Topologies of Care: From the Clearing to the Park in Peter Sloterdijk

Abstract

This article examines the articulation between biopolitics and zoopolitics in Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy, highlighting the centrality of the concept of anthropotechnics as the key to understanding the genesis of politics and civilization. Based on an ontogenealogy of domestication, the study aims to analyze how paleopolitics, understood as the original matrix of dwelling and co-immunity, allows for a rethinking of politics as the art of cohabitation and care. Methodologically, it develops a theoretical-comparative reading of Sloterdijk's works in dialogue with Heidegger and Luhmann, to reconstruct a genealogy of political space stemming from the spheres of domestication, surveillance, and interfaciality. The results indicate that anthropotechnics offers a post-anthropocentric model of multilateralism, in which care and technique are understood as mediations between the human and the non-human, the symbolic and the material. By investigating the topologies of care in Sloterdijk, the article also proposes a dialogue with the theme of spatial multilateralism, understanding anthropotechnics as a diversified practice of cohabitation and symbolic exchange between human and non-human natures. Furthermore, the reading of paleopolitics as a matrix of co-immunity reveals that every form of dwelling involves a praxis of negotiation among differences—cultural, technical, and environmental—establishing interlocutions and confrontations that configure the different modes of producing the common.