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This paper aims to enquire into the relationship between, on the one hand, the phenomenon of addiction; on the other, the use of psychotropic substances. This enquiry is carried out following Peter Sloterdijk’s (Karlsruhe, 1947) analysis concerning a medial and historical anthropology of the question of ascetic movements and production of ecstasies. This leads us, firstly, to put into question the relationship between use of drugs and issues of addiction within premodern societies. Secondly, to detect other, non-drug-related modes of producing addiction within contemporary socioeconomic system. While drug consumption was formerly an institutionalised vehicle to elicit social synthesis, nowadays it seems like addition has become viral and is encouraged and designed by our own mode of existence.

In the third volume of his Spheres trilogy, Foams, Peter Sloterdijk (Karlsruhe, 1947) develops a topology of the human, namely a theory concerning the fundamental dimensions of the anthropogenesis. These dimensions represent the criteria, provided which the phenomenon of human being is possible. Each of them expresses an aspect of the event of the anthropogenesis and an essential constant of the human condition. The aim of this paper is, firstly, to analyze one of these dimensions, namely the thermotop. This dimension represents the complex of the dynamics, which produce the space of the spoiling, in which the human being can appear. In this context, spoiling means the consequence of the suspension of the environmental selective pressure, in favor of the institution of endogenous criteria of surviving. This circumstance allows highlighting the technical nature of the human being, whose genesis deeply depends on the production of inorganic prosthesis, which shape its psychophysical and behavioral constitution. Secondly, this paper aims to show how this fundamental situation of the human being entails, according to Sloterdijk, the coincidence of its existence and conception conditions. This means, that the human environment represents at the same time the place, in which the human being can exist as such and through which one can properly conceptualize it. This is due to the fact, that the reconstruction of the process of anthropogenesis includes in itself the reconstruction of its own conditions of possibility.

Sloterdijk’s spherology has brought many contributions to contemporary philosophical debate, around themes as space, subject and society. Many roots of these reflections can be found in an earlier text, Der Denker auf der Bühne. Nietzsches Materialismus (1986). In a strict dialogue with Nietzsche’s thought, Sloterdijk envelopes here the relation between bodies, language and subjectivity. The result is a radical deconstruction of the classical metaphysical subject, characterized by selfreflection and personal autonomy, in order to conceive the individual as a point of emergency of different forces and impulses. These are independent and not reducible one to another and crystalize themselves in a totally accidental illusion of autonomy. This theory can also be useful to rethink a possible global ethics, which, according to Sloterdijk, should not be based on the violent imposition of abstract ideals, but it should realize a systemic and complex cooperation between human and nonhuman agents, in order to endure ecologically sustainable life conditions on the earth-system