Category: Books

Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture is the latest release in the Thought in the Act book series, published by Duke University Press, which explores how research and creation can be transformed by philosophy. In The Minor Gesture, Manning draws heavily fro …

All history is the history of struggles for spheric expansion. –from Globes In Globes—the second, and longest, volume in Peter Sloterdijk’s celebrated magnum opus Spheres trilogy—the author attempts nothing less than to uncover the philosophical founda …

If I had to place a sign of my own at the entrance to this trilogy, it would be this: let no one enter who is unwilling to praise transference and to refute loneliness. –from Bubbles An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk’s three-vo …

#5 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Ch. 7

Our reading group on Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain begins a with a preliminary talk about his Nobel Prize acceptance essay, “The Case for Literature.”

#4 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Chs. 5-6 — Readers Underground

#3 of 6 conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES. Chs. 3 – 4

#2 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Chs. 1-2

#1 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Prologue, Introduction, and other preliminary texts

Readers Underground group for Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview page

#9 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 8, “Closer to Me Than I Am Myself – A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside,” Excursus 10: Matris in gremio – A Mariological Cricket,” and “Transition: On Ecstatic Immanence,” pps. 539–632.

#8 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 7, “The Siren Stage – On the First Sonsospheric Alliance,” as well as Excursus 8, “Illiterate Truths – A Note on Oral Fundamentalisms” and Excursus 9, “Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong,” pps. 477–538.

#7 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 6: “Soul Partitions – Angels—Twins—Doubles,” as well as Excursus 6: “Spheric Mourning – On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What Is Missing” and Excursus 7: “On the Difference Between and Idiot and an Angel,” pps. 413-476.

#6 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 5, “The Primal Companion – Requiem for Discarded Organ” as well as “Excursus 5: The Black Plantation – A Note on Trees of Life and Enlivement Machines,” pages 343–412

#5 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 4, “The Retreat Within the Mother: Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology,” along with the following Excursi, pps. 269–342

#4 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 3, “Humans in the Magic Circle: On the Intellectual History of the Fascination with Closeness,” and Excursus 1, “Thought Transmission,” pps. 207–268. — Readers Underground

#3 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 2, “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere,” pps. 139–206. — Readers Underground

#2 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Reflections and ch. 1, “Heart Operation; Or, On the Eucharistic Excess,” pps. 83–138.

In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.

#1 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Note and Introduction, pps. 9–81.

Readers Underground group for Bubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview page

We are the robots. Or rather, we are like people who allow their servants to do everything for them, and subsequently feel they have lost touch with life, but don’t know exactly why.

In this hangout on July 28, 2016, we explore ideas from both the novel and one another’s personal experiences. It’s a LIVE Freak out!

A group reading of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, July 25 – September 1, 2016.

Katherine Dunn, the original Freakmother, makes muses of monstrosity in her 1989 masterpiece, about a bizarrely geek-inspired, traveling circus family, born of the stale kernels of boxing reports and advice columns—a celebration of human adaptability t …

In this hangout we discuss (primarily) “The Thief” vignette, meaning and symbolism in the The Saddlebag, consciousness studies, Henry Corbin and the Illuminationist school (think: angels), Zoroastrianism, Babism, and The Bahai Faith.

“The Uigur’s eyes were bright and keen, but he had difficulty reading the fine script on that delicate paper. The noonday sun was beating down on the page and it blazed before him, blinding him momentarily. He could hardly make it out. It was written a …

Here we are at the end of WoO. Spring is upon us, and our “Spring to Origins” poetic revelry event was, I think, a great success. Books have beginnings and endings but they are never finished. Re-reading a book forces us to work with a book over time, to disclose its nature slowly to us. They invite returning, like the seasons; their imperative merely to read and re-read, corso e ricorso. New interpretations glimmer up from occlusion, hidden treasures discovered in neglected passages.

Our fifteenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and the Postscript (pg. 528-547).

Recording of our fourteenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapter 8.