Infinite Mobilization

by Peter Sloterdijk, Sandra Berjan (Translation)

The core of what we refer to as 'the project of modernity' is the idea that human beings have the power to bring the world under their control, and hence it is based on a 'kinetic utopia' the movement of the world as a whole reflects the implementation of our plans for it.

But as soon as the kinetic utopia of modernity is exposed, its seemingly stable foundation cracks open and new problems appear: things don't happen according to plan because as we actualize our plans, we set in motion other things that we didn't want as unintended side-effects. We watch with mounting unease as the self-perpetuating side-effects of modern progress overshadow our plans, as a foreign movement breaks off from the very core of the modern project supposedly guided by reason and slips away from us, spinning out of control. What looked like a steady march towards freedom turns out to be a slide into an uncontrollable and catastrophic syndrome of perpetual mobilization. And precisely because so much comes about through our actions, these developments turn out to have explosive consequences for our self-understanding, as we begin to realize that, so far from bringing the world under our control, we are instead the agents of our own destruction.

In this brilliant and insightful book Sloterdijk lays out the elements of a new critical theory of modernity understood as a critique of political kinetics, shifting the focus of critical theory from production to mobilization and shedding new light on a world facing the growing risk of humanly induced catastrophe.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Social Science

240 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist, television host and columnist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe.

Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical Reason. In 2001 he was named president of the State Academy of Design, part of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. In 2002 he began to co-host Das Philosophische Quartett, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key issues affecting present-day society.

The Kritik der Zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason), published by Suhrkamp in 1983, became the best-selling philosophical book in the German language since the Second World War and launched Sloterdijk's career as an author.

The trilogy Spheres is the philosopher's magnum opus. The first volume was published in 1998, the second in 1999, and the last in 2004.

Reviews

[Frank D'hanis junior · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always with Sloterdijk his abundance of metaphors and unforeseen twists makes my attention drift away from time to time. The idea of politics as kinetics, with his idiomatic use of the term mobilisation is very clearly written and the point is abundantly clear. Sometimes very Heideggerian, but less grave. I also liked the part about Flemish nationalist ideologue's Joachim Pohlman's favourite writer Ernst Junger. In the end, the poignant observation that we are tricked, or wrong anyway, to look for the utopian by means of the frenetic activitity of going ahead, the utopian is more likely in and behind us (hence the tao of the title). Of course, a plea for mysticism too.

[Joeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it is written in the eighties of the last century, it's basic premise stands strong: because of continuous mobility we exploit the living conditions of this very planet, which asks for a new attitude to life and the planet.

[Ayush]

If you're not sure whether or not to read, definitely give this essay on the book - "Deep Time Ecstasy" https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.ph...

[Lauryn nip yeuk-yuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The broadly catastrophic element of the term "mobilisation" implies a civilising fluid mechanism that runs counter to positivism, a movement that is constantly extended, dimensionally switched, self-given and deviated from in the whole process from interaction to self-burial, and it is here that the broad field of dynamic paradox opens up for another kind of critique of modernity (which, at the level of the social, is only capable of targeting a false mobility); for the catastrophictwo extreme scenarios of systematics: a) the relative cessation of the mobilisation of the whole through the mutual deceleration of partial processes (possibly triggering its hydrostatic approach?) b) the ecodynamic hell of the exponential growth of the mobilisations by interacting with each other. When the non-melodic coercion of mobilisation intrudes into the normality of the real world, the social dynamics of self-mobilised subjects can be referred to in a calm critical tone, without the need for their diagnosticians to be elevated to the status of prophets