Sloterdijk's book on Europe appears in English as The Continent Without Qualities

Peter Sloterdijk's essays on Europe have been published by Polity under the title The Continent Without Qualities: Bookmarks in the Book of Europe. The English translation is by Robert Hughes.

The allusion in the title#

The Continent Without Qualities points directly to Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. Musil's hero, Ulrich, was a figure unable to decide which life to live, left hanging among possibilities.

Sloterdijk transfers the same suspension to a continent: Europe as a political subject that cannot settle on what to define itself as. The image of bookmarks in the subtitle says the same thing — the history of Europe read as a series of markers left in a book that has not been closed.

Where Sloterdijk stands#

Born in 1947, Sloterdijk made his name with the Critique of Cynical Reason of 1983. The book brought a substantial objection to the Frankfurt School's critique of ideology: the contemporary subject is not deceived, but knows — and goes on behaving as before all the same. Sloterdijk called that posture cynicism.

His next major work is the three-volume Spheres, published between 1998 and 2004. Here Sloterdijk argues that human beings always live in an “inside” — in a sphere, a bubble, a zone of immunity. Modernity is read as the bursting of these protective spheres.

His lecture of 1999, Rules for the Human Zoo, set off a fierce argument in Germany; the distance between Sloterdijk and Jürgen Habermas became public on that occasion.

Sloterdijk in Turkish#

Critique of Cynical Reason, In the World Interior of Capital, Rules for the Human Zoo and Derrida, an Egyptian are among his books translated into Turkish.