Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne

The Completeness of the Stars is a collection of astronomical glosses. "Astronoetics" is Blumenberg's ironic response to the question that was repeatedly asked when, at the end of the 1950s, the first false comet, the beeping artificial moon "Sputnik," orbited the Earth and triggered the "Sputnik Shock" in the Western world: And what do we have that is comparable? The texts in this book were created over nearly three decades, as a quiet development of a circumscription of the concept of theory emerging from instrumental powerlessness and the decline of the spectacular: How did one find oneself in this world of worlds and in relation to it? What remained for those left behind in astronautics? Surely not just to make glosses, but that too as a cheerful compensation for the fact that this home did not want to become cozier. Hans Blumenberg.