EXCERPTS FROM SPHERES III Sphli,enlll: Schliume Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004 By Peter Sioterdljk First English

translation by Daniela Fabricius Foams In the Age of Knowledge (pages 65-74) The things that are most delicate become objects only later. This is true for many things that are taken for granted and only mature into being recognized once they are 1051. and they are usually lost the moment that they are drawn into comparisons thai take away their naive given ness. The air that we breathe without thinking. the places saturated with moods in which we unknowingly exist both contained and containing, the unremarkable because obvious atmospheres in which we live. move, and have our beingt-these are all thematic latecomers because until they were brought to our consciousness they provided, like perennial natures or goods. an a priori silent background to our being and presence. These elements now become themes only because they have proven manipulatable in both constructive and destructive ways. Previously accepted as discrete provisions of being. they had to become objects of concern before they could become objects of theory. They had to be experienced as fragile, destructible, and losable before they could advance to being tasks for air and mood phenomenologists. for relationship therapists. for atmosphere engineers and interior decorators. as well as for cultural theorists and media technologists; they had to become unbreathable before people could begin to see themselves as protectors. reconstructors. and inventors of what had until then just been assumed. The background breaks its silence only when processes in the foreground overexert its carrying capacity. How many real ecological and military catastrophes were necessary before one could say with legal. physical. and atmo-technical precision how to provide an atmosphere that is breathable for humans? How much ignorance towards the atmospheric premises of human existence had to accumulate in theory and praxis before the attention of radicalized thinking was capable of submerging itself into an essence of moods (Wesen der Stimmungenp-only to later encroach on the constitution of being-in an encompassing milieu and on the modi of existential imbedded ness in totalities 1

(for which we have recently started to use the term "immersion")? How far did the pendulum have to swing in the direction of individualistic misunderstandings and autistic desolation before the intrinsic value of resonance phenomena and inter-psychic entanglement in an animated space could be articulated in a reasonably complete way? How much neglect. masked as progress, did close human relationships have to endure before a constitutive definition of sufficienlly good couple and family relationships could be described with respect for their fundamental terms?" fAil th'at is very explicit becomes demoni~e who engages in making articulate background realities that were previously kept in unspoken shared thoughts or knowledge-and even more in what is unthought or unknown-commits himself to a situation in which the stringency of what is required and what is kept silent is advanced and irresistibly endless. Woe betides him who bears deserts: Now what once seemed to be a given natural resource must be artificially reconstructed. One is forced to articulate. with burdensome care and provocative detail. what once participated in silent (onnolation. At this transilion into the ex.plicit. the modern function 01 cull ural science (KU/tufWissenscho/t) becomes manifesl.lt is the preferred agent of civilizational explications in general. From now on it needs to be both a technical science and the curatorial training needed for working in our cultural greenhouses. It is especially after cultures have stopped seeming to be a given that one must care fortheir maintenance and cultivate their regeneration by redescribing, filtering, clarifying, and reforming. The culture of cultures becomes a criterion of civilization in the age of making backgrounds explicit. To be absolutely contemporary, we have to assume that hardly anything Ciln be assumed anymore. When we begin, at this point to articulate the world with estranged detail, what can we say about the state of the art of our beingintheworld? When we carefUlly articulate (with the phenomenologists) in what encompassing states or totalities we see ourselves as embedded, when we design and eventually reconstruct (along with the media scientist. the interior architect, the ergonomic specialist, the atmodesigner) the spatialities, the atmospheres, and the encompassing

situations in which we spend time according to our own plans and values, then there is an aftereffect of alienation in these constructive and reconstructive activities that have eliminated the obvious before they allow us to return 10 a second set of givens. II they return, then the products or objects of explication come under the care of conservation. They either become objects of constant sociopolitical concern or undergo the process of their new design. Where there was a wlifeworld," there must now be air~conditioning. What about the Inside' Revolution, Rolation.lnvaslon The demon ism olthe explicit is the path olthe history of civilization. It grows at the pace at which modernity progresses in becoming aware of its own artificiality. What was once in the background moves into the foreground; that which has been unspoken since one can remember suddenly has been brought forward; the enfolded implicit is projected onlo an open surface so that every detail that was once hidden on the inside lies evenly spread out in bright visibility: these scenes are evidence of a movement in which those with knowledge radically change their position in relationship to nowknowable objects that were once known differently or not at all. The obsolete metaphor of the "revolution" as a groundbreaking overturn or relationships between bodies and roles can, in respect to such changes in position, be granted epistemological honor just one last time before being stored in the archive of exhausted (oncepts. The closest example of what can be defined as a "revolution" is found in looking at the breakthrough or the work of the anatomists of the 16th century. who decided to open the body's interior by cutting into it, and to publish their Rndings through descriptive illustrations. It may be that the Vesalian "revolution" had a greater impact on the relationships of Western people to themselves than the long over-cited and misunderstood Copernican revolution. By confronting the conventional darkness of one's own corporeality with organ maps and drafted documents showing a new, precisely viewed inner machine world (it is not for nothing that the magnum opus ofVesalius is called De human; corpo,;s fobrico). the early modern anatomists tore open the image'poor somatic interior ground of a

perceived selrimprisonment and involuted the self knowledge of Ihe thusportrayed bodily subject so that nothing could be found in the same place of knowing or being as before. Now I have to look at the anatomical maps and take;n their message: There you are! That's what it looks like inside you as soon as those who know what they are doing take a look with a scalpel! No anti anatomical mauvaise fo; can help bring back Ihe naivete of bodily being as it existed before the ability to operate. Actors of modernity took part, whether they wanted to or nol, in a quasiautochirurgical revolution. Even those who were nol dissection artists occupied with cutting into organic tissue were, as cultural partiCipants, virtually placed into a position of operation and of knowledge in which there was no choice but to comply with the great changes in the old relationship to the inner universe of the body. Understanding one's own corporal interiority from the possibility of its anatomical exteriorily was the primary cognitive Nrevolutionary" result of modernity-comparable only to the world pictureshifting violence of the first trip around the world by Magellan and del Cano.' For the cognitive habitus, to circumnavigate and map the earth is the same thing as to cut open the human body hom all sides and graphically represent it from all angles. 80th operations belong to the great rotation that chang~d the angte of knowledge 01 things and circumstances. ~'Making it explicit" has meant, since the beginning of modernity. a turning around of the bodity world-partially through the operalive abilities of the anatomists-in which one is constituted as a virtual sellsurgeon with a radically changed angle on the relationship with one's self-NAtter all, an object becomes comprehensible to us only at an angle of forty five degrees.'" Modernity is the age of anatomy, the age of cuts. of invasions, of penetrations, of implantations in the dark continent. the former lethe. EJ:cerpls from Sphern III: looms

"THE DEMONISM OF THE EXPLICIT IS THE PATH OF THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION. WHAT WAS ONCE IN THE BACKGROUND MOVES INTO THE FOREGROUND; THAT WHICH HAS BEEN UNSPOKEN SINCE ONE CAN REMEMBER SUDDENLY HAS

BEEN BROUGHT FORWARD." In a much later phase. after academic abstractions had pushed the underlying operative conditions of modern knowledge past the point of recognition, philosophers (ould come upon the idea that making things explicit is a discourse operation that first of all concerns the bookkeeping of the accounts of opinion and persuasion of a speaker.' Is thus every person who speaks a speculator in the stock market of statements. and philosophy the market regulalor? The true meaning of explication lies elsewhere: The powerful quality of modern knowledge relations is not the ability to mirror the "subject" within itself or to publicly a((ounl for the reasons for one's opinions; the subject operates on itself and has its own maps of the partially enlightened darkness in front of itself, which sketches out potential points of attack for selfinvasion. One can', be confused by the division of labor between surgeon and non surgeon. He who is a subject afterVesalius inhabits. willingly or not, an autooperative space. Being modern, I can no longer authentically-meaning in cohetencp with the cultural niveou-be myself if I abstract from my potential inner surgeon. When modern people are lying in a deep way, then it is almost always because they are consciously avoiding their autooperable natures.' The principal of saying "no" to operating on the state in which one finds oneself is the seed of bad Romanticism. Our unavoidably imperfect but still expandable ability to grasp our own somatic and psychosemantic interior ground is characteristic of the situation that w~ describe with the worn-out predicate of "modern." We Have Never Been Revolutionary (page. 86-88) With the 20th century having run its course, there is a dawning recognition that it was a mistake to put the term "revolution" at the center of its meaning-just as it was wrong to understand the most extreme ways of thinking during that time as the mirroring of a ",evotutionary" social base. One 51ill gives (omplicit credit to the selfmystification of the actors of the epoch. Whoever spoke of revolution. whether political or cultural. before or after 1917. alway. lei himself be made a fool by a vague melaphor of movement. After all. the impact of the century never lay in reversals. Nowhere did the top and bottom switch places; nothing that was standing on ils head was put on its feet; it would be futile to look for evidence that somewhere something

that was last became first. Nothingwas turned around, nothing was spun in a circle. Instead, everywhere that which was in the background was brought into the foreground; on countless fronts. that which was tatent was encouraged to become manifest. That which was opened up through invasive hypotheses, intelVentions. and probes ended UP in think tanks, in printed text, in business balance sheets. The middle ground was spread out, representational functions proliferated, laws were shuffled , management expanded. the points of attack for actions. production, and publications proliferated. new bureaus shot out of the ground, and the number of career options multiplied by a factor of a thou.and, Something about all of this fit. well with "Paul Valery's malicious thesis that the French and eo ipso, the Moderns. had turned "a revolution" into "a routine~ - The real fundamental term for modernity is not revolution. but eA'PUCQtiO~ExPication is. for our time. the true word for becoming. under which the conventional modes of being can-through drift. simulation, catastrophe. and creative recombinationbe subsumed. Oeleuze must have articulated a related thought when he tried to displace the type of event that is a "revolution" onto the molecular level, in order to avoid the ambivalences of action in relation to "the masses"; it is not the voluminous overturn that counts, but the flowing. the discrete continuation into the next state. the .u.tained night out of the .tatu. quo. In the molecular realm. it is just about the small and the Whal aboullhe In5lde~ smallest maneuvers; everything new that carries on is operative. The visibility of real innovations comes back to the effect of explication-what is then praised as "revolution" is usually only the leftover noise that arises when the event is over. The contemporary age does not turn over objects or themes-it turns them out. It unfolds them. it pull. them to the forefront. it lay. them out on a plane. it forces them to become manifest. it spells them out in a new analytic way and installs them into synthetic routines. It turns suppositions into operations: it gives exact methods to confused tones of expression; it interprets dreams in user's guides; it arms ,essenti~ ment, it lets love play on countless and often newly invented instruments; it wants to know everything about what i. in the background. enfolded. formerly unavailable-at least as much as is needed to make it

available for new acts in the foreground-unfaldings, crackings open. intelVentions, and reformations. It translates the monstrous into the everyday. It invents methods of bringing the unheard of into the register of the real; it create. the button. that allow u.ers to have easy access to what was previously impOSSible. It tells its own: "Dontt despair. What you can't do you will learn." Rightly. ours i. called the technical age. World,50ulln Agony orthe Emergence of Immune Sy.tems (pages 192-201) In the campaign of modernity again.t the .elfevident. that which was once called nature, air, atmosphere, culture, art. and life are put under the pressure of explication. which fundamentally change. the way of being of these "givens." What was once the background of a saturated latency has now been given emphasis as an i ue. and ha. been placed in the category of the pre.ent. the objective. the worked out. the manufactur able. In the forms of terrorism, iconoclasm, and science, three latency~breaking forces were put into place, under whose innuences the data and meaning of the old "Iifeworlds" cave iGrOriSm makes explicit the environment from the angle of its vulnerability; iconoclasm makes explicit culture from the experience of its ability to be parodied; .cience make. explicit primal nature from the point of view of its repUcability through pro.thetic device. and it. ability to be integrated into D,agp,D,uck.anlug.IIPalmt"nl 01 de (omplt"ssion sickness. 1915. Source unknown technical processes; systems theories make explicit societies as structures visible to their visions and btind to their blindnessJ Encompassing relationships that could traditionally be experienced in the form of devotion. participation. and communion free from ulterior motives were placed, through explication, into the objective givens of technical feasibility and execution, without giving people the option to remove themselves from these "circumstances" or "media." Even if mistrust grows. we remain immanent to the suspected. We are damned to being~in, even if the containers and the atmospheres with which we have to surround ourselves can no longer be assumed,like a benevolent nature.' The circumstantial totalities that we cannot leave. but that we al.o can no longer fully trust. have been

calted Umweltenlo (environments) since the beginning of the 19th century, a term that was introduced into the di.course of theoretical biology in 1909 by Jacob von Uexkiill. It i. al.o a term that has .ince pa ed through a long and sometimes meandering career. which appears to be imminent to seemingly self-evident concepts. II With the ob.ervation that life i. alway. already life in an environment-and thus also in a certain sense against this environment and in opposition to many foreign environments-the perpetual crisis of holism begins. The ancient human disposilion to allow oneself to surrender to immediate totalities as to good local gods lost its orienta tiona I value when the environments themselves became construe Is or could be recognized as such. The quasi-religious act of propping oneself up against a surrounding primacy-nature. cosmos, creation, situation. culture, homeland. or whateverwould. in an age of toxins and strategies, have the semblance of a seduction into self-endangerment. The progress of explication forces naivete to have a change of meaning; naivete becomes more conspicuous and even offensive. Now, naive is that which invites sleepwalking in the midst of present dangers. Excerpts from Sph~rn III: FfHlms After the awareness of the first as well as the second greenhouse effect,living and breathing under an open sky can no longer mean what it once did. From the immemorial homeliness of morta l~ in thf Opt" air, an unhomely, unlivable. and unbreathable one has risen. With the appearance of the environmental que~tion. human habitation of its primary milieu has turned out to be problematic. After Pasteur and Koch rttVe~led and substantiated through scientific publications the existence of microbes. human ellistencf has had to understand itself. through explicit measur~s. as in symbiosis with the invisible-and moreover. in prevention and resistance against now precisely positioned microbic competition. From the moment of the massive gas attacks of the Germans. as well as the devastating counterattacks of the Allies in 1915. breathable air 1051 its innOCen c.f; bfginn'ng in 19'9 it could be portioned and given as gifts in thr lorm 01 ready-mades, and from t924 on it could be offered as executionary air for delinquents. U After the synchro nization of national presses during the fir st World War. civil communication was fundamentally compromisedthe

Signs themselves seemed to be stained through their contribution to belligerent deliriums and psvchosemantic arms races; thanks to the critiq~ of reliBion, ideology. and language, vast portions of the Sfmantic environment were demarcated as int~ll f-ttuaIlV unbreathable zones-from that moment on. it would be responsible to only occupy spaces that had been pumped empty by analy.i newlv furnished. and cleared for critically mobile living. Even Mona lisa smiled differently after Marcel Duchamp save her a moustache. In this conle:d,the Question of immune systems ;uio;( ... Wh('n everything could be latently contaminated .lnd poisoned, when everything is potentially deceitful and suspicious. wholeness and being able to be whole can no longer be derived from external contexts. Now, integrity is no longer thought of as something won by putting faith in a beneficial enclosure; instead it comes from the personal contribution of an organism actively tending to delimiting itself from an environment. Thus the thought emerges that life is not so much determined by openness and participation in a whole, bul by self-enclosure and selective refusal to participate. The greater part of the surrounding world is a toxic or meaningless background for the organismthus it arranges itself in a zone of strictly chosen things and signals, which become one's own circle of relevance: in other words, to come into language as "an environment." One could go 50 far as to call this the fundamental thinking of a post-metaphysical or othermetaphysical civilization. Its psycho-social trace is manifested in the shock of naturalism, through which biologically enlightened cultures learned to convert from a phantasmic ethic of universal peaceful coexistence to an ethic of antagonistic protection of interests of finite units-a learning process out of which political systems since Machiavelli have gained manifest advantages. With the catastrophe of passed down culture and its holistic morals, the issue of the century emerges: making immune systems explicit. Clearly, the construction of immunity is an event that is much too broad and contradictory to be described only in medical and biochemical terms. In keeping with its complex nature, components that are political, military. juridical,

security technological. psychosemantic, and even religious contribute to its emergence in the real." The twilight of immunity would determine the intellectual lighting conditions of the 20th century. learning to be suspicious, for which there is no other example in GeistesgeschicMe (the history of ide .. and thought), colors the meaning of everything that was previously called rationality. For Intelligence operating at the forefront of development, the education in noncommitment begins. What about thrlflsldr ? The first manifoldly felt, yet hardly fully grasped consequence of privileging dissociation over participation is the growing pressure of risk. which has, since the beginning of the 20th century. burdened potential global scenarios and their inhabitants. Because humans in the age of background explications pick up ever less untouched a priori information about how and where they should b. (unless they live high in the mountains or are rooted in one of the evermore rare traditional cultures), they are forced to adjust their orientation from being anchored in an implicit background to settling in the explicit. As the self-evident became rare, its role had to be taken over by options. This leads to the age of chosen world images (Welt bilder) and chosen self-images. The long economic cycle of "identities" sets in. Identity is a prosthesis for self-evidence in uncertain terrain. It is fashioned according to both individual and colle clive patterns. The concept of building mental prostheses expresses the insight and circumstance that the production of vital assumptions-life-guiding "hypotheses" (in William James's sense)-is no longer primarily derived from a cultural inheritance, but is instead ever more a matter of new Inventions and constant reformatting. This is where the growing impulse to individualize life forms comes from. Admittedly, as long as I seethe singular fact of my life to be that I am Corsican. Armenian, or Irish Protestant, then modernisms of this kind are none of my business; "11 consider myself an ethnic readymade and prepare myself to appear in the multicultural bazaar. I will even, if must be, protest on the streets for the preservation of the British fox hunt. If I don't Ukethis escape into a type, however,' assure myself of my selrorganismic foundations, on which' will depend from now on ...

This search for inner solidity is not without irony. In the massive interest in biologically grounded self hood. it is precisely the most avid clients of bodily health as a form of identity who are drawn into a paradoxical insecurity that leads to the realization that health, in the fullest sense, does not exist. What one loses sight of in the cult of health is the subversive role that medical research has played in the events of explication. As a consequence of the search for the

"WHEN 500 NEW DISEASES ARE FOUND OR DESCRIBED EVERY YEAR, IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE SAFETY OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE PROUD TOWER OF
CIVILIZATION INCREASES." latest principals of health as the minimal biological requirement of existence. and the discovery and problematization of those finely tuned delicate structures, there had to come that which we have called the " immune system" (in the biochemical sense) for the last tOO years. The forced awareness of background securities al the level ofone's own body opened a layer of regulating mechanisms that, once they appeared, allowed the profound implausibility of biosystemic integrity to come into view forthe first time. With the body's own immune systems having become an issue, the connection of the enlightened individual to the organic requirements of being sick or healthy radically changed. Now one had to recognize that there are occult battles between pathogens and antibodies in the human body, the results of which determine the status of our health. Many biologists describe the somatic self as a [xcerplS from Sph~ru III: Faams MoUCI'\ Duchamp .'io((ofPr,,;( Ai!. 1919. (t) Arli!ot!io Right .. Society lARSI. t~ ... wYorkl ADAGP. P.lri!io/Suc(l!~sion Marccl Ducllolmp. ( ourlt'W Th l' Phil.ldt'lphia MUSt'um of Art: louise o1nd Waite. A.t('n~ b(lrg (OIlf'(lion. 1'} 'jO besieged terrain defended by the body's own border troops with varying success. In contrast to the users of this hawkish terminology is a biological dove faction that paints a less martial image of the events of

immunity; according to this group, the self and the other are so intertwined at a deeper levellhat one is more likely to encourage counterproductIVe effects by using these an-too primitive strategies of marking boundaries. In addition, an intricate game at endocrinological emissions surfaces. one that works in the threshold between subconscious biochemical processes and the experiential surface of the organism . It is not jusl in Iheir intricacy that immune systems confuse the security demands of their owners; they irritate even more through the immanent paradox that their successes. if they turn out to be too thorough. can turn into a cause for their own kind of sickness: The growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the self to be victorious to the death in the fight against the other. n is not by chance that in more fecent definitions of immunity there is a tendency to attribute a much more meaningful role to the presence of the foreign within the self than was provided for in the traditional understandings of identity as a monolithic. closed organism of the self- one could almost speak of a postslructurat turn in biology. In this light. the parrots of antibodies in an organism seem le~!t to be a police force that applies a strict policy against fOffignefs and more a theater troupe that parodies its invaders and acts as their transvestites. But no mallet how one sums up the debates or biologists surrounding the meaning of immunity, whoever is extensively interested in health as the basis for personal lntegrily and identity will soonet or later learn so much about their functional lequirements that the biochemical dimension of immunity as such steps irritatingly out of its latency and grows into one of the most concerning foreground issues. This has consequences for the mental immunity of "enlightened society." It no longer just knows what it knows but must now form an opinion on how it will live wilh its always-arriving state of explication. Moderns are shown with increasing urgency that the progress of knowledge does not consistently translate into analogous advantages for immunity. Knowledge, it turns oul. isn't always power. When, as is true today. sao new diseases are found or described every year, it does not mean that the safety of the inhabilanls of the

proud tower of civilization therefore increases. Revealed knowledge about the security architecture of existence-whether from the fields of medicine. law, or politics- often, because of ils increasing explicitness (and decreased ability to be suppressed), has a destabilizing effect. As a result of the counterproductive effects of advanced explication. latency as such also becomes explicated for its desirable functions. For someone who has come into knowing, it becomes clear only after the lact what he really had by not knowing, Thus it is revealed that pre'enlightened or already ex plica led conditions as such can be relevant immunologically-at least in the sense that residing in what is opened up occaSionally and conditionally allows for a psychic profiting from certain protective funclions 01 not knowing. This had already been recognized by ancient authors like Cicero, who wrote: "Certainly the ignorClnce of future malice is more usefullhan knowledge ofit ." I~ While enlightened consciousness today springs from explicitly imagined possibilities of failureevidence ol~isk in accidents, terrorism, business. cancer and heart attacks/and other scales of precisely enumerable possibilitie~of damage-the unalarmed "THE FURNISHING OF SPACES FOR A HAPPY BEING-IN-ONE'S-SElF IS A PREVENTATIVE MEASURE THAT ANTICIPATES THE PROBABLE DISRUPTIONS OF WEllBEING IN A SHARED REALM." What about the Inside? life. insofar as it is in vague agreement with its background and can be supported by tradition, often still maintains an aura of protected naivet~ . One who Is enlightened smiles at this. but nevertheless, having already lived too long in perpetual alarm, also envies it at timest!he enlightenment of enlightenment becomes a form of management of the collateral damage of knowledge. Due to first stage enlightenment. we are all- to use a phrase of Botho Strauss-"prognostically contaminated."';-J In whIch we live, and move, and have our beIng On Modern Architecture as the Making Explicit of

InhabitatIon (pages 501-507) If one had to find the quickest possible way of explaining what changes the 20th century brought for human being-in-the-world,the bulletin should read: It architecturally, aesthetically, and juridically unfolded existence as in~abitation-or to put it SimPlyGt made dwelling explic~ Modern building disassembled the house. the supplement to nature that makes being human possible. into discrete elements, and reassigned them"; it took the city, which was once at the center of a world planned in a circle around itself. and repOSitioned it so that it became but one position In a network of flows and streams. The analytical "revolution" that constitutes the central nervous system of modernity also infected the architectural shells of human spheres and by establishing a formal alphabet created a new art of synthesis, a modern grammar of generating space. and a changed stale of existing in an artificial milieu. II The phrase spatial revolution, which Carl Schmitt used to describe the political consequences of the transition into the age of domination over alr.I' would be worth reserving for this event if we had not already encouraged abstaining from the use of the word revolution because it is a kinetically deceptive and politically misleading term for processes of explication. What Schmitt was referring to belongs to a complex of phenomena thatl have elsewhere described as the making explicit of air space, whether through gas terrorism, the Air force, air design, or airconditioning. 1o It represents the epitome for types of practices (aerotechnical, artilliary, aviatory, pyrotechniC, photographic, cartographic) that in sum yield what one can call air sovereignty or spatial domination in the third dimension. Its extension into electronic technology produces control over telecommunications. or "ether domination." with the oft noted consequence that space was temporarily moved to the background in favor 01 lime. As to the opinion that "spatial thinking" altogether has since then represented something out of date, only those who allowed themselves to be overly Impressed by analogous declarations that have been circulating since the 19205 can continue to adhere to it. The English author E.M. Forster had alreadY,ln his 1928 posthistorical science fiction story. "The Machine Stops," put the sentence into the mouth of one character: "You know that we have lost the sense of

space. We say 'space is annihilated,' but we have annihilated not space. but the sense thereof."ll This thesis on the primacy of time is one of the rhetorical forms in which intimidation cloaks itself in modernity. Whoever gives in to it risks missing a key event in contemporary thought. which can be placed under the title "the return of space."]s Michel Foucault wrote. "The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space .... The real "spatial revolution" of the 20th century is the explication of interior human habitation or dwelling through machines for living. climactic design, and environmental planning (including the large building forms that I call "collectors"))), as well CIS the exploration of neigh borings with two nonhuman spatial structures that are pre-embedded or adjunct to the human. the cosmic (macro and micro) and the virtual. In order to make explicable the inhabitation of living spaces by humans. no less was required than the inversion of the relationship between foreground and background. To think of it in Heidegger's perspective and put It in his way of speaking: The being in something-at-all had to be out of jOint before It could emphatically be raised to the theme of inhabitation-in the-world. While traditionally living and housing lormed the supportive background of lile processes, in the caustic airof modernity being in a "lifeworld" was part of a greater environmental reversal.uThe selfevidence of living can no longer remain in the background, Even if Eac.rpts from Sph~~s III: Foams we do not usually project houses and apartments into a vacuum, in the future they might .. well be lormulated as explicitly as if they were close relatives of space capsules. Thus the definition or modern architecture emerges: It is the medium in which the ex.plication 01 human inhabitation in manmade interiors is articulated in a process. Accordingly, building has. since the 191h century. represented what was un1i1 1848 caned a "realization of philosophy." To use Heidegger's voice again: It puts into effect the erorterung (discussion; figuratively speaking: demarcating or exploring of a sile) of being. Architecture was not satisfied with bting the more or less artistic handmaiden for meeting the housing needs of people. the roots of which can be traced back to the arrangement of shelters. caves, and

huts. It reformulated the places where the living, resting, and beinginplaces of groups and individuals could happen under conditions 01. high d.g ... of .ellreferentiality. of financial exchange. of legalization, networking. and mobility. We now know that the-Sf places can no longer be thought of as just the here and there of one lifeworld. For a place to exist. it must meet the following conditions: a quantum of enclosed and conditioned air. a site of inherited and updated atmospheres. a node in housed rel ationships. a crossing in a network of datanows. an address fot business initiatives. a niche for self relation ships. OJ base camp for expeditions into the world of work and experience. and a guarantee of a subjective niChe. The further explication advances. the more the construction of apartments resembles the installation of space stations. living itself. and the manufacturing orits containers, becomes a spelling out of all of the dimensions or components that were once primordially connoted on the anthropogenic island; in doing so. the fragmentation 01 completely lumped together living relationships and their rational new formations can be pushed toward an extreme where the absolute human world-jsland is repeated in the form of the apartment for a single resident. Ie is above all the modern mobilization and communication of persons and goods that radically changed the conditions of perception and design for the dwelling human being. Ever since the portion of humanity that was first affected by the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the U.S. worked itself out of an agrarian condition and was converted to a multi-local, semi-nomadic modus vivendi, it became apparent how full of presuppositions the old way of living in villages and domains in the agrarian age was. All knowledge that we carry within ourselves of the habitations and habits of the old fundus reflects a world of residing in homelands, fatherlands, and regions, which was imprinted over the 10,000 year realm of sedentariness, whose formal and material sediment are present in the form of historically referential house. village, and city architectures. This universe belongs to a life that has stopped, which, because of its imprisonment in narrow field markers and languid rhythms. was incapable of giving an adequate account of the motives and

Whal aboollhe Inside' conditions of its living behavior. It never had a sufficient reason, not to mention the resources, ror this . The present contains, in this regard. not just the advantages of explicitness; the angle of reflection has changed draslically enough so Ihal an analylically productive, chronic awareness of questions of inhabitation and habitus has been provoked. One can now freely state that sedentary life was too slow. too much turned inward. and too oriented to a model based on the plant to come to speak of its forms of living with the deterritorialization necessary for theoretical insight. As long as the sedentary world condition stayed in place then (it is Varros's dictum), the land would be of divine origin, whereas the city would be an addition of the human hand that circumscribed the horizon-only those who use the city for a second house and treat their country villas as their real homes could still know what being at home means. The city dweller should believe Ihal he is jusl a Iransposed planl-and planls don'l jusl live in a place. they root themselves (though plants with double root systems seem to be a hybrid). Only since the rise of modern transport conditions- transport understood as the explication of movement or telemobility-did real architectural. technological. and existential alternatives to the post-Neolithic habitus of living emerge. an alternative that finally made it possible 10 bring lighl inlo Ihe elernal half-darkness of sedentariness. Now skepticism can assert itself against everything that sticks to the ground; the term uprooting (or rootlessness) has a light sound to it and can be expressed on demand. Ever since this split. one could say that traditional living in so-called homelands in no way represents the universal ur-form and norm of habitation (of housing oneself), as some Pietists have recently pontificated. It is instead a dogged but surmountable way that humans inhabit space when they are held back by somelhing. The Apartment as Immune Syslem (pages 534-545) There is a form of explicit habitation in which human living is understood as the construction of a shared communal and personal immune system. This quasihygienic dimension of primal existential space formation is best elucidated by an initially implausible sounding sentence in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space: "Ihe wellbeing of allHfe is in ils germ."

This Ihesis becomes acceplable when it is lied 10 Ihe daim Ihallopology should be inlroduced as Ihe base discipline of immunology. The furnishing of spaces for a happy being-in-one's-self is, in this view. a preventative measure that anticipates the probable disruptions of wellbeing in a shared realm. Bachelard's lopophilic onlology is Ihus read as Ihe foundalion of a Iheory of a well-positioned life-or better, as a theory of residence in a eutonic space. We shouldn't be disoriented by Ihe facllhallhis conlradicls crilical conformily. The offensiveness of a doctrine of happy consciousness in the middle of a cult of unhappiness dissolves as soon as one admits that a positive theory of an integral position is in one dimension many times richer than a critical Iheory Ihal invariably lakes form as a symplom of an inability to participate. A theory of an integral position allempls 10 explain Ihal. and why.lhe welfare oflhose living alone in their own spaces. temporally and objectively fakes precedence over estrangement. It elucidates why ressenUment usually reveals itself as a jealousy of place: those who wish for the humiliation of others want to see the devastation of the place in which Ihey would feel whole in Ihemselves. Thus one reaches a dynamic definilion oflhe apartment as a spatial immune system. living is, from an immunological perspective. a measure of defense Ihrough which a zone of well-being is walled off againsl Invaders and other bearers of illness.- All -imm-une syslems go beyond reason in calling upon Iheir righllo defend agaTnst disruptions. If they become contentiou""S, it is only because the di;;osions of zones of shared immunity are not defined 0 priori for cultural beings. Immunity (even if under a different name) is above all and for Ihe mosl pari underslood as a social faclone could go so far as to look for the criteria of social coherence in the automatic participation in an immune commune. Tradillonally. families and dans. and laler also Ihe cily.lhe community of failh.lhe people. Ihe party.lhe corporalion. havewanled 10 qualify as an operatively effective immune system. and forced onto its followers Ihe behavior Ihal conformed 10 Ihe slandards of commonly gained immunity, called "solidarity" since Excerpts from Sp"~rft III: FoDms the 19th century. Whoever steps out of the determined community of immunity and solidarity is traditionally considered a traitor. The scandal of the modern model of

living consists in the fact that it supports the isolation and communication needs of individuals and their life partners. who no longer look for an immunitary ideal in imaginary and real collectives or cosmic totalities hind analogous models for houses. peoples. classes, and states),2' For them. the latent layer of meaning of the Roman expression immunitos is brought to the next level by not collaborating in the community project. Can onelhus perhaps say Ihal modern "sociely" forms a collective of traitors of the collective? If modern housing types are forms of explication of an immunitary quality. could one not then expect that the beginnings of modern architecture would manifest a debate around the correct definition of an immune space? Don'lthe houses of our era have to become material symbols of the struggle between an interest in isolation and a demand for integration? Are the apartments of this time not the manifestations of a civilizational project that brings to the table a new format of immune unities and integral spaces? What is certain is that the link between immunity and community has had to be thought out in a new way as living and working conditions have started moving toward the atomization of individuals living on their own. Just as life in the age or"bare life" is defineod as thesuccessful phase of a (biochemical) immune sysu~m. so "existence" thus describes the successful phase of a one-person household. The Roman juridical expression integrum did not only refer to the unharmed state of natural-born living conditions. which are protected bv law; it atso rl!'f~n~d 10 Ihe idea Ihallhe unharmed slale of Ihe whole "Ih ing" Ihal is a household or a public good was ilself alreadv the result of conflicts and measures. This seemingly willful and. solospeak. heaUhy slale exisls as such only because il profils from Ihe benefit ot living undor Ihe sharp sword of Ihelaw (in differenll~ rms Ihis has been called Ihe dialeclical relalionship b~tw n violence and law). The integrum is an a .. embl~d life or rhymed lola lily in which Ihings belong logolhor. like house and yard. skin and hair. man and mouse.U

"THE MODERN APARTMENT IS A PLACE TO WHICH UNDESIRED GUESTS ALMOST NEVER HAVE

ACCESS. HERE TOXIC PEOPLE HAVE TO STAY OUT. ALONG WITH BAD NEWS:
These double forms evoke the protective blessing that guarantees peace for a collective: they beseech the common roof of immunity that shields the community. The so-called whole thus takes advantage of a bordermaking. assembling. complementing power. Seen from this angle. the right to integrity of the domestic sphere is the source from which the early European culture of law unfolded. The institution of Housherrenrechr(patriarchallaw) Is the latent model for aU immunity-provided that one interprets th is as the decision-making authority over the admitlance or nonadmittance of that which is foreign to one's own realmwhereas this realm always already has to be imagined as an effective immune assemblage of own and notown, lI lmmunity implies a prophylactic violence to prevent a harmful violence-it interiorizes what it wants~ to protect again~ Roumrecht (the right of space). which forms the heart of private law, protects the unified life as the embodiment of the activities of multiple intertwined lives: these should be able to thrive alone in the places where they realize themselves by themselves, which unavoidably means in their own borders. to the exdusion of others. Immunity, as a tocat aseity. stems from the practice of successfully setting limits-it is an emergency of inclusive exclusivity. No universalist propaganda can change this. Even a single god, whether it is Yahweh or Allah or Pater Noster, is first and foremost a big evictor. Even if he sends out invitations to everybody, they are formulated according to rather standoffish conditions. There is no mention of the fact that there is enough room at his house for everybody. There may be many apartments in the house of the Father, but most are empty because they are unaffordable. As the spirit What about the 1n!.lde? 01 immunity. the One who supposedly addresses everybody actually represents the quintessence of selectivity. Intuitions of this type were present for Nietzsche when he presented his friends with a suggestion for formulating a new categorical imperative after the death

of God: 8e a new beginning yourself, by your own power! Be an original game that plays itself. be "a sellrolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea " !:r, With suggestions of this kind. the adjustment from theology to immunology is implicitly complete-and eo ipso the resulting release of finite egoisms. Saying yes to oneself sketches the outline of the real living space of the yessayer, in recognition of the fact thai no sphere of self yes saying can be allencompasslng-and that forthe Other. and others Ihal want themselves. there will always be enough room, even if never in the same exact place. Every loca' "yes" to one's self noats in a foam of analogously sectioned off selfaffirmations. "And he who proclaimeth the Ego wholesome and holy. and s.IHshness blessed. verily. he. the prognosticator. speaketh also what he knoweth." What Nietzsche. who unsuccesslully searched for a place in the world that was atmospherically bearable for himself. does not explain here, of course, is why the empirical place for refurbished and legitimized selfhood is usually the apartment-understood here as an immuno-spatlal self extension of the human who remains happily by himself. That this should be a small room can only at ftrst glance seem surprising. It was Marshall McLuhan who later let slip the secret of living in modern conditions when he deduced It from a fully transformed immune situation. The literate person, according to McLuhan, no longer has the need "to see his hous .. . as a cultllke e.tenslon of his body ..... because he no longer uses the universe. its divine foundation, and its supposedly universal set of rules as a personal immune system. Thus he no longer needs to equate the house with the cosmos; global order and lifestyle part ways. For the resident of the media enhanced house. modernity has replaced the vague psycho semantic protection systems of religious metaphysics with specialized legally and climatically insulated living cells (as well as anonymous systems of solidarity). The modern apartment is a place to which undesired guests almost never have access. Here toxic people have to stay out. along with bad news. if possible. The apartment is developed into an ignorance machine or an integral defense mechanism. In it the basic right to not take note of the outside world finds its architectural support.n The modern apartment is the extension of the body

through which Ihe habitualized care for one'S self and one's own background defensivity is specifically brought to representation. It makes e.plicit the fact that living organisms do not exist without making sure that they are enclosed within themselves. Thus the apart ment wins a share of the core processes of modernization: It articulates the appearance-or the becoming articulate-of immune systems, and at the same time the experiments of self'relating individuals with larger associations (of which even the largest will be much smaller than the "whole"). It materializes the lact that human openness to the world always corresponds to a complementary aversion from it. At night, the hour strikes when the immunitary house reveals its performance as a protector of sleep. In forming a prate clive sleeping environment, the house becomes complicit in the acosmic needs of its residents. It forms an enclave of world less ness in the worlda nightly integrum. secured through roof and wall, door and lock. The house. which is the shell of sleep. delivers the purest evidence of the relationship between immunity and spatial sequestering. It embodies the unity of geometry and life. a topically realized utopiaas a timeless projection of the interior as a stillalways being-inside." It guards the human-forming and regenerating nights in which no plan for the world of daylight is forged. The natural transcendence of night is articulated most closely in the built forms of bedrooms offering deSigned rest environments. Here the skin1 expands into a bed-i- surrounded by a room-' in a housel. The puresl sleep is one in an acosmic onion. In the house of nighl, the houseless are accommodated: those of us who are "released" also find here another umbrella over our heads-an umbrella that we don't have to wish, for that moment. to have poked through with holes and opened to the outside. ' Because nest formations" in these four walls that are called one's own neither serve the sleep of death nor postulate a flight to heaven. the house that ensures nightly immunity does not make any demands in terms of size. It demands neither a Pharonic pyramid nor the furnish ing of cathedrals. Maybe the " small house," which some contemporary architects are concerning themselves with .)~ is above all a form of explication of the nightly beingat-home-herein a response of an architecture for historical people to the

ahistoric hut. At the cen ter of the small, immune, acosmic house stands the bed-the Simple technical assistant to sleep that more than anything else has contributed to the humanizing of nights. Thus much supports the idea that living is, in the last instance, the epitome of being able to sleep at one's own place. In this sense the bed is the middle of the world." The bedchamber of real people is not "as Hegel says ... a crystal, in which a dead person resides")': it is also not a gothic tree of life that curves itself up into an " organic excelsior"n; it is the shell of the acosmic at a human scale. In homeless people one can observe how the need for a place to sleep approaches the minimum; a cardboard box over one's head can be enough to meet the requirements of an inviolable space. The expression Is delivered by the most famous among the homeless: "The foxes have holes. and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head."oWhat does this mean? He who is su a spherical hyperimmunity (et non sum solus, quia Poter mecum est)-' can even abstain from the most basic sleeping comfort of God's children; he does not demand his own bed. but the blanket of paradise. When the house acts as a giver of shelter at night, the primal scene of the integrum is lulHlled. Thus il turns out that worldlessness IS a local attribute. Every sleep is the sleep of somebody: e absentmindedness is the absence of a finite sp i Jlt of a section of the world . There is no sleep of the world. because the world has no eyes that it could close as a whole. just as there is no worldhouse 10 which everything could be at home. The guiding hyperbole of classical metaphysics. the suggestion that the cosmos is a house, went out of service with the transition in to explicit living. We recognizelhatthe metaphysical reflex of looking for immunity in the all-inclusive represents a thriftlessness that onlv the poorest, the unhoused and uninsured of antiquity and the middle ages, could afford. Those who are weak live in hyperboles; the strong fill territories and leave them again. Every apartment, as the support point of a finite-being-abletolive, creates exclusivity: every punctual self-yessing produces breakdowns in communication and the its "selfhood, ",.:I and all the same its normal diagnosis.

The crisis of the world-soul passes through housing. Even God cannot. if He is committed to life and not an empty mask of. totality, take in everyone. These .re harsh words for those who romanticize the dissolution of boundaries. Who will hear them? denial of environments. That is its affirmative virtue. Thanks go 10 Simone Boler for checking this translation. Additionol thanks go to Suhrkomp Verlag GmbH & Co .. Frankfurt, for permission to reprint this text.