Peter Sloterdijk

“You’re not a painter if you haven’t painted gray”, declared Paul Cézanne. The same could be said of philosophers: you’re not a philosopher if you have never thought gray. This simple four-letter word signifies much more than a quasi-neutral color lying between black and white: we use the same word to describe moods, November skies, the hair of the elderly, the withered features of faces, dusty shelves, faceless bureaucracies, dreary politicians and hundreds of other things. This plain, unassuming word conceals a multitude of thoughts that we seldom pause to consider. In this exceptionally original book, Peter Sloterdijk follows the grey thread through the history of philosophy, art, literature and politics, enabling us to see familiar things in new ways and highlighting features of our lives that would otherwise remain unseen. Beginning with Plato’s allegory of the cave which introduced the concept of gray into thought, Sloterdijk unfolds a chiaroscuro narrative which recognizes the power of grey as a metaphor for the indefinite, the indifferent, the ordinary, the intermediate and the neutralizing. We see the invention of photography and monochrome’s journey through modern art – from Malevich’s Black Square to Richter’s grey panel paintings – in a new light, and we see modern states and modern politics as full of grey zones, from the hidden spheres of the security services to the extraterritorial spaces that harbor illegal activities like money laundering and the drug trade. A work of brilliance by one of the most creative philosophers writing today, If You Have Never Thought Gray will appeal to a wide readership interested in philosophy, art and politics, and to students and academics in philosophy, visual arts and the humanities generally.

Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called “Germany’s most controversial thinker” by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity. For Sloterdijk, modernity is defined by its need to break with the past. Moderns are perpetual rebels who seek to sever the ties of tradition and forms of inheritance that bind generations and eras together. With deep philosophical, historical, and literary range, he traces this antigenealogical experiment from the French Revolution onward, from Madame de Pompadour and Napoleon through Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, the Dadaists, and Deleuze. Acutely aware of the destructive potential of cultural discontinuities, Sloterdijk is no less critical of the “fathers” who condemn change than the “terrible children” who seek a drastic rupture with their predecessors. Equally concerned with the grand sweep of history and our current predicaments, he instead calls for new ways to live together in the intersubjectivity of the human condition. Incisive and daring, breathtaking in its scope, this account of youthful rebellion against tradition asks us to reimagine the ethics of genealogy.