Bubbles

An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-pageSpheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century'spredominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described "student of theair," reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial andimmunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) tothe poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to thecontemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatialtheories of Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille intoa morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling--identifying the question of being as one bound upwith the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, thefirst volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings--or as thebook's original intended subtitle put it, an "archeology of the intimate." Bubblesincludes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatialand visual "parallel narrative" to his exploration of bubbles.Written over the course of adecade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translationfrom Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the comingseasons.

The most celebrated, and often controversial, German philosopher since Jurgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk has established an academic career confronting the darkest traditions of European ideology in the twentieth century. His first book, Critique of Cynical Reason remains the best-selling philosophical work in the German language since World War II. Among his other books are Terror from the Air and Neither Sun nor Death, both published by Semiotext(e).