Cohabitating in the Globalised World: Peter Sloterdijk's Global Foams and Bruno Latour's Cosmopolitics

This paper seeks to present a comprehensive and systematic picture of Peter Sloterdijk's ambitious and provocative theory of globalisation. In the Sphären (Spheres) trilogy, Sloterdijk provides both a spatialised ontology of human existence and a historical thesis concerning the radical shifts in human conceptions of the space or sphere they inhabit. Essentially, Sloterdijk argues that global interconnectedness and increasing population and communication density have brought about a situation in which every human action is limited and inhibited by the proximity of others—a situation he describes using the metaphor of foam. In this context, are not all possibilities for constructive political action stifled from the very outset? I will argue that Bruno Latour's concept of cosmopolitics furnishes us with resources to respond to this collapse of political space.