Quotes from Peter Sloterdijk

El hecho de que la política esté cambiando cada vez más hacia la gestión de la fatalidad es propio de la naturaleza de los procesos multifactoriales. El juego con el azar se está volviendo, a su vez, cada vez más aleatorio.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

Está enojado por la noticia de que el ejército israelita solo mató a todos los hombres, tomando prisioneros a las mujeres y los niños. En su celo, alimentado por la conciencia del pacto, Moisés insiste en matar a todos los niños y a las mujeres adultas, perdonando solo a las niñas vírgenes: "Pero a todas las niñas entre las mujeres que no hayan conocido varón, las dejaréis con vida para vosotros

In fact, by founding the Academy in the year 387 BC, Plato was envisaging a practical pattern of life in retreat that he had encountered shortly before on his first Sicilian journey. Near the city of Kroton (now called Crotone) in southern Italy, he had come upon a commune of hermits doing theory who were followers of the savant Pythagoras, a man of whom it was not known whether he was still a shaman or had already become a mathematician or was both at once.

In practice, Plato transposed the retreat from the city back into the city again and, in doing so, established a political-topological difference that would have a major effect on world history. To borrow Michel Foucault's term, the settlement of the Academy in the city was an issue of a "heterotopia

Parece que los levitas que empuñaban la espada actuaban como sucesores de los verdugos sagrados de la época prehistórica, cuyas huellas sobrescritas en varios pasajes del Antiguo Testamento han sido descifradas recientemente, aunque sean hipotéticas 21.

is an entirely concrete place very close to the city, within walking distance of its walls, a real existing Elsewhere

Wer komplexe Wirklichkeit leugnet, gibt sich gern objektiv und bezichtigt die Problembewussten der Wirklichkeitsflucht und der Träumerei.

Having rejected any transcendent source, Nietzsche comes to hold that the principle of this becoming and struggle must lie in material things themselves, things considered as "dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta.

Not until Plato's Republic was a type of politician created who would no longer serve as a loudspeaker, but rather as a receiver of quiet ideas – with little success, as we know, as the introduction of the quiet politician is yet to come. It would be a contradiction in terms, for politics, as the art of what is possible in noise, remains assigned to the loud side of the phonotope

What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.

It illustrates the process of intelligence in relation to non-transparent factors on the basis of five typical configurations that I shall call: the grave; the body; the book; the bureaucracy; the complex machine. It would be an accidental but not undesirable effect if people recognize this series as a progressive approach to the living environment, or, rather, the box environment of modernity.

This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian definitions of life and forms of life.

ÈŠn mediul celor avuÈ›i, insaÈ›iabili, "interesul pentru art? nu e, de regul?, decât faÈ›a duminical? a l?comiei".

Din marele elan al transform?rii egalitariste a umanit??ii nu a r?mas, pân? la urm?, mult mai mult decât autoprivilegierea nedisimulat? a funcÈ›ionarilor – ca s? nu mai vorbim de paralizia, resemnarea È™i cinismul pe care le-a l?sat moÈ™tenire.

Una de las ironías de las religiones en la Modernidad es que incluso hacen de lo absoluto una opción. Incluso aquellos que luchan por lograr la ortodoxia no escapan al imperativo herético, porque la verdadera creencia también depende de una elección (hairesis) a su favor.

Being-'subject' means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action.

The beautiful in its pure form can safely be left to the idealists, while the half-beautiful and the ugly occupy empiricists.

As the activity culture of modernity constitutes itself against heteronomy, however, it will seek and find methods to place the commanding authority inside the hearer of the command themselves, so that they seem only to be obeying their inner voice when they submit. In this way, the fact of 'subjectivity' is demanded, created and fulfilled. What is meant, then, is the individual's co-determination of the authority that can give them commands.

Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.

The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.