From "A Celebrity Philosopher Explains the Populist Insurgency/Peter Sloterdijk has spent decades railing against the pieties of liberal democracy. Now his ideas seem prophetic" by Thomas Meaney (in The New Yorker).
ADDED: The term "negative gynecology" never reappears in the article, and I was curious enough to dig up "Taking Up The Challenge Of Space: New Conceptualisations Of Space In The Work Of Peter Sloterdijk And Graham Harman" by Marijn Nieuwenhuis in a journal called "continent," which I'd have advised is a terrible name — what with its medical, excretory meaning — but the subtitle is "maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art," so get your head out of the toilet. Nieuwenhuis explains:
Sloterdijk empirically demonstrates that within the womb... it is impossible to draw an epistemological distinction between the object and the subject. This is because the foetus does neither recognise the placenta nor the “‘nobjects’ ([ie.] neither subjects nor objects) such as placental blood, intrauterine acoustics, and other medial givens… [The] child develops [therefore] an identity not by recognizing itself at a distance in the mirror but through presubjective resonances” (van Tuinen 2007: 281). This “negative gynaecology” (negative Gynäkologie), Sloterdijk argues, embodies the perfect immersion of “Being-a-pair” [Paar-Sein] in a bubble, which ultimately bursts when the natal process commences.Does the New Yorker article ever talk about the womb? Only here:
“In terms of its dramatic content, what one generally calls ‘cutting the [umbilical] cord’ is the introduction of the child into the sphere of ego-forming clarity. To cut means to state individuality with the knife. The one who performs the cut is the first separation-giver in the subject’s history; through the gift of separation, he provides the child with the stimulus for existence in the external media.” (Sloterdijk 2011: 388). The moment the child is “thrown-into-the-World” and has bid farewell to the placenta (“primal companion” or the Urbegleiter) is also the moment in which it will have to form new relationships and in turn create and dwell in new bubbles....
“The car is like a uterus on wheels,” [Sloterdijk] says. “It has the advantage over its biological model for being linked to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy. The car also has phallic and anal components—the primitive-aggressive competitive behavior, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other, slower person into an expelled turd.”The return of the toilet.
