ABSTRACT
Peter Sloterdijk’s account is, by his own description, a grand narrative consisting of various lines of explication, which is a process of bringing an undisclosed background into an illuminated foreground. The expanding process of this interiorization–exteriorization provides the main line of Sloterdijk’s narrative, which is itself a performative enactment of this process at a symbolic level. The theory of society is a description of the system that expands its own complexity, but never objectifies society as a whole. Any observation of society still takes place within society, and it cannot observe itself. The description of society thus remains necessarily and perpetually incomplete. Sloterdijk points out that thematizing religion means, paradoxically, it can no longer serve the function it has lost simply by virtue of the fact that it can be indicated. In the later nineteenth century, two philosophers of particular importance addressed this phenomenon: Friedrich Nietzsche and William James.
