In the summer semester of 1988, Peter Sloterdijk held the endowed chair for poetics at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. He naturally started from the characteristics of these poetics lectures, which simultaneously led him to the center of his reflections. "Whoever speaks from this Frankfurt podium usually does not expose themselves, but rather looks back on their history of exposure. One has the word here because one has had it elsewhere before. One had it elsewhere and earlier because one could not refrain from exposing oneself and because one stubbornly insisted on making oneself audible and readable. Here we encounter the guiding motif of these lectures: if there is a common thread in them, it unfolds from the idea that the poetics of exposure must be developed as a poetics of beginnings.".