Difference

In this paper1 I investigate Peter Sloterdijk s relation to humanism, especially in its post-Kantian sense of an ideology of Enlightenment based on anthropology. How does an author who writes after Nietzsche s biopolitical challenge of the Übermensch, Heidegger s ontological upgrading of the humanitas, Foucault s structuralist decentering of man, Derrida s deconstruction of anthropocentric discourse, and Deleuze & Guattari s machinic constructivism, relate to the ideology of emancipation through formation (Bildung), i.e. the anthropotechnics of reading and writing? What are the biopolitical insights of an anthropo-phenomenology or an anthropology beyond humans? (1999: 54) Can a positive understanding of humanity still be found in his work? Since the Summer of 1999, it has been impossible to find an answer to these questions without reference to the complex context of the affair with which it is customary to associate Sloterdijk s name. The occasion for Jürgen Habermas and other public intellectuals to ring the alarm bell was a philosophico-literary lecture given by Sloterdijk entitled Prescriptions for the Human Park. A Reply to Heidegger s Letter On Humanism.2 The contents of this text were wilfully and abusively interpreted as a programmatic series of statements on engineerin