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, depr…