SPECIAL ISSUE

VOLUME THREE
ISSUE THREE
NOVEMBER 2007

Peter Sloterdijk

CULTURAL
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CULTURAL POLITICS
VOLUME THREE
ISSUE THREE
NOVEMBER 2007

CONTENTS

275
Critique Beyond Resentment: An
Introduction to Peter Sloterdijks
Jovial Modernity
SJOERD VAN TUINEN

307
Living Hot, Thinking Coldly:
An Interview with Peter
Sloterdijk RIC ALLIEZ

327

What Happened in the Twentieth

Century? En Route to a Critique of
Extremist Reason
PETER SLOTERDIJK

357

Interest and Excess of Modern

Mans Radical Mediocrity: Rescaling
Sloterdijks 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 Sineld, 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 ONeill, 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
Sloterdijks Theory of Globalization
LIESBETH NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS
and WILLEM SCHINKEL

CULTURAL POLITICS

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 275306

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BERG 2007
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SJOERD VAN TUINEN IS

JUNIOR RESEARCHER AT THE
INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY
AND MORAL SCIENCE AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF GHENT,
WHERE HE IS CURRENTLY
WORKING ON GILLES
DELEUZES CONCEPT OF THE
FOLD. HE IS THE AUTHOR
OF PETER SLOTERDIJK EIN
PROFIL (MNCHEN: WILHELM
FINK VERLAG, 2006). FOR
MORE INFORMATION, SEE:
HTTP://USERS.UGENT.BE/~SVTUINEN.

ABSTRACT This essay serves as an

introduction both to this special issue and
to the works of Peter Sloterdijk. It starts out
from the opposition between the critical
and the afrmative 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.
After a general outline of the Sphrenproject, I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijks
development of Ernst Jngers critical
concept of mobilization and show how
his engagement with critical theory has
gradually transformed from an aesthesis
of the event, through a Nietzschean
transvaluation of all values generosity

275

SJOERD VAN TUINEN

CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226861

CRITIQUE BEYOND
RESENTMENT: AN
INTRODUCTION TO
PETER SLOTERDIJKS
JOVIAL MODERNITY

SJOERD VAN TUINEN

instead of resentment as motivating force of critique or retuning

of Heideggers concept of the Lichtung, into a poetical and global
constructivism. This is followed by the unraveling of three layers
that have constituted the 1999 scandal following Sloterdijks
reply to Heideggers letter On Humanism: Sloterdijks actual text
on humanism and Bildung in the age of genetic engineering; the
scandal and the mass-medialization of philosophical critique; and
the hypermorality of the last, but still all too dominant generation of
Frankfurt School theorists. Finally, I draw some political conclusions
by opposing another source of inspiration for Sloterdijks joviality,
the Luhmannian theory of complexity, to the bivalent passion for the
real that, despite all that has happened in the twentieth century, still
seems to inform both the realist projects of philosophical critique
and the Heideggerian belief in the Kehre.
KEYWORDS: megalopsychia, mediality, critical theory, mobilization,
posthistory, humanism, complexity
Mehr Licht!
J.W. von Goethe

276

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

The completion of the monumental trilogy entitled Sphren

(Spheres, 1998b, 1999, 2004) has denitely put the
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the map as one
of contemporary philosophys most provocative and productive
thinkers and writers. The originality, scope, and conceptual athleticism
of his works together with his many extra-academic appearance,1 for
example as a host of a philosophical talk show on German television,
confront us with a genuine philosophical event a philosophicalliterary experiment in thinking after the structural transformation
of the mass-mediatized public sphere, the complexity of which is a
challenge to anyone interested in understanding what it means to
do philosophy today. Yet surprisingly, and notwithstanding the fact
that his books have been translated into twenty-seven languages
so far parts of Sphren have already been translated into Italian,
Spanish, French, and Dutch they have remained largely unnoticed
in the English-speaking world. Since his study of the early work of
Nietzsche, Thinker on Stage. Nietzsches Materialism (1990[1986]),
nothing has been translated into English. 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, his later work had lost
connection with the present. This special issue hopes to prove
that this neglect has been a mistake and makes a modest, and
overdue, attempt at lling up this lacuna by critically focusing on
the signicance of Sloterdijks work for, rst of all, contemporary
critical theory.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJKS JOVIAL MODERNITY

277

With over 70,000 copies sold within the rst year of its appearance,
Sloterdijks debut, Critique of Cynical Reason, almost immediately
became the best-selling philosophy book ever in postwar Germany.
It is a book which perfectly catches the disillusioned spirit of its
age, diagnosing its critical self-consciousness as cynical, that is
as enlightened false consciousness.2 If the twentieth century
was marked by our passion for the Real, as much later Badiou
and iek would also argue, then the success of enlightening
and consciousness-raising critical interventions has led us to a
premature resignation in the face of an overwhelming cynicism.
The problem is that modern debunking and critique have only given
us better insight into the misery of our situation, without providing
the means for improving it. 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. As a consequence, the disillusioned
discourse of critical theorists Sloterdijk primarily refers to an
aesthetical idealism (2001b: 235ff.) and a priori pain (1987a:
xxxiii) in the later works of rst generation Frankfurt School theorists
(e.g. Adorno) and an intersubjective idealism (2001a: 307) in
those of second generation ones (e.g. Habermas) has converged
despite itself with what used to be called a conservative standpoint.
Pragmatic paradoxes and aporias have become the modus operandi
of contemporary politicians and postenlightened philosophers alike.
At worst, philosophical critique has become part of the same alarm
economy and textbook gothic as that which dominates massmedial rationality.
Throughout his work, Sloterdijk draws on diverse sources to
propose alternative modes of enlightenment, rst of all understood
as an experience of relief. In the Critique of Cynical Reason, he
recognizes such an alternative in kynicism, the frivolous antiidealism that he adopts from such vitalists as Diogenes, Heinrich
Heine, and Nietzsche. In short, Sloterdijks kynical text is an
extensive performance specic to its argument and inspired by a
critical existentialism of satirical consciousness (1987a: 535): a
self-condent, watchful miming of critique and a bodily disclosure
of truth that ultimately gives or provokes a living stage on
which are comprehensible, but only secondarily, the discourses of
abstract critique and rationalist idealizations (1988: 20). From the
perspective of their performative Outside, less compelling ways
of relating to rationalism and even a refusal of the slavery of
self-preservation (2001a: 334) then become possible.3 And though
he later calls his initial strategy a romanticism of dissidence,
the malicious sense of irony and compromising thought of the
kynical thinkers will remain central to his work: Philosophers have
only differently attered society, it is now a matter of provoking it
(2000: 623).

CULTURAL POLITICS

1. JOVIAL MODERNITY

278

CULTURAL POLITICS

SJOERD VAN TUINEN

One leitmotiv that connects Sloterdijks early critique with the

critique of political kinetics in Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen
Kinetik (1989) and, nally, with the critique of extremist reason
included in this issue, 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. In Selbstversuch (Self-Experiment,
1996), he explains how he seeks the impossible, namely to combine
the antique ontological dogma that all that is, is good with the
critical moment of Enlightenment in what one could call a jovial
modernism (ibid.: 39ff.). 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-oating
intelligence or pure contemplation then in modernity theory it has
reached its critical phase and become a question of down-to-earth,
depressing, and exacting conceptual work, which for Sloterdijk,
contrary to the Marxist tradition, cannot be the locus of progressivity
(1987b: 146, 2001a: 341ff.).4 Ever since Kant, there has been a
gap in philosophy between critical and afrmative projects. The rst
consist of the major academic project of philosophical reection
and an ever-shrinking concept of truth; the second consist of a
comparatively minor and even subversive conception of philosophy
as creativity, embodied by Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger. It
is only with Nietzschean thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze
that philosophical critique has attempted to become afrmative
again. 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.
For Sloterdijk, the concept of joviality has a similar meaning to that
of generosity, adopted from Nietzsche, whose unreserved gesture of
self-publicizing5 had rst broken the philosophers devils circle of
resentment, idealism, and critique. Generosity is what is common
both to Diogenes deliberately compromising antiphilosophy and
Aristotles megalopsychia,6 the greatness of soul or magnanimity
which is renewed in the philosophical extravagance of Sloterdijks
magnum opus, Sphren. Repeatedly, it is connected to a hyperbolical
reason which serves to overcome postmetaphysical philosophical
and nonphilosophical mediocrity (2001b: 27ff., 267). 7 Just as
Zarathustras schenkende Tugend can only be understood beyond
the binary logic of giving and taking, or of self versus world, exaggerating helps us to reevaluate the given that is the result of the
canonization of exclusive, dichotomous, thinking (1998b: 13;
Oosterling in this issue, p. 363). The problem, in short, with most
modern grand narratives is not that they are too grand, but rather
that they are not grand enough (2005: 14). Therefore, Sloterdijk
explicitly contrasts his exaggerated theory with the tradition of
critical theory, understood as an exercise in understatement,
and with deconstructivism, understood as the exaggeration of
understatement (2001b: 235ff., 2006: 291f.).

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. His texts strike a delicate
balance between philosophy and poetics, science and mythology,
subtle abstractions and banal jokes. In the face of a culture of
unbridled analysis (1987b: 13), new complexities, 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). His method is
the juxtaposed sampling of diverse discourses, archives, and media
(many of his books are strewn with illustrations, contributing to a
plastic or material argumentation), 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. The theoretical resources used are extremely diverse and
range from psychoanalysis and constructivist philosophy to theology,
Indian philosophy, architectural theory, paleoanthropology, ethnology,
pop culture, medicine, economics, media theory, systems theory,
and cybernetics. In other words, its nonacademic hybris (2004:
865) has more in common with Deleuze and Guattaris Capitalism
and Schizophrenia than with the Critique of Pure Reason, Being and
Time, or Being and Event. Still, his discourse remains profoundly
independent. In fact, just as recent French philosophy developed
substantially as a translation of a German phenomenological
heritage, so Sloterdijk translates existentialism, structuralism,
discourse-archeology, and (de-)constructivism back into something
absolutely singular and, maybe, German.
So how can modern philosophy, in Sloterdijks view, have access to
joviality? The essay included in this special issue gives the reader an
indication of his current answer. It is an answer that follows directly
from recent books such as Sphren and Im Weltinnenraum des
Kapitals (2005), in which he implicitly distances himself from earlier
strategies. Below, after starting with a general outline of the Sphrenproject, I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijks philosophical quest for
alternative modes of enlightenment by tracing the development of
the critical concept of mobilization, which is central both to his early
works, especially Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemische
Abrstung (Copernican Mobilization and Ptolemaic Disarmament,
1987b) and Eurotaoismus, and his recent works. This allows us to
explicate several crucial aspects of the theoretical background to the
essay by Sloterdijk and to situate the interview with ric Alliez which
precedes it. It also helps us to trace some important inuences in
his work, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to contrast it with
other critical paradigms, such as the work of Paul Virilio, whose
post-Heideggerian approach to technological mobilization is naturally
very close to that of Sloterdijk and yet revealingly different, and Alain
Badiou, whose extremist according to Sloterdijks analysis of

CULTURAL POLITICS

AN INTRODUCTION TO PETER SLOTERDIJKS JOVIAL MODERNITY

SJOERD VAN TUINEN

the twentieth century in this issue ethics of the real can without
exaggeration be regarded as todays fashionable strategy of critique
that is most diametrically opposed to that of Sloterdijk.

280

CULTURAL POLITICS

2. SPHERES
Sphren is a wilfully megalomaniac, archival (it was initially subtitled
an archeology of intimacy, 2001a: 137), and philosophico-literary
performance in which Sloterdijk undertakes the onto-phenomenological
task of staging modern man not as an individualized and rationalized
being, but as primarily co-existential and sym-pathetic. It tries to
answer the anthropological but explicitly posthumanist question
of where man is, instead of what he is, by supplementing, from a
perspective in radical media theory, Kants extensive denition
of space as the possibility of being together with an intensive
denition of being together as possibility of space (2004: 307). From
a Hegelian perspective, according to which the history of the world
and the history of the spirit (Geist) converge, it is possible to say that
in principle all of mans productions have been spatial and that the
philosophical concept of spirit from the rst time it was used referred
to inspired spatial communities (begelte Raumgemeinschaften)
(1998b: 19). Yet the main referent is Heidegger, whose existentialist
phenomenology of nearness (Nhe) and being-in (In-Sein) offers the
basis for a conceptual framework capable of describing man as the
product of a permanent psychotopical tuning. Throughout, Sphren
is an investigation of the existential of ecstatical existence lies
an essential tendency towards proximity (im Dasein liegt eine
wesenhafte Tendenz auf Nhe, ibid.: 336) and being-in is beingwith others (das In-Sein ist Mit-sein mit Anderen, ibid.: 639). Man is,
and always has been, rst and foremost an inhabitant of spheres:
intimate virtual spacings which are always already implied by
classic metaphysical or extensive oppositions such as inside/
outside, subject/object, or friend/enemy (2001b: 172). Because
such a relational onto-topology falls outside any established
representational logic, Sloterdijk explicitates,8 or helps toward
representation, beyond the metaphysical opposition of reality and
appearance, a series of epistemo-ontological scenes on which can
be staged these existential relations (starke Beziehungen), starting
from, to name but a few, the microspherical dyad in the mothers
womb (the Ursphre), theories of angels, twins, and doubles, early
modern magnetism, ancient macrospherical cosmopolitism, the
mediological strategies of the apostles, the nautical ecstasies of
Columbus and Magellan, and our egotechnical interior designs in
the age of globalization and information technology.
Sphren I. 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, the fundamental
neurosis of Western culture (1998b: 85). Heideggers Turn and
Foucault/Deleuzes Outside are invoked as welcome corrections,

281

but for Sloterdijk they have to be supplemented by a profound theory

of intimacy, understood as a mise-en-abyme in what is closest
(Abgrndigkeit im Nchstliegenden), and through the subversive
effects . . . that the sweet, the sticky have on proud subjectivity
(ibid.: 92). Thus, Sphren is a diving school for the vaults of
presubjective and preobjective con-subjectivity and other immersive
principles (2001a: 295). A typical recurring argument is the critique of
the individualist cult of distance and ego-constituting separations in
modern psychoanalysis. Like psychoanalysis, which aims at making
manifest unconscious facts (Traumdeutung), it is spherologys task
to explicitate the tender truths about our atmospherical places
of existence (Schaumdeutung, 2004: 32ff.). But by tracing the
prehistory of psychoanalysis in the magical ties and magnetic
and hypnotic affects and interferences which he nds in the works
of Ficino, Bruno, Mesmer, and German idealism (mainly Schelling and
Hufeland), Sloterdijk describes transitive relations between selves,
rather than reexive relations of the self.
Under the banner of a negative gynecology he deals with the
metaphysical, mystical, psychoanalytic, and messianic-evangelistic
ways of thinking an ecstatic and total inside. 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).9 This is achieved through a revision of the psychoanalytic doctrine of stages of development, 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. An immersive communication with something preobjective is the true precursor of what will
later be called reality. Psychoanalysis misses the signicance of
nobjects (neither subjects nor objects) such as placental blood,
intrauterine acoustics, and other medial givens, 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.
In the prenatal embeddedness of the motherchild bi-unity, an
intrauterine symbiosis with the nonself overrules lack in desire with
a primary ecstatic excess (or afuence beruss): in terms of
the connectivity of ows Sloterdijks concept of the sphere often
resembles Deleuze and Guattaris purely relational concept of the
desiring-machine (2004: 687, n. 577)). In the rituals through which
cultures less object-oriented than ours have dealt with the loss of
the original companion, such as those surrounding the placenta,
one can recognize immune strategies that serve to preserve some
kind of membrane-like bubble transparent, virtual, porous or
interior lifeworld (Lebenswelt) relieved of an unliveable outside
(Umwelt) (2001b: 172).
Sphren I closes with a theological propaedeusis, based on
the doctrines of such authors as John of Damascus, Margaret of

CULTURAL POLITICS

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282

CULTURAL POLITICS

SJOERD VAN TUINEN

Porete, and Shihabuddin Yahya Sohravardi, of inter-intelligence

and perichoretical forms of sociality across a whole spectrum
of communes, communitarisms, and communisms from the
communion sanctorum to [Marshall McLuhans neo-Catholic vision
of] a homogeneous global state without outside as the ultimate
structure of communities (1998b: 639). Sphren II. 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, arches, temples, and other
defensive structures has provided an experience of interior spaces
(ibid.: 225). Thus we are no longer dealing with little dyadic bubbles
but with holistic globes (derived from the Greek sphaira). What
denes the history of a civilization for Sloterdijk are the metaphysical,
sociopolitical, and technological attempts at extending a virtual
interior community centripetally in an ever-increasing inclusion.
The globe is the main formal concept of an extensive morphology
of anthropological and cultural history (1998b: 78), the aim of which
is to offer a truly philosophical theory of globalization (2005: 18ff.).
Sloterdijk denes the global as the monstrous (das Ungeheure) or the
incommensurable (das Unverhltnismssige), typical articulations
of the human taste for the immeasurable or the whole, which is
megalopathia (1993: 28ff., 1994: 380f., 1999a: 303, 2005: 13). He
distinguishes three great historical globalizations, 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. The
rst strategy is static and primarily metaphysical or cosmological. It
consists of a combination of ontology and optimism, a monstrodicy
(2004: 870): the great Parmenidean and Platonic contemplations
of the whole, the summum bonum, were a kind of geometry of the
immeasurable combined with exact optimism (1999a: 389) which
continued to determine the metaphysical tradition until Modernity
(ibid.: 132). It is rationalist because it imagines the unrepresentable
and measures the immeasurable, putting everything that is in an
adequate proportion to the rest (1989: 257, 1999: 47ff.). It was
a morphological evangelism based on superlatives, celebrating
total inclusion and the impossibility of anything really disappearing
(1999a: 117ff.). In this context, Sphren II offers a critique of round
reason, dening its limits through the tension between immunity and
community though communal life offers a vital protection against
an outside, 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, this guarantee becomes untenable if the whole becomes
innite or decentered (ibid.: 410).
The second, essentially historical globalization coincides with the
history of imperialist capitalism: the terrestrial exploration of the last
globe by missionaries, explorers, and colonizers. Freud was wrong to

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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. The most important fact of modernity is not that
the earth orbits the sun, but that money orbits the earth (2005:
79). In following Sloterdijks view, this history of globalization began
with the discoveries of Magellan and Columbus and was completed
when the rst worldwide currency was established with the gold
parity between the US dollar and the British pound-sterling in 1944
and our rst sight of the globe in its entirety from outer space in
1969 the completion of the age of the world picture (2001b:
370f., 2005: 234ff.).
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, transport, and
economic systems. Yet this development, 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,
posthistorical situation better described as a hybrid complexity of
spheres of various forms, (dis-)connections, and scales. In Sphren
III. Schume (Foams) Sloterdijk uses the physical and mythopoetic
metaphor of foam, a substance of an almost completely accidental
and connective structure, to describe an unlimited multiplicity of
virtual worlds without a central gravitational pole.
First, this metaphor indexes the co-fragility and co-isolation
of life in a world of simultaneity (1999a: 49f) where everybody is
everybody elses neighbor, but nonetheless still lives in the luxurious
position of excluding the Other from the privacy of his apartment.
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). Instead of established sociological
categories, or theories of the social contract or the social organism,
he prefers Gabriel Tardes 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. Accordingly, the scene
of modern representative democracy the social was never
more than an autogenous illusion, a society in the mirror, and
should at least be supplemented by a monadological understanding
of agglomerations and conglomerations of foams according to
which every thing is a society, even if there is no symbolically
mediated communication (2004: 296).11
Second, the metaphor of foams serves to supplement the
more common but anorectic notion of network, taking into
account not only the virtual connections between local spheres
but also the primary expansiveness of such intensive spacings
(Verrumlichungen) (ibid.: 257). Following the vitalist Jakob von

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Uexkll, who used the same metaphor for a pluralistic ontology

according to which humans are creatures equipped with a primary
expansive capacity, a capacity of self-defense through creativity
(ibid.: 25055), Sloterdijk stresses the asymmetric creativity and
incompressibility of life (2005: 391412).
Posthistory sets in after the crystallization of our carefully designed lives in the comfort of the World Interior (Sloterdijks Rilkean
metaphor for the West) of capital or Empire (2004: 801ff.), an
enormous greenhouse which, contrary to Hardt and Negris analysis
of a biopolitical Empire without transcending Outside, ostentatiously
manifests its exclusive structure through the utter boredom of the
Western(ized) middle class.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. Therefore, third, Sloterdijk extensively exploits
the frivolity of the metaphor of foam to develop an interpretation
of Enlightenment as upswing and indulgence (Auftrieb und
Verwhnung). In retrospect, the vitalist or biophilosophical project
of Sphren turns out to be a universal history of generosity (ibid.:
885) that explores wealth as a source of ethos (ibid.: 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. It closes with a discussion of the existential qualities of
the superuous in terms of surpluses of vigilance declining
birth rates, increases of productivity and victimological luxury
that bear witness to an unprecedented luxury of reection (ibid.:
833ff.). If a philosophical critique is still necessary today, therefore,
it will be a critique of pure mood (Kritik der reinen Laune) (ibid.:
671ff.).

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3. CRITICAL THEORY OF MOBILIZATION

Already in Sloterdijks work in the 1980s, the history of Enlightenment
is told not only in terms of a metaphysics of knowledge and light,
but also as a universal acceleration, a becoming lighter. Freedom
of movement has served as the basis of our autonomy ever since
the days of the mechanization of the world picture. Borrowing a
concept from the German writer and eroticist of steel, Ernst
Jnger, Sloterdijk sketches an image of modernity as the process of
a planetary mobilization that lends truth to its military connotations
and dialectics. We are constantly mobilizing further, always more
likely to respond to a summons to action, led by a kinetic utopia in
which we will be delivered from any direct confrontation with the real.
But, in fact, this kinetic utopianism has led us to equate the means
acceleration with the end autonomy. Progress is nothing but
movement for the sake of movement and toward more movement.
Thus, one can say that the medium for example communication
at the speed of light has become the message and that the

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classic humanist subject has disappeared in favor of an increasingly

hardened or steeled subjectivity. Even now that the arms race
of the Cold War is no longer an issue, the secret services, those
specialists in cynical reasoning and the most mobile offshoot of
the military, are still the best safeguard against the threat of arms.
That is why, according to Sloterdijk, we experience a strange kind
of discontent, despite our cynical compliance with almost every
increase in pace. In the worlds actual course, which displays an
accelerated passion for catastrophe, people, both as executioners
and victims of mobilization, experience their dominant form of life as
something heading in the wrong direction. Simultaneously, in their
capacity as wrongdoers they recognize their capacity to agree with
these misguided trends, up to the point of complete identication
(1989: 12).
Continuing Heideggers critique of the epoch of modern technology,
Sloterdijk declares himself a Left Heideggerian, and criticizes our
physics of freedom (ibid.: 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. Modernity is the neurotic installing
of a continuing growth of potential of movement, in order to keep
up positions that make themselves impossible and progressively
untenable, precisely because of the conditions and effects of the
installation (1989: 45). Most forms of Critical Theory form part of
this self-suffocating project of Copernican mobilization, i.e. the
emancipation of the subjective and the aggressive stance toward
all matters of course (1987b: 59ff.), leading Sloterdijk to the
observation that in fact there has never been a Frankfurt critical
theory, but only a Freiburg one (1989: 143). A modern progressive
ethical impulse such as communicational transparency is always
kinetic and, in the end, militaristic. And of course the nest example
of offensive kinetic nihilism can already be found in the Communist
Manifesto of 1847, where it is demonstrated how capital mobilizes
all traditional relations that resist the unchaining of the industrial
production process, and how it consequently makes everything that
stands and that is solid melt into air (1989: 66, 2004: 851).
According to Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemische
Abrstung we can distinguish three kinds of critique in historical
Enlightenment. The rst 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.). However, the unbridled exploration of the pure Outside
(1999a: 932ff.) is unavoidably followed by a total dizziness and
a withdrawing into Ptolemaic disarmament. 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. For Sloterdijk, its most exemplary
philosophical expression can be found in the work of Heidegger,

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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, 23/1976: 193ff., 1987b: 63ff., 2001a: 105). However, if
in the rst half of the twentieth century the reasons for withdrawing
into inactivity and nineteenth-century pessimism were obvious, it
is no longer a plausible position today. In fact, the bankruptcy of
historicism was already evident in Nietzsches Moment (Sloterdijk
1989: 165ff., 2006: 44ff.), marking a third reective movement
that is rst and foremost an aesthesis of events, understood not
phenomenologically as a backing out before the phenomena into idle
vacuity, but as receiving its impulse for activity only from the things
themselves and from being embedded in the actual (wirkliche)
world (1987b: 81, 1989: 148f., 2001a: 330f., 2001b: 53, 227).
It is an aesthetic reection, because, like the pantomimical critique
of cynicism, it implies a comprehensive consciousness of movement
within the movement of critique, and thus goes beyond the division
between the logical and the aesthetic. In fact, aesthetic judgement
is inseparable from theoretical and practical reason, because it
functions as their critical physiognomy (1987a: 139ff., 1988: 22,
2001b: 16) and serves an enlightenment of human movements
through a wakeful or vigilant being-here-and-now and being-in
(1987b: 124ff.). Throughout his works, this aesthetics of the event
will remain the paradigm for critique.
In his early works, Sloterdijk explains this third kind of critique
not so much in terms of Copernican creativity as of a participating
wakefulness, which returns what was excluded at the outset of
modern reection the interested, prejudiced, projecting, immersive
factor (ibid.: 65ff.). 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, but rather in an
immediate relation to the over-complex (2001a: 28). Contrary to
the dialectical cynicism of Critical Theory, Sloterdijks early critique
of political kinetics lays the emphasis on the possibility, created
through crisis, of an evolutionary slowdown of false actions of
mobilization (1989: 76f.). Rather satirically, it focuses its attention
on the small kinetic excess that is always present, the little speed
merchant that, rushing past us and, transgressing all frontiers, dashes
into the unwanted. Much like Virilio, that other theorist of military
accelerations, Sloterdijk concentrates on the accident that every
technological development inherently produces. The critical potential
of the accidental, however, cannot be sufciently distinguished from a
(young) Hegelian appropriation of the negative. At stake is a critique
of eschatological reason (ibid.: 239) or a posthistorical principle
of reality (ibid.: 246). Sloterdijk goes so far as to claim that the
contemporary way of critique leads to the critique of the way (ibid.:
267). This is alluded to in the title of Eurotaoism, a book that, like
all his work, is strongly informed by a non-European, Asian type of

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criticism of metaphysics and subjectivity. 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. Lao Tzu taught how to live within the stream of events as a
continuous process of differentiation emanating from one energetic
principle. The moral rules of practical reason serve more as an
obstacle than as a means. The ideal of Taoism is, formulated in
a post-Heideggerian way, being-at-ease-in-movement (2005: 93,
2001a: 350, 2001b: 29ff.). We can thus recognize a Taoist critique
in the afrmative point of view from which there is ultimately nothing
to criticize. Thats why a true critical theory, if it shall exist, will
equate with an authentic mysticism (1989: 274).13
Concerning the relation between modern subjectivity and offensiveness, Sloterdijk arrives at a similar conclusion in his recent books.
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, even a kind of
hysterization (2004: 94f). Sloterdijk interprets modern philosophy
as a kind of human resource management in terms of the modern
subjects autoconsultation and autopersuasion. Subjectivity
is the inclination toward an active appropriation of ones own
passivity. 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, 2005: 99).
The essence of our subjectivity is the internal combustion engine,
a rational mechanism that transforms fuels into subjective action
the French word for petrol, essence, is particularly revealing.
Essential for Modernity is the model of the explosion, the process
by which given resources can easily be transformed into active
energy. 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 dened in terms of
energetic rules. A philosophical kinetics should demonstrate how
the nest branchings of our thought and feeling are determined by
the experience of the internal combustion engine and the reactor
(2001a: 322).
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. Though it is true that
in the rst 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, he foretells, this romantics of the
explosion will be reinterpreted as a globalized energetic fascism
(2005: 287ff.) 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. If the age

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of world metaphysics is substantially the time of anti-constructivism

(2004: 386), then post-Copernican mobilization, which is the same
as terrestrial globalization, must also be understood as the great
modern process of the reconstruction of the earth, 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, opportunities, and unimaginable seductions
(1999a: 809ff., 856ff., 2005: 175ff.). 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, i.e. of being
collectively at home in a hostile element (1999a: 873ff.). Today,
their result must be described not only in terms of the nal victory
of the mobilized subject over his surroundings, but also through the
nonmilitaristic terms of relief (Entlastung) and de-scarcication
(Entknappung). Technologically, we have lifted off from the conditions
and oppressions of a rst reality into a second world of our own
making. Technological constructivism has led us not to a dangerous
neglect of Being, but rather from the human condition to air
conditioning, or, in other words, to a full technological explicitation
and the ability of further immunizing and extending our atmospherical
lifeworld. And economically, modern people live in the Crystal Palace,
the giant Victorian exhibition hall for these new technologies dating
from 1851, described by Dostoyevsky in his Memoirs from the House
of the Dead (1862) as a modern Baal: a monstrous edice with a manconsuming structure in which all the demons of the West the power
of money, pure movement, and intoxicating enjoyments receive
their tribute. Despite civilizational differences, the globalized and
continually reterritorializing earth is one world market under an open,
but no longer vertical, sky: a carefully calculated conservatory, or
human park, in which naturally given forms of scarcity have become
indoor affairs and in which all forms of work, desire, and expression
of those who are caught up in its system have been absorbed in the
immanence of its buying power (2005: 276).
The historical result of this modern reterritorialization is that,
both technologically and economically, the interior-principle [has]
crossed a critical threshold (2005: 266). In the West, despite recent
violent attempts to reintroduce history, we now inhabit a synchronous world, populated by Nietzsches Last Men and regulated by
universal human rights to a comfortable life of eternal boredom
(ibid.: 26). Any contemporary practice of critique will have to take
into account this radical transformation as a reterritorialization, even
an ungrounding or relief (2001b: 273f.) of the foundations of
critique themselves. This is the subject of Sloterdijks essay in this
issue: how levity has acquired the fundamental position (p. 346).
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, real/false, or faithful/unfaithful. If the Right was

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never interested in mobilizing the foundations of things and thus

could not see the change, the Left wouldnt want to gain insight,
even if it could. Both are conservative in so far as they are founded
on a suppression of the truth of their own prosperity (2004: 681ff.).
But, as Sloterdijk asks through a typical Nietzschean twist, isnt it
typical of life in luxury, that one is able to avoid the embarrassment
of inquiring after ones origin? (ibid.: 690).

289

If Sloterdijks early concept of critique already differed sharply from

that of the Frankfurt School or of Heideggerians, this divergence
becomes even more strongly emphasized in Sphren. Still primarily
aesthetic, critique is not only understood in terms of participating
observation, but also through a retrospective revaluation of postCopernican creativity. If today what we call globalization is rst of all
the turning of the earth into a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk),
then philosophys relation to the monstrous must be dened as
constructive aesthetic reection (2004: 811, 2005: 415). It is a
reexive constructivism, not because it is the well-founded privilege
of an aggressive subject, but because it operates on the ipside of
subjectivity (2004: 84). The monstrous has not disappeared, but it
has been immanentized as an upward abyss (Abgrund nach oben)
(ibid.: 495). The ultimate aim of all of spherology, it turns out, has
been to afrm this upward abyss which in earlier works Sloterdijk
referred to with Nietzsches and then Hannah Arendts a-historic
concept of natality, the primordial and perpetual antigravitational
thrust of coming-into-the-world, as opposed to Heideggers Sein-zumTode (Sloterdijk 1989: 151f.) and to lead the reader through an
enormous post-Heideggerian retuning (Umstimmung, 2001a: 16,
2004: 850): a transvaluation of all values in terms of generosity and
abundance (beruss). Instead of an overly anticipatory closure upon
the future that might fall victim to heavy metaphysics, 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.
Contrary to the omnipresent abnegation of the world of its
benevolence or the oppressive denegation of levity (2004: 696),
critique has to start from an afrmation of and primary trust in the
luxury of the state of having arrived.15 Enlightenment is not only
a ludicrous wager on the improbable (1987b: 126), we should also
realize that the society of the future is condemned to condence
(2001b: 233). This means that, contrary to todays miserabilism,
a nonconservative critique starts from generosity. With an obvious
appetite for perversion, Sloterdijk gives an offensive twist to
Heideggers premodern interpretation of technology and globalization
as dangerous. Contrary to Heidegger, for whom Nietzsche was the
last of the metaphysicians to pose the human subject as the supreme

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NIETZSCHES RELIEF

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end of the will to power, it was precisely Nietzsche who taught us the
from the outset relieved (freigesprochene) offensivity,16 even the
emancipation of the offensive from the economy of resentment
(2005: 121f.). The maturing of the modern sense of abundance
is expressed in an ontological constructivism, which treats beings
not as Bestand, enframed in a world picture, but as events in a
dissipative process of production (2004: 214). And in fact, a literal,
stubborn (1988: 9), kinetic (1989: 260, 2001b: 29ff.), and
sometimes historical and evolutionary (2001b: 7) reading of
Heideggers clearing (Lichtung) allows us to understand the great
work of installation art called Earth as nothing but our luxuriously
furnished house of Being. In todays automobilized society, we
are no longer thrown (geworfen), but rather are we borne along
(getragen, 1988: 44, 2001b: 197) in the technological and economical levitation (Leichtung, 1989: 260) of a kinetic (Umwelt) and
gives us access to the world (Welt).
From the perspective of a theory of constitutive luxury, in
which anthropology and phenomenology converge (2004: 709),
mans relation to technology is not so much determined by the
instrumentalizing will of a Cartesian subject as by the latters
immersion in its own media. There is thus not only a dangerous
or harmful side to mobilization, but also always already an ecstatic
openness to it. Despite the apparent difference in appreciation of
mobilizing tendencies between Sloterdijks early and recent works,
there is no contradiction between them in this respect. Rather, one
could qualify them as different interpretations of Gelassenheit. In
Eurotaoism, Sloterdijk explains how postmodern relief17 depends on
the readiness to convert the proud active phrases of Modernity into
passive or impersonal phrases (1989: 28). But instead of his early
preference for meditative, intermedial passivity, he clearly chooses
the latter, more generous option in Sphren, which must be read
as the paradoxical translation of Heideggers onto-phenomenology
into the impersonal systems of cybernetics, or a sensible division
of reason between the poles of subject and process (1990: 89).
This implies a transition in the understanding of the self from a
priori-regulation to a posteriori-regulation (2004: 870). Contrary to
Heideggers 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, because it was the rst 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, which turns reexivity into a
mechanism in such a way that both humans and nature now appear
as its derived variables (2001b: 218, 2004: 740f.).18 Our lifeworlds
are autogenous, anthropogenetic islands: technology-mediated
hybrids of world and environment or, in the case of their extreme
explicitation, absolute islands such as shopping centers or space

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stations in which nature has been explicitated completely as the

not-outside (2004: 490ff.) and in which Being or natura naturans
becomes a cultural drama (1989: 154f., 2004: 194). Accordingly,
all human facts derive from an impersonal production process of
creative self-birth, self-organization, self-extroversion, self-extension,
and self-immunization (spheropoisis) 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. In other words it is through being-in in an intensive
space of comfort through proximity, that man is able to encounter
Being and to ecstatically reterritorialize on the monstrous (1999a:
42, 2001b: 173, 367). It is no coincidence that inhabiting (wohnen)
the house of Being and indulgence (Verwhnung) are etymologically
related (1989: 180, 264, 2001b: 197). The human taste for the
monstrous, or, in an expression Sloterdijk has adopted from Ernst
Bloch, the experimentum mundi (1996: 65, 2001b: 290), is in
essence already the generous expression of a primary relief.
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,
Paul Virilio, is exemplary of the critical potential of these principles
of generosity and relief. The rarity of Sloterdijks reference to his
colleague (exceptions are 1989: 85, 1996: 35ff., 2001a: 243f.) must
be explained as a consequence of their contrasting positions relative
to Nietzsche. Virilio, 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). We live in the ill-fated society of the accident,
where systems of information transmission have become bombs,
and in which we are handed over to the lawlessness of globalization
(ibid.: 23ff.). Since progress and progressivism have always been
inherently linked to movement and critique, 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. Hence
Derridas aporia of speed, rst formulated in No Apocalypse, Not Now
(1984), applies: the critical slowdown may thus be as critical as the
critical acceleration.19 However, ever since his antiphilosophical
kynicism, Sloterdijk has tried to overcome the undecidability of
this, in itself, already miserabilistic and conservative choice.
Going further than Derridas ambivalent principle of the coup de
don (which he never tired of setting to work, even in his reading of
Nietzsche; Derrida 1979: 109ff.) and the customary discourses
of gifts and poisons, both natality and generosity point toward a
practice of production after the reactionary chain of resentment has
been broken (2001c: 48, 2001b: 111). They are the principles of
a self-praise of life beyond the constraints of two-valued logic and
the inescapability of lack, in short, of a political constructivism
beyond the alternative of conservative and progressive (1999a:

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410, n. 173).20 As such, they are the only afrmative 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, 2001b: 100ff.). Therefore, while for Virilio
war and the military-industrial complex are the driving forces behind a
linearly developing history, this cannot be so for Sloterdijk. 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. To think after Nietzsche means not only to avoid
describing modernity as a history of escalation, but also to get out
of a narrative approach to history altogether (2001c: 50).

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5. HUMANISM: A CRITICAL CASE

Nietzsche also constituted the stumbling block that led to the affair with
which it has become customary to associate Sloterdijks name ever
since the summer of 1999. 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 fr den Menschenpark (Prescriptions21 for the
Human Park).22 It consists of a rather untimely philosophicoliterary reply to Heideggers letter On Humanism (1946), in which
Sloterdijk offers a critique of Heideggers concept of Lichtung in
terms of biopolitics and the political meaning of writing.23 On both
issues, it is argued that, despite himself, Heidegger occupies a
humanist position. In short, Sloterdijk denes the essence and
function of humanism through two intrinsically related projects:
rst, that of the domestication and breeding of humans through
biopolitical technics, and, second, that of friendship-constituting
telecommunication in the medium of writing (2001a: 60, 2001b:
302, 324). Both projects are carried out in false innocence
concerning the presupposed knowledge of what it is to be human,
a knowledge which is in fact the result of a century-old media
conict (ibid.: 309). Even in Heideggers critique of the humanist
tradition, this conict remains unthought. Sloterdijk argues that the
mediality of language itself remains unthought, thus he implicitly
adopts Derridas critique that in Heidegger writing is subordinate
to the direct presence of Being through human speech (Derrida
1997: 18ff.). As a consequence, Heidegger is not critical enough
of the disciplining and domesticating function of language as the
house of Being. In his pastoral discourse (Sloterdijk 2001b:
127), the humanitas of man is directly related to his ecstatic and
decentered residence in language through which he shepherds the
truth of Being. But this shepherding not only sets man free from
his enslavement to the ontic, but also keeps him in servitude
(hrig) to prescribed messages from Being, which is obeyed as
the sole authority, without critically differentiating between the
domesticating, emancipating, and the potentially dangerous
disinhibiting tendencies of this communication (ibid.: 316ff.).

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However, with the advent of new media for biopolitical writing such
as the Internet and biotechnology, the media conict unavoidably
manifests itself again. To be sure, 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.: 327), but they have also
internally eroded the classic strategies of manipulation and their
media by exceeding any prescribed, idealistic model of the anthropos.
Despite the fact that it was Heidegger who paved the way for the
liberation of writing or poisis from anthropocentrism, it is ironically
rather Heideggers rst and last metaphysicians Plato, the theorist
of genetic engineering in terms of shepherding, weaving, and tending,
and Nietzsche, the theorist of pastoral power and the bermensch
as the great challenge of writing for the future to whom, according
to Sloterdijk, we have to refer for the philosophical genealogy of
contemporary technics of writing, which he calls anthropotechnics
(ibid.: 329) or homeotechnics (ibid.: 227). In their works we nd
an understanding of humans as products immanent to an all but
harmless production process of self-breeding and self-formation
through self-writing, which is more relevant than ever in the context
of a posthumanist biopolitical situation that knows no sovereign
(ibid.: 334) and where a codex for anthropotechnics (ibid.: 329)
is so dangerously absent. In short, they have explicitated a problem
that remains the Outside of all classic humanisms.
In reaction to this exit from humanism through Plato, Nietzsche,
and Heidegger, Habermas sent a letter to various journalists of
which, despite his initial denying its existence, 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 Sloterdijks text about what is for obvious historical
reasons such a sensitive subject in Germany. In the ensuing scandal,
Sloterdijk was branded a philosophical parvenu, a popstar of thought,
fascistoid breeder of the bermensch, a cynical ideologist of Grand
Politics, but also simply the new Nietzsche. The result was rst of
all a conrmation of Nietzsches prophecies of what it means to
do journalism and critique in a time dominated by increasingly
indifference-producing, nonfriendship-constituting, and therefore
posthumanist mass media. That this posthumanist mediocrity is
becoming more and more compelling, even in philosophy, is proven by
the fact that after the rst attacks in Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, many
respected academics such as Henri Atlan, Richard Dworkin, Manfred
Frank, and Ernst Tugendhat also felt the need to react in various
other European periodicals without taking the trouble to seriously
read or contextualize Sloterdijks text, which was never meant for
publication but of which pirate copies had been circulated by, again,
Habermas. These serious authors agreed on two points, namely
that Sloterdijk leaves the reader with an uncertainty about what
he actually wanted to say and that he had failed to rst study the

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ethical and biological matter of his text. As typical representatives

of the silent takeover of philosophy by professionalized ethics,
they immediately cried re and quite happily made a grotesque
category mistake between ontology and democracy, assuming that
they had before them an inferior text on moral rules instead of a
post-Heideggerian meditation on the essence of prescriptions.
Yet the affair is most of all instructive in that it is reminiscent
of the discussion surrounding Habermass Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity (1985) and the HabermasFoucault controversies
from the early 1980s. At that time Habermas had already shown
that for him any serious critique of humanism was automatically
antidemocratic. Humanism as a politics of friendship was supposed
to be the exclusive basis of democracy as the rational, power-free
process of reaching intersubjective consensus and it did not allow for
such posthumanist approaches to politics in terms of biopower and
dissensus. For many disciples of the Frankfurt School, the critique of
humanism, indeed all post-Nietzschean critique which intermingles
critique and power as the inside and outside of the same democratic
process, automatically equates to antidemocratic sophistry and
can thus be pilloried. But other than what happened in the 1980s,
when post-Nietzschean philosophy became customarily known as
obscure and relativistic, the false innocence of humanism,
about which Sloterdijk had warned in his lecture, manifested itself
perfectly clearly. Habermas, in spite of his being the theorist of
democratic dialogue, decided not to enter into one with Sloterdijk but
rather excluded him from the outset and chose the path of indirect,
false imputation.24 However, in a judo-like reaction, Sloterdijk took
the opportunity to demonstrate the sham-liberal character of the
still highly inuential Frankfurt School by creating a metascandal
through publishing two letters a decent humanistic practice in itself
in Die Zeit, one of which is addressed to the journalist Assheuer,
whom he sees as typical of journalistic alarmism, the other to
Habermas, who is accused of Jacobinism and a social-liberal
version of the dictatorship of morality. Combined, these letters constitute a vehement protest against the progressive convergence of
hypermorality and overmediatization (1996: 114, 2000: 14). At the
end of his second letter, 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, on this second day of
September, dead. She has long since been bedridden, the sullen old
woman, now she has passed away completely. We will gather at the
grave of an epoch, to take stock, but also to contemplate the end of a
hypocrisy. Thinking means thanking, said Heidegger. I say, rather, that
thinking means heaving a sigh of relief (Sloterdijk 1999b: 35).

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6. THE NEW POLITICS OF COMPLEXITY

Ultimately, Sloterdijks critical position is founded in the alleviation
of the de jure conservatism and miserabilist progressivism which

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cannot handle its de facto state of being-in-the-world. The traditional

stance of critical theory toward the new world of light facts is
articulated, for example, by Virilio in Ground Zero when he critically
describes our world as one that is resolutely accidental that is
to say, an enemy to its own substance (2002: 49). Against this
standpoint, 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. In reality, 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,
in the air, in the atmosphere. As soon as this is understood, the
conditions of criticism change dramatically. Marx argued that all
criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would say instead that
all criticism begins with the critique of gravity.25
In short, the power of critique will depend on whether one conceives
of mobilization as driven by an economy of guilt and lack, based on the
conditions of the old and the transcendence of Being over the self; or
as driven by an economy of generosity and dissipation, of the active
conditioning of the new and the immanence of self-expression, selfpreservation, and self-overcoming. The second option is described
by Sloterdijk as to confess to relief as to an evangelical interval
(2004: 698, 1998b: 54, 2001b: 284). In Weltinnenraum he speaks
of a heavenly Left (himmlische Linke, 2005: 413ff., an allusion to
Baudrillards gauche divine), elsewhere of Nietzsches fth gospel
as another word for kynicism (2001c: 47).26 Its critical principle,
generosity, is attained neither through hatred of life, nor through
tearfulness or hope but through a biopositive, nonillusionary but
indecipherable, because foetal, reservation of the world (1988: 94).
In more colloquial terms: by focusing on becoming instead of history,
it knows that revenge and compensation are impossible (2004:
762). Rather, 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.).
To a certain extent we have already answered the question in the
title of Sloterdijks essay in this issue, his inaugural lecture for the
Emmanuel Levinas Chair held in Strasbourg in March 2005, called
What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to a Critique of
Extremist Reason. What has taken place is the transition from a cult
of the real to a cult of possibility. Sloterdijk adopts Alain Badious
characterization of le sicle as marked by a passion for the real.
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), that
is a change in the meaning and functioning of the real (2001b:
79ff.). Earlier he had already dened such a Turn as a conjunctural
reversal of currents of mobilization and an ontological ebbing of
subjectivity (1989: 199ff.). Here it is the change of tide in the ows
of money, information, and other regenerative fuels that bears the

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potential of a posthistorical, even a postontological relief (1988:

103, 1999: 49f., 2001b: 78ff.).27 The aim of his essay is to interpret
this change of current in terms of an apocalypse of the real, and
thus to invite, and almost explicitly seek under the banner of a
critique of extremist reason a polemical confrontation with such
ethicists of the real as iek or Badiou, who gures as one of
the last keepers of the treasure of lost radicalism at the beginning
of the twenty-rst century (this volume, p. 329).
For Sloterdijk, the real problem: the problem of the real (das
wirkliche Problem: das Problem des Wirklichen, 1987b: 106) was
put on the philosophical agenda by Nietzsche, when he exclaimed
that along with the true world, we have also done away with the
apparent!28 Because the principle of the real is the principle of
difference (ibid.: 83, 1988: 73), it is the catastrophe of the real
that the true world would be nothing but a theater unmasked as
theater (1987b: 109, 2006: 292). Yet, in a time when everybody
wants to be critical, when everyone wants to be realistic and
nurtures a mistrust of all appearance (1987a: 22ff.), the twentiethcentury struggle for the interpretation of the real can hardly be said to
have been decided. In his earlier works, again alluding to Baudrillard,
Sloterdijk therefore speaks of an agony of the real (1985: 210ff.).
In critical philosophy, 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. This is a particular property of young Hegelian
philosophy and radical practices of critique, 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, 250ff.). But though this humble theory
proceeds through identication with the dirty work, it is the contrary
of a prostration of philosophy before nonphilosophical bon sens
such as kynicism. Rather, 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., 1989: 254, 260ff., 1999a: 69f., 2001a:
33f., 2006: 292), or, as Badiou puts it, a political project: grandiose,
epic and violent (Badiou 2007: 9) borne by the virtues of courage,
perseverance, faith, and discipline (2002: 58ff.).
In Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch (2006) a
genealogy of the revolution based on a general economy of thymos
(pride) and rage, as rst proposed by Nietzsche and Bataille, that
traces the concept of revolution back to the hot zone of Augustines
early Christian theology of history (2006: 44ff., 50ff., 2001b: 24ff.,
97ff.) Sloterdijk analyzes this postmetaphysical hermeneutics of
the real, both inside and outside philosophy, as a fundamentalism,

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a dismal science that wavers between resignation and rage (2004:

673). It claims the real as a foundation, 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,
2006: 74f., 171ff., 292). It depends on a primordial lack in the
actual appearance of reality even if only formal as in the case
in Badious Platonism which must be compensated for by a
Realpolitik at any cost (2006: 225). Therefore, while for Badiou
the dening episode of the twentieth century took place between
Lenin and Mao Zedong (Badiou 2007: 11f.), it is no coincidence that
Sloterdijk depicts Lenin as the father of twentieth-century extremism
and Mao as his most excessive inheritor (2006: 231, 261ff.). And
though far less dangerous, todays extremist automobilizations and
holy accelerations still count on what Hegel called the monstrous
power of the negative to turn history into an innite depository of
resentment (ibid.: 103ff.). They depend on a denial of the break
out of modern society from the denitions of reality from the age
of material poverty and its spiritual compensation (2001b: 87ff.,
2004: 671ff., 723). A fairer image of the real (2006: 353) would
demonstrate their nonsituational universalism to be no more than
a sovereign anachronism (ibid.: 273, n. 83).29
It is Sloterdijks strategy to outdo negativistic and submissive
hyperboles with an emancipated critique of hyperboles that
groundlessly celebrates life: Only hyperboles help against hyperboles (2001b: 273f.). 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, a reason of composites, of the nonsimple and the nonplain
(2004: 877f.). In a time marked by a caesura such as ours, it is a
sign of the attempt to be true to the obstinate ambivalence between
agro-imperialistic and techno-capitalistic denitions of the real
(2004: 88085). 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.: 674),
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, 352, 2001b: 80, p. 330 in this issue). On the one hand,
the reduction of complexity is the congenital defect of philosophy,
understood as the organized resistance against thought about the
monstrosity of being (2001b: 290). In a postparanoid culture of
Reason (2001b: 229), on the other hand, the hypermoralism with
which an individual subject relates directly to the Whole is impossible.
Today, Sloterdijk argues, we dont need a disinhibiting theory, but
a critical theory of the negentropic30 factor of density (Dichte)
which determines the intimate physical and mental trafc, or in more
intimate terms, intercourse (Verkehr), among the localities of the

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globalization process (1999a: 835, 2005: 27, 277ff.). Heideggers

vertical kinetics of the Kehre between fallenness (Verfallenheit) and
reversion (Umwendung) dont do justice to the contemporary world,
in which revolutions have become chronic and in which we have come
to occupy a horizontal in-between (2001b: 42ff.). Rather, a grammar
of shared situations and being-in-the-middle-of-it should allow for
a conception of thinking as the art of nding orientation in a world
of complexity (2001a: 351ff.). 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.).
Ultimately, according to Sloterdijk, such a critique must be guided
by Bismarcks dictum about politics as the art of the possible.
Bismarck, despite his enormous reactionary legacy, is correct as long
as the restricting reality of Realpolitik is not thought of reductively,
but as an in situ-principle, derived from the public in-between of
the being-together of political animals in shared communities. In
other words it cannot appropriate, but must start from and remain
immanent to real existing, social, and solidary ties. Though the
reader might be surprised by such a conservative formulation,
especially because Sloterdijks model for this kind of politics is
the boat, or rather, the being-in-the-same-boat a thoroughly
capitalistic model for investment, corporate identity policy, and
human resource management, that is rst found, after Sophocles
canonical metaphor of the ship of state, with fteenth-century
Portuguese seafarers it is Sloterdijks argument that we still dont
know what this metaphor means today. 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). It offers a post-post-Copernican,
complex way of relating to the future as the opposite of a catalogue
of miseries, disasters, and mutually exclusive choices, because it is
engaged (verlobt) with the prevailing winds, letting itself be borne
unconditionally into the Open, while always remaining local and even
provincial (1993: 7ff., 1994: 60, 2005: 397ff.). Ultimately, this
engagement implies a postmonotheistic, multivalent denition 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, cf. 1990: 85f., 2004: 411, 722).31 In
terms of the Kehre and possible changes of current, we must not seek
a true re-turn, re-volution, or re-version but ongoing inversions
or constructive explications in the plural (Verwindungen) (2001b:
72ff., 328f.). Such inversions are not countermovements (ibid.:
75) but movements of cooperation, in which problems only appear
when circumstances offer their solution: turns of technology against
technology, of capital against capital, of war against war, of science
against science, and of media against media: (ibid.: 76f) The
seafarers of the future navigate in coherences, in which there can
no longer be revolutions in the old style, but extraversions from

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moribund and biased structures, new contrarities to be baptized

and fatal routines turning movements, through which the meaning
of active, conscious, shared life in the multiple mobilized world
necessarily changes (ibid.: 80).
Most Western individuals dont want to be revolutionized, but
insured. After the age of extremes has come to an end, the
reality of the posthistorical political stage seems to be that of an
omnipresent normalization and drive into the mainstream (die
Mitte), a totalitarian and depressing center of gravity (2001a:
150ff.). A contemporary critique that starts from its immersion in
reality, however obstinate, must therefore be antigravitational, that
is constructivist. Because the mainstream is the most formless
of monsters (ibid.: 284), this constructivist relief is rst of all
aesthetic. Insofar as philosophy has always been the (in)forming and
formatting of and by the monstrous, critical explicitation today
must be an aesthetics of being-in-the-mainstream. And what is
the ethical mandate of art, if not generosity (2001c: 49)? In
his contribution, Interest and Excess of Modern Mans Radical
Mediocrity. Rescaling Sloterdijks Grandiose Aesthetic Strategy,
Henk Oosterling adopts Sloterdijks analysis of globalization as the
megalomaniacal or hyperpolitical installing of a total work of art
(Gesamtkunstwerk) in terms of a threefold (energetic, informational,
and epistemological) explicitation of mans radical immersion in
his own media and discusses the political potential of Sloterdijks
merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Nietzschean and
Bataillan principle of excess rather than on lack and scarcity. If today,
radical mediocrity is our rst nature, then we need strong criteria
to differentiate between miserabilist and afrmative critique. This
distinction is anything but self-evident, because, as Oosterling points
out, 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-reective, and therefore radical, mediocrity. In the nal
analysis, the psychological surplus of generosity and the substance
of creativity consist precisely of this self-reective in-between.
Therefore, any feasible critical reection requires, as Oosterling
argues, a downscaling of Sloterdijks 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,
and not merely something that belongs to insurance companies.
Thus, Oosterling formulates one possible answer to the critical
questions that must be asked: wherein lies the possibility of
resistance in Sloterdijks recent analyses of capitalism? After
Sinopean kynicism, post-Copernican aesthesis and Taoist meditation,
does his recent work offer us any political strategy? Of what use
is the epic neutrality (2004: 881, 1998b: 76) of Sphren, his
thinking coldly (2001a: 215f., 306, 2006: 105; see also the
interview in this issue) for a reader interested or acting in the eld of

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cultural politics? Sloterdijks own rst answer might well be that for
us, the new politics begins with the art of creating words that point
out the horizon on board of reality (1994: 60). Though philosophy
is its time as apprehended in thoughts, it must be careful not to
become all-too-contemporary (2001a: 150). Therefore, he sees his
work as a series of attempts, to gather together a knowledge that
is pushed away from normalization, but nonetheless consolidated
and send it to later generations in the form of a message in a bottle
(2001a: 281f.). This issue offers some critical explorations of these
attempts. Hopefully, they will be the beginnings of a wider cultural
and academic reception.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank the contributors, referees, and editors of Cultural
Politics for their trust, assistance, and enduring patience during the
editing process of this issue. Special thanks go to our translator,
Chris Turner, whose excellent work and generous helpfulness have
proven to be indispensable for overcoming the sometimes seemingly
insurmountable difculties in translating the Sloterdijkean discourse
into English. Most of all, Id like to thank John Armitage for the
opportunity he has given me and for his inexhaustible faith in the
project from start to nish.

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NOTES
1. He is one of four Germans besides Jrgen Habermas, Hans
Kng, 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).
2. In the following, quotes are taken from published translations
where such exist. Where none exist, I use my own translations.
3. See for a more in-depth discussion of kynicism the foreword to
the English edition of the Critique of Cynical Reason by Andreas
Huyssen, The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual
(1987a: ixff.).
4. Nietzsches concept of workers of philosophy in Beyond Good
and Evil, KSA 5.211.
5. In anticipation of my discussion of the critical principle of generosity,
it is important to remember that, according to Zarathustras lesson
of Schenkende Tugend, even if one abundantly gives oneself,
one is not oneself given. Rather, giving is a process of sich
aussetzen, sich kompromittieren, sich mitteilen, sich austeilen,
vorgeben, freigeben, and ausgeben through transsubjective kinds
of communication. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, KSA 4.11,
4.137, 4.405; cf. Sloterdijk 1988: 22ff., 2001b: 37, 99, 2001c:
46ff.
6. As one of the greatest virtues, megalopsychia constitutes
the mean between the excess of vanity and the deciency of
pusillanimity. Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 6.

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7. In an unpublished interview (Scheltema, Amsterdam, March

2006) with me, Sloterdijk dened critique as the art of
returning into mediocrity and as the protection of mediocrity
against the irreversibility of hyperboles.
8. This concept of explicitation combines Heideggers poisis
(bringing forth into the open) with what Bruno Latour calls
articulation (Sloterdijk 2004: 208ff.). See also Oosterlings
remarks in this issue.
9. Sloterdijk refers to Sphren as a medial poetics of existence
(1998b: 81). Ever since Der Zauberbaum (1985), he writes
about human facts from a materialist perspective of mans
immersion in media as a medium amidst media. This approach
is as much indebted to psychoanalysis as it is to Marshall
McLuhans pioneering studies of the intimate relationships
between self-consciousness, the body, and its technological
extensions in Understanding Media (2003: 31, 301).
10. An excursion on merdocracy (1999a: 34053) offers a playful
media theory of the sociopolitical problem of air conditioning
in sedentary cultures, especially those mediated by obscene
politics and mediocre journalism, 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). It is in
such passages that Sloterdijk comes closest to authors like
Baudrillard or iek, though his conclusions are quite different,
because he doesnt accept the colloquial distance between the
scene and the obscene which only allows for politics on the level
of the symbolic. Rather, 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.
See for an in-depth discussion: Tuinen (forthcoming a).
11. For a discussion of Sloterdijks use of Tarde, ibid.
12. Sloterdijk has argued Negris work to be a mysticism of beingagainst that needs the invisible Whole as opponent and ultimately
ends in the requiem of leftist radicalism, 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, 23/04, 06/02/05; cf. 2004: 825ff.,
2006: 134).
13. Another important Asian inuence, though less explicit, is
Rajneesh, the Wittgenstein of religion, whom he compares
to Lacan, that other psychocharlatan who combined
psychoanalysis, theatrality, and provocation two forward
looking ways of rendering oneself impossible. Also recognizable
in his works are the ego-criticism of the Indian Vedanta, the
Buddhist Anatta doctrine and Nagarjuna, the yoga and tantric
schools, and the neo-Hindu syncretisms of Aurobindo and
Krishnamurti (1996: 105ff., 2001a: 16ff.).

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14. The bomb demands of us neither struggle nor resignation,

but self-experience. We are it. In it, the Western subject is
consummated (1987a: 131).
15. http://www.cicero.de/97.php?ress_id=7&item=850 (accessed
04/27/07).
16. On the economy of acquittal (Freispruch) in terms of natality,
1988: 163ff.
17. Earlier I preferred to translate Gelassenheit with yielding in
order to stress its more passive character in Sloterdijks early
work. Relief refers to exoneration, relaxation, enlightenment,
as well as levitation, and better captures the meaning of
Gelassenheit in his later work.
18. This unpersonal approach to Gelassenheit is also referred to
as escapology, after the title of the Robbie Williamss album
from 2003, because it connects postmodern hedonism to the
study of life as relief phenomenon and as that which normally
escapes our attention (2004: 736).
19. Quoted by Redhead (2002: 93, 166). Cf. Derrida: The future
can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger
(1997: 4).
20. Sloterdijk is at his most Deleuzian when he calls the traces of
language of such a life Spinozistic, because they are expressions that serve as an advertisement for their own force and
as the self-impartation of the successful (2001c: 47f.).
21. For the German original, http://menschenpark.tripod.com/
(accessed 04/27/07); for a stylistically slightly revised version
2001b: 302ff. For reasons that follow from my exposition, I prefer
to translate the original Regeln with prescriptions rather than
rules. Sloterdijk is neither a political nor a moral philosopher.
However, his concept of Regeln carries a strong juridical and
medical meaning. Here I will especially emphasize the rst, but
the reader should keep in mind Sloterdijks immunological
intentions and his strong functions as physician of culture.
(2001a: 9).
22. http://menschenpark.tripod.com/ (accessed 04/27/07),
2001b: 302ff.
23. 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 Sloterdijks work: Foucault and Derrida. See
for such an exposition: Tuinen (forthcoming b).
24. Therefore, as Alliez has argued, the Sloterdijk Affair might also
be called the Habermas case. See: Le Monde des dbats,
October 1999. Despite repeated invitations by third parties,
Habermas refused to communicate about their differences
(2001b: 61). He also prohibited a reprint of his initial letter to
Die Zeit (9/16/1999) in a Dutch dossier of the debate, to which
Richard Dworkin, Rdiger Safranski, Slavoj iek, Bruno Latour,
Lorenz Jger, Antje Vollmer, Henri Atlan, and others contributed

26.

27.
28.
29.

303

25.

(Sloterdijk, Peter. 2000. Regels voor het mensenpark. Kroniek

van een debat. Amsterdam: Boom).
http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html
(accessed 04/27/07).
Sloterdijk adds that, as Diogenes Laertius writes in The Lives and
Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes of Sinope, son of a
banker, was charged for debasing the coin and can therefore
be regarded as a forerunner of Nietzsches transvaluation of all
values (2001c: 46).
On Sloterdijks concept of the Turn, see 2001b: 60ff. and Tuinen
2006: 93ff., 119ff., 145ff.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, KSA 6.81.
As Badiou has analyzed, on the one hand, we are in the realm
of suspicion when a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the
real from semblance. (Badiou 2007: 54). What is necessary is
a passion for the real, a differential and differentiating passion,
devoted to the construction of a minimal difference, to the
delineation of its axiomatic. (Badiou 2007: 56). Being the
generic as such, the real is a subtraction from objective reality
that legitimates a much realer subjectivity. The romantics and
pedagogy of the clandestine in Badiou denies any objective
realism. It is profoundly Platonic when he says that politics is
the art of the impossible. Yet it is not an idealistic philosophy
because he abnegates philosophy the privilege of its own truth
and reduces it to a formalism. For Sloterdijk, on the other hand,
poetics may be the art of the impossible (1988: 29), but
politics is the art of the atmospherically possible (1999:
1,003). It therefore goes that air is the best possible residence for theories of all sorts (1988: 96). For him, philosophy
understood as megalopsychia is not just a modus vivendi, but a
discipline that possesses its own and its own subject and object,
the subject being the athletic soul that stretches according to
the form of the world (the sphere) in which it lives (2005: 16,
286). 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 Nietzsches pathos of distance.
Philosophy has therefore always been traversed by questions of
inhabitation, yet it is not idealist precisely because it is tied to
situations and participates in the complex. As an author who is
rst and foremost interested in the complexity of things, nally,
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. In this sense Im not a political
writer . . . Political writers are those who have an enemy, who
array themselves in some kind of intellectual battle . . . and for
them there is no true theory, but only encampment discourse.
Every morning marks the issuing of an order, a brieng and the
observation of hostile operations Tuinen 2004: 27ff.).

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SJOERD VAN TUINEN

30. In the 1950s, the physicist Erwin Schrdinger called the life
force negentropy to indicate its opposite direction from the
push of thermal decay.
31. After Luhmann, the most important theorist of complexity
present, though often only implicitly, in Sloterdijks work seems
to be Michel Serres, for whom the model of the boat operates
as a natural contract, a principle of cordiality in which, in
opposition to a social contract, the subject is the collective
itself (Tuinen 2007).

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REFERENCES
Alliez, ric. 1999. Laffaire Sloterdijk ou le cas Habermas? Le
Monde des dbats, October.
Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford
Translation. Jonathan Barnes (ed.). Bollingen Series. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Armitage, John (ed.). 2000. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. Theory, Culture and Society Series.
London: Sage.
Badiou, Alain. 2002. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.
Trans. and introduction Peter Hallward. London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain. 2007. Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1979. Spurs. Nietsches Styles. Trans. B. Harlow.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1997. Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore/London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1987. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Trans. F.G. Lawrence. Berkeley: The MIT Press.
1999. Post vom bsen Geist. Die Zeit, 38: 28.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993. On Humanism. In Basic Writings. London/
New York: Routledge.
Kellner, D. 2000. Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical
Reections. In J. Armitage (ed.), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to
Hypermodernism and Beyond. Theory, Culture and Society Series,
pp. 103ff. London: Sage.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003. Understanding Media. The Extensions
of Man. Critical Edition. T. Gordon (ed.). Corte Madera: Gingko
Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Smtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe
in 15 Bnden. Giorgio Colli and Mazzimo Montinari (eds). Mnchen:
Walter De Gruyter/dtv.
Redhead, Steve. 2002. Paul Virilio. Theorist for an Accelerated Culture.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1976. Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten. Der
Spiegel, 23, May 31: 193219. Available online at http://www.
eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/350kPEEHeideggerSpiegel.pdf
(accessed 04/27/07).

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1985. Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse im

Jahr 1785. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1987a. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred
with a foreword by Andreas Huyssen. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
1987b. Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemasche
Abrstung. sthetischer Versuch. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
1988. Zur Welt kommen zur Sprache kommen. Frankfurter
Vorlesungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1989. Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik einer politischen Kinetik.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1990. Thinker on Stage. Nietzsches Materialism. Trans. J.O.
Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1993. Im selben Boot. Versuch ber die Hyperpolitik. Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1994. Falls Europa Erwacht. Gedanken zum Programm einer
Weltmacht am Ende des Zeitalters ihrer politischen Absence.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1996. Selbstversuch. Ein Gesprch mit Carlos Oliveira. Mnchen:
Carl Hanser Verlag.
1998a. Der starke Grund zusammen zu sein. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
1998b. Sphren I. Blasen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1999a. Sphren II. Globen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1999b. Die Kritische Theorie ist tot. Die Zeit, 37: 35f.
2000. Die Verachtung der Massen. Versuch ber Kulturkmpfe in
der modernen Gesellschaft. Franktfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
(with Heinrichs, Hans-Jrgen). 2001a. Die Sonne und der
Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
2001b. Nicht Gerettet. Versuche ber Heidegger. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
2001c. ber die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches
fnftes Evangelium. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
2004. Sphren III. Schume. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
2005. Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Fr eine philosophische
Theorie der Globalisierung. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
2006. Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Tuinen, Sjoerd van. 2004. Terrorisme is een bewijs van te veel
communicatie. Interview with Peter Sloterdijk. Filosoe, June/
July: 27ff.
2006. Peter Sloterdijk. Ein Prol. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag.
2007. La Terre, vaisseau climatis. cologie et complexit
chez Sloterdijk. Horizons philosophiques, 17/2, 61ff.

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forthcoming a. The Breath of Relief. Peter Sloterdijk and the

Politics of the Intimate. In Dominiek Hoens, Sigi Jottkant, and
Gert Buelens (eds), Catastrophe: On Borders, Cuts and Edges in
Contemporary Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
forthcoming b. Peter Sloterdijks Transgenous Philosophy.
Post-Humanism, Homeotechnics and the Poetics of Natal
Difference. Theory, Culture & Society.
Virilio, Paul. 2002. Ground Zero. Trans. C. Turner. London: Verso.

PETER SLOTERDIJK IS A GERMAN

PHILOSOPHER, BEST KNOWN IN THE
ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD FOR
CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON (1987).
HE IS PRESIDENT OF THE STATE
ACADEMY OF DESIGN, PART OF THE
CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA IN
KARLSRUHE.
RIC ALLIEZ (1957) IS SENIOR
RESEARCH FELLOW AT MIDDLESEX
UNIVERSITY IN LONDON. HE IS A
MEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD
OF MULTITUDES AND EDITOR OF THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF GABRIEL
TARDE. HIS MAJOR PUBLICATIONS
ARE: CAPITAL TIMES, VOL. 1
(UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS,
1996); THE SIGNATURE OF THE WORLD.
WHAT IS DELEUZE AND GUATTARIS
PHILOSOPHY? (CONTINUUM,
2004); DE LIMPOSSIBILIT DE
LA PHNOMNOLOGIE. SUR
LA PHILOSOPHIE FRANAISE
CONTEMPORAINE (VRIN, 1995); (WITH
J.-C. BONNE) LA PENSE-MATISSE
(LE PASSAGE, 2005) (WITH JEAN-CLET
MARTIN): LIL-CERVEAU. NOUVELLES
HISTOIRES DE LA PEINTURE MODERNE
(VRIN, 2007).
SEE ALSO: HTTP://WWW.MDX.AC.UK/
WWW/CRMEP/STAFF/ERICALLIEZ.HTM.

REPRINTS AVAILABLE
DIRECTLY FROM THE
PUBLISHERS.

PHOTOCOPYING
PERMITTED BY LICENSE
ONLY

BERG 2007
PRINTED IN THE UK

LIVING HOT,
THINKING COLDLY:
AN INTERVIEW WITH
PETER SLOTERDIJK
RIC ALLIEZ
ABSTRACT Subsequent to a dialogue
concerning the German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijks Regeln fr den Menschenpark
(Rules for the Human Park), the following
interview with ric Alliez introduces the reader
to Sloterdijks appreciation of contemporary
cultural politics. However, the focal points of the
interview are Sloterdijks core cultural conception
of Nietzschean-inected thought and his own
Sphere Theory, his ideas on immunization,
notions of ecology, anthropotechnics, and
the question of Being. As these central themes
of Sloterdijks current work and the title of this
interview indicate, Sloterdijks belief in living
hot, thinking coldly is also considered by Alliez
alongside Sloterdijks contribution to cultural
and political theory.

CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226870

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 307326

KEYWORDS: Regeln fr den Menschenpark, Nietzsche,

Sphere Theory, immunization, ecology, anthropotechnics

307

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RIC ALLIEZ

308

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ric Alliez: Lets begin with the worst of beginnings: the so-called
Sloterdijk Affair.1 The worst of beginnings whichever way you look at
it. The Affair that bears that name reduces the philosophical work of
Peter Sloterdijk to a single lecture Regeln fr den Menschenpark
a lecture which was, in fact, published after the triggering of the
Affair in order to exhibit the implausibility of the reading made of it
(Sloterdijk 1999a). For we must immediately note the impossibility
both in terms of content and form of dialogue with the reader
Habermas. 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 . . . But its impossible, too, if we think
of the way the dialogue begun in the early 1980s by Habermas with
Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard developed, because whats lacking is a
common polemical space, a minimal community of thought capable
of sustaining such a dialogue . . . Because whats in question is
the very denition of philosophy (in its excess over the regulated
circulation of arguments), the very denition of politics (in its
excess over the production of consensus) . . . Now, that excess
is for Habermas the exclusive and necessary mark of a lack, of a
lapsing from democracy synonymous with neoconservatism. With
the Sloterdijk Affair, its even argued that a radical neoconservatism
is at issue, reference being made to the most dubious pages of
the most irresponsible of philosophers: Nietzsche . . . Quod erat
demonstrandum.
We must, then, review the general meaning of this Sloterdijk
Affair, going back over the course of it for the non-German reader.
Knowing that the reader could have been thrown somewhat by
the summary versions provided by some columnists. I quote, not
entirely at random, a text printed in bold type: The former German
ultra-leftist has gone over to radical neo-conservatism. But (sic) the
hatred of democracy is still present. Facing him, humanism is not
disarmed (sic) . . ..
Peter Sloterdijk: Starting out from current events would be the
worst of things for a philosopher of a classical orientation. But isnt
it the best of beginnings for a philosopher who involves himself in
his times? If we have, as you suggest, to go back over the Sloterdijk
Affair or, as it has sometimes been called, the SloterdijkHabermas
Scandal let me say briey why I think that Affair, which I see
as a manifestation of disquiet on the part of the contemporary
intelligentsia at the national and European levels, is an ideal starting
point for our discussion. This is because, with Nietzsche, Ive always
thought that free thinking is essentially an affair and that it always
will be. An affair in all possible senses of the word: drama, event,
project, offense, negotiation, noise, participation, excitation, emotion,
collective confusion, struggle, scrimmage, mimesis, business, and

309

spectacle. As a consequence, if there is a Sloterdijk Affair in the

German media and in the French newspapers, with epicenters in
Israel and Brazil (bastions of a globalized Habermasianism), and
if its given rise to a broad and relatively agitated debate on what
is at stake and at risk in the new biotechnologies, a debate
triggered by my remarks at Elmau and Basle, then I cant and wont
withdraw from my responsibilities, even if, from the standpoint of my
philosophical project overall, I regret the way my actual argument has
slipped from the center to the periphery of the debate. Insofar as
this discrepancy, this polarization on a relatively marginal aspect of
my work, isnt a mere error and an innocent hermeneutic accident,
its worth our taking some time over the phenomenon.
Youve located precisely the origin of the polemical complex at
work in the said Affair: I nd myself caught, in fact, in an impossible
controversy with an adversary whos omnipresent and absent at the
same time. So in the months of September, October, and November
1999, the German public had the opportunity to participate in an
asymmetric dialogue between a real philosopher, sublime and
silent, by the name of Jrgen Habermas, and a known sophist,
Peter Sloterdijk, who, in the patent absence of his opponent, carried
on his little conversation alone with that impossible Other. Hence
that primal scene of academicism mentioned in your question. A
scene in which we were able to observe how true philosophers go
about excluding the sophist from the eld of the pursuit of truth,
so as to ensure sovereign control of the terrain for the masters
and possessors of true discourse. Ill add that, one primal scene
may conceal another: behind Aristotles nger looms the menacing
shadow of that reeducation camp in the country reserved by Plato
in The Laws for the enraged, unrepentant atheists. Excommunication
procedures have certainly changed today, but they havent particularly
got any milder . . . To arrive at the effective exclusion of the sophist,
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, but which was inevitably to produce a
lethal effect if the public became aware of it. Having, then, read and
reviled the text of the sophists lecture, Regeln fr den Menschenpark,
the philosopher of truth was to charge another sophist, a journalist
associated with the confraternity of true discourse, a contributor
to the Hamburg-based weekly, Die Zeit that is to say, his faithful
disciple Thomas Assheuer with denouncing the sophist Sloterdijk.
The charge sheet was to be read out loud and clear, the offenses
being precisely those the philosopher did not dare to pronounce
publicly. Two weeks later, 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. But at that point
the young sophist Assheuer, who no doubt aspired to be received and
recognized among the true philosophers, had to face up to the cruel

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RIC ALLIEZ

truth: Habermas who hasnt neglected to read Carl Schmitt never

had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. Does
one really need to ght a duel to make the distinction between friend
and enemy? Cant the true philosopher have himself represented
by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes aware
of his masters 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.
The rest of the story is better known in Germany than in France.
The young sophist was to take his revenge. A few weeks after the
Affair exploded, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September
16 published extracts, wholly compromising for the sender, of
a letter from J. Habermas to T. Assheuer. It contained a violent
critique of the Elmau lecture. 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, whom one could no longer, according to the pronouncements
of the master of Starnberg, regard as a person of sound mind.
Alarm and consternation among Habermass 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. I say almost, having in mind a certain precedent,
which we must now analyze. Like you, I have in my sights here
that action-packed battle conducted by Habermas and his people
against those French thinkers whove been dubbed, practically and
reductively, post-structuralists or neo-structuralists, and who
offered Habermas the ideal opportunity to go to war on yet one
more occasion against his eternal enemy, Nietzsche, and all those
who refuse to treat the philosopher of Sils Maria as a dead dog. By
a pleasing coincidence, the premier German television channel ARD,
in a programme marking the seventy-fth anniversary of the founding
of the Institut fr 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 ofcial version of
the affair: he had lied to the public by brazenly downplaying his
role in setting up the scandal.
We touch here on the political heart of the affair: for Habermas
did not lie when he lied. He simply one too many times perhaps
defended, by means that seemed justied to him, given the dictates
of militant democracy, what he sees as the space of consensual
truth against what he perceives as the irruption of the word of
the sophist, of a discourse thats polyvalent, essayistic, seductive,
harmful, French, and irresponsible. Having said this, its clear that
were back once again as in the early 1980s at the heart of

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a struggle for the denition and redenition of philosophy itself.

Your remarks make that point with all the requisite clarity. Let us
nonetheless because we have to dene the eld of philosophy
by seeking to make something out in the troubled waters of the
admissible and the inadmissible. Its the case that, since my
beginnings in philosophy, Ive been too steeped in the lessons of
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Adorno, Bloch, Sartre, Foucault, Canetti, and
other master-thinkers for my generation not to be persuaded of this
exigency: truth games of the philosophical type, if they are not to sink
into anodyne salon conversation, cannot and must not be conned
within the frames of an epistemological establishment or within
the institutions of a politics of knowledge thats given once and for
all, even if that politics comes with the best of recommendations,
and claims the purest moral and political intentions. If theres a
common doctrine toward which the above-mentioned great teachers
and these proud researchers may converge, it would doubtless be
the following: modern philosophy, in its fruitful times, exposes itself
to a metabolism with that which is not philosophy social struggles,
madness, pain, the arts, politics, accidents, clinical practice, and
technologies. For 200 years, everything that has red authentic
thinking has come from nonphilosophy irrupting into philosophy a
movement inaugurated by Schopenhauer and the Young Hegelians.
The slogan of those times was to turn ideas back the right way up, to
stand them on their real foundations. Hence the well-known schema
of base and superstructures. Thinking, henceforth, would mean
engaging in a battle for the meaning of the real. But the battle over
the real is not over, even after the decline of Marxist theory (which
was the logical heart of that battle for a century). It is present more
than ever in our activities and our constructions of the world. To the
point where, for the rst time in the history of mentalities, everyone
wants to be a realist . . . Im convinced we cant at the present
time be said to need one more denition of philosophy: we have too
many of them already, all useful and all useless. We must, rather,
provide evidence that la pense de la diffrence, thinking without
epithets, still exists. We must interrupt the arrivistes danse macabre
of realism. In my view, the real danger for thought today is the rise
of a neo-scholasticism normalizing almost the whole of academic
production, which coexists in a dangerous liaison with omnipresent
mediatization, a phenomenon that has replaced reection (one
would, in the past, have dared to say existential reection) and
theoretical work with a neoserious attitude and/or an anticonformist
conformism. What is dangerous is this kind of totalitarianism lite,
which has left its mark on the Zeitgeist throughout the Western world.
Consequently, I would be much more interested not in a denition
of philosophy, but in its de-denition, in a de-scholasticization, a
de-conformization, even indeed a de-professionalization of reection,
provided it were a wise subversion of pseudo-professionalism. As a
philosophical writer whos dened the essay as a denitive form of

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RIC ALLIEZ

the provisional, I have in my sights an essayistic notion of philosophy

of the highest possible level. Isnt philosophy a thing much too ne,
much too real to be left to the philosophers alone? Each one of us
mocking philosophy as best he or she can.
I should like to come back now to the formula you put to me,
to this language game thats supposed to sum up my intellectual
entelechy between an ultra-Leftist starting point and a nishing point
named radical neoconservatism. Lets put aside for a moment the
ignorant, disparaging aspects of such a construction, and lets forget
the Habermasian stamp upon it. This is an amusing and revealing
equation because it reveals a highly signicant phantasm quite
commonly found among the new conformists, whether they present
themselves as people of the Left or as prudent representatives
of the liberal Center-Left. In my view, they hallucinate a trajectory
thats 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. That hallucination isnt, then, without a certain interest,
and even a certain truth, if I may be so bold, because those who argue
this way are admitting, in an indirect and yet quite clear way, that
they have, at a certain point in their mental development, stopped
thinking. And how could it be otherwise, since they have found the
truth, have locked themselves away in divine reunion with it? They
havent moved, in fact, since the post-May 68 period. They couldnt
move because they effectively came home sure of themselves,
sure of their rights and their property. But did that mean they could
totally lose the sense of movement when others, once of the same
ilk, 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,
an end point not at all shared, which diabolizes any departure from
their stock-in-trade, which is the regulated production of consensus
(the extremes say the same about the Other). He who distances
himself from the axiomatics of an eternal but rebranded Left,
anchored in the fundamentum inconcussum of good conscience and
its timeless commitments, is consequently doomed to move closer
to the Right of yesteryear (which is historically their own truth) or,
worse still, to team up with the neoconservatives who, it is (quite
wrongly) imagined, would reserve an extremely warm welcome for
the deserters from the ultra-Left.
Everyone has experienced this kind of disorientation: youre in
a train in the station and suddenly theres movement; you dont
know if its the train alongside thats started up or your own train.
To dispel the dizziness and distinguish between the movements,
you have to recover a sense of stability. This has been part of the
cognitive biogram of Homo presapiens and Homo sapiens since we

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lived in hordes on the savannah. Were programmed to lend the most

extreme attention to the slightest movement picked out against a
stable horizon. We might speak here of the origin of difference by
the irruption of an unexpected presence or development against a
at horizon. 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 whove chosen
to project the immediate data of the ultra-Leftist consciousness
of 1968 into somewhat less . . . immediate directions. Those who
havent moved for a long time and who nonetheless claim an important
position for themselves at the head of the hierarchy of ideas, are
at loggerheads and thus in a constant clinch with those whove
espoused the movement of our times at the level of existential
experiment and at the level of the concept, to undertake a renewed
analysis of that permanent revolution that expresses itself in an
unparalleled social, technological, artistic, and scientic dynamism. I
note in passing that I fell in love with this French expression pouser
le mouvement (was it in a text by Virilio that I stumbled upon it?).
A rather sublime expression, which can translate one of the richest
ideas of Heideggerian thought when it ventures to conceive Being
as movement, as thrownness [Geworfenheit] and consignment or
dispatch [Geschick] and as correspondence to that movement.
We must, therefore, expect frictions between those who espouse
thrownness and who, as a consequence, distance themselves
from commonplaces (which have, in any case, lost all usefulness),
and those whove settled into their posts and remain comfortably
in their places, inducing in themselves the illusion of movement by
watching the trains go by. To cut a long analysis short I dont want to
become interminable I shall refer to the little book of dialogues with
Carlos Oliveira, a young Spanish philosopher of a socialist orientation
who has chosen for himself a pantheon of rather singular thinkers
John of the Cross, Marx, Derrida, and the German Idealists that
has just appeared in a French translation entitled Lessai dintoxication
volontaire.2 Toward the end of these dialogues, youll nd 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 . . .), together with certain hints for better
understanding the driving forces behind this Babylonian confusion
of political languages thats evident nowadays a confusion which
means that quite often even potential allies no longer recognize
each other as such.
In spite of all these risks, Lessai dintoxication volontaire was
very favorably received in France. Roger-Pol Droits observations in
his article in Le Monde des livres were in my view very indicative: the
inevitably light tone of this recorded conversation didnt detract from

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the understanding of the philosophical issues. I mention this fact also

because I had read his Loubli de lInde with a great deal of sympathy
and I share Roger-Pol Droits revulsion at the incredible ignorance
European philosophers display toward Indian philosophy and, more
generally, 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. Ive even asked myself at times under
what conditions Raymond Schwabs formula regarding an Oriental
Renaissance (1984) could take on new meaning for our times . . .
There remains the (essential) fact which other articles published
since in France seem to indicate, such as Bruno Latours (1999) or
your piece in Le Monde des dbats (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. Dare I add that I would have
been astonished had that not been the case? . . .
A last word on my alleged radical neoconservatism, the senile
malady of the initial ultra-Leftism. I freely concede that this is a
particularly economical summary of the Affair that bears my name.
But why economize on intelligence? This particular economical
individual seems to draw his knowledge of my deep motives from
downright occult sources. Otherwise, how could he declare, on the
basis of my Elmau lecture, over which he can be said to have cast
a lofty eye, that the hatred of democracy is still there? Is it so
difcult to recognize that the task of the philosopher, one of his roles
in our modern societies, is to produce, for oneself and ones fellow
citizens, an analysis of the weaknesses and aws 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, but that it must also determine, 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 Lvys ne book comes to mind here) and by believing rather
classically that its an intelligent machinery that prospers only when
subjected to permanent criticism? In short, Im sure that democracy,
when it devises for itself some other course than mere survival on
principle, lives by the good ofces of those who arent disposed
to idealize it (and we know how much those idealists know how to
exploit it as though it were their efdom: do they not derive copious
benets from it?). Its only too clear what a democratic decit there
would be if we allowed the conformists of every stamp to stie free
thinking to the point of prohibiting the questioning and problematizing
contained in an uncompromising critique. Ill permit myself to refer
here to the article Du centrisme mou au risque de penser, 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, that advent of a boundless conformism that is the unthought
element of the Habermas System.

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315

PS: Simply Nietzschean. Thats a phrase that would certainly re

my imagination, even if I didnt know whod said it. Its an obvious
fact to me that the Nietzsche event was that earthquake, that
cerebral upheaval, which overthrew the entire intellectual tradition
of old Europe. In Ecce Homo, we nd very explicit traces of the
epochal consciousness Nietzsche had of the distant effects he bore
within him. Im thinking particularly of the famous pronunciamento:
One lives before me or after me,5 which sounds like the interior
monologue of a Messiah busy with the reform of the calendar made
necessary by his appearance. If one were looking for an example
that proved megalomania and sobriety can coincide, this is surely it.
For we must admit that its a matter of record for us: we do, indeed,
live after Nietzsche. Lets hold to the idea that this coincidence
of the megalomaniac and the sober is philosophy itself. The philosopher is that grandiloquent human being to whom it occurs that the
grandeur of the ideas he formulates exceeds his grandiloquence.
In Aristotelian terms, hes the zoon logon (megalon) echon. It
would, of course, be possible to replace the term grandeur with
less shocking expressions: substantiality, efcacity, pertinence,
validity, precision, creativity, potency, operativity. But, whatever the
expression chosen, we accept that there are, in any event, thinking
beings through whom something happens that affects the state
of reality as such. Which amounts to positing that real thought is
a production. Parenthetically, it seems necessary here to ask the
following question: if philosophical megalomania is a reality, wouldnt
it be entirely reasonable to conceive the parallel existence of a
specically philosophical megalo-depression? Is this to say that
the thought of our century will have been, to a very large extent,
merely the drama of the inter-pathology of ideas and thinkers? Intermadness [inter-folie] a concept to revisit.
So, simply Nietzschean what can that mean in the conditions
of contemporary thought? Lets begin by noting that the formula is,
rst, a chronological statement which says that were situated in

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A: Since the appearance of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983)3

and Der Denker auf der Bhne (1986),4 which is a commentary
on The Birth of Tragedy, two of your works that are translated into
French, its been possible to see you as the only German philosopher
likely to lay claim to Foucaults assertion that he was simply
Nietzschean . . . Id like you, then, to expand on the sense of that
reading of Nietzsche, if possible, 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; your (by no means simple) relationship
to Heideggerian interpretation; and, lastly, and above all, 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, indeed, in your eyes, the philosopher of
life par excellence.

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a time after someone. In this, its entirely in line with the title of
Giorgio Collis famous book, Dopo Nietzsche. We know the social
sciences and contemporary philosophy have formed the habit of
dating themselves within a period after a master-thinker. The postFreud period of J.B. Pontalis comes to mind; the post-Saussure of
the structuralists; the post-Foucault of the new genealogists and
archivists; the post-Braudel of the psychohistorians, and, more
recently, the post-Luhmann period (at least in Germany) of the
analysts of social systems and subsystems.
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 ow of discourses doesnt go far enough.
We have to go further and delve into the content and method of a
radically contemporary thinking. Hence the following questions: What
is thought (la pense) if one thinks after Nietzsche? And how does
one think if one thinks within the sphere of inuence and on the
horizon of Nietzschean thought?
The answer to the rst of these questions must indicate why
that thought is at the center of modern civilization. For, after
Nietzsche, one thinks (most of the time without realizing it) the
conditions of possibility and the conditions of reality of life. One
tries to understand how life, a life, our lives (and our thinking about
these lives) are possible and, among the answers given to this
question, theres one that relates to philosophy. (Let us, for the
moment, dene 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, a life, our shared life is
possible by virtue of the fact that human beings are endowed with
a sense of truth. This sixth sense enables them to live a life more
or less successfully and be part of a development: rst, because
it provides them with the means to adapt to a given environment
(accommodation of the intellect to things) and, second, 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). This is
also why, after Nietzsche, the theory of truth the old royal discipline
of philosophy transforms itself into an element of an expanded
metabiological reection. (Here again its tempting to make use of
the schema of de-denition: life and theory are things too important
to abandon to the biologists alone.) In my most recent work, Ive set
about integrating psychoanalysis, the history of ideas and images,
systems theory, sociology, urbanism, etc. into a metaparadigm I call
General Immunology or, alternatively, Sphere Theory. If one takes the
new denition of life (of a life) given by the immunologists at this
centurys end, according to which life, a life, is the success phase
of an immune system, one immediately grasps how these studies
lend themselves to a Nietzschean reformulation of the question
of truth. From the standpoint of Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean
philosophical metabiology, truth is understood as a function of

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vital systems that serves in their orientation in the world and

their cultural, motivational, and communicational autoprogramming.
At this level we are dealing with a philosopher/biologist Nietzsche,
the author of the famous phrase, We have need of lies . . . in order
to live.6 In my terminology, one would say that the truths (which I
shall term rst-order) are symbolic immune systems. 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.
Now, I think this way of considering individuals systems of opinions
has moral implications of considerable scope. It teaches, not a duty
of reserve, but a decision to act with reserve. In postconsensual
society, I regard this kind of ethics as indispensable.
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 theres a second level in Nietzschean thinking on
truth, which is strictly different from the rst. Here, Nietzsche is the
philosopher-adventurer: he abandons the terrain dened by concern
with the vital system and immunitary illusionism, whether that of
the individual or the social body. He advances into a region where
he discovers (second-order) truths, the effect of which is indifferent
to the vital interests of human beings or, worse, which is directly
opposed to those interests. There is, then, a second face of truth.
If the rst were that of a protective mother, the second assumes the
features of the Medusa. Faced with the former, one melts; confronted
with the latter, one freezes. 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 denitively harmful to life.
One might thus venture that modern philosophy (the philosophy that
has killed God, 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. (Sokal
and Bricmont can pull out their notebooks here for an augmented
edition of their book! Since I dont dare believe theyd accept the
invitation to join my seminar on the role of scientic metaphor in the
development of cutting-edge theories . . .)
Thought reaches its maximum degree of discomfort here, for
this challenge is addressed to the pride of the animal endowed with
logos. Knowing we can think strictly unbearable things, do we for that
reason have to give up the adventure of thought because most of
the hard truths arent assimilable as such by human beings, 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, with the metaphysician of the
artistic function of life, who formulated the battleeld for inhuman
truths in two sentences. First: We have art in order not to die of [the]
truth; and: Let knowledge advance, let life perish!7

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We shant take this analysis of the conict between the thinkable

and the bearable any further here. Theres a very useful book by
Rdiger Safranski (Wieviel Wahrheit braucht der Mensch?) that may
serve as an introduction to this particular problematic. 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. It was, in fact, the young Basle philologist
who opened up the battle of the titans of our age around the
essent by showing that the Dionysian isnt in itself bearable, that
its life itself thats incapable of bearing itself as it is and which,
as a consequence, invents more pleasing representations
representations that please us. To use the vocabulary of The
Birth of Tragedy, life transgures itself. One might say it invests the
secondary process. (In this connection: who doesnt see that all
the principles of Viennese psychoanalysis can be found in the text of
the young Nietzsche, including its keyword, primal scene, found there
in the plural: Urszenen des Leidens, which we might render as the
archi-dramas of suffering?) By way of a rather bizarre mythological
apparatus, not well received by Greek scholars, 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 Nietzsches work under the somewhat mediocre
label of active nihilism). Its mainly this hard Nietzsche that
interests me, the philosopher who tried to think without any regard
whatever for the stabilization of his own system of vital illusions.
That particular Nietzsche offers a poignant interpretation of his idea
that the philosopher is the physician of civilization, for, in order
to train in that perilous profession, 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. This is, ultimately,
what I mean by the term Selbstversuch, self-experiment . . .8 What the
simply Nietzschean thinkers of a generation more fted than our own
called la pense du dehors.
In my most recently published book, the second volume of Spheres
(1998b), which is on macrospheres or globes (let us not forget that
the sphere of all physical spheres for more than 2,000 years bore,
in old Europe, the ne name of Cosmos and that the sphere of
all mental or vital spheres was called God), I ventured the paraNietzschean proposition: The Sphere is dead. I attempted to outline
there the programme of a vitalist or supervitalist philosophical
thinking, that is to say, an introduction to the specically modern
dilemma, 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, the individual and collective poetico-hallucinatory
system; the immune cogito). (B) We destroy (or transcend) our mental
immune system when we think (and it is real, operative, external
thought that gains the upper hand there; it thinks, a masterless
thinking). This dual model of thought carries far beyond the traditional

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critique of ideologies, into an area beyond the vrai naf and the faux
naf. In my view, the famous parable of paragraph 125 of The Gay
Science, in which the death of God is proclaimed, invokes precisely
the need to invent a new poetics of immunizing space. And this can
be done only in an exteriority that will forever be radically ahead of
any construction of an interior. How shall we console ourselves
. . . 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, indeed, 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, its necessary to replace divine, heavenly, and private
immunity with a technical, earthly, political immunity. I should point
out that in my view this substitution is the hard core of the process
of modernization.) All this bringing us back to the impossible dialogue
between Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans. I propose the following
scenario: the former warm themselves in life and like (or put up with)
cold in thought; the latter are cold in life and seek to nd some
warmth in thought. 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; the latter apply
themselves to building the new cathedrals of communication, and
they heat those cathedrals using the pleasant illusions maintained
by the neo-humanist, neo-idealist, or neo-transcendalist schools, etc.
This amounts to saying that we dont live on the same isothermal
lines.

319

PS: Precisely. If only to break with the rather too exclusive attention
paid by research, where this author is concerned, to that doctrine
of the will to power that was monstrously twisted by the jackbooted, helmeted readers of the 1930s. Now, the writings of the
young philologist seemed to me haunted by what Ive called his
Dionysian materialism. This provocative expression signaled my
intention to read the Nietzschean corpus as forming part of the
subversive tradition of those marginal thinkers whove managed
to keep themselves apart from the idealist closure. In the 1980s,
this notion of materialism which I employed with a touch of
humor had, in spite of everything, retained a last hint of its initial
aggressiveness. 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 is to say how delighted I am at the
edition of the works of Tarde youre publishing . . . I wasnt unaware,
either, that this materialist terminology was going to create denite

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A: Hence this inevitable and necessary tactical or strategic

dimension in the materialist use you make of the early
Nietzsche . . .

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unease among Heideggerians of a neo-pietist persuasion. Having

proposed an iconoclastic and Left-wing reading of Heideggers
work in Critique of Cynical Reason, I didnt at any cost wish to be
confused with that de-virilized, conservative Heideggerianism . . .
As for Heideggers enormous (not, it must be said, a particularly
Nietzschean quality) and, in certain respects, admirable Nietzsche,
I must stress Ive never accepted his claim to have gone beyond
Nietzsche. On the contrary, it was, in my view, in Nietzsche that one
should look for paths leading somewhere,10 toward an open future for
thought. Dionysian materialism: the formula expresses the need
for a rapprochement between the post-Marxist and post-Nietzschean
currents, a highly implausible encounter in the academic and public
context of the time. Its true that I havent explicitly gone back to
this formula in the fteen years since the publication of Thinker
on Stage. And yet its become virtually second nature to me, and
if I didnt use the expression often, thats because Id 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. I carry the notion on my
head like a miners lamp; without it I couldnt follow the seam that
keeps leading me on. Now, to come back to the question: there is,
for certain, a strong epistemological linkage between concepts like
Dionysian materialism and vitalism, 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. Were arriving
at a point where the most committed idealists are obliged to admit
the productive and ideoplastic nature of the process of conceptual
labor. More specically, where the expression superior materialism
that you propose and use in your writings is concerned, Im very sorry
that the work of Gotthard Gnther isnt known in France. Gnther
is the author of an amazing book and more than the title of it, The
Consciousness of Machines. A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (1963),
deserves to be translated. He also wrote an enormous work in
several volumes aimed at dening the principles of a non-Aristotelian
logic (197680). This is a mass of impregnable ideas, and it
has become a source of constant inspiration for the necessary
reform of the philosophical grammar of old Europe. After the shock
induced by Nietzsche, a shock with multiple effects, that reform
is continuing, of course, in the works of contemporary thinkers:
Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Luhmann . . . But in Gnthers work the
concept of a formless matter embodies, in my view, all thats been
thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of things to
mind. It tests out a trivalent or multivalent logic thats so potent
it could rid us of the impotent, brutal binarism of the mind/thing,
subject/object, idea/matter type . . .
A: Its easier now to see how you can be regarded as the most
French of the German philosophers . . . Whether its to deplore

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321

PS: It seems to me that in transposing the opposition Ive just

outlined between thinking in the cold and the warming function of
ideas to the level of the geopolitics of ideas, one sees immediately why Im so French. Actually, it isnt 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. I conne myself merely to naming Lvi-Strauss,
Foucault, and Deleuze. This is the crystal sky above discourse,
above the order of discourse of the human sciences at this close
of the twentieth century. And its no accident if reading Nietzsche
was a turning point for most of them. As for me, 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. More precisely, it was the encounter with
Foucault in Les mots et les choses that catapulted me into a space
of reection that went beyond my original philosophical training,
steeped as it was in young-Hegelian and Marxist thinking, particularly
in its Adornian version. I was immediately dazzled by the aura of
serenity and rigor that emanated from Foucaults work, yet I felt an
indescribable sense of nausea reading it. I realize today that my
distress was a reex, or rather an alarm signal indicating to me
that Id been pulled irreversibly into a decisively non-Hegelian, nonKantian mode of thought. I was taking my rst steps in a mental
space where the logic of reconciliation through a nal synthesis
no longer operated. For anyone raised in the Hegelian faith, in the
Principle of Hope, in the comfort of teleological thought and the
necessity of the categorical imperative, in the happy-endism of
the philosophy of history, in the as-if-messianism of Benjamin and
Adorno, and in the certainty that the great refuser is morally superior
to the collaborators with the data of experience (which was, in fact,
the spiritual source of the Frankfurt School in its rst incarnation),
reading Foucault was a bit like having your heart torn out by an Aztec
priest with a tip of obsidian. If I had to characterize the Foucault
of that period of my intellectual history, Id say that he seemed to
me like someone who no longer philosophized with a hammer, but
with a blade of obsidian. For obsidian has its reasons which reason
knows nothing of.12

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your dependence on whats been called neo-structuralist thought

(Manfred Frank) and la pense 68 (Ferry and Renaut), or to include
you afrmatively in that movement of biopolitical/biophilosophical
thought that has its anchorage points in Deleuze and Foucault. What
thoughts do these French positionings of your work inspire in you?
What are your relations with that darker, nighttime concept of the
political that casts its gaze on the hidden ecology of universal pain,
referred to in your Nietzsche book (1989: 76)? Whats the meaning
of this appeal to an expressive ecology of a new kind, to which
you give the name Psychonautics?

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As a result of the shock of that treatment and the ashbacks

that made me relive the experience, rifing back through it with
curiosity Im thinking here of my trip to India I moved right away
from the archipelago of dialectics, of phenomenology, of Frankfurt
politico/neo-Messianic thought and entered a quite other space
that I now recognize as being identical to the eld of conceptual
creation opened up by Nietzsche. It may perhaps be useful to remind
the reader that, if this kind of thought coexists necessarily with a
practice of writing, that practice has nothing whatever to do with
the caricaturally simplistic ideas of those who doggedly persist in
believing that philosophy is rst and foremost a matter of content,
the rest being a mere rhetorical dressing-up of that same content. I
think, quite to the contrary, that resolutely modern philosophy invests
the extinction of the metaphysical distinction between form and
content as one of its constitutive aspects. This is why its highly
probable that a philosophy [une pense] that doesnt exist in its
writing wont count as a philosophy [une pense]. To anyone wishing
to test out this proposition, I can recommend the Wittgensteinian
corpus, since that master of analytic thinking, who never knew
the pleasure of the text as ow of sentences (he was incapable of
chatting), only ever produced logical crystals, in the sense that the
heights of clarity he achieved are above all heights of formulation.
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, with an artist of the concept
who might be hailed as the inventor of minimal art in philosophy.
For my part, and insofar as an author can speak of his intentions,
if I had to characterize my philosophical work, Id say its positioned
and moves in an oscillation between the incredibly soft and
the absolutely hard. The reader of Spheres I (1998a) nds herself
grappling with an author-psychonaut undertaking a descent into the
symbiotic hell, into the womb of the Great Mother. That reading may
reveal itself to be of a pitiless gentleness. By contrast, in volumes
II and III, one traverses passages of cosmic coldness: its the visit
to the world of human beings by a cosmonautical, extraterrestrial
intelligence. This visitor from Outside describes the mental
machinations of traditional and modern societies with a perfectly
cold eye, for he isnt afraid to take the metaphysical constructions
of security, in which human beings have installed themselves, for
what they are. Between the very gentle and the very hard is played
out what Ive termed the hidden ecology of universal pain. I like
to think that in a hundred years time therell be an author capable
of writing the book we might be said to need today on a general
ecology of suffering, technologies, and illusions.
So far as Deleuzes work is concerned, which isnt far removed
from a similar project, I realize that at the time I quite simply missed
the encounter with it. Its only in recent times that Ive begun to read

LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

him in a more coherent way. Although friends pointed out to me

almost twenty years ago a certain kinship between his approach and
my intentions, I wasnt able to achieve the resonance for myself. Its
different today. I began reading A Thousand Plateaux and Critique et
clinique, as well as Spinoza, philosophie pratique, with tremendous
pleasure, and sometimes feeling I learned more in an hours reading
than in a year of ordinary research. Which is to say how much the
encounter is useful to me for a better understanding of what Im
looking for philosophically without ever being sure of having found
it . . . The trace of Deleuze will be perceptible in the third volume of
the Spheres project, which is called Schume [Foams]. Youll see
how I try to combine the biophilosophical propositions of the French
writers with my ideas on general morpho-immunology (or spherology).
The theme of the hidden ecology of universal pain will be further
developed as a result.

323

PS: A last word, then . . . on what was at stake there in philosophical terms: from the standpoint Ive termed anthropotechnical. An
expression, I may remark in passing, that whipped up a storm among
the German square-heads (the expression belongs to a broader
eld of concepts in which its antonym theotechnic also gures,
but one should also add hippotechnic, caninotechnic, felinotechnic,
rhodotechnic, narcotechnic, etc. to reestablish the complete lexicon
of an analysis of the hominization-domestication-biopower complex).
Most readers in Germany, France, and elsewhere didnt 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. Yes, that lecture for we are talking about a lecture here
doesnt speak about biotechnology, genetics, bioethics, etc., and,
if it ventures on to that terrain, it does so allusively, in the manner
of a marginal note (no wonder, then, that some commentators can
claim to be unsatised!). What interested me was the clearing
Heidegger speaks of. My reections were on that superphenomenal
phenomenon that projects us into the openness where everything
shows itself: the place from which the world is only world. Whos
afraid of the clearing? As I conceive it, its the gap of an opening
or a distance between human intelligence and the environment
its the site of the human ekstasis that brings it about that we are
in-the-world.
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, at fresh cost to ourselves, to nd a way to a philosophical
and historical anthropology that measures up to our contemporary
knowledge. (Ive just published a short text in Germany on the natural
history of the principle of distance as a relation of human beings

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A: Do you want to say something more about the pretext-lecture

of Elmau?

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to nature in a recent number of the magazine Geo ([September

1998]). Which may shock Heideggerians by my desire to work for the
birth of a philosophical anthropology of a new type: these remarks
are, in fact, an integral part of a reection on the foundations of a
biocultural discourse of the clearing. The theory of neoteny13 has
to do with this reection in the Elmau lecture.) So Ive attempted
to render Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose
benevolence is anything but ironic. For Nietzsche and Plato have
invited themselves to the symposium to comment on the ideas
of Heidegger, to put forward their opinions on the drama played out
in the clearing. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How
human beings produce themselves. And suddenly everyone wants to
be invited, everyone dramatically wants to be part of the debate,
to take part in it.
When I reread the mountain of articles prompted by the lecture,
I noticed that the typical sentence was of the negative order of
the acknowledgement of fact: what I was saying wasnt new; my
remarks were so lacking in originality that it wasnt at all clear why
anyone should waste their time on my text. 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. We want a knowledge thats independent independent of any
thought, and even more so of any disturbing thought. We shall turn,
then, to the experts, for the expert is precisely the person who no
longer needs to think: he has already thought. The whole secret of his
profession consists in having us share in his postreexive serenity.
As guardian of collective nonthought, his profession is a very liberal
one. Hence this concert of experts afrming in unison: Sloterdijk
has perhaps sparked a debate, but to conduct that debate properly
we must begin by excluding this provocateur who has said nothing
new except perhaps . . . but no, and leave us in peace!
One of the most interesting versions of this clich was provided by
Henri Atlan on the occasion of an interview he gave to Le Monde des
dbats (Atlan 1999). Strange for a declared Spinozist . . . Disinclined
to waste his precious time with the anacoluthons of my prose (it
must be remembered that the expert is a salaried individual),
his media grammatology was apparently to be satised with an
antithesis as crude as it was symptomatic: where the problems
posed by the biotechnologies were concerned, one could speak
either as a philosopher (and if thats the case, you cant say much
thats particularly relevant, given that its 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, by denition,
the expert has mastery of knowledge: in this case, what it costs
to clone a human being). In short, Monsieur Atlan nds it difcult
to admit there might exist a discourse, that is to say, in principle a
movement of thought, which proposes, philosophically and rigorously,
to question technology as a form of production of self-evident facts,

LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

the order of experts as controllers of knowledge, and the claim of

certain experts (the most eminent) to control both their discipline
and its philosophical premisses . . .
The fact remains that Henri Atlans contribution is precious on
at least one point and, in my view, not the least important. 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,
abject euthanasian eugenics that is part of our history is one
thing, and the challenge of the biotechnologies and biopolitics of
the future is another. Whether many people like it or not, it is this
radical difference that provides us with food for thought.
Translated by Chris Turner

325

1. This interview was conducted by ric Alliez by e-mail and completed in January 2000. It was rst published in Multitudes 1
(2000). Alliez is here making an allusion to Bergsons Les
Donnes immdiates de la conscience, translated into English
as Time and Free Will (1996).
2. Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1999. German: Selbstversuch (1996).
3. Translated by Michael Eldred and published in 1988 as Critique
of Cynical Reason.
4. Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel and published in 1989 as
Thinker on Stage, subtitled Nietzsches Materialism.
5. This is a paraphrase. The passage referred to in Ecce Homo
reads in translation as follows: The unmasking of Christian
morality is an event without equal, a real catastrophe. He who
exposes it is a force majeure, a destiny he breaks the history
of mankind into two parts. One lives before him, one lives after
him (1979: 133).
6. The Will to Power, section 853.
7. Fiat veritas, pereat vita. This is quoted in section IV of the
Foreword to Nietzsches On the Use and Abuse of History for
Life (1873).
8. Selbstversuch (1996) is the original title of Lessai dintoxication
volontaire.
9. Wie trsten wir uns, die Mrder aller Mrder? (Nietzsche
1959: 167).
10. An allusion to Chemins qui mnent nulle part, the title of the
French translation of Heideggers Holzwege.
11. These two terms in English in original.
12. An allusion to Pascals Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison
ne connat point.
13. A zoological term referring to the capacity of certain species to
procreate in a state of biological immaturity. In his book, Das
Problem der Menschwerdung (Jena, 1926), the anthropologist
Ludwig Bolk developed the hypothesis that human morphology

CULTURAL POLITICS

NOTES

RIC ALLIEZ

reects foetal states that have become permanent. This theory

was integrated into the work of the last of the masters of
German sociology and historical anthropology, Dieter Claessens
(see Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte, Frankfurt a.M., 1980).
In France, Dany-Robert Dufour has led the way in stressing
the importance of the concept of neoteny (see Lettre sur la
nature humaine lusage des survivants, Calmann-Levy, 1999).
[Information communicated by P. Sloterdijk.]

326

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REFERENCES
Atlan, Henri. 1999. La biologie de demain nest pas leugnisme
nazi. Le Monde des dbats, November.
Bergson, Henri. 1996. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate
Data of Consciousness. Whitesh, MO: Kessinger Publishing
Co.
Gnther, Gotthard. 1963. Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. BadenBaden/Krefeld: Agis-Verlag.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Un nouveau Nietzsche. Le Monde des dbats,
November.
Lvy, Pierre. 1994. LIntelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie
du cyberespace. Paris: La Dcouverte.
Nietzsche, F. 1979. Ecce Homo. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
1873[1980]. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Trans.
with an introduction by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company Inc.
1959. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. Munich: Goldmann.
Schwab, R. 1984. The Oriental Renaissance: Europes Rediscovery
of India and the East, 16801880. Trans. G. Patterson-Black and
V. Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1983. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
1986. Der Denker auf der Bhne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred.
London: Verso.
1989. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsches Materialism. Trans. Jamie
Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
1996. Selbstversuch: Selbstversuch. Ein Gesprch mit Carlos
Oliveira. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.
1998a. Sphren I. Blasen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1998b. Sphren II. Globen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
1998c. Das Phnomen Adam. Geo, vol. 9: 436.
1999a. Regeln fr den Menschenpark. Ein Antwortschreiben
zu Heideggers Brief ber den Humanismus. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
1999b. Du centrisme mou au risque de penser. Le Monde
des dbats, November.

PETER SLOTERDIJK (1947) STUDIED

PHILOSOPHY, GERMANIC STUDIES,
AND HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF MUNICH. HE RECEIVED HIS PHD
FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG
ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WEIMAR
REPUBLIC IN 1975. IN 1980 HE VISITED
BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH IN
POONA, INDIA. IN 1983 HIS BESTSELLING CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL
REASON APPEARED, A BOOK HE NOW
RENOUNCES FOR ITS ROMANTICISM
OF RESISTANCE BUT WHICH ALREADY
INVOLVES MANY OF THE THEMES THAT
APPEAR IN HIS RECENT WORKS, SUCH AS
THE SPHREN-TRILOGY (1998, 1999, 2004).
OTHER KEY PUBLICATIONS ARE THINKER
ON STAGE (1986), EUROTAOISMUS (1989),
IM SELBEN BOOT (1994), NICHT GERETTET
(2001), AND IM WELTINNENRAUM DES
KAPITALS (2005). 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. HIS FAME PEAKED DURING
THE MEDIA SCANDAL THAT FOLLOWED
HIS LECTURE ON HUMANISM AND
BIOPOLITICS IN THE AGE OF GENETIC
ENGINEERING CALLED REGELN FR
DEN MENSCHENPARK (1999). SINCE 2002
HE HAS BEEN THE HOST, TOGETHER
WITH GERMAN PHILOSOPHER RDIGER
SAFRANSKI, OF THE MONTHLY
PHILOSOPHICAL TALK SHOW DAS
PHILOSOPHISCHE QUARTETT ON
GERMAN TELEVISION. FOR A FULL
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HIS PUBLICATIONS
AND OTHER INFORMATION, SEE
HTTP://WWW.PETERSLOTERDIJK.NET/.

REPRINTS AVAILABLE
DIRECTLY FROM THE
PUBLISHERS.

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, Emmanuel
Levinas Chair, Strasbourg,
March 4, 2005
PETER SLOTERDIJK
ABSTRACT Peter Sloterdijk rst
presented the following text as his
inaugural lecture for the Chaire Emmanuel
Levinas, March 4, 2005 at the University
of Strasbourg. To a certain extent, it
bears homage to that great thinker of the
complex Other. However, other than taking
a political stance, Sloterdijk prefers the
perspective of a curator who is concerned
about conserving the past centurys critical
impulse, which todays consumerism and
the collapse of Left-wing traditions tend
to render ghostly. In the rst two parts of
his essay, Sloterdijk argues that if in

CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226889

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 327356

327

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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. The subject of this extremist reason
is dened by its vassalage, apostolate, and mediality in relation to a
commanding and disinhibiting reality. Its forerunners are champions
of good crime such as Marquis de Sade and the young Hegelians;
its exemplary twentieth-century cases are Lenin and Mao. Alain
Badiou is right to note that the memory of their critical projects
is rapidly giving way to the uncontested status of todays global
neoliberalist ideology. Yet, Sloterdijk argues, this is not necessarily
a bad thing, not even for critical thought. In the third and fourth
parts of his essay, his explicit aim is to translate Badious thesis
that the twentieth century was marked by a passion for the real
into the context of his own project of spherology. The twentieth
century consists primarily of the activation of the real in a passion
for technological and economic antigravitation. 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. Economically, the ending of scarcity
(Entknappung) and, 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. 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, a post-Marxist theory of enrichment,
a new interpretation of dreams, and a general economy of energy
resources based on excess and dissipation.

328

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KEYWORDS: passion for the real, extremism, excess, gravity,

anthropology.

1. 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. If we take an image of this kind as our base,
we might see the positive contents and characteristics of cultures
as the reefs that, thanks to the sedimenting work of repetition,
tradition, and archiving, stand out from the sea of forgetfulness.
If the currents change within that sea, then great segments of the
protruding blocks may be engulfed, and objects of tradition that we
regarded until recently as topical and current may sink below the
water line.

329

In the following thoughts, I start out from the assumption or,

more exactly, the observation, that in present-day culture, so far as
the Western hemisphere is concerned, something like a reversal
of the currents has in fact occurred and, as a result, relations of
memory with the recent past have changed within a matter of a very
few years. I am alluding here, on the one hand, to the synergies
between victorious consumerism and the image-worlds of the high
life, together with the superstructures of neoliberal doctrine built
upon these, the consequence of which is to put paid to the greater
part of our dark, pathos-laden memories; on the other hand, a
collapse of Left-wing traditions may with good reason be diagnosed,
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, in large part, already
disappeared. When I speak of fear here, I should like the term to
be understood in the rst instance merely as the symptom of a
concern for conservation, not as an adherence to any particular
political standpoint.
You may judge how justied these thoughts may be from a
remark by Alain Badiou, one of the last keepers of the treasure
of lost radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-rst century. In
the introduction to his remarkable book Le Sicle, which bears the
publication date 2005 and plainly does not speak of the century
to come but of the one just past, that author felt obliged to cite a
sentence by Natacha Michel that runs: Le XXe sicle a eu lieu.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. With all its wars, struggles, and
atrocities, 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. If any of its great themes were to continue
to be of signicance to later ages, that would only be because it
could serve for a long time yet as a treasure trove of materials for
entertainment lms in tragic settings. It is, to some extent, behind
the backs of the present generations that the twentieth century has
turned ghostly, 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 fall of the Berlin Wall, the
controlled descent of the Mir space station, the sequencing of the
human genome, the introduction of the euro, the attack on the World
Trade Center, or any other occurrence in recent history.
The unfathomably banal proposition, the twentieth century took
place can best be appreciated by relating it to Hegels dictum that
the life of the mind is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it
and maintains itself in it (Hegel 1977: 19). Raised to this level, the
proposition gives rise immediately to an excessive logical and human

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330

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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, in which
the basic affect of philosophy changes from astonishment to horror.
Admittedly, ancient astonishment was never wholly free from dark
affects, and it must already have been something of a strain for the
ancients to hold to the ontological dogma that all that is, is good;
only in tragic excesses could an utterance such as Philoctetuss I
found the Gods evil impinge upon the general commandment to be
positive. But only in the most recent modernity more precisely, in the
philosophical witches kitchen of the interwar years, and completely
only after 1945 could the thesis be explicitly expressed that Being
itself was in no sense the Good and, indeed, that the Good must
be wrested from Being, insofar as something asserted itself which,
from the outset, would be conceived as other-than-Being, to refer
to Emmanuel Levinass post-ontological or meta-ontological gure
of thought [Denkgur], the claims of which extend further than we
can elucidate here, and the logical implications of which possibly
reach beyond the discursive means of contemporary philosophy. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, it required Hegels sublime
cool-headedness to conceive a spirit that possessed the virtue, in
its learning processes, to look the sun and death impassibly in the
face. The thinking of the rst years of the twenty-rst century has
lost the strength for such lofty indifference [Indifferenz]. We nd
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 xment.
It is against the background of these remarks that the question
in the title of this lecture is to be elucidated. When we say, above,
What happened in the twentieth century? we do not expect an
answer in the form of a historical report. We know from the outset
that no enumeration of transformations for good or ill can provide
sufcient information as to what gave the twentieth century its
dramatic and evolutionary substance. The difculties of doing justice
to this period do not lie only in the fact that the century presents
itself retrospectively as a Medusan, extremist one particularly in
the unleashings of violence of its rst half. 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 truth, even more an age of complexities. Seen from the
standpoint of the present, that denition is apparently self-evident
and would remain the emptiest of all possible commentaries on this
object if it were not given a specically 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. The
formula, the reduction of complexity, by which, since Luhmann,
one aspect of all system functioning has been characterized, has
a quite particular meaning for the twentieth century. It is time now

331

nally to realize that all the Medusan extremisms of that time had
the character of fundamentalisms of simplication to which the
fundamentalism of activism and of the myth of renewal through
revolution also belong that bitter, proud attitude of the radical
break with the preexistent world, which has, admittedly, generally
lost its appeal among Europeans, and yet still has local effects in
our present age, particularly in the maquis of the most recent Left
radicalism. Wherever, in the course of the twentieth century, we
came upon manifestations of the extreme, 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, extremely
reductionist ideas of which had been formed in every camp.
Because a quasi-formal gigantomachia had lodged itself in
the heart of the twentieth century, as a duel between the logics
of complexity and of polemical simplication, it will come as no
surprise that this age now appears in retrospect as a century of
confusions, 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, Verkappte Religionen: Kritik des kollektiven Wahns 2
[Disguised Religions: Critique of Collective Madness], without ever
deecting any of the adherents of the reductionist-extremist religions
from their faiths).
That alleged Age of Extremes which, in reality above all on
account of its extremisms was an age of confusions, has never
fallen silent about itself. As an age of total speech [Gerede], it has
already said everything that is to be said about itself everything
and its opposite and this observation too was made long ago, as
for example can be deduced from Karl Jasperss 1931 book, The
Spiritual Situation of the Age, where similar statements are to be found
throughout. What the author argues there on the phenomenon of the
frontless war resurfaced half a century later among disappointed
Leftists, or Leftists suffering from a belated complexity that went
by the name of New Opacity, except that now the source was no
longer named or known. It would for this reason be a difcult, if
not indeed hopeless, task and would furthermore condemn us to a
methodologically false approach, 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. In most cases, we would merely be
confronted again with the hyperboles which saw the activists and
prophets through in their hand-to-hand combat with events. This
applies even to that darkest of all hyperboles, formulated from the
standpoint of the exemplary victims of the centurys madness, the
murdered Jews of Europe: the denition of the twentieth century
as the age of that great collapse of civilization symbolized in such

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

names as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Even were one empirically to bring

to light the whole truth about the Shoah and entirely penetrate the
sources of the annihilation conceptually, one would still presumably
have understood only a small segment of the overall drama of the
twentieth century. We have really gained little with Eric Hobsbawms
formula, The Age of Extremes, even if we add that this short
twentieth century runs from 1917 to 1990, which would make
it coextensive with the history of the Soviet experiment. Its core
process, argues Hobsbawm, consisted wholly and solely in the titanic
battle between liberalism and egalitarianism, in which the latter
presented itself as a two-headed fascist and communist monster.
Hobsbawms theses seem to echo another great interpretation of
the twentieth century (proposed by Ernst Nolte and modied by
Dan Diner), according to which it was shaped by its central conict,
the global civil war. And, indeed, 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, but the silent
overturning of all traditions, triggered by the break with agrarian
culture and the triumphal march of urbanization. This point does,
however, cast light on the present situation in which, in a highly
industrialized country like Germany, only 2 percent of the population
still live from agriculture, while even in an imaginarily agro-centric
nation like France, the corresponding gures no longer exceed an
order of magnitude of 56 percent.
If we look back over the other all-embracing interpretations
that have been proposed for the twentieth century, either during
the period or retrospectively, the awkward situation remains that,
in each case, individual events, themes, or features have been
elevated into a picture of the age or a dominant symptom. None of
our contemporaries in this year 2005 can comfortably put herself
back into the period around 1950, when the expression the atomic
age was uttered with a powerful historical-philosophical quavering
of the voice, in the conviction which then prevailed that we were, at
last, close to grasping the essence of the period. At that time the
atom and its splitting were spoken of with the same troubled piety,
with the same ontological lascivity even, with which the genome
and genetic engineering began to be spoken of around the year
2000. Arnold Gehlens proposal, also advanced around the middle
of the century, that the present age be understood as the era of
crystallization is remembered today by just a few experts, 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, pacied nal forms. Even a bold title like
the sexual revolution has lost much of its color today (or, more
exactly, it has fallen prey to the culture of memory, as one could
see in the most recent media campaigns on the ftieth anniversary
of the Kinsey Report) and a similar fate can be predicted for the

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY?

currently topical slogan, the Grey Revolution. So far as the era of

decolonization is concerned, it is remembered only by a few Third
World experts. For the historians among the political scientists,
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). Europeans, by contrast, are
inclined to tie their twentieth century to the sequence that runs from
August 1914 to May 1, 2004, that is to say to the complete cycle
of the rending and restoration of European integrity. This view may
be said to have a certain dramaturgical plausibility in its favor; one
consequence, though, was that Europeans looked back, all things
considered, over a lost century, without being able to be entirely
certain that, after this passage through self-destruction, they had
found their way to a more adequate conception of themselves and
their role in the world.
To make one further comment, in conclusion, on what is called
globalization, which had, at the end of the twentieth century, monopolized all discourse on the contemporary age, let us simply say
here that the expression, insofar as it is used in a meaningful way,
is synonymous with the condensation of the world in a great system
of articiality that is distancing itself increasingly quickly from the
problems of the twentieth century, which already seem to us like
entirely phantom concerns. We shall have an opportunity here to test
the supposition that the current forgetting of the twentieth century
has in fact fullled the innermost intentions of that century itself.

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, nor with those of the history of discourse or ideas.
The essence of the period does not reveal itself unadorned in a single
event or trend; nor can it be condensed in an absolutely privileged
text (or selection of great texts), however eminent the philosophical
and poetic articulations the century produced. Retrospectively, one
has, rather, the sense that in almost all the historical self-expressions
of the time a certain bias is expressed. One senses everywhere the
hypnotizing of the actors by the programmes, the dazzling of the
contemporary witnesses by the dramas. We must grant, then, that
Alain Badiou is right when he argues, in the above-mentioned Le
Sicle, that the passion of the twentieth century is not to be found
in ideologies, messianisms, or phantasms: the predominant motif
of the twentieth century was rather, in his view, that terrible passion
du rel that expressed itself in the action of the protagonists as the
will to activate the true directly in the here and now.
I am convinced that this view of the complex of the twentieth
century in fact affords fruitful access to it. Not only is this to defend

CULTURAL POLITICS

2. THE APOCALYPSE OF THE REAL: ON THE LOGIC OF

EXTREMISM

334

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

the dignity of philosophy, which persists in the belief that in the tumult
of battles there is still also a struggle over the truth of concepts,
but it is also to afrm the idea that the real is only ever given to
us through the lter of changeable formulations and that the mode
of our purchase on reality fuses into a single amalgam with that
reality. What we have here is, ultimately, 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. This
thesis is reected in Nietzsches dictum on Greek tragedy that it is
the charm of these battles that whoever sees them must himself
also ght. In the propositions of the classics is expressed, as in
Badious synthesis, the abyssal insight, that between understanding
and ghting there is a convergence that is not easily avoidable and
may even be inevitable. According to Plato, to think is necessarily
to take sides in the logical civil war in which truth goes into battle
against opinion. According to Nietzsche, to think even means to
comprehend that the thinker herself is the eld of battle on which
the parties to the primal conict between energies and forms clash.
In Badious efforts to rescue radicalism, too, the ideal of apathic
theory is rejected using contemporary means, by showing how,
behind the currently prevalent false appearances of liberal pacism,
a thoroughly polemical praxis is at work.
In what follows I should like to resituate the thesis that the twentieth
century was marked by the passion du rel in a context marked by
my own investigations into the emergence of lightweight elements,
atmospheric facts, and the immune system investigations that have
found concrete expression mainly in the Sphren [Spheres] trilogy
and in the recently published Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Zu
einer philosophischen Theorie der Globalisierung (2005). 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
redenition of the meaning of reality. In contrast, however, to the
polemical ontologies that dominated the discourse of the twentieth
century, I attempt to show that the main event of this time consisted
in Western civilizations escape from the dogmatism of gravity. The
proposition that the passion du rel was the main concern of the
twentieth century may also be regarded as entirely appropriate. But
only the supplementary conclusion that the activation of the real
now also manifests itself in a passion for antigravitation enables
us to understand, on its own terms, the meaning and course of
the battles over the real. The drama of the century reveals itself
adequately only if we interpret the most visible battles, both physical
and discursive, as forms of expression of something generally dying
out. I am speaking of the death throes of the belief in gravity, which,
since the nineteenth century, has manifested itself in ever-renewed
battles, reactions, and fundamentalisms.

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The spherological approach is based on a hermeneutics of

antigravitational or unburdened, exonerated3 existence that has both
a destructive and a constructive dimension to it. While, from the
constructive perspective, the discovery of atmospheric facts and of
the hidden realities of the immune system is discussed, the general
theory of antigravitation and exoneration focuses, in its destructive
thrust, on the ideological productions which, since the days of the
French Revolution, have riveted human beings to the ontological
hardships of modernity: the hardships of lack, want, scarcity of
resources, violence, and crime. At the heart of all these theories,
which for the most part present themselves as anthropologies,
economics, and theories of barren nature, statements on reality
(alias nature or history) are advanced, which, in the process, limit
the eld of human freedom to the hesitant gesture of subordination
to the law of the real. Wherever the new realisms nd their voice,
human beings are declared the vassals and vehicles of overpowering
forces of reality, whether these are styled in naturalistic, voluntaristic,
economistic, vitalistic, drive-theoretical, or genetic idioms.
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. This is precisely
what I wanted to capture when I gave this lecture the thematic
subtitle Critique of Extremist Reason. I mean to devote this cycle
of presentations, talks, and readings to a logical constellation, the
investigation of which can, I hope, be seen as a homage to the man
after whom this Strasbourg chair is named: Emmanuel Levinas.
I assume, moreover, that that logical constellation lends itself
particularly to the verication of Hegels saying that philosophy is its
times grasped in thought. I have never concealed my view that Hegel
can be said to be right on this only in an ideal-typical perspective,
but misses the mark entirely from an empirical standpoint, since
philosophy, as we have known it for almost 200 years in public and
academic life, is, for the most part, simply the most thoroughly
organized ight out of time. Only the fact that each period ees
from itself in a different way produces an involuntary contribution
of philosophy to the characterization of each period. The honor of
philosophy as present voice of truth is only ever rescued by the
marginal gures who were once described, not without reason, as
the dark authors of the bourgeoisie.
So far as the emergence of the aforementioned passion du rel
is concerned, I think I can show that it cannot be conned to the
twentieth century. This passion undoubtedly reaches its height in
that period of battling realisms, but the dispositions that made
such battles possible and inevitable go back quite clearly to the
era of the French Revolution. This not only created the archetype of
modern, offensive fundamentalism in the form of Jacobinism and
not only brought into the world the schema of unnished revolution,
which has since retained its force as the matrix of radicalism; it

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also encouraged the activistic and materialistic ontologies that

must be read as the effective textbooks of the modern society
of labor and struggle. For this complete caesura in the history of
mentalities I have elsewhere suggested the somewhat dramatic
term apocalypse of the real,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. No one
has summed up what changed at that point in the economy of
European thought more lucidly than Nietzsche, 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. (Those interested in
an extended version of this communiqu can refer to Karl Lwiths
From Hegel to Nietzsche: Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought
for a masterly and comprehensive account.)
The signicant element of this event lies in the fact that during
the nineteenth century the traditional relations between the esoteric
and the exoteric are reversed. So long as the idealist metaphysic of
old Europe, shaped by theology, held sway, the center of gravity of all
esoterism lay in the discovery, to be kept secret at all costs, of the
fact that neither God nor gods existed and that, as a consequence,
all representations relating to a higher, otherworldly realm [Jenseits]
were pure invention, mere castles in the air erected by fear, weakness,
and human yearning. Until the nineteenth century, atheism, that
highly dangerous wisdom, had to remain hidden as true occultism,
whereas for one and a half millennia metaphysical theology was able
to play the role of public opinion. But then the page was turned:
what had been secret teaching became the exoteric, became public
opinion, while, in a countermove, an alternative esoterics formed
that presented itself as an empirical theology or ethnology of the
otherworldly, to contradict the neo-realist, pragmatic spirit of the
age. We must stress that the concept of the Unconscious could
only begin its career in this neo-esoteric context; that concept, which
became current around 1800, signals the fact that the otherworldly
is near at hand and that the hidden side of nature begins right on
the doorstep of consciousness.
The neo-realist break in nineteenth-century thought nds expression in a ood 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. This literature
presents itself as scientic in tenor; yet, where its performative
form is concerned, it is also prophetic, 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, human labor, class
struggles, the movements of capital, natural selection, and sexual
libido. The advent of the realm of the real is heralded unceasingly,

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and the public is called upon to prepare itself for its coming. It
was these speech acts of modern realism that were foremost in
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessys mind when he characterized the masterthinkers of the nineteenth century Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and
Freud as dysangelists. We may doubt whether this expression
designates the content of the neo-realist messages precisely, since
its spokespersons certainly do not see themselves merely as bearers
of bad news. 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. (To allude at this stage
to the Medusan dynamic of the neo-realist practice of disclosure
[Enthllung], which becomes manifest only later, we shall permit
ourselves the remark that where prophets and apostles of the real
begin to speak, 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.)
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. The new realisms see themselves, each and every one, as
gures in an evolutionary or revolutionary tableau that allots them an
inevitably exterminist function. To some degree, nineteenth-century
evolutionism offers historicized variants of an ontology of an ancient
oriental type based on forces in struggle, an ontology that was never
entirely extinguished even under the dominance of monotheism
and had survived in cryptic, dualistic undercurrents of Western
metaphysics. 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, but as historically antecedent. This
leads to an ontologically asymmetrical conception of the opposing
object as obstacle, whether this is dened as an embodiment
of circumstances, a complex of ideas, or a social group. No one
grasped this more clearly than the young Marx who, in an important
note on the essence of the new active critique, observed that this
sought not to refute its object, but to annihilate it. The exterminism
inseparable from the modus operandi of the polemical radicalisms
of the twentieth century has its source in the evolutionarily inclined
conict ontologies, according to which the truth of the real must itself
be activated against the still existent, but already transcended and
merely provisional, apparent reality. In order for the reign of the real
to come about, an end must be put to the dominance of the unreal,
which has so far been able to retain power thanks to an illusory
concealment and distortion of reality.
These remarks relate particularly to the situation of young-Hegelian
thought, in which the irruption of the real manifested itself on the

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widest front. With it, the triumphal march of the realisms became
a public, political fact, despite all neo-idealist restorations. Out of
this came the moment of critical theory, the productive period of
which runs from 1831 to 1969 (if we take the deaths of Hegel and
Adorno as limiting dates). If we wished to examine the earlier origins
of this current of thought, it would be sufcient initially to go back
to Lenins well-known reference to the Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of the Marxist worldview, where specic reference
is made (alongside English sensualism and German idealism) to
eighteenth-century French materialism. What Lenin did not mention,
or was not aware of, is that the master-thinker of that tendency was
the Marquis de Sade, in whose writings the Advent of the Real is
presented as a future kingdom of crime. De Sade is the occult genius
of modern radicalism because he was the rst to demonstrate how
the activists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would imagine
their marriage with the active principle of reality. For Sade, as for
Spinoza, nature assumes the function of omniactive substance. If
it is the task of modern thought to develop substance as subject,
and if, consequently, nature must become a person [Mensch] to
realize itself fully and achieve its most extreme possibilities, then
human beings must, conversely, also wish to become nature or,
more exactly, must put themselves, as agents of nature, in a medial
relationship to this latter. The nature of the moderns creates its
own apostolates. This turn toward a medial or apostolic naturalism
would perhaps give no further cause for concern had Sade not
dened the essence of nature as that of the absolute criminal.
(The German Romantics in fact developed a quite different variant
of medial naturalism, according to which nature is the healer that
communicates itself through the corresponding media.) However,
because nature as such embodies for him a principle of criminal
indifference and pure arbitrariness in the search for pleasure, a
principle that can be activated as soon as the restraining effect of
religion is eliminated, 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, when he becomes
an apostle of crime, in order to proclaim with every act of his life the
gospel of primal criminality. It is not enough to commit crimes; one
must also actively teach crime and, indeed, as Dolmanc, the hero of
La Philosophie dans le boudoir, explains, do so rst within the context
of secret societies, but then, also, in the context of a republican
constitution. This propheticism of crime is articulated in the rst
naturalistic manifesto of modernity, Franais, encore un effort si vous
voulez tre rpublicains [Frenchmen, One More Effort If You Want To
Become Republicans]. In this extraordinary pamphlet, which must
be read alongside the great texts of the French Revolution as the
Declaration of Human Rights of excessive liberalism, not only is the
emancipation of the criminal initiative proclaimed, but the essence of
reaction in its specically modern sense is dened for the rst time:

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reaction and restoration are now seen at work wherever the powers
of the religious ancien rgime put up obstacles, old and new, to the
free development of the principle of nature that has been released
within individuals. This means quite simply that the natural subject,
who is to be emancipated realistically, 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. The
essence of subjectivity is interpreted here as something that can
be activated only by a specic disinhibition, i.e. by the expulsion of
the inner ancien rgime and its inhibiting agencies. We might argue
that Sade, two generations before Bakunin, was the true discoverer
of the superego, insofar as he succeeded in ventilating the true
identity of the prohibition, namely as repressive priestly rule over
true nature; at the same time, he might be said to be the patriarch
of radicalism, since he formulated the categorical imperative of every
revolt: the abolition of the ancien rgime in the psychopolitical sense.
Since then, every activist has been able to profess this maxim:
you may do what you will insofar as what you will fulls an instinct
[Trieb] of the great criminal that is nature. Realism now no longer
means the humble correspondence of the intellect to an order of
things outside us; it implies the activation of the real in the sense
of a progressive intensication of causes for the production of new
effects. Uncommitted crimes await their perpetrators, in the same
way that as yet unaccomplished revolutions await their activists.
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, as much
as for Hitler and Mao. The realist is the agent, the medium, and the
apostle of a force that, only after having lost its inhibition, achieves
what is termed its free expression. Is it still necessary to say that
with Sade, also, from the aesthetic standpoint, there begins that
modern expressivism in which the real will itself be dened as the
constant passing-over of forces into their expression? The schema of
force and expression can, however, be transposed without difculty
on to what is called history, which summons up its media as much
as does active nature. According to the activists belief, however,
history is not so much a criminal as a surgeon amputating the sick
tissue of the past.
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. To be radical, as neo-realist authors since
Marx assert, means to grasp things at their roots. But the root
and the Sadean paradigm shows this is sought in a dynamic
fundamental domain of the essent, which is constructed from the
bottom up. Because the roots are to be conceived as basic forces,
becoming radical means uniting with the forces situated at the base
of situations to drive them toward new, freer, more uninhibited forms
of expression, whether these manifest themselves as crimes, revolts,

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revolutions, works of art, or acts of free or excessive love. The vegetal

metaphor of roots connects, moreover, with no complications worthy
of mention, with the architectonic metaphor of foundation or base.
Just as true radicalism sets in train new expressive activity from the
roots up, so true fundamentalism seeks to overturn or restore the
base in order to change things in the superstructure. 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. Both are based on the
assumption that what is below has a greater degree of reality than
what is above. Inasmuch as they are indebted to the metaphysics
of gravitation, both are derivatives of one and the same ontology, according to which substantial, heavy, weighty things press downward,
so as to form the oor on which all the rest must be supported.
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, a conception that is admittedly understandable, but nonetheless
to be rejected. If, in his time, Marx argued that all criticism begins
with the critique of religion, that argument implied that it is sufcient
to identify religion as a superstructural phenomenon to be able to
situate it as lying on a base of relations of production. The critical
operation implies the destruction of the object by referring it back to
the deeper ground and dissolving it in the real. Only in rare moments
does Marx deviate from this reductive practice and suggest the
possibility of a rescuing critique, when he describes religion as the
heart of a heartless world. Such thinking does not in fact proceed
critically but dogmatically, for what purports to be criticism is merely
the assertion of propositions from an inadequate ontology of the
basal. In reality, 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.
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 reections that in the course
of the most recent social evolution, upward-striving forces have
taken on considerable scope and thrust extending far beyond the
Ascensions of religious illusion. 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. To this end, I
take up Nietzsches formula on the transvaluation of all values, to
transpose it away from the conict 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

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY?

the civilization of mass comfort based on fossil fuels. 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. We must
prepare ourselves for an inversion of radicalism for a turn toward
the airy, the rootless, and the atmospheric. Whoever wishes to get
down to the deepest foundations today must ascend into the air. So
far as the light, quasi-immaterial objects are concerned, we shall have
to show that, despite their counterpoising to any ground, they are
more elementary than the ctions of gravity by which the twentieth
centurys passions du rel were bewitched. Since these reections
require support from a general theory of antigravitation, I shall in
what follows present the outlines of an interpretation of technology
as agency of exoneration [Entlastung]. I shall, subsequently, attempt
to supplement the anthropological theory of exoneration with a postMarxist theory of enrichment.

341

If one wanted to learn more of the general premisses of exoneration

in the age of its technical intensication, the best place to look would
be among the early French socialists, namely Saint-Simon and his
school, in whose journalism not for nothing was their newspaper
named Le Globe the rst features of an explicit policy of pampering
[Verwhnung]7 from a species-theoretical standpoint are to be found.
The formula, the era of exoneration, which is still current in theory
and practice today, goes back to Saint-Simonianism.8 According to
that formula, with the advent of large-scale industry in the eighteenth
century, the hour had come to end the exploitation of man by man
and to introduce, rather, the methodical exploitation of the earth
by human beings. In the given context the epochal content of this
turn can be appreciated: with it, the human race, represented by
its vanguard, the various strata of industriels, was identied as the
beneciary of a comprehensive movement of exoneration or, in the
terminology of the day, as the subject of an emancipation, whose goal
was set out in the age-old, evangelical expression of the resurrection
of the esh within ones time on earth.
Such a thing could be conceived on only one condition: that the
typical distribution of the burden in agro-imperial class societies, the
exoneration and liberation of the ruling few by the exploitation of the
serving many, had to be revisable on the basis of an exoneration
of all classes by a new general servant, the earth, considered as a
resource brought under control by large-scale technology. 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 Gehlens efforts developed a sufciently abstract concept
of exoneration.9 Since this concept has been available to cultural
studies, it has been possible to formulate some general comments

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on the trends within high-technological social complexes that have

somewhat more purchase systemically and psychologically than
the palpably nave nineteenth-century theses on emancipation and
progress. If we link the phenomenon and concept of exoneration
back to Saint-Simonian exploitation, 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].
Against this background, 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). This proposition
is not only one dimension more general than Marx and Engelss
dogma that all history is the history of class struggles; 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; 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) conicts. Moreover, in spite of its
high level of abstraction, it involves no deformation of the data that
have come down to us from history. There was such a deformation
in the polemical and didactic Communist Manifesto, which passed
over in silence the reality of class compromises, in order normatively
to generalize the comparatively rare phenomenon of open class
struggles, at the risk of ascribing exemplary signicance for the
redistributive battles of wage-earners to the slave and peasant uprisings of past history, with their desperate, aconceptual, and often
vandalistic tendencies.
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, as we know today, since what is
involved here is, in no sense, a process of overthrow in which
above and below change places, but the explicit recognition of
product manufacture through mechanical substitution for human
movements. The key to the transition from human labor to machine
labor (and to new humanmachine cooperation) lies in the coupling
of power systems with execution systems. In the age of physical
labor, such couplings remained latent, insofar as the worker himself,
as biological energy-converter, formed a unity of power and execution
systems. However, after a seriously signicant innovative leap in
mechanical power systems had taken place, they could pass to the
stage of explicit elaboration.
This is the beginning of the epic of engines: with their construction,
a new generation of heroic agents bestrides the stage of civilization,
and as a result of their emergence, the rules of the energy game
for traditional cultures change radically. Since engines have been
among us, even physical and philosophical concepts like power,

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energy, expression, action, and freedom have assumed radically new

meanings. Although we are normally concerned with domesticated
forces here, the mythology of the bourgeoisie has never totally lost
sight of their unfettered, potentially catastrophic side, alluding to
this by drawing parallels with the pre-Olympian race of violent titanic
deities. Hence the deep fascination exerted by exploding machines
and, indeed, explosions in general.
Since the neo-Titans made their appearance in our modern
lifeworlds, the nations have transformed themselves into hostcountries for power machines. An engine is, to a certain extent, a
headless energy-subject brought into existence out of interest in the
use of its power. It has, however, nothing of the actor about it, being
unencumbered with thoughts or explanations and possessing only
the qualities associated with propulsion. As decapitated subject,
the engine does not move from theory to praxis, but from standstill
to operation. What in human subjects who move into action has to
be performed by disinhibition, is performed in engines by the starter
mechanism. Engines are perfect slaves, untroubled by any thought
of human rights, even when they are made to operate night and day.
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.
In order to integrate engines systematically as cultural agents,
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. Hence, in the epic of the engines, the most
dramatic sections are the cantos on energy. One may go so far as to
ask whether the formulation of the abstract, homogeneous concept
of energy, of energy sans phrase, by modern physics is not merely
the scientic reection of the normalization principle by which the
nonspecic coupling between food and organism has been replaced
by the precise relationship between fuel and motorized machine.
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.
The grand narrative of exoneration among the moderns begins,
as is well-known, with the story of the massive invasion of the rst
generation of mechanical slaves which, from the eighteenth century
onward, became naturalized in the emerging industrial landscapes of
North West Europe under the name of steam engines. These new
agents were particularly evocative of mythological associations, as
the operating principle of these machines, the expansive pressure of
locked-in water vapor, was redolent of the Titans of Greek theogony,
condemned as they were to remain prisoners beneath the earth.
Since water vapor is produced in the rst instance by the burning of
coal (not until the nuclear power stations of the twentieth century
is an entirely new agent introduced), that fossil fuel could not but

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become the heroic energy vector of the early years of the industrial
age. It is one of the numerous dialectics of modernity that the
powerful pampering-agent [Verwhnungsagens] coal had generally
to be unearthed through the infernal efforts of underground mining.
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.
Promethean coal was joined from the end of the nineteenth century
by those further fossil-energy vectors, oil and natural gas both of
them agents of exoneration and pampering of the highest order. In
their extraction, forms of resistance of a quite other type than those
involved in mining had to be overcome. It was at times possible to
observe an effect that might be described as an accommodation
on the part of nature, as though this latter herself wanted to make
her contribution to putting an end to the age of scarcity and its
reection in ontologies of lack and miserabilisms.
The primal scene in this acceding of natural resources to human
demand was played out in 1859 in Pennsylvania when, during drilling
near Titusville, the rst oil well and with it the rst oil eld in the
New World was opened up, in a very shallow deposit scarcely more
than 20 meters deep. Since then, the image of the erupting oil well,
which the specialists call a gusher, has been among the archetypes
not only of the American dream, but also of the modern way of life,
as made possible by easily accessible energies. 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, James Dean,
a leading character in Giant (1956), 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, science, technology, and
consumption, over a period lasting more than 250 years, including
the repercussions we describe as the psychosemantic conversion
of populations on the basis of lasting exoneration- and pamperingeffects it also drew such respectable categories of the ontology
of old Europe as Being, Reality, and Freedom, into an abrupt change
of meaning.
The activist connotation of the always-also-being-able-to-beotherwise meanwhile lodged itself in the concept of the real (a
connotation of which, up to then, only artists, as guardians of the
sense of the possible, had had an inkling), by contrast with the
ndings of the tradition, in which the reference to real-ity was always
shot through with the pathos of the being-that-way-and-no-other,
and hence required that we bow before the power of nitude, severity,
and lack. For example, an expression like bad harvest was, for an
entire age, fraught with the admonitory seriousness of the classical
doctrine of the real. In its way, it was a reminder that the prince of
this world could be none other than death supported by his usual

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escort, the horsemen of the apocalypse. In a world like todays,

shaped by the basic experience of a superabundance of energy,
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. No wonder, then, that Catholic
theology, which thinks in essentially premodern and miserabilist
terms, has entirely lost its connection with the facts of the present,
even more than the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines, which have at
least a semimodern approach. Logically, in the course of the last
hundred years, the concept of freedom also had to free itself from
its traditional meanings. Against its current harmonics, it sounds
out dimensions of meaning of a new kind, particularly the denition
of freedom as the right to an unrestricted mobility and to a festive
wastage of energy (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2001: 3212). With this,
two former seigneurial rights receive a democratic generalization:
wilful freedom of movement and capricious expenditure, at the
expense of a subject nature, though naturally only where the climatic
conditions of the great greenhouse are already in force. Because
modernity overall is a gure standing out against a ground of the
primary color of excess, its citizens face the challenge posed by the
sense of permanent abolition of boundaries [Entgrenzung]. They can
and must be aware that their lives are unfolding in an age in which
there is no normality. Thrownness into the world of excess is paid
for with the sense that the horizon is slipping.
The sensitive zone in the reprogramming of the pitch of existence
in modernity concerns, then, the experience of the ending of scarcity,
which the inhabitants of the Crystal Palace come up against at an
early stage and which they hardly ever appreciate adequately. In
the agro-imperial age, human beings reality-feelings were calibrated
to the scarcity of goods and resources, because they were based
on the experience that work, embodied in arduous agricultural labor,
was just sufcient to create precarious islands of human articiality
within nature. The ancient theories of the successive ages of the
world themselves say just this, in resignedly informing us that even
the great empires collapse and the most arrogant towers are leveled
by invincible nature within a few generations. Agrarian conservatism
expressed the ecological-moral consequences of this in a categorical
prohibition of waste. Because the product of labor could not normally
be increased, but at best complemented by campaigns of pillage, it
was always clear to the people of the ancient world that the value
generated constituted a limited, relatively immutable quantity that
was to be protected absolutely. In these conditions, the wastrel was
inevitably regarded as a madman. For that reason, the narcissistic
expenditures of great lords could be interpreted only as acts of
hubris their later reinterpretation as culture could not yet be
foreseen.
These views have ceased to hold since, more than 200 years
ago or so, with the breakthrough to a style of culture based on fossil

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

energy, a sinister11 liberalism came on the scene and began decisively

to reverse all signs. Whereas, for the tradition, waste represented
the ultimate sin against the spirit of subsistence, because it put at
risk an always scarce reserve of survival resources, 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. Not that reserves of goods and energy increased to innity
overnight; but the boundaries of the possible are constantly being
pushed back: this gives a fundamentally different coloration to the
sense of being. Only Stoics now think in terms of reserves. For the
common Epicureans in the great comfortable hothouse, reserves
are precisely what can be assumed capable of constant increase.
Collective readiness to consume more has succeeded, within a
few generations, in rising to the rank of a premiss of the system:
mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. From
its blossoming we can see how levity has acquired the fundamental
position. The prohibition on waste has been supplanted by the
prohibition on frugality this nds expression in the constant
appeals to stimulate internal demand. Modern civilization rests not
so much on the exit of humanity from the unproductivity for which
it is itself responsible (Brckling 2004: 275) as on the constant
ow of an undeserved wealth of energy into the space of enterprise
and experience.
In a genealogy of the theme of waste, we would have to stress how
deeply the verdict of the tradition on the luxurious, the idle, and the
superuous was rooted in theological evaluations. In monotheistic
doctrine, everything superuous could not but be displeasing to God
and nature as though they too thought in terms of reserves.12 It
is remarkable that even the proto-liberal Adam Smith, ready as he
was to sing the praises of the markets boosted by luxury, held to
a highly negative concept of waste which is why, throughout his
Wealth of Nations, there runs the following refrain: waste is a giving
in to the passion for present enjoyment (Smith 1979: 441). It is
part of the habitus of unproductive people; that is to say of priests,
aristocrats, and soldiers, who, by dint of a long-ingrained arrogance,
subscribe to the belief that they are called upon to squander the
wealth generated by the productive mass of the population.
Even Marx does not get away from the agro-imperial ages concept
of waste when, following Smith, he maintains the distinction between
the laboring and the wasteful classes, though admittedly with the
ne distinction that it is now the owners of capital far more than the
feudal parasites who assume the role of malign wastrels. He does,
however, concede with Smith that, as a result of the new economic
ways, there is a surplus product in the world that far exceeds the
small margins of surplus of agrarian times. The author of Capital
stylizes his bourgeois as a vulgarized aristocrat, whose cupidity
and turpitude know no bounds. In this portrait of the capitalist as
rentier, no account is taken of the fact that, with the system of

347

capital, the novel phenomenon of the working rich also begins

its career the working rich who balance out present enjoyment
with the creation of value. Equally neglected is the fact that, in the
modern welfare and redistributive state, unproductivity shifts from
the top of society to its base bringing into being the virtually
unprecedented phenomenon of the parasitic poor. Whereas, in the
agro-imperial world, one could normally assume that those without
means were exploited producers, 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, as of national and human
solidarity).13 However, their functionaries are forever asserting that
they are exploited individuals, who, on the basis of their privations,
should properly be compensated.
Though Liberals and Marxists both made serious attempts to
interpret the phenomenon of industrial society, the fossil-energy
phenomenon was not perceived in either system; still less was it
plumbed conceptually. Insofar as the value of labor, exaggerated
in doctrinaire fashion, was the lead factor in all explanations of
wealth, the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries remained chronically incapable of grasping that coal,
needed and used in industry, was not a raw material like any
other, but the rst great agent of exoneration or relief. Thanks to
this universal nature-worker (which the alchemists had sought in
vain for centuries), the principle of afuence made its entrance into
the sphere of civilization.
Nevertheless, even if, under pressure of the new evidence,
one is prepared to conceive the vectors of fossil energy and
the three generations of engines that are its offspring steam
engines, internal combustion engines, and electrical motors as
the primary relief-agents of modernity, 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 bulk of present
exploitation has been shifted on to working animals, which, thanks
to the industrialization of agriculture, have now entered upon the era
of their mass production and exploitation [Verwertung]. On this topic,
gures are more eloquent than sentimental arguments: according
to the German Federal Governments Report on Animal Protection
for 2003, almost 400 million hens were slaughtered in Germany in
2002, to which may be added 31 million turkeys, and around 14
million ducks; where larger mammals are concerned, 44.3 million
pigs, 4.3 million cattle, and 2.1 million sheep and goats were put to
their nal intended use. Similar gures may be supposed for most
market societies, and to these national statistics we must also add
an enormous quantity of imports. Animal proteins constitute the

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

largest legal drugs market. The enormity of the gures exceeds any
emotional evaluation even analogies to the holocausts perpetrated
by the National Socialists, Bolsheviks, 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). 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, we can see that the ooding of the market with meat
from animal bioconverters itself goes back to the oods of oil that
were released in the twentieth century. Ultimately, we feed on coal
and oil, once these have been transformed into edible products by
industrialized agriculture (Sieferle 2002: 125). 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, already largely in
place today, which will stress the indissociable connection between
human rights and cruelty to animals.14 This movement could turn out
to be the spearhead of a development that ascribes a new meaning
to nonurban ways of life.
If we had, then, to put a name to the axis around which the
transvaluation of all values in the developed civilization of comfort
revolves, then only the reference to the principle of afuence could
provide the answer. There is no doubt that current afuence, which
demands always to be experienced against a horizon of intensication
and of abolition of boundaries, will remain the distinguishing feature
of future situations, even if the fossil-energy cycle reaches its end in
a hundred years or somewhat later. 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. Yet, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the detailed
form of these energies is still not known. The only thing certain is
that the new system many call it, succinctly, the coming solar
economy must take us beyond the constraints and pathologies
of the current fossil-energy resource politics (Scheer 2004).
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, we might speak of a qualied
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. Hence their deep relation to the categories of stability,
necessity, and lack. At the dawn of the second transvaluation of
values, a global climate of civilization is looming, of which we may
say with some likelihood that it displays postliberal features; it will
bring to power a hybrid synthesis of technical avant-gardism and
eco-conservative moderation. (To speak in the color symbolism of

4. BEYOND THE EXPENSIVE AND THE GRATIS: FOR A

NEW ALLIANCE WITH THE NATURE-WORKER
If we examine, from this standpoint, the question of what happened
in the twentieth century, then it is clear that that era must in many

349

politics, it will be black/green, though to interpret this merely as a

restoration would be a mistake.) More and more, the conditions
for the exuberant expressionism of wastefulness that characterizes
present mass culture will be removed.
Insofar as the demands that the principle of afuence awakened
in the industrial age remain in force in the postfossil era, technical
research will have to occupy itself predominantly with the sources of
an alternative wastefulness. In future experiences of afuence, there
will inevitably be a shifting of the center of gravity toward immaterial
ows, because growth in the material sphere will be prohibited on
eco-systemic grounds. We shall presumably see a dramatic reduction
of material ows and with it a revitalization of regional economies.
In these conditions, what is as yet premature talk today of the global
information or knowledge society might well be tested out. It will
then be mainly in the eld of virtually immaterial data-streams that
the decisive afuence will be seen. It is to these alone that the label
of globalism will genuinely apply.
How postfossility will reshape the current concepts of enterprise
and freedom of expression can at the moment be predicted only
vaguely. It is probable that, from the standpoint of the future soft
solar technologies, we shall retrospectively condemn explosionbased Romanticism or, more generally, the psychical, aesthetic,
and political derivatives of the sudden release of energy as a world
expressive of an energy fascism globalized by mass culture. This
latter is a reex of the directionless vitalism that arises out of the
impoverished perspective of the fossil-energy-based world system.
Against this background, one can understand why the culture industry
in the Crystal Palace evinces a profound disorientation beyond the
demonstrable convergence between boredom and entertainment.
The joyful, 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 signicance. High and low are, for the
time being, living by the maxim: Aprs nous le solaire.
After the ending of the fossil-energy regimes, it might be that
what geopoliticians of the present have described as a shift from
the Atlantic to the Pacic space in fact takes place. This shift would,
above all, bring about the transition from the rhythm of explosion to
that of regenerations. The Pacic style would necessarily develop
the cultural derivatives of the transition to the techno-solar energy
regime. Whether this would simultaneously full the expectations
of worldwide peace-processes, planetary equalization of resources,
and the defeat of global apartheid, only the future can tell.

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

respects be regarded as a time of fullments. Badiou has rightly

stressed the extent to which the century broke with the prophetic
habitus of the preceding one. It is the century of triumphant impatience,
capable of anything except waiting for things to mature in their own
slow way. It is the century of immediate accomplishment, in which
the martial law of the measures taken substitutes for patience,
postponement, and hope. Retrospectively, we must remember that,
contrary to what Ernst Bloch said, the twentieth century never knew
a Principle of Hope, but only ever a Principle of Immediacy, made
up of two collaborative components, the Impatience Principle and
the Gratis Principle.
To the sociopsychological mysteries of the twentieth century
belongs the unleashing of impatience, without which neither the
realistic excesses of the rst half, nor the mass-cultural relaxations
of the second can be understood. This epochal impatience is, in
our view, the product of the combined effects of neo-realist praxis
and generally effective lightenings of the material burdens of life
[Entlastungen], but also of the intrusion of the new motive forces
into human propulsive arrangements. 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.
To do justice to the twentieth century as a period in which the
aspirations of yesteryear were taken seriously, we must grasp its
resolute presentism and understand the reasons for the transition
from a time of expectations to a time of deeds. As we have pointed
out, however, this cannot be done if we limit the time-window of the
analysis to the period between 1914 and the present. Even the
extension of the search for motivations, as above, to the time of the
French Revolution is insufcient. The real dynamic of the twentieth
century cannot in any sense be explained by the emergence of
radicalism alone, in which the new subjects or agents sought to
turn themselves into the media of coming nature or future history.
We must, rather, 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.
This allusion to early modern magic is not an accidental one, for
whoever wishes to track the dynamic presentism of contemporary
culture with all its features of explosiveness, impatience, immediate
gratication, and self-satised dissatisfaction, must focus on the
crystallization phase of a new mental structure that runs from the
sixteenth century to the twenty-rst. 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. The
summum bonum that points the direction for desire in general has,
since the sixteenth century (with some preludes in the fteenth
and fourteenth), translated itself from the striving for redemption

351

to the search for relief of burdens [Erleichterung]. With this shift

of emphasis, immanent situations came to assume supremacy. A
monstrous interest in so-called natural magic was thereby released,
which, on a rst reading, had no other meaning than to give human
beings the means to break out of the prison of the old needs (that
this did, on a second reading, lead to the discovery of the rst depth
psychology and to a symbolic technique of self-birth, is a point we
shall mention here only in passing). As a result, the life of modern
human beings as such can assume the form of a treasure hunt.
The treasure is imagined as the universal means for easing lifes
burden, and it need only be found for its benecent effects to be
felt at once.
To understand the developments of the European dynamic of
enrichment, it is necessary to recall once again the paradoxical
course taken by exploratory movements [Suchbewegungen]. We
nd 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, than it took on
the form of an unbridled endeavor, in which the enormous efforts
involved overrode the imagined result of the quest and seemed
to nd justication only in regard to phantasmatically anticipated
outcomes. This can be seen in the immeasurable investment
baroque thought and experimentation made in so-called alchemy,
which is today forgotten or regarded with ridicule particularly the
art of transmutation into gold. This branch of alchemy, doubtless its
most fascinating outgrowth, was based on the grandiose precapitalist phantasm that the quintessence of value or the substance of
treasure itself could be directly produced. Were this the case, those
who mastered gold production would be able to turn the hunt for
treasure into a scientically controlled manufacturing process. In
this way, they would free themselves from the vagaries of external
fortune and install themselves directly at the source of wealth. Here
the predominant fairytale theme of the modern world surfaces with
crystal clarity: from this point on, it is always a question of working
so as not to have to work again. In the new regime, every effort has
only a provisional character; the sense of all exertions lies in the
striving for effortless homeostasis. One is patient for the last time,
in order nally, after the great discovery, to have to be patient no
longer. The profoundest dream of Europe is the worklessness that
arises out of material prosperity.
I suggest we should see the major event of the twentieth century
as lying in the fullment of the alchemical dream. We have seen
that it is part of the style of the age that none of these fullments
is successfully achieved without simultaneously bringing to light
the horrors concealed within the dream. To the irony of exploration
is added the irony of realization. It is clear that the confusion of
work and questing was from the beginning inherent in the pursuit
of wealth. As soon as that pursuit itself had to assume the form

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PETER SLOTERDIJK

of organized work, the concept of wealth as such also changed,

and from the gure of treasure there emerged little by little that
gure of capital, against which the acumen of the economists and
of the critics of political economy was, from the late eighteenth
century onward, to be tested. The more the economists mastered
the subject, the more the sense of the treasure hunt generally fell
away, 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. The last character-mask of treasure was
perhaps the ill-fated Count of Monte Cristo, who, as a discoverer of
treasure, was already completely a gure of the past, but as avenger
was entirely the man of the future.
I shall conclude these remarks with the observation that a
General Economy, which, even after Bataille and the allusions of the
ecologists and deep ecologists, contemporary thought still awaits,
will not be able to avoid coming back to the concept of treasure that
is so frowned upon today. From the fate of the alchemists we must,
of course, now learn the correct lessons. In the future, the treasure
function the sudden and, as it were, magical relieving of lifes
burden is not to be sought in the gold fetish: in todays 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 the light of historical
experience we cannot, however, deny that without the intervention
of the most immense of all treasures (to which we have referred
above), there would be no capitalism, no widespread prosperity, no
welfare state, and none of those things which make up the modus
vivendi of the current Western comfort system. The treasure that
is integrated into capitalism was not found in pirates trunks or
alchemists cabinets, but in the strata of the earth. That treasure,
though occasionally described as black gold, is not on the money
side of the economic process, but on the labor side, to invoke the
Marxist dualism of capital and labor. It is, however, in no sense part
of the usual concept of the worker, because it is not a person, but a
pure vector of energy. The concept of treasure, which we must now
take up in post-Marxist terms, requires, then, a new, 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 gure of wage-dependence. The active treasure
we are speaking of here, coal and oil (and later, also, other forms of
biosynthesis), embodies the Gratis Principle in a typically modern way
because, unlike its predecessor, the earth as bearer of slow growth,
it is suited to rapid combustion and the production of instantaneous
effects. It is the real agent of the Immediacy Principle.
It will be clear that the agent we are enquiring after and which can
be neither capital nor labor is none other than postconventionally,
postmetaphysically understood nature in its dual specialization
as fossil vector of energy and laboratory of organic syntheses. The

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY?

name we are looking for can only be nature-worker. The soughtafter General Economy can, as a result, be elaborated only in the
form of a tripolar theory that devotes itself to articulating together
work, capital, and the nature-worker. We know since Nietzsche, and
again since Bataille, that the role of the Prime Squanderer has
always been played by the sun. It is, for the foreseeable future, the
greatest embodiment of the virtue of giving, which represents the
absolute counterprinciple to the acquisitive principle of capitalism.
A postcapitalist world-form and a corresponding ethics can start out
only from a new interpretation of the sun. Understandably, current
capitalist intelligence has nothing to say about an agent like the sun,
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,
the side of the nature-worker, is passed over in silence. Let us, for
the moment, merely state that the golden age of this ignorance is
coming to an end.
If the twentieth century brought the realization of modernitys
dreams on to the agenda, without having interpreted them correctly,
we may say of the twenty-rst that it has to begin with a new
interpretation of dreams. In that interpretation, the question will be
how humanity is to continue the hunt for treasure, without which we
should not be able to say what Being-in-the-world means for us.
Translated by Chris Turner

353

1. The twentieth century took place. [Trans.]

2. Originally published in 1917. Most recently available in an edition
of 1979 published by Franz Ehrenwirth Verlag, Munich [Trans.].
3. The German term here is entlastet. Following the lead of Dr.
Christian Thies of the University of Rostock, I have generally
translated the concept of Entlastung, which is taken from the
later work of Arnold Gehlen, as exoneration.
4. P. Sloterdijk, Heideggers Politik: Das Ende der Geschichte
vertagen. Strasbourg, Heidegger Conference, December 5,
2004, pp. 4ff.
5. On the presence of the gure of Zarathustra in European literature
before Nietzsche, see Michael Stausberg (1998).
6. A state deriving its revenues from the taxation of a market
economy.
7. The German term here is Verwhnung, which, in this broader
context, might also perhaps be translated as featherbedding
[Trans.].
8. The reference here is to exoneration in the sense of relief from
material want. It should be noted that this is quite different from
that Golden Age of Exoneration of which Saul Bellow wrote,

CULTURAL POLITICS

NOTES

PETER SLOTERDIJK

9.

10.
11.
12.

13.

a time in which all are allegedly absolved of personal guilt

[Trans.].
For a discussion of this concept, see Sloterdijk, Sphren III.
Schume, chapter 3, section 2, Die Mngelwesen-Fiktion, pp.
699700. I show there that, on the basis of his institutional
interests, Gehlen has developed only the illiberal strand of
consequences from the concept.
Hot spot in English in the original.
The German adjective here is unheimlich. Das Unheimliche is
the Freudian Uncanny.
Since . . . superuity is displeasing both to God and nature,
and everything displeasing to God and nature is evil. Dante,
Monarchy, I, 14, in Monarchy and Three Political Letters
(London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), p. 22 [cum . . . omne
superuum Deo et naturae displiceat . . . et omne quod Deo et
naturae displicet sit malum].
See Rolf Peter Sieferle, Gesellschaft im bergang, pp. 139
40:
The aim of the current demand for social justice is to
conscate property from the productive sector, so as to
redirect it socially to the unproductive sector. Since
the propertyless (and perhaps even the unproductive or
unemployed) might tend to be in the social majority, 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, parasitic
poor.

14. The life story of an exemplary agitator on this front is told in

Peter Singer (1998).

354

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REFERENCES
Brckling, Ulrich. 2004. Unternehmer. In Ulrich Brckling, Susanne
Krasmann, Thomas Lemke (eds), Glossar der Gegenwart, p. 275.
Frankfurt, a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lwith, Karl. 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche: Revolution in Nineteenth
Century Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scheer, Hermann. 2004. The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for
a Sustainable Global Future. London: Earthscan Publications.
Sieferle, Rolf Peter. 2002. Gesellschaft im bergang. In Dirk Baecker
(ed.), Archologie der Arbeit, pp. 11754. Berlin: Kadmos.
Singer, Peter. 1998. Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the
Animal Rights Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld
Publishers.

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355

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Sloterdijk, P. and Heinrichs, Hans-Jrgen. 2001. Die Sonne und der

Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt, a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Smith, Adam. 1979. The Wealth of Nations, Books IIII, Andrew
Skinner (ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Stausberg, Michael. 1998. Faszination Zarathushtra. Zoroaster und
die europische Religionsgeschichte der frhen Neuzeit, 2 vols.
Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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 INTERKULTURALITT IM
DENKEN HEINZ KIMMERLES
(VERLAG BAUTZ 2005). SEE:
HTTP://WWW.HENKOOSTERLING.NL.

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INTEREST AND
EXCESS OF MODERN
MANS RADICAL
MEDIOCRITY:
RESCALING
SLOTERDIJKS
GRANDIOSE
AESTHETIC
STRATEGY
HENK OOSTERLING
ABSTRACT In my contribution,
I adopt Sloterdijks 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 mans
radical immersion in his own media as
radical mediocrity and argue that this
has become our rst nature. But then, what
is the political potential of Sloterdijks

CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226898

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 357380

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 afrmative 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-reective radical mediocrity. In the
nal analysis, the psychological surplus of generosity and the
substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reective inbetween. Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires a
downscaling of Sloterdijks 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 Sloterdijks 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.
Its 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. Wasnt 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 Groe, 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 Heideggers
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
reection on the monstrous (ST: 290).
In order to get a grip on Sloterdijks 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 Sphren 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 qualies it with Gilles Deleuzes 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 qualication
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 Sloterdijks imagery:
the mother-child cocoon has been blown up to global proportions,
exploded, and reconditioned as airy foam.
Megalomania suits Sloterdijks 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 SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

360

CULTURAL POLITICS

HENK OOSTERLING

be patient of big questions.6 One specic Heideggerian overtone,

prominently present in his earlier works especially Eurotaoism
(Sloterdijk [ET] [1989]) but expelled from his last project, resonates:
monstrosity demands to be endured (Gelassenheit). It is too vast
for man. It is beyond all discourses: It is a work of art, but much
more than a work of art; it is grand politics, but much more than
grand politics; it is technology, but much more than technology . . .
(NG: 367).
The next step demands a tailoring of his concept of the enormous
to relational proportions by downscaling these to an individual level.
In the concluding sentences of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals
(2005) Sloterdijk proposes Aristotles concept megalopsychia. This
sensibility an existential condition has to become the second
nature of citizens of posthistorical foam city. It sensitizes them
to their current mode of existence: generosity and abundance.
According to Nietzsche, Sloterdijks other main inspiration, 7 every
second nature over time becomes rst. Modern generosity and,
for that matter, modern tolerance needs an update. Different
concepts are proposed by Sloterdijk to actualize this notion. The
most frequently used is creativity. In the very last sentences of the
Sphren-plus project, Sloterdijk wonders why megalopsychia would
not be adequate, just because [our contemporaries] nowadays say
creativity instead of magnanimity. Creative people . . . are those
who prevent the whole from falling back into pernicious routine
(WIK: 415). Ill come back to these harmful routines. For the time
being I restrict myself to registering that Sloterdijk puts his shirt on
an aesthetic category: not autonomy but creativity.
One more step is needed. After having read 2,988 pages, one
starts to wonder what exactly the political relevance of Sloterdijks
trilogy-plus is. 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 (beruss)? In the land of plenty, grilled chickens y
around to be grabbed at will. Mere distribution of scarce resources
is no longer needed.
I will start with the exploration of Sloterdijks politico-aesthetic
strategy in the strict sense: in his writing. After having analyzed its
rhetorical aspects I contextualize his claim of abundance in political
economy, anthropology, media theory, and ontology. Then I return
to aesthetics and politics. I specify in my own terms his mediatheoretical underpinning of anthropology. In order to rephrase his
critique of the indifference and mediocrity of the masses (Sloterdijk
[VM] [2000]) in mediological terms, I need to make a distinction
between the reactive and afrmative conditions of being-in-media.
The first condition reproduces lack and is qualified by me as
radical mediocrity; the latter is open, reective, and labeled as
inter-esse.8 Hyperpolitical megalopsychia becomes micropolitical

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

inter-esse. In having rescaled and miniaturized megalopsychia to

these mediological proportions, Sloterdijks politico-aesthetic
strategy is better understood as the micropolitics of public space,
i.e. art as public space.

361

Sloterdijks spherological project is monstrous indeed! More adequate a qualication cannot be found for his trilogy-plus Sphrenproject. The number of pages is enormous, the use of neologisms
excessive, the conceptual avalanche overwhelming, the historically
embedded, methodological legitimization overpowering. The explicitly
pseudo-Hegelian overtones that give Sloterdijks text coherence and
consistency are triggered by his desire to outdo Oswald Spenglers
failed morphology of world history (SI: 78). For him, 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. Instead of
reproducing a historical approach based on negativity (Hegel) and
resentment (Spengler), Sloterdijk adopts an afrmative approach
(Nietzsche). He turned his back on reactive nihilism and its implied
cynicism earlier in Critique of Cynical Reason (1987; rst published in
German: 1983). This shift from cynicism to kynicism rehabilitated
the hero of antiphilosophy and cosmopolitism Diogenes of Synope,
the philosopher in drag, 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. He has
not been seen lately. Do they already know he is dead?
The death of God, rst proclaimed by Hegel (1952: 523, 546),
opened a new space in human consciousness: the sublime. Burke
problematized this affective tension, Kant transcendentalized it and
in a postmodern turn it was rephrased by Jean-Franois Lyotard
as the ambiguous rationale of the avant-garde art that methodically
shocks the bourgeoisie out of its tastes. Lyotards sublime still
resonates in Sloterdijks notion of monstrosity when he merges
aesthetics with politics (Oosterling 1999).9 At the end of Sphren
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 mega installation can
be described as a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, if this had
not been occupied by aesthetic ideology (SIII: 811).
Benjamins analysis of Nazism as the political Gesamtkunstwerk
par excellence10 problematized the relation between art and politics
indeed. Therefore Sloterdijks 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 . . .
(SIII: 813). Is globalization perhaps an option? Or McLuhans
global village? For Sloterdijk these are not suitable candidates.11

CULTURAL POLITICS

1. ART AND POLITICS: GETTING BEYOND GRAND

NARRATIVES

HENK OOSTERLING

This sphere of all spheres only exists politico-economically as an

inclusive concept of markets (WIK: 231), the coherence of which
is guaranteed by joint ventures.
Isnt this reason enough for Sloterdijk to draw the same conclusion
as Lyotard did, i.e. that the grand narratives have come to an end?
On the contrary. Sloterdijk makes an unexpected move: he would
rather reproach the grand narratives for not being big enough (WIK:
14). Understanding how Sloterdijk overtrumps the modern grand
narratives demands an understanding of his use of aesthetics at
different levels of his writing.

2. RHETORIC: FICTION, METAPHOR, HYPERBOLE, ESSAY

So how does Sloterdijk get beyond the grand narratives of modern
enlightenment, i.e. of state-building, emancipation, and globalization?
If these narratives are no longer viable, how can Sloterdijk still claim
the truth for his own grand narrative on spheres? Why, for instance,
has he chosen the sphere as an all-encompassing image? Is the
form, i.e. the gure of the sphere form and gure 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, Heidegger, Foucault,
and Deleuze.

362

CULTURAL POLITICS

a. ction and metaphors

Truth, Nietzsche states in Posthumous Writings, is a mobile army
of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum
of human relations that, poetically and rhetorically intensied,
transferred, and adorned, after steady use occur to a people as
founded, canonical and obligatory: truths are illusions . . . (1980:
880, 881). Objectivity is at best the convergence of as many
perspectives as possible. Likewise our collective consciousness is
lled or formatted by the spherical. Objectivitys ction, over time,
gains a truth value. This canonized ction cannot be unmasked
without using the very same ction in the process of unveiling.
Sloterdijk investigates this aporetic quality in his writing.
Heideggers phenomenological notion of truth (aletheia) i.e.
simultaneous disclosure and unconcealment of Being is beyond
the conguration of the objective and subjective. We are always
already attuned to truth, always already in the mood. For Heidegger,
Dasein is not a subject but a project. To Foucault, truth was initially
a product of discursive formations, but it was eventually downscaled
to a truth game, a collective practice in which knowledge, power, and
subjectivity converge. That truth is an expression of a will to power is
acknowledged by both Foucault and Deleuze. When Nietzsches view
is linked to Deleuze and Guattaris denition of philosophy, Sloterdijks
shift to creativity becomes self-evident: Philosophy is the art of
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts and With its concepts,
philosophy brings forth events (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: resp. 2,

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

199; see also WIK: 14). Reecting on the inconceivable monstrous,

in short, demands the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize a
projected truth. This creation of truth is neither a subjective projection
nor pure description of a given reality. It is a revealing of what has
been concealed for a certain period in order to forge different political
alliances and congure yet unseen epistemological coherencies.
Truth is a projective practice.
So Sloterdijks aesthetic intervention rst and foremost takes
place at the level of his writing. He strategically applies stylistic
gures and uses rhetorical devices against the aforementioned
philosophical background. Is the sphere, for instance, a metaphor?
Given the Deleuzean inspiration Sloterdijk felt while writing the
third volume of Sphren especially12 we can compare his use of the
sphere with Deleuze and Guattaris use of the notion of the machine.
Machine is not a metaphor (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 36).
Given the representational quality of the metaphor, this would still
presuppose the very metaphysics that is under attack. And again
it was Nietzsche, the thinker on the stage, who taught Sloterdijk
that For the true poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, but a
representative image which really hovers in front of him in the place
of an idea (Nietzsche 2000: 19). Sloterdijks conceptual avalanche
covers this necessary illusion (ST: 188).
In a staged retrospective conversation at the end of part III a
conversation on this oxymoron between a historian, a theologian, and
a literary critic, 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). The author, the literary critic goes on, has
used a superlativist and supremacist form of classical philosophical
reason. But this does not really solve the aporetic tension. It only
shows that this is the breeding ground for truth.13

363

Being a hermeneutic thinker, Sloterdijks truth-nding means moving

toward an as yet undisclosed truth. What, then, is exactly the specic
rhetorical device that is applied in order to overtrump the grand
narratives? In the introduction to Sphren I it appears to be the
hyperbole. A hyperbolic phenomenology14 resonates in Sloterdijks
spherology. Political overtones can be heard: by exaggerating the
given divisions of society, [philosophy] makes us aware of the
exclusions and offers them up for a retuning once more . . . Through
philosophical hyperbole the chance arises to revise denite options
and to decide against exclusion (SI: 13). Exaggerating helps us
to revalue the apparently given that is the result of the canonization
of exclusive, dichotomous thinking.
A decisive analysis of the relation between hyperbole and truth
is not given in Sphren. For this, we have to turn to Nicht Gerettet,
published during the nalization of the trilogy. In this philosophical

CULTURAL POLITICS

b. critique of hyperbolic reason: hypocritical thinking

HENK OOSTERLING

physiognomy of Heidegger, Sloterdijk dissects Adornos and

Heideggers de(con)struction of metaphysics.15 The relation between
aesthetics and epistemology is rephrased in terms of hyperbole and
truth. Citing the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Sloterdijk points out that
a hyperbole becomes a stylistic virtue once the topic has surpassed
a natural measure (naturalem modum excessit, in Quintilians words).
The topic is the monstrous, an excessive world. It is better for reason
to speak hyperbolically than to remain modestly in the background
in the search for truth. Quintilians words are paraphrased: the
justication of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness
[Angemessenheit an das Malose] (NG: 256).
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. When his interlocutor in
Die Sonne und der Tod proposes the word excess (bersteigerung),
Sloterdijk reacts approvingly: I like the expression, because it
reduces transcendence to exaggeration (ST: 31). Metaphysics turns
out to be canonized rhetoric. That is why metaphysics can only be
criticized inter-hyperbolically. The genitive of in critique of hyperbolic
reason has to be understood as both objective and subjective: in
the nal instance, in criticizing another hyperbole it exposes itself
as such. Surpassing Critical Theory, Sloterdijk undermines his own
critique. In a technical sense he has become hypocritical. We are
all collaborators. No one has an alibi (NG: 367).

364

CULTURAL POLITICS

c. essay: exemplary singularity

The reference to Quintilian for understanding hyperbole as an
adequate rhetorical device for evoking and projecting truth, bears
witness to Sloterdijks proximity to the French philosophy of
difference.16 Although he is hardly mentioned in Sphren, it was
Lyotard who, in referring to another Roman rst-century rhetorician
Longinus prepared an understanding of the sublime for postmodern
discourse. Both Quintilian and Longinus shifted the emphasis from
the audience where it lay in Aristoteles Poetics to the rhetorician;
from reception to production. In criticizing the modern avatar of
this production unit the genius Lyotards attention shifts to
the work of art in its working of the text. Not only does Lyotard
subsequently connect the sublime to the Heideggerian event; 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).17 For him, it is the genre that best
expresses micronarratives. For Sloterdijk, however, the essay is a
hypergenre. It hyperbolically establishes a singular truth.
The essay is radically democratic: it seeks its own rules. In
Kantian terms, it reects on the exemplary position of the singular.
In writing on singularity one is condemned to polyvocity (Sloterdijk
1993b: 62). That is why for Lyotard the essay is a micropolitical

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

tactic. Given its hyperbolic quality and Sloterdijks characterization of

politics after modernity as hyperpolitics, the essay is a hyperpolitical
genre. Hyperpolitics intervenes in a world that is understood as
logic of functions, relations, liquefactions, . . . as a mode of thinking
on groundless complexity (Sloterdijk 1993a: 76).
Rhetorical exaggeration eventually evokes in its audience the
substantial topic of the spherology. As the outcome of a revaluation
of all values (WIK: 349), abundance turns out to be the projected
truth of Sloterdijks spherology. Taking expression to be the indiscernible unity of form and matter, style and content, 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.

3. POLITICAL ECONOMY: EXPENDITURE OR

DISSIPATION?
Now we understand how he is writing, the question remains as to
what the writing is about. In order to convey the idea that reality is
ruled by abundance, Sloterdijk has to reach beyond modern and
postmodern discourse. In spite of the empirical evidence of our
abundant wealth, even within postmodern discourse, abundance
is not so easily accepted as a basic trait of human behavior and
thought. On the contrary, economic and political practices still
thrive on the opposite idea: scarcity. It is scarcity that legitimizes
the economists contention that the efcient distribution of scarce
resources to everyone serves the common good. But the discourse
of scarcity and lack has become so excessive that victim culture is
ourishing. Victimism is a trend that is enhanced within the current
compensation culture as the vibrant nucleus of a global risk society.
Herein freedom is facilitated by security and insurance. Abundance
is everywhere, but it is ideologically neglected and even denied by a
culture that makes money out of fearful anticipation and translates
complaints into claims. Political culture both the Left and the Right
sustains and enhances this attitude. The former still interprets the
world in terms of oppression and exploitation; the latter laments the
loss of values in terms of decadence.

365

The scarcity option is declined by Sloterdijk as miserabilistic. The

laments of miserophiles, their bel canto miserabilism (SIII: 690)
thrives on an anthropology of lack. 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. Benjamin too is dismissed as misre
conservative (SIII: 781). Our main problem in the afuent society
is our self-image, our self-denition, and our self-esteem. Revaluating
the surplus requires a theory of constitutive luxury (SIII: 676),
questioning the apparent primacy of scarcity. Is it an ontological,

CULTURAL POLITICS

a. afuent society and miserabilism

366

CULTURAL POLITICS

HENK OOSTERLING

ideological, or discursive illusion? Is it an integral part of our being,

of our political economy, or just paradigmatic for a certain period?
Even worse, is Sloterdijks proposal to appreciate abundance over
scarcity utopian?
A genealogy of scarcity proves him to be right. Although he does
not mention this book, Foucaults The Order of Things can be taken
as a guideline. His archeology of human sciences reveals that the
concept scarcity came to the fore in eighteenth-century discourse
(Foucault 1970: 256). The systematic introduction of scarcity was
shaped between the classical and modern episteme by economists
like Say, Ricardo, and Smith. Deconstructing scarcity and advocating
abundance can therefore be understood hyperpolitically as a critique
of economic discourse.
In the course of modernity substantial arguments for abundance
over scarcity have been made by others as well. In France this afrmative approach is part of a deep-seated tradition. In the 1920s the
debate was set in motion by Marcel Mauss. During his anthropological
research on North-American tribes he became acquainted with
the potlatch: a periodic ritual in which the powerful dissipate their
wealth. By outdoing their rivals they not only reestablished their
power, but they also renewed the economic cycle for another year.
Mausss anthropological research was philosophically adapted by
Georges Bataille, who passed the word to a generation of thinkers
of differences, among whom were Kristeva, Lyotard, and Deleuze, but
more particularly Foucault and Derrida (see Derrida 1978).
Expenditure of wealth, however, 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. Within this perspective, dissipation has a pejorative
quality. It is still burdened by exactly those guilty and shameful
feelings Schama describes in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987).
Bataille, however, develops an afrmative view on expenditure
(dpense). Once we shift our gaze to the process level, the instant
gratication of overowing enjoyment appears to be an afrmative
feature of dissipation. Spending time excessively not only annihilates
the surplus of economic transactions even the most necessary
goods are destroyed, ecstacizing the participants of the ritual to the
point of self-loss or even annihilation. A Bataillan analysis of soccer
hooliganism is instructive.
All our addictions bear witness to the paradoxical fact that
dissipation is collectively productive. The astonishing, though powerinvested, 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 ts the logic of
both scarcity and autonomy, but in the nal instance explains how
expenditure drives the global economy. Surrounded by abundance,

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

globally connected, leading comfortable lives, we realize that a

paradigmatic ethico-economic shift is needed in order to share our
wealth. The we, this will be evident, are the wealthy inhabitants of
the ve-storey-high Greenhouse (WIK: 33348), the Crystal Palace
as a mega installation that has been slowly, but rmly, erected during
the complex triple globalization.
Sloterdijk counters the uncomfortable aspect of our afuent
society, triggered by guilt and resentment, by advocating sources
of alternative dissipation (WIK: 362). Experience-based knowledge
being transformed into free-oating information, and facts into data,
Sloterdijk foresees a future where all that is solid melts into air
as Marx wrote of modernization. Matter dissolves into immaterial
ows. This is an inescapable conclusion of a genealogy of globalization: after the second globalization, territory is no longer a safe
harbor for human communities. The earth deterritorializes and reterritorializes in the air. Current extraterritorial globalization, driven by
an urge to move forward (Auftrieb), forces us to levitate our existence.
Enlightenment as an overall explicitation cuts through the Cartesian
dichotomy of mind and matter. In becoming less heavy, lighter, both
consciousness and body are enlightened. Air conditioning takes
on a very literal meaning. Coal and oil will be replaced by solar
energy.

367

Although Bataille is not referred to in Sphren, statements like the

following do suggest that a modied Bataillan perspective is adopted:
Isnt it more true to say that life fundamentally is an overreaction,
an excess, an orgy. Man is an overreactive animal par excellence.
Making art means overreacting, thinking means overreacting,
marrying means overreacting. All decisive human activities are
exaggerations. Walking upright is already a hyperbole . . . (ST: 32).
Disproportionate excess (Unverhltnismige) is the bottom line of
human life.
Given the pseudo-Hegelian overtones in Sloterdijks texts, it is
perhaps instructive to understand the excess in formal-ontological
terms. In Hegels Science of Logic the extreme or the measureless
(das Malose) is a transitional concept at the very end of the logic
of Being where, after the negation of quality by quantity, both are
sublated in measure. Once measure loses its qualitative guarantee
and becomes sheer quantity, it becomes a knotted, highly complex
network of measure relations. Its dialectical dynamics nally dissolve
into excess as an upbeat to absolute indifference. In the rst
movement in the logic of Essence (Wesen) that follows the logic of
Being, this absolute indifference, in trying to understand itself, has
to acknowledge that it is sheer appearance. In following dialectical
negation and sublation, the overcoming of absolute indifference
leads to the realization of the human condition world spirit in its

CULTURAL POLITICS

b. revaluation of all values: a formal-ontological primacy

of excess

HENK OOSTERLING

historical articulation in terms of the reective concepts of identity,

difference, contradiction, and nally ground.
Once dialectics loses its universal authority, excess as a false
innity of the logic of Being is afrmed.18 The hyperbole is a
rhetorical device that is applied to recongure the excess coherently.
The hyperbolic text sensitizes its readers not to become indifferent
to the truth. Sloterdijks hermeneutics of the monstrous, aiming
at a revaluation of all values, does not ignore indifference. He
afrms this as the nihilistic excess of values in a kynical way in
order to overcome the postmodern dissolution of truth. Playing on
Blochs Principle of Hope Sloterdijk hyperbolically proposes the
principle of abundance as the still-concealed truth of modernity.
Man can acknowledge this condition through his worldliness and
by communicating its monstrosity hyperbolically.
In a revaluation of all values, excess becomes abundance, a
condition discursively evoked by exaggeration: The justication of
the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness (NG: 256).
But why does this revaluation of values suddenly pop up? Although
the sublation of excess into indifference is understood in terms
of nihilism, this nihilism does not imply, as is often proposed, the
absence of values. It is rather the result of a radical evaluation of any
sovereignty that was once beyond evaluation: in the nal instance,
of God. It is the excess of values that can no longer be coped with
in a consistent and coherent way. This leads to a chaotic metastasis
of values, as is for instance nowadays illustrated by the rules and
regulations that govern public space. Metastasis also sheds light
on the debacle of multicultural society and the logic of the risk
society. The subject has to become indifferent in order to cope with
the excess of meaning and means.

368

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4. RELATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY: LACK AND TOO MUCH

We always already inhabit the dimension of excess (ST: 337).
Following Hegel, excess is, in formal ontological terms, a presupposition for reecting identity. Sloterdijk redenes this formalontological transfer in his anthropology. In Die Verachtung der
Massen eroded individualism has made indifference the one and
only principle of the masses (VM: 88). Identity and indifference
have to be understood as synonyms (VM: 86) once all ontological
differences gods, saints, sages, and the talented are negated.
Modern mans contemptuousness (Verachtung) is pacied in the
differential indifference that forms the formal secret of the
masses and of a culture that organizes a total middle (VM: 87).19
The latter can even become totalitarian (VM: 95).
If hyperbole as a rhetorical device evokes truth, and if expenditure is the hidden rationale of economic life, what then are the
implications for an afrmative anthropology? Though Hegel was
the rst to proclaim the death of God in his grandiose effort to
secularize Christian negativity, it was Nietzsche who radically drew

369

its consequences: Man has to acknowledge being as rst and

foremost an afrmative will to life that legitimates itself via a will
to truth as a will to power. Excess is an afrmation of these vital
forces: The element of human beings is the too much [das Zuviel]
(SIII: 709).
This is, however, not mans essence. Surplus is at best mans
fth element, his quint-essence. Given this quintessential excess
we need to revalue our present human condition, not by feeling guilty,
but by acknowledging and practicing generosity and creativity. Hence
Sloterdijks hyperbolic proposal of a theory of a constitutive luxury.
Most people have no problem acknowledging that modern life has
gradually become more comfortable. Over the last two centuries
an apparently innite range of possibilities for applying scientic
research to daily circumstances has raised the level of comfort
exponentially. For wealthy cosmopolitans the struggle for life has
been reduced to a minimum. Once we cross the 10 percent poverty
threshold, we enter the ve oors of the Greenhouse (WIK: 334,
335), populated by people who no longer sweat. They are stressed
and fearful, but properly insured.
This comfortable situation has consequences for anthropology.
Is man as an animal rationale mind governing body, in spite of
evident shortcomings still an option? For Nietzsche man was a
nicht-festgestellte Tier, an animal not fully realized. Nietzsches
denition, when incorporated into Schelers view on human behavior
as openness to the world, enabled Arnold Gehlen to qualify human
beings as Mangelwesen (SIII: 699, literally a being of lack): in
spite of all the luxury that surrounds him, man is a being whose
element is a constitutive lack of the necessary means of subsistence.
This, however, triggers institutional compensation: family, school,
gang, army, church, nation, in the nal instance culture. These
normalizing, disciplinary institutions form immune systems, wherein
lack is transformed into a productive force, as happened with
asceticism based on resentment. Ascetics, enjoying excessive
discipline, transform the reactive element of lack afrmatively into
a value in itself.
Gehlen regards the lack of means (Mittellosigkeit) as an essential
trait. In Sphren III. Schume (Foams) all intellectual and rhetorical
forces are mobilized to free Nietzsche from Gehlens miserabilist
grip. Although every newborn lacks the means to survive and
therefore has to be protected and guided, the abundance of sensorial
stimuli is unlimited. The senses, being a-specic, are overowing
with stimuli. Sloterdijk reverses Gehlens thesis by focusing on
relations that are enabled by media and mediations. These even
constitute relations as an openness, a creative force that channels
excessive abundance: what we call the open is the dimension
of wealth in its existential reex (SIII: 760), wealth being the
ability to participate in an explicitation . . . (SIII: 756). Given the
anthropological premise of plenty, during their lifetime individuals are

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CULTURAL POLITICS

HENK OOSTERLING

embedded in ever-changing immune systems to prevent them from

collapsing under a constitutive abundance, called addiction.
Immune systems decline over time. They engender their own
aporias and become auto-immune. In an article20 on urban culture
Sloterdijk explores an alternative lifestyle of expenditure. One of his
critical remarks concerns the redenition of freedom caused by the
primacy of mobility and the abundance of cheap energy. Automobility
is qualied as a Heideggerian existential. In Eurotaoism total
mobilization is positioned as our rst nature. In this kinetic
anthropology the car is the technical double of the principally active
transcendental subject (ET: 42). But automobility has produced its
own auto-immune disease: Total mobilization suffocates urban life
and comes to a standstill in a thousand-mile-long trafc-jam. It is
evident that an immune system will dissolve once man does not
acknowledge and foster its auto-immune tendencies. But more
than these aporias, Sloterdijk emphasizes another, more relevant
anthropological implication. In line with Deleuzean thought, immune
systems reveal the foundation of mans being as relationality.
In opening up to the world the child is always already beyond
itself. It is embedded in a bi-unity of motherchild, an extra-uterine
symbiosis that overrules lack. In order to accentuate relationality over
lack at the very end of Sphren I. Blasen (Bubbles), Lacans theory
of desire is countered by Kristevas primacy of the motherdaughter
relation (SI: 542). This symbiosis is an ecstatic immanence (SI:
641).21 The shift from a male-dominated, monomaniacal perspective
to a female-oriented, open, one was already made in Eurotaoismus.
There, Heideggers implicit negation of life being-toward-death
is overruled by Hannah Arendts natality: A coming-into-world (zurWelt-kommen) (ET: 205) that includes both bi-unity and creativity.
Within Sloterdijks general science of revolution, natality is the
second radical. The rst revolutionary radical was civil society as
part of modern nation-state building within the second, territorial
globalization. The third radical Sloterdijk writes this in 1994 is
a conversion of souls prepared by philosophy (SV: 61, 62). This
at least echoes the idea that in order to change the world, collective
consciousness Hegels World Spirit has to convert itself. In
Sphren the perspective has slightly changed. Modifying Latours
question as to whether we have ever really been modern, Sloterdijk
wonders whether we have ever been revolutionary (SIII: 87). The
revolutionary impact is no longer presented as a reversal, but as a
radical unfolding, a making explicit, emphasizing the making. The
result of this explicitation is a comfortable life for the inhabitants
of the Greenhouse, which is fully dependent upon technological,
juridical, and insurance-based mediations.

370

5. ENLIGHTENMENT AS MEDIOLOGICAL EXPLICITATION

I see myself as a human being who functions amid technical media
as a medium in the second degree, if this is a plausible proposition

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

(ST: 15). If we want to understand the radical implications of a

theory of constitutive luxury, we cannot neglect Sloterdijks media
theory, based on McLuhans thesis that media are extensions of our
senses, organs, and limbs. Media theory underpins his anthropology.
This mediology miniaturizes and literally ex-plains, i.e. extends
megalopsychia generosity and creativity in mans use of his
media. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to res
cogitans. Mediologically, both are reinvested in a relational condition.
Sloterdijks grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects of
mediatization need a rescaling, because I think there is a blind spot
in Sloterdijks media theory. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must be
invested in micropolitical art practices. In order to expose this blind
spot, a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media
driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reectively afrms
abundance. I will characterize this, emphasizing the interest of the
in-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijks
work, as inter-esse. Preliminary to this distinction is a further
differentiation of the notion of Enlightenment.

371

Mediological enlightenment (WIK: 261) not only enlightens the

mind; it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and
bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in the
world. I call this Triple Enlightenment. Next to the conventional
Enlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) emancipation
from our selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit (self-inicted immaturity)
enlightenment explicitates itself through scientic knowledge, the
explicitation of which in its turn is technology. Ever-accelerating
means of transportation literally enlighten our bodies (2) as do
means of telecommunication (3). Territorial distances are annihilated
a supernova right in front of our noses; intercontinental chatter
new virtual ones created atomic universes; virtual public space. In
this way speed of transportation and transparency of communication
enlighten body and sight. The three aspects of enlightenment are
fully dependent upon each other. The last two have always been
part of Enlightenment, but only in retrospect can we acknowledge
their constitutive value.
But the steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, television,
pacemaker, computer, and Internet to mention only the most obvious
have initially ruptured existing immune systems. Enlightenment
has this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). Gradually, however,
these mediations are internalized. Modern mans life becomes
more comfortable. Once the immunity of the system is restored
or a new immune system installed, this comfort becomes part of
normalization and subjectivation. Speeded up in capsular nodes
(cars, trains, planes), communicating via interfaces (computers,
cellphones, GPS), extending their potentialities, human beings feel
less heavy, i.e. freer.

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a. Triple Enlightenment: silent takeover of the mind

HENK OOSTERLING

Modern life has undergone a silent takeover: Technology has

converted explicitated modern mans soul without his realizing it.
As a result of this triple enlightenment, man and machine, mind and
matter have integrated. Machine is no longer a metaphor. Man has
become a psycho-technological and techno-psychological being.22
Media are incorporated to the point of becoming indispensable means
of subsistence. As a result, our moral categories are transformed. 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. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionless
immersion in a media environment. Enforcing your own rules being
auto-nomos is transformed into a will to access and exposure.
Heteronomy is no problem. The lightness of being is no longer
unbearable.23

372

CULTURAL POLITICS

b. Dasein is design: radical mediocrity as rst nature

If relational anthropology is in need of an ontology of prosthetic
realities (NG: 361), mediatization explains how our souls are
converted: by being-in-media. Being-in-the-world is now being-inmedia, a medium being more than just an instrumental, kinetic
connection between separate beings. The identity of the relata
is constituted in and by the relation. Intention is articulated by
its extensions, inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. Medical
technology replaces and transforms vital functions of both body
and mind. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life;
they actually constitute sociability. The proposed transformation of
Aristotelian megalopsychia has to take into account the constitutive
workings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG: 361).
How does second nature become rst (SIII: 809)? After the initial
illness that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium,
end-users consume the comfort, the abundance of their media. But
once this mediological abundance constitutes the end-users milieu
or immune system, the incorporated media will become as invisible
as they are indispensable. Proximity without distance roots both body
and soul in media. In retrospect this mediological relationality always
has been an inextricable quality of mans condition. Every medium
becomes the message, i.e. mans milieu. The medium becomes an
experience in itself. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainment
and even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). It is no longer
a means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobility
and interactivity feels like being crippled, blinded, or deafened. It
is as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properly
functioning eye or ear.
Nowadays Dasein seems reduced to a rooted or radical mediocrity (see Oosterling 2004b, 2005a). The mediocrity of the masses
expressing contemptuousness, so severely criticized by Sloterdijk,
is an indication of a constitutive lack. Given their indifference,
individuals nowadays no longer realize that their rst nature

RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

was initially second nature. In medial performance, memory of

this rst nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggered
by the second. In comfort one does not ask where it comes from
when it has become a habit (SIII: 403). Unreective being-in-media
takes its users beyond history. It is at this crucial point that a
medium becomes a harmful routine. Once the abundance of new
mediological conditions is internalized, needs that were previously
nonexistent are ontologized. They become primary needs. Autonomy
has become automobility, freedom frictionless access, Dasein design.
As a result the unprecedented possibilities or better, virtualities
of an internalized extension reproduce lack on another level.
Every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. In order to add a normative component to
being-in-media, I make a distinction between a miserabilist and an
afrmative mediological condition. As a result of forgetfulness the
former prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only the
second, which advocates openness, enhances the reectivity which
Sloterdijks museological attitude presupposes (SIII: 810). In part I of
Sphren, for living in each other in ecstatic immanence it sufces
to be a male or female modern mass-media being (SI: 640). But
when he notices that the mediocre, medial, and vulgar effaced the
horizon (SI: 642), it is evident that for Dasein to be a passion in
the face of the monstrous (NG: 223) reectivity has to be part of
our medio-crity. This is acknowledged at the end of part III: Actually
reectivity and being spoilt (Verwhnung) are inextricably linked.
Once imaginations concerning lack have become second nature,
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 reective. As long as the in-betweenness
of radical mediocrity does not reect on itself, comfortable life
can easily turn into an experience of lack. For Sloterdijk, mediocre
people are part of the They (das Man), Heideggers qualication
of inauthentic existence (SI: 643). Notwithstanding the collective
productivity of addictions, 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. Autonomy being sheer illusion a
Nietzschean ction for Sloterdijk, authenticity obviously is still an
option. What is needed is a reective attitude as an existential in
which mediocrity is experienced in its afuent generosity. As Hegel
argues: reectivity sublates indifference.
Ontologically, radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between.
In foam city we, glued foam bubbles, share the in-between. 24 An
afrmative approach acknowledges that Homo sapiens is an interesse (Zwischenwesen). Although Sloterdijk criticizes our efforts

CULTURAL POLITICS

c. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esse

HENK OOSTERLING

to make ourselves interesting, which means to make-oneselfbetter-thanthe-others (VM: 87), with reference to Heideggers
They, an authentic human condition is at hand. 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, inter-esse, means to be among and in the
midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with
it. But todays interest accepts as valid only what is interesting.25
Inter-esse is the cement (Kit) of relationality or Being-with
(Mit-sein). In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt took Heideggers
distinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interests
as interesse: These interests constitute, in the words of the most
literal signicance, something which inter-est, which lies between
people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most
action and speech is concerned with this in-between . . . (Arendt
1958: 182). This ontology of the in-between this esse of the
inter needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. In the
nal analysis, the psychological surplus of generosity and the
substance of creativity Aristotles megalopsychia consist of
this self-reective in-between. Unreected inter-esse asks for the
combination of de-interesting and re-interesting in a nondual type
of morality (SIII: 411).

374

CULTURAL POLITICS

6. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THE

INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK
From the imperative that we have to become lighter (i.e. enlightened),
Sloterdijk draws political consequences. Strategies that favor
heaviness over lightness in terms of resignation (Gelassenheit)
and recycling, and ideologies that still dene human relations in
terms of oppression are declared miserabilistic. Scapegoats are
the Green parties and the Old Left. But is it enough to afrm the
antigravitational ows and criticize gravitational conservatism?
Does Sloterdijks jovial perspective sufce 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 dened as resistance to oppression and injustice in the
political sense (ST: 262, 284, 287). After criticizing Lacan, resistance
to the effort of the analyst to unlock the xated reality principle of his
patient is no option either. Perhaps the deconstructionists rsistance
or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognized
in the refusal to follow the rules of ones own game (ST: 285).
Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. Within
his general science of revolution, this is understood as explicitation.
Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.
Inhabiting the Greenhouse a thermotope (SIII: 396) means
we are still haunted by scarcity. In the absence of a convincing

375

thermic socialism, for the time being we have to be content with

a thermic aesthetics (SIII: 405). His afnity with the avant-garde
not only explains Sloterdijks 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 Beuyss artistic practice give us a
clue.26 Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuyss 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 Foucaults
proposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can we
recognize Sloterdijks exaggerative reasoning in Foucaults 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 transgure 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 articiality [Knstlichkeit]
(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). Reecting the inter
is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. Bazon
Brock qualied 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 Werksttte, 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
Adornos phrase, the totalization (das ganz Groe) 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 Dal is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive.
In the past fteen years these elements have been conceptualized
in art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a,
2003b, 2004a).28 Concepts such as relational architecture (Rafael

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RESCALING SLOTERDIJKS 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 reect 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 Sloterdijks politico-aesthetic strategy. We are entering
an era of new games of enlightenment (VM: 63). Their target is
aesthetic reectivity. 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 rst and foremost relational. Cooperation, participation, and
interaction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to the
fore in creativity.

376

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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
Hlderlins work. He transformed it into das Unheimliche (uncanny).
See Heidegger (1982: 150).
3. Alongside the three volumes of Sphren I. Blasen, II. Globen,
III. Schume [SI,SII,SIII] he published Im Weltinnenraum des
Kapitals. Fr eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung
[WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and its
aesthetico-political implications more specically. Since there
are no published translations available yet, all quotes are my
translations.
4. See Sloterdijk [NG] (2001: 1646); 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 ber Hyperpolitik, Sloterdijk makes
a distinction between megalomania and megalopathia. Aristotle
transformed Alexandre the Greats 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 philosophys raison dtre. See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). See
also SII: 303, n. 130. He renes this concept in later interviews
by dening 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. 30726. It is this inter that I will explore in this
article.
Nietzsche rst 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, Nietzsches Materialism
(1989) is fully focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pages
of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijks 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 Sphren together with Badiou
and other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for their
political innitism (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 Hardts 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 ric Alliez, this volume, pp. 30726.
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 Gnther 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 (bertriebene) reason (NG: 235).
In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusively to
Michel Foucault, with just an incidental remark on Derrida. But
in Sphren Foucault is sidelined by Kristeva, and even more
by Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then denitely Sloterdijks
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.

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HENK OOSTERLING

20. See www.petersloterdijk.net/german/topoi/stadtenergetik.

html.
21. It is, however, surprising that he does not mention Kristevas
nondiscursive semiotik in order to stress the importance
of the acoustic-tactile embedding of desire that subverts its
discursive articulation.
22. See the writings of the present director of the McLuhan Institute:
Derrick de Kerckhove (1997: 46).
23. Sloterdijk understands spherology as a delightenment
(Abklrung), i.e. a dis-enlightenment of our burdened existence.
The delight of wine tasting in which context the term Abklrung
means clarification is implied in this spherological
decanting (SV: 1223).
24. This is the topic of another trans-Heideggerian Nancy (2002).
See Oosterling (2005a).
25. In Heideggerian terms, the ephemeral interest as an indifferent
attitude needs to be transformed to existential inter-esse. See
(1978: 347). See also Being and Time, o.c., p. 124.
26. Utero-topically as a community art analogous to the group as
utero-tope [Uterotop] (SIII: 392); thermo-topically in the guise of
Beuyss work of art The honeypump (SIII: 404) that reminds us
of a sweet life; as an example for the era of the uplifting
that can be seen as a critique of heavy reason (SIII: 733).
27. His lecture at the Tate focuses mainly on surrealism.
28. The outcome of this research can be found at www2.eur.nl/fw/
cfk (accessed 12/5/06).

378

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REFERENCES
Anders, Gnther. 1980. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: ber die
Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Band 1.
Ch. Mnchen: Beck Verlag.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: The Beacon
Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e).
Benjamin, Walter. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. See http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/
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Derrida, Jacques. 1978. From Restricted to General Economy:

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2005a. From Interests to Inter-esse. Nancy on Deglobalization
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archive.com/nettime-l@bbs.thing.net/msg02523.html; http://
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1993b. Medien-Zeit: Drei Gegenwartsdiagnostische Versuche.
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Sauerlnder.

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BOOK REVIEW

Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Fr eine

Philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung,
Peter Sloterdijk, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
2005, 415 pages, 25.50, HB ISBN 3518416766
LIESBETH
NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS
IS AN ECONOMIST
AND PHILOSOPHER AT
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY
ROTTERDAM, THE
NETHERLANDS.
WILLEM SCHINKEL IS
A SOCIOLOGIST AT
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY
ROTTERDAM, THE
NETHERLANDS.

>

Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) delivers

what its subtitle promises: a philosophical theory
of globalization. This book and the theory it expounds extends the morphological philosophy of space
put forward previously by Sloterdijk in the Sphren-trilogy
(p. 14),1 which discusses a philosophical history of what
he calls terrestrial globalization. For Sloterdijk, the globe
as a philosophical concept (Globus, Kugel, sphaira) is a
result of terrestrial globalization (p. 37) the processes
of materialist expansion that produce the world system.
Terrestrial globalization marks the middle stage of a threetier process. It is the only part of humanity that Sloterdijk

393

LIESBETH NOORDEGRAAF-EELENS AND

WILLEM SCHINKEL

CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226915

THE GLOBAL SPHERE:

PETER SLOTERDIJKS
THEORY OF
GLOBALIZATION

394

CULTURAL POLITICS

BOOK REVIEW

nds worth calling world history in a philosophical sense (p. 28).

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, in which we are currently enmeshed.
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. 21). In its emphasis on the intersection of philosophical
and materialist processes through which the globe comes into view,
the book continues a philosophical style that radically differs from
continental hermeneutics, critical theory, or Deconstruction. Instead,
it offers a self-proclaimed metanarrative that seeks to overcome
the aw of former metanarratives, which, Sloterdijk says, were not
meta or global enough (p. 14). Im Weltinnenraum shows the earth
to have gradually become an excentric globe, focusing on being-inthe-world-of-capital because economic globalization has, Sloterdijk
argues, proven to be the most effective totalization, the contraction
of the earth by means of money in all its appearances (p. 17).
In the rst part of the book, Sloterdijk pays attention to what one
might call three discoveries and one invention: the discoveries of
space, water, risk, and the ensuing invention of the modern subject.
Sloterdijk discusses how geographers and seafarers mapped this
modern vision of the world. The very notion of humanity as a single
species becomes possible only after Magellan, Columbus, and
others of their kind. Monogeism the emergence of the single
globe involved a number of changes. For one, the processes of
terrestrial globalization produce a changed sense of locality and
subjectivity. In the modern age, the earth becomes the planet to
which one can return (p. 41). Not the inside, but the outside, the
faraway, the there is what tempts (p. 175). The interior becomes
a mirror of the exterior (p. 44), as becomes apparent in cabinets
of curiosities and in curiosities-collections. When the interior is the
mirror of the exterior world, living conditions condition knowledge
conditions (p. 45). Thought thus becomes oriented toward space,
faraway places, toward the unknown but knowable. It transcends
traditional world spaces. Terrestrial globalization becomes apparent
in its most formalized form in Jules Vernes Phileas Fogg, whose
travels around the world in eighty days (1874) mark, as Sloterdijk
says, the birth of the modern tourist: Fogg travels, with blinds closed,
to places he knows (from the prospectus); Fogg also knows what
they look like, for the point of his travels is not education but
travel itself (p. 66). The message is: the earth is round and can
be rounded.
Yet the modern age also understands that the earth is really
an incorrect name for our planet. Rather, water is discovered as the
leading element. This discovery of water means that the conquest
of the globe takes place over water, resulting in the modern shift
from shoreland-thought to ocean-thought (p. 71). The maritime age

395

dawns, and the liquid element is homologous to the ows of global

capital which stream between the Old and the New World (p. 133).
Modern global capitalism starts with the maritime age. Crucial
herein, says Sloterdijk, is the discovery, next to space and water,
of risk. Speculation and the globe form the conditions of a world
system of capitalism (p. 74). If seafaring brought with it an enormous
potential for trade, this was paralleled only by the huge possibilities
for speculation. The adventures on the ocean were full of potential
opportunities but in austere, faraway markets (p. 75). The modern
entrepreneur is thus born as a speculator on a mostly liquid globe.
He becomes a debt-producer. Debt is no longer a moral decit, but a
source of economic prot. Cartography becomes an object of power;
whoever owns the best image of the world, owns the world (pp.
159, 167). The main fact of the new age is not that the earth goes
round the sun, but that the money goes round the earth (p. 79).
The principle of tele-vision stems from an age in which one must of
necessity look ever further, in accordance with the motto with which
Charles V sailed the oceans: plus ultra (ever further).
The discoveries of space, water, and risk thus lead to a new
form of subjectivity. Because of this new conguration of space
and place that has been discovered by Magellan and others, the
modern subject emerges. Sloterdijk quotes Heidegger (Holzwege,
1950) from Die Zeit des Weltbildes, who says that the essence of
the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture. This
conquest through the image starts with modern cartography and
ends with 21st-century mediatization. Globalization, for Sloterdijk, is
a process (Geschehen) in which Being and Form meet in a sovereign
body (p. 21). The topological message of modernity is that people
are living beings, living at the edge of an uneven round body a
body which, as a whole, is neither a mothers body nor a container,
and which has no protection to offer (p. 54). The modern subject,
aided by researchers, priests, entrepreneurs, politicians, and many
others, is a rationally motivated actor (p. 92). Sloterdijk argues
that this is an autopersuasive subject (p. 102), or a subject that
is in constant need of ideology, and, especially from 1968 on,
consultancy (pp. 912, 1027). The core of modern subjectivity
lies in the shift from theory to praxis (pp. 93ff.). A subject, according
to Sloterdijk, is someone able to suspend inhibition for acting. In
what is an obviously Foucault-informed analysis, Sloterdijk argues
that subjectivity entails an internalized pressure from outside. The
subject becomes constituted in the production of the authority that
orders him or her (p. 93). Modern subjectivity thus hinges on the
organization of the suspension of inhibition to action. The modern
philosophy of the autonomous subject reies the idea that it is the
individual, which overcomes his or her inhibitions to action, yet it
authorizes this by means of Reason or history, through ideology, or,
as is presently the case, consultancy. This subject is an entrepreneur,
a product of action-thought, of progress, of the new (p. 108).

CULTURAL POLITICS

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CULTURAL POLITICS

BOOK REVIEW

Dostoevskys Raskolnikov is the prototype of the innovative

subject, who, through his crime, becomes an action-person (p. 117).
This kind of subjectivity is the consequence and presupposition
of the conquering of the world. It is the action-man that strives
for total inclusion of the globe within a single imperialist/capitalist
world system. Sloterdijk nonetheless argues that total inclusion is
a ction (p. 26). The Crystal Palace of global capitalism to which
we turn below is at once an outside to another inside. In other
words, from the perspective of those outside the Crystal Palace, the
palace is an outside to other insides. The rst to encounter the
failure of the project of total inclusion were the translators of the
modern world, who came across a Babel-like multitude of languages
that could not be integrated into one system (p. 213). 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. 176). Humanity
became a project to be established worldwide. Global capitalism
took resources and brought humanity. The modern discoverers were
the forerunners of todays technicians of corporate identity (p.
129), and the subjectivity of taking (p. 189) became the hallmark
colonization. It is characterized by risk, since every subject is a
potential threat, a point of autonomous initiative, of incalculability (p.
95), and the project of humanity as global subjectication therefore
remains, as Sloterdijk puts it, no picnic (p. 106).
The second part of the book, the great interior, presents a theory
of the global inner space of capital. This theory of the inside is
necessary as globalization repositions humankind: not by complete
global inclusion, as is often claimed, but by local exclusion. Local
immunities are created to cope with globalization. Before Sloterdijk
begins with the description of the global inside, he pays attention to
the change in human social relations. As distance disappears, or at
least shrinks, everyone becomes everyone elses neighbor. Ironically,
this process strengthens misanthropic tendencies and reproduces
the original similarity between neighbor and enemy (p. 220). The
misanthropic Glasshouse spawns terrorism. Knowing how to make
use of the telerealistical situation that has been created, terrorists
are experts in spreading a climate of fear. Through performances that
go beyond the fantasies of Hollywood screenwriters and production
studios (p. 282), they realize large consequences by means of small
actions.
Most interesting in the second part is Sloterdijks description
of the new modus vivendi of people adapting to life between the
local and the global and he offers Dostoevskys Crystal Palace as
an architectural metaphor for the current situation. Here, Sloterdijk
describes the replacement of the nation state by a global comfort
system that mediates between the self and place. About one
third of the population lives in the Crystal Palace: people with better
life chances and more purchasing power are included while the

397

poor parasites are excluded (p. 305). According to Sloterdijk, a

new form of apartheid is born through apartheid by capitalization
(p. 307). Once within the Crystal Palace, however, no one leaves,
as everything the consumer needs is present (p. 275). Probably
unexpectedly, but not surprisingly, Sloterdijk considers communist
states as secondary, albeit less luxurious, building sites of the Crystal
Palace (p. 276). Moreover, communist states and the Crystal Palace
each have their own rules for living. In the global inner space of
capital, collective certainties are replaced by groups of privately
insured individuals (p. 241). Politics is banished from the palace,
not political elections but the mood uctuations of the inhabiting
consumers determine what will happen (p. 268). In addition to their
political choices, the inhabitants have also lost their energy source.
Due to the revaluation of all values the crucial position of labor
has been replaced by fossil energy: people are baptized in oil. The
ontological consequences of this are as follows: the denition of
freedom as the unlimited possibility of mobility; reality as a choice (it
could have been different) instead of necessity and the replacement
of scarcity by waste (pp. 355ff.). How long this ontological change
will stand depends upon the time it takes to replace oil with solar
energy. The consequences of the revaluation of all values are
opaque and diffuse. Yet a number of characteristics are evident:
people will, for instance, earn money without working; enjoy political
security without warfare, immunity without suffering, knowledge
without learning, and be famous without substantial performance
(pp. 334ff.). Living in the Crystal Palace is not difcult as people live a
comfortable life in solidarity. But the Crystal Palace is hard to defend.
This is because, for Sloterdijk, globalization creates new borders
and new immunities that put into question traditional dichotomies.
In political terms: Leftist values are realized through the promotion
of a Rightist programme. Solidarity and success ask for asymmetry,
exclusivity, selectivity, protectionism, and irreversibility (p. 413).
For Sloterdijk, the United States (US) founds the Crystal Palace.
However, the USs perspective on world politics is founded on a
kind of militarized management that guarantees the functioning of
the global comfort system. Yet to survive as a country based on
immigration, which implies welcoming people to the American dream,
the Crystal Palace must be turned into a fortress. Of course, one
can criticize the US from this standpoint, but Sloterdijk is aware that
(energy) resources are necessary to keep the palace comfortable.
He then leaves the reader with the question of whether Europe could
emancipate itself without using military power (p. 390). This makes
Sloterdijks book more personal than the Sphren-trilogy, and much
of this is due to the essayistic style of Im Weltinnenraum. Here, he
addresses the current situation and its antecedents, all the while
reframing global geopolitical questions in terms of a philosophy of
space that recognizes the necessary exclusion accompanying every
inclusion. This work is thus as much a new kind of critical theory as

CULTURAL POLITICS

BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

it is a work of political theory, and it raises awareness of historical

links such as, to name but one, that between Phileas Fogg and US
President George W. Bush. Where it leaves the reader wanting is in
the realm of cultural politics. Sloterdijk assumes the necessities of
inclusion and exclusion, but does not explain the cultural political
consequences of the borders between the inside and the outside.
Thus, in conclusion, while Sloterdijk searches for ways to maintain
a balance between inclusion and exclusion without waging war, he
fails to avoid what might be called the reication of spatiality. For
Sloterdijk and for us, then, questions of inclusion and exclusion, of
the inside and the outside, not only remain contested but also
do so on a global scale. His eulogy of asymmetry (pp. 406ff.)
hence does not grasp more complexity than a bipolar antagonism
such as Schmitts friend/enemy distinction.

NOTE

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CULTURAL POLITICS

1. All references to page numbers refer to Im Weltinneraum des

Kapitals. (All translations are these authors own.)