominant generation of Frankfurt School theorists. Finally, I draw some political conclusions by opposing another source of inspiration for Sloterdijk’s “joviality,” the Luhmannian theory of complexity, to the bivalent “passion for the real” that, despite all that has happened in the twentieth century, still seems to inform both the realist projects of philosophical critique and the Heideggerian belief in the “ Kehre ”.

Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art

Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philosophical concepts for styles from art history: expressionism and baroque. It is true that he discusses many other notions from the history of style, but these are the only ones that are truly made to ‘exist in themselves’. Or might there be a third, buried like a wedge between its two neighboring concepts? Although the notion of mannerism recurs in several of Deleuze’s writings, it is never developed in any systematic way. Even in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque mannerism stays entirely subordinate to ‘its working relation with the baroque’. It is only in his last course at Vincennes, in which he draws a parallel between Michelangelo and Leibniz, that Deleuze wonders whether we possess ‘the means to give a certain philosophical consistency to the concept of mannerism’, which in addition he labels ‘the most evident, the most certain theme of our investigations this year’. My aim is to render mannerism separable again from the baroque. This will be done by putting attempts in art history and art criticism to give a definition of mannerism in interference with a close-reading of key passages in Deleuze’s work, especially from The Fold and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. From the concept of the ‘Figure’ developed in the latter, I will distillate an initial concept of mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. Subsequently, I will compare this concept to Deleuze’s concept of the Baroque (the ‘fold taken to infinity’) and argue that, while the baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolutionary ‘catastrophe’ of mannerism to the extreme, it simultaneously and paradoxically forms a conservative and restorative reaction to it. It is by exploring mannerism’s ‘very particular relations’ with the baroque, finally, that we can also discover in mannerism a precursor to 20 th century modernism and in Deleuze’s modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies. Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art Sjoerd van Tuinen, 2012, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Populism and Grandeur: From Marx to Arafat

At the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze famously mentioned that his last book was to be called ‘Grandeur de Marx’. While it is unlikely that he ever started to actually write such a book, its title reminds us of an outspoken political text of Deleuze entitled ‘The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat’. The aim of this contribution is to explore and define this concept of grandeur. After some initial remarks on ‘Deleuze’s aristocratic posture’ and its supposedly problematic relation to actual politics, my strategy will be to develop two paradoxes, the paradox of health’s intrinsic relation to illness and the paradox of glory’s intrinsic relation to shame, and then relate both paradoxes to the ethical imperative of Stoicism that grandeur lies in becoming worthy of the event. I conclude with some brief reflections on what could be the grandeur of Marx.

A Transcendental Philosophy of the Event: Deleuze’s Non-Phenomenological Reading of Leibniz

This chapter situates Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in the context of its rejection of phenomenologically inspired readings of Leibniz. Though texts like The Logic of Sense and Immanence: A Life seem to be written almost entirely under the sign of a radicalised transcendental reduction, it is well-known that Deleuze takes an almost diabolical pleasure in dismissing the phenomenological tradition, which is ‘too pacifying and has blessed too many things’ (F 113). His critique of Husserl and Husserl’s followers condenses in his critique of common sense in its transcendental functioning, in other words, of Urdoxa. Even if phenomenology replaces transcendent essences with the immanence of sense in intentionality, Deleuze argues that it nonetheless resurrects essences by imposing on us the alternative of either the non-sense of an undifferentiated groundlessness or sense as guaranteed by its imprisonment in common sense (LS 103, 106; F 14; WP 51, 160). Firstly, in its account of the genesis of sense, it confuses the explanans with the explanandum: it raises ‘to the transcendental a mere empirical exercise in an image of thought presented as originary’ (LS 98) and ‘thinks of the transcendental in the image of, and in the resemblance to, that which it is supposed to ground’ (LS 105). Secondly, because it determines the lived flux of time as an experience immanent to human consciousness instead of vice versa, it inevitably reinstates a triple transcendence: the objective sensory World, the intersubjective Other and higher-level scientifico-cultural Communities1, three proto-beliefs that carry away the flow of immanence by determining the ‘significations’ of the potential totality of the lived (WP 47, 142).