About the book
English title: Prometheus’s Remorse
ISBN: 978-3-518-02985-5
80 pages
Published: 13.03.2023

Rights sold to:
English world rights (Semiotexte), Spanish world rights (Siruela), Catalan rights (Arcadia), France (Payot), Italy (Marsilio)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (CC Live)

The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022

From time immemorial, man has had to organise his »metabolism with nature«. For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labour. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.

But where trees could only be burnt once, the weights of the factors labour and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fires to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to Earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.

»Sloterdijk commands an overwhelming knowledge and interweaves this knowledge with his bright judgement, never limited by the status quo.« Daniel Kehlmann, Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat

»Sloterdijk plays with language, taking delight in brilliant expressions. Wherever you open the book, you will find sentences that inspire an embarrassing sense of envy. Sloterdijk’s style is unrivalled.« Michael Maar, Süddeutsche Zeitung on Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat

About the author
Peter Sloterdijk was born in 1947 and is professor emeritus of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the Institute of Design in Karlsruhe. The unmistakable characteristic of Peter Sloterdijk’s thought and writings is the way he embeds current issues in a long history. This way, he succeeds in redefining the current human condition, visualizes it from a hitherto unknown perspective, and finds evidence for unexpected or unsought connections. His book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft is one of the biggest-selling philosophical books of the 20th century.

 

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