Prometheus's Remorse: From the Gift of Fire to Global Arson

The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.

From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their “metabolism with nature.” For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.

But wher...