An “anti-orpheus” essay: cosmological perspectivism as a conterpoint to Sloterdijk’s spherology

Abstract

This paper questions the anthropocentrism of Peter Sloterdijk’s “spherology”, with its anthropogenesis as the immunological making of the “house of Being” in which humans break from animal “cage” and build spheres, immunological islands of human coexistence. Orpheus’s myth represents immunology to Sloterdijk: in losing his loved one, Orpheus immunologically rebuilds the supplement, neutralizing the absent ghost as language. One proposes a philosophical experiment, the “Anti-Orpheus”, in which Viveiros de Castro and Tania Stolze Lima’s Cosmological perspectivism, topologically reframed, serves as counterpoint in order to put spherology into perspective, pointing to a variation of inside and outside and to “anthropophagy” as another topological distribution that allows a non-immunological relation with otherness. With this, one points to a ‘spherology from the enemy’s point of view’, i.e. from otherness standpoint, opening ways to modulate spherology and showing it as a diagnosis of the “autoimmunity” of immunological spheres.