Books
Peter Sloterdijk on the Theory of Color
Francisco de Goya, La condesa de Chinchón, detalle. ©Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
On the mythical path of Goethe, Peter Sloterdijk tries out a theory of color. We have dealt with the German thinker time and again in Arquitectura Viva since 2003, examining his texts on ‘atmoterrorism,’ human domestication, and the rejection of modernity. In 2020 we reviewed The Aesthetic Imperative, where he proposes in fragmented form a philosophy of beauty, and now he weaves many of his artistic or literary intuitions around the color gray, which he associates with the contemporary world.
Tackling chromatic criticism is not an easy task – in the above-mentioned magazine we tried with ‘Color and Crime’ and ‘Color Cultures,’ two synthetic articles, one architectural and the other bibliographic – and Sloterdijk does the same with a text divided into five chapters by four digressions, but in fact he himself is pure digression meandering through the fields of thought, politics, and art. More structured than past books – often collections of conferences or second-hand articles –, but with an arbitrary order that evokes the dispersion of his spheric trilogy, If You Have Never Thought Gray: A Theory of Color (English translation to be released in December 2024) navigates through the chromatic universe building in patches the ‘Farbenlehre’ of the original title...
