Books for Jewish American Heritage Month
In celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month in May, we are sharing books by authors who share their individual stories, experiences, and lives. Find our full collection of books here.
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An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.
Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.
Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.
[Bubbles] is perhaps best read as a long philosophical poem, powerfully expressive of the modern experience of disorientation and loneliness, wrenching itself into bizarre shapes in its imperfect attempt to conjure an ancient wholeness.
—Adam Kirsch, Times Literary Supplement—An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis.
Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles.
Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.
[Bubbles] is perhaps best read as a long philosophical poem, powerfully expressive of the modern experience of disorientation and loneliness, wrenching itself into bizarre shapes in its imperfect attempt to conjure an ancient wholeness.
—Adam Kirsch, Times Literary Supplement—
In celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month in May, we are sharing books by authors who share their individual stories, experiences, and lives. Find our full collection of books here.
For Mental Health Awareness Month in May, we are sharing books to educate and raise awareness about mental health and the various factors that may affect it, and to provide tools and resources for student wellness. Find our full collection of titles here.
Each May, we honor the stories, histories, and cultures of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. Below is a selection of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction books by AANHPI creators to share with your students this month and throughout the year. Find our full collection of titles for Higher Education here.
