Juan Carlos Valdivia y las relaciones con la otredad

Ultimately, Sloterdijk’s 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 expression, self-preservation, 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 Baudrillard’s gauche divine), elsewhere of “Nietzsche’s fifth 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 Sloterdijk’s 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 Badiou’s characterization of le siècle 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 defined 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 flows 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 Žižek or Badiou, who figures as “one of the last keepers of the treasure of lost radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-first 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 twentieth-century 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 identification 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 first proposed by Nietzsche and Bataille, that traces the concept of revolution back to the hot zone of Augustine’s 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 Badiou’s Platonism – which must be compensated for by “a Realpolitik at any cost” (2006: 225). Therefore, while for Badiou the defining 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, today’s “extremist” automobilizations and

“holy” accelerations still count on what Hegel called “the monstrous power of the negative” to turn history into an infinite “depository of resentment” (ibid.: 103ff.). They depend on a denial of the “break out of modern ‘society’” from the “definitions of reality from the age of material poverty and its spiritual compensation” (2001b: 87ff., 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 Sloterdijk’s strategy to outdo negativistic and submissive hyperboles with an “emancipated critique of hyperboles” that groundlessly celebrates life: “Only hyperboles help against hyper-boles” (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” definitions of the real (2004: 880–85). 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 don’t need a disinhibiting theory, but a critical theory of the “negentropic”³⁰ factor of “density” (Dichte) which determines the intimate physical and mental traffic, or in more intimate terms, intercourse (Verkehr), among the localities of the

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globalization process (1999a: 835, 2005: 27, 277ff.). Heidegger’s vertical kinetics of the Kehre between fallenness (Verfallenheit) and reversion (Umwendung) don’t 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 finding 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 Bismarck’s 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 Sloterdijk’s 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 first found, after Sophocles’

canonical metaphor of the “ship of state,” with fifteenth-century Portuguese seafarers – it is Sloterdijk’s argument that we still don’t 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 definition of the real in a new “ecology of expression” that is no longer determined by “the resentment of antiquated bivalence against misunderstood polyvalence” (2001b: 223, 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 don’t 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 first 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 Man’s Radical Mediocrity. Rescaling Sloterdijk’s Grandiose Aesthetic Strategy,”

Henk Oosterling adopts Sloterdijk’s analysis of globalization as the megalomaniacal or “hyperpolitical” installing of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in terms of a threefold (energetic, informational, and epistemological) “explicitation” of man’s radical immersion in his own media and discusses the political potential of Sloterdijk’s merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Nietzschean and Bataillan principle of excess rather than on lack and scarcity. If today,

“radical mediocrity” is our first nature, then we need strong criteria to differentiate between miserabilist and affirmative 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-reflective, and therefore “radical,” mediocrity. In the final analysis, the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reflective in-between.

Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires, as Oosterling argues, a downscaling of Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitical understanding of being-in in terms of micropolitical art practices: lack and abundance are of interest because they are directly political and value creating, 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 Sloterdijk’s 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 Sphären, his

“thinking coldly” (2001a: 215f., 306, 2006: 105; see also the interview in this issue) for a reader interested or acting in the field of

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cultural politics? Sloterdijk’s own first 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 difficulties in translating the Sloterdijkean discourse into English. Most of all, I’d like to thank John Armitage for the opportunity he has given me and for his inexhaustible faith in the project from start to finish.

NOTES

1. He is one of four Germans – besides Jürgen Habermas, Hans Küng, 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. Nietzsche’s 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 Zarathustra’s 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 deficiency of pusillanimity. Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 6.

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7. In an unpublished interview (Scheltema, Amsterdam, March 2006) with me, Sloterdijk defined “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 Heidegger’s poièsis (bringing forth into the open) with what Bruno Latour calls

“articulation” (Sloterdijk 2004: 208ff.). See also Oosterling’s remarks in this issue.

9. Sloterdijk refers to Sphären as a “medial poetics of existence”

(1998b: 81). Ever since Der Zauberbaum (1985), he writes about human facts from a materialist perspective of man’s immersion in media as a medium amidst media. This approach is as much indebted to psychoanalysis as it is to Marshall McLuhan’s 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: 340–53) 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 Žižek, though his conclusions are quite different, because he doesn’t accept the colloquial distance between the scene and the obscene which only allows for politics on the level of the symbolic. 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 Sloterdijk’s use of Tarde, ibid.

12. Sloterdijk has argued Negri’s work to be a mysticism of being-against 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

12. Sloterdijk has argued Negri’s work to be a mysticism of being-against 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