One of the philosophical authors that immediately comes to mind in the context of interiority and its link with the notion of the interior is the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Between 1998 and 2004, Sloterdijk authored the trilogy Spheres, in which he examines the history of western civilization through the image of the bubble (the title of the first volume) and the globe (the title of the second volume; the third volume is titled foam, a mass of bubbles). In these books, Sloterdijk is able to connect phenomena as diverse as religious conceptions of the universe, greenhouses and spaceships, because in each of them he detects a movement of delimitation or shielding off that allows for the construction of something within these limits: the interior is the condition for an interiority.
One of Sloterdijk’s sources of inspiration for the trilogy is the work of Estonian biologist Jacob von Uexküll and more specifically his notion of Umwelt. Uexküll also happens to be of great significance to the philosophical tandem Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The latter are usually subsumed under the heading of poststructuralism, a “school” in continental philosophy that originated in the sixties of the previous century and ended somewhere at the end of it. Other poststructuralist authors include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva.
However, Deleuze and Guattari appear to make different use of Uexküll’s insights than Sloterdijk: instead of stressing the necessity of a delimitating movement, they focus on the interactive character of Umwelt or, rather, on the fact that it includes a dialogue between parts of entities and thus presupposes a movement of opening up pre-established entities. Is this observation correct? And if so, does this difference in focus reflect a more general difference of nature between poststructuralism and the philosophies that came to succeed it? Is it, for example, an illustration of the revolutionary nature of poststructuralism (decentering, destabilizing, desubjectivization) versus the more pragmatic stance of the philosophers that work with the legacy of poststructuralism?
It will become clear that, in both Deleuze and Guattari’s as well as Sloterdijk’s philosophies, there are elements to be distinguished that undermine or, at least, nuance this observation. With respect to Deleuze and Guattari, we can refer to the notions of “armature” (Francis Bacon. The logic of sensation) and “house” (What is Philosophy?). To nuance the characterization of Sloterdijk’s philosophy, we will look at the multiple and transformative nature of his interiorities, the aspects that prevent these interiorities from turning into absolute interiorities that no longer need an outside. In the final part of this article, we will reassemble all the arguments and try to determine what might constitute the difference between a Deleuzo-Guattarian interiority and a Sloterdijkian interiority.
The same principle of co-isolation or co-immunism is present in Buckminster Fuller’s architectural principle of construction called tensegrity (Sloterdijk, 2004: 472–473). As the word itself indicates, a tensegrity refers to the integrity of structures that is based on the equilibrium between the push and pull loads. The pulling forces are absorbed by flexible cables or tendons, whereas the pushing forces are absorbed by bars or struts. Contrary to “classical” constructions, similar elements never touch one another (isolation) and every element is necessary in order to hold the construction. If one removes a single element, the construction collapses.
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