What Happened in the Twentieth Century?

When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we see? Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the 20th century was the age of two devastating world wars, of totalitarian regimes and terrible atrocities like the Holocaust the age of extremes, to use Hobsbawms famous phrase. But in this new book, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that we will never understand the 20th century if we focus on events and ideologies. Rather, in his view, the predominant motif of the 20th century is what Badiou called apassion for the real, which manifests itself as the will to actualize the truth directly in the here and now.

Drawing on hisSpheres trilogy, Sloterdijk interprets the actualization of the real in the 20th century as a passion for economic and technological antigravitation. The rise of consumerism and the easing of the burdens of human life by the constant deployment of new technologies have killed off the kind of radicalism that was rooted in the belief that power would rise from a material base of production. If the 20th century can still inspire us today, it is because the fundamental shift that it brought about opened the way for a critique of extremist reason, a post-Marxist theory of enrichment and a general economy of energy resources based on excess and dissipation.

While developing his highly original interpretation of the 20th century, Sloterdijk also addresses a series of related topics including the meaning of the Anthropocene, the domestication of humans and the significance of the sea. The volume also includes major new pieces on Derrida and on Heideggers politics. This work, by one of the most original thinkers today will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in philosophy and critical theory.

• The Anthropocene - A Stage in the Process on the Margins of the Earth's History?
• From the Domestication of the Human Being to the Civilizing of Cultures: Answering the Question of Whether Humanity is Capable of Taming Itself
• The Ocean Experiment: From Nautical Globalization to a General Ecology
• The Synchronized World: Philosophical Aspects of Globalization
• What Happened in the 20th Century? Toward a Critique of Extremist Reason
• The Thinker in the Haunted Castle: On Derrida's Interpretation of Dreams
• Deep Observation: Towards a Philosophy of the Space Station
• The Permanent Renaissance: The Italian Novella and News of Modernity
• Heidegger's Politics: Postponing the End of History
• Odysseus the Sophist: On the Birth of Philosophy from the Spirit of Travel Stress
• Almost Sacred Text: Essay on the Constitution
• The Other Logos, or the Reason of Cunning: On the Intellectual History of the Indirect
• Editorial Note
• Notes