The Shape of Things SAM HAN Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. 664pp. F or anyone even remotely interested in philosophy, when a igure sets out to “cor- rect” Heidegger, you want to pay attention. his is not necessarily out of admira- tion for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine curios- ity made up of equal parts amazement and horror. he interest would be compulsory, akin to intellectual rubbernecking, for it is more than likely that he or she, the subject of such an utterance, will, like Heidegger, be vulnerable to intense scrutiny and inter- pretation. herefore, when MIT Press describes the much-anticipated Spheres trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk as “the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time,” there is reasonable expectation for it to be disastrous. Ever since the English translation of his he Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988, Sloterdijk has been known in English-speaking intellectual circles as somewhat of a mercurial igure. Not much, still, is known about him. From where, that is, what intellectual milieu or tradition, did he emerge? Is he a Frankfurt guy? Is he a Luhman- nite? Is he Heideggerian? he rather out-of-nowhere character of Sloterdijk’s work, as well as the inconsistent reception of his work outside a handful of watchers of developments in continental philosophy and social theory, placed Sloterdijk in the category of “heard of him” (otherwise known as “oh right, he wrote that one thing”) in North American cultural theory. But Sloterdijk’s trajectory difered tremendously in his native Germany. When cop- ies of Cynical Reason started leaving the shelves at a rapid pace upon its release, the then-journalist was boosted into the highbrow German intellectual scene tradition- ally illed with academics. Today, we can count Sloterdijk among the country’s public intellectuals, a group that also includes luminaries like J ürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth (more on these two later). Sloterdijk is also host to a show called “Das Philosophische Quartett” (he Philosophical Quartet), which airs on ZDF, the Ger- man equivalent to PBS in the United States or NHK in Japan. It features Sloterdijk alongside guests of various intellectual pedigrees, from academics to journalists. More recently, Sloterdijk has made himself known among the wider American reading Reviews in Cultural heory Vol. 4, Issue 1. Copyright © 2013 Sam Han.