Foams Quotes

“One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy.
Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

“It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their owners' longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the own to win itself to death in the battle against the other.
It is no coincidence that recent interpretations of the immunity phenomenon exhibit a tendency to assign far greater significance to the presence of the foreign amidst the own than was intended in traditional identitary understandings of a monolithically closed organismic self - one could almost speak of a post-structuralist turn in biology. In the light of this, the patrol of antibodies in an organism seems less like a police force applying a rigid immigration policy than a theater troupe parodying its invaders and performing as their transvestites.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

“One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy.
It remained decisive for the conservative syndrome which took shape in Europe after the 1789 French Revolution that it had resulted from looking back at the irretrievable goods, life forms and arts of the pre-bourgeois times.
One of the preconditions was the certainty of never becoming the dominant view. It acquired its elegiac hues by emphasizing the habit of expecting the darker constants of human nature.
To be conservative is to continue believing that good and noble things are tied to places and unique phenomena – for vulgar things, on the other hand, the majority principle and mechanical repetition are sufficient.
Such reserve imposes itself on those with nothing more to win in a history addicted to novelty.
This way of feeling will be cultivated by those who are keen to avoid being mistaken for profiteers of future conditions.
When people in the optimistic mainstream speak of a constant improvement of living conditions, the conservative keeps a low profile.
Assuming that better things lie ahead – does that not already mean searching in the wrong direction?
Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work.
Progress, the conservative is sure, is only ever an acceleration of the flight from good, which lies unattainable behind us…
Any conservative who wanted to elevate themselves to the level of principles had to move on from here to anthropological generalizations.
They had to learn to associate the idea of “mankind” with the epithet “incorrigible”…
One could no longer even speak of the “return of the tragic” – for we are ineluctably embedded in it, as if in a fabric woven of first and second nature.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

“The lively thought-image of foam serves to recover the premetaphysical pluralism of world-inventions postmetaphysically. It helps us to enter the element of a manifold thought undeterred by the nihilistic pathos that involuntarily accompanied a reflection disappointed by the monological metaphysics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explains once again what this liveliness is about: “God is dead” is affirmed as the good news of the present day. One could reformulate it thus: “So the One Orb has imploded – now the foams are alive” When the mechanisms of cooption through simplifying globes and imperial totalizations have been seen through, this is precisely not a reason to abandon everything that was considered great, inspiring and valuable. Claiming that the harmful god of consensus has died means declaring which energies are required to resume work: it can only be those that were bound by metaphysical hyperbole. Once a great exaggeration becomes obsolete, swarms of more discrete upsurges arise.”
― Peter Sloterdijk , Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

“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”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

“The lively thought-image of foam serves to recover the premetaphysical pluralism of world-inventions postmetaphysically. It helps us to enter the element of a manifold thought undeterred by the nihilistic pathos that involuntarily accompanied a reflection disappointed by the monological metaphysics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explains once again what this liveliness is about: “God is dead” is affirmed as the good news of the present day. One could reformulate it thus: “So the One Orb has imploded – now the foams are alive” When the mechanisms of cooption through simplifying globes and imperial totalizations have been seen through, this is precisely not a reason to abandon everything that was considered great, inspiring and valuable. Claiming that he harmful god of consensus has died means declaring which energies are required to resume work: it can only be those that were bound by metaphysical hyperbole. Once a great exaggeration becomes obsolete, swarms of more discrete upsurges arise.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology