What is Purgatory?
Dante, Sloterdijk, and Sociality
“Hell is other people,” writes Sartre.
But Peter Sloterdijk writes that for Dante, the presence of others transforms hell (an unspeakable, private pain) into purgatory (a suffering that is shared by a community of the non-blessed).
At a crucial moment in the Inferno (Canto XXXIV), Dante writes, “Try to imagine me there, if you can imagine, me there, deprived of death and life at once.” For Sloterdijk, purgatory is the place where we can say, “I went to hell, reader, and came back.”
So which is it—is hell a social phenomenon or the absence of sociality? We could ask the same about heaven.
If heaven is ineffable, how can it be a site of sociality?
It would seem that purgatory is the only place where we can speak of having been to places that are unspeakable.
For Dante, at any rate, the blessing and curse of purgatory—the human condition—is our ability to speak to others about experiences for which we once had no words. Purgatory is less a place, then a movement: the movement of having returned from heaven and hell to tell the tale.
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