Book review: In the World Interior of Capital, by Peter Sloterdijk

by Peter Sloterdijk
Polity
3.5 stars
Stuart Jeffries

In 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky went to London where he visited the site for the International Exhibition in South Kensington, in the space dominated by the Crystal Palace in the previous decade. These hothouses of glass and steel disturbed the Russian novelist: he took them as metaphors of Western civilisation, immune systems that brought the world's most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products under one roof, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, diseases) dwindled into irrelevance.

If you want to understand modern capitalism and consumer society, explore the ramifications of Dostoevsky's metaphor, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues. "He recognised the monstrous edifice as a man-eating structure, a cult container in which humans pay homage to the demons of the West: the power of money and pure movement," he writes.

Sloterdijk reflects on what 15th- century explorer Christopher Columbus and his globetrotting successors did to the world: namely, ensuring their values defined the emerging global system. They also brought Christianity - and cholera-infected blankets as gifts for native Americans.

"What the 16th century set in motion was perfected by the 20th," Sloterdijk writes. "No point on the earth's surface, once money had stopped off there, could escape the fate of becoming a location - and a location is not a blind spot in a field, but rather a place in which one sees that one is seen." The internet diminished distance further but hardly helped the earth become a global village.

Sloterdijk argues that the most visible change to the West's mentality in the past half-century is the arrival of the new man, that symptom of the rapid disintegration of historical masculinity.