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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
This is the first English-language introduction to Peter Sloterdijk, the distinguished German philosopher and controversial public intellectual. Sloterdijk, in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heine, is an iconoclast who uses humour and biting critique to challenge many of modernity s sacred thinkers, from Kant to Heidegger, in the process radically reinterpreting the canon of Western philosophy. In this unique textbook, leading Sloterdijk expert Jean-Pierre Couture explains in accessible language Sloterdijk s exceptional contribution, breaking his thought down into five key approaches: psychopolitics, anthropotechnics, spherology, controversy, and therapeutics. Sloterdijk s frequent public controversies, with supporters of Habermas and the Frankfurt school in particular, are assessed and their significance for current philosophical debates explained. This fascinating book will be an essential companion for those interested in the hybrid aesthetics of thought situated at the crossroads of art and philosophy. Its up-to-date analyses of Sloterdijk s recently translated corpus will make it essential reading for all students and scholars of modern European thought.
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Seitenzahl: 324
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Copyright page
Copyright © Jean-Pierre Couture 2016
The right of Jean-Pierre Couture to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6380-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6381-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Couture, Jean-Pierre, 1975–
Sloterdijk / Jean-Pierre Couture.
pages cm. – (Key contemporary thinkers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-6380-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-6380-X (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6381-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-6381-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947– I. Title.
B3332.S254C68 2015
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2015012743
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Dedication
For Roman, sun of December
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the support of a special circle of friends, colleagues, and students. First, I would like to thank Emma Hutchinson and David Winters of Polity for positive initial contact with regard to the book proposal, and Pascal Porcheron, also of Polity, for his patience, trust, and work on the production of the manuscript.
The earliest version of this book was tentatively discussed in a seminar held at La Casa Obscura in Montréal. Philippe-David Blanchette, Marc-Olivier Castagner, Hubert Gendron-Blais, Robert Hébert, Simon Hogue, Simon Labrecque, and Sylvain Munger offered, on those occasions, brilliant comments that helped me rethink it.
I would like to express my gratitude to my translator, Richard Ashby, who was also part of that seminar and whose expertise, diligence, and patience added considerably to my confidence about the project. A very special thanks goes to my Masters students Alex Del Duca and Jonah Clifford, who carefully read and commented on the advanced version; the final product is the better for it.
I must also acknowledge the beneficial influence of my old friend and supervisor Jean-Marc Piotte, without whose example and encouragement I would not have considered becoming a professor. It was under his tutelage that I developed a better work ethic and a sense of political and intellectual commitment.
Many students, too, have provided me with kind words over the last few years, and I would like to thank them: Frédérique Bélanger, Laurence Bernier-Renaud, Caroline Brouillette, Ducakis Désinat, Xavier Dionne, Nicholas DuBois, Mélanie Dufour, Anaïs Elboujdaïni, Jean-Philip Guy, Isabelle Hêtu, David B. Hyppia, Susan Kim, Jonathan Lalande-Bernatchez, †Rémi Latulippe, Dylan Peaks, Guillaume Poirier, Lana Racković, and Maxime Wawanoloath. Appreciation also goes to the office staff of my department, Gail Petrin and Sylvie Lachapelle, who bring much life and spirit to our milieu.
I must not forget to mention Sophie Bernard-Piché, Mathieu Boislard, Nathalie Burlone, Anne-Marie D'Aoust, Gabrielle Gauvin, David Grondin, Yves Lavoie, Marie Leahey, Jean-Charles Saint-Louis, and Patrick Sénécal. I warmly thank you all for your humor, lust for life, and precious friendship.
I recognize that this research would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It would have been simply impossible without colleagues such as Christian Rouillard and Micheline Lessard, who fought for my academic freedom at the University of Ottawa in recent years. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to them.
Finally, my warmest thanks go to my wife, Stéphanie, without whose love and support this book would never have been started. My greatest debt is to her.
Abbreviations
Introduction
Interpreting an author's work during his or her lifetime is not without its many challenges. One does not have the luxury of either a definitive corpus or the passive silence of authors who are no longer with us. This said, an exhaustive introduction to Peter Sloterdijk is a needed and legitimate undertaking. Since the first decade of the 2000s, his newly translated works have piqued the interest of an English-speaking public that had not really followed his thought beyond the 1980s. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1940–2012) introduced Sloterdijk to the English-speaking world when, in the series he edited at the University of Minnesota Press, Critique of Cynical Reason was published in 1987, quickly followed by Thinker on Stage in 1989. Following a gap of two decades in the reception and translation of Sloterdijk's work, three English-language publishers – Polity, Semiotext(e), and Columbia University Press – have all had a hand in the recent effort. This critical work took shape around publications edited by Stuart Elden: the special issue (co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta and Nigel Thrif) of Society and Space in 2009 and the Sloterdijk Now collection in 2012. Along with these substantive contributions, the Dutch philosopher Sjoerd van Tuinen was one of the first to critically study Sloterdijk's work, and the German author Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs published a general introduction to Sloterdijk's thought in 2011.1 The present book seeks to relate the rise of this distinguished contemporary philosopher and notorious public intellectual by drawing out the vivacity of both his recent and older published work. In doing so, it hopes to enable a wider reading public to navigate his fertile and at times provocative intellectual output.
This exercise is critical in nature. As such, I often overlook Sloterdijk's self-descriptions or his occasional shots across the bows of the influential commentators or translators of his work whose judgment or mere stupidity he fears:
One of the distinctive signs of the thought of our times is to have questioned the concept of the author. Among other things, this thought is in the process of suppressing the theological ballast that had been used to support the idea of the old Europe, that is, the human paternity of intellectual production. Since then, contemporary authors, perhaps more so than their historical predecessors, have had reasons and opportunities to examine the abysmal difference between their personal intentions and how their work is received.2
By their very nature, the secrets of intentions are impossible to plumb. I therefore concentrate on texts, their arguments and their contributions, the debates to which they gave rise and the softening of some of the biting arguments after their initial formulation. Though the behind-the-scenes publication intrigues and battles to the death in Germany's intellectual landscape are discussed in chapter 4, it should be noted that they color several remarks throughout the book. The reason is that Sloterdijk constantly redraws the boundaries between provocation and theory by sitting astride a hybrid beast composed of art and philosophy, which he refers to as centauric literature. Lastly, my political science background often leads me to assess Sloterdijk's arguments in political and ideological terms as they unfold in debates in which he has willingly participated. If there is a constant in these few political discords, it touches upon the intrinsic limits of Sloterdijk's project; that is, the fact that he so strongly describes his work as emerging from Nietzsche can only put it on a collision course with the foundations of democracy. Like his forerunner, Sloterdijk neither is nor wants to be a theorist of equality. Far from rejecting the fecundity of this provocative, dissensual body of work, this remark seeks only to disclose my own reservations and my own fears. More serenely, I do not think that the collective reception of Sloterdijk's thought will prevent him from perhaps attaining the ranks of those essential thinkers whose works are forever discussed. Indeed, “classic texts are those that survive their interpretations” (TS 3).
Born in 1947 in Karlsruhe, Germany, Sloterdijk studied philosophy and German literature in Munich and Hamburg before shifting his interest to structuralism and the thought of Michel Foucault. In 1976, he completed his doctoral research on autobiographical material produced in Weimar Germany. Afterwards, he disappeared momentarily from the intellectual scene and permanently from the world of academic philosophy.
Around 1980, Sloterdijk spent some time in Poona, India, at an ashram that was home to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's sect. Born as Rajneesh Chandra Mohanin in 1931, “Bhagwan” (the “divine”) previously taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Jalapur. At his Poona ashram, he directed an institute for comparative research on religions that attracted tens of thousands of Westerners between 1974 and 1981. Following his move to Oregon in the United States, “Bhagwan,” who had changed his name to “Osho,” showed his darker side when he became the guru of an oppressive sect. On the heels of problems with the FBI, he returned to Poona, where he died in 1990. Sloterdijk regularly returns to both his Poona experiences and Bhagwan, whom he ranked among the twentieth century's four greatest proponents of Indian spirituality (MCL 280). As a testament, no doubt, to Bhagwan's formative influence on the younger Sloterdijk, the lessons learned in Poona are never far removed from the theoretical stances adopted in his later thought: release of the body, anti-kinetic slowness, post-rational breathing, pre-individualist fusion, and athletic exercise in vertical tension.
The two volumes of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason) were published in 1983. With this inaugural work, Sloterdijk immediately imposed himself as the author of a cult book that sold more than 120,000 copies in Germany before being translated into English in 1987. It remains post-war German philosophy's greatest success. A new philosopher had been born, who then began to craft a cycle of psychopolitical works focused on the spirit of his times.
Associated with the 1968 intellectual generation, referred to as “APO” (Außerparlamentarische Opposition; i.e., Extra-Parliamentary Opposition), Sloterdijk participated in neither the Marxist nor the anarchist or left-wing terrorist fringe, but rather in the hedonist fringe. This counter-cultural trait would subsequently lead him to comb through the legacy of Romanticism for the conditions of a Dionysian materialism arising out of the necessary rejection of critical theory.
Indeed, Sloterdijk came to want to sever all ties with the Frankfurt School as he intensified his efforts to find resources in the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger for a genuinely frontal critique of modernity. This project would have been impossible without the efforts of a few forerunners who had been working since the early 1960s on remodeling the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger within the framework of the consumer society. These forerunners are from France and took their inspiration from Henri Lefebvre and Jean Beaufret. Going against all orthodox thought, Lefebvre attempted to create a dialogue between Marx and Nietzsche in addition to contributing to the birth of a philosophy of space. For his part, Beaufret paved the way for introducing Heidegger's thought in France. His efforts were soon exploited and amplified by a subsequent generation personified by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
France is Sloterdijk's adopted intellectual homeland.3 Like Heine in the mid-nineteenth century, he has worked at making German thought known in France and French thought known in Germany. The flow of this trade route across the Rhine is perhaps tilted in the latter direction because he ardently wants to make up for Germany's lag in appreciating the contributions of Nietzsche and Heidegger to contemporary thought about emancipation. The libertarian-slanted reappropriation of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian canons has been the accepted reading by French poststructuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, and it is for this reason that Sloterdijk's adoption of this posture rightly saw him labeled as the “most French-leaning of German philosophers.”4
Indeed, Sloterdijk's relationship with France is both friendly and close. He spends a good part of each year in France and maintains a place in a network of influential thinkers. He periodically collaborates with notable conservative thinkers such as Alain Finkielkraut5 and Régis Debray,6 and has developed a long-lasting friendship with Bruno Latour, who has contributed significantly to making Sloterdijk's work known in France.7 Although Sloterdijk did not have the opportunity to meet Foucault before the latter's early demise in 2004, he assigns him an important place in his work and takes inspiration from his last classes at the Collège de France in his thoughts about ethics (MCL 148–59). Lastly, Sloterdijk mourned the death of Derrida in 1984 by immediately paying homage to the Derridian specter, which he links with figures from the past and present-day friendships.8
This closeness, however, is not without a few disagreements and disappointments. In 2005, for example, Sloterdijk bitterly reproached the French left for refusing to accept the European constitution project even though Germany had supported it. This disagreement also led him to say that the Franco-German partnership had faded somewhat in the general indifference to the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Franco-German treaty of friendship, signed by Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle in 1963. Although he was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic in 2006, Sloterdijk quickly began to lament this shared indifference, which he claimed could be viewed as a consolation prize given to long-lasting peace. At the very least, his tender sarcasm recommends the virtues of shared indifference to all countries at war:
Do it the same way that we did, don't be too interested in each other! And be careful how you choose your foreign correspondents for the newspapers, make sure that those reporting from neighbouring countries are sure to bore their readers to death! Only in this way can those happily separated from one another live in friendship and peace with each other.
(TPWP 49)
Although he is more often than not disappointed with the politics of his times, which he views as lacking vision and ambition, it needs to be noted that Sloterdijk's intellectual trajectory is lacking in neither. He was appointed as rector in 2001 of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, a setting that provides him with a research laboratory in which contemporary thought, aesthetic theory, and visual arts work side by side. Under the supervision of his friends and collaborators Boris Groys and Peter Weibel, the university regularly organizes important exhibitions that explore the fertile nature of the meeting of these fields.9 The iconoclastic nature of this school has certainly provided Sloterdijk's philosophical undertaking with a creative physical and mental space and a freedom of inquiry unbounded by the imperatives of university specialization. Indeed, Sloterdijk explores the possibilities of writing that brings together form and content, literature and philosophy, and art and thought within the framework of an undertaking that operates as much in terms of expressiveness as of permissiveness. To be sure, he has taken advantage of his considerable institutional independence to construct a research climate free from academic auto-censorship. Moreover, he openly mistrusts the milieu of professional philosophy, which, he says, now settles for “avoiding mistakes” and “minimizing declarations”:
Today philosophy is at its most professional when it may explain how it would say something, in the extraordinary case that it would say something. However, it is far too reflexive to say anything; it is afraid of relevant worldviews like a child fears the fire s/he touched once. Instead, from the earlier love of wisdom a multinational concern specialized in error avoidance has emerged, which promises security as a first principle. Modern philosophy achieves its highest goal in speaking most minimally and in its refrainment from too far-fetched statements.10
This extra-academic position certainly enables him to enjoy the largesse of an exploratory and speculative approach that is not accountable to the surveillance of an unlettered dean.
This considerable autonomy recalls Albert William Levi's description of the era of gentlemen in early modern times. Before the age of professionals of academic philosophy, these gentlemen generated and invested their cultural capital outside of universities sponsored then by theology and now by impact factor management.11 Sloterdijk's reputation is made up from various forms of capital and redefines the framework of intellectual engagement. From 2002 to 2012, he co-hosted, along with his good friend Rüdiger Safranski, Das philosophische Quartett, a monthly television program broadcast on the German ZDF network. As a public intellectual, he never refuses interview requests from major German media outlets on matters relating to current affairs. Moreover, he is regularly solicited by high-level authorities to advise public servants. Lastly, his books are not only bestsellers, but also feats of erudition and literary quality that have earned him prestigious awards: the Ernst Robert Curtius Prize for Essay Writing (1993), the Christian Kellerer Prize for the future of philosophical thought (2001), the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005), and the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose (2005), awarded in the past to Hannah Arendt, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Jürgen Habermas.
Sloterdijk views his work as a medicine of civilization, willing intoxication and theory of immersion. His essays are both literary and philosophical; they come at times from the angle of very concise, philosophy-based commentaries on a political conjuncture, and at other times reveal themselves as much more ambitious, nearly-1,000-page opuses. For Sloterdijk, philosophy is about storytelling and forms: the author's capacity for expression at several levels simultaneously (philosophical erudition and working within the framework of canons, mixed with the irony and humor of a metaphorical language accessible to an educated public and non-professional philosophers) and the regular use of iconography (many images projected over and alongside a discourse and which themselves present an argument) all bear witness to his singularity. Yet there is nothing certain about merging entertainment and knowledge. Sloterdijk is indeed entertaining, but does he philosophize? For many observers, therein lies the question.
This book has five main chapters, each of which covers one of the five approaches used in Sloterdijk's work. Chapter 1 draws out the initial motives underlying his work devoted to the study of cultural crises or psychopolitics. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the anthropological and spatial narratives that support the Great Narrative of the human adventure. This story of anthropotechnics and spherology is strongly impregnated with Heideggerian thought, which Sloterdijk explores in an unprecedented manner. This positioning within the thought of Freiburg and the grandiloquence of Nietzsche would inevitably lead Sloterdijk to a confrontation with the Frankfurt School. In chapter 4, the quarrels with Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth shed light on Sloterdijk's ideological coordinates. This controversy reveals above all a change in the German intellectual landscape within which Sloterdijk had irrevocably taken his place. Chapter 5 provides an impressionistic portrait of Sloterdijk's panoply of therapeutic prescriptions. This pharmakon, supportive of an alter-modernity, oscillates between a re-enactment of Epicurean retreat, recreating the enclosure of a healthy, sustainable microcity, on the one hand, and the virtues of strong belonging, undermining the supremacy of bourgeois, bellicose, and greedy subjectivity, on the other. The book's conclusion adds a couple of nuances to the portrait of Sloterdijk's work by situating it within the framework of serene observation and serendipity.
Sloterdijk is the creator of a corpus whose raison d'être is to prevent the disappearance of philosophy's eros to the sole benefit of scholarly sobriety. Even though he severely criticizes social democracy and the idea of social equality, he deplores the rarefaction of the public's role in philosophy as the perpetual questioning of conventional wisdom. As such, his work shows us that this Nietzsche of the biotech era wants paradoxically to philosophize in the street in the heart of the city and amid his fellow citizens, even if doing so means suffering the occasional rebuke: “Philosophers have only flattered society in various ways; what is important now is to provoke it.”12
Notes
1
In addition to several articles, Tuinen published
Peter Sloterdijk: Ein Profil
(Paderborn: Fink, 2007) as well as a special issue on Peter Sloterdijk for
Cultural Politics
3 (3) 2007. For his part, Heinrichs published
Peter Sloterdijk: Die Kunst des Philosophierens
(Munich: Hanser, 2011) and, with Sloterdijk, a collection of interviews translated as
Neither Sun nor Death
, transl. S. Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
2
Sloterdijk, “Postface à l'édition française de
Règles pour le parc humain
” [Afterword to “Rules for the Human Zoo”] (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1999), 57.
3
To underline this unabashed francophilia, he published all his writings on this theme in a single collection titled
Mein Frankreich
[
My France
] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013).
4
Tuinen,
Peter Sloterdijk
, 139.
5
Sloterdijk and Alain Finkielkraut,
Les battements du monde
(Paris: Pauvert, 2003).
6
Régis Debray invited Sloterdijk to inaugurate the Emmanuel-Levinas Chair at the University of Strasbourg in 2005. His keynote address was published as “What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to a Critique of Extremist Reason,”
Cultural Politics
3 (3) 2007: 327–56.
7
Appointed associate director of the Institut d'études politiques de Paris in 2007, Latour is a philosopher of science and an anthropologist of culture. With regard to his intellectual intimacy with his German friend, he candidly admits that “I was born a Sloterdijkian” (Bruno Latour, “Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization,”
Harvard Design Magazine
30 2009: 138–44 at 139).
8
Sloterdijk,
Derrida, An Egyptian
, transl. W. Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
9
See Boris Groys and Peter Weibel (eds.),
Medium Religion: Faith. Religion. Art
(Cologne: König, 2011); Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.),
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005); Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, and Charlotte Bigg (eds.),
Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002).
10
Taken from
www.petersloterdijk.net
(December 23, 2012).
11
Albert William Levi,
Philosophy as Social Expression
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
12
Sloterdijk,
Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 62–3.
1Psychopolitics
“Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exemplary healing” (CCR xxxvi). In Critique of Cynical Reason and intermittently throughout the corpus of his work, Sloterdijk casts himself as a Zeitdiagnostiker, a “specialist physician of the pathologies of the opinion apparatus” (ZT 22). In this self-assigned role, he seeks to decode the prevailing mental illnesses of his time and to prescribe a cure for the consequences of having overlooked the diagnosis. In this chapter, the three symptoms analyzed – cynicism, mobilization, and rage – correspond to the following psychopolitical works: Critique of Cynical Reason, Eurotaoismus, and Rage and Time.1 Before examining these works, it is important to tease out the Nietzschean epistemological horizon of Sloterdijk's psychopolitical approach.
Psychopolitics as rejection of historicism
Sloterdijk's psychopolitical inquiry emerges out of his doctoral thesis on autobiographical narratives in the Weimar Republic.2 He describes these life stories as a “form of social praxis” (LOL 6) that reveal the mental structure of a state of society via the so-called subjective and objective outpourings of individuals. Psychopolitics thus assumes that psychological moods are qualities that can be transferred from individuals to collectivities and vice versa. This transference (Übertragung), taken from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, is, moreover, at the very heart of Sloterdijk's relationship with time and space and with stories and territories that he synchronizes or superposes by means of transmigration.
These processes were also explored in Der Zauberbaum (The Magic Tree), Sloterdijk's one and only novel. At the book's end, the protagonist Jan van Leyden, an assistant to the hypnotist Marquis de Puységur at the time of the French Revolution, enters the body of Sigmund Freud in his Berggasse office in Vienna (ZB 318–22). This allusion to the fantasies of occultism is not coincidental, insofar as it exemplifies one aspect of Sloterdijk's particular talent and frivolity, when he sets about aligning significant cultural moments with one another and inserting himself into them as a key author. It is worth recalling in this regard that he wrote the preface to Critique of Cynical Reason in the summer of 1981 on the occasion of the bicentenary of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (CCR xxx), that his novel on the “discovery of psychoanalysis in 1785”3 was uncoincidentally published in 1985, and that it was he who was chosen by the Nietzsche-Archiv to give a talk at Weimar on August 25, 2000, the hundredth anniversary of the death of Nietzsche (NA). It was this same Nietzsche who was the first philosopher to be discussed in the Critique of Cynical Reason (CCR xxvii–xxix), the first to whom Sloterdijk dedicated a scholarly book (TS), and whom he still defends with the utmost ardour and clarity.4
Psychopolitical transference seeks to draw out homologous mental structures among epochs and times far removed from one another. Nietzsche's imprint in this regard will be discussed later. For the moment, however, it is worth noting that Sloterdijk's psychopolitics postulates the synchronicity of certain periods when their moods are concordant with one another. History is neither a continuous nor a discontinuous series of mental or cultural states. Rather, it is a serpentine air duct able to establish contact, via improbable airlocks, between atmospheres accidentally separated in time.
In a short text with the strange though revealing title “Weimar and California,”5 Sloterdijk argues that psychopolitics inserts itself as a cure for the omnipotence of the historicism that saturated Germany in the 1970s, because this rebirth of the philosophy of history was unfit to serve as a “therapeutic compensation for collective identity crises.”6 The reason, notes Sloterdijk, is that modern philosophies of history (liberalism, Hegelianism, and Marxism) are unable to answer the vital questions: “Who are we really and how should we live?”7 Because of this failure, he links the mood of the Weimar Republic to that of California in the 1980s. The public's widespread infatuation with a vocabulary of crisis – including pain, loss, social decadence, mistrust of the world, denegation, restoration, and escape into the absolutely new – appears to call upon the same solution in both cases, namely, “dissonance and emptiness” and hurried patchworks of new syntheses that annihilate critical thought.8 The danger here is that these climates could ultimately foster the increased importance of fatal charismatic figures “as if our own past flowed once again towards us.”9
Sloterdijk is not speaking as an historian but on behalf of an art form – that of the historical virtuoso – able to attain the “suprahistorical” dimension that Nietzsche prescribed as the cure for the excesses of the science of history. In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche argues that historicism is hostile to life and youth, that is, to the creative instinct of art: “In producing this effect, history is the antithesis of art: and only if history can endure to be transformed into a work of art will it perhaps be able to preserve instincts or even evoke them.”10 Sloterdijk fully subscribes to Nietzsche's diagnosis and wholly endorses the idea that life is prey to forces contrary to its vital impulse: “It is sick with many illnesses and not only with the memory of its chain – what chiefly concerns us here is that it is suffering from the malady of history. Excess of history has attacked life's plastic powers, it no longer knows how to employ the past as a nourishing food.”11
For Nietzsche and Sloterdijk, this looming evil can be countered only by the hardiness of the historical virtuoso, who becomes the hero through whom art and history are reunited in the suprahistorical. This virtuoso “has developed in himself such a tenderness and susceptibility of feeling that nothing human is alien to him; the most various ages and persons continue to sound in kindred notes on the strings of his lyre.”12 Going to the heart of Sloterdijk's light-hearted and creative relationship with the seriousness of the discipline of history, this passage helps us to understand why he would rather explore the passageways and other airlocks between and among epochs and why he allows himself to fold space and annihilate time.
In sum, psychopolitics is a fully Nietzschean undertaking that, in light of Sloterdijk's foundational inquiry into cynicism, would make Nietzsche a very timely author, given that, in 1874, he had already written: “[t]he oversaturation of an age with history … leads [it] into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism.”13
Cynicism
“Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain” (CCR 5). Critique of Cynical Reason is a composite book (26 chapters and 10 excursuses accompanied by 40 illustrations) that presents itself as a study of mores and mentalities. It is Sloterdijk's fundamental psychopolitical work and for this reason must be discussed at length here, all the more so since it is reviewed and amended in his subsequent works. In it, he provides a critical review of the Enlightenment, which, he argues, has not led to the promised emancipation. The spectrum of this review ranges from the darkest to the lightest and most glowing tones as Sloterdijk seeks to separate the best from the worst in the 200-year-old tradition of criticism. The thesis of this eclectic work maintains that late modernity has given birth to the most advanced modern subject – the cynic – faced with whom the usual devices of critique – unmasking, education, dialogue – are caught off guard. As enlightened false consciousness, cynicism breaks the candid conditions of the Enlightenment's pacifying dialogue, for which the autonomy of the subject necessarily comes about through the elimination of ignorance and illusion.14
What Kant sought to accomplish in the field of epistemology, politics would seek to accomplish via the state. Indeed, as Sloterdijk notes, the inaugural scenes of modern political thought (in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) were equally absorbed with the problem of self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung). However, this seemingly banal imperative carried within it an intrinsically bellicose and paranoid dimension that fueled the development of modern cynicism. Sloterdijk argues that this new form of realism stems less from the desire for emancipation through accurate knowledge of the world (Kant) than from the fear of being deceived or overpowered (Descartes):
In his proof through doubt Descartes goes as far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world of appearance is only the work of a genius malignus, calculated to deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective on reality cannot be comprehended without a thorough cooling down of the ego–world relation, without the deep penetration of suspicion and feat about self-preservation to the very roots of modern will to know.
(CCR 330)
Taken as the starting point for modern subjectivity, this fear of being deceived, which entails resorting to deception for the purposes of self-preservation, was already in the orbit of cynicism. In the logic of psychopolitical transference, once this presumed inherent impetus of the individual is transferred to the state through the social contract, suspicion and aggression are then deployed on an unprecedented, gigantic, and destructive scale. The self-preservation imperative (and its inherent tendency to be suspicious, hostile, and aggressive) thus reaches the ultimate form of its pathology with general espionage and the worldwide proliferation of atomic bombs.
The enlightened-but-false paradox is thus no mere play on words. If the Enlightenment founders on the rocks of cynicism, it is because “its falseness is already reflexively buffered” (CCR 5). The political subject of emancipation is no longer interested in freeing itself. Knowing that one is mistaken but continuing all the same has become the cynic's maxim for life: “Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work” (CCR 5). Sloterdijk sees in this state of affairs the symptoms of a dominant mood, of a new “discontent in our culture” (CCR 3) that stands in the way of the naive, optimistic Enlightenment. This warning is all the more alarming inasmuch as he sees it as a point of comparison between the Weimar Republic and the zeitgeist of the 1980s. He argues that from a suprahistorical perspective, the two periods are characterized by the same obsessive attraction to catastrophe, or catastrophilia, the same schizoid morality, and the same desire to deceive and be deceived, “as if our own past flowed once again towards us.”
Before examining these mechanisms, it should be noted that Critique of Cynical Reason is also an (im)personal account of the disillusionment experienced by the 1968 generation and its attendant profusion of dropouts. As he told his old friend Rüdiger Safranski at their 1981 meeting, at a time when he “vibrate[d] with gentle determination,”15 Sloterdijk wanted to make his return from Poona (see the introduction
