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International Dialogue

International Dialogue

Pieter Lemmens

Abstract

Although the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (1947) is certainly still not a well-known, let alone “settled” author within the Anglophone philosophical community that leans toward what is still frequently called “continental philosophy,” unlike similarly important figures such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Bruno Latour, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Niklas Luhmann and Axel Honneth, his star is nevertheless slowly rising and many of his books have been translated in English in recent years. One of the reasons for this delayed reception in Anglophone academia might be Sloterdijk’s highly idiosyncratic approach to philosophy, his even more idiosyncratic, lavishly exuberant, intensely literary and (in my humble opinion) hardly translatable prose, as well as the enormous variety of themes his formidable versatile intellect engages itself with, which makes him a thinker who is very difficult to pinpoint or categorize. And although his work nevertheless touches to a large extent upon the same themes that many other “continental” thinkers address—from postmodernity and posthumanism to biopolitics and globalization—the way he frames those themes is so utterly original and so thoroughly different from the usual theoretical formats and frameworks that this work is not so easy to connect with. And last but not least, it appears to be strangely immune to academic appropriation/annexation.

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