Abstract: This essay performs a comparative reading of metaphysical sphericity as totalizing impetus in Peter Sloterdijk's Globes and A. R. Ammons's long poem "Sphere," explicating the thematic and formal significance of orbed reality in Sloterdijk and Ammons as precipitating an objective image of completion and teleological synchronization that, in turn, unfolds a metaphysics of equivalence between subject and object, concept and reality. Historicizing Ammons's poetic optimism in employing the total world picture as signifier of existential co-belonging via Sloterdijk's narrative of modernization helps us understand the poet's unacknowledged reliance on a technocratic, late capitalist worldview, which problematizes his shallow articulation of a multicultural politics. In turn, Ammons's poem presents a needful skepticism toward its own spherical figurality that respond more sensitively to the contemporary dissonance within a "world interior" that Sloterdijk's anthropocentric immunology fails to account for.
Ian Tan (Wed,) studied this question.