Hope and Suspicion: Alexander Kluge, Peter Sloterdijk, and the Non-Existent
Hope and Suspicion: Alexander Kluge, Peter Sloterdijk, and the Non-Existent

Summary/Abstract: This essay theorizes a spatial-affective strategy from the discursive silence between Alexander Kluge and Peter Sloterdijk. Using as a springboard their discussion of a film that Sergei Eisenstein never made, I identify two possibilities of agency in an age of late globalization: Kluge’s faith in the possibility of liberating processes and spaces and Sloterdijk’s mistrust in the hegemonic structures of contemporary society. The difference between those agentive-affective possibilities gives rise to distinct strategies for a subjective geography capable of countering the violent and virtual spaces of late globalization. Rather than declaring one philosopher’s strategy the path to luck, this essay tests how each can be mobilized. Thereby, the crucial location of humans in spaces normally constrained by capitalism’s rhetoric of terror and safety can instead become—though hope or suspicion—spaces engendering more plural subjects.

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