Closer to me than I am myself: Chapter 8

First point – Contraction

p. 575

I was interested in Sloterdijk’s exposition of Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘coincidence of opposites’ as an early modern attempt to envisage the immanent relation of Creator (God) and creature (the individual’s soul). Cusa’s argument, as illustrated in the examples given by Sloterdijk, is that all things are enveloped or enfolded (complicatio) in God, while God is manifest only as developed or unfolded (explicatio) in all the things of the world. The means by which enfolding and unfolding occur - that is, the relation between the processes of enfolding and unfolding – is that of contraction (contractio), or the delimitation of God (the divine maximum) into nature – e.g. individual perception as a contraction, a ‘branch office’ of God’s actually infinite vision (p.275). Although Cusa’s philosophy appears to gesture toward a fully immanent pantheism, Sloterdijk highlights his reaffirmation of the asymmetry and sovereign/hierarchical transcendence of the divine as absolute maximum (e.g. in the discussion of debt and the birth of entrepreneurial subjectivity – this section is actually one of many in the chapter that reminded me of Foucault’s lecture series). Nicholas of Cusa’s speculative mysticism would later be taken up (and Deleuze argues radicalised – complication and explication are absolutely equivalent) in the philosophy of Spinoza, where the Cusan ‘coincidence of opposites’, where the maximum is the minimum and vice versa, is streamlined in Spinoza into a single, univocal substance. Whilst the Cusan process of contraction into nature is, in Spinoza, the expression of modes of movement and affect.

Second point – The Monstrous

p. 629-630

I am intrigued by Heidegger and Sloterdijk’s notion of ‘inhabiting the monstrous outside’ as the defining character of ‘being-in’ of our contemporary world. The translation footnote states that Sloterdijk isn’t referring here to monster (das Unngeheure) in the conventional sense of ‘atrocious’ or ‘horrible’, but rather as something ‘immense’, ‘enormous’, or ‘unfathomable’. I have read elsewhere that Sloterdijk will return to the notion of ‘the monstrous’ in the preface to the next book of Spheres (Globes), where he describes globalisation as the geometrisation of the unmeasurable,‘geometry in the monstrous’. So the monstrous is used as a qualification within Sloterdijk’s work for a world in which the Sphere-One (the notion of being-in-God explored in this chapter) has imploded (‘God is dead’), resulting in a totality that allows neither full understanding nor total comprehension, and a situation in which smaller inferior spheres have to be produced which emulate the immunological functions of the monosphere. I am interested to see how this argument is unpacked and developed in the subsequent volumes, particularly in terms of the transference from micro- to macrospheres (the mechanisms and psycho-political risks all to briefly hinted at in this first book), as well as the concepts a spherology provides to think the architecture and communication/relation between different spheres and intimacies.