Sloterdijk's Anthropotechnics

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms.

This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that ‘immunize’ human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself ‘ascetically’. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Andrea Rossi is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. His principal research interests lie at the intersection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Continental philosophy and political theory, with a special focus on the question of political and economic subjectivity. He is the author of The Labour of Subjectivity: Foucault on Biopolitics, Economy, Critique (2015), and co-editor with Diana Stypinska of Pastoral Power Today (forthcoming).

Patrick Roney earned his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and taught in the Philosophy department at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, as an Associate Professor until his retirement in 2018. At present he teaches in the Liberal Arts Department at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. His research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with a particular focus on the sublime and the postmodern, the modern lyric, as well as phenomenology and environmental ethics. He has published numerous essays both in literature and in philosophy in journals such as the African American Review, Research in Phenomenology, The South African Journal of Philosophy, and several others.