Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design.

• ContentsI. WORLD OF SOUNDLa musique retrouvée 3Remembrance of Beautiful Politics 15Where Are We When We Hear Music? 27 II. IN THE LIGHTClearing and Illumination. Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism and Politics of Light 49Illumination in the Black Box: On the History of Opacity 61III. DESIGNThe Right Tool for Power: Observations on Design as the Modernization of Competence 83On the Charisma of Symbols 97For a Philosophy of Play 100IV. CITY AND ARCHITECTUREThe City and its Negation: An Outline of Negative Political Theory 113Architects Do Nothing But ‘Inside Theory’: Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Sabine Kraft and Nikolaus Kuhnert 141For a Participatory Architecture - Notes on the Art of Daniel Libeskind with reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry 174V. CONDITIO HUMANAEssay on the Life of the Artist: Heretics *Wastrels* Falls/Cases* Inhabitants 185Confessions of a Loser 192Minima Cosmetica - An Essay on Self-Aggrandizement 197VI. MUSEUMThe Museum: School of Disconcertment 221World Museum and World’s Fair 231VII. ART SYSTEM‘I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself’ 249Art is folding into itself 253Emissaries of Violence - On the Metaphysics of Action Cinema 265Good-For-Nothing Returns Home or The End of an Alibi - and A Theory of the End of Art 280Afterword by Peter Weibel: Sloterdijk and the Question of Aesthetics 304Notes 320 Publication Sources 334

"The Aesthetic Imperative crystalizes and intensifies the already formidable force of Sloterdijk's corpus. By working through the history of philosophy we discover that the bourgeois subject's capacity to discern the beautiful is at once an art of self-formation and a beautiful form of the self. This is not one more book on the relation between art and politics: it redefines the polity as a singular account of a beauty beyond art, and redefines the aesthetic by way of a subjectivity that is on its way to being political."Claire Colebrook, Penn State University