What happened in the twentieth century?: towards a critique of extremist reason

When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we see?

Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the 20th century was the age of two devastating world wars, of totalitarian regimes and terrible atrocities like the Holocaust 'the age of extremes', to use Hobsbawm's famous phrase.

But in this book, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that we will never understand the 20th century if we focus on events and ideologies.

Rather, in his view, the predominant motif of the 20th century is what Badiou called 'passion for the real', which manifests itself as the will to actualide the truth directly in the here and now.