SPECIAL ISSUEVOLUME THREE ISSUE THREE NOVEMBER 2007 Peter Sloterdijk CULTURAL POLITICS Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the UK Cultural Politics enjoys an agreement with the Chinese journal Cultural Studies, published in Beijing, that allows selected articles to be published in both journals nearly simultaneously, thus furthering intellectual exchange between English and Chinese-speaking academicians and artists. Cultural Politics invites papers comprising a broad range of subjects, methodological approaches, and historical and social events. Such papers may take the form of articles and case studies, review essays, interviews, book reviews, field reports, interpretative critiques and visual essays. Cultural Politics, while embodying the interdisciplinary coverage and discursive critical spirit of contemporary cultural studies, emphasizes how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power. The journal invites articles on: representation and visual culture; modernism and postmodernism; media, film and communications; popular and elite art forms; the politics of production and consumption; language; ethics and religion; desire and psychoanalysis; art and aesthetics; the culture industry; technologies; academics and the academy; cities, architecture and the spatial; global capitalism; Marxism; value and ideology; the military, weaponry and war; power, authority and institutions; global governance and democracy; political parties and social movements; human rights; community and cosmopolitanism; transnational activism and change; the global public sphere; the body; identity and performance; heterosexual, transsexual, lesbian and gay sexualities; race, blackness, whiteness and ethnicity; the social inequalities of the global and the local; patriarchy, feminism and gender studies; postcolonialism; and political activism. Cultural Politics publishes work that analyses how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved. In so doing, the journal supports the innovative study of established, embryonic, marginalised or unexplored regions of cultural politics. Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. Cultural Politics explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. Publishing across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the journal welcomes articles from different political positions, cultural approaches and geographical locations. AIMS AND SCOPE Berg Publishers is a member of CrossRef Cultural Politics is indexed by Baywood’s Abstracts in Anthropology; CSA: British Humanities Index; KG Saur Verlag (Thomson): IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences; LSE: IBSS (International Bibliography of Social Sciences); KG Saur Verlag (Thomson): IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature on Human and Social Sciences; CSA: Sociological Abstracts; and CSA: Worldwide Political Science Abstracts ISSN (print): 1743-2197 ISSN (online): 1751-7435 ©2007 Berg. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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[email protected] BY TELEPHONE +44 (0)1767 604951 BY FAX +44 (0)1767 601640 BY MAIL Berg Publishers C/o Customer Services Turpin Distribution Pegasus Drive Stratton Business Park Biggleswade Bedfordshire SG18 8TQ UK ONLINE http://culturalpolitics.org www.bergpublishers.com 2007: Volume 3 One volume per annum. Three issues per volume. SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME THREE ISSUE THREE NOVEMBER 2007 CONTENTS 275 Critique Beyond Resentment: An Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk’s Jovial Modernity SJOERD VAN TUINEN 307 Living Hot, Thinking Coldly: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk ÉRIC ALLIEZ 327 What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to a Critique of Extremist Reason PETER SLOTERDIJK 357 Interest and Excess of Modern Man’s Radical Mediocrity: Rescaling Sloterdijk’s Grandiose Aesthetic Strategy HENK OOSTERLING 381 FIELD REPORT United Society of Believers CARRIE MOYER Slavoj Zizek, Institute for Social Studies, Slovenia Robert Young, University of Oxford, UK Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia Chris Turner, Independent Scholar and Translator, UK Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick, UK John Street, University of East Anglia, UK Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, USA Alan Sinfield, University of Sussex, UK Andrew Ross, New York University, USA Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney, Australia Mark Poster, University of California, USA Peggy Phelan, Stanford University, USA John O’Neill, York University, Canada Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside, USA Achille Mbembe, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa George Marcus, University of California, USA Katya Mandoki, Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico David Lyon, Queens University, Canada 393 BOOK REVIEW The Global Sphere: Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Globalization LIESBETH NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS and WILLEM SCHINKEL . ISSUE 3 PP 275–306 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. WHERE HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON GILLES DELEUZE’S CONCEPT OF THE “FOLD.” HE IS THE AUTHOR OF PETER SLOTERDIJK – EIN PROFIL (MÜNCHEN: WILHELM FINK VERLAG.2752/175174307X226861 CRITIQUE BEYOND RESENTMENT: AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY .UGENT.BE/~SVTUINEN. I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijk’s development of Ernst Jünger’s critical concept of “mobilization” and show how his engagement with critical theory has gradually transformed from an aesthesis of the event. FOR MORE INFORMATION.” After a general outline of the Sphärenproject. ABSTRACT This essay serves as an introduction both to this special issue and to the works of Peter Sloterdijk. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK SJOERD VAN TUINEN IS JUNIOR RESEARCHER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND MORAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GHENT. SEE: HTTP://USERS. It starts out from the opposition between the critical and the affirmative projects in modern philosophy. It is my intent to demonstrate how Sloterdijk displaces this opposition in favor of what I propose to call a “jovial modernity” and a post-Heideggerian philosophy of Gelassenheit or “relief. 2006). through a Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values” – generosity 275 SJOERD VAN TUINEN CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3. but still all too dominant generation of Frankfurt School theorists. and conceptual athleticism of his works together with his many extra-academic appearance. critical theory.” 1998b. attempt at filling up this lacuna by critically focusing on the significance of Sloterdijk’s work for. von Goethe 276 CULTURAL POLITICS > The completion of the monumental trilogy entitled Sphären (“Spheres. nothing has been translated into English. This special issue hopes to prove that this neglect has been a mistake and makes a modest.SJOERD VAN TUINEN instead of resentment as motivating force of critique – or “retuning” of Heidegger’s concept of the Lichtung. still seems to inform both the realist projects of philosophical critique and the Heideggerian belief in the “Kehre. and Dutch – they have remained largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. contemporary critical theory. scope. and the hypermorality of the last.” the Luhmannian theory of complexity. Thinker on Stage. . 2004) has definitely put the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the map as one of contemporary philosophy’s most provocative and productive thinkers and writers. to the bivalent “passion for the real” that. This is followed by the unraveling of three layers that have constituted the 1999 scandal following Sloterdijk’s reply to Heidegger’s letter On Humanism: Sloterdijk’s actual text on humanism and Bildung in the age of genetic engineering. It is as if it has simply been assumed that after the 1980s – which he had diagnosed in such a playful but merciless way in his Critique of Cynical Reason (1987a[1983]) – had ended so turbulently.” KEYWORDS: megalopsychia. Nietzsche’s Materialism (1990[1986]). into a “poetical” and “global” constructivism. The originality. and notwithstanding the fact that his books have been translated into twenty-seven languages so far – parts of Sphären have already been translated into Italian. posthistory. the complexity of which is a challenge to anyone interested in understanding what it means to do philosophy today. confront us with a genuine philosophical event – a philosophicalliterary experiment in thinking after the structural transformation of the mass-mediatized public sphere. first of all. mobilization. 1999. French. despite all that has happened in the twentieth century. complexity Mehr Licht! J. Since his study of the early work of Nietzsche. and overdue. mediality.1 for example as a host of a philosophical talk show on German television. Spanish. Yet surprisingly. I draw some political conclusions by opposing another source of inspiration for Sloterdijk’s “joviality. Finally. his later work had lost connection with the present. the scandal and the mass-medialization of philosophical critique. humanism.W. diagnosing its critical self-consciousness as cynical. Pragmatic paradoxes and aporias have become the modus operandi of contemporary politicians and postenlightened philosophers alike. first of all understood as an experience of relief. then the success of enlightening and consciousness-raising critical interventions has led us to a premature resignation in the face of an overwhelming cynicism. it is now a matter of provoking it” (2000: 62–3). philosophical critique has become part of the same “alarm economy” and “textbook gothic” as that which dominates massmedial rationality. almost immediately became the best-selling philosophy book ever in postwar Germany. Adorno) and an “intersubjective idealism” (2001a: 307) in those of second generation ones (e. In short. CULTURAL POLITICS 1. The Enlightenment is blinded by its own light: a collective “realism” and an institutionalized “rationalism” have led to an exhausting self-preservation that leaves all idealistic or utopian critique in its wake. It is a book which perfectly catches the disillusioned spirit of its age. less compelling ways of relating to rationalism and even a “refusal of the slavery of self-preservation” (2001a: 334) then become possible. In the Critique of Cynical Reason. Heinrich Heine. From the perspective of their performative Outside.AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY 277 With over 70.) and “a priori pain” (1987a: xxxiii) in the later works of first generation Frankfurt School theorists (e. Sloterdijk’s kynical text is an extensive “performance” specific to its argument and inspired by a “critical existentialism of satirical consciousness” (1987a: 535): a self-confident. watchful miming of critique and a “bodily” disclosure of truth that ultimately “gives” or “provokes” a living stage on which are comprehensible.000 copies sold within the first year of its appearance. and Nietzsche. the discourses of abstract critique and rationalist idealizations (1988: 20).” as much later Badiou and Žižek would also argue. The problem is that modern debunking and critique have only given us better insight into the misery of our situation.”2 If the twentieth century was marked by our “passion for the Real. As a consequence. Habermas) – has converged despite itself with what used to be called a conservative standpoint.g. Sloterdijk’s debut. JOVIAL MODERNITY .3 And though he later calls his initial strategy “a romanticism of dissidence. At worst. Sloterdijk draws on diverse sources to propose alternative modes of enlightenment. the disillusioned discourse of critical theorists – Sloterdijk primarily refers to an “aesthetical idealism” (2001b: 235ff. without providing the means for improving it. Critique of Cynical Reason. Throughout his work. that is as “enlightened false consciousness.” the frivolous antiidealism that he adopts from such vitalists as Diogenes. he recognizes such an alternative in “kynicism.g.” the malicious sense of irony and “compromising” thought of the kynical thinkers will remain central to his work: “Philosophers have only differently flattered society. but only secondarily. 267). or of self versus world. Bergson. It is they who have set the coordinates for the return of philosophical trust in the world and it is among these that we must situate Sloterdijk.). with most modern grand narratives is not that they are too grand.278 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN One leitmotiv that connects Sloterdijk’s early critique with “the critique of political kinetics” in Eurotaoismus. with the “critique of extremist reason” included in this issue. which for Sloterdijk. namely to combine the antique “ontological dogma that all that is. and exacting conceptual work. For Sloterdijk.” and with “deconstructivism. The problem. finally. in short. thinking” (1998b: 13. 363).). whose unreserved gesture of “self-publicizing”5 had first broken the philosopher’s devil’s circle of resentment. there has been a gap in philosophy between critical and affirmative projects. adopted from Nietzsche. It is only with Nietzschean thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze that philosophical critique has attempted to become affirmative again. but rather that they are “not grand enough” (2005: 14). cannot be the locus of progressivity (1987b: 146. depressing. Sloterdijk explicitly contrasts his “exaggerated theory” with the tradition of “critical theory. If in antiquity theoretical contemplation was a “technique of happiness” or relaxation exercise for the soul in joviality – the stretching of the soul into a kind of free-floating intelligence or pure contemplation – then in modernity theory it has reached its critical phase and become a question of down-to-earth. is good” with the critical moment of Enlightenment in what one could call a “jovial” modernism (ibid. and critique. idealism. Generosity is what is common both to Diogenes’ deliberately compromising antiphilosophy and Aristotle’s megalopsychia.” understood as the “exaggeration of understatement” (2001b: 235ff. embodied by Nietzsche.6 the greatness of soul or magnanimity which is renewed in the philosophical extravagance of Sloterdijk’s magnum opus. In Selbstversuch (“Self-Experiment. the concept of joviality has a similar meaning to that of generosity.” 1996).. Oosterling in this issue.. p. The first consist of the major academic project of philosophical “reflection” and an ever-shrinking concept of truth. 2006: 291f. . 2001a: 341ff. Therefore. it is connected to a “hyperbolical reason” which serves to overcome postmetaphysical philosophical and nonphilosophical “mediocrity” (2001b: 27ff. Sphären. is the Nietzschean attempt at subjecting post-Kantian critique to a more radical or total critique in the name of a positive conception of life. and Heidegger.). he explains how he seeks the impossible.” understood as an “exercise in understatement. “exaggerating helps us to reevaluate the given that is the result of the canonization of exclusive.: 39ff. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (1989) and. the second consist of a comparatively minor and even subversive conception of philosophy as creativity. Repeatedly. contrary to the Marxist tradition.4 Ever since Kant. 7 Just as Zarathustra’s schenkende Tugend can only be understood beyond the binary logic of giving and taking. dichotomous. ” which is central both to his early works. discourse-archeology. economics. so Sloterdijk translates existentialism. archives. and media (many of his books are strewn with illustrations. ethnology. such as the work of Paul Virilio. its nonacademic “hybris” (2004: 865) has more in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia than with the Critique of Pure Reason. and a loss of critical overview. he presents a “wild philosophy” or “neosynthetic system” to seduce or force the reader toward insights into “great cohesions” and “grand associations” (2001a: 30). science and mythology. This allows us to explicate several crucial aspects of the theoretical background to the essay by Sloterdijk and to situate the interview with Éric Alliez which precedes it. whose post-Heideggerian approach to technological mobilization is naturally very close to that of Sloterdijk and yet revealingly different. paleoanthropology. Indian philosophy. It is an answer that follows directly from recent books such as Sphären and Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005). contributing to a plastic or material argumentation). just as recent French philosophy developed substantially as a translation of a German phenomenological heritage. whose “extremist” – according to Sloterdijk’s analysis of CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . Still. and to contrast it with other critical paradigms. In other words. It also helps us to trace some important influences in his work. or Being and Event. maybe. systems theory. Being and Time. In the face of a culture of “unbridled analysis” (1987b: 13).279 What strikes the reader immediately is his “Frenchness”: he demands from his reader an undogmatic and generous conception of philosophy and a readiness to apply the classic distinction between form and content in a dynamic way. in which he implicitly distances himself from earlier strategies. The theoretical resources used are extremely diverse and range from psychoanalysis and constructivist philosophy to theology. His texts strike a delicate balance between philosophy and poetics. new complexities. with the aim of overcoming the perversions of analytical spirit or the resignation of philosophical critique to counterfactualism and abstractions in the face of complex reality. and (de-)constructivism back into something absolutely singular and. subtle abstractions and banal jokes. and cybernetics. architectural theory. in Sloterdijk’s view. pop culture. and Alain Badiou. I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijk’s philosophical quest for alternative modes of enlightenment by tracing the development of the critical concept of “mobilization. and his recent works.” So how can modern philosophy. medicine. especially Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemäische Abrüstung (“Copernican Mobilization and Ptolemaic Disarmament. such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. In fact. after starting with a general outline of the Sphärenproject. his discourse remains profoundly independent. “German. structuralism. media theory. Below. His method is the juxtaposed sampling of diverse discourses.” 1987b) and Eurotaoismus. have access to joviality? The essay included in this special issue gives the reader an indication of his current answer. ”8 or helps toward representation. ibid. “the fundamental neurosis of Western culture” (1998b: 85). Man is. SPHERES Sphären is a wilfully megalomaniac. Sphären is an investigation of the “existential” of “ecstatical existence lies an essential tendency towards proximity” (im Dasein liegt eine wesenhafte Tendenz auf Nähe. the mediological strategies of the apostles.” 2001a: 137). and our “egotechnical interior designs” in the age of globalization and information technology. early modern magnetism. subject/object. and always has been. the nautical ecstasies of Columbus and Magellan. twins. ibid. and philosophico-literary performance in which Sloterdijk undertakes the onto-phenomenological task of staging modern man not as an individualized and rationalized being. Blasen (“Bubbles”) is intended to be read as a “microspherological” “medial poetics of existence” (1998b: 81) and mainly consists of a radical critique of subjectivity.: 336) and “being-in is beingwith others” (das In-Sein ist Mit-sein mit Anderen. 280 CULTURAL POLITICS 2. From a Hegelian perspective. ancient macrospherical cosmopolitism. a series of epistemo-ontological scenes on which can be staged these “existential relations” (starke Beziehungen). by supplementing. Yet the main referent is Heidegger.” Throughout. It tries to answer the “anthropological” but explicitly “posthumanist” question of where man is. but as primarily co-existential and sym-pathetic. from a perspective in radical “media theory.” Kant’s extensive definition of space as the possibility of being together with an intensive definition of being together as possibility of space (2004: 307). instead of what he is. theories of angels.: 639). whose existentialist phenomenology of nearness (Nähe) and being-in (In-Sein) offers the basis for a conceptual framework capable of describing man as the product of a permanent “psychotopical tuning. beyond the metaphysical opposition of reality and appearance. according to which the history of the world and the history of the spirit (Geist) converge. archival (it was initially subtitled “an archeology of intimacy. Sphären I. the microspherical dyad in the mother’s womb (the Ursphäre). and doubles. starting from. or friend/enemy (2001b: 172). Sloterdijk “explicitates. it is possible to say that in principle all of man’s productions have been spatial and that the philosophical concept of spirit “from the first time it was used referred to inspired spatial communities (beflügelte Raumgemeinschaften)” (1998b: 19). . first and foremost an inhabitant of “spheres”: intimate virtual “spacings” which are always already implied by classic metaphysical or extensive oppositions such as inside/ outside. Heidegger’s “Turn” and Foucault/Deleuze’s “Outside” are invoked as welcome corrections. Because such a relational “onto-topology” falls outside any established representational logic.SJOERD VAN TUINEN the twentieth century in this issue – “ethics of the real” can without exaggeration be regarded as today’s fashionable strategy of critique that is most diametrically opposed to that of Sloterdijk. to name but a few. and German idealism (mainly Schelling and Hufeland).” an intrauterine symbiosis with the nonself overrules lack in desire with a primary ecstatic “excess” (or affluence – Überfluss): in terms of the connectivity of flows Sloterdijk’s concept of the “sphere” often resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s purely relational concept of the desiring-machine (2004: 687. A typical recurring argument is the critique of the individualist cult of distance and ego-constituting separations in modern psychoanalysis. and messianic-evangelistic ways of thinking an ecstatic and total “inside. An immersive communication with something preobjective is the true precursor of what will later be called reality. Bruno. Sphären is a “diving school” for the “vaults” of “presubjective and preobjective con-subjectivity” and other immersive principles (2001a: 295). Sphären I closes with a “theological propaedeusis. Thus. 2004: 32ff. Like psychoanalysis.). it is spherology’s task to explicitate the tender truths about our atmospherical places of existence (Schaumdeutung.9 This is achieved through a revision of the psychoanalytic doctrine of stages of development. which aims at making manifest unconscious facts (Traumdeutung).” such as those surrounding the placenta. mystical. In the prenatal embeddedness of the “mother–child bi-unity. intrauterine acoustics. the sticky” have on “proud subjectivity” (ibid. 577)). . that the sweet. Mesmer. Sloterdijk describes transitive relations between selves.” based on the doctrines of such authors as John of Damascus. virtual. and through the “subversive effects . rather than reflexive relations of the self.281 but for Sloterdijk they have to be supplemented by a profound theory of intimacy. in which he argues that the so-called “oral stage” is preceded by several preoral stages of development in which the foetus already learns to communicate presubjectively with its environment. But by tracing the “prehistory” of psychoanalysis in the “magical ties” and “magnetic” and “hypnotic” affects and interferences which he finds in the works of Ficino. and ultimately fails to see how a child develops an identity not by recognizing itself at a distance in the mirror but through presubjective resonances.: 92). one can recognize “immune strategies” that serve to preserve some kind of membrane-like “bubble” – transparent.” It is not a positive gynecology because it must do without the analytical means of representational reason and implies the literal immersion of the subject of research into its object: “a bizarre epistemological affair” (1998b: 288). . In the rituals through which cultures less object-oriented than ours have dealt with the loss of the “original companion. Margaret of CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . understood as “a mise-en-abyme in what is closest” (Abgründigkeit im Nächstliegenden). Psychoanalysis misses the significance of “nobjects” (neither subjects nor objects) such as placental blood. and other medial givens. n. Under the banner of a “negative gynecology” he deals with the metaphysical. porous – or interior “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) relieved of an unliveable outside (Umwelt) (2001b: 172). psychoanalytic. It consists of a combination of ontology and optimism.: 410).: 225). essentially historical globalization coincides with the history of imperialist capitalism: the terrestrial exploration of “the last globe” by missionaries.).). It was a “morphological evangelism” based on superlatives. it can also turn against itself10 – and the success of “individual self-assurance in the whole” – though the contemplation of an inclusive whole guarantees a secure position for each of its members. What defines the history of a civilization for Sloterdijk are the metaphysical. It is rationalist because it imagines the unrepresentable and measures the immeasurable. communitarisms. 2005: 13). each of which is a typically Western strategy of relating to and domesticating – both in the sense of taming and also of rendering homely – the global. temples. typical articulations of the human taste for the immeasurable or the whole. which is megalopathia (1993: 28ff. Sloterdijk defines the global as “the monstrous” (das Ungeheure) or the “incommensurable” (das Unverhältnismässige). explorers. and technological attempts at extending a virtual interior community centripetally in an ever-increasing inclusion. Globen (“Globes”) furthers this conceptual study of spherological immune strategies on a macroscale and demonstrates how the world spirit (Weltgeist) has been materialized in “social uteruses” (1999a: 205) in which “a primary animism” of walls. celebrating total inclusion and the impossibility of anything really disappearing (1999a: 117ff. this guarantee becomes untenable if the whole becomes infinite or decentered (ibid. Freud was wrong to . were a kind of “geometry of the immeasurable” combined with “exact optimism” (1999a: 389) which continued to determine the metaphysical tradition until Modernity (ibid. arches. and other defensive structures has provided an experience of interior spaces (ibid. Thus we are no longer dealing with little dyadic bubbles but with holistic globes (derived from the Greek sphaira). of “inter-intelligence” and “perichoretical forms of sociality” across a whole “spectrum of communes.: 132). the aim of which is to offer a “truly philosophical” theory of globalization (2005: 18ff.. 1994: 380f. He distinguishes three great historical globalizations. In this context.” defining its limits through the tension between immunity and community – though communal life offers a vital protection against an outside. and Shihabuddin Yahya Sohravardi. a “monstrodicy” (2004: 870): the great Parmenidean and Platonic contemplations of the whole.). Sphären II. The first strategy is static and primarily metaphysical or cosmological.282 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN Porete. 1999a: 303. 1999: 47ff. The second.. and colonizers. putting everything that is in an “adequate” proportion to the rest (1989: 257. sociopolitical. Sphären II offers a “critique of round reason. and communisms – from the communion sanctorum to [Marshall McLuhan’s neo-Catholic vision of] a homogeneous global state without outside as the ultimate structure of communities” (1998b: 639). The globe is the main “formal concept” of an extensive morphology of anthropological and cultural history (1998b: 78). the summum bonum. but nonetheless still lives in the luxurious position of excluding the Other from the privacy of his “apartment. Accordingly. Yet this development. Following the vitalist Jakob von CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . and scales. 2005: 234ff. “The most important fact of modernity is not that the earth orbits the sun. and should at least be supplemented by a monadological understanding of “agglomerations and conglomerations of foams” according to which “every thing is a society. this history of globalization began with the discoveries of Magellan and Columbus and was completed when the first worldwide currency was established with the gold parity between the US dollar and the British pound-sterling in 1944 and our first sight of the globe in its entirety from outer space in 1969 – “the completion of the age of the world picture” (2001b: 370f. a substance of an almost completely “accidental” and “connective” structure. transport. but that money orbits the earth” (2005: 79).” “posthistorical” situation better described as a hybrid complexity of spheres of various forms.). (dis-)connections.11 Second.: 257).” For example Sloterdijk argues that the concept of society is no longer of any use to describe the social scenes where social cohesion is constituted (2004: 261ff). following the death of God and the disappearance of a global center of power. has in fact put an end to the age of global holisms and replaced it with an “amorphous. to describe an unlimited multiplicity of virtual worlds without a central gravitational pole. the scene of modern representative democracy – “the social” – was never more than “an autogenous illusion. Schäume (“Foams”) Sloterdijk uses the physical and mythopoetic metaphor of foam. In Sphären III.” even if there is no symbolically mediated communication (2004: 296). The third globalization is what most of us have become used to understanding by this term and refers to the advent of high-speed orbiting around the planet of networked information. the metaphor of foams serves to supplement the more common but “anorectic” notion of network. and economic systems. taking into account not only the virtual connections between local spheres but also the primary expansiveness of such intensive “spacings” (Verräumlichungen) (ibid. this metaphor indexes the “co-fragility” and “co-isolation” of life in a “world of simultaneity” (1999a: 49f) where everybody is everybody else’s neighbor. First. or theories of the social contract or the social organism. Instead of established sociological categories. he prefers Gabriel Tarde’s recently rediscovered mimetological microsociology: a neo-Leibnizean attempt to generalize the concept of imitation in terms of monadological associations so as to describe all empirical facts as states of coexistence. In following Sloterdijk’s view.283 depict the Copernican revolution as a humble lesson in the human condition. In fact. it meant the start of a long and dynamic history of entrepreneurial “deterritorializations” of productive energies from the abstract and ideal toward “reterritorializations” on the concrete and interesting..” a society in the mirror. : 885) that explores wealth as a “source of ethos” (ibid.: 833ff. the vitalist or “biophilosophical” project of Sphären turns out to be a “universal history of generosity” (ibid. the history of Enlightenment is told not only in terms of a metaphysics of knowledge and light. ostentatiously manifests its exclusive structure through the utter boredom of the Western(ized) middle class. If a philosophical critique is still necessary today. Thus.” a capacity of “self-defense through creativity” (ibid. but also as a universal acceleration.” Ernst Jünger. Progress is nothing but movement for the sake of movement and toward more movement. But. an enormous greenhouse which. Sloterdijk sketches an image of modernity as the process of a “planetary mobilization” that lends truth to its military connotations and dialectics.). therefore. third. always more likely to respond to a summons to action. contrary to Hardt and Negri’s analysis of a biopolitical Empire without transcending Outside. Freedom of movement has served as the basis of our autonomy ever since the days of the mechanization of the world picture. Sloterdijk extensively exploits the frivolity of the metaphor of foam to develop an interpretation of Enlightenment as “upswing and indulgence” (Auftrieb und Verwöhnung).). 284 CULTURAL POLITICS 3. it will be a “critique of pure mood” (Kritik der reinen Laune) (ibid. It closes with a discussion of the existential qualities of the superfluous in terms of “surpluses of vigilance” – “declining birth rates. led by a kinetic utopia in which we will be delivered from any direct confrontation with the real. Borrowing a concept from the German writer and “eroticist of steel.12 Its inhabitants live in a security which can already be recognized in monospherical Christian metaphysics. but which has now found its secular form in the social security system and the welfare state. CRITICAL THEORY OF MOBILIZATION Already in Sloterdijk’s work in the 1980s. one can say that the medium – for example communication at the speed of light – has become the message and that the . Sloterdijk stresses the “asymmetric” creativity and “incompressibility” of life (2005: 391–412). a becoming lighter. We are constantly mobilizing further. who used the same metaphor for a pluralistic ontology according to which humans are creatures equipped with a “primary expansive capacity. Therefore.: 250–55). in fact.: 685) and constructs a language for a “new empiricism” of those medial givens and light “things” that volatilize immediately when approached with the heavy instruments of a science of solids or a rationalist critique.: 671ff.SJOERD VAN TUINEN Uexküll. this kinetic utopianism has led us to equate the means – acceleration – with the end – autonomy.). In retrospect. Posthistory sets in after the crystallization of our carefully designed lives in the comfort of the “World Interior” (Sloterdijk’s Rilkean metaphor for the West) of capital or “Empire” (2004: 801ff.” “increases of productivity” and “victimological luxury” – that bear witness to an unprecedented “luxury of reflection” (ibid. those specialists in cynical reasoning and the most mobile offshoot of the military. people. precisely because of the conditions and effects of the installation” (1989: 45). the unbridled exploration of the “pure Outside” (1999a: 932ff.285 classic humanist subject has disappeared in favor of an increasingly “hardened” or “steeled” subjectivity.). both as executioners and victims of mobilization. militaristic. The first is the Post-Copernican mobilizing movement which still characterizes much of twentieth-century avant-gardism and which consists in the declaration of war by the acting subject against everything that seems naturally given in a premodern way (1987b: 59ff. its most exemplary philosophical expression can be found in the work of Heidegger.). in the end. leading Sloterdijk to the observation that “in fact there has never been a Frankfurt critical theory.” This second moment of critique is expressed in a “tired” nihilism which has abandoned all faith in progressivity in favor of a passive “anything goes” and a “postmodern” playing with the old. A modern “progressive” ethical impulse such as communicational transparency is always kinetic and. where it is demonstrated how capital mobilizes all traditional relations that resist the unchaining of the industrial production process. are still the best safeguard against the threat of arms. and criticizes our “physics of freedom” (ibid. Modernity is the neurotic “installing of a continuing growth of potential of movement. which displays an accelerated passion for catastrophe. experience their dominant form of life as something heading in the wrong direction. Most forms of Critical Theory form part of this self-suffocating project of “Copernican mobilization. in their capacity as wrongdoers they recognize their capacity to agree with these misguided trends. and how it consequently “makes everything that stands and that is solid melt into air” (1989: 66.) is unavoidably followed by a “total dizziness” and a withdrawing into “Ptolemaic disarmament. Simultaneously. “In the world’s actual course. According to Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemäische Abrüstung we can distinguish three kinds of critique in historical Enlightenment. but only a Freiburg one” (1989: 143). up to the point of complete identification” (1989: 12). 2004: 851). CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . despite our cynical compliance with almost every increase in pace. For Sloterdijk. we experience a strange kind of discontent. the secret services. Continuing Heidegger’s critique of the epoch of modern technology. Even now that the arms race of the Cold War is no longer an issue.: 28) as a nihilism that takes the form of the “installation” (Ge-stell) of the world by its subjects and their will to power over the world around us. the emancipation of the subjective and the aggressive stance toward all “matters of course” (1987b: 59ff. And of course the finest example of offensive kinetic nihilism can already be found in the Communist Manifesto of 1847. according to Sloterdijk. That is why. Sloterdijk declares himself a Left Heideggerian.e. However. in order to keep up positions that make themselves impossible and progressively untenable.” i. created through crisis.. the little speed merchant that. rushing past us and. It does not consist in the sublation of the opposition between Modernity and its postmodern negation in what would again be a Post-Copernican progressivity.286 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN which is characterized by disinterested yielding or releasement (Gelassenheit) and an inveterate fear of technology in the face of a monstrosity from which “only a God can still save us” (Der Spiegel. In fact. it is no longer a plausible position today... the bankruptcy of historicism was already evident in Nietzsche’s “Moment” (Sloterdijk 1989: 165ff. Sloterdijk concentrates on the “accident” that every technological development inherently produces. 23/1976: 193ff. Sloterdijk goes so far as to claim that the contemporary “way of critique leads to the critique of the way” (ibid. 2001a: 330f. At stake is a “critique of eschatological reason” (ibid. this aesthetics of the “event” will remain the paradigm for critique. that other theorist of military accelerations.: 246). dashes into the unwanted. Contrary to the dialectical cynicism of Critical Theory. Much like Virilio.. because..” understood not phenomenologically as a backing out before the phenomena into idle vacuity. In fact. and thus goes beyond the division between the logical and the aesthetic.: 267). transgressing all frontiers.: 65ff. if in the first half of the twentieth century the reasons for withdrawing into inactivity and nineteenth-century pessimism were obvious. 1987b: 63ff. it focuses its attention on the small kinetic excess that is always present. but as receiving its impulse for activity only from “the things themselves” and from “being embedded in the actual (wirkliche) world” (1987b: 81. projecting. This is alluded to in the title of Eurotaoism. is strongly informed by a non-European. of an evolutionary slowdown of false actions of mobilization” (1989: 76f. 2001b: 16) and serves an “enlightenment of human movements through a wakeful or vigilant being-here-and-now and being-in” (1987b: 124ff.). 1989: 148f. 2001b: 53. Throughout his works. The critical potential of the accidental.).. 227). In his early works. it implies a comprehensive consciousness of movement within the movement of critique.: 239) or a “posthistorical principle of reality” (ibid. a book that. However. however. 1988: 22. Rather satirically. marking a third reflective movement that is first and foremost an aesthesis of “events. like the pantomimical critique of cynicism. but rather in an “immediate relation to the over-complex” (2001a: 28). 2006: 44ff.” which returns what was excluded at the outset of modern reflection – “the interested. prejudiced. Sloterdijk’s early critique of political kinetics lays the emphasis on “the possibility.). aesthetic judgement is inseparable from theoretical and practical reason. It is an aesthetic reflection. Asian type of . immersive factor” (ibid.). like all his work. Sloterdijk explains this third kind of critique not so much in terms of Copernican creativity as of a “participating wakefulness. 2001a: 105). because it functions as their critical “physiognomy” (1987a: 139ff. cannot be sufficiently distinguished from a (young) Hegelian appropriation of the negative. is particularly revealing. if it shall exist. 2001a: 350. “A philosophical kinetics should demonstrate how the finest branchings of our thought and feeling are determined by the experience of the internal combustion engine and the reactor” (2001a: 322). a rational mechanism that transforms fuels into subjective action – the French word for petrol. 2005: 99).) – paradoxically it is exactly this will to dissipate in the welfare states of the second half of the twentieth century which might lead us to more resilient forms of enlightenment. Motors are the perfect slaves and ever since the Industrial Revolution – revolutions being the “motor principle of the world process” (1987b: 123) – freedom has been defined in terms of energetic rules. Lao Tzu taught how to live within the stream of events as a continuous process of differentiation emanating from one energetic principle. Sloterdijk arrives at a similar conclusion in his recent books. We can thus recognize a Taoist critique in the affirmative point of view from which there is ultimately nothing to criticize. The process of subjectivation is not so much a becoming an agent of self-control as it is the “armoring and disinhibiting (Enthemmung) of the acting self” toward a transcending Outside. But despite his earlier interpretations of the dangerous explosiveness of mobilization – in the Critique of Cynical Reason the bomb is bluntly declared the telos of modern subjectivity14 – Sloterdijk does not become gloomy about the future.). the process by which given resources can easily be transformed into active energy. will equate with an authentic mysticism” (1989: 274). “being-at-ease-in-movement” (2005: 93. formulated in a post-Heideggerian way. The ideal of Taoism is. Though it is true that in the first half of the twentieth century the will to power which led to the emancipation of the subject turned into the will to detonate for its own sake – and soon. Essential for Modernity is the model of the explosion. even a kind of “hysterization” (2004: 94f). essence. The moral rules of practical reason serve more as an obstacle than as a means.287 criticism of metaphysics and subjectivity. If “the age CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY .13 Concerning the relation between modern subjectivity and offensiveness. 2001b: 29ff. The essence of our subjectivity is the internal combustion engine. The Tao literally means the “Way” or “Road” of the principles that lead to an enlightened existence in which man lives in harmony with his social and cosmic relations. this “romantics of the explosion” will be reinterpreted as a globalized “energetic fascism” (2005: 287ff.” Subjectivity is the “inclination toward an active appropriation of one’s own passivity. Sloterdijk interprets modern philosophy as a kind of human resource management in terms of the modern subject’s “autoconsultation” and “autopersuasion. he foretells. “That’s why a true critical theory.” He illustrates this through the symbiotic relationship between the transcendental subject and his car: a combination of “a powering system of passion-like (later also: interest-like) motives with a Reason-oriented operating system” (1989: 42. described by Dostoyevsky in his Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862) as a modern Baal: a monstrous edifice with a manconsuming structure in which all the demons of the West – the power of money. and intoxicating enjoyments – receive their tribute..). but “no longer vertical. desire. that is of essentially capitalist reterritorializations on the newly discovered monstrous Outside conceived not only as a danger but also as immanentizable locus of utopias. pure movement. 2005: 175ff.” i. we have lifted off from the conditions and oppressions of a first reality into a second world of our own making. must also be understood as the great modern process of the reconstruction of the earth.). despite recent violent attempts to reintroduce history. The historical result of this modern reterritorialization is that. then post-Copernican mobilization. of being collectively at home in a hostile element (1999a: 873ff. or faithful/unfaithful. modern people live in the Crystal Palace.” sky: a carefully calculated conservatory. And economically.e. opportunities. If the Right was . “the interior-principle [has] crossed a critical threshold” (2005: 266). 346).288 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN of world metaphysics is substantially the time of anti-constructivism” (2004: 386). In the West. the giant Victorian exhibition hall for these new technologies dating from 1851. 856ff.” or. and unimaginable seductions (1999a: 809ff. or human park. which is the same as terrestrial globalization. both technologically and economically. to a full technological “explicitation” and the ability of further immunizing and extending our atmospherical lifeworld.” the globalized and continually reterritorializing earth is one world market under an open. in which naturally given forms of scarcity have become indoor affairs and in which “all forms of work.. in other words. Today. Despite “civilizational differences.: 26). their result must be described not only in terms of the final victory of the mobilized subject over his surroundings. real/false. This is the subject of Sloterdijk’s essay in this issue: “how levity has acquired the fundamental position” (p. but rather from “the human condition” to “air conditioning. and expression of those who are caught up in its system have been absorbed in the immanence of its buying power” (2005: 276). These reterritorializations start with the elemental change from being at home in a divinely conditioned world of agrarian regularity to maritime mobility and the so-called “human condition” of “nautical ecstasies. populated by Nietzsche’s Last Men and regulated by universal human rights to a comfortable life of eternal boredom (ibid. but also through the nonmilitaristic terms of “relief” (Entlastung) and “de-scarcification” (Entknappung). The essence of living in wealth is “the critical question” (2004: 687) which takes us beyond existing political and critical categories such as (in-)authentic. Any contemporary practice of critique will have to take into account this radical transformation as a reterritorialization. Technological constructivism has led us not to a dangerous neglect of Being. we now inhabit a “synchronous” world. Technologically.) of the foundations of critique themselves. even an “ungrounding” or “relief” (2001b: 273f. ” Contrary to Heidegger. we should also realize that “the society of the future is condemned to confidence” (2001b: 233).: 495). an analysis of our existence from the perspective of its dissipative beginning as opposed to its end should make it possible for us to avoid further neurotic or hysterical mobilizations. Still primarily aesthetic.) – and to lead the reader through an enormous post-Heideggerian retuning (Umstimmung. then philosophy’s relation to the monstrous must be defined as constructive aesthetic reflection (2004: 811. POST-HEIDEGGERIAN GENEROSITY: NIETZSCHE’S RELIEF .” the primordial and perpetual antigravitational thrust of coming-into-the-world. but it has been immanentized as an “upward abyss (Abgrund nach oben)” (ibid. The monstrous has not disappeared. but because it operates “on the flipside of subjectivity” (2004: 84). as opposed to Heidegger’s Sein-zumTode (Sloterdijk 1989: 151f. 2005: 415). critique has to start from an affirmation of and primary trust in the “luxury” of “the state of having arrived. “isn’t it typical of life in luxury.AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY never interested in mobilizing the foundations of things and thus could not see the change. for whom Nietzsche was the last of the metaphysicians to pose the human subject as the supreme CULTURAL POLITICS 4. 2001a: 16. not because it is the well-founded privilege of an aggressive subject. 2004: 850): a transvaluation of all values in terms of generosity and abundance (Überfluss). has been to affirm this upward abyss – which in earlier works Sloterdijk referred to with Nietzsche’s and then Hannah Arendt’s a-historic concept of “natality.” Both are conservative in so far as they are founded on a suppression of the truth of their own prosperity (2004: 681ff. Contrary to the omnipresent abnegation of the world of its benevolence or the oppressive “denegation of levity” (2004: 696). contrary to today’s “miserabilism. it turns out. This means that. If today what we call globalization is first of all the turning of the earth into a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). Sloterdijk gives an “offensive twist” to Heidegger’s “premodern” interpretation of technology and globalization as “dangerous.” a nonconservative critique starts from generosity. even if it could.”15 Enlightenment is not only “a ludicrous wager on the improbable” (1987b: 126). as Sloterdijk asks through a typical Nietzschean twist. but also through a retrospective revaluation of postCopernican creativity. The ultimate aim of all of spherology.: 690). critique is not only understood in terms of participating observation.). 289 If Sloterdijk’s early concept of critique already differed sharply from that of the Frankfurt School or of Heideggerians. this divergence becomes even more strongly emphasized in Sphären. With an obvious appetite for perversion. Instead of an overly anticipatory closure upon the future that might fall victim to heavy metaphysics. But. It is a “reflexive” constructivism. “the Left wouldn’t want to gain insight. that one is able to avoid the embarrassment of inquiring after one’s origin?” (ibid. ” in which anthropology and phenomenology converge (2004: 709). which turns reflexivity into a mechanism in such a way that both humans and nature now appear as its derived variables (2001b: 218. enframed in a world picture.). but also always already an ecstatic openness to it.290 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN end of the will to power. it was precisely Nietzsche who taught us the “from the outset relieved (freigesprochene) offensivity.). but as events in a dissipative process of production (2004: 214). In Eurotaoism. In today’s “automobilized society. Sloterdijk explains how “postmodern relief”17 depends on “the readiness to convert the proud active phrases of Modernity into passive or impersonal phrases” (1989: 28). there is no contradiction between them in this respect. 1988: 44. 2001b: 197) in the technological and economical levitation (Leichtung. From the perspective of a “theory of constitutive luxury.18 Our lifeworlds are “autogenous.” “stubborn” (1988: 9). Rather. Contrary to Heidegger’s analysis of the poverty of modern subjectivity as the feedback system of technology – where man is not in his “proper” element – Sloterdijk understands cybernetics as the discovery of life beyond property and lack. or “a sensible division of reason between the poles of subject and process” (1990: 89). But instead of his early preference for meditative. 2004: 740f. “kinetic” (1989: 260. This implies a transition in the understanding of the self from “a priori-regulation to a posteriori-regulation” (2004: 870). Despite the apparent difference in appreciation of mobilizing tendencies between Sloterdijk’s early and recent works. There is thus not only a dangerous or harmful side to mobilization. one could qualify them as different interpretations of Gelassenheit.”16 even the “emancipation of the offensive” from the economy of resentment (2005: 121f. but rather are we “borne along” (getragen. 2001b: 29ff. he clearly chooses the latter. because it was the first science to explicitate what could previously only be understood as the intolerable and irrational “scum” of the real: the functioning of information as a third term between subject and object. man’s relation to technology is not so much determined by the instrumentalizing will of a Cartesian subject as by the latter’s immersion in its “own” media. The maturing of the modern sense of abundance is expressed in an ontological constructivism. And in fact. which must be read as the paradoxical translation of Heidegger’s onto-phenomenology into the impersonal systems of cybernetics. intermedial passivity. in the case of their extreme explicitation.” “anthropogenetic islands”: technology-mediated hybrids of world and environment or. a “literal. 1989: 260) of a “kinetic (Umwelt) and gives us access to the “world” (Welt).). more generous option in Sphären. which treats beings not as Bestand.” we are no longer “thrown” (geworfen). and sometimes “historical” and “evolutionary” (2001b: 7) reading of Heidegger’s “clearing” (Lichtung) allows us to understand the great work of installation art called Earth as nothing but our luxuriously furnished house of Being. “absolute islands” such as shopping centers or space . 2001b: 173. 367). Derrida 1979: 109ff.. Going further than Derrida’s ambivalent principle of the coup de don (which he never tired of setting to work. 2001b: 111). any critical analysis of modernity conceived as “the drama of total war” leaves us with the inability to decide whether critique should be slow or fast. all human facts derive from an impersonal production process of creative self-birth.: 23ff. 2001b: 290).”19 However.” where “systems of information transmission have become bombs. In other words it is through “being-in” in an intensive space of comfort through proximity. in an expression Sloterdijk has adopted from Ernst Bloch. The human taste for the monstrous. self-extension. self-extroversion. Since progress and progressivism have always been inherently linked to movement and critique. 2004: 194). that man is able to encounter Being and to ecstatically reterritorialize on the monstrous (1999a: 42. 1996: 35ff. in itself. of “a political constructivism beyond the alternative of conservative and progressive” (1999a: CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . even in his reading of Nietzsche.) must be explained as a consequence of their contrasting positions relative to Nietzsche. in short.” and in which we are handed over to the “lawlessness” of globalization (ibid.) and “the customary discourses of gifts and poisons.291 stations in which nature has been explicitated completely as the not-outside (2004: 490ff. Hence Derrida’s aporia of speed. Paul Virilio. We live in the ill-fated “society of the accident.). Accordingly. and self-immunization (“spheropoièsis”) which isolates and distances a human sphere from its natural “environment” and allows for an excessive “world” and “the capacity for creating natures” (2001b: 300) to appear. ever since his “antiphilosophical” kynicism. 2001b: 197). 264. A brief contrast between this account of mobilization from the perspective of “historical anthropology” (2001b: 44) and that other “left-Heideggerian” (Kellner 2000) theorist of accelerated Modernity. already “miserabilistic” and conservative choice. as a staunch humanist and self-acknowledged Catholic. focuses almost completely on the self-destructive tendencies of the “global suicidal state” into which our Welfare State has mutated (2002: 37). They are the principles of a self-praise of life beyond the constraints of two-valued logic and the inescapability of lack.) and in which “Being” or “natura naturans becomes a cultural drama” (1989: 154f. first formulated in No Apocalypse. Not Now (1984). 2001a: 243f. is in essence already the generous expression of a primary relief. or. self-organization. Virilio. Sloterdijk has tried to overcome the undecidability of this. is exemplary of the critical potential of these principles of generosity and relief. applies: “the critical slowdown may thus be as critical as the critical acceleration.” both natality and generosity point toward a practice of production after the reactionary chain of resentment has been broken (2001c: 48. The rarity of Sloterdijk’s reference to his colleague (exceptions are 1989: 85.. the experimentum mundi (1996: 65. It is no coincidence that inhabiting (wohnen) the “house of Being” and indulgence (Verwöhnung) are etymologically related (1989: 180. Heidegger is not critical enough of the disciplining and domesticating function of language as the house of Being. As a consequence.: 309). thus he implicitly adopts Derrida’s critique that in Heidegger writing is subordinate to the direct presence of Being through human speech (Derrida 1997: 18ff. n. HUMANISM: A CRITICAL CASE Nietzsche also constituted the stumbling block that led to the affair with which it has become customary to associate Sloterdijk’s name ever since the summer of 1999. while for Virilio war and the military-industrial complex are the driving forces behind a linearly developing history. To think after Nietzsche means not only to avoid describing modernity as a history of escalation. in which Sloterdijk offers a critique of Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung in terms of biopolitics and the political meaning of writing.). Sloterdijk argues that the mediality of language itself remains unthought. they are the only affirmative attitudes toward the future: “what Nietzsche called the innocence of becoming is essentially the innocence of dissipation and eo ipso the innocence of enrichment” (2001c: 51.). But this shepherding not only sets man free from his enslavement to the ontic. that of the domestication and breeding of humans through “biopolitical” technics. Therefore.SJOERD VAN TUINEN 410. the humanitas of man is directly related to his ecstatic and decentered residence in language through which he shepherds the truth of Being. but also keeps him “in servitude” (hörig) to prescribed messages from Being. 292 CULTURAL POLITICS 5.20 As such. 2001b: 302. 173). that of “friendship-constituting telecommunication in the medium of writing” (2001a: 60. without critically differentiating between the “domesticating. and. Both projects are carried out in “false innocence” concerning the presupposed knowledge of what it is to be human. The occasion for Habermas and several journalists to ring the alarm bell was a lecture given by Sloterdijk at an international conference on “Philosophy after Heidegger” in July entitled Regeln für den Menschenpark (“Prescriptions21 for the Human Park”). . Sloterdijk defines the essence and function of humanism through two intrinsically related projects: first. In his “pastoral discourse” (Sloterdijk 2001b: 127). a knowledge which is in fact the result of a century-old “media conflict” (ibid. Nietzsche is the philosophical mark of a caesura in history between a time of an economy of guilt and resentment and a time of generosity and openheartedness. 324). second. 2001b: 100ff. despite himself. this conflict remains unthought. Even in Heidegger’s critique of the humanist tradition. Heidegger occupies a humanist position.: 316ff.” and the potentially dangerous “disinhibiting” tendencies of this “communication” (ibid.” “emancipating.22 It consists of a rather “untimely” philosophicoliterary reply to Heidegger’s letter On Humanism (1946). but also to get out of a narrative approach to history altogether (2001c: 50).). it is argued that.23 On both issues. which is obeyed as the sole authority. this cannot be so for Sloterdijk. In short. and Heidegger. In the ensuing scandal.: 327).: 227). That this posthumanist mediocrity is becoming more and more compelling. the theorist of genetic engineering in terms of shepherding. but they have also internally eroded the classic strategies of manipulation and their media by exceeding any prescribed. which he calls “anthropotechnics” (ibid. To be sure. many respected academics such as Henri Atlan.: 329) or “homeotechnics” (ibid. weaving. Richard Dworkin. and Ernst Tugendhat also felt the need to react in various other European periodicals without taking the trouble to seriously read or contextualize Sloterdijk’s text.: 329) is so dangerously absent. and therefore posthumanist – mass media. we have to refer for the philosophical genealogy of contemporary technics of writing. idealistic model of the anthropos. In their works we find an understanding of humans as products immanent to an all but harmless production process of self-breeding and self-formation through self-writing. The result was first of all a confirmation of Nietzsche’s prophecies of what it means to do journalism and critique in a time dominated by – increasingly indifference-producing. but also simply the new Nietzsche. they have explicitated a problem that remains the Outside of all classic humanisms. which was never meant for publication but of which pirate copies had been circulated by. the media conflict unavoidably manifests itself again.293 However. Sloterdijk was branded a philosophical parvenu. a cynical ideologist of Grand Politics. is proven by the fact that after the first attacks in Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. and Nietzsche. a popstar of thought. it is ironically rather Heidegger’s first and last metaphysicians – Plato. In short. nonfriendship-constituting. which is more relevant than ever in the context of a posthumanist biopolitical situation that knows no sovereign (ibid. Manfred Frank. the theorist of pastoral power and the Übermensch as the great challenge of writing for the future – to whom. these technics are themselves essentially a product of the humanist biopolitical project of forming human animals into civilized “park animals” through processes of “(se-)lection” and “reading (out)” (ibid. Nietzsche. a facsimile was shown on the premier German television channel ARD on September 20 – with instructions for publishing a number of rather sensational critiques of Sloterdijk’s text about what is for obvious historical reasons such a sensitive subject in Germany. fascistoid breeder of the Übermensch.: 334) and where a “codex for anthropotechnics” (ibid. These “serious” authors agreed on two points. Habermas. with the advent of new media for biopolitical writing such as the Internet and biotechnology. again. In reaction to this exit from humanism through Plato. Despite the fact that it was Heidegger who paved the way for the liberation of writing or poièsis from anthropocentrism. even in philosophy. according to Sloterdijk. Habermas sent a letter to various journalists – of which. and tending. despite his initial denying its existence. namely that Sloterdijk leaves the reader with an uncertainty about what he actually wanted to say and that he had failed to first study the CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . As typical representatives of the silent takeover of philosophy by “professionalized” “ethics. in a judo-like reaction. For many disciples of the Frankfurt School. manifested itself perfectly clearly. that thinking means heaving a sigh of relief” (Sloterdijk 1999b: 35). dead. the sullen old woman. said Heidegger. Sloterdijk therefore proclaims – as in fact he had already done in the Critique of Cynical Reason – the death of Frankfurt Critical Theory: “Critical theory is. indeed all post-Nietzschean critique which intermingles critique and power as the inside and outside of the same democratic process. who is accused of “Jacobinism” and a “social-liberal version of the dictatorship of morality. Humanism as a politics of friendship was supposed to be the exclusive basis of democracy as the rational. rather. now she has passed away completely. false imputation. automatically equates to antidemocratic sophistry and can thus be pilloried. I say. but also to contemplate the end of a hypocrisy. one of which is addressed to the journalist Assheuer. Sloterdijk took the opportunity to demonstrate the “sham-liberal character” of the still highly influential Frankfurt School by creating a “metascandal” through publishing two letters – a decent humanistic practice in itself – in Die Zeit. Sloterdijk’s critical position is founded in the alleviation of the de jure conservatism and miserabilist “progressivism” which . At that time Habermas had already shown that for him any serious critique of humanism was automatically antidemocratic. to take stock. 2000: 14). the critique of humanism.CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN ethical and biological matter of his text.” the “false innocence” of humanism.24 However. THE NEW POLITICS OF COMPLEXITY Ultimately. 294 6. Habermas. when post-Nietzschean philosophy became customarily known as “obscure” and “relativistic. power-free process of reaching intersubjective consensus and it did not allow for such posthumanist approaches to politics in terms of biopower and dissensus. in spite of his being the theorist of democratic dialogue.” they immediately cried fire and quite happily made a grotesque category mistake between ontology and democracy. decided not to enter into one with Sloterdijk but rather excluded him from the outset and chose the path of indirect. whom he sees as typical of journalistic “alarmism.” Combined. We will gather at the grave of an epoch. about which Sloterdijk had warned in his lecture. on this second day of September. At the end of his second letter. She has long since been bedridden.” Yet the affair is most of all instructive in that it is reminiscent of the discussion surrounding Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) and the Habermas–Foucault controversies from the early 1980s. Thinking means thanking. assuming that they had before them an inferior text on moral “rules” instead of a post-Heideggerian meditation on the essence of “prescriptions.” the other to Habermas. But other than what happened in the 1980s. these letters constitute a vehement protest against the progressive convergence of hypermorality and overmediatization (1996: 114. an allusion to Baudrillard’s gauche divine). a feasible future leftism will depend on its potential to create surplus value beyond any price and beyond the burning resentment against property and prosperity (2006: 50ff.” What has taken place is the transition from a “cult of the real” to a “cult of possibility.25 In short. information. an enemy to its own substance” (2002: 49). in the air. his inaugural lecture for the Emmanuel Levinas Chair held in Strasbourg in March 2005.295 cannot handle its de facto state of being-in-the-world. As soon as this is understood. the conditions of “criticism” change dramatically. Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion. of the active conditioning of the new and the immanence of self-expression. and other regenerative fuels that bears the CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY .” Yet he gives this term not a Lacanian but a Heideggerian content: the major event that took place in the twentieth century was a profane and more contemporary version of a Heideggerian Turn (Kehre). based on the conditions of the old and the transcendence of Being over the self. and self-overcoming. Here it is the change of tide in the flows of money. The traditional stance of critical theory toward the new world of “light facts” is articulated.” Sloterdijk adopts Alain Badiou’s characterization of le siècle as marked by a “passion for the real. by Virilio in Ground Zero when he critically describes our world as one “that is resolutely accidental – that is to say. nor through tearfulness or hope” but through “a biopositive. nonillusionary but indecipherable. Earlier he had already defined such a Turn as a “conjunctural” “reversal of currents of mobilization” and an “ontological ebbing of subjectivity” (1989: 199ff. The second option is described by Sloterdijk as “to confess to relief as to an evangelical interval” (2004: 698. that is a change in the meaning and functioning of the real (2001b: 79ff. is attained “neither through hatred of life.). 2001b: 284). In Weltinnenraum he speaks of a “heavenly Left” (himmlische Linke. In more colloquial terms: by focusing on becoming instead of history. it knows that revenge and compensation are impossible (2004: 762). I think that it is through the occurrence of abundance in the modern age that the heavy has turned into appearance – and the “essential” now dwells in lightness. 2005: 413ff. generosity.. reservation of the world” (1988: 94). In reality. To a certain extent we have already answered the question in the title of Sloterdijk’s essay in this issue. because foetal.). Rather. elsewhere of “Nietzsche’s fifth gospel” as another word for “kynicism” (2001c: 47). or as driven by an economy of generosity and dissipation.). I would say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity. in the atmosphere. selfpreservation. the power of critique will depend on whether one conceives of mobilization as driven by an economy of guilt and lack. 1998b: 54. for example. called “What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to a Critique of Extremist Reason. Sloterdijk argues that such theorists practice criticism in the old style in that they “expose” the lightness of appearance in the name of the heaviness of the real.26 Its critical principle. Against this standpoint. both inside and outside philosophy.” and thus to invite. 2001b: 24ff. 1989: 254. p. In Zorn und Zeit. we have also done away with the apparent!”28 Because “the principle of the real” is the principle of “difference” (ibid. In critical philosophy... “the real problem: the problem of the real” (das wirkliche Problem: das Problem des Wirklichen.. Sloterdijk therefore speaks of an “agony of the real” (1985: 210ff. “a political project: grandiose. In his earlier works. and almost explicitly seek – under the banner of a “critique of extremist reason” – a polemical confrontation with such “ethicists of the real” as Žižek or Badiou.. 2006: 292).” This is a particular property of young Hegelian philosophy and radical practices of critique. 50ff.. as first proposed by Nietzsche and Bataille. 2006: 292).” “perseverance. even a postontological relief (1988: 103. 2001b: 78ff.” when everyone wants to be “realistic” and nurtures a mistrust of all appearance (1987a: 22ff.).).” “faith.” . as a “fundamentalism. But though this “humble theory” proceeds through identification with “the dirty work. that is those forms of critique that resist the excessive appropriations of rationalism and more moderate forms of critique: a reasoning which “praises the way downwards because it still expects from it an ascension to the thing itself” (1989: 243. epic and violent” (Badiou 2007: 9) borne by the virtues of “courage. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch (2006) – a genealogy of the revolution based on a general economy of thymos (pride) and rage. 329). 250ff.” and “discipline” (2002: 58ff. 97ff. 1999a: 69f. 2001a: 33f.296 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN potential of a posthistorical. as Badiou puts it. in a time when everybody wants to be “critical.). it is “the catastrophe of the real” that “the true world would be nothing but a theater unmasked as theater” (1987b: 109.27 The aim of his essay is to interpret this change of current in terms of an “apocalypse of the real. again alluding to Baudrillard. the twentiethcentury struggle for the interpretation of the real can hardly be said to have been decided. that traces the concept of revolution back to the hot zone of Augustine’s early Christian theology of history (2006: 44ff.. 260ff.). when he exclaimed that “along with the true world. Rather. or. who figures as “one of the last keepers of the treasure of lost radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (this volume. 1987b: 106) was put on the philosophical agenda by Nietzsche. it heroically assumes all the heaviness of what is low and real. What for Sloterdijk binds Marx and Heidegger together is an “Atlas-complex”: the “postmetaphysical” continuation of the ambition to understand everything under the guise of bearing everything (1988: 115ff.. this is characterized by the attempt to go beyond metaphysics along a path of reasoning which can be understood as “humble theory” (niedere Theorie): “the turn of thinking toward ‘lowlands’ (Niederungen) that richly compensate it for its losses of idealistic elevation. For Sloterdijk.) – Sloterdijk analyzes this postmetaphysical hermeneutics of the real.).” it is the contrary of a prostration of philosophy before nonphilosophical bon sens such as kynicism..: 83. 1988: 73). Yet. 1999: 49f. They depend on a denial of the “break out of modern ‘society’” from the “definitions of reality from the age of material poverty and its spiritual compensation” (2001b: 87ff. of the nonsimple and the nonplain (2004: 877f. 292).).. It depends on a primordial lack in the actual appearance of reality – even if only “formal” as in the case in Badiou’s Platonism – which must be compensated for by “a Realpolitik at any cost” (2006: 225).). And though far less dangerous. it is no coincidence that Sloterdijk depicts Lenin as the father of twentieth-century extremism and Mao as his most excessive inheritor (2006: 231. a reason of composites. 352. 330 in this issue). In a “postparanoid culture of Reason” (2001b: 229). or infrastructure (Unterbau) that both keeps us down and serves as a disinhibiting principle in the name of which offensive action is legitimized (2005: 285. Because our reality of hybrid foams and lightness is more and more determined by the “real existing appearance” (1996: 70) and the “real occurring relief” (2004: 848) that take us beyond the “proletarian or agrarian-pauperistic condition” (ibid.. but a critical theory of the “negentropic”30 factor of “density” (Dichte) which determines the intimate physical and mental traffic. understood as “the organized resistance against thought about the monstrosity of being” (2001b: 290). Sloterdijk argues. Sloterdijk presents himself as a “radical” situationist for whom the denegation of the situational and what Luhmann called the “reduction of complexity” that determined the “age of extremes” is intolerable (2001a 47.. we don’t need a disinhibiting theory. it is a sign of the attempt to be true to the obstinate ambivalence between “agro-imperialistic” and “techno-capitalistic” definitions of the real (2004: 880–85). p.297 a “dismal science” that wavers between resignation and rage (2004: 673).: 273. while for Badiou the defining episode of the twentieth century took place between Lenin and Mao Zedong (Badiou 2007: 11f. 2001b: 80.).29 It is Sloterdijk’s strategy to outdo negativistic and submissive hyperboles with an “emancipated critique of hyperboles” that groundlessly celebrates life: “Only hyperboles help against hyperboles” (2001b: 273f.: 103ff.: 674). 83). today’s “extremist” automobilizations and “holy” accelerations still count on what Hegel called “the monstrous power of the negative” to turn history into an infinite “depository of resentment” (ibid. 723). the hypermoralism with which an individual subject relates directly to the Whole is impossible. among the localities of the CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . n. on the other hand.. 2004: 671ff. Today. In a time marked by a caesura such as ours. A “fairer image of the real” (2006: 353) would demonstrate their nonsituational universalism to be no more than a “sovereign anachronism” (ibid. the reduction of complexity is the congenital defect of philosophy. Another recurring trope that protects us against one-dimensional negativistic superlatives is the oxymoron: the connection of two opposed qualities in one connective speech act. Therefore. It claims the real as a foundation. 261ff.). intercourse (Verkehr). On the one hand.). or in more intimate terms. 171ff. 2006: 74f. and of media against media: (ibid.. according to Sloterdijk.).. complex way of relating to the future as the opposite of a catalogue of miseries. A contemporary philosophical critique should start with “the attempt to image the complex” and save itself from a world “in which only realists have a chance” (2004: 876f. we must not seek a “true” re-turn.). Such inversions are not “countermovements” (ibid. but must start from and remain immanent to real existing. in which revolutions have become chronic and in which we have come to occupy a horizontal in-between (2001b: 42ff. or rather. the “being-in-the-same-boat” – a thoroughly capitalistic model for investment.). cf. and mutually exclusive choices. social. disasters. 2005: 397ff. Heidegger’s vertical kinetics of the Kehre between fallenness (Verfallenheit) and reversion (Umwendung) don’t do justice to the contemporary world. such a critique must be guided by Bismarck’s dictum about politics as “the art of the possible. 1994: 60.” with fifteenth-century Portuguese seafarers – it is Sloterdijk’s argument that we still don’t know what this metaphor means today.. especially because Sloterdijk’s model for this kind of politics is the boat. 1990: 85f. a “grammar of shared situations” and “being-in-the-middle-of-it” should allow for a conception of thinking as the art of finding orientation in a world of complexity (2001a: 351ff. because it is “engaged (verlobt) with the prevailing winds. derived from the public in-between of the being-together of political animals in shared communities.” letting itself be borne unconditionally into the Open. 328f.” Bismarck. multivalent definition of the real in a new “ecology of expression” that is no longer determined by “the resentment of antiquated bivalence against misunderstood polyvalence” (2001b: 223.” and “human resource management. “corporate identity policy.31 In terms of the Kehre and possible changes of current.” that is first found. Ultimately. but extraversions from .298 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN globalization process (1999a: 835. 2004: 411. of capital against capital. this engagement implies a postmonotheistic. 277ff. despite his enormous reactionary legacy. of war against war.). in which there can no longer be revolutions in the old style. It offers a post-post-Copernican. or re-version but ongoing “inversions” or constructive “explications” in the plural (Verwindungen) (2001b: 72ff. Rather. but as an in situ-principle. re-volution. In other words it cannot appropriate.: 75) but movements of “cooperation. Though the reader might be surprised by such a conservative formulation. 2005: 27. Ultimately.). after Sophocles’ canonical metaphor of the “ship of state.” in which problems only appear when circumstances offer their solution: turns of technology against technology. 722). and solidary ties. of science against science. while always remaining local and even ‘provincial’” (1993: 7ff.: 76f) “The seafarers of the future navigate in coherences.). For example the model of the boat warns us for the political exaggerations that were so typical of the early Heidegger and for the antipolitical acquiescence of the later Heidegger (1993: 58). is correct as long as the restricting reality of Realpolitik is not thought of reductively. Thus.). informational. does his recent work offer us any political strategy? Of what use is the “epic neutrality” (2004: 881. If today. critical explicitation today must be an aesthetics of being-in-the-mainstream. shared life in the multiple mobilized world necessarily changes” (ibid. however obstinate. Because “the mainstream” is “the most formless of monsters” (ibid. between plain comfortable life and self-reflective.299 moribund and biased structures. Rescaling Sloterdijk’s Grandiose Aesthetic Strategy. his “thinking coldly” (2001a: 215f. but insured. and therefore “radical. 306.: 284). “radical mediocrity” is our first nature. A contemporary critique that starts from its immersion in reality.: 80). this constructivist relief is first of all aesthetic. In the final analysis. because. After the “age of extremes” has come to an end. This distinction is anything but self-evident. through which the meaning of active. new contrarities to be baptized and fatal routines – turning movements. Oosterling formulates one possible answer to the critical questions that must be asked: wherein lies the possibility of resistance in Sloterdijk’s recent analyses of capitalism? After Sinopean kynicism. Insofar as philosophy has always been the (in)forming and formatting of and by the monstrous. the reality of the posthistorical political stage seems to be that of an omnipresent “normalization” and “drive into the mainstream (die Mitte). It depends on the critical difference between mediocrity and inter-esse. see also the interview in this issue) for a reader interested or acting in the field of CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . and not merely something that belongs to insurance companies. 2006: 105. Therefore. post-Copernican aesthesis and Taoist meditation.” mediocrity. a downscaling of Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitical understanding of being-in in terms of micropolitical art practices: lack and abundance are of interest because they are directly political and value creating. as Oosterling argues. every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness.” a totalitarian and depressing center of gravity (2001a: 150ff. any feasible critical reflection requires. as Oosterling points out. then we need strong criteria to differentiate between miserabilist and affirmative critique. and epistemological) “explicitation” of man’s radical immersion in his own media and discusses the political potential of Sloterdijk’s merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Nietzschean and Bataillan principle of excess rather than on lack and scarcity. And what is “the ethical mandate of art. conscious.” if not “generosity” (2001c: 49)? In his contribution. Most Western individuals don’t want to be revolutionized. must therefore be antigravitational. the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reflective in-between.. 1998b: 76) of Sphären. “Interest and Excess of Modern Man’s Radical Mediocrity. that is constructivist.” Henk Oosterling adopts Sloterdijk’s analysis of globalization as the megalomaniacal or “hyperpolitical” installing of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in terms of a threefold (energetic. and enduring patience during the editing process of this issue. 3. cf. “The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual” (1987a: ixff. 6.SJOERD VAN TUINEN cultural politics? Sloterdijk’s own first answer might well be that “for us. Hans Küng. I’d like to thank John Armitage for the opportunity he has given me and for his inexhaustible faith in the project from start to finish. Most of all. sich mitteilen.). one is not oneself given. assistance.11.137. Nicomachean Ethics. he sees his work as a series of “attempts. giving is a process of sich aussetzen. but nonetheless consolidated and send it to later generations in the form of a message in a bottle” (2001a: 281f. sich austeilen. . whose excellent work and generous helpfulness have proven to be indispensable for overcoming the sometimes seemingly insurmountable difficulties in translating the Sloterdijkean discourse into English. Therefore. 6. Special thanks go to our translator. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank the contributors. it must be careful not to become all-too-contemporary (2001a: 150). 99. it is important to remember that. and editors of Cultural Politics for their trust. This issue offers some critical explorations of these attempts. Where none exist. In anticipation of my discussion of the critical principle of generosity. referees. 2001c: 46ff. 2.. Sloterdijk 1988: 22ff. KSA 5. quotes are taken from published translations where such exist. megalopsychia constitutes the mean between the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity. sich kompromittieren. 5. Though philosophy is its time as apprehended in thoughts. even if one abundantly gives oneself. the new politics begins with the art of creating words that point out the horizon on board of reality” (1994: 60). See for a more in-depth discussion of kynicism the foreword to the English edition of the Critique of Cynical Reason by Andreas Huyssen. Nietzsche. 4. Book II. Nietzsche’s concept of “workers of philosophy” in Beyond Good and Evil.405. I use my own translations.). He is one of four Germans – besides Jürgen Habermas. In the following. 300 CULTURAL POLITICS NOTES 1. 2001b: 37. Chris Turner. As one of the greatest virtues. 4. and Pope Benedictus XVI – present on the list of 100 leading intellectuals worldwide published by the English and American magazines Prospect and Foreign Politics (10/2005). freigeben. vorgeben. according to Zarathustra’s lesson of Schenkende Tugend. to gather together a knowledge that is pushed away from normalization. Rather. Hopefully. and ausgeben through transsubjective kinds of communication. KSA 4.211. 4. they will be the beginnings of a wider cultural and academic reception. ” because it is no longer able to think situational solidarity (“Die Nachkriegszeit ist zuende”: interview with Sloterdijk conducted by Frank Hartmann & Klaus Taschwer in Falter. 13. 23/04. For a discussion of Sloterdijk’s use of Tarde. It is in such passages that Sloterdijk comes closest to authors like Baudrillard or Žižek.).” 8. especially those mediated by “obscene politics” and “mediocre journalism. 301).. In an unpublished interview (Scheltema. Sloterdijk refers to Sphären as a “medial poetics of existence” (1998b: 81). CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . 12.). Sloterdijk has argued Negri’s work to be a mysticism of beingagainst that needs the invisible Whole as opponent and ultimately ends in the “requiem of leftist radicalism.” Also recognizable in his works are the ego-criticism of the Indian Vedanta. 2001a: 16ff. that other “psychocharlatan” who combined psychoanalysis. Rather. 11. is Rajneesh. This approach is as much indebted to psychoanalysis as it is to Marshall McLuhan’s pioneering studies of the intimate relationships between self-consciousness. 2006: 134). because he doesn’t accept the colloquial distance between the scene and the obscene which only allows for politics on the level of the symbolic. he gives priority to an ethico-political approach of the forgotten and nonrepresentable scenes of the intimate that are central to all mass-mediatized micropolitics.” the inhabitants of which can no longer get out of the way of the noxious emanations of their own faeces and thus attain their self-identity and coherence through “political miasmas” (1999a: 358). This concept of explicitation combines Heidegger’s poièsis (bringing forth into the open) with what Bruno Latour calls “articulation” (Sloterdijk 2004: 208ff. “the Wittgenstein of religion. though less explicit. Another important Asian influence. theatrality. cf. 06/02/05. and its technological “extensions” in Understanding Media (2003: 31. See for an in-depth discussion: Tuinen (forthcoming a). and provocation – “two forward looking ways of rendering oneself impossible. See also Oosterling’s remarks in this issue. Sloterdijk defined “critique” as “the art of returning into mediocrity” and as the protection of mediocrity against the “irreversibility of hyperboles. the Buddhist Anatta doctrine and Nagarjuna. he writes about human facts from a materialist perspective of man’s immersion in media as a medium amidst media. An excursion on “merdocracy” (1999a: 340–53) offers a playful media theory of the sociopolitical problem of “air conditioning” in sedentary cultures.. and the neo-Hindu syncretisms of Aurobindo and Krishnamurti (1996: 105ff. 2004: 825ff. Amsterdam. ibid. the yoga and tantric schools. March 2006) with me.301 7.” whom he compares to Lacan. 9. Ever since Der Zauberbaum (1985). 10. the body. though his conclusions are quite different. Therefore. 1988: 163ff. 23. 24. 18. For the German original. He also prohibited a reprint of his initial letter to Die Zeit (9/16/1999) in a Dutch dossier of the debate. Rüdiger Safranski. 17.com/ (accessed 04/27/07). See for such an exposition: Tuinen (forthcoming b).tripod. 2001b: 302ff. relaxation. as Alliez has argued. Quoted by Redhead (2002: 93. http://menschenpark.” Sloterdijk is neither a political nor a moral philosopher.” See: Le Monde des débats. Cf. Henri Atlan. Here I will especially emphasize the first. but self-experience. A proper reading of the text would therefore need to set it in relation to the works of two post-Heideggerians who have strongly informed Sloterdijk’s work: Foucault and Derrida. Habermas refused to communicate about their differences (2001b: 61). Slavoj Žižek. Bruno Latour.” (2001a: 9). 15.” after the title of the Robbie Williams’s album from 2003. Sloterdijk is at his most Deleuzian when he calls the “traces of language” of such a life “Spinozistic. and better captures the meaning of Gelassenheit in his later work. Lorenz Jäger.tripod. http://menschenpark. but the reader should keep in mind Sloterdijk’s “immunological” intentions and his strong functions as “physician of culture. Earlier I preferred to translate Gelassenheit with “yielding’” in order to stress its more passive character in Sloterdijk’s early work. the Western ‘subject’ is consummated” (1987a: 131). http://www.de/97. This “unpersonal” approach to Gelassenheit is also referred to as “escapology. enlightenment. Derrida: “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger” (1997: 4).).php?ress_id=7&item=850 (accessed 04/27/07). as well as levitation. I prefer to translate the original “Regeln” with “prescriptions” rather than “rules. “Relief” refers to exoneration. For reasons that follow from my exposition. Antje Vollmer.302 CULTURAL POLITICS SJOERD VAN TUINEN 14. Despite repeated invitations by third parties. his concept of Regeln carries a strong juridical and medical meaning. the “Sloterdijk Affair” might also be called “the Habermas case.com/ (accessed 04/27/07). 19. On the economy of acquittal (Freispruch) in terms of natality. “The bomb demands of us neither struggle nor resignation. 22. 166). to which Richard Dworkin.cicero. for a stylistically slightly revised version 2001b: 302ff. 21. October 1999. We are it.” because they are “expressions” that “serve as an advertisement for their own force” and as the “self-impartation of the successful” (2001c: 47f. 16. In it. 20. and others contributed . However. because it connects postmodern hedonism to the study of life as “relief phenomenon” and as that which normally escapes our attention (2004: 736). to the delineation of its axiomatic. . son of a banker.” Yet it is not an idealistic philosophy because he abnegates philosophy the privilege of its own truth and reduces it to a formalism. Regels voor het mensenpark. 145ff. Amsterdam: Boom).. For Sloterdijk. Political writers are those who have an enemy. Beyond Good and Evil. . and Tuinen 2006: 93ff.bookforum. The romantics and pedagogy of the clandestine in Badiou denies any objective realism.003). “poetics” may be “the art of the impossible” (1988: 29). devoted to the construction of a minimal difference.26. (Sloterdijk. yet it is not idealist precisely because it is tied to situations and participates in the complex. finally.” (Badiou 2007: 56). It is profoundly Platonic when he says that “politics is the art of the impossible. 303 25. Kroniek van een debat. http://www. the real is a subtraction from “objective” reality that legitimates a much realer subjectivity. 29. On Sloterdijk’s concept of the Turn.html (accessed 04/27/07). 2000. KSA 6.” (Badiou 2007: 54). It therefore goes that “air is the best possible residence for theories of all sorts” (1988: 96). Sloterdijk is no political author in a classical sense: “I myself am interested neither in war nor in politics as the waging of war with the means of peace. It offers an ontology of the present from the perspective of the immersive and extatical relation between the here and the there – nothing else than Nietzsche’s “pathos of distance. As an author who is first and foremost interested in the complexity of things. . who array themselves in some kind of intellectual battle . In this sense I’m not a political writer . Peter. see 2001b: 60ff. as Diogenes Laertius writes in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. a briefing and the observation of hostile operations” Tuinen 2004: 27ff. 286). CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . the subject being the athletic soul that stretches according to the form of the world (the sphere) in which it lives (2005: 16. and for them there is no true theory. Sloterdijk adds that.). As Badiou has analyzed. Being the generic as such. Every morning marks the issuing of an order. For him. “we are in the realm of suspicion when a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the real from semblance. 119ff. on the one hand.81. but “politics is the art of the atmospherically possible” (1999: 1. 28. 27.. Nietzsche. but only encampment discourse. a differential and differentiating passion. . What is necessary is “a passion for the real.com/archive/feb_05/funcke. but a discipline that possesses its own and its own subject and object. on the other hand.” Philosophy has therefore always been traversed by questions of inhabitation. philosophy understood as megalopsychia is not just a modus vivendi. Diogenes of Sinope. was charged for “debasing the coin” and can therefore be regarded as a forerunner of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values (2001c: 46). The Revised Oxford Translation. in opposition to a “social contract. Alain. Harlow. Armitage. “L’affaire Sloterdijk ou le cas Habermas?” Le Monde des débats. Trans. 2003. . Trans. 2000. McLuhan. Sämtliche Werke. 23. Understanding Media. Available online at http://www. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. “On Humanism. 1993.” In Basic Writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nietsche’s Styles. In the 1950s. Theorist for an Accelerated Culture. Alain. Badiou. Derrida.G. London: Verso. Jonathan Barnes (ed. After Luhmann. Heidegger. Aristotle.” a principle of “cordiality” in which.). G. John (ed. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. 38: 28. though often only implicitly. Armitage (ed. The Extensions of Man. Jürgen. Sloterdijk. Spurs. Culture and Society Series. 1999. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lawrence. London/ New York: Routledge. Theory. October.” Der Spiegel. Peter. 103ff. in Sloterdijk’s work seems to be Michel Serres. Princeton: Princeton University Press. the most important theorist of complexity present. T. Alberto Toscano. 1987. Jacques. Corte Madera: Gingko Press. Habermas. Theory. München: Walter De Gruyter/dtv. Redhead. Ethics. 2000. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. D. Trans.” the subject is the collective itself (Tuinen 2007). and introduction Peter Hallward. Trans. Giorgio Colli and Mazzimo Montinari (eds). Bollingen Series.pdf (accessed 04/27/07). 304 CULTURAL POLITICS REFERENCES Alliez.utexas. 2007.SJOERD VAN TUINEN 30. Century. Culture and Society Series. Kellner. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. War. London: Sage. B. Marshall. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Critical Edition. 1999. pp.). 1984. Nietzsche.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 31. 1979. Badiou. “Virilio. Steve. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 2002. Friedrich. the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the life force “negentropy” to indicate its opposite direction from the push of thermal decay.).C. May 31: 193–219. Trans. Martin. —— 1999. and Technology: Some Critical Reflections. F. Éric.” Die Zeit. Spivak. Gordon (ed. “Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten.” In J. London: Sage. Of Grammatology. “Post vom bösen Geist. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2002. for whom the model of the boat operates as a “natural contract. —— 1997. Paul Virilio. 1976.edu/~hmcleave/350kPEEHeideggerSpiegel. eco. Berkeley: The MIT Press. Frankfurt a. “Die Kritische Theorie ist tot.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt a. —— 1988. CULTURAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJK’S JOVIAL MODERNITY . Versuche über Heidegger. vaisseau climatisé. Zur Kritik einer politischen Kinetik. Daniel. Frankfurt a. Gedanken zum Programm einer Weltmacht am Ende des Zeitalters ihrer politischen Absence. —— 1994. Michael Eldred with a foreword by Andreas Huyssen. Blasen. Hans-Jürgen). Critique of Cynical Reason. —— 2001b.M. Ein Gespräch mit Carlos Oliveira. 37: 35f. Frankfurt a. Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Sphären I. Die Sonne und der Tod.: Suhrkamp Verlag.: Suhrkamp Verlag. 17/2. Frankfurt a. Frankfurter Vorlesungen. Trans. Dialogische Untersuchungen. Sphären II. —— 1993. 2001a. Versuch über die Hyperpolitik. Nietzsche’s Materialism. —— 1996. Écologie et complexité chez Sloterdijk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt a. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung. Frankfurt a. —— 1990.: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (with Heinrichs. Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemaïsche Abrüstung.” Horizons philosophiques. Frankfurt a.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Ästhetischer Versuch. —— 2006. Schäume.M. Franktfurt a. Frankfurt a. Sjoerd van.: Suhrkamp Verlag. June/ July: 27ff.M. —— 2005. “La Terre. Trans. Frankfurt a. Thinker on Stage. Ein Profil.: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— 2006. Peter Sloterdijk. —— 1999a.M. Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt a. Die Verachtung der Massen.: Suhrkamp Verlag.M. —— 1987b.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Nietzsche’s fünftes Evangelium.M. —— 1989. —— 1998b.M. Sphären III. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse im Jahr 1785.M. 61ff.” Interview with Peter Sloterdijk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Globen. Der Zauberbaum. —— 1987a.M. Filosofie.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.O. Der starke Grund zusammen zu sein. —— 2000. 2004. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. —— 2007.M.M. Frankfurt a.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Eurotaoismus. Zorn und Zeit. —— 1999b.M. —— 1998a.305 —— 1985.M. Im selben Boot.” Die Zeit. Selbstversuch. Frankfurt a. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Falls Europa Erwacht. Nicht Gerettet. —— 2001c. Frankfurt a. Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft. J. Tuinen.: Suhrkamp Verlag. “Terrorisme is een bewijs van te veel communicatie. Zur Welt kommen – zur Sprache kommen.: Suhrkamp Verlag.M. —— 2004. C. Peter Sloterdijk and the Politics of the Intimate. and Gert Buelens (eds). “The Breath of Relief. Ground Zero. Culture & Society. Homeotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference. Catastrophe: On Borders. 2002. Paul. Turner. London: Verso.” In Dominiek Hoens. Virilio. “Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘Transgenous Philosophy’.” Theory. Sigi Jottkant. Trans. —— forthcoming b. Post-Humanism. . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.SJOERD VAN TUINEN 306 CULTURAL POLITICS —— forthcoming a. Cuts and Edges in Contemporary Theory. 2752/175174307X226870 VOLUME 3. HE IS PRESIDENT OF THE STATE ACADEMY OF DESIGN. PART OF THE CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA IN KARLSRUHE.AC. “anthropotechnics. 1 (UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS. 1995). ISSUE 3 PP 307–326 KEYWORDS: Regeln für den Menschenpark. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK LIVING HOT. 2005) (WITH JEAN-CLET MARTIN): L’ŒIL-CERVEAU. CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10. BONNE) LA PENSÉE-MATISSE (LE PASSAGE. 2004). the focal points of the interview are Sloterdijk’s core cultural conception of Nietzschean-inflected thought and his own Sphere Theory. Sphere Theory. the following interview with Éric Alliez introduces the reader to Sloterdijk’s appreciation of contemporary cultural politics. (WITH J. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK ÉRIC ALLIEZ ABSTRACT Subsequent to a dialogue concerning the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Regeln für den Menschenpark (“Rules for the Human Park”). DE L’IMPOSSIBILITÉ DE LA PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE.PETER SLOTERDIJK IS A GERMAN PHILOSOPHER.” and the question of Being.UK/ WWW/CRMEP/STAFF/ERICALLIEZ.HTM. notions of ecology. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF MULTITUDES AND EDITOR OF THE COLLECTED WORKS OF GABRIEL TARDE. ecology. SEE ALSO: HTTP://WWW. ÉRIC ALLIEZ (1957) IS SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY IN LONDON. 1996). REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. HIS MAJOR PUBLICATIONS ARE: CAPITAL TIMES. 2007). Sloterdijk’s belief in “living hot. WHAT IS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S PHILOSOPHY? (CONTINUUM. However. BEST KNOWN IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD FOR CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON (1987).-C. NOUVELLES HISTOIRES DE LA PEINTURE MODERNE (VRIN. VOL.MDX. As these central themes of Sloterdijk’s current work and the title of this interview indicate. Nietzsche. anthropotechnics 307 CULTURAL POLITICS . his ideas on immunization. immunization. SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE FRANÇAISE CONTEMPORAINE (VRIN. THE SIGNATURE OF THE WORLD. thinking coldly” is also considered by Alliez alongside Sloterdijk’s contribution to cultural and political theory. because what’s lacking is a common polemical space. the very definition of politics (in its excess over the production of “consensus”) . negotiation. and . . project. to go back over the Sloterdijk Affair – or. mimesis. Dialogue is impossible because Habermas refuses to engage in it: you no longer belong to the circle of intellectuals of sound mind – and we could refer back here to the primal scene in Book Gamma of the Metaphysics in which Aristotle expels the sophist from the philosophical stage . An affair in all possible senses of the word: drama. of a lapsing from democracy synonymous with neoconservatism. emotion. . a minimal community of thought capable of sustaining such a dialogue . . as it has sometimes been called. struggle. the Sloterdijk–Habermas Scandal – let me say briefly why I think that Affair. . is an ideal starting point for our discussion. I’ve always thought that free thinking is essentially an affair and that it always will be. which I see as a manifestation of disquiet on the part of the contemporary intelligentsia at the national and European levels. This is because. We must. With the Sloterdijk Affair. then. offense. published after the triggering of the Affair in order to exhibit the implausibility of the reading made of it (Sloterdijk 1999a).1 The worst of beginnings whichever way you look at it. going back over the course of it for the non-German reader. Facing him. But isn’t it the best of beginnings for a philosopher who involves himself in his times? If we have. . not entirely at random. humanism is not disarmed (sic) . collective confusion. .”. too. The Affair that bears that name reduces the philosophical work of Peter Sloterdijk to a single lecture – Regeln für den Menschenpark – a lecture which was. But (sic) the hatred of democracy is still present. . Because what’s in question is the very definition of philosophy (in its excess over the regulated circulation of “arguments”). noise. a text printed in bold type: “The former German ultra-leftist has gone over to radical neo-conservatism. For we must immediately note the impossibility – both in terms of content and form – of dialogue with the reader Habermas. scrimmage. it’s even argued that a radical neoconservatism is at issue. Knowing that the reader could have been thrown somewhat by the summary versions provided by some columnists. business. Peter Sloterdijk: Starting out from current events would be the worst of things for a philosopher of a classical orientation. . event. review the general meaning of this Sloterdijk Affair. if we think of the way the dialogue begun in the early 1980s by Habermas with Foucault. But it’s impossible. excitation. I quote. in fact. Quod erat demonstrandum. as you suggest. reference being made to the most “dubious” pages of the most “irresponsible” of philosophers: Nietzsche . participation. Derrida or Lyotard developed. Now. . . that excess is for Habermas the exclusive and necessary mark of a lack. with Nietzsche.ÉRIC ALLIEZ 308 CULTURAL POLITICS Éric Alliez: Let’s begin with the worst of beginnings: the so-called Sloterdijk Affair. it’s worth our taking some time over the phenomenon. the German public had the opportunity to participate in an asymmetric dialogue between a real philosopher. the true philosopher of our age resorted to a clandestine stratagem that would doubtless have effected that delicate operation for him if it could have remained secret. Having. a contributor to the Hamburg-based weekly. So in the months of September. Excommunication procedures have certainly changed today. Insofar as this discrepancy. . But at that point the young sophist Assheuer. a journalist associated with the confraternity of true discourse. a debate triggered by my remarks at Elmau and Basle. You’ve located precisely the origin of the “polemical complex” at work in the said Affair: I find myself caught. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK . To arrive at the effective exclusion of the sophist. read and reviled the text of the sophist’s lecture. unrepentant atheists. so as to ensure sovereign control of the terrain for the masters and possessors of true discourse. in fact. October. A scene in which we were able to observe how true philosophers go about excluding the sophist from the field of the pursuit of truth. and November 1999. one primal scene may conceal another: behind Aristotle’s finger looms the menacing shadow of that reeducation camp “in the country” reserved by Plato in The Laws for the enraged. from the standpoint of my philosophical project overall. sublime and silent. isn’t a mere error and an innocent hermeneutic accident. I’ll add that. As a consequence. even if. by the name of Jürgen Habermas. Peter Sloterdijk. I regret the way my actual argument has slipped from the center to the periphery of the debate. but which was inevitably to produce a lethal effect if the public became aware of it. carried on his little conversation alone with that impossible Other. with epicenters in Israel and Brazil (bastions of a globalized Habermasianism). who no doubt aspired to be received and recognized among the true philosophers. had to face up to the cruel CULTURAL POLITICS LIVING HOT. in an impossible controversy with an adversary who’s omnipresent and absent at the same time. and if it’s given rise to a broad and relatively agitated debate on what is at stake – and at risk – in the new biotechnologies. who. then I can’t and won’t withdraw from my responsibilities.309 spectacle. his faithful disciple Thomas Assheuer – with denouncing the sophist Sloterdijk. then. in the patent absence of his opponent. . the scandal ordered by the master of Starnberg was served up to him – accompanied by the most violent mental storm to affect Germany since the end of the student protests and ultra-Left turbulence of the 1970s. the offenses being precisely those the philosopher did not dare to pronounce publicly. Die Zeit – that is to say. this polarization on a relatively marginal aspect of my work. and a known sophist. the philosopher of truth was to charge another sophist. if there is a Sloterdijk Affair in the German media and in the French newspapers. Hence that primal scene of academicism mentioned in your question. Regeln für den Menschenpark. The charge sheet was to be read out loud and clear. but they haven’t particularly got any milder . Two weeks later. ” and who offered Habermas the ideal opportunity to go to war on yet one more occasion against his eternal enemy.” Alarm and consternation among Habermas’s last friends: the Master of “the inclusion of the other” – the title of one of his latest books – is unmasked as having practiced a tactic of exclusion of almost unprecedented brutality in postwar Germany and as having developed an outlandish – not to say downright insane – reading of a philosophical text. and all those who refuse to treat the philosopher of Sils Maria as a dead dog.” having in mind a certain precedent. Assheuer. A few weeks after the Affair exploded. according to the pronouncements of the master of Starnberg. French. it’s clear that we’re back once again – as in the early 1980s – at the heart of . practically and reductively. in a programme marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt (mythic headquarters of the School of the same name) – this is September 20 – showed the letter desperately concealed by Habermas and his henchmen on camera – the letter which gave the lie to his official version of the affair: he had “lied” to the public by brazenly downplaying his role in setting up the scandal. Does one really need to fight a duel to make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can’t the true philosopher have himself represented by a true substitute? Now. of a discourse that’s polyvalent. Nietzsche. essayistic. at this point.310 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ truth: Habermas – who hasn’t neglected to read Carl Schmitt – never had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. He simply – one too many times perhaps – defended. The rest of the story is better known in Germany than in France. which we must now analyze. given the dictates of militant democracy. I have in my sights here that action-packed battle conducted by Habermas and his people against those French thinkers who’ve been dubbed. “post-structuralists” or “neo-structuralists. what he sees as the space of consensual truth against what he perceives as the irruption of the word of the sophist. by means that seemed justified to him. We touch here on the political heart of the affair: for Habermas did not lie when he lied. whom one could no longer. harmful. By a pleasing coincidence. of a letter from J. regard as a person “of sound mind. Habermas to T. and irresponsible. Like you. the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 16 published extracts. Having said this. wholly compromising for the sender. These extracts prove in the most conclusive way what Habermas had denied in his response to Die Zeit – namely that he had pressed his Hamburg lieutenant to launch an attack on the “authentically fascist” sophistry of the orator of Elmau. It contained a violent critique of the Elmau lecture. seductive. the premier German television channel ARD. I say “almost. The young sophist was to take his revenge. this latter becomes aware of his master’s cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth. in a de-scholasticization. since my beginnings in philosophy. for the first time in the history of mentalities. politics. the arts. Your remarks make that point with all the requisite clarity. it would doubtless be the following: modern philosophy. It is present more than ever in our activities and our constructions of the world. rather. cannot and must not be confined within the frames of an epistemological establishment or within the institutions of a politics of knowledge that’s given once and for all. What is dangerous is this kind of “totalitarianism lite. In my view. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK .” which has left its mark on the Zeitgeist throughout the Western world. a phenomenon that has replaced reflection (one would. I’m convinced we can’t at the present time be said to need one more definition of philosophy: we have too many of them already. Adorno. pain. everyone wants to be a “realist” . the real danger for thought today is the rise of a neo-scholasticism normalizing almost the whole of academic production. . provide evidence that la pensée de la différence.311 a struggle for the definition and redefinition of philosophy itself. As a philosophical writer who’s defined the essay as a definitive form of CULTURAL POLITICS LIVING HOT. a de-conformization. exposes itself to a metabolism with that which is not philosophy – social struggles. and claims the purest moral and political intentions. Hence the well-known schema of “base” and “superstructures. even indeed a de-professionalization of reflection. . all useful and all useless.” Thinking. in its fruitful times. Freud. madness. Bloch. Let us nonetheless – because we have to – define the field of philosophy by seeking to make something out in the troubled waters of the “admissible” and the “inadmissible. thinking without epithets. Consequently. Canetti. which coexists in a dangerous liaison with omnipresent mediatization. The slogan of those times was to turn ideas back the right way up. For 200 years. but in its de-definition. I’ve been too steeped in the lessons of Marx. We must interrupt the arrivistes’ danse macabre of realism. henceforth. Nietzsche.” But the battle over the “real” is not over. to stand them on their “real” foundations. if they are not to sink into anodyne salon conversation. and other master-thinkers for my generation not to be persuaded of this exigency: truth games of the philosophical type. I would be much more interested not in a definition of philosophy. still exists. would mean engaging in a battle for the meaning of the “real. and technologies. Foucault. everything that has fired authentic thinking has come from nonphilosophy irrupting into philosophy – a movement inaugurated by Schopenhauer and the Young Hegelians. If there’s a common doctrine toward which the above-mentioned great teachers and these proud researchers may converge. provided it were a wise subversion of pseudo-professionalism. have dared to say existential reflection) and theoretical work with a neoserious attitude and/or an anticonformist conformism. even if that politics comes with the best of recommendations.” It’s the case that. Sartre. in the past. We must. accidents. To the point where. even after the decline of Marxist theory (which was the logical heart of that battle for a century). clinical practice. Isn’t philosophy a thing much too fine. that they have. in an indirect and yet quite clear way. to this language game that’s supposed to sum up my intellectual entelechy between an “ultra-Leftist” starting point and a finishing point named “radical neoconservatism. They couldn’t move because they effectively came home – sure of themselves. To dispel the dizziness and distinguish between the movements. you don’t know if it’s the train alongside that’s started up or your own train. anchored in the fundamentum inconcussum of good conscience and its timeless commitments. an end point not at all shared. In my view. would reserve an extremely warm welcome for the deserters from the ultra-Left. This is an amusing and revealing equation because it reveals a highly significant phantasm quite commonly found among the new conformists. and even a certain truth. they hallucinate a trajectory that’s dual in character: it is copied phantasmatically from their own itineraries (what have they become if not conservatives?) and they know those itineraries fail radically to meet the imperatives of an intelligence freed of the ballast with which they have burdened themselves. which diabolizes any departure from their stock-in-trade. But did that mean they could totally lose the sense of movement when others. disparaging aspects of such a construction. then. have locked themselves away in divine reunion with it? They haven’t moved. to team up with the neoconservatives who. That hallucination isn’t. you have to recover a sense of stability. much too real to be left to the philosophers alone? Each one of us mocking philosophy as best he or she can.” Let’s put aside for a moment the ignorant. I should like to come back now to the formula you put to me. at a certain point in their mental development. since the post-May 68 period. were moving away from them? It was tempting at that point to conclude that the others’ movement led from a possibly shared and – in spite of its excesses (the ultra-Leftism they have thrown off) – potentially good starting point to an intrinsically bad end point. He who distances himself from the axiomatics of an eternal – but rebranded – Left. This has been part of the cognitive biogram of Homo presapiens and Homo sapiens since we . which is the regulated production of consensus (the extremes say the same about the Other). since they have found the truth. Everyone has experienced this kind of disorientation: you’re in a train in the station and suddenly there’s movement. and let’s forget the Habermasian stamp upon it. is consequently doomed to move closer to the Right of yesteryear (which is historically their own truth) or. because those who argue this way are admitting. And how could it be otherwise. it is (quite wrongly) imagined. stopped thinking. worse still. once of the same ilk. I have in my sights an essayistic notion of philosophy of the highest possible level. whether they present themselves as people of the Left or as prudent representatives of the liberal Center-Left. sure of their rights and their property. without a certain interest. in fact.312 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ the provisional. if I may be so bold. and scientific dynamism. therefore. We’re programmed to lend the most extreme attention to the slightest movement picked out against a stable horizon. Those who haven’t moved for a long time and who nonetheless claim an important position for themselves at the head of the hierarchy of ideas. together with certain hints for better understanding the driving forces behind this Babylonian confusion of political languages that’s evident nowadays – a confusion which means that quite often even potential allies no longer recognize each other as such. a young Spanish philosopher of a socialist orientation who has chosen for himself a pantheon of rather singular thinkers – John of the Cross. as “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] and “consignment” or “dispatch” [Geschick] and as correspondence to that movement. expect frictions between those who espouse “thrownness” and who. artistic. . Marx. But how are we to orient ourselves in a world where that horizon has begun to shift? How are we to think in a world where the sun has stopped revolving around the earth and where things have stopped revolving around the subject? Here lies the whole irony of the discourse on the alleged neoconservatism of those allegedly irresponsible individuals who’ve chosen to project the immediate data of the ultra-Leftist consciousness of 1968 into somewhat less . to undertake a renewed analysis of that permanent revolution that expresses itself in an unparalleled social.313 lived in hordes on the savannah. distance themselves from commonplaces (which have. and those who’ve settled into their “posts” and remain comfortably in their places. L’essai d’intoxication volontaire was very favorably received in France. In spite of all these risks. Roger-Pol Droit’s observations in his article in Le Monde des livres were in my view very indicative: the inevitably light tone of this recorded conversation didn’t detract from CULTURAL POLITICS LIVING HOT. I note in passing that I fell in love with this French expression “épouser le mouvement” (was it in a text by Virilio that I stumbled upon it?). technological. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK .). and the German Idealists – that has just appeared in a French translation entitled L’essai d’intoxication volontaire. immediate directions. which can translate one of the richest ideas of Heideggerian thought – when it ventures to conceive Being as movement. To cut a long analysis short – I don’t want to become interminable – I shall refer to the little book of dialogues with Carlos Oliveira. you’ll find a number of passages concerned with analyzing the moral and conceptual disorientation of the “classicist” Left (“classical” is too inhabited by the nasty word “class” . lost all usefulness). A rather sublime expression.2 Toward the end of these dialogues. . . are at loggerheads – and thus in a constant clinch – with those who’ve espoused the movement of our times at the level of “existential” experiment and at the level of the concept. We must. inducing in themselves the illusion of movement by watching the trains go by. in any case. Derrida. as a consequence. . We might speak here of the origin of difference by the irruption of an unexpected presence or development against a flat horizon. such as Bruno Latour’s (1999) or your piece in Le Monde des débats (1999) – that my analysis of the ideological confusion and disarray of the old Left may present some interest on the other side of the Rhine. how could he declare. but that it must also determine.” the senile malady of the initial ultra-Leftism. is to produce. I’ve even asked myself at times under what conditions Raymond Schwab’s formula regarding an “Oriental Renaissance” (1984) could take on new meaning for our times . I freely concede that this is a particularly economical summary of the Affair that bears my name. for oneself and one’s fellow citizens. . It’s only too clear what a democratic deficit there would be if we allowed the conformists of every stamp to stifle free thinking to the point of prohibiting the questioning and problematizing contained in an uncompromising critique.” in which I attempted to explain the devastating effects of the Kohl era on the culture of debate in our country – that implosion of the political space. A last word on my alleged “radical neoconservatism. I’m sure that democracy. There remains the (essential) fact – which other articles published since in France seem to indicate. . But why economize on intelligence? This particular economical individual seems to draw his knowledge of my deep motives from downright occult sources. on the basis of my Elmau lecture. lives by the good offices of those who aren’t disposed to idealize it (and we know how much those idealists know how to exploit it as though it were their fiefdom: do they not derive copious benefits from it?). over which he can be said to have cast a lofty eye. that advent of a boundless conformism that is the unthought element of the Habermas System. when it devises for itself some other course than mere survival on principle. I’ll permit myself to refer here to the article “Du centrisme mou au risque de penser. Otherwise. one of his roles in our modern societies. . that “the hatred of democracy is still there”? Is it so difficult to recognize that the task of the philosopher. an analysis of the weaknesses and flaws in our system of organization of communal life? Does one show hatred of democracy by thinking not only that it can cope with the description of its real or potential failings. Dare I add that I would have been astonished had that not been the case? .314 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ the understanding of the philosophical issues. the thought of Eastern and non-European civilizations. These are subjects that have been close to my heart since my return from India in 1980. more generally. I mention this fact also because I had read his L’oubli de l’Inde with a great deal of sympathy and I share Roger-Pol Droit’s revulsion at the incredible ignorance European philosophers display toward Indian philosophy and. . . so far as is possible – the limits never being laid down in advance – the course of its future development? Does one show scorn for democracy by conceiving it as a set of arrangements of the “collective intelligence” (Pierre Lévy’s fine book comes to mind here) and by believing – rather classically – that it’s an intelligent machinery that prospers only when subjected to permanent criticism? In short. and. In Ecce Homo. and above all. indeed. indeed. For we must admit that it’s a matter of record for us: we do. first. creativity. Let’s hold to the idea that this coincidence of the megalomaniac and the sober is philosophy itself. in your eyes. in any event. But. which overthrew the entire intellectual tradition of old Europe. whatever the expression chosen. . a chronological statement which says that we’re situated in CULTURAL POLITICS ÉA: Since the appearance of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983)3 and Der Denker auf der Bühne (1986). potency.LIVING HOT. he’s the zoon logon (megalon) echon. Which amounts to positing that real thought is a production. it seems necessary here to ask the following question: if philosophical megalomania is a reality. the philosopher of life par excellence. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK 315 PS: “Simply Nietzschean. we find very explicit traces of the epochal consciousness Nietzsche had of the distant effects he bore within him. I’d like you. we accept that there are. if possible. live after Nietzsche.”5 which sounds like the interior monologue of a Messiah busy with the reform of the calendar made necessary by his appearance. on the priority you seem to accord to the young philosopher of The Birth of Tragedy to the detriment of the thinker of the “will to power”. of course. Parenthetically. lastly. The philosopher is that grandiloquent human being to whom it occurs that the grandeur of the ideas he formulates exceeds his grandiloquence. merely the drama of the inter-pathology of ideas and thinkers? Intermadness [inter-folie] – a concept to revisit. that cerebral upheaval. validity. pertinence. then. It would. it’s been possible to see you as the only German philosopher likely to lay claim to Foucault’s assertion that he was “simply Nietzschean” . be possible to replace the term “grandeur” with less shocking expressions: substantiality. what you mean by “Dionysian materialism”: what kind of higher materialism is in play here and how does this notion specify the general category of vitalism if Nietzsche is.” That’s a phrase that would certainly fire my imagination.4 which is a commentary on The Birth of Tragedy. your (by no means simple) relationship to Heideggerian interpretation. So. “simply Nietzschean” – what can that mean in the conditions of contemporary thought? Let’s begin by noting that the formula is. even if I didn’t know who’d said it. . If one were looking for an example that proved megalomania and sobriety can coincide. In Aristotelian terms. two of your works that are translated into French. this is surely it. to a very large extent. operativity. precision. I’m thinking particularly of the famous pronunciamento: “One lives before me or after me. wouldn’t it be entirely reasonable to conceive the parallel existence of a specifically philosophical megalo-depression? Is this to say that the thought of our century will have been. to expand on the sense of that reading of Nietzsche. It’s an obvious fact to me that the Nietzsche event was that earthquake. thinking beings through whom something “happens” that affects the state of reality as such. efficacity. . systems theory. a life. This is also why.316 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ a time “after” someone. This sixth sense enables them to live a life more or less successfully and be part of a development: first. etc. the post-Luhmann period (at least in Germany) of the analysts of social systems and subsystems. and. the history of ideas and images. the post-Foucault of the new genealogists and archivists. sociology. If one takes the new definition of life (of a life) given by the immunologists at this century’s end. because it inspires in them the respect for the rules that make up the religion of the tribe (accommodation of behavior to the “divine” law). there’s one that relates to philosophy. among the answers given to this question. more recently. a life. one thinks (most of the time without realizing it) the conditions of possibility and the conditions of reality of life.B. define philosophy as that agency of wisdom whose task is to manage the question of truth within an advanced civilization.) The answer consists in the proposition that life. I’ve set about integrating psychoanalysis. after Nietzsche. into a metaparadigm I call General Immunology or. Hence the following questions: What is thought (la pensée) if one thinks “after Nietzsche”? And how does one think if one thinks within the sphere of influence and on the horizon of Nietzschean thought? The answer to the first of these questions must indicate why that thought is at the center of modern civilization. We know the social sciences and contemporary philosophy have formed the habit of dating themselves within a period after a master-thinker. because it provides them with the means to adapt to a given environment (accommodation of the intellect to things) and. From the standpoint of Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean philosophical metabiology. For. Sphere Theory. the theory of truth – the old royal discipline of philosophy – transforms itself into an element of an expanded metabiological reflection. one immediately grasps how these studies lend themselves to a Nietzschean reformulation of the question of truth. urbanism. But this mere observation that modern thinking is marked by its historicity and that the proper names of the major authors serve us as markers in the chaotic flow of discourses doesn’t go far enough. “truth” is understood as a function of . it’s entirely in line with the title of Giorgio Colli’s famous book. the post-Saussure of the structuralists. (Let us. according to which life. One tries to understand how life. The postFreud period of J. Dopo Nietzsche. alternatively. for the moment. our shared life is possible by virtue of the fact that human beings are endowed with a sense of truth.) In my most recent work. Pontalis comes to mind. (Here again it’s tempting to make use of the schema of de-definition: life and theory are things too important to abandon to the biologists alone. We have to go further and delve into the content and method of a radically contemporary thinking. after Nietzsche. is the success phase of an immune system. In this. the post-Braudel of the psychohistorians. our lives (and our thinking about these lives) are possible – and. second. a life. a second face of truth. Faced with the former. confronted with the latter. which is strictly different from the first. the effect of which is indifferent to the vital interests of human beings or. then. He advances into a region where he discovers (second-order) truths. . At this level we are dealing with a philosopher/biologist Nietzsche. in order to live. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK .317 vital systems that serves in their orientation in the “world” and their cultural. Here. (Sokal and Bricmont can pull out their notebooks here for an augmented edition of their book! Since I don’t dare believe they’d accept the invitation to join my seminar on the role of scientific metaphor in the development of cutting-edge theories . If the first were that of a protective mother. Lives are condemned to perform a permanent effort of raising their morphoimmune shields against the microbiological invasions and semantic lesions (we call these “experiences”) to which they are exposed.) Thought reaches its maximum degree of discomfort here. In postconsensual society. who formulated the battlefield for “inhuman” truths in two sentences. one would say that the truths (which I shall term “first-order”) are symbolic immune systems. If we turn now to the second question – that of the “how” or the methodical approach of a properly Nietzschean thinking – we note immediately that there’s a second level in Nietzschean thinking on truth. . worse. I regard this kind of ethics as indispensable. I think this way of considering individuals’ systems of opinions has moral implications of considerable scope. There is. with the metaphysician of the artistic function of life. by all human beings? Shall we deduce from this that life should at all costs strive to avoid the truths “external” to it? Midi-Minuit is the hour of the meeting with the other Nietzsche. It teaches. the ultimate expression of the will to be integrated into an incorruptible space) is the equivalent at the level of cognitive systems of what doctors call the auto-immune illnesses. . the author of the famous phrase. one freezes. one melts. “We have need of lies . which is directly opposed to those interests. for this challenge is addressed to the pride of the animal endowed with logos. . and communicational autoprogramming. One might thus venture that modern philosophy (the philosophy that has killed God. Now. not a duty of reserve. The meta-immune or contra-immune function of the (second-order) truth consequently triggers an internal crisis in the human beings who have ventured too far into these forms of knowledge that transcend life or are definitively harmful to life. Knowing we can think strictly unbearable things. but a decision to act with reserve. whether that of the individual or the social body. the second assumes the features of the Medusa. motivational. Nietzsche is the philosopher-adventurer: he abandons the terrain defined by concern with the vital system and immunitary illusionism. let life perish!7 CULTURAL POLITICS LIVING HOT.”6 In my terminology. do we for that reason have to give up the adventure of thought because most of the “hard truths” aren’t assimilable as such by human beings. First: We have art in order not to die of [the] truth. and: Let knowledge advance. Nietzsche outlines a science that is to come – a science that could bear the name of vitalist constructivism (which was recognized at a certain point in the debate around Nietzsche’s work under the somewhat mediocre label of “active nihilism”). not well received by Greek scholars. which is on macrospheres or globes (let us not forget that the sphere of all physical spheres for more than 2. One might say it invests the “secondary process. a masterless thinking). the immune cogito). the philosopher who tried to think without any regard whatever for the stabilization of his own system of vital illusions. which we might render as the “archi-dramas of suffering”?) By way of a rather bizarre mythological apparatus. that it’s life itself that’s incapable of bearing itself as it is and which. what I mean by the term Selbstversuch. (B) We destroy (or transcend) our mental immune system when we think (and it is real. This is. . the fine name of “Cosmos” and that the sphere of all mental or vital spheres was called “God”). as it expresses itself in this antithesis: (A) We think to immunize ourselves (and here it is the mental immune system that thinks – let us say. including its keyword. I simply point out that this too cursory survey contains all the elements of an answer to the question why I may have accorded priority to the earliest Nietzsche. I ventured the paraNietzschean proposition: The Sphere is dead. operative. found there in the plural: Urszenen des Leidens. it thinks. in order to train in that perilous profession. primal scene. in fact. life “transfigures” itself. as a consequence.000 years bore. To use the vocabulary of The Birth of Tragedy. the young Basle philologist who opened up the battle of the titans of our age around the essent by showing that the Dionysian isn’t in itself bearable. the second volume of Spheres (1998b).” In my most recently published book. It was. he throws himself into radical experimentation in vivo on the system of illusions on which his life – and perhaps human life in general – is founded. an introduction to the specifically modern dilemma. the individual and collective poetico-hallucinatory system. for. I attempted to outline there the programme of a “vitalist” or “supervitalist” philosophical thinking.318 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ We shan’t take this analysis of the conflict between the thinkable and the bearable any further here.” (In this connection: who doesn’t see that all the principles of Viennese psychoanalysis can be found in the text of the young Nietzsche. There’s a very useful book by Rüdiger Safranski (Wieviel Wahrheit braucht der Mensch?) that may serve as an introduction to this particular problematic. external thought that gains the upper hand there. in old Europe. This dual model of thought carries far beyond the traditional . that is to say. ultimately. That particular Nietzsche offers a poignant interpretation of his idea that the philosopher is the physician of civilization.8 What the simply Nietzschean thinkers of a generation more fêted than our own called “la pensée du dehors. It’s mainly this “hard” Nietzsche that interests me. self-experiment . invents more “pleasing” representations – representations that “please” us. . political immunity. The former have broken the sound barrier of human and humanistic illusionism and no longer (or only indirectly) obey the traditional exigencies of the Lebenswelt. it’s necessary to replace divine. In the 1980s. It seemed always useable to me as a positional – and oppositional – beacon in relation to an intellectual environment that displayed hostility to everything that could evoke the vitalism of the early years of the century. this notion of “materialism” – which I employed with a touch of humor – had.” This provocative expression signaled my intention to read the Nietzschean corpus as forming part of the subversive tradition of those marginal thinkers who’ve managed to keep themselves apart from the idealist closure. “How shall we console ourselves . I propose the following scenario: the former warm themselves in life and like (or put up with) cold in thought. . heavenly. This amounts to saying that we don’t live on the same isothermal lines. And this can be done only in an exteriority that will forever be radically ahead of any construction of an interior. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK critique of ideologies. invokes precisely the need to invent a new poetics of immunizing space. indeed. I should point out that in my view this substitution is the hard core of the process of modernization. . . neo-idealist. In my view. . into an area beyond the vrai naïf and the faux naïf. or neo-transcendalist schools. the latter apply themselves to building the new cathedrals of communication.) All this bringing us back to the impossible dialogue between Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans. . This is to say how delighted I am at the edition of the works of Tarde you’re publishing .LIVING HOT. I wasn’t unaware. and private immunity with a technical. either. where this author is concerned. we who are the murderers of all murderers?”9 By making love? By engaging in politics? By building well-heated houses and planning functional hospitals. which are. earthly. essential? (In the terms of a theory of religion: the probability of encountering God in the world having become much more remote than the opposite proposition. that this “materialist” terminology was going to create definite CULTURAL POLITICS ÉA: Hence this inevitable and necessary tactical or strategic dimension in the “materialist” use you make of the early Nietzsche . the famous parable of paragraph 125 of The Gay Science. in spite of everything. If only to break with the rather too exclusive attention paid by research. retained a last hint of its initial aggressiveness. and they heat those cathedrals using the pleasant illusions maintained by the neo-humanist. Now. in which the death of God is proclaimed. helmeted readers of the 1930s. the writings of the young philologist seemed to me haunted by what I’ve called his “Dionysian materialism. 319 PS: Precisely. etc. the latter are cold in life and seek to find some warmth in thought. . . to that doctrine of the “will to power” that was monstrously twisted by the jackbooted. in the works of contemporary thinkers: Deleuze. We’re arriving at a point where the most committed idealists are obliged to admit the productive and “ideoplastic” nature of the process of conceptual labor. . in my view. . a particularly Nietzschean quality) and. This is a mass of “impregnable” ideas. On the contrary. a strong epistemological linkage between concepts like “Dionysian materialism” and “vitalism. I’m very sorry that the work of Gotthard Günther isn’t known in France. idea/matter type . I didn’t at any cost wish to be confused with that de-virilized. As for Heidegger’s enormous (not. it must be said. it was. He also wrote an enormous work in several volumes aimed at defining the principles of a non-Aristotelian logic (1976–80). admirable Nietzsche. where the expression “superior materialism” that you propose and use in your writings is concerned. Foucault. all that’s been thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of “things” to “mind. subject/object. without it I couldn’t follow the seam that keeps leading me on. that reform is continuing. in Nietzsche that one should look for paths leading somewhere.10 toward an open future for thought. Whether it’s to deplore . ÉA: It’s easier now to see how you can be regarded as the most French of the German philosophers . But in Günther’s work the concept of a “formless matter” embodies. a shock with multiple effects. that’s because I’d formed the habit of considering all my problems and all my interventions in the affective light of this concept – without having any further need to develop its purely theoretical dimensions. for certain. a highly implausible encounter in the academic and public context of the time. The Consciousness of Machines.” It tests out a trivalent – or multivalent – logic that’s so potent it could rid us of the impotent. in certain respects. It’s true that I haven’t explicitly gone back to this formula in the fifteen years since the publication of Thinker on Stage. “Dionysian materialism”: the formula expresses the need for a rapprochement between the post-Marxist and post-Nietzschean currents. . After the shock induced by Nietzsche. . . Luhmann . to come back to the question: there is. .320 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ unease among Heideggerians of a neo-pietist persuasion.” a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and life technics11 have just passed into a new phase of their development. brutal binarism of the mind/thing. And yet it’s become virtually second nature to me. Now. conservative Heideggerianism . of course. and if I didn’t use the expression often. and it has become a source of constant inspiration for the necessary reform of the philosophical grammar of old Europe. Günther is the author of an amazing book and more than the title of it. Having proposed an iconoclastic – and “Left-wing” – reading of Heidegger’s work in Critique of Cynical Reason. I must stress I’ve never accepted his claim to have “gone beyond” Nietzsche. More specifically. in my view. . . A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (1963). deserves to be translated. I carry the notion on my head like a miner’s lamp. Derrida. I realize today that my distress was a reflex. reading Foucault was a bit like having your heart torn out by an Aztec priest with a tip of obsidian. in the “happy-endism” of the philosophy of history. particularly in its Adornian version. in the comfort of teleological thought and the necessity of the categorical imperative. in the Principle of Hope. but with a blade of obsidian. And it’s no accident if reading Nietzsche was a turning point for most of them. above the order of discourse of the human sciences at this close of the twentieth century. and in the certainty that the great refuser is morally superior to the “collaborators” with the data of experience (which was. yet I felt an indescribable sense of nausea reading it. and Deleuze. steeped as it was in young-Hegelian and Marxist thinking. Foucault. I was taking my first steps in a mental space where the logic of reconciliation through a final synthesis no longer operated. More precisely. nighttime concept of the political that casts its gaze on the hidden ecology of universal pain. As for me.” Actually.” referred to in your Nietzsche book (1989: 76)? What’s the meaning of this appeal to an “expressive ecology of a new kind. What thoughts do these French “positionings” of your work inspire in you? What are your relations with that “darker. For obsidian has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. If I had to characterize the Foucault of that period of my intellectual history. it isn’t my fault if the French thought of this century has produced a set of exceptional authors who embody the cold tendency of contemporary thought in entirely impressive forms. in the as-if-messianism of Benjamin and Adorno. I’d say that he seemed to me like someone who no longer philosophized with a hammer. or to include you “affirmatively” in that movement of biopolitical/biophilosophical thought that has its anchorage points in Deleuze and Foucault. the spiritual source of the Frankfurt School in its first incarnation). For anyone raised in the Hegelian faith.” one sees immediately “why I’m so French. in fact. I was immediately dazzled by the aura of serenity and rigor that emanated from Foucault’s work. nonKantian mode of thought.12 CULTURAL POLITICS your dependence on what’s been called neo-structuralist thought (Manfred Frank) and “la pensée 68” (Ferry and Renaut). it was the encounter with Foucault in Les mots et les choses that catapulted me into a space of reflection that went beyond my original philosophical training. or rather an alarm signal indicating to me that I’d been pulled irreversibly into a decisively non-Hegelian. I confine myself merely to naming Lévi-Strauss. This is the crystal sky above discourse.LIVING HOT. it was the great stroke of luck of my intellectual life that I encountered these French Nietzscheans at a point when it was inconceivable to read Nietzsche in Germany.” to which you give the name Psychonautics? . THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK 321 PS: It seems to me that in transposing the opposition I’ve just outlined between thinking in the cold and the warming function of ideas to the level of the “geopolitics of ideas. Between the very gentle and the very hard is played out what I’ve termed “the hidden ecology of universal pain. quite to the contrary. of Frankfurt politico/neo-Messianic thought and entered a quite other space that I now recognize as being identical to the field of conceptual creation opened up by Nietzsche. riffling back through it with curiosity – I’m thinking here of my trip to India – I moved right away from the archipelago of dialectics. For my part. and illusions. since that master of “analytic” thinking. only ever produced logical crystals. So far as Deleuze’s work is concerned. in volumes II and III. extraterrestrial intelligence. I’d say it’s positioned – and moves – in an oscillation between the incredibly soft and the absolutely hard. if this kind of thought coexists necessarily with a practice of writing. who never knew the pleasure of the text as flow of sentences (he was incapable of chatting). It may perhaps be useful to remind the reader that. The reader of Spheres I (1998a) finds herself grappling with an author-psychonaut undertaking a descent into the symbiotic hell. that resolutely modern philosophy invests the extinction of the metaphysical distinction between form and content as one of its constitutive aspects. It’s only in recent times that I’ve begun to read . By contrast. With this paradoxical effect: the fact that Wittgenstein is the only philosopher-writer of our century to have managed to gain recognition by the “hardest” academicism is down to academicians not having realized they were dealing with a writer. the “rest” being a mere rhetorical dressing-up of that same content. That reading may reveal itself to be of a pitiless gentleness.” in which human beings have installed themselves. To anyone wishing to test out this proposition. for he isn’t afraid to take the metaphysical constructions of “security. if I had to characterize my philosophical work. and insofar as an author can speak of his intentions. into the womb of the Great Mother. of phenomenology. I realize that at the time I quite simply missed the encounter with it. for what they are. This visitor from Outside describes the mental machinations of traditional and modern societies with a perfectly cold eye. with an artist of the concept who might be hailed as the inventor of minimal art in philosophy. This is why it’s highly probable that a philosophy [une pensée] that doesn’t exist in its writing won’t count as a philosophy [une pensée]. technologies. in the sense that the heights of “clarity” he achieved are above all heights of formulation. which isn’t far removed from a similar project.” I like to think that in a hundred years’ time there’ll be an author capable of writing the book we might be said to need today on a general ecology of suffering. one traverses passages of cosmic coldness: it’s the visit to the world of human beings by a cosmonautical. I can recommend the Wittgensteinian corpus. I think. that practice has nothing whatever to do with the caricaturally simplistic ideas of those who doggedly persist in believing that philosophy is first and foremost a matter of content.322 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ As a result of the shock of that treatment and the flashbacks that made me relive the experience. caninotechnic. The theme of the “hidden ecology of universal pain” will be further developed as a result. . 323 PS: A last word. narcotechnic. Which is to say how much the encounter is useful to me for a better understanding of what I’m looking for philosophically without ever being sure of having found it . bioethics. to find a way to a philosophical and historical anthropology that measures up to our contemporary knowledge. You’ll see how I try to combine the biophilosophical propositions of the French writers with my ideas on general morpho-immunology (or spherology). An expression. I began reading A Thousand Plateaux and Critique et clinique. it does so allusively.” What is the clearing precisely? How was it carved out in the forest of being – and by what techniques? This is the question we have to pose. then. in the manner of a marginal note (no wonder. . rhodotechnic. It’s different today. as well as Spinoza. that lecture – for we are talking about a lecture here – doesn’t speak about biotechnology. I wasn’t able to achieve the resonance for myself. philosophie pratique. What interested me was the clearing Heidegger speaks of. and sometimes feeling I learned more in an hour’s reading than in a year of ordinary research. The trace of Deleuze will be perceptible in the third volume of the Spheres project. Yes. My reflections were on that superphenomenal “phenomenon” that projects us into the openness where everything shows itself: the place from which the world is only world.LIVING HOT. which is called Schäume [Foams]. felinotechnic. but one should also add hippotechnic. with tremendous pleasure. at fresh cost to ourselves. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK him in a more coherent way. Most readers – in Germany. etc. I may remark in passing. it’s the gap of an opening or a distance between human intelligence and the “environment” – it’s the site of the human ekstasis that brings it about that we are “in-the-world. and elsewhere – didn’t feel it necessary to point out that my lecture makes practically no reference to what the media coverage of the Sloterdijk Affair put at the center of the debate. that some commentators can claim to be “unsatisfied”!). and. if it ventures on to that terrain. genetics. (I’ve just published a short text in Germany on the natural history of the “principle of distance” as a relation of human beings CULTURAL POLITICS ÉA: Do you want to say something more about the pretext-lecture of Elmau? . Although friends pointed out to me almost twenty years ago a certain kinship between his approach and my intentions. that whipped up a storm among the German square-heads (the expression belongs to a broader field of concepts in which its antonym “theotechnic” also figures. to reestablish the complete lexicon of an analysis of the hominization-domestication-biopower complex). then . France.. . on what was at stake there in philosophical terms: from the standpoint I’ve termed anthropotechnical. Who’s afraid of the clearing? As I conceive it. . etc. In short.) So I’ve attempted to render Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose benevolence is anything but ironic. my remarks were so lacking in originality that it wasn’t at all clear why anyone should waste their time on my text. to take part in it. When I reread the mountain of articles prompted by the lecture. . The whole secret of his profession consists in having us share in his postreflexive serenity. . And suddenly everyone wants to be invited. his media grammatology was apparently to be satisfied with an antithesis as crude as it was symptomatic: where the problems posed by the biotechnologies were concerned. then. an integral part of a reflection on the foundations of a biocultural discourse of the clearing. and even more so of any disturbing thought. Disinclined to waste his precious time with the anacoluthons of my prose (it must be remembered that the expert is a salaried individual). Monsieur Atlan finds it difficult to admit there might exist a discourse. I noticed that the typical sentence was of the negative order of the “acknowledgement of fact”: what I was saying wasn’t new. Which may shock Heideggerians by my desire to work for the birth of a philosophical anthropology of a new type: these remarks are. his profession is a very liberal one. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How human beings produce themselves. for the expert is precisely the person who no longer needs to think: he has already thought. The dynamics of these statements seem to me entirely clear: our opinions will remain exactly the same both before and after the reading of a philosophical text. in fact. We shall turn. what it costs to clone a human being). that is to say. The theory of neoteny13 has to do with this reflection in the Elmau lecture. For Nietzsche and Plato have invited themselves to the “symposium” to comment on the ideas of Heidegger. one could speak either as a philosopher (and if that’s the case. We want a knowledge that’s independent – independent of any thought. which proposes. . everyone – dramatically – wants to be part of the debate. . Hence this concert of experts affirming in unison: Sloterdijk has perhaps sparked a debate. the expert has mastery of knowledge: in this case. given that it’s easier to quote Plato than to produce a clone) or as a technical medical man (in which case one will have complete mastery of discourse since. to question technology as a form of production of self-evident facts. Strange for a declared Spinozist . to put forward their opinions on the drama played out in the clearing. in principle a movement of thought. . philosophically and rigorously. but no.324 CULTURAL POLITICS ÉRIC ALLIEZ to nature in a recent number of the magazine Geo ([September 1998]). but to conduct that debate properly we must begin by excluding this provocateur who has said nothing new – except perhaps . you can’t say much that’s particularly relevant. As guardian of collective nonthought. and leave us in peace! One of the most interesting versions of this cliché was provided by Henri Atlan on the occasion of an interview he gave to Le Monde des débats (Atlan 1999). to the experts. by definition. and the claim of certain experts (the most eminent) to control both their discipline and its “philosophical premisses” . a destiny – he breaks the history of mankind into two parts. . Paris: Calmann-Lévy. This interview was conducted by Éric Alliez by e-mail and completed in January 2000. It is so in as much as it emphasizes with all the requisite vigor that German edginess about these topics – the product of a criminal. subtitled “Nietzsche’s Materialism. “Fiat veritas. die Mörder aller Mörder?” (Nietzsche 1959: 167). a real catastrophe. One lives before him. 10.LIVING HOT. section 853. 12. not the least important. in my view. 3. He who exposes it is a force majeure. 4. Whether many people like it or not. 1999. German: Selbstversuch (1996).” This is quoted in section IV of the “Foreword” to Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873). “Wie trösten wir uns. These two terms in English in original. 1926). 2. Alliez is here making an allusion to Bergson’s Les Données immédiates de la conscience. abject euthanasian “eugenics” that is part of our history – is one thing. The passage referred to in Ecce Homo reads in translation as follows: “The unmasking of Christian morality is an event without equal. 8. The Will to Power. An allusion to Chemins qui mènent nulle part. 9. Selbstversuch (1996) is the original title of L’essai d’intoxication volontaire. Translated by Michael Eldred and published in 1988 as Critique of Cynical Reason. . This is a paraphrase. the title of the French translation of Heidegger’s Holzwege. In his book. Das Problem der Menschwerdung (Jena. An allusion to Pascal’s “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. A zoological term referring to the capacity of certain species to procreate in a state of biological immaturity. Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel and published in 1989 as Thinker on Stage. the anthropologist Ludwig Bolk developed the hypothesis that human morphology CULTURAL POLITICS NOTES . 6. 7. it is this radical difference that provides us with food for thought.” 13.” 5. The fact remains that Henri Atlan’s contribution is precious on at least one point – and. one lives after him” (1979: 133). 11. pereat vita. and the challenge of the biotechnologies and biopolitics of the future is another. THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK the order of experts as controllers of knowledge. Translated by Chris Turner 325 1. translated into English as Time and Free Will (1996). It was first published in Multitudes 1 (2000). Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heidegger’s Brief über den Humanismus.M. Frankfurt a. Günther. New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1989. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace. Latour.J. Jamie Owen Daniel. MO: Kessinger Publishing Co. Trans. Time and Free Will. —— 1873[1980]. 1999). Trans. Trans. November. Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. Patterson-Black and V. Michael Eldred. —— 1959. 1979. London: Verso. 1984. Bruno.M. —— 1998b.M. —— 1998a. 1999. . Blasen. Frankfurt a. Pierre. Selbstversuch: Selbstversuch. Der Denker auf der Bühne.: Suhrkamp Verlag.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.. “Das Phänomen Adam. vol. with an introduction by Peter Preuss. Schwab. Peter. Calmann-Levy. Henri. Henri. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. “La biologie de demain n’est pas l’eugénisme nazi. —— 1986. R. Hollingdale. Critique of Cynical Reason. In France. Trans. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.M. 9: 43–6. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. F. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Dany-Robert Dufour has led the way in stressing the importance of the concept of neoteny (see Lettre sur la nature humaine à l’usage des survivants. Sphären II. —— 1999b. Reinking. Dieter Claessens (see Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte. November.ÉRIC ALLIEZ reflects foetal states that have become permanent. Bergson. BadenBaden/Krefeld: Agis-Verlag. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Gotthard. Frankfurt a.” Le Monde des débats. 1963. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. “Du centrisme mou au risque de penser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Regeln für den Menschenpark. 1980). Frankfurt a. Sphären I. Munich: Goldmann. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Ein Gespräch mit Carlos Oliveira. Nietzsche. Globen. Whitefish. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East. Sloterdijk. —— 1996. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1999. Ecce Homo. “Un nouveau Nietzsche.: Suhrkamp Verlag. 1994.] 326 CULTURAL POLITICS REFERENCES Atlan.” Le Monde des débats. R. —— 1998c. 1996. November. 1983. Paris: La Découverte.” Geo. —— 1999a. Trans. G.” Le Monde des débats. 1680–1880. [Information communicated by P. —— 1988. Sloterdijk. L’Intelligence collective. This theory was integrated into the work of the last of the masters of German sociology and historical anthropology. Lévy. 2005 at the University of Strasbourg. IN 1983 HIS BESTSELLING CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON APPEARED. 1999.2752/175174307X226889 VOLUME 3.NET/. Strasbourg. However. 2004). 2005 PETER SLOTERDIJK ABSTRACT Peter Sloterdijk first presented the following text as his inaugural lecture for the Chaire Emmanuel Levinas. ISSUE 3 PP 327–356 327 CULTURAL POLITICS . it bears homage to that great thinker of the complex Other. OF THE MONTHLY PHILOSOPHICAL TALK SHOW DAS PHILOSOPHISCHE QUARTETT ON GERMAN TELEVISION. which today’s consumerism and the collapse of Left-wing traditions tend to render ghostly. GERMANIC STUDIES. NICHT GERETTET (2001). A BOOK HE NOW RENOUNCES FOR ITS ROMANTICISM OF RESISTANCE BUT WHICH ALREADY INVOLVES MANY OF THE THEMES THAT APPEAR IN HIS RECENT WORKS. TOGETHER WITH GERMAN PHILOSOPHER RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI. EUROTAOISMUS (1989). AND HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH. IN 1980 HE VISITED BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH IN POONA. In the first two parts of his essay. HE RECEIVED HIS PHD FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC IN 1975. INDIA. SINCE 2002 HE HAS BEEN THE HOST. AND IM WELTINNENRAUM DES KAPITALS (2005).PETERSLOTERDIJK. Sloterdijk argues that if in CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10. HIS FAME PEAKED DURING THE MEDIA SCANDAL THAT FOLLOWED HIS LECTURE ON HUMANISM AND BIOPOLITICS IN THE AGE OF GENETIC ENGINEERING CALLED REGELN FÜR DEN MENSCHENPARK (1999). other than taking a political stance. March 4. SEE HTTP://WWW. OTHER KEY PUBLICATIONS ARE THINKER ON STAGE (1986). Sloterdijk prefers the perspective of a curator who is concerned about conserving the past century’s critical impulse. REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. Emmanuel Levinas Chair.PETER SLOTERDIJK (1947) STUDIED PHILOSOPHY. To a certain extent. IM SELBEN BOOT (1994). PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? EN ROUTE TO A CRITIQUE OF EXTREMIST REASON Inaugural Lecture. FOR A FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HIS PUBLICATIONS AND OTHER INFORMATION. SUCH AS THE SPHÄREN-TRILOGY (1998. March 4. SINCE 1993 HE HAS BEEN PROFESSOR AT THE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS IN VIENNA AND SINCE 2001 HE HAS BEEN PRESIDENT OF THE STATE ACADEMY OF DESIGN IN KARLSRUHE. apostolate.” a “post-Marxist theory of enrichment. If the twentieth century can still inspire us today. this is because its reprogramming of the pitch of existence (Daseinsstimmung) paves the way for a “critique of extremist reason. technologically. the exoneration (Entlastung) of the burdens of human life by the intrusion of new motive forces into human propulsive arrangements have led to the death throes (“Agonie”) of the belief in the base/superstructure division and the radicalism or fundamentalism derived from it. its exemplary twentieth-century cases are Lenin and Mao. and mediality in relation to a commanding and disinhibiting reality. 1.” Economically. excess. we might see the positive contents and characteristics of cultures as the reefs that. tradition. The subject of this extremist reason is defined by its vassalage. Alain Badiou is right to note that the memory of their critical projects is rapidly giving way to the uncontested status of today’s global neoliberalist ideology. 328 CULTURAL POLITICS KEYWORDS: passion for the real. The result is the slow but unavoidable emancipation of Western civilization from “the dogmatic opportunism of the real as power-of-the-base-from-below” toward “a free-moving position intermediate between the heavy and antigravitational tendencies. If we take an image of this kind as our base. not even for critical thought. then great segments of the protruding blocks may be engulfed. stand out from the sea of forgetfulness. the ending of scarcity (Entknappung) and.” and a “general economy” of energy resources based on excess and dissipation.” a “new interpretation of dreams. Its forerunners are champions of “good crime” such as Marquis de Sade and the young Hegelians. The twentieth century consists primarily of the activation of the real in a passion for technological and economic antigravitation.PETER SLOTERDIJK contemporary diagnoses the twentieth century appears as a time of confusions. . this is because it is an “Age of Extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm): an age of revolts against complexities by the critical reference of all actual or objective states of affairs to a basic cause or fundamental factor. and objects of tradition that we regarded until recently as topical and current may sink below the water line. extremism. and archiving. his explicit aim is to “translate” Badiou’s thesis that the twentieth century was marked by a “passion for the real” into the context of his own project of spherology. gravity. this is not necessarily a bad thing. thanks to the sedimenting work of repetition. anthropology. Sloterdijk argues. In the third and fourth parts of his essay. If the currents change within that sea. ATTEMPTS TO PUT A NAME TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY > Human civilizations have at times been described as the outcomes of a permanent struggle between memory and forgetting. Yet. to some extent. If any of its great themes were to continue to be of significance to later ages. but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it” (Hegel 1977: 19). one of the last keepers of the treasure of lost radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I start out from the assumption or. behind the backs of the present generations that the twentieth century has turned ghostly. “the twentieth century took place” can best be appreciated by relating it to Hegel’s dictum that the life of the mind is not “the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation. The unfathomably banal proposition. It is. I am alluding here. in large part. struggles. it has become a mere phantom that can no longer be reconstituted from the feelings of present generations – and whose only apparent future is as an arsenal of myths and a chaotic repository of scenes of violence. not as an adherence to any particular political standpoint. something like a reversal of the currents has in fact occurred and. You may judge how justified these thoughts may be from a remark by Alain Badiou. that would only be because it could serve for a long time yet as a treasure trove of materials for entertainment films in tragic settings. that in present-day culture. When I speak of fear here. the proposition gives rise immediately to an excessive logical and human CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . already disappeared. the observation. or any other occurrence in recent history. With all its wars. on the one hand. the consequence of which is to put paid to the greater part of our dark. so far as the Western hemisphere is concerned. which bears the publication date 2005 and plainly does not speak of the century to come but of the one just past. and atrocities. I should like the term to be understood in the first instance merely as the symptom of a concern for conservation. the introduction of the euro. Raised to this level.329 In the following thoughts. on the other hand. more exactly. as a result. the fall of the Berlin Wall. without our being able to point to any single event by which the earnest and the passion of past time were extinguished in us – not the Chernobyl disaster. the sequencing of the human genome. the controlled descent of the Mir space station. the attack on the World Trade Center. that author felt obliged to cite a sentence by Natacha Michel that runs: “Le XXe siècle a eu lieu. pathos-laden memories. to the synergies between victorious consumerism and the image-worlds of the high life.”1 This would be stupid or trivial were it not the antithesis of another unspoken proposition that can easily be divined: that the twentieth century ultimately never took place. together with the superstructures of neoliberal doctrine built upon these. relations of memory with the recent past have changed within a matter of a very few years. a collapse of Left-wing traditions may with good reason be diagnosed. In the introduction to his remarkable book Le Siècle. giving grounds for fearing that these could subside forever into the capitalist Lethe before we have an opportunity to gauge the extent of the reef systems that are sinking and have. above. We find ourselves compelled to go back to La Rochefoucauld and assert with him that: “Le soleil ni la mort ni le XXe siecle ne se peuvent regarder fixément. it required Hegel’s sublime cool-headedness to conceive a spirit that possessed the virtue. and the logical implications of which possibly reach beyond the discursive means of contemporary philosophy. in truth. and completely only after 1945 – could the thesis be explicitly expressed that Being itself was in no sense the Good and. since Luhmann. At the beginning of the nineteenth century. the “reduction of complexity. ancient astonishment was never wholly free from dark affects. The thinking of the first years of the twenty-first century has lost the strength for such lofty indifference [Indifferenz]. only in tragic excesses could an utterance such as Philoctetus’s “I found the Gods evil” impinge upon the general commandment to be positive. is good. the claims of which extend further than we can elucidate here. But only in the most recent modernity – more precisely. Seen from the standpoint of the present. and it must already have been something of a strain for the ancients to hold to the ontological dogma that all that is. When we say. The crucial complications that stand in the way of a reconstruction of the twentieth century are linked to the fact that this (questionably) so-called “age of extremes” was. in which the basic affect of philosophy changes from astonishment to horror. that definition is apparently self-evident and would remain the emptiest of all possible commentaries on this object if it were not given a specifically historic content by the fact that the dominant discourses and actions of the period had themselves fought a raging battle against the emergence of complexity. to look the sun and death impassibly in the face. The formula. It is time now .” to refer to Emmanuel Levinas’s post-ontological or meta-ontological figure of thought [Denkfigur]. has a quite particular meaning for the twentieth century. would be conceived as “other-than-Being. one aspect of all system functioning has been characterized.330 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK demand: it demands of thinkers that they stand before the petrifying gaze of the Medusa and meditate upon it as an icon of present being – a demand that corresponds to the spirit of the century. We know from the outset that no enumeration of transformations for good or ill can provide sufficient information as to what gave the twentieth century its dramatic and evolutionary substance.” by which. in the philosophical witches’ kitchen of the interwar years. in its learning processes. The difficulties of doing justice to this period do not lie only in the fact that the century presents itself retrospectively as a Medusan.” It is against the background of these remarks that the question in the title of this lecture is to be elucidated. “What happened in the twentieth century?” we do not expect an answer in the form of a historical report. that the Good must be wrested from Being. from the outset. Admittedly. even more an age of complexities. indeed. insofar as something asserted itself which. extremist one – particularly in the unleashings of violence of its first half. and yet still has local effects in our present age. the murdered Jews of Europe: the definition of the twentieth century as the age of that great collapse of civilization symbolized in such CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . which has. admittedly.” except that now the source was no longer named or known. What the author argues there on the phenomenon of the “frontless war” resurfaced half a century later among disappointed Leftists. That alleged “Age of Extremes” which. The Spiritual Situation of the Age. as for example can be deduced from Karl Jaspers’s 1931 book. It would for this reason be a difficult. it will come as no surprise that this age now appears in retrospect as a century of confusions. there on each occasion the insurrection against complexity was in play – that is to say the insurrection against the formal law of the contemporarily conceived real – and this always in the name of the real itself. This applies even to that darkest of all hyperboles. where similar statements are to be found throughout. we came upon manifestations of the extreme. generally lost its appeal among Europeans. we would merely be confronted again with the hyperboles which saw the activists and prophets through in their hand-to-hand combat with events. As an age of total speech [Gerede]. as a duel between the logics of complexity and of polemical simplification. without ever deflecting any of the adherents of the reductionist-extremist religions from their faiths). it has already said everything that is to be said about itself – everything and its opposite – and this observation too was made long ago. if not indeed hopeless. particularly in the maquis of the most recent Left radicalism. Wherever. proud attitude of the radical break with the preexistent world. a time bereft of any general overview and an era of the exaggeration of chance standpoints – in which the main form of exaggeration consisted in the reference of all things to an allegedly all-powerful cause or basic factor (an observation which the publicist Carl Christian Bry had already articulated most lucidly in his forgotten masterwork. in reality – above all on account of its extremisms – was an age of confusions. formulated from the standpoint of the exemplary victims of the century’s madness. Because a quasi-formal gigantomachia had lodged itself in the heart of the twentieth century. extremely reductionist ideas of which had been formed in every camp. or Leftists suffering from a belated complexity that went by the name of “New Opacity. has never fallen silent about itself. In most cases. Verkappte Religionen: Kritik des kollektiven Wahns 2 [Disguised Religions: Critique of Collective Madness].331 finally to realize that all the Medusan extremisms of that time had the character of fundamentalisms of simplification – to which the fundamentalism of activism and of the myth of renewal through “revolution” also belong – that bitter. in the course of the twentieth century. were we to appeal predominantly to what was said and written in the period itself to learn what kind of century we are dealing with. task and would furthermore condemn us to a methodologically false approach. however. consisted wholly and solely in the titanic battle between liberalism and egalitarianism. when the expression “the atomic age” was uttered with a powerful historical-philosophical quavering of the voice. also advanced around the middle of the century. as one could see in the most recent media campaigns on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kinsey Report) and a similar fate can be predicted for the . in which the latter presented itself as a two-headed – fascist and communist – monster. Arnold Gehlen’s proposal. according to which it was shaped by its central conflict. We have really gained little with Eric Hobsbawm’s formula. This point does. that the present age be understood as the era of “crystallization” is remembered today by just a few experts. but the silent overturning of all traditions. while even in an imaginarily agro-centric nation like France. “The Age of Extremes. Hobsbawm himself gives the lie to the title of his own all-too-successful book when he explains in its decisive chapter why it was not so much the pure drama of the battle of ideologies that decided the fate of the age. in the conviction which then prevailed that we were. indeed. it has fallen prey to the culture of memory. with the same ontological lascivity even. themes. Hobsbawm’s theses seem to echo another great interpretation of the twentieth century (proposed by Ernst Nolte and modified by Dan Diner). close to grasping the essence of the period. pacified final forms. Even were one empirically to bring to light the whole truth about the Shoah and entirely penetrate the sources of the annihilation conceptually. more exactly. If we look back over the other all-embracing interpretations that have been proposed for the twentieth century. the awkward situation remains that. At that time the atom and its splitting were spoken of with the same troubled piety. the global civil war. at last. although what was at issue was an ingenious conceptualization that sought to point to a transformation in the aggregate state of social facts toward postrevolutionarily. in each case. or features have been elevated into a picture of the age or a dominant symptom. individual events. Its core process. the corresponding figures no longer exceed an order of magnitude of 5–6 percent. which would make it coextensive with the history of the Soviet experiment. only 2 percent of the population still live from agriculture. either during the period or retrospectively. And.” even if we add that this “short twentieth century” runs from 1917 to 1990. with which the genome and genetic engineering began to be spoken of around the year 2000. None of our contemporaries in this year 2005 can comfortably put herself back into the period around 1950.332 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK names as Auschwitz and Treblinka. one would still presumably have understood only a small segment of the overall drama of the twentieth century. triggered by the break with agrarian culture and the triumphal march of urbanization. cast light on the present situation in which. argues Hobsbawm. Even a bold title like the “sexual revolution” has lost much of its color today (or. in a highly industrialized country like Germany. which already seem to us like entirely phantom concerns. nor with those of the history of discourse or ideas. in his view. the twentieth century may signify the era of translatio imperii from the British to the Americans (the British withdrawal from their commitments in the Balkans and the Levant in February 1947 will be cited as a key date in this connection). all things considered. in conclusion. rather. nor can it be condensed in an absolutely privileged text (or selection of great texts). the sense that in almost all the historical self-expressions of the time a certain bias is expressed. messianisms. Not only is this to defend CULTURAL POLITICS 2. THE APOCALYPSE OF THE REAL: ON THE LOGIC OF EXTREMISM . after this passage through self-destruction. Europeans. I am convinced that this view of the complex of the twentieth century in fact affords fruitful access to it. that terrible passion du réel that expressed itself in the action of the protagonists as the will to activate the true directly in the here and now. then. however eminent the philosophical and poetic articulations the century produced. One senses everywhere the hypnotizing of the actors by the programmes. is synonymous with the condensation of the world in a great system of artificiality that is distancing itself increasingly quickly from the problems of the twentieth century. that the passion of the twentieth century is not to be found in ideologies. which had. without being able to be entirely certain that. are inclined to tie their twentieth century to the sequence that runs from August 1914 to May 1. in the above-mentioned Le Siècle. on what is called globalization. they had found their way to a more adequate conception of themselves and their role in the world. insofar as it is used in a meaningful way. over a lost century. The essence of the period does not reveal itself unadorned in a single event or trend. the “Grey Revolution. or phantasms: the predominant motif of the twentieth century was rather. To make one further comment.” So far as the “era of decolonization” is concerned. by contrast. Retrospectively. was that Europeans looked back.WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? currently topical slogan. We shall have an opportunity here to test the supposition that the current forgetting of the twentieth century has in fact fulfilled the innermost intentions of that century itself. 2004. let us simply say here that the expression. 333 The foregoing thoughts prompt the conclusion that the core process of the twentieth century is to be come at neither with the means of event-based history. it is remembered only by a few Third World experts. though. the dazzling of the contemporary witnesses by the dramas. We must grant. This view may be said to have a certain dramaturgical plausibility in its favor. at the end of the twentieth century. one consequence. one has. monopolized all discourse on the contemporary age. that is to say to the complete cycle of the rending and restoration of European integrity. that Alain Badiou is right when he argues. For the historians among the political scientists. The proposition that the passion du réel was the main concern of the twentieth century may also be regarded as entirely appropriate. In contrast.334 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK the dignity of philosophy. The drama of the century reveals itself adequately only if we interpret the most visible battles. however. According to Nietzsche. a thoroughly polemical praxis is at work. In the propositions of the classics is expressed. the ideal of apathic theory is rejected using contemporary means. The central idea of this spherological project is articulated in the statement that modernity can be understood only as the age of a struggle over the redefinition of the meaning of reality. as forms of expression of something generally dying out. In what follows I should like to resituate the thesis that the twentieth century was marked by the “passion du réel” in a context marked by my own investigations into the emergence of lightweight elements. has manifested itself in ever-renewed battles. . to think even means to comprehend that the thinker herself is the field of battle on which the parties to the primal conflict between energies and forms clash. to think is necessarily to take sides in the logical civil war in which truth goes into battle against opinion. both physical and discursive. by showing how. In Badiou’s efforts to rescue radicalism. but it is also to affirm the idea that the real is only ever given to us through the filter of changeable formulations and that the mode of our purchase on reality fuses into a single amalgam with that reality. a contemporary reprise of the Platonic doctrine that the ceaseless titanic struggle over Being is fought out within thought itself and nowhere else – and that only in thought can we see what the reality of reality is founded upon. ultimately. too. reactions. on its own terms. I am speaking of the death throes of the belief in gravity. I attempt to show that the main event of this time consisted in Western civilization’s escape from the dogmatism of gravity. This thesis is reflected in Nietzsche’s dictum on Greek tragedy that it is the charm of these battles that whoever sees them must himself also fight. According to Plato. the meaning and course of the battles over the real. and fundamentalisms. as in Badiou’s synthesis. What we have here is. atmospheric facts. since the nineteenth century. behind the currently prevalent false appearances of liberal pacifism. which. and the immune system – investigations that have found concrete expression mainly in the Sphären [Spheres] trilogy and in the recently published Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. to the polemical ontologies that dominated the discourse of the twentieth century. the abyssal insight. which persists in the belief that in the tumult of battles there is still also a struggle over the truth of concepts. But only the supplementary conclusion that the activation of the real now also manifests itself in a passion for antigravitation enables us to understand. Zu einer philosophischen Theorie der Globalisierung (2005). that between understanding and fighting there is a convergence that is not easily avoidable and may even be inevitable. This passion undoubtedly reaches its height in that period of battling realisms. scarcity of resources. vitalistic. This not only created the archetype of modern. that that logical constellation lends itself particularly to the verification of Hegel’s saying that philosophy is its times grasped in thought. not without reason. and theories of barren nature. the investigation of which can. At the heart of all these theories. This is precisely what I wanted to capture when I gave this lecture the thematic subtitle “Critique of Extremist Reason. I think I can show that it cannot be confined to the twentieth century. drive-theoretical.335 The spherological approach is based on a hermeneutics of antigravitational or unburdened. as we have known it for almost 200 years in public and academic life. statements on reality (alias nature or history) are advanced. violence. While. have riveted human beings to the ontological hardships of modernity: the hardships of lack. economistic. whether these are styled in naturalistic. as the “dark authors of the bourgeoisie. the discovery of atmospheric facts and of the hidden realities of the immune system is discussed.” So far as the emergence of the aforementioned passion du réel is concerned. be seen as a homage to the man after whom this Strasbourg chair is named: Emmanuel Levinas. offensive fundamentalism in the form of Jacobinism and not only brought into the world the schema of unfinished revolution.” I mean to devote this cycle of presentations. it CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . and readings to a logical constellation. since philosophy. It is precisely this vassalage and mediality in relation to a commanding reality that it falls to us to elucidate further in the philosophical exercises of the year that lie before us. which for the most part present themselves as anthropologies. in its destructive thrust. I have never concealed my view that Hegel can be said to be right on this only in an ideal-typical perspective. or genetic idioms. talks. Only the fact that each period flees from itself in a different way produces an involuntary contribution of philosophy to the characterization of each period. simply the most thoroughly organized flight out of time. is. but the dispositions that made such battles possible and inevitable go back quite clearly to the era of the French Revolution. on the ideological productions which. exonerated3 existence that has both a destructive and a constructive dimension to it. which. want. for the most part. human beings are declared the vassals and vehicles of overpowering forces of reality. I hope. The honor of philosophy as present voice of truth is only ever rescued by the marginal figures who were once described. but misses the mark entirely from an empirical standpoint. economics. limit the field of human freedom to the hesitant gesture of subordination to the law of the real. in the process. from the constructive perspective. Wherever the new realisms find their voice. moreover. and crime. voluntaristic. since the days of the French Revolution. the general theory of antigravitation and exoneration focuses. I assume. which has since retained its force as the matrix of radicalism. held sway.”4 in order to point up the fact that the transition to modernity involved more than merely a generational change within the metaphysical tradition of old Europe. (Those interested in an extended version of this communiqué can refer to Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche: Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought for a masterly and comprehensive account. otherworldly realm [Jenseits] were pure invention. weakness. We must stress that the concept of the Unconscious could only begin its career in this neo-esoteric context. The neo-realist break in nineteenth-century thought finds expression in a flood of revelation literatures devoted to the task of obtaining for the previously repressed or dissimulated dimensions of reality their due place in the parliaments of knowledge. and sexual libido. that highly dangerous wisdom. and human yearning. which became current around 1800. yet. pragmatic spirit of the age. while. the center of gravity of all esoterism lay in the discovery. No one has summed up what changed at that point in the economy of European thought more lucidly than Nietzsche. in a countermove. of the fact that neither God nor gods existed and that. an alternative esoterics formed that presented itself as an empirical theology or ethnology of the otherworldly.) The significant element of this event lies in the fact that during the nineteenth century the traditional relations between the esoteric and the exoteric are reversed. became public opinion. to be kept secret at all costs. the movements of capital. So long as the idealist metaphysic of old Europe. whereas for one and a half millennia metaphysical theology was able to play the role of public opinion. it is also prophetic. as a consequence.336 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK also encouraged the activistic and materialistic ontologies that must be read as the effective textbooks of the modern society of labor and struggle. Until the nineteenth century. For this complete caesura in the history of mentalities I have elsewhere suggested the somewhat dramatic term “apocalypse of the real. to contradict the neo-realist. who managed to compress the history of ideas – if not indeed the history of being – of the nineteenth century into telegraphic format with his “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth.” That fateful text sums up the logical central event of this period by registering the way in which the notion of a “beyond” had imploded. This literature presents itself as scientific in tenor. shaped by theology. signals the fact that the otherworldly is near at hand and that the hidden side of nature begins right on the doorstep of consciousness. natural selection. But then the page was turned: what had been secret teaching became the exoteric. The advent of the realm of the real is heralded unceasingly. insofar as it reveals by more than mere description the realia to which it brings a new thematic treatment: the grounding of the world in the will. atheism. had to remain hidden as true occultism. mere castles in the air erected by fear. human labor. that concept. class struggles. . all representations relating to a higher. where its performative form is concerned. To some degree. The exterminism inseparable from the modus operandi of the polemical radicalisms of the twentieth century has its source in the evolutionarily inclined conflict ontologies.) It is part of the dynamic of the neo-realist discourses described here that they are essentially polemical – and not merely in the commonplace sense that the better is always the enemy of the good. apparent reality. These remarks relate particularly to the situation of young-Hegelian thought. nineteenth-century evolutionism offers historicized variants of an ontology of an ancient oriental type based on forces in struggle. No one grasped this more clearly than the young Marx who. (To allude at this stage to the Medusan dynamic of the neo-realist practice of disclosure [Enthüllung]. whether this is defined as an embodiment of circumstances. Darwin. since its spokespersons certainly do not see themselves merely as bearers of bad news. It was these speech acts of modern realism that were foremost in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s mind when he characterized the masterthinkers of the nineteenth century – Marx. 5 The nineteenth-century neo-realistic ontologies of struggle differ from classical dualism mainly in conceiving the antagonistic dimension not as an eternal opponent standing over against them symmetrically. as figures in an evolutionary or revolutionary tableau that allots them an inevitably exterminist function. But what Rosenstock-Huessy discerns correctly is the prophetic and apostolic habitus of the new discourses: without exception. they connect the epistemological apocalypse of the real with a moral adventism that describes the realm of the real as closeat-hand and already present in the depths. in which the irruption of the real manifested itself on the CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . but already transcended and merely provisional. or a social group. This leads to an ontologically asymmetrical conception of the opposing object as obstacle. we shall permit ourselves the remark that where prophets and apostles of the real begin to speak. according to which the truth of the real must itself be activated against the still existent. but to annihilate it. but as historically antecedent. and Freud – as dysangelists. In order for the reign of the real to come about. dualistic undercurrents of Western metaphysics. an ontology that was never entirely extinguished even under the dominance of monotheism and had survived in cryptic. in an important note on the essence of the new active critique. which has so far been able to retain power thanks to an illusory concealment and distortion of reality. a complex of ideas. which becomes manifest only later. each and every one. observed that this sought not to refute its object. an end must be put to the dominance of the unreal.337 and the public is called upon to prepare itself for its coming. The new realisms see themselves. We may doubt whether this expression designates the content of the neo-realist messages precisely. the martyrs of the real cannot be far behind – and the persecution of the enemies of the real will not be long in coming either. Nietzsche. ) However. a principle that can be activated as soon as the restraining effect of religion is eliminated. one must also actively teach crime and. De Sade is the occult genius of modern radicalism because he was the first to demonstrate how the activists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would imagine their marriage with the active principle of reality. which must be read alongside the great texts of the French Revolution as the Declaration of Human Rights of excessive liberalism. then human beings must. political fact. For Sade. as agents of nature. nature assumes the function of omniactive substance. not only is the emancipation of the criminal initiative proclaimed. In this extraordinary pamphlet. as for Spinoza. as Dolmancé. It is not enough to commit crimes. the triumphal march of the realisms became a public. when he becomes an apostle of crime. also. must put themselves. explains. consequently. it would be sufficient initially to go back to Lenin’s well-known reference to the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts” of the Marxist worldview. in the context of a republican constitution. With it. the hero of La Philosophie dans le boudoir. do so first within the context of secret societies.338 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK widest front. despite all neo-idealist restorations. indeed. Out of this came the moment of “critical theory. This propheticism of crime is articulated in the first naturalistic manifesto of modernity. Français. One More Effort If You Want To Become Republicans]. nature must become a person [Mensch] to realize itself fully and achieve its most extreme possibilities. If we wished to examine the earlier origins of this current of thought. because nature as such embodies for him a principle of criminal indifference and pure arbitrariness in the search for pleasure. man can successfully naturalize himself or become a medium for the absolute criminal only when he transforms himself into a sovereign criminal – more than this. in whose writings the Advent of the Real is presented as a future kingdom of crime. in a medial relationship to this latter. also wish to become nature – or. according to which nature is the healer that communicates itself through the corresponding media. encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains [Frenchmen. but the essence of reaction in its specifically modern sense is defined for the first time: . but then. where specific reference is made (alongside English sensualism and German idealism) to eighteenth-century French materialism. more exactly. or was not aware of.” the productive period of which runs from 1831 to 1969 (if we take the deaths of Hegel and Adorno as limiting dates). is that the master-thinker of that tendency was the Marquis de Sade. This turn toward a medial or apostolic naturalism would perhaps give no further cause for concern had Sade not defined the essence of nature as that of the absolute criminal. If it is the task of modern thought to develop substance as subject. and if. The nature of the moderns creates its own apostolates. in order to proclaim with every act of his life the gospel of primal criminality. (The German Romantics in fact developed a quite different variant of medial naturalism. conversely. What Lenin did not mention. This means quite simply that the natural subject.e. however. which is constructed from the bottom up. the medium. to the free development of the principle of nature that has been released within individuals. was the true discoverer of the superego. becoming radical means uniting with the forces situated at the base of situations to drive them toward new. We might argue that Sade. Realism now no longer means the humble correspondence of the intellect to an order of things outside us. revolts. from the aesthetic standpoint. means to grasp things at their roots. who is to be emancipated realistically. namely as repressive priestly rule over true nature. be transposed without difficulty on to what is called “history. According to the activists’ belief. The essence of subjectivity is interpreted here as something that can be activated only by a specific disinhibition. it implies the activation of the real in the sense of a progressive intensification of causes for the production of new effects.” which summons up its media as much as does active nature. Because the roots are to be conceived as basic forces. by the expulsion of the inner ancien régime and its inhibiting agencies. i. Uncommitted crimes await their perpetrators. To be radical. Since then. at the same time. as much as for Hitler and Mao.339 reaction and restoration are now seen at work wherever the powers of the religious ancien régime put up obstacles. What the twentieth century understood as “grosse Politik” (the expression goes back to Nietzsche) for that reason always assumed the form of the great “good crime” – for Lenin and Stalin. two generations before Bakunin. more uninhibited forms of expression. since he formulated the categorical imperative of every revolt: the abolition of the ancien régime in the psychopolitical sense. history is not so much a criminal as a surgeon amputating the sick tissue of the past. The realist is the agent. he might be said to be the patriarch of radicalism.” Is it still necessary to say that with Sade. and the apostle of a force that. whether these manifest themselves as crimes. can come into his own – that is to say be liberated to accede to his pleasure principle – only if he turns against his own prehistory and his moral inhibitedness. also. every activist has been able to profess this maxim: you may do what you will insofar as what you will fulfils an instinct [Trieb] of the great criminal that is nature. as neo-realist authors since Marx assert. old and new. But the root – and the Sadean paradigm shows this – is sought in a dynamic fundamental domain of the essent. only after having lost its inhibition. there begins that modern expressivism in which the real will itself be defined as the constant passing-over of forces into their expression? The schema of force and expression can. The decisive point in this rapid philosophical portrait of the divine marquis is that from him alone can we understand the structure of modern radicalism. in the same way that as yet unaccomplished revolutions await their activists. however. freer. CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . achieves what is termed its “free expression. insofar as he succeeded in ventilating the true identity of the prohibition. Radicalism and fundamentalism are synonymous insofar as they both seek alliance with the lower dimensions – it being of no consequence whether these are seen as forces or values. to transpose it – away from the conflict over value – on to an event that I consider to be the real innovation of the twentieth century: the construction of the Western system of the easing of living conditions [Lebensentlastung] on the basis of the Steuerstaat6 and . when he describes religion as the heart of a heartless world. but nonetheless to be rejected. Both are based on the assumption that what is below has a greater degree of reality than what is above. Just as true radicalism sets in train new expressive activity from the roots up. both are derivatives of one and the same ontology. all criticism has necessarily to begin with a critique of gravitation – but this requires that thought renounce the dogmatic opportunism of the real as power-of-the-base-from-below and place itself in a free-moving position intermediate between the heavy and antigravitational tendencies. Such thinking does not in fact proceed critically but dogmatically. I think I shall be able to demonstrate this by investigating the antigravitational dynamic of the real itself as the technical transformation of the world unfolds. In what follows I shall attempt to show how – and why – this ontological fundamentalism inherent in all modern realisms and their exacerbated radical forms is based on an erroneous conception of the real. so true fundamentalism seeks to overturn or restore the base in order to change things in the superstructure. according to which substantial. in his time.340 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK revolutions. I take up Nietzsche’s formula on the transvaluation of all values. Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion. heavy. that argument implied that it is sufficient to identify religion as a superstructural phenomenon to be able to situate it as lying on a base of relations of production. There are also good reasons to argue that the question of antigravity is by no means on a weak footing in modernity – if an image with such clear reference to the ground may be permitted here. We shall see from the following reflections that in the course of the most recent social evolution. moreover. works of art. with the architectonic metaphor of foundation or base. Only in rare moments does Marx deviate from this reductive practice and suggest the possibility of a rescuing critique. weighty things press downward. In reality. To this end. with no complications worthy of mention. The vegetal metaphor of roots connects. The critical operation implies the destruction of the object by referring it back to the deeper ground and dissolving it in the real. a conception that is admittedly understandable. If. for what purports to be criticism is merely the assertion of propositions from an inadequate ontology of the basal. or acts of free or excessive love. upward-striving forces have taken on considerable scope and thrust – extending far beyond the Ascensions of religious illusion. Inasmuch as they are indebted to the metaphysics of gravitation. so as to form the floor on which all the rest must be supported. quasi-immaterial objects are concerned. in whose journalism – not for nothing was their newspaper named Le Globe – the first features of an explicit policy of pampering [Verwöhnung]7 from a species-theoretical standpoint are to be found. despite their counterpoising to any ground. which is still current in theory and practice today. had to be revisable on the basis of an exoneration of all classes by a new general servant. rather. It is possible to have an untrammeled view of these phenomena only if we stand back far enough from the rachitic dogmas of Left radicalism. the rootless. in the terminology of the day. was identified as the beneficiary of a comprehensive movement of exoneration or. considered as a resource brought under control by large-scale technology.9 Since this concept has been available to cultural studies. we shall have to show that. I shall in what follows present the outlines of an interpretation of technology as agency of exoneration [Entlastung]. and the atmospheric. the best place to look would be among the early French socialists. The formula. the hour had come to end “the exploitation of man by man” and to introduce.WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? the civilization of mass comfort based on fossil fuels. What the key Saint-Simonian term “exploitation” means from a process-logic perspective could not be explicitly articulated until the philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century – particularly as a result of Arnold Gehlen’s efforts – developed a sufficiently abstract concept of exoneration. represented by its vanguard. Whoever wishes to get down to the deepest foundations today must ascend into the air. it has been possible to formulate some general comments CULTURAL POLITICS 3. the methodical exploitation of the earth by human beings. In the given context the epochal content of this turn can be appreciated: with it. Such a thing could be conceived on only one condition: that the typical distribution of the burden in agro-imperial class societies. THE TRANSVALUATION OF ALL VALUES: THE PRINCIPLE OF EXCESS . whose goal was set out in the age-old. the human race. So far as the light. namely Saint-Simon and his school. the era of exoneration. attempt to supplement the anthropological theory of exoneration with a postMarxist theory of enrichment. the various strata of industriels. subsequently. as the subject of an emancipation. the earth. with the advent of large-scale industry in the eighteenth century. they are more elementary than the fictions of gravity by which the twentieth century’s passions du réel were bewitched. goes back to Saint-Simonianism.8 According to that formula. Since these reflections require support from a general theory of antigravitation. We must prepare ourselves for an inversion of radicalism – for a turn toward the airy. the exoneration and liberation of the ruling few by the exploitation of the serving many. 341 If one wanted to learn more of the general premisses of exoneration in the age of its technical intensification. I shall. evangelical expression of the resurrection of the flesh within one’s time on earth. There was such a deformation in the polemical and didactic Communist Manifesto. This is the beginning of the epic of engines: with their construction. insofar as the worker himself. it is also far more in keeping with the empirical evidence. Its generality extends further insofar as it encompasses both natural and human (“labor power”) energies. In the age of physical labor. a process of “overthrow” in which above and below change places. aconceptual. The narrative of the exploitation of energy sources reaches its current hot spot10 as soon as it approaches the event complex that long-standing and recent social history together term the “Industrial Revolution” – a false designation. since what is involved here is. and as a result of their emergence. we may advance the thesis that all narratives of the metamorphoses of the conditio humana are narratives of the changing exploitation of energy sources – or descriptions of metabolic regimes (Sieferle 2002). However. The key to the transition from human labor to machine labor (and to new human–machine cooperation) lies in the coupling of power systems with execution systems. the rules of the energy game for traditional cultures change radically. which passed over in silence the reality of class compromises. it becomes clear that the effect described is not to be achieved by the many without a shifting of exploitation on to a new bottom stratum [Unten].342 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK on the trends within high-technological social complexes that have somewhat more purchase systemically and psychologically than the palpably naïve nineteenth-century theses on emancipation and progress. with their desperate. they could pass to the stage of explicit elaboration. This proposition is not only one dimension more general than Marx and Engels’s dogma that all history is the history of class struggles. Since engines have been among us. in no sense. after a seriously significant innovative leap in mechanical power systems had taken place. at the risk of ascribing exemplary significance for the redistributive battles of wage-earners to the slave and peasant uprisings of past history. If we link the phenomenon and concept of exoneration back to Saint-Simonian exploitation. as we know today. in spite of its high level of abstraction. in order normatively to generalize the comparatively rare phenomenon of open class struggles. as biological energy-converter. formed a unity of power and execution systems. and often vandalistic tendencies. it squares better with the facts in that it rejects the bad historicism of the doctrine that all states of human culture are linked together in a single evolutionary sequence by reason of (allegedly creative or dynamic) conflicts. Moreover. but the explicit recognition of product manufacture through mechanical substitution for human movements. Against this background. such couplings remained latent. . a new generation of heroic agents bestrides the stage of civilization. it involves no deformation of the data that have come down to us from history. even physical and philosophical concepts like power. as the operating principle of these machines. The grand narrative of exoneration among the moderns begins. even when they are made to operate night and day. condemned as they were to remain prisoners beneath the earth. of energy sans phrase. expression. that fossil fuel could not but CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . They do not listen to abolitionist preachers who dream dreams of a day not far off when engines and their owners will enjoy equal rights and the children of human beings and machines will play together. with the story of the massive invasion of the first generation of mechanical slaves which. nothing of the actor about it. was redolent of the Titans of Greek theogony. potentially catastrophic side. the most dramatic sections are the cantos on energy. the engine does not move from theory to praxis. as is well-known. but from standstill to operation. Since water vapor is produced in the first instance by the burning of coal (not until the nuclear power stations of the twentieth century is an entirely new agent introduced). in the epic of the engines. from the eighteenth century onward. untroubled by any thought of human rights. Hence the deep fascination exerted by exploding machines and. by modern physics is not merely the scientific reflection of the normalization principle by which the nonspecific coupling between food and organism has been replaced by the precise relationship between fuel and motorized machine. Engines are perfect slaves. and freedom have assumed radically new meanings. What in human subjects who move into action has to be performed by disinhibition. to a certain extent. being unencumbered with thoughts or explanations and possessing only the qualities associated with propulsion. Although we are normally concerned with domesticated forces here.” These new agents were particularly evocative of mythological associations. alluding to this by drawing parallels with the pre-Olympian race of violent titanic deities. Hence. the expansive pressure of locked-in water vapor. however. In order to integrate engines systematically as cultural agents. With the evacuation of power from the organism begins a passage in the grand narrative of the processes and stages of the exploitation of energy sources that has all the prerequisites for dictating a still ongoing last chapter. It has. One may go so far as to ask whether the formulation of the abstract. action. As decapitated subject. An engine is. explosions in general.343 energy. indeed. became naturalized in the emerging industrial landscapes of North West Europe under the name of “steam engines. is performed in engines by the starter mechanism. the mythology of the bourgeoisie has never totally lost sight of their unfettered. homogeneous concept of energy. a headless energy-subject brought into existence out of interest in the use of its power. Since the neo-Titans made their appearance in our modern lifeworlds. fuels of a quite different nature are needed from the food that kept alive the human and animal vectors of muscular labor in the agro-imperial world. the nations have transformed themselves into hostcountries for power machines. In its way. Promethean coal was joined from the end of the nineteenth century by those further fossil-energy vectors. technology. up to then. and Freedom. oil and natural gas – both of them agents of exoneration and pampering of the highest order. and consumption. A soaking in oil is the baptism of contemporary man – and Hollywood would not be the broadcasting hub of our current mythology had it not shown one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century. it was a reminder that the prince of this world could be none other than death – supported by his usual . but also of the modern way of life. the first oil well – and with it the first oil field in the New World – was opened up. an expression like “bad harvest” was. In their extraction. which the specialists call a “gusher. forms of resistance of a quite other type than those involved in mining had to be overcome. For example. James Dean. into an abrupt change of meaning. only artists. The activist connotation of the “always-also-being-able-to-beotherwise” meanwhile lodged itself in the concept of the real (a connotation of which. severity. Reality. during drilling near Titusville. over a period lasting more than 250 years.and pamperingeffects – it also drew such respectable categories of the ontology of old Europe as Being.” and hence required that we bow before the power of finitude. fraught with the admonitory seriousness of the classical doctrine of the real. bathing in his own oil well. The continually swelling stream of energy from as yet unexhausted fossil reserves not only enabled constant “growth” to take place – that is to say the positive feedback between labor. in a very shallow deposit scarcely more than 20 meters deep. the image of the erupting oil well. in which the reference to real-ity was always shot through with the pathos of the “being-that-way-and-no-other. science. It is one of the numerous “dialectics” of modernity that the powerful pampering-agent [Verwöhnungsagens] coal had generally to be unearthed through the infernal efforts of underground mining.” has been among the archetypes not only of the American dream. as guardians of the sense of the possible.344 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK become the heroic energy vector of the early years of the industrial age. It was at times possible to observe an effect that might be described as an accommodation on the part of nature. as made possible by easily accessible energies. had had an inkling). Since then. The miners of the coal-hungry nineteenth and twentieth centuries could then be called on as living witnesses to the Marxist thesis that the wage contract is merely the juridical mask of a new slavery. by contrast with the findings of the tradition. The primal scene in this acceding of natural resources to human demand was played out in 1859 in Pennsylvania when. as though this latter herself wanted to make her contribution to putting an end to the age of scarcity – and its reflection in ontologies of lack and miserabilisms. a leading character in Giant (1956). for an entire age. and lack. including the repercussions we describe as the psychosemantic conversion of populations on the basis of lasting exoneration. shaped by the basic experience of a superabundance of energy. in the course of the last hundred years. the narcissistic expenditures of great lords could be interpreted only as acts of hubris – their later reinterpretation as “culture” could not yet be foreseen. that Catholic theology. the horsemen of the apocalypse. then. which the inhabitants of the Crystal Palace come up against at an early stage – and which they hardly ever appreciate adequately. though naturally only where the climatic conditions of the great greenhouse are already in force. Thrownness into the world of excess is paid for with the sense that the horizon is slipping. two former seigneurial rights receive a democratic generalization: wilful freedom of movement and capricious expenditure. In these conditions. at the expense of a subject nature. embodied in arduous agricultural labor. human beings’ reality-feelings were calibrated to the scarcity of goods and resources. it was always clear to the people of the ancient world that the value generated constituted a limited. With this. Because the product of labor could not normally be increased. more than 200 years ago or so. the concept of freedom also had to free itself from its traditional meanings. Logically.345 escort. its citizens face the challenge posed by the sense of permanent abolition of boundaries [Entgrenzung]. relatively immutable quantity that was to be protected absolutely. in resignedly informing us that even the great empires collapse and the most arrogant towers are leveled by invincible nature within a few generations. For that reason. the wastrel was inevitably regarded as a madman. Agrarian conservatism expressed the ecological-moral consequences of this in a categorical prohibition of waste. which thinks in essentially premodern and miserabilist terms. has entirely lost its connection with the facts of the present. then. In a world like today’s. but at best complemented by campaigns of pillage. In the agro-imperial age. because they were based on the experience that work. which have at least a semimodern approach. particularly the definition of freedom as the right to an unrestricted mobility and to a festive wastage of energy (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2001: 321–2). was just sufficient to create precarious islands of human artificiality within nature. Against its current harmonics. even more than the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines. the experience of the ending of scarcity. They can and must be aware that their lives are unfolding in an age in which there is no normality. These views have ceased to hold since. it sounds out dimensions of meaning of a new kind. the ancient and medieval dogma of resignation has lost its validity – there are now new degrees of freedom that reach right to the level of the profoundest sense of existence. with the breakthrough to a style of culture based on fossil CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . Because modernity overall is a figure standing out against a ground of the primary color of excess. The sensitive zone in the reprogramming of the pitch of existence in modernity concerns. No wonder. The ancient theories of the successive ages of the world themselves say just this. that is to say of priests. we would have to stress how deeply the verdict of the tradition on the luxurious. Whereas. Modern civilization rests not so much on “the exit of humanity from the unproductivity for which it is itself responsible” (Bröckling 2004: 275) as on the constant flow of an undeserved wealth of energy into the space of enterprise and experience. In this portrait of the capitalist as rentier. “reserves” are precisely what can be assumed capable of constant increase. In monotheistic doctrine. because it put at risk an always scarce reserve of survival resources. concede with Smith that. there runs the following refrain: waste is a giving in to “the passion for present enjoyment” (Smith 1979: 441).12 It is remarkable that even the proto-liberal Adam Smith. in the age of fossil energy a thoroughgoing change has occurred in the meaning of waste – and it may now calmly be said that it represents the primary civic duty. though admittedly with the fine distinction that it is now the owners of capital far more than the feudal “parasites” who assume the role of malign wastrels. For the common Epicureans in the great comfortable hothouse. he maintains the distinction between the laboring and the wasteful classes. but the boundaries of the possible are constantly being pushed back: this gives a fundamentally different coloration to the “sense of being. who. with the system of . waste represented the ultimate sin against the spirit of subsistence. aristocrats. no account is taken of the fact that. The author of Capital stylizes his bourgeois as a vulgarized aristocrat. ready as he was to sing the praises of the markets boosted by luxury. everything superfluous could not but be displeasing to God and nature – as though they too thought in terms of reserves. Even Marx does not get away from the agro-imperial age’s concept of waste when. It is part of the habitus of “unproductive people”.” Only Stoics now think in terms of reserves. within a few generations. In a genealogy of the theme of waste. throughout his Wealth of Nations. Collective readiness to consume more has succeeded. however. and soldiers. in rising to the rank of a premiss of the system: mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. the idle. as a result of the new economic ways. subscribe to the belief that they are called upon to squander the wealth generated by the productive mass of the population. following Smith. and the superfluous was rooted in theological evaluations. Not that reserves of goods and energy increased to infinity overnight. whose cupidity and turpitude know no bounds. there is a surplus product in the world that far exceeds the small margins of surplus of agrarian times.346 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK energy. held to a highly negative concept of waste – which is why. by dint of a long-ingrained arrogance. He does. The prohibition on waste has been supplanted by the prohibition on frugality – this finds expression in the constant appeals to stimulate internal demand. From its blossoming we can see how levity has acquired the fundamental position. a sinister11 liberalism came on the scene and began decisively to reverse all signs. for the tradition. and electrical motors – as the primary relief-agents of modernity. to which may be added 31 million turkeys. 44. Though Liberals and Marxists both made serious attempts to interpret the phenomenon of industrial society. On this topic.13 However. their functionaries are forever asserting that they are exploited individuals. on the basis of their privations.347 capital. Nevertheless. under pressure of the new evidence. the fossil-energy phenomenon was not perceived in either system. even if. in the modern welfare and redistributive state. as of national and human solidarity). which. figures are more eloquent than sentimental arguments: according to the German Federal Government’s Report on Animal Protection for 2003. one could normally assume that those without means were exploited producers. the novel phenomenon of the “working rich” also begins its career – the working rich who balance out “present enjoyment” with the creation of value. exaggerated in doctrinaire fashion. have now entered upon the era of their mass production and exploitation [Verwertung]. and to these national statistics we must also add an enormous quantity of imports. unproductivity shifts from the top of society to its base – bringing into being the virtually unprecedented phenomenon of the parasitic poor. should properly be compensated. but the first great agent of exoneration or relief. internal combustion engines. 4.3 million cattle. was the lead factor in all explanations of wealth. Insofar as the value of labor. the principle of affluence made its entrance into the sphere of civilization. Whereas. where larger mammals are concerned. still less was it plumbed conceptually. who. even if one will go so far as to welcome them as the genius benignus of a civilization beyond lack and muscular slavery – one cannot deny the fact that the inevitable shift of exploitation of the fossil-energy age created a new proletariat through whose suffering the alleviated conditions in the Palace of Prosperity were made possible. the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained chronically incapable of grasping that coal. needed and used in industry. and around 14 million ducks. Similar figures may be supposed for most market societies.3 million pigs. thanks to the industrialization of agriculture. in the agro-imperial world. the poor of the Crystal Palace – bearing the title “the unemployed” – live more or less outside the sphere of value creation (and their upkeep is not so much a matter of “justice” to be demanded. Thanks to this universal “nature-worker” (which the alchemists had sought in vain for centuries). and 2. The bulk of present exploitation has been shifted on to working animals.1 million sheep and goats were put to their final intended use. was not a “raw material” like any other. Animal proteins constitute the CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . Equally neglected is the fact that. almost 400 million hens were slaughtered in Germany in 2002. one is prepared to conceive the vectors of fossil energy and the three generations of engines that are its offspring – steam engines. it will bring to power a hybrid synthesis of technical avant-gardism and eco-conservative moderation. which demands always to be experienced against a horizon of intensification and of abolition of boundaries. a global climate of civilization is looming. we can see that the flooding of the market with meat from animal bioconverters itself goes back to the floods of oil that were released in the twentieth century. and lack. to put a name to the axis around which the transvaluation of all values in the developed civilization of comfort revolves. Bolsheviks.14 This movement could turn out to be the spearhead of a development that ascribes a new meaning to nonurban ways of life. will remain the distinguishing feature of future situations. and Maoists cannot fully do justice to the infernal routines of the production and exploitation of animal life (we do not here comment on the moral and metaphysical implications of the comparison between large-scale human and animal exterminisms). With the “solar system” we are inevitably speaking of a transvaluation of the transvaluation of all values – and since the turn to current solar energy will put an end to the intoxication of the consumption of past solar energy. At the dawn of the second transvaluation of values. even if the fossil-energy cycle reaches its end in a hundred years or somewhat later. which will stress the indissociable connection between human rights and cruelty to animals. In these conditions. we can expect in the course of the next century to see increasing agitation among the populations of the great hothouse in the form of an internationalized movement for animal rights. at the beginning of the twentieth century. already largely in place today. necessity. we feed on coal and oil. “Ultimately. It is already broadly evident today which forms of energy will be made possible by a postfossil era: it will predominantly be a range of solar technologies and renewable fuels. If we had. If we take into account that the mass farming of livestock has as its precondition the explosive increase in production of animal feeds made possible by the agro-chemical industry. of which we may say with some likelihood that it displays postliberal features. once these have been transformed into edible products by industrialized agriculture” (Sieferle 2002: 125). then only the reference to the principle of affluence could provide the answer. the coming “solar economy” – must take us beyond the constraints and pathologies of the current fossil-energy resource politics (Scheer 2004). The enormity of the figures exceeds any emotional evaluation – even analogies to the holocausts perpetrated by the National Socialists. (To speak in the color symbolism of . There is no doubt that current affluence. The only thing certain is that the new system – many call it. succinctly. then. the detailed form of these energies is still not known. Hence their deep relation to the categories of stability.348 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK largest legal drugs market. we might speak of a qualified return to the “old values” – for all old values were derivatives of the imperative of budgeting on the basis of energy renewable within an annual cycle. Yet. We shall presumably see a dramatic reduction of material flows – and with it a revitalization of regional economies. CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . there will inevitably be a shifting of the center of gravity toward immaterial flows. bring about the transition from the rhythm of explosion to that of regenerations. It will then be mainly in the field of virtually immaterial data-streams that the decisive affluence will be seen. what is as yet premature talk today of “the global information or knowledge society” might well be tested out.4. it will be black/green. living by the maxim: Après nous le solaire. In these conditions. more generally. only the future can tell. it might be that what geopoliticians of the present have described as a shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific space in fact takes place. technical research will have to occupy itself predominantly with the sources of an alternative wastefulness. from this standpoint. In future experiences of affluence. the question of what happened in the twentieth century. though to interpret this merely as a “restoration” would be a mistake. “High” and “low” are. planetary equalization of resources. from the standpoint of the future “soft” solar technologies. aesthetic. and the defeat of global apartheid. for the time being. The Pacific style would necessarily develop the cultural derivatives of the transition to the techno-solar energy regime. How postfossility will reshape the current concepts of enterprise and freedom of expression can at the moment be predicted only vaguely. This latter is a reflex of the directionless vitalism that arises out of the impoverished perspective of the fossil-energy-based world system. Insofar as the demands that the principle of affluence awakened in the industrial age remain in force in the postfossil era. Against this background. This shift would. mass-cultural nihilism of the consumer scene is precisely as bereft of perspective and future as the high-cultural nihilism of the prosperous private individuals who build up art collections to give themselves personal significance. It is probable that. BEYOND THE EXPENSIVE AND THE GRATIS: FOR A NEW ALLIANCE WITH THE NATURE-WORKER If we examine. above all. It is to these alone that the label of globalism will genuinely apply. because “growth” in the material sphere will be prohibited on eco-systemic grounds. Whether this would simultaneously fulfil the expectations of worldwide peace-processes. the psychical. then it is clear that that era must in many 349 politics. After the ending of the fossil-energy regimes. and political derivatives of the sudden release of energy – as a world expressive of an energy fascism globalized by mass culture. the conditions for the exuberant expressionism of wastefulness that characterizes present mass culture will be removed. we shall retrospectively condemn explosionbased Romanticism – or. The joyful. one can understand why the culture industry in the Crystal Palace evinces a profound disorientation – beyond the demonstrable convergence between boredom and entertainment.) More and more. the product of the combined effects of neo-realist praxis and generally effective lightenings of the material burdens of life [Entlastungen]. rather. contrary to what Ernst Bloch said. we must remember that. as above. go back as far as the era of Renaissance arts and baroque universal magic to see the decisive lines of force that become visible in their triumphant splendor in the twentieth century. Retrospectively.” made up of two collaborative components. must focus on the crystallization phase of a new mental structure that runs from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. but only ever a “Principle of Immediacy. and self-satisfied dissatisfaction. capable of anything except waiting for things to mature in their own slow way. we must grasp its resolute presentism and understand the reasons for the transition from a time of expectations to a time of deeds. The summum bonum that points the direction for desire in general has. impatience. As we have pointed out. It is the century of triumphant impatience. Badiou has rightly stressed the extent to which the century broke with the prophetic habitus of the preceding one. in our view. postponement. but also of the intrusion of the new motive forces into human propulsive arrangements. this cannot be done if we limit the time-window of the analysis to the period between 1914 and the present. nor the mass-cultural relaxations of the second can be understood.350 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK respects be regarded as a time of fulfilments. Even the extension of the search for motivations. translated itself from the striving for redemption . the twentieth century never knew a Principle of Hope. I am speaking here of a reversal. in the course of which the formulation and formatting of human desire [Begehren] shifts from a religious to a secular object. in which the new subjects or agents sought to turn themselves into the media of coming nature or future history. however. To do justice to the twentieth century as a period in which the aspirations of yesteryear were taken seriously. This epochal impatience is. The theme of power is able to become omnipresent in the twentieth century because the technical organs of the exercise of power simultaneously forge their new alliance with the available energies. This allusion to early modern magic is not an accidental one. in which the martial law of “the measures taken” substitutes for patience. since the sixteenth century (with some preludes in the fifteenth and fourteenth). To the sociopsychological mysteries of the twentieth century belongs the unleashing of impatience. immediate gratification. to the time of the French Revolution is insufficient. without which neither the realistic excesses of the first half. for whoever wishes to track the dynamic presentism of contemporary culture with all its features of explosiveness. It is the century of immediate accomplishment. We must. the Impatience Principle and the Gratis Principle. The real dynamic of the twentieth century cannot in any sense be explained by the emergence of radicalism alone. and hope. doubtless its most fascinating outgrowth. We find here an effect we might describe as the irony of exploration: scarcely had the modern magia naturalis taken shape as the epistemological matrix for the quest for means of relief. which. it is necessary to recall once again the paradoxical course taken by exploratory movements [Suchbewegungen]. I suggest we should see the major event of the twentieth century as lying in the fulfilment of the alchemical dream. immanent situations came to assume supremacy. which is today forgotten or regarded with ridicule – particularly the art of transmutation into gold. The profoundest dream of Europe is the worklessness that arises out of material prosperity. than it took on the form of an unbridled endeavor. With this shift of emphasis. This branch of alchemy. the life of modern human beings as such can assume the form of a treasure hunt. To understand the developments of the European dynamic of enrichment. after the great discovery. on a first reading. to have to be patient no longer. and it need only be found for its beneficent effects to be felt at once. in order finally. on a second reading. This can be seen in the immeasurable investment baroque thought and experimentation made in so-called alchemy. In the new regime. To the irony of exploration is added the irony of realization. The treasure is imagined as the universal means for easing life’s burden. was based on the grandiose precapitalist phantasm that the quintessence of value or the substance of treasure itself could be directly produced. it is always a question of working so as not to have to work again. In this way.351 to the search for relief of burdens [Erleichterung]. One is patient for the last time. in which the enormous efforts involved overrode the imagined result of the quest and seemed to find justification only in regard to phantasmatically anticipated outcomes. Here the predominant fairytale theme of the modern world surfaces with crystal clarity: from this point on. the sense of all exertions lies in the striving for effortless homeostasis. A monstrous interest in so-called natural magic was thereby released. those who mastered gold production would be able to turn the hunt for treasure into a scientifically controlled manufacturing process. Were this the case. lead to the discovery of the first depth psychology and to a symbolic technique of self-birth. is a point we shall mention here only in passing). As a result. had no other meaning than to give human beings the means to break out of the prison of the old needs (that this did. It is clear that the confusion of work and questing was from the beginning inherent in the pursuit of wealth. every effort has only a provisional character. We have seen that it is part of the style of the age that none of these fulfilments is successfully achieved without simultaneously bringing to light the horrors concealed within the dream. they would free themselves from the vagaries of external fortune and install themselves directly at the source of wealth. As soon as that pursuit itself had to assume the form CULTURAL POLITICS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? . the more the sense of the treasure hunt generally fell away. the treasure function – the sudden and. In the light of historical experience we cannot. the earth as bearer of slow growth. though occasionally described as black gold. It will be clear that the agent we are enquiring after – and which can be neither capital nor labor – is none other than postconventionally. The last character-mask of treasure was perhaps the ill-fated Count of Monte Cristo. as it were. The active treasure we are speaking of here. but in the strata of the earth. deny that without the intervention of the most immense of all treasures (to which we have referred above). magical relieving of life’s burden – is not to be sought in the gold fetish: in today’s conditions this would be equivalent to inviting people to take up forgery or to try their luck in casinos or on the stock exchange. in no sense part of the usual concept of the worker. it is suited to rapid combustion and the production of instantaneous effects. unlike its predecessor. From the fate of the alchemists we must. contemporary thought still awaits. also. and the concept of treasure came merely to lead a gloomy existence on the fringes of the capitalist (and socialist) imaginary as the private fortune of the capitalist – something that aroused both envy and amazement. It is. and from the figure of treasure there emerged little by little that figure of capital. was already completely a figure of the past. embodies the Gratis Principle in a typically modern way because. requires. I shall conclude these remarks with the observation that a General Economy. but on the labor side. no widespread prosperity. of course. which. other forms of biosynthesis). from the late eighteenth century onward. then. now learn the correct lessons. is not on the money side of the economic process. In the future. That treasure. The more the economists mastered the subject. even after Bataille and the allusions of the ecologists and deep ecologists. to invoke the Marxist dualism of capital and labor. a new. however. no welfare state. The . as a discoverer of treasure. The treasure that is integrated into capitalism was not found in pirates’ trunks or alchemists’ cabinets. which we must now take up in post-Marxist terms. because it is not a person. and none of those things which make up the modus vivendi of the current Western comfort system. against which the acumen of the economists – and of the critics of political economy – was. coal and oil (and later.352 CULTURAL POLITICS PETER SLOTERDIJK of organized work. the concept of wealth as such also changed. there would be no capitalism. but a pure vector of energy. It is the real agent of the Immediacy Principle. explicit term that allows us to express both its belonging to the sphere of labor and also its essential difference from the previously so-called proletariat or from any other figure of wage-dependence. however. but as avenger was entirely the man of the future. will not be able to avoid coming back to the concept of treasure that is so frowned upon today. The concept of treasure. to be tested. postmetaphysically understood nature – in its dual specialization as fossil vector of energy and laboratory of organic syntheses. who. A postcapitalist world-form and a corresponding ethics can start out only from a new interpretation of the sun. which represents the absolute counterprinciple to the acquisitive principle of capitalism.” Strasbourg. for the foreseeable future. since – even after the ecological caesura – it remains thoroughly shaped by that habitus in which the interaction between capital and labor is absolutized and the contribution from the third side. 4ff. pp. [Trans. Originally published in 1917. 5. and the nature-worker. December 5. Heidegger Conference. We know since Nietzsche. Translated by Chris Turner 353 1. Following the lead of Dr. 7. without having interpreted them correctly. without which we should not be able to say what Being-in-the-world means for us. the question will be how humanity is to continue the hunt for treasure. Sloterdijk. If the twentieth century brought the realization of modernity’s dreams on to the agenda. Munich [Trans. The twentieth century took place. The German term here is entlastet. in this broader context. A state deriving its revenues from the taxation of a market economy. which. It is. On the presence of the figure of Zarathustra in European literature before Nietzsche. 8. CULTURAL POLITICS NOTES . Christian Thies of the University of Rostock. merely state that the golden age of this ignorance is coming to an end. In that interpretation. Most recently available in an edition of 1979 published by Franz Ehrenwirth Verlag. see Michael Stausberg (1998). as a result. 6. It should be noted that this is quite different from that “Golden Age of Exoneration” of which Saul Bellow wrote. the side of the nature-worker. The soughtafter General Economy can. The reference here is to exoneration in the sense of relief from material want.WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? name we are looking for can only be nature-worker. for the moment. which is taken from the later work of Arnold Gehlen. capital. we may say of the twenty-first that it has to begin with a new interpretation of dreams. I have generally translated the concept of Entlastung. the greatest embodiment of the virtue of giving. as exoneration. “Heideggers Politik: Das Ende der Geschichte vertagen. 3. current capitalist intelligence has nothing to say about an agent like the sun.] 2. is passed over in silence. 4. Understandably. and again since Bataille. that the role of the Prime Squanderer has always been played by the sun. be elaborated only in the form of a tripolar theory that devotes itself to articulating together work. The German term here is Verwöhnung. might also perhaps be translated as “featherbedding” [Trans. Let us. 2004.]. P.]. 11. Scheer. Archäologie der Arbeit. 2004. et omne quod Deo et naturae displicet sit malum”].PETER SLOTERDIJK 9.F. 22 [“cum . Gehlen has developed only the illiberal strand of consequences from the concept.” pp. 275. Miller. 139– 40: The aim of the current demand for “social justice” is to confiscate property from the productive sector. Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement. 2004.” Dante. 12. 2002. Sieferle. 10. section 2. 117–54. we might be said to have a remarkable change before us: the democratic state is becoming the agency of extra-economic compulsion and is attempting to tax the productive capitalist economy in order to support the unproductive. G. on the basis of his institutional interests.]. The German adjective here is “unheimlich. Susanne Krasmann. “Unternehmer. “Gesellschaft im Übergang.V. . 1977. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 14. New York: Columbia University Press. . . 13. Hegel. and everything displeasing to God and nature is evil.” I.” Das Unheimliche is the Freudian “Uncanny.: Suhrkamp. Since the propertyless (and perhaps even the unproductive or unemployed) might tend to be in the social majority. Hermann. The life story of an exemplary agitator on this front is told in Peter Singer (1998). 699–700. 354 CULTURAL POLITICS REFERENCES Bröckling. pp. MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. I show there that. “Hot spot” in English in the original. Lanham. Berlin: Kadmos. Löwith.” In Ulrich Bröckling. A. From Hegel to Nietzsche: Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. Phenomenology of Spirit. pp. see Sloterdijk. Schäume. 1964. chapter 3. .). so as to redirect it “socially” to the unproductive sector. Gesellschaft im Übergang.M. Peter. The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future. p. a time in which all are allegedly absolved of personal guilt [Trans. . omne superfluum Deo et naturae displiceat . London: Earthscan Publications. Frankfurt.W. Rolf Peter. “Monarchy. “Die Mängelwesen-Fiktion. See Rolf Peter Sieferle.” “Since . Karl. For a discussion of this concept. Ulrich. in Monarchy and Three Political Letters (London. parasitic poor. p. Trans. Thomas Lemke (eds). 14. 1954). 1998. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.” In Dirk Baecker (ed. Sphären III. . Singer. a. superfluity is displeasing both to God and nature. . Glossar der Gegenwart. Die Sonne und der Tod. 2001. Michael. Smith. The Wealth of Nations. 1979. Books I–III.: Suhrkamp. Zoroaster und die europäische Religionsgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.M. Andrew Skinner (ed. Dialogische Untersuchungen. Hans-Jürgen. P. 2 vols. a. and Heinrichs. 1998. Frankfurt. Faszination Zarathushtra. Adam. Stausberg.).WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? 355 CULTURAL POLITICS Sloterdijk. HENK OOSTERLING (1952) IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF DIFFERENCE, INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY, AND AESTHETICS AT THE ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM. HE IS ALSO DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART, CHAIRMAN OF THE DUTCH AESTHETICS FEDERATION, AND SECRETARY OF THE DUTCHFLEMISH ASSOCIATION FOR INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY. HE HAS PUBLISHED EXTENSIVELY ON FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. HIS BOOKS INCLUDE: DOOR SCHIJN BEWOGEN. NAAR EEN HYPERKRITIEK VAN DE XENOFOBE REDE (KOK AGORA, 1996), RADICALE MIDDELMATIGHEID (BOOM, 2000), AND INTERKULTURALITÄT IM DENKEN HEINZ KIMMERLES (VERLAG BAUTZ 2005). SEE: HTTP://WWW.HENKOOSTERLING.NL. REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK INTEREST AND EXCESS OF MODERN MAN’S RADICAL MEDIOCRITY: RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY HENK OOSTERLING ABSTRACT In my contribution, I adopt Sloterdijk’s analysis of globalization as the megalomaneous or “hyperpolitical” installing of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). I rephrase his threefold (energetical, informational, and epistemological) “explicitation” of man’s radical immersion in his own media as “radical mediocrity” and argue that this has become our first nature. But then, what is the political potential of Sloterdijk’s CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226898 VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 PP 357–380 357 CULTURAL POLITICS HENK OOSTERLING merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Bataillan principle of excess rather than lack and scarcity? Should we not differentiate between miserabilist and affirmative critique? This distinction is all but self-evident, because every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. It depends on the critical difference between mediocrity and inter-esse, between plain comfortable life and self-reflective radical mediocrity. In the final analysis, the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reflective inbetween. Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires a downscaling of Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitical understanding of being-in in terms of micropolitical art practices. I will concentrate on one possible answer to the critical questions that must be asked: wherein lies the possibility of resistance in Sloterdijk’s recent analyses of capitalism? KEYWORDS: philosophy, art, media critique, ecology, micropolitics, globalization > Upon taking the stage at the Tate Gallery in December 2005, Peter Sloterdijk began his lecture on the relation between art and politics, dealing with surrealism and terror, with the following statement: 358 CULTURAL POLITICS I like very much the pronunciation of the word “enormous.” It gives me a feeling for what I really am, that means, a person working on monstrosity. No more, no less. Philosophy demands that all of us produce a new and convincing interpretation of that strange state of mind we call megalomania. In every generation megalomania has to be reinterpreted by its carriers. It’s not a choice, megalomania is choosing you and you have to cope with that as well as you can. The stress has to be put not on the word “mania” but on the fact that it is a kind of suffering. The real term should be “megalopathia,” to be patient of big questions. As soon as you can accept this existential condition you will feel a little bit better, but you are not healed of course.1 There is no cure, only a taste for the enormity of our problems. 0. WORKING ON MONSTROSITY We can imagine Sloterdijk almost physically performing a judgement of taste by literally examining the palatal, alveolar, and labial qualities of the English word “enormous,” caressing the elongated, rounded sound represented in writing by “or.” Wasn’t it Gaston Bachelard who – in his phenomenology of the spherical – made the observation that “the value of perfection attributed to the sphere is entirely verbal” 359 (Bachelard 1994: 235)? In shifting to the content level, Sloterdijk introduces the focus of his judgement of taste: monstrosity. Both “enormous” and “monstrosity” are variations on one of the crucial ideas that haunt and inspire his spherological discourse: das Ungeheuer. Although in earlier interviews he preferred the synonym “das ganz Große,” at the Tate it was once again “monstrosity.” Adopting this concept from Martin Heidegger, who borrowed it from Greek tragedy,2 Sloterdijk no longer relates the monstrous to mythical gods or a Christian God. It is a secularized version of Heidegger’s In-Sein: “to inhabit the monstrous” (dem Ungeheuren einwohnen) (SI: 643).3 For Sloterdijk, authentic philosophy cannot be but “a hermeneutics of the monstrous” (NG: 166; ST: 291).4 Conventional thinking “means only the organized form of resistance against any reflection on the monstrous” (ST: 290). In order to get a grip on Sloterdijk’s “enormous” diagnosis of our time one has to take at least three giant steps. First, given the fact that the tensions between the local and the global and accompanying technology are articulations of the monstrous, one has to familiarize oneself with his analysis of contemporary globalization. This process consists of three stages. After a metaphysical globalization that begins with the pre-Socratic “global” mapping of the universe, a terrestrial globalization starts in 1492 with the “nautical ecstasies” of European powers which led to the discovery of the different continents. The last sentence of Sphären I – “Where are we when we are in the monstrous?” (SI: 644) – resonates in the preface of part II: globalization is understood as the geometrization of the unmeasurable, i.e. as “geometry in the monstrous” (SII: 47): “Thinking the sphere means to be realized as a local function of the monstrous” (SII: 25). In writing its genealogy, Sloterdijk implicitly rejects the unique character of current digital globalization. It is just another explication (Explikation) of a millennia-long process. Rather than labeling this explication as a progressive development, Sloterdijk qualifies it – with Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “pli,” or fold, in mind (Deleuze 1993) – as “explicitation.”5 “World history” is a discursive invention of the second phase. In the third phase man is beyond history (WIK: 247). The monstrous becomes a qualification of a posthistorical world, i.e. a totality that allows neither full understanding nor total comprehension. It is the enigmatic name for a network of immune systems, of cocoons, and capsules: after the biological mother womb and the political nation state, man has erected an ecological Greenhouse with a foam-like texture, consisting of cocoon-like bubbles, glued together. To enhance Sloterdijk’s imagery: the mother-child cocoon has been blown up to global proportions, exploded, and reconditioned as airy foam. Megalomania suits Sloterdijk’s state of mind. Mania, however, contains too much madness. Sloterdijk therefore corrects himself by replacing megalomania with megalopathia not as much emphasizing the aspect of suffering as the aspect of patience and endurance: to CULTURAL POLITICS RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY media theory. . but much more than a work of art. and ontology. Mere distribution of scarce resources is no longer needed. for that matter. grilled chickens fly around to be grabbed at will. One more step is needed. The first condition reproduces lack and is qualified by me as “radical mediocrity”. It is beyond all discourses: “It is a work of art.6 One specific Heideggerian overtone. The next step demands a tailoring of his concept of the enormous to relational proportions by downscaling these to an individual level. After having analyzed its rhetorical aspects I contextualize his claim of abundance in political economy. It sensitizes them to their current mode of existence: generosity and abundance. In the concluding sentences of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) Sloterdijk proposes Aristotle’s concept megalopsychia.988 pages. . I will start with the exploration of Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy in the strict sense: in his writing. Modern generosity – and. Sloterdijk wonders why megalopsychia would not be adequate. . are those who prevent the whole from falling back into pernicious routine” (WIK: 415). The most frequently used is creativity. “just because [our contemporaries] nowadays say creativity instead of magnanimity. it is technology. I need to make a distinction between the reactive and affirmative conditions of being-in-media. This sensibility – “an existential condition” – has to become the second nature of citizens of posthistorical foam city. but much more than grand politics. and labeled as “inter-esse. reflective. Sloterdijk’s other main inspiration. Different concepts are proposed by Sloterdijk to actualize this notion.” “Creative people . What does his “introduction to a general science of revolution” (SV: 64) mean? How are revolution and resistance articulated within an aesthetic strategy? What kind of politics is left when the outcome of spherological diagnosis is the principle of abundance (Überfluss)? In the land of plenty. resonates: monstrosity demands to be endured (Gelassenheit). I specify in my own terms his mediatheoretical underpinning of anthropology. For the time being I restrict myself to registering that Sloterdijk puts his shirt on an aesthetic category: not autonomy but creativity.” (NG: 367). After having read 2.360 CULTURAL POLITICS HENK OOSTERLING be patient of big questions. 7 every second nature over time becomes first. According to Nietzsche. It is too vast for man. I’ll come back to these harmful routines. anthropology. the latter is open. In the very last sentences of the Sphären-plus project. modern tolerance – needs an update. Then I return to aesthetics and politics.”8 Hyperpolitical megalopsychia becomes micropolitical . but much more than technology . In order to rephrase his critique of the indifference and mediocrity of the masses (Sloterdijk [VM] [2000]) in mediological terms. one starts to wonder what exactly the political relevance of Sloterdijk’s trilogy-plus is. it is grand politics. prominently present in his earlier works – especially Eurotaoism (Sloterdijk [ET] [1989]) – but expelled from his last project. . e. first published in German: 1983). Do they already know he is dead? The death of God. Lyotard’s sublime still resonates in Sloterdijk’s notion of monstrosity when he merges aesthetics with politics (Oosterling 1999). or Gesamtkunstwerk. who was presented by Nietzsche as the madman with his lantern wandering around asking the townsmen in the market whether they know the whereabouts of God. The explicitly pseudo-Hegelian overtones that give Sloterdijk’s text coherence and consistency are triggered by his desire to outdo Oswald Spengler’s failed “morphology of world history” (SI: 78). . opened a new space in human consciousness: the sublime. the conceptual avalanche overwhelming. writing a history of “the sphere as a form” means constructing a genealogy of the sphere insofar as it informed and formatted collective consciousness and culture from the beginnings of Western civilization. Kant transcendentalized it and in a postmodern turn it was “rephrased” by Jean-François Lyotard as the ambiguous rationale of the avant-garde art that methodically shocks the bourgeoisie out of its tastes. For him. Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy is better understood as the micropolitics of public space. He turned his back on reactive nihilism and its implied cynicism earlier in Critique of Cynical Reason (1987.9 At the end of Sphären III our current immune sphere – the Greenhouse or “Crystal Palace” – is described in terms of an artistic superinstallation in which public space has gained a museum-like quality. This shift from cynicism to “kynicism” rehabilitated the hero of antiphilosophy and cosmopolitism Diogenes of Synope. Instead of reproducing a historical approach based on negativity (Hegel) and resentment (Spengler). art as public space. the philosopher in drag. first proclaimed by Hegel (1952: 523.11 CULTURAL POLITICS 1. Burke problematized this affective tension. “if this had not been occupied by aesthetic ideology” (SIII: 811). In having rescaled and miniaturized megalopsychia to these “mediological” proportions.” (SIII: 813).RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY inter-esse. . the use of neologisms excessive. Benjamin’s analysis of Nazism as the political Gesamtkunstwerk par excellence10 problematized the relation between art and politics indeed. This mega installation can be described as a total work of art. He has not been seen lately. Sloterdijk adopts an affirmative approach (Nietzsche). Therefore Sloterdijk’s ”delimiting the concept of art in order to identify the system of society with the system of art” must surpass “all previous interpretations of the concept of the total work of art . The number of pages is enormous. 361 Sloterdijk’s spherological project is monstrous indeed! More adequate a qualification cannot be found for his trilogy-plus Sphärenproject. Is “globalization” perhaps an option? Or McLuhan’s “global village”? For Sloterdijk these are not suitable candidates. the historically embedded. i. 546). methodological legitimization overpowering. ART AND POLITICS: GETTING BEYOND GRAND NARRATIVES . 2.e. 2. over time. and fabricating concepts” and “With its concepts. HYPERBOLE. Heidegger’s phenomenological notion of truth (aletheia) – i.” (1980: 880. of state-building. emancipation. 362 CULTURAL POLITICS a. i.e. This canonized fiction cannot be unmasked without using the very same fiction in the process of unveiling. Sloterdijk investigates this aporetic quality in his writing. the coherence of which is guaranteed by joint ventures. Objectivity is at best the convergence of as many perspectives as possible. Sloterdijk makes an unexpected move: he would rather reproach the grand narratives for “not being big enough” (WIK: 14). Heidegger. the figure of the sphere – form and figure are synonyms (ST: 177) – not chosen arbitrarily and externally as an analytic tool in his hermeneutics of the monstrous? It is instructive to consult his philosophical sources of inspiration: Nietzsche. i. ESSAY So how does Sloterdijk get beyond the grand narratives of modern enlightenment. and globalization? If these narratives are no longer viable. but it was eventually downscaled to a truth game. and subjectivity converge. how can Sloterdijk still claim the truth for his own grand narrative on spheres? Why. Nietzsche states in Posthumous Writings. simultaneous disclosure and unconcealment of Being – is beyond the configuration of the objective and subjective. gains a truth value. When Nietzsche’s view is linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of philosophy. always already in the mood. fiction and metaphors Truth. Sloterdijk’s shift to creativity becomes self-evident: “Philosophy is the art of forming. a collective practice in which knowledge. in short a sum of human relations that. is “a mobile army of metaphors. that the grand narratives have come to an end? On the contrary.e. . . RHETORIC: FICTION. Objectivity’s fiction. Foucault. metonymies. philosophy brings forth events” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: resp. We are always already attuned to truth. canonical and obligatory: truths are illusions . Dasein is not a subject but a project. inventing. and Deleuze.HENK OOSTERLING This “sphere of all spheres” only exists politico-economically as “an inclusive concept of markets” (WIK: 231). Understanding how Sloterdijk overtrumps the modern grand narratives demands an understanding of his use of aesthetics at different levels of his writing. transferred. Isn’t this reason enough for Sloterdijk to draw the same conclusion as Lyotard did. i. truth was initially a product of discursive formations. Likewise our collective consciousness is “filled” or formatted by the spherical. power. poetically and rhetorically intensified. That truth is an expression of a will to power is acknowledged by both Foucault and Deleuze.e. For Heidegger. for instance. 881). METAPHOR. To Foucault. has he chosen the sphere as an all-encompassing image? Is the form. anthropomorphisms. . after steady use occur to a people as founded. and adorned. a theologian. Political overtones can be heard: “by exaggerating the given divisions of society. critique of hyperbolic reason: hypocritical thinking . For this. A “hyperbolic phenomenology”14 resonates in Sloterdijk’s spherology. Truth is a projective practice. In a staged retrospective conversation at the end of part III – a conversation on this oxymoron between a historian. a metaphor? Given the Deleuzean inspiration Sloterdijk felt while writing the third volume of Sphären especially12 we can compare his use of the sphere with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the notion of the machine. published during the finalization of the trilogy. Reflecting on the inconceivable monstrous. we have to turn to Nicht Gerettet. and a literary critic. . the literary critic goes on. has used a superlativist and supremacist form of classical philosophical reason. metaphor is not a rhetorical trope. He strategically applies stylistic figures and uses rhetorical devices against the aforementioned philosophical background. The author. . Given the representational quality of the metaphor. In this philosophical CULTURAL POLITICS b. It only shows that this is the breeding ground for truth. but a representative image which really hovers in front of him in the place of an idea” (Nietzsche 2000: 19). This creation of truth is neither a subjective projection nor pure description of a given reality. Through philosophical hyperbole the chance arises to revise definite options and to decide against exclusion” (SI: 13).RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY 199. It is a revealing of what has been concealed for a certain period in order to forge different political alliances and configure yet unseen epistemological coherencies. Machine is not a metaphor (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 36). [philosophy] makes us aware of the exclusions and offers them up for a retuning once more . is exactly the specific rhetorical device that is applied in order to overtrump the grand narratives? In the introduction to Sphären I it appears to be the hyperbole. Sloterdijk’s truth-finding means moving toward an as yet undisclosed truth. A decisive analysis of the relation between hyperbole and truth is not given in Sphären. And again it was Nietzsche. dichotomous thinking. So Sloterdijk’s aesthetic intervention first and foremost takes place at the level of his writing. all waiting for the philosopher to join in – the literary critic counters the others’ critique by stressing “the working of the text”: “you neglect the information that is stored in the rhetorical construction” (SIII: 87). see also WIK: 14). for instance. demands the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize a projected truth. in short. who taught Sloterdijk that “For the true poet. Is the sphere. then.13 363 Being a hermeneutic thinker. What. “Exaggerating” helps us to revalue the apparently given that is the result of the canonization of exclusive. the thinker on the stage. this would still presuppose the very metaphysics that is under attack. But this does not really solve the aporetic tension. Sloterdijk’s conceptual avalanche covers this “necessary illusion” (ST: 188). Surpassing Critical Theory.17 For him. it reflects on the exemplary position of the singular. in Quintilian’s words). Sloterdijk dissects Adorno’s and Heidegger’s de(con)struction of metaphysics. it is the genre that best expresses micronarratives. he – as Foucault had done before him with reference to Montaigne – comes to the conclusion that the essay is the most adequate genre for postmodernity (Lyotard 1986). That is why for Lyotard the essay is a micropolitical . Quintilian’s words are paraphrased: “the justification of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness [Angemessenheit an das Maßlose]” (NG: 256). For Sloterdijk. In writing on singularity one is condemned to polyvocity (Sloterdijk 1993b: 62). In criticizing the modern avatar of this production unit – the genius – Lyotard’s attention shifts to the work of art in its “working of the text. because it reduces transcendence to exaggeration” (ST: 31).” No one has an alibi (NG: 367). the essay is a hypergenre. essay: exemplary singularity The reference to Quintilian for understanding hyperbole as an adequate rhetorical device for evoking and projecting truth. in criticizing another hyperbole it exposes itself as such. Sloterdijk reacts approvingly: “I like the expression. Citing the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Metaphysics turns out to be canonized rhetoric. It is better for reason to speak hyperbolically than to remain modestly in the background in the search for truth. from reception to production. In Kantian terms.” Not only does Lyotard subsequently connect the sublime to the Heideggerian event. That is why metaphysics can only be criticized inter-hyperbolically.16 Although he is hardly mentioned in Sphären. 364 CULTURAL POLITICS c. It hyperbolically establishes a singular truth. Sloterdijk points out that a hyperbole becomes a stylistic virtue once the topic has surpassed a natural measure (naturalem modum excessit.HENK OOSTERLING physiognomy of Heidegger. an excessive world. The essay is radically democratic: it seeks its own rules. Sloterdijk undermines his own critique. When his interlocutor in Die Sonne und der Tod proposes the word “excess” (Übersteigerung). however. Both Quintilian and Longinus shifted the emphasis from the audience – where it lay in Aristoteles’ Poetics – to the rhetorician. it was Lyotard who. in referring to another Roman first-century rhetorician – Longinus – prepared an understanding of the sublime for postmodern discourse. bears witness to Sloterdijk’s proximity to the French philosophy of difference. We are all “collaborators. Sloterdijk wants to break the nihilistic spell of negativity – and. as we shall see: lack and scarcity – by constructing a literary machine as a hyperbolic system that deconstructs the internalized hyperboles of metaphysics that are taken for granted. The genitive “of” in “critique of hyperbolic reason” has to be understood as both objective and subjective: in the final instance.15 The relation between aesthetics and epistemology is rephrased in terms of hyperbole and truth. In a technical sense he has become hypocritical. The topic is the monstrous. Revaluating the surplus requires “a theory of constitutive luxury” (SIII: 676). POLITICAL ECONOMY: EXPENDITURE OR DISSIPATION? Now we understand how he is writing. questioning the apparent primacy of scarcity. Herein freedom is facilitated by security and insurance.RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY tactic. 365 The scarcity option is declined by Sloterdijk as “miserabilistic. “Victimism” is a trend that is enhanced within the current compensation culture as the vibrant nucleus of a global risk society. In spite of the empirical evidence of our abundant wealth. relations. liquefactions. abundance turns out to be the projected truth of Sloterdijk’s spherology. Rhetorical exaggeration eventually evokes in its audience the substantial topic of the spherology. Our main problem in “the affluent society” is our self-image. On the contrary. Political culture – both the Left and the Right – sustains and enhances this attitude. as a mode of thinking on groundless complexity” (Sloterdijk 1993a: 76). our self-definition. style and content. Its advocates are by no means negligible: The respected Pierre Bourdieu is downgraded to an agent of the “miserabilistic Internationale” whose interests are looked after by “poverty lawyers. But the discourse of scarcity and lack has become so excessive that victim culture is flourishing. Abundance is everywhere.” The laments of “miserophiles. The former still interprets the world in terms of oppression and exploitation. Given its hyperbolic quality and Sloterdijk’s characterization of politics after modernity as hyperpolitics. . . Taking expression to be the indiscernible unity of form and matter. In order to convey the idea that reality is ruled by abundance. Sloterdijk has to reach beyond modern and postmodern discourse. affluent society and miserabilism . even within postmodern discourse.” their “bel canto miserabilism” (SIII: 690) thrives on an anthropology of lack.” Benjamin too is dismissed as “misère conservative” (SIII: 781). abundance is not so easily accepted as a basic trait of human behavior and thought. but it is ideologically neglected and even denied by a culture that makes money out of fearful anticipation and translates complaints into claims. Is it an ontological. the latter laments the loss of values in terms of decadence. As the outcome of a “revaluation of all values” (WIK: 349). CULTURAL POLITICS a. Sloterdijk aims at mobilizing the truth by evoking the content of his thesis – excess and abundance – in his grandiose attempt at a tale bigger than any Grand Narrative. economic and political practices still thrive on the opposite idea: scarcity. the essay is a hyperpolitical genre. It is scarcity that legitimizes the economists’ contention that the efficient distribution of scarce resources to everyone serves the common good. the question remains as to what the writing is about. Hyperpolitics intervenes in a world that is understood “as logic of functions. 3. . and our self-esteem. Although he does not mention this book. Spending time excessively not only annihilates the surplus of economic transactions – even the most necessary goods are destroyed.366 CULTURAL POLITICS HENK OOSTERLING ideological. dissipation has a pejorative quality. or just paradigmatic for a certain period? Even worse. however. of our political economy. but they also renewed the economic cycle for another year. or discursive illusion? Is it an integral part of our being. In France this affirmative approach is part of a deep-seated tradition. but more particularly Foucault and Derrida (see Derrida 1978). is different from dissipation: “the mediocre dissipation [durchschnittliche Verschwendung] of today cannot be compared with the generous refutation of lack as such” (ST: 334). Dissipation still functions within a discourse of scarcity that favors recycling and asceticism as the main solutions to our problems. however. The astonishing. The systematic introduction of scarcity was shaped between the classical and modern episteme by economists like Say. Surrounded by abundance. ecstacizing the participants of the ritual to the point of self-loss or even annihilation. In the course of modernity substantial arguments for abundance over scarcity have been made by others as well. A Bataillan analysis of soccer hooliganism is instructive. All our addictions bear witness to the paradoxical fact that dissipation is collectively productive. and Smith. Lyotard. Bataille. Once we shift our gaze to the process level. It is still burdened by exactly those guilty and shameful feelings Schama describes in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987). By outdoing their rivals they not only reestablished their power. Ricardo. Foucault’s The Order of Things can be taken as a guideline. Mauss’s anthropological research was philosophically adapted by Georges Bataille. Deconstructing scarcity and advocating abundance can therefore be understood hyperpolitically as a critique of economic discourse. among whom were Kristeva. the instant gratification of overflowing enjoyment appears to be an affirmative feature of dissipation. His archeology of human sciences reveals that the concept “scarcity” came to the fore in eighteenth-century discourse (Foucault 1970: 256). Expenditure of wealth. . Within this perspective. though powerinvested. who passed the word to a generation of thinkers of differences. In the 1920s the debate was set in motion by Marcel Mauss. statement of the American president in his State of the Union address in 2005 – “America is addicted to oil” – is only one further miserabilistic confession that apparently fits the logic of both scarcity and autonomy. but in the final instance explains how expenditure drives the global economy. During his anthropological research on North-American tribes he became acquainted with the potlatch: a periodic ritual in which the powerful dissipate their wealth. develops an affirmative view on expenditure (dépense). and Deleuze. is Sloterdijk’s proposal to appreciate abundance over scarcity utopian? A genealogy of scarcity proves him to be right. In the first movement in the logic of Essence (Wesen) that follows the logic of Being. .RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY globally connected. revaluation of all values: a formal-ontological primacy of excess . this absolute indifference. statements like the following do suggest that a modified Bataillan perspective is adopted: “Isn’t it more true to say that life fundamentally is an overreaction. erected during the complex triple globalization. Man is an overreactive animal par excellence. Disproportionate excess (Unverhältnismäßige) is the bottom line of human life. it is perhaps instructive to understand the excess in formal-ontological terms. both are sublated in measure. lighter. . This is an inescapable conclusion of a genealogy of globalization: after the second globalization. in trying to understand itself. forces us to levitate our existence. both consciousness and body are enlightened. leading comfortable lives. the overcoming of absolute indifference leads to the realization of the human condition – world spirit in its CULTURAL POLITICS b. The “we. All decisive human activities are exaggerations. but firmly. are the wealthy inhabitants of the five-storey-high Greenhouse (WIK: 333–48). Experience-based knowledge being transformed into free-floating information. triggered by guilt and resentment. thinking means overreacting.” (ST: 32). Air conditioning takes on a very literal meaning. Matter dissolves into immaterial flows. it becomes a knotted. marrying means overreacting. In becoming less heavy. Given the pseudo-Hegelian overtones in Sloterdijk’s texts. 367 Although Bataille is not referred to in Sphären. we realize that a paradigmatic ethico-economic shift is needed in order to share our wealth. In following dialectical negation and sublation. Sloterdijk counters the uncomfortable aspect of our affluent society. by advocating “sources of alternative dissipation” (WIK: 362). the Crystal Palace as a mega installation that has been slowly.” this will be evident. Once measure loses its qualitative guarantee and becomes sheer quantity. Its dialectical dynamics finally dissolve into excess as an upbeat to absolute indifference. and facts into data. has to acknowledge that it is sheer appearance. In Hegel’s Science of Logic the extreme or the measureless (das Maßlose) is a transitional concept at the very end of the logic of Being where. territory is no longer a safe harbor for human communities. Enlightenment as an overall explicitation cuts through the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter. Coal and oil will be replaced by solar energy. highly complex network of measure relations. after the negation of quality by quantity. Making art means overreacting. Sloterdijk foresees a future where “all that is solid melts into air” as Marx wrote of modernization. an orgy. Current extraterritorial globalization. driven by an urge to move forward (Auftrieb). an excess. Walking upright is already a hyperbole . The earth deterritorializes and reterritorializes in the air. Modern man’s contemptuousness (Verachtung) is pacified in the “differential indifference” that forms “the formal secret of the masses and of a culture that organizes a total middle” (VM: 87). In Die Verachtung der Massen “eroded individualism” has made indifference “the one and only principle of the masses” (VM: 88). what then are the implications for an affirmative anthropology? Though Hegel was the first to proclaim the death of God in his grandiose effort to secularize Christian negativity. excess – as a “false infinity” of the logic of Being – is affirmed. excess becomes abundance. the absence of values. RELATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY: LACK AND TOO MUCH “We always already inhabit the dimension of excess” (ST: 337). and finally ground. of God. difference. If hyperbole as a rhetorical device evokes truth. Once dialectics loses its universal authority. Sloterdijk’s hermeneutics of the monstrous. Man can acknowledge this condition through his worldliness and by communicating its monstrosity hyperbolically.18 The hyperbole is a rhetorical device that is applied to reconfigure the excess coherently. 368 CULTURAL POLITICS 4. aiming at a revaluation of all values. saints. it was Nietzsche who radically drew . “Identity and indifference have to be understood as synonyms” (VM: 86) once all ontological differences – gods. a condition discursively evoked by exaggeration: “The justification of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness” (NG: 256). This leads to a chaotic metastasis of values. sages. The subject has to become indifferent in order to cope with the excess of meaning and means. It is the excess of values that can no longer be coped with in a consistent and coherent way. excess is. as is often proposed. contradiction. this nihilism does not imply. Sloterdijk redefines this formalontological transfer in his anthropology. He affirms this as the nihilistic excess of values in a “kynical” way in order to overcome the postmodern dissolution of truth. a presupposition for reflecting identity.19 The latter can even become “totalitarian” (VM: 95). and if expenditure is the hidden “rationale” of economic life. Metastasis also sheds light on the debacle of multicultural society and the logic of the risk society. as is for instance nowadays illustrated by the rules and regulations that govern public space. The hyperbolic text sensitizes its readers not to become indifferent to the truth. But why does this revaluation of values suddenly pop up? Although the sublation of excess into indifference is understood in terms of nihilism. in formal ontological terms. In a revaluation of all values. Playing on Bloch’s “Principle of Hope” Sloterdijk hyperbolically proposes the principle of abundance as the still-concealed truth of modernity. does not ignore indifference.HENK OOSTERLING historical articulation – in terms of the reflective concepts of identity. Following Hegel. It is rather the result of a radical evaluation of any sovereignty that was once beyond evaluation: in the final instance. and the talented – are negated. Once we cross the 10 percent poverty threshold. Nietzsche’s definition. triggers institutional compensation: family. They are stressed and fearful. the abundance of sensorial stimuli is unlimited. Excess is an affirmation of these vital forces: “The element of human beings is the too much [das Zuviel]” (SIII: 709). In Sphären III. gang. The senses.” Given this quintessential excess we need to revalue our present human condition. This is. are overflowing with stimuli.” enabled Arnold Gehlen to qualify human beings as “Mangelwesen” (SIII: 699. wealth being “the ability to participate in an explicitation . . church. disciplinary institutions form immune systems. but by acknowledging and practicing generosity and creativity. when incorporated into Scheler’s view on human behavior as “openness to the world. man is a being whose element is a constitutive lack of the necessary means of subsistence. Hence Sloterdijk’s hyperbolic proposal of “a theory of a constitutive luxury. during their lifetime individuals are CULTURAL POLITICS RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY . Gehlen regards the lack of means (Mittellosigkeit) as an essential trait. Is man as an animal rationale – mind governing body. . we enter the five floors of the Greenhouse (WIK: 334. literally a “being of lack”): in spite of all the luxury that surrounds him. Given the anthropological premise of plenty. These even constitute relations as an openness.” Surplus is at best man’s fifth element. Schäume (Foams) all intellectual and rhetorical forces are mobilized to free Nietzsche from Gehlen’s “miserabilist” grip. however. but properly insured. however. These normalizing.” an animal not fully realized. Over the last two centuries an apparently infinite range of possibilities for applying scientific research to daily circumstances has raised the level of comfort exponentially. wherein lack is transformed into a productive force. in spite of evident shortcomings – still an option? For Nietzsche man was a “nicht-festgestellte Tier.” (SIII: 756). This comfortable situation has consequences for anthropology. This. his “quint-essence. army. being a-specific. enjoying excessive discipline. Sloterdijk reverses Gehlen’s thesis by focusing on relations that are enabled by media and mediations. 335). in the final instance – culture. not man’s “essence. Ascetics. school. For wealthy cosmopolitans the struggle for life has been reduced to a minimum. transform the reactive element of lack affirmatively into a value in itself. a creative force that channels excessive abundance: “what we call the open is the dimension of wealth in its existential reflex” (SIII: 760). populated by people who no longer sweat.369 its consequences: Man has to acknowledge being as first and foremost an affirmative will to life that legitimates itself via a will to truth as a will to power. nation. as happened with asceticism based on resentment. not by feeling guilty.” Most people have no problem acknowledging that modern life has gradually become more comfortable. Although every newborn lacks the means to survive and therefore has to be protected and guided. ” It is embedded in a bi-unity of mother–child.” In Eurotaoism total mobilization is positioned as our “first” nature. immune systems “reveal” the foundation of man’s being as relationality. called addiction. They engender their own aporias and become auto-immune. which is fully dependent upon technological. But automobility has produced its own auto-immune disease: Total mobilization suffocates urban life and comes to a standstill in a thousand-mile-long traffic-jam. In this “kinetic anthropology” the car is “the technical double of the principally active transcendental subject” (ET: 42). Immune systems decline over time. In an article20 on urban culture Sloterdijk explores an alternative lifestyle of expenditure.” The result of this explicitation is a comfortable life for the inhabitants of the Greenhouse. Sloterdijk emphasizes another. There.CULTURAL POLITICS HENK OOSTERLING embedded in ever-changing immune systems to prevent them from collapsing under a constitutive abundance. The revolutionary impact is no longer presented as a reversal. Heidegger’s implicit negation of life – “being-toward-death” – is overruled by Hannah Arendt’s “natality”: A coming-into-world (zurWelt-kommen) (ET: 205) that includes both bi-unity and creativity. natality is the second radical. Lacan’s theory of desire is countered by Kristeva’s primacy of the mother–daughter relation (SI: 542).21 The shift from a male-dominated. This at least echoes the idea that in order to change the world. territorial globalization. 62). and insurance-based mediations. if this is a plausible proposition” . Modifying Latour’s question as to whether we have ever really been modern. Automobility is qualified as a Heideggerian “existential. It is evident that an immune system will dissolve once man does not acknowledge and foster its auto-immune tendencies. but as a radical unfolding. one was already made in Eurotaoismus. This symbiosis is an “ecstatic immanence” (SI: 641). In line with Deleuzean thought. collective consciousness – Hegel’s World Spirit – has to convert itself. The third radical – Sloterdijk writes this in 1994 – is “a conversion of souls” prepared by philosophy (SV: 61. an extra-uterine symbiosis that overrules lack. monomaniacal perspective to a female-oriented. open. But more than these aporias. more relevant anthropological implication. In Sphären the perspective has slightly changed. Within Sloterdijk’s general science of revolution. 370 5. a making explicit. One of his critical remarks concerns the redefinition of freedom caused by the primacy of mobility and the abundance of cheap energy. The first revolutionary radical was civil society as part of modern nation-state building within the second. In order to accentuate relationality over lack at the very end of Sphären I. Blasen (Bubbles). Sloterdijk wonders whether we have ever been revolutionary (SIII: 87). ENLIGHTENMENT AS MEDIOLOGICAL EXPLICITATION “I see myself as a human being who functions amid technical media as a medium in the second degree. emphasizing the “making. In opening up to the world the child is always already beyond “itself. juridical. jet engine. and limbs. This “mediology” miniaturizes and literally ex-plains.” Preliminary to this distinction is a further differentiation of the notion of Enlightenment. The last two have always been part of Enlightenment. trains. these mediations are internalized. I will characterize this. combustion engine. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to res cogitans. Territorial distances are annihilated – a supernova right in front of our noses. If we want to understand the radical implications of a theory of constitutive luxury. it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in the world. Sloterdijk’s grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects of mediatization need a rescaling. human beings feel less heavy. In order to expose this blind spot.e.RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY (ST: 15). CULTURAL POLITICS a. but only in retrospect can we acknowledge their constitutive value. intercontinental chatter – new virtual ones created – atomic universes. organs. i. Next to the conventional Enlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) – emancipation from our “selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit” (self-inflicted immaturity) – enlightenment explicitates itself through scientific knowledge. planes). a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reflectively affirms abundance. Mediologically. Enlightenment has this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). as “inter-esse. In this way speed of transportation and transparency of communication enlighten body and sight. freer. television. the explicitation of which in its turn is technology. extending their potentialities. Speeded up in capsular nodes (cars. GPS). Gradually. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must be invested in micropolitical art practices. pacemaker. Ever-accelerating means of transportation literally “enlighten” our bodies (2) as do means of telecommunication (3). Triple Enlightenment: “silent takeover” of the mind . however. i.e. computer. this comfort becomes part of normalization and subjectivation. I call this Triple Enlightenment. because I think there is a blind spot in Sloterdijk’s media theory. Modern man’s life becomes more comfortable. both are reinvested in a relational condition. virtual public space. emphasizing the interest of the in-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijk’s work. The three aspects of enlightenment are fully dependent upon each other. 371 ”Mediological enlightenment” (WIK: 261) not only enlightens the mind. Once the immunity of the system is restored or a new immune system installed. extends megalopsychia – generosity and creativity – in man’s use of his media. But the steam engine. and Internet – to mention only the most obvious – have initially ruptured existing immune systems. we cannot neglect Sloterdijk’s media theory. based on McLuhan’s thesis that media are extensions of our senses. Media theory underpins his anthropology. communicating via interfaces (computers. cellphones. 23 372 CULTURAL POLITICS b. Every medium becomes the message. or deafened. The medium becomes an experience in itself. Proximity without distance roots both body and soul in media. Intention is articulated by its extensions. As a result of this triple enlightenment. The mediocrity of the masses expressing contemptuousness. Machine is no longer a metaphor. our moral categories are transformed. Being-in-the-world is now being-inmedia. Heteronomy is no problem. blinded. end-users consume the comfort. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainment and even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). 2005a). a medium being more than just an instrumental. How does second nature become first (SIII: 809)? After the initial “illness” that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium. the abundance of “their” media. is an indication of a constitutive lack. so severely criticized by Sloterdijk. Man has become a “psycho-technological” and “techno-psychological” being. Nowadays Dasein seems reduced to a rooted or “radical” mediocrity (see Oosterling 2004b. individuals nowadays no longer realize that their “first” nature . Dasein is design: radical mediocrity as first nature If relational anthropology is in need of “an ontology of prosthetic realities” (NG: 361). they actually constitute sociability. Given their indifference.HENK OOSTERLING Modern life has undergone a “silent takeover”: Technology has converted – explicitated – modern man’s soul without his realizing it. mediatization explains how our souls are converted: by being-in-media. It is as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properly functioning eye or ear. As a result. i. the “incorporated” media will become as invisible as they are indispensable. But once this mediological abundance constitutes the end-user’s milieu or immune system. It is no longer a means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobility and interactivity feels like being crippled. The proposed transformation of Aristotelian megalopsychia has to take into account the constitutive workings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG: 361). In retrospect this mediological relationality always has been an inextricable quality of man’s condition. kinetic connection between separate beings. Do modern subjects still nurture the idea that they have an instrumental relation to “their” media? They can abandon them when they have no more use-value. Enforcing your own rules – being auto-nomos – is transformed into a will to access and exposure. man and machine. inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. The “lightness of being” is no longer unbearable.22 Media are incorporated to the point of becoming indispensable means of subsistence. man’s milieu.e. The identity of the relata is constituted in and by the relation. Medical technology replaces and transforms vital functions of both body and mind. mind and matter have integrated. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionless immersion in a media environment. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life. mediocre people are part of the They (das Man).” Once “imaginations concerning lack have become second nature. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esse . As a result of forgetfulness the former prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only the second. virtualities – of an internalized extension reproduce lack on another level. It is at this crucial point that a medium becomes “a harmful routine. for “living in each other in ecstatic immanence” it suffices to be “a male or female modern mass-media being” (SI: 640). it is hard to see how they can perform this change of perspectives on their own” (SIII: 809). 373 The lightness of being-in-media does not “naturally” make the experience of abundance reflective. “In comfort one does not ask where it comes from when it has become a habit” (SIII: 403). the current level of addiction to all kinds of media – even oil – bears witness to the fact that autonomy is no longer adequate as a category with which to understand ourselves in terms other than indifference. In foam city we. In order to add a normative component to being-in-media. authenticity obviously is still an option. Autonomy has become automobility. Notwithstanding the collective productivity of addictions. memory of this “first” nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggered by the second. What is needed is a reflective attitude as an “existential” in which mediocrity is experienced in its affluent generosity. In medial performance. Every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. freedom frictionless access. Dasein design. which advocates openness. For Sloterdijk. As a result the unprecedented possibilities – or better. Autonomy being sheer illusion – a Nietzschean fiction – for Sloterdijk.” Once the abundance of new mediological conditions is internalized. comfortable life can easily turn into an experience of lack. But when he notices that “the mediocre. it is evident that for Dasein to be “a passion in the face of the monstrous” (NG: 223) reflectivity has to be part of our “medio-crity. As Hegel argues: reflectivity sublates indifference. 24 An affirmative approach acknowledges that Homo sapiens is an “interesse” (Zwischenwesen). Heidegger’s qualification of inauthentic existence (SI: 643). needs that were previously nonexistent are ontologized. and vulgar effaced the horizon” (SI: 642). In part I of Sphären. Although Sloterdijk criticizes “our efforts CULTURAL POLITICS c. They become primary needs.RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY was initially second nature. As long as the in-betweenness of radical mediocrity does not reflect on itself. share the in-between. Unreflective being-in-media takes its users beyond history. I make a distinction between a miserabilist and an affirmative mediological condition. medial. enhances the reflectivity which Sloterdijk’s museological attitude presupposes (SIII: 810). Ontologically. radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between.” This is acknowledged at the end of part III: “Actually reflectivity and ‘being spoilt’ (Verwöhnung) are inextricably linked. glued foam bubbles. Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. and ideologies that still define human relations in terms of oppression are declared “miserabilistic. Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.e. with reference to Heidegger’s They. But today’s interest accepts as valid only what is interesting.” (Arendt 1958: 182). Sloterdijk draws political consequences. resistance to the effort of the analyst to unlock the fixated reality principle of his patient is no option either. inter-esse. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK From the imperative that we have to become lighter (i. “In the absence of a convincing . Heidegger makes a distinction between an inauthentic condition of the interesting as shallow entertainment and a being-in-between (Zwischen-sein) as “Inter-esse”: “Interest. Perhaps the deconstructionist’s résistance or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognized in “the refusal to follow the rules of one’s own game” (ST: 285). 287).HENK OOSTERLING to make ourselves interesting. Inhabiting the Greenhouse – a thermotope (SIII: 396) – means we are still haunted by scarcity.” which means to “make-oneselfbetter-than–the-others” (VM: 87). . In the final analysis. in the words of the most literal significance. the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity – Aristotle’s megalopsychia – consist of this self-reflective in-between. enlightened). Unreflected inter-esse asks for “the combination of ‘de-interesting and re-interesting’ in a nondual type of morality” (SIII: 411). something which inter-est. Strategies that favor heaviness over lightness in terms of resignation (Gelassenheit) and recycling. this is understood as explicitation. means to be among and in the midst of things. or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it. an authentic human condition is at hand.”25 “Inter-esse” is the “cement” (Kit) of relationality or Being-with (Mit-sein). After criticizing Lacan. . 374 CULTURAL POLITICS 6.” Scapegoats are the Green parties and “the Old Left. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between .” But is it enough to affirm the antigravitational flows and criticize “gravitational conservatism”? Does Sloterdijk’s “jovial” perspective suffice to “convert” radical mediocrity? What kind of politics does he propose? Is resistance still an option? There was an implicit acknowledgement of resistance in Critique of Cynical Reason – albeit romantic – but in Die Sonne und der Tod it is no longer defined as resistance to oppression and injustice in the political sense (ST: 262. which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt took Heidegger’s distinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interests as “interesse”: “These interests constitute. This ontology of the in-between – this “esse” of the “inter” – needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. 284. Within his general science of revolution. 375 thermic socialism, for the time being we have to be content with a thermic aesthetics” (SIII: 405). His affinity with the avant-garde not only explains Sloterdijk’s aversion to the mediocre They; it also sheds light on the political premise of his exaggerative reasoning: revising definite options and deciding against exclusion. The approving remarks on Joseph Beuys’s artistic practice give us a clue.26 Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuys’s concept of the “social sculpture” (Sozial Plastik) (SIII: 661, 811). Every generous citizen has to become an artist, as Joseph Beuys once proposed (SIII: 811). Like Foucault, Sloterdijk favors creativity over autonomy. If aestheticization is needed for enduring monstrosity, is Foucault’s proposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can we recognize Sloterdijk’s exaggerative reasoning in Foucault’s attempt to connect truth games with spirituality beyond religious interpretations as “the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject” (Foucault 2004: 17)? In our comfortable Greenhouse the great divide between life and art, art and nonart, high and low culture is superseded. The superinstallation – as an “inclusive concept of artificiality [Künstlichkeit]” (SIII: 813) that “‘integrates’ all subcultures” – demands an aesthetic attitude: “one transfers the form of the museum to the system as a whole and moves around in it as a visitor” (SIII: 818). Cruising public space demands museological sensibility. But how is this stimulated? Does society become a Gesamtkunstwerk? Sloterdijk has already excluded this option. The Crystal Palace is beyond a total work of art, because the risk has to be avoided that “a culture that organizes a total middle” becomes “totalitarian” (VM: 95). Reflecting the inter is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. Bazon Brock qualified this as “an inclination [Hang] towards the total work of art” (see Szeemann et al. 1983). A genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk – starting with German idealism via Wagner and Wiener Werkstätte, Arts & Crafts, Merzbau, Bauhaus, and Surrealism27 – shows that it never realized itself to a full extent without becoming totalitarian. However, in its constant failure to totalize art as life, it fully explored the space in between disciplines, media, and in between the artist and his audience. The inter is the “cement” of a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is articulated in interdisciplinary, multimedia, and interactive art practices. To borrow Adorno’s phrase, the totalization (das ganz Große) is the false. The truth is in its failure. In failing it shows us its truth: the inter. Sloterdijk favors art practices that relate precisely by resisting their own rules. That explains his emphasis on surrealism in his Tate lecture. More than any other art “style,” surrealism – and especially Dalì – is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive. In the past fifteen years these elements have been conceptualized in art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a, 2003b, 2004a).28 Concepts such as “relational architecture” (Rafael CULTURAL POLITICS RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY HENK OOSTERLING Lozano-Hemmer) have been invented to express the binding force of installations in public space. More than dropping an art object in open space, intermedial art practices reflect upon and intend to transform the way people relate to each other via art. It is no longer art in public space, but art as public space. The consequences for the acceptance of a mediological condition based on generosity “are far reaching in the moral domain” (SIII: 807) because freedom and a sense of justice can no longer be understood “without the phantasm of equality of all with regard to luxury in material terms” (SIII: 820). Ex negative, this phantasm focuses Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy. “We are entering an era of new games of enlightenment” (VM: 63). Their target is aesthetic reflectivity. In a Deleuzean turn, this means that being rooted in media (i.e. radical mediocrity) has to be enlightened to the point of becoming an enlightened rhizomatic inter. No roots, just routes. This “conversion” has far-reaching anthropological implications. Against the background of the intended megalopsychia, creativity no longer resides in, but in-between individuals. Creativity is first and foremost relational. Cooperation, participation, and interaction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to the fore in creativity. 376 CULTURAL POLITICS NOTES 1. See: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_ of_action/. 2. It is this concept of the “deinon” that Heidegger takes from Hölderlin’s work. He transformed it into das Unheimliche (uncanny). See Heidegger (1982: 150). 3. Alongside the three volumes of Sphären – I. Blasen, II. Globen, III. Schäume [SI,SII,SIII] – he published Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and its aesthetico-political implications more specifically. Since there are no published translations available yet, all quotes are my translations. 4. See Sloterdijk [NG] (2001: 164–6); Sloterdijk and Heinrichs [ST] (2001: 291). 5. In his Tate lecture Sloterdijk himself translates the German “Explikation” as “explicitation”: to unfold in the sense of explicitly making things. 6. In Im selben Boot. Versuch über Hyperpolitik, Sloterdijk makes a distinction between megalomania and megalopathia. Aristotle transformed Alexandre the Great’s megalomania into megalopathia as a lived experience that engenders big questions. The polis has become part of global space. For two millennia megalopathia has been philosophy’s raison d’être. See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). See also SII: 303, n. 130. He refines this concept in later interviews by defining late modern philosophy as megalo-depressive, as 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 377 7. an inter-pathology or inter-mania. See the Alliez article in this volume, pp. 307–26. It is this “inter” that I will explore in this article. Nietzsche first came to the fore in Critique of Cynical Reason in which he has the highest reference index, followed by Diogenes, Marx, Freud, and Hitler. Thinker on Stage, Nietzsche’s Materialism (1989) is fully focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pages of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijk’s verbal avalanche is spiced with Nietzschean phrases updated by references to French neo-Nietzschean thinkers. The word “Inter-esse” is German for “interest.” However, it also means “to be interested in.” In a philosophical context this connotation is used in a literal sense: being (esse) in between (inter). Lyotard is mentioned only once in Sphären together with Badiou and other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for their “political infinitism” (SII: 410). I come back to this point in the last paragraph of this section. See the concluding remarks of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Neither is Negri and Hardt’s Empire, their name for the Crystal Palace. Their proposal is rejected by Sloterdijk as too totalitarian a project for “revolutionary” ends (SIII: 825). See the interview with Éric Alliez, this volume, pp. 307–26. Sloterdijk by the way does not join the debate. The three are waiting in vain at the end of the book. He refers for this method to Günther Anders (1980). See also NG: 362. The essay “What is solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall?” has as its subtitle “A notice on critical and exaggerated/hyperbolic (übertriebene) reason” (NG: 235). In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusively to Michel Foucault, with just an incidental remark on Derrida. But in Sphären Foucault is sidelined by Kristeva, and even more by Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then definitely Sloterdijk’s most favored traveling companions. In this text Lyotard deals with different kinds of literary genres. Here a parallel can be drawn with Fatal Strategies (1983) by Jean Baudrillard, published in the same year as Critique of Cynical Reason. The latter criticizes dialectical thinking too and replaces sublation with excess. At the very beginning of this text, the end of dialectics is proclaimed and the advent of an era envisaged, the dynamics of which will no longer be ruled by dialectical sublation. It is the logic of excess that rules. For me the enigmatic expression “eine totale Mitte” is a synonym for “radical mediocrity” that will be explored in the next paragraph. CULTURAL POLITICS RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY 26. 1983. Jean. Utero-topically as a “community art” analogous to the group as utero-tope [Uterotop] (SIII: 392). Capitalism and Schizophrenia. What is Philosophy? London and New York: Verso. München: Beck Verlag. Gaston. 25. —— 1994. His lecture at the Tate focuses mainly on surrealism. See also Being and Time. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. i. Günther.nl/fw/ cfk (accessed 12/5/06). Gilles. 1994. p. 1958. 28. New York: Semiotext(e). Investigating the new electronic reality.eur. See (1978: 347). Baudrillard. Deleuze. The delight of wine tasting – in which context the term Abklärung means “clarification” – is implied in this spherological “decanting” (SV: 122–3). Bachelard. Fatal Strategies. 124..com/arthistory/ modern/The-Work-of-Art-in-the-Age-of-Mechanical-Reproduction. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 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Frankfurt a. http:// www.HENK OOSTERLING 380 CULTURAL POLITICS archive.com/news_archive/001009. Medien-Zeit: Drei Gegenwartsdiagnostische Versuche. Eurotaoismus.: Suhrkamp.: Suhrkamp. 1999. Frankfurt a. Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. —— [SI] 1998. The Experience Economy. B. —— [WIK] 2005 Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Frankfurt a.M. —— [VM] 2000. Blasen. Sphären III. Ein gespräch with Carlos Oliviera. Die Verachtung der Massen.thing. Frankfurt a. [ST] 2001. München/Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag.: Suhrkamp.M.: Suhrkamp.M. —— [SV] 1996. —— 1993b.: Suhrkamp. —— [NG] 2001.: Suhrkamp. CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3. THE WEATHERSPOON.2752/175174307X226906 CARRIE MOYER 381 CARRIE MOYER IS A NEW YORK-BASED PAINTER AND A CO-FOUNDER OF THE RENOWNED PUBLIC ART PROJECT. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK FIELD REPORT UNITED SOCIETY OF BELIEVERS CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10. MOYER TEACHES PAINTING AT THE RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN (RISD). AMONG OTHERS. DYKE ACTION MACHINE! 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FIELD REPORT ������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������� ������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������ ����������������������������������������� ������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������ ��������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ��������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������� 391 ����������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������ ��������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������ ���������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������� CULTURAL POLITICS �������������� . ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������� �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 392 CULTURAL POLITICS FIELD REPORT ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� . WILLEM SCHINKEL IS A SOCIOLOGIST AT ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM. Terrestrial globalization marks the middle stage of a threetier process. sphaira) is a result of terrestrial globalization (p. This book and the theory it expounds extends the morphological philosophy of space put forward previously by Sloterdijk in the Sphären-trilogy (p. the globe as a philosophical concept (Globus. 415 pages. 2005.CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3.50€. ISSUE 3 PP 393–398 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. Frankfurt a. Peter Sloterdijk. Kugel.1 which discusses a philosophical history of what he calls terrestrial globalization. HB ISBN 3–518–41676–6 LIESBETH NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS IS AN ECONOMIST AND PHILOSOPHER AT ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM.M. > Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) delivers what its subtitle promises: a philosophical theory of globalization. 37) – the processes of materialist expansion that produce the world system. THE NETHERLANDS. Für eine Philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung. 14).2752/175174307X226915 THE GLOBAL SPHERE: PETER SLOTERDIJK’S THEORY OF GLOBALIZATION . For Sloterdijk. 25. THE NETHERLANDS. It is the only part of “humanity” that Sloterdijk 393 LIESBETH NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS AND WILLEM SCHINKEL CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.: Suhrkamp. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK BOOK REVIEW Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. the “there” is what tempts (p. 21). Monogeism – the emergence of the single globe – involved a number of changes. the contraction of the earth by means of money in all its appearances” (p. Sloterdijk discusses how geographers and seafarers mapped this modern vision of the world. the processes of terrestrial globalization produce a changed sense of locality and subjectivity. whose travels around the world in eighty days (1874) mark. The maritime age . the earth becomes the planet to which one can return (p. It marks a stage in the history of European (“Christian-capitalist”) colonial expansion which historians tend to pin down to around 1492 to 1945 (p. as Sloterdijk says. Columbus. it offers a self-proclaimed metanarrative that seeks to overcome the flaw of former metanarratives. 71). or Deconstruction. and others of their kind. The message is: the earth is round and can be rounded. 41). living conditions condition knowledge conditions (p. for the point of his travels is not education but travel itself (p. in which we are currently enmeshed. water is discovered as the “leading element. critical theory. Sloterdijk says. Terrestrial globalization becomes apparent in its most formalized form in Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. Instead. 17). It transcends traditional world spaces. but the outside. Yet the modern age also understands that the “earth” is really an incorrect name for our planet. The very notion of humanity as a single species becomes possible only after Magellan. focusing on being-inthe-world-of-capital because economic globalization has. resulting in the modern shift from shoreland-thought to ocean-thought (p. Sloterdijk argues. the faraway. 45). In its emphasis on the intersection of philosophical and materialist processes through which the globe comes into view. water. In the first part of the book. Fogg also knows what they look like. the birth of the modern tourist: Fogg travels. Terrestrial globalization follows a cosmic-Uranian or morphological globalization – marked by the Greek metaphysical discovery of the globe as apparent in their love of the spheric form – and is followed by the electronic globalization. which. toward the unknown but knowable. For one. Sloterdijk pays attention to what one might call three discoveries and one invention: the discoveries of space. were not “meta” or global enough (p. In the modern age. 14). proven to be “the most effective totalization. faraway places. The interior becomes a mirror of the exterior (p. Rather. the book continues a philosophical style that radically differs from continental hermeneutics. risk. and the ensuing invention of the modern subject. Thought thus becomes oriented toward space. as becomes apparent in cabinets of curiosities and in curiosities-collections. 28). 66). 44). 175). Im Weltinnenraum shows the earth to have gradually become an excentric globe.” This discovery of water means that the conquest of the globe takes place over water. Not the inside. to places he knows (from the prospectus).394 CULTURAL POLITICS BOOK REVIEW finds worth calling “world history in a philosophical sense” (p. When the interior is the mirror of the exterior world. with blinds closed. The adventures on the ocean were full of potential opportunities but in austere. but that the money goes round the earth” (p. yet it authorizes this by means of Reason or history. this was paralleled only by the huge possibilities for speculation. especially from 1968 on. in accordance with the motto with which Charles V sailed the oceans: plus ultra (ever further).395 dawns. 102). is a process (Geschehen) in which Being and Form meet in a sovereign body (p. Sloterdijk argues that this is an autopersuasive subject (p. Sloterdijk quotes Heidegger (Holzwege. 92). of progress. The modern philosophy of the autonomous subject reifies the idea that it is the individual. and. 75).). is a rationally motivated actor (p. says Sloterdijk. faraway markets (p. This subject is an entrepreneur. living at the edge of an uneven round body – a body which. a product of action-thought. 108). or a subject that is in constant need of ideology. and many others. is neither a mother’s body nor a container. as a whole. as is presently the case. 1950) from Die Zeit des Weltbildes. who says that the essence of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture. 159. 54). The modern entrepreneur is thus born as a speculator on a mostly liquid globe. This conquest through the image starts with modern cartography and ends with 21st-century mediatization. 93ff. The principle of tele-vision stems from an age in which one must of necessity look ever further. next to space and water. The main fact of the new age “is not that the earth goes round the sun. through ideology. The topological message of modernity is “that people are living beings. The core of modern subjectivity lies in the shift from theory to praxis (pp. 74). aided by researchers. Modern global capitalism starts with the maritime age. owns the world (pp. The subject becomes constituted in the production of the authority that orders him or her (p. CULTURAL POLITICS BOOK REVIEW . which overcomes his or her inhibitions to action. and the liquid element is homologous to the flows of global capital which stream between the Old and the New World (p. consultancy. for Sloterdijk. 102–7). but a source of economic profit. Crucial herein. priests. He becomes a debt-producer. 79). A subject. 21). 93). and which has no protection to offer” (p. of the new (p. whoever owns the best image of the world. is the discovery. 91–2. The discoveries of space. Debt is no longer a moral deficit. is someone able to suspend inhibition for acting. the modern subject emerges. Because of this new configuration of space and place that has been discovered by Magellan and others. or. water. Cartography becomes an object of power. and risk thus lead to a new form of subjectivity. 133). The modern subject. Speculation and the globe form the conditions of a world system of capitalism (p. consultancy (pp. Modern subjectivity thus hinges on the organization of the suspension of inhibition to action. of risk. entrepreneurs. 167). according to Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk argues that subjectivity entails an internalized pressure from outside. politicians. Globalization. If seafaring brought with it an enormous potential for trade. In what is an obviously Foucault-informed analysis. Before Sloterdijk begins with the description of the “global inside. but by local exclusion. Local “immunities” are created to cope with globalization. The Crystal Palace of global capitalism – to which we turn below – is at once an outside to another inside. The misanthropic Glasshouse spawns terrorism. The modern discoverers were the forerunners of today’s technicians of “corporate identity” (p. 282). who. Knowing how to make use of the telerealistical situation that has been created. 213). 176). and the “subjectivity of taking” (p. 95). 106). Sloterdijk nonetheless argues that total inclusion is a fiction (p. This kind of subjectivity is the consequence and presupposition of the conquering of the world. 220). Humanity became a project to be established worldwide.396 CULTURAL POLITICS BOOK REVIEW Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is the prototype of the innovative subject. as Sloterdijk puts it. Sloterdijk describes the replacement of the nation state by a global comfort system that mediates between the “self” and “place. they realize large consequences by means of small actions. Here. In other words. Ironically. As distance disappears. 26). 189) became the hallmark colonization. It is characterized by risk.” presents a theory of the “global inner space of capital. everyone becomes everyone else’s neighbor. terrorists are experts in spreading a climate of fear. and the project of humanity as global subjectification therefore remains. as is often claimed. Global capitalism took resources and brought humanity.” The first to encounter the failure of the project of total inclusion were the translators of the modern world. or at least shrinks. from the perspective of those outside the Crystal Palace. becomes an action-person (p. a point of autonomous initiative. the palace is an “outside” to other “insides. 117). “the great interior.” About one third of the population lives in the Crystal Palace: people with better life chances and more purchasing power are included while the . The second part of the book. since every subject is a potential threat. who came across a Babel-like multitude of languages that could not be integrated into one system (p. Modern imperialism is explained by the conquering of other subjects on a “dark continent” or an outside of another kind that is characterized by a lack of subjectivity and therefore of humanity (p. Through performances that go beyond the fantasies of Hollywood screenwriters and production studios (p. “no picnic” (p.” he pays attention to the change in human social relations. It is the action-man that strives for total inclusion of the globe within a single imperialist/capitalist world system. 129). of incalculability (p. this process strengthens misanthropic tendencies and reproduces the original similarity between “neighbor” and “enemy” (p.” This theory of “the inside” is necessary as globalization repositions humankind: not by complete global inclusion. through his crime. Most interesting in the second part is Sloterdijk’s description of the new modus vivendi of people adapting to life between the local and the global and he offers Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace as an architectural metaphor for the current situation. building sites of the Crystal Palace (p. Once within the Crystal Palace. which implies welcoming people to the American dream. According to Sloterdijk. 390). Moreover. no one leaves. the US’s perspective on world politics is founded on a kind of militarized management that guarantees the functioning of the global comfort system. one can criticize the US from this standpoint. for instance. In addition to their political choices. not political elections but the mood fluctuations of the inhabiting consumers determine what will happen (p. he addresses the current situation and its antecedents. However. But the Crystal Palace is hard to defend. enjoy political security without warfare. Living in the Crystal Palace is not difficult as people live a comfortable life in solidarity.). 268). 241). Solidarity and success ask for asymmetry. the inhabitants have also lost their energy source. This work is thus as much a new kind of critical theory as CULTURAL POLITICS BOOK REVIEW . selectivity. Of course. Yet a number of characteristics are evident: people will. For Sloterdijk.397 poor “parasites” are excluded (p. however. exclusivity. How long this ontological change will stand depends upon the time it takes to “replace” oil with solar energy. but not surprisingly. 413). Here. and be famous without substantial performance (pp. knowledge without learning. a new form of apartheid is born through apartheid by capitalization (p.” In the “global inner space of capital. for Sloterdijk. Yet to survive as a country based on immigration. 307). 275). The ontological consequences of this are as follows: the definition of freedom as the unlimited possibility of mobility. 276). earn money without working. albeit less luxurious. communist states and the Crystal Palace each have their own “rules for living. Sloterdijk considers communist states as secondary. but Sloterdijk is aware that (energy) resources are necessary to keep the palace comfortable.” collective certainties are replaced by groups of privately insured individuals (p. immunity without suffering. globalization creates new borders and new immunities that put into question traditional dichotomies. This is because. the Crystal Palace must be turned into a fortress. and irreversibility (p. reality as a choice (it could have been different) instead of necessity and the replacement of scarcity by waste (pp. the United States (US) founds the Crystal Palace. protectionism. 355ff. In political terms: Leftist values are realized through the promotion of a Rightist programme. Probably unexpectedly. and much of this is due to the essayistic style of Im Weltinnenraum. Due to the “revaluation of all values” the crucial position of labor has been replaced by fossil energy: people are “baptized” in oil. 305). as everything the consumer needs is present (p. all the while reframing global geopolitical questions in terms of a philosophy of space that recognizes the necessary exclusion accompanying every inclusion. The consequences of the “revaluation of all values” are opaque and diffuse. 334ff. Politics is banished from the palace. This makes Sloterdijk’s book more “personal” than the Sphären-trilogy. He then leaves the reader with the question of whether Europe could emancipate itself without using military power (p.). to name but one.” For Sloterdijk and for us. 406ff. His “eulogy of asymmetry” (pp. Sloterdijk assumes the necessities of inclusion and exclusion. (All translations are these authors’ own.) hence does not grasp more complexity than a bipolar antagonism such as Schmitt’s “friend”/“enemy” distinction. Bush. he fails to avoid what might be called the “reification of spatiality. that between Phileas Fogg and US President George W.BOOK REVIEW it is a work of political theory. while Sloterdijk searches for ways to maintain a balance between inclusion and exclusion without waging war. in conclusion. but does not explain the cultural political consequences of the borders between the inside and the outside. then. questions of inclusion and exclusion. Where it leaves the reader wanting is in the realm of cultural politics. All references to page numbers refer to Im Weltinneraum des Kapitals. of the “inside” and the “outside.) . NOTE 398 CULTURAL POLITICS 1. and it raises awareness of historical links such as.” not only remain contested but also do so on a global scale. Thus.