Birth and Bubbles - Holistic Spaces

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

HUMANISTIC ----------------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group

health services - organisations

... "To the holistic absorption by the One – upon which the success of so many religions and philosophies was premised for centuries – Sloterdijk opposes the proposition of a dyadic theory of intimacy. This is a distinction between an acute appearance of unity, experienced from a cosmic position of being fully contained inside a whole, and an ontological insistence that this position is itself contingent on a constitutive relationality".

"Sloterdijk dedicates the bulk of Bubbles to birth, providing a detailed discussion of intrauterine dwelling, including the sensory presence of liquids, soft bodies, the early experience of spatial boundaries, fluidal communion in the medium of blood, the constitution of an intimate acoustic bipolar sphere and, above all, cohabitation with the placenta, conceived as primal, anonymous companion. Intrauterine space is approached as the most vivid illustration of the spherological principle according to which coexistence precedes essence. At once enclosed and porous, poetic and connected, intrauterine space is the production of a dense and connected ‘two’: ‘What we call ‘mother and child’ in the abbreviated terms of subject-object language are, in their mode of being, only ever poles of a dynamic in-between’ (Bubbles, p320)". ... p.47.

Duclos, V. (2019). Falling into things: Peter Sloterdijk, ontological anthropology in the monstrous. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 95, 37-53. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/715818.