I've just started reading the third volume of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres. It promises to be a true intellectual feast...
"Foams offer a theory of the present age from the perspective that 'life' unfolds multifocally, multiperspectivally and heterarchically."
December 25th, 2024, Lodz
Foam is actually existing deception—the non-entity as an entity nonetheless, or a feigner of being, a symbol of the First False, an emblem for the undermining of the solid by the untenable—a ghost light, a superfluity, a mood, a swamp gas, inhabited by a dubious subjectivity.
Foam begets nothing, it has no consequences. With no life expectancy or next generation, all it knows is running ahead into its own bursting.
Hegel’s new logic, a positivization of the negative came into view, and with it a possible rehabilitation of foam: “Out of the ferment of finitude, before its transformation into foam, spirit rises up fragrantly.
Does spirit itself, the medium in which substance develops into the subject, even now owe something to foam? Does this bastard that could not be trusted transpire as the long-sought middle element in which the spiritual and the material join to form that concreteness which we call existence?
Is it the third factor through which binary idiocy could be overcome? Did Aristotle foresee such amalgams when, in Problemata physica, he classed the illness of brilliant men—melancholy—among the “air-filled ailments,” whose features include an affinity for foamable substances: black gall, which the doctors of antiquity believed to appear as an aerated mixture?
December 26th, 2024, Lodz
