Aesthetic Imperative (eBook)

Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design.

Contents

I. WORLD OF SOUND
La musique retrouvée 3
Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 15
Where Are We When We Hear Music? 27

II. IN THE LIGHT
Clearing and Illumination. Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism and Politics of Light 49
Illumination in the Black Box: On the History of Opacity 61

III. DESIGN
The Right Tool for Power: Observations on Design as the Modernization of Competence 83
On the Charisma of Symbols 97
For a Philosophy of Play 100

IV. CITY AND ARCHITECTURE
The City and its Negation: An Outline of Negative Political Theory 113
Architects Do Nothing But 'Inside Theory': Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Sabine Kraft and Nikolaus Kuhnert 141
For a Participatory Architecture - Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry 174

V. CONDITIO HUMANA
Essay on the Life of the Artist: Heretics *Wastrels* Falls/Cases* Inhabitants 185
Confessions of a Loser 192
Minima Cosmetica - An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement 197

VI. MUSEUM
The Museum: School of Disconcertment 221
World Museum and World's Fair 231

VII. ART SYSTEM
'I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself' 249
Art is folding into itself 253
Emissaries of Violence - On the Metaphysics of Action Cinema 265
Good-For-Nothing Returns Home or The End of an Alibi - and A Theory of the End of Art 280
Afterword by Peter Weibel: Sloterdijk and the Question of Aesthetics 304

Notes 320

Publication Sources 334

"The Aesthetic Imperative crystalizes and intensifies the already formidable force of Sloterdijk's corpus. By working through the history of philosophy we discover that the bourgeois subject's capacity to discern the beautiful is at once an art of self-formation and a beautiful form of the self. This is not one more book on the relation between art and politics: it redefines the polity as a singular account of a beauty beyond art, and redefines the aesthetic by way of a subjectivity that is on its way to being political."

Claire Colebrook, Penn State University