2023-05-26 14:30:13
Book. Gray is not a color like any other. First, because this pigment appears as a whole: “The sum of the individual colors does not produce a luminous omnicolor, but rather a dull brownish gray. » Then because Peter Sloterdijk makes it the “determining color value of the present time”. For the ontology of the moderns would be more than ever tinged with this gray which “shows our contemporaries the colorless omnicolor of alienated freedom”according to the somewhat fatalistic thesis of the German philosopher developed in his book Gray. A political theory of colors. Would gray be the ultimate color of a West that has explored everything, tried everything, imagined everything, and would come out exhausted?
More than a reflective challenge – “As long as we have not thought about gray, we are not a philosopher”, he says, paraphrasing a maxim by Cézanne on painting – the former rector of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe looks at our civilization through the ambiguous gray of his thought: his focus on loss gives him a conservative tone. The philosopher, author of a major work since Critique of cynical reason (1983), particularly marked by the trilogy Spheres at the turn of the 2000s, lamented in his last translated book, Make the sky speak (Payot, 2021), erasing the “theopoetry”, this word of the gods which has been the compass of meaning for so long. The terminal gray of modernity, on the other hand, becomes synonymous with an era of indistinction, neutrality, obliteration, lack of differentiation,« adiaphorisation »a neologism referring to a moral neutralization of which it makes the reverse of the contemporary celebration of diversity.
This variation on gray, Peter Sloterdijk composes it with his singular prose which places him in France somewhere between Régis Debray and Bruno Latour: his style is willingly facetious, sometimes nebulous or disconcerting, while shining in bursts. As when he assimilates technique to a “Inflation of Magic” and makes the camera a “generalizable magic”or that he analyzes the hegemony of gray in reunified Germany as the fruit of “reciprocal disappointments” of these reunions. This spite would shape a whole generation marked by the « gris Merkel » and the hegemony of automobiles in “sophisticated metallic and matte tones”. In 2021, the Mercedes catalog offered one hundred and ten shades of gray, he notes mischievously.
Inspired by Cézanne, it is the pictorial mode that best renders his intellectual gesture. Because Gris does not have the spirit of system: Peter Sloterdijk works on the inspiration of the brushstroke. But it fills its canvas, with its five chapters (and its four « digressions ») which cover the entire spectrum: philosophy, technology, literature, theology.
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