No More Learning

We must not forget that superhomo is an arch-Christian word in which the high Middle Ages uttered its most intense concern - it was first used for the French king St Louis IX in the late thirteenth century! The exhaustion of such an otherworldly pole becomes most appar- ent in the fact that ever fewer people strive to walk the tightrope. In keeping with an egalitarian zeitgeist of neighbourly ethics, one is now content with an amateurish, at best floor-gymnastic interpretation of Christianity. Even a holy hysteric like Padre Pia had so little faith in the transcendent origin of his wounds that, it is alleged, he yielded to
64
HUNGER ART
the to about cor- rosive acids renew them as required.
Since the nineteenth century, the assembly of an alternative genera- tor for the build-up of high existential tension has been on the agenda. In truth, this generator is set up by demonstrating the existence of an equivalent dynamics in the interior of the existence that understands itself correctly. We must once again invoke the name of Nietzsche, for it was he who succeeded in revealing an a priori asymmetry with a strong pull between being able and being more able, wanting and wanting more, and between being and being more - as well as uncov- ering the aversive or bionegative tendencies that not infrequently aim, under the pretext of humility, for the wanting of not-wanting and of always-wanting-to-be-Iess. Talk of the will to power and of life as constant self-overcoming, by now all too commonplace, provides the formulas for the inherent differential energetics of the existence that works on itself. As hard as the circulating ideologies of relaxation might try to conceal these circumstances, the modern protagonists in the search for the 'true path' have not tired of drawing our atten- tion to the elementary facts of the life demanded from above, as they were before being covered up by trivial moralities, humane chum- miness and wellness programmes. That Nietzsche presented them in heroistic codings, while Kafka favoured the lowly and paradoxical figures, does not change the fact that the two were working towards the same cause. Whether Zarathustra says in his first speech that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and Obermensch' or Kafka has the rope set up close to the ground as a tripwire for the self-righteous - it is neither the same rope nor the same trick in both cases, but the ropes come from the same factory, which has been making equipment for acrobats since time immemorial. The technical observation that Nietzsche tended towards an acrobatics of strength and wealth while Kafka preferred that of weakness and lack does not require further exposition here. This difference could only be discussed within a general theory of good and bad habits and a consideration of the sym- metries between strengthening and weakening forms of training.
Kafka objectified his intuitions about the meaning of acrobatics and asceticism in three tales that have become classics: 'A Report to an Academy' (1917, first published in the journal Der Jude, edited by Martin Buber), 'First Sorrow' (1922, first published in the journal Genius) and 'A Hunger Artist' (1923, first published in Die Neue Rundschau) .
The first of these contains the autobiography of an ape that became human by means of imitation. What Kafka presents is no less than
65
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
a new depiction process perspective
an animaL The motif this transformation is found not in the usual combination of evolutionary adaptations and cultural innovations. Instead, it results from a fatal facticity: the circumstance that the animal-catchers of the Hagenbeck Circus capture the ape in Africa and abduct it to the world of humans. The implied question is not made explicit: why do humans, at the present end of their develop- ment, create both zoos and circuses? Presumably because both places confirm the vague feeling that they could learn something there about their own being and becoming.
The ape already realizes aboard the ship which takes it back to Europe that, as far as its future fate is concerned, the choice between the zoo and vaudeville leaves only the latter as a tolerable option. Only there can it see a chance to preserve some remainder, however small, of its legacy. This legacy lives on within it as the feeling that there must always be some way out for an ape - ways out are the animal raw material for what humans pompously call 'freedom'. In addition, the ape arrives in the human world with its natural mobility impaired, marked by two gunshots fired during its capture - one at the cheek, leaving a scar that causes its captors to call it 'Red Peter', and one below the hip, turning it into a cripple and allowing it to walk only with a slight limp. Hans Wurtz should have included Red Peter alongside Lord Byron and Joseph Goebbels in the class of 'deformity cripples', the limping and misshapen, and partiy also next to Unthan, the armless fiddler, who states at one point in his memoirs that he started limping without any organic cause for a time, but managed to give up this incorrect posture again through intensive training.
Because the vaudeville path is the only one still viable, the ape's humanization leads directly to the acrobatic trail. The first trick Red Peter learns - unaware that it marks the beginning of his self-training - is the handshake, the gesture with which humans communicate to their kind that they respect them as equals. While social philosophers of Kojeve's type attribute humanization to the duel, in which the opponents risk their life on the basis of a feeling that some inad- equately call boisterousness, Kafka's acrobatic anthropology con- tents itself with the handshake, which renders the duel superfluous: 'a handshake betokens frankness'. 52 This gesture is the realization of the first ethics - an ape had to perform it so that the provenance of the ethical from conditioning would become apparent, in this case a conditioning towards similarity. Even before the handshake, Red Peter had acquired a mental attitude that would provide the founda- tion for all further learning - the forced peace of mind based on the
66
LAST
attempting escape worsen its
Having understood that becoming a member mankind is the only way out for the displaced animal, it can do anything it wants - except breaking the crutches on which it limps towards its goal. Between the freedom of apes and humanization lies a spontaneous stoicism that keeps candidates from 'desperate acts', as Red Peter puts it.
The next tricks develop further what was implicit in the first: Red Peter learns to spit in people's faces for fun, and to be good-naturedly amused when they reciprocate. This is followed by pipe-smoking, and finally by dealing with bottles of liquor, which present the first major challenge for its old nature. The implication of these two lessons is clear: humans cannot become what they are meant to represent in their sphere without stimulants and narcotics. From that point on, Red Peter gets through a series of teachers on his way to the heights of vaudeville aptitude - including one who is so confused by his deal- ings with his pupil that he has to be admitted to an asylum. In the end, 'with an effort which up till now has never been repeated', he manages to reach 'the cultural level of an average European',53 which means nothing in one sense, but something significant in another sense, as it opens a way out from the cage, 'the way of humanity'. 54 Summing up, the humanized ape places value on noting that his account is a neutral reproduction of genuine events: 'I am only making a report. To you also, honoured Members of the Academy, I have only made a report. '55
At the next stage of Kafka's vaudeville-existentialist investigations, the human personnel steps into the foreground. In the short tale 'First Sorrow', which Kafka described as a 'revolting little story' in a letter to Kurt Wolff, he tells of a trapeze artist who has become accustomed to remaining up inside the circus dome instead of descending after his performances. He settles in under the tent roof, forcing those around him to look after him up there. Having grown accustomed to an existence far above the ground, he finds moving between the cities in which the circus makes its guest appearances increasingly torturous, such that his impresario does his best to make the shifts easier for him. In spite of this, his suffering becomes ever greater. He can only survive the inescapable travels in the fastest of cars or by hanging from the luggage racks of train compartments. One day, he surprises his impresario with the announcement that he requires a second trapeze at all costs - in tears, he asks himself how he could ever have made do with a single bar. He then falls asleep, and the impresario discovers the first wrinkles in the sleeper's face.
This tale presents fundamental statements of vaudeville 67
THE PLANET OF PRACTISING
into a very
the internal dynamics artiste's existence, starting with the
observation that the artiste increasingly loses touch with the world on the ground. By wanting to settle exclusively in the sphere in which he performs his tricks, he ends his relationship with the rest of the world and withdraws to his precarious height. Such lines read like an earnest parody of the idea of anachoresis, the religiously motivated renunciation of the profane world. Kafka's trapeze artist thus does away with the tension that accompanies a double life as 'artist and citizen', as described in the temporally and conceptually close state- ments of Gottfried Benn and Thomas Mann: he opts for the complete absorption of his existence by the one. His demand for the second trapeze indicates the innate tendency in all radical artistry towards a constant raising of its standards. The urge to go further is as inherent in art as the will to transcend reality in religious asceticism: perfection is not enough. Nothing less than the impossible is satisfactory.
We here encounter a further mental module56 seldom missing from the composition of religious systems: it encompasses the inner operations that present the impossible as achievable - in fact, they assert that it has already been accomplished. Wherever they are carried out, the boundary between the possible and the impossible vanishes. This third building block enables the rehearsal of a hubristic conclusion: the impossibility of x proves that it is possible. In a pecu- liar fashion, the artiste who demands a second bar is repeating the credo quia absurdum with which Tertullian formalized the new syl- logism in the third century. 57 Needless to say, this constitutes the true surrealistic religious module. Its execution involves an inner operation that Coleridge - in an aesthetic context - termed a 'willing suspension of disbelief'. 58 With this, the believer ruptures the system of empirical plausibility and enters the sphere of the actually existing impossible. Whoever trains this figure intensively can attain the mobility in dealing with the unbelievable that is typical among artistes.
Kafka makes his decisive discovery in the form of an implicit clue. He uncovers the fact that there is no artistry whose one-sidedly absorbing training duties do not lead to an unmarked second training. While the first is based on toughening exercises, the second amounts to a course of un-toughening, and simultaneously moulds the artiste on the rope into a virtuoso of the inability to live. That he must be taken no less seriously in this state than in his first function is shown by the impresario's behaviour: he meets his charge's needs in both respects, on the one hand with new apparatus for his high-altitude performance, and on the other hand with all the life-facilitating
68
concern
m moments transition. We now equipment too has the
training devices, devices used by the acrobat to train his increasing remoteness from life. The impresario would have had every reason to be concerned about this second movement towards the limits of possibility. At the same time, however, it proves the artiste's radical artistry - an artiste who remained suited to life would only reveal that he had time for dealing with non-art alongside his art, which would automatically eliminate him from the ranks of the great. Kafka can therefore be considered the inspirer of a negative theory of training.
The author's most significant impulses are to be found in the short tale 'A Hunger Artist'. Here, he augments his observations on the existence of artistes with a statement about their future fate. The opening sentence already makes the tendency clear: 'During these last decades the interest in hunger artists has markedly diminished. '59 The contemporary audience, we are told, no longer derives much amuse- ment from the performances of such virtuosos, while observers were spellbound in earlier times. In the heyday of the art, there were sub- scribers who would sit in front of the cage for days - in fact, the atten- tion of the whole town was fixed on the ascetic, and 'from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted'. 60 While demonstrating his art, the faster wore a black top that greatly emphasized his ribs. He was kept in a cage lined with straw in order to guarantee the full monitoring of his activities. Wardens ensured the strict observance of the fasting rules, preventing him from eating anything in secret. He would never have resorted to dishonest means, however. Occasionally he even had an opulent breakfast served for the guards, paid for out of his own pocket, as a token of his gratitude for their services. Nonetheless, suspicion towards his art was a constant companion.
In better times, hunger performances could be displayed as a self- sufficient sensation in the world's largest venues. The impresario set a limit of forty days for each fasting period - not for the sake of any biblical analogy, but because experience had shown that the audi- ence's interest in large cities could only be held for that long, and began to dwindle if the event continued. The hunger artist himself was always dissatisfied with this temporal restriction, as he felt an urge to prove that he could even outdo himself with 'a performance beyond human imagination'. 61 When he collapsed after his forty-day performance it was by no means because he was exhausted from fasting, as his impresario, confusing cause and effect, claimed, but rather out of frustration that he had been prevented yet again from overstepping the boundary of what was thought possible.
69
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
in art at start the tale began, artist, after some vain attempts to revive the dying genre, decided to dismiss his impresario and join a large circus; here, he knew, he would by no means be a prestigious performer, only a marginal curiosity. His cage was set up near the stalls for the circus animals, so that the visitors who came in throngs to see the animals in the intervals would cast a passing glance at the emaciated ascetic. He had to face the facts, even the bitterest one: he was now no more than 'an impediment on the way to the menagerie'. 62 True, he could now fast for as long as he had always wanted, because he remained unobserved and therefore unrestrained, but his heart was heavy, for 'he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward'. 63 Concealed among his straw, he set records that went
unnoticed.
When he felt his death growing near, the hunger artist made his
artistic confession to the warden who had found him by chance curled up in the straw:
'I always wanted you to admire my fasting,' said the hunger artist. 'We do admire it,' said the overseer, affably. 'But you shouldn't admire it,' said the hunger artist. 'Well then we don't admire it,' said the overseer, 'but why shouldn't we admire it? ' 'Because I have to fast, I can't help it,' said the hunger artist. 'What a fellow you are,' said the overseer, 'and why can't you help it? ' 'Because [. . . ] I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else. '64
After his death, the cage was given to a young panther that leapt about splendidly. The narrator conveys the essence of its existence by telling us that 'it lacked for nothing'.
I do not intend to comment on this oft-interpreted masterpiece from an artistic perspective. In our context, an anartistic reading that takes the text as an intellectual-historical document is sufficient. What is important is to take Kafka's reflection further and arrive at a general ascetological model. What began as a vaudeville philosophy can now be developed into an explication of classical asceticisms. This is due to the choice of discipline: fasting. It is not an artistic discipline like any other; it is the metaphysical asceticism par excellence. From time immemorial it has been the exercise by which, if it succeeds, the ordi- nary human who is subject to hunger learns - or observes in others - how one can beat nature at its own game. The fasting of ascetics is the skilled form of the lack that is otherwise always experienced pas- sively and involuntarily. 65 This triumph over need is only accessible to
70
LAST HUNGER ART
are a master ascetics say hunger God or enlightenment66 must other desire if it is to be sated, they are presupposing a hierarchy priva- tions. The pious language game takes up the possibility of doubling oral abstinence in order to counter profane hunger with a sacred one. In truth, sacred hunger is not a longing to be filled, but rather the search for a homeostasis for which 'satisfaction of hunger' is only a spiritual-rhetorically established metaphor. 67
The decisive aspect of Kafka's asceticism parable is the artiste's admission that he did not deserve admiration, because his fasting was simply a consequence of his innermost inclination - or rather disinclination: all he was doing was obeying his aversion to the imposition of having to consume the food that was available. The statement 'But you shouldn't admire it' is the most spiritual European pronouncement during the last century; we have yet to hear the analogous injunction: you should not sanctify it. What Nietzsche generally described as the negativism of the vitally handicapped now returns specifically as an aversion to nutrition. Hence Kafka's artiste never overcomes himself; he follows an aversion that works for him, and which he only needs to exaggerate. In the final analysis, the most extreme artistedom turns out to be a question of taste. 'I do not like the taste of anything' - thus the verdict pronounced at the Final Judgement on what existence has to offer. The rejection of nourishment goes even further than the message of 'don't touch me' conveyed by Jesus to Mary of Magdalene in John 20:17; it gesturally communicates 'don't enter me' or 'don't stuff me full'. It moves from the prohibition of contact to the refusal of metabolic exchange, as if any collaboration with the absorptive tendencies of one's own body were a depraved risk.
What makes Kafka's experiment meaningful is the fact that he works consistently under the 'God is dead' premise. This enables hunger art to reveal what remains of metaphysical desire when its transcendent goal is eliminated. What transpires is a form of beheaded asceticism in which the supposed tensile strain from above proves to be an aversive tension from within; then the torso is every- thing. Kafka experiments with leaving out religion - to test out a final religion of leaving out everything that previously characterized it: what remains are the artiste's exercises. The hunger artist is therefore speaking truthfully when he asks not to be admired. The withdrawal of the public's interest in his performances comes at exactly the right moment - as if the crowd, without knowing, were following the inspirations of a zeitgeist that wants to speak the final word on the
71
THE
and farmers' republics or followers of a social market economy. What was once the most spiritual of all asceticisms is now, in truth, no more
than 'an impediment on the way to the menagerie'.
Ten years after the publication of 'A Hunger Artist', Joseph Stalin put an end to hunger art by other means when, during the winter of 1932-3, he sent innumerable Ukrainian farmers - counts vary between 3. 5 and 8 million - to their death through a hunger block- ade; they too were untimely, impediments on the way to abundance. 68
Even Stalin was not able to achieve the profanation of hunger com- pletely. The hunger artist actually existed in his time - not in Prague but in Paris, a few years after Kafka's death; not as a man in a black top with bulging ribs, but as a very skinny young woman in blue stockings. She too was an artiste in the field of weight loss for the sake of the entirely other: the greatest thinker of anti-gravitation in the twentieth century, born in 1909, an anarchist of Jewish descent, converted to Catholicism, an insider on all magic mountains of worldlessness and simultaneously a searcher for a rooting in authen- tic community, resistance fighter and defiance existentialist, who wanted to starve alongside the workers in order to ennoble her lack of appetite and humble her nobility. Simone Weil managed to die in British exile at the age of thirty-four of a twofold cause: tuberculosis and voluntary starvation.
72
-5-
PARISIAN BUDDHISM
Cioran's Exercises
The last figure I wish to present in these introductory reflections, the Romanian aphorist Emile M. Cioran, who was born in 1911 and lived in Paris from 1937 to 1995, is likewise part of the great turn that is at issue here. He is an important informant for us, because one can see in his work how the informalization of asceticism progresses without a loss of vertical tension. In his own way, Cioran too is a hunger artist: a man who fasts metaphorically by abstaining from solid food for his identity. He too does not overcome himself, rather- like Kafka's protagonist - following his strongest inclination, namely disgust at the full self. As a metaphorical faster, all he ever does is to show that refusal is the foundation of the great, demonstrating the unfolding of scepticism from a reservation of judgement to a reserva- tion about the temptation to exist.
To approach the phenomenon of Cioran, it is best to take two statements by Nietzsche as a guideline:
Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises. 69 Moral: what sensible man nowadays writes one honest word about
himself? He must already belong to the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. 7o
The latter remark refers to the almost inevitably displeasing nature of all detailed biographies of great men. Even more, it describes the psychological and moral improbability of an honest self-portrayal. At the same time, it names the one condition that would make an exception possible; one could, in fact, view Cioran as the prior of the prospective order imagined by Nietzsche. His holy foolhardiness stems from a gesture that Nietzsche considered the most improbable and least desirable: a rejection of the norms of discretion and tact,
73
THE PLANET THE
to say UVUHHi".
this position once in own work, when he practised 'cynidsm' necessary for an honest self-portrayal in the 'physiological' pas- sages of Ecce Homo - immediately labelling this gesture as 'world- historical' to compensate for the feeling of embarrassment through the magnitude of the matter. The result was more like baroque self- praise than any indiscretion towards himself, however - assuming that self-praise was not a deeper form of exposure on this occasion. The rest of the time, Nietzsche remained a withdrawn prophet who only perceived the disinhibitions he foresaw through the crack of a door.
Whoever, like Cioran, dated themselves after Nietzsche was con- demned to go further. The young Romanian followed Nietzsche's lead not only by heading the Order of Holy Foolhardiness, along with other self-exposers such as Michel Leiris and Jean-Paul Sartre; he also realized the programme of basing the final possibility of self-respect on contempt for oneself. He was able to do this because, despite the apparently unusual nature of his intention, he had the zeitgeist on his side. The epochal turn towards making the latent explicit took hold of him, and led him to commit thoughts to paper that no author would have dared formulate a few years earlier. In this turn, the 'honest word about himself' postulated yet excluded in practice by Nietzsche became an unprecedented offensive power. Mere honesty becomes a mode of writing for ruthlessness towards oneself. One can no longer be an autobiographer without being an autopathographer - which means publishing one's own medical file. To be honest is to admit what one lacks. Cioran was the first who stepped forward to declare: 'I lack everything - and for that reason, everything is too much for me. '
The nineteenth century had only pushed the genre of the 'honest word' to its limits once, in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, published in 1864. Nietzsche's reaction to this work is well known. Cioran worked for half a century on his notes from the attic, in which he treated his only subject with admirable monotony: how to con- tinue when one lacks everything and everything is too much. Early on, he saw his chance as an author in donning the coat offered by Nietzsche; he had already slipped into it during his Romanian years, and never took it off again. If Nietzsche interpreted metaphysics as a symptom of suffering from the world and an aid to fleeing from it, Cioran accepted this diagnosis without the slightest attempt to formulate an opposing argument. What he rejected was Nietzsche's flight in the opposite direction: the affirmation of the unaffirmable.
74
BUDDHISM
For ~ a
who hangs his flag out of the while the world is as unaccept- able as it always has been. Who would speak of the eternal recur- rence, when existing once already means existing once too often?
In his student years, Cioran had experimented for a time with the revolutionary affirmations typical of the time and drifted about in the circles of Romanian right-wing extremists. He took to the fashionable mysticism of general mobilization and to political vitalism, which was praised as a cure for scepticism and an excessive preoccupation with one's inner life. All this invited him to seek salvation in the phantasm of the 'nation' - a close relative of the spectre now active as 'returning religion'.
Cioran abandoned this position - assuming it ever was one - before long. In time, his increasing disgust with its hysterical excursions into positivity restored his clear-sightedness. When he moved to Paris in 1937 to begin an almost sixty-year period of hermit-like existence there, he was not entirely cured of the temptation to participate in great history, but he did increasingly leave behind the exaltations of his youth. The basic aggressive-depressive mood that had always characterized him was now expressed in other forms. During this phase, Cioran succeeded in gaining a lasting foothold in the genre of the 'honest word about himself'.
The impossibility of killing or killing myself caused me to stray into the field of literature. It is this inability alone that made a writer out of me. 71
Never again would he use the language of commitment he had adopted in his Romanian days with the talent of the pubescent imi- tator. The blind admiration he had once felt for Germany and its brutal shift disappeared with it. 'If there is one illness of which I have been cured, it is that one. '72 For the cured man, part of speaking an honest word about his own illness is the admission that he sought to heal himself by dishonest means. Liberated from this evil once and for all, he devoted himself to the task of inventing the writer Cioran, who would set up a business using the psychopathic capital he had discovered in himself as a youth. The figure that created itself in those days could have come from one of Hugo Ball's novels: it presents a 'jostled human', the vaudeville saint, the philosophical clown who expands despair and the disinclination to make anything of himself into a theatre revue.
The secularization of asceticisms and the informalization of spiritu- ality can be observed in Cioran's 'life's work' in the most concentrated
75
THE PLANET THE PRACTISING
In case,
ance was expressed not in an existentialism of
but rather in an endless series of acts of disengagement. The ceuvre of this existentialist of refusal consists of a succession of rejection letters to the temptations to involve oneself and take a stance. Thus his central paradox crystallizes ever more clearly: the position of the man with no position, the role of the protagonist with no role. Cioran had already attained stylistic mastery with the first of his Parisian books, the 1949 text Precis de decomposition - translated into German by Paul Celan in 1953 under the title Lehre vom Zerfall (English title: A Short History of Decay]. Cioran had certainly absorbed the spirit of the Without period to lasting effect; the crutches he wanted to break, however, were those of identity, belonging and consist- ency. Only one basic principle convinced him: to be convinced by nothing. From one book to the next he continued his existential- ist floor gymnastics, whose kinship with the exercises of Kafka's fictional characters is conspicuous. His number was fixed from the start: it is that of the hungover marginal figure who struggles not only through the city, but rather in the universe as a homeless (sans abril, stateless (sans papier) and shameless (sans gene) individual. It is not for nothing that his impressive collection of autobiographical utterances is entitled Cafard [Snitch/Cockroach/Moral Hangover] in the German edition. 73 As a practising parasite, Cioran followed on from the Greek meaning of the word: parasitoi, 'people who sit at a spread table', was what Athenians called guests who were invited to contribute to the company's entertainment. The Romanian emigre in Paris did not find it difficult to fulfil such expectations. In a letter to his parents he wrote: 'Had I been taciturn by nature, I would have starved to death long ago. '74 Elsewhere he states: 'All our humili- ations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. '75
Cioran's aphorisms read like a practically applicable commen- tary on Heidegger's theory of moods, that is to say the atmospheric impregnations of the individual and collective 'thymos' that 'lend' existence an a priori pre-logical tinge. Neither Heidegger nor Cioran went to the trouble of discussing the lending and the lender of moods as extensively as the significance of the phenomenon would demand - presumably because both tended to break off psychological analysis and move on quickly to the sphere of existential statements. In truth, Cioran accepts his aggressive-depressive disposition as the primal atmospheric fact of his existence. He accepts that he is fated to expe- rience the world primarily in dystonic timbres: weariness, boredom,
76
PARISIAN BUDDHISM
thing is the case. He frankly diagnosis
the ideals of metaphysics should be viewed as the intellectual prod- ucts of physical and psychophysical illness.
By taking the approach of speaking 'an honest word about himself' further than any author before him, he openly admits that his concern is to offset the 'failed creation'. Thinking does not mean thanking, as Heidegger suggests; it means taking revenge.
It was only with Cioran that the thing Nietzsche had sought to expose was fulfilled as if the phenomenon had existed from time immemorial: a philosophy of pure ressentiment. But what if such a philosophy had only become possible through Nietzsche's influence? Here the German-born existentialism of defiance changes - bypassing the French existentialism of resistance, which Cioran despised as a shallow trend - into an existentialism of incurability with crypto- Romanian and Dacian-Bogomilian shades. This shift only came to a halt at the threshold of Asian inexistentialism. Though Cioran, marked by European vanitas, played throughout his life with a feeling of all-encompassing unreality, he could never quite bring himself to follow Buddhism in its abandonment of the postulation of reality, and with it that of God. The latter, as is well known, serves to guarantee the reality we know through a 'last reality' that is hidden from US. ? 6 Though he felt drawn to Buddhism, Cioran did not want to subscribe to its ontology. He not only loathed the reality of the world, but also intended to take advantage of it; he therefore had to accept the reality of reality, even if it was only sophistically. He neither wanted to save himself nor to let anyone else save him. His entire thought is a com- plaint about the imposition of requiring salvation.
One could pass over all this as a bizarre breeding phenomenon in the biotopes of Parisianism after 1945, were it not for the fact that it brings to light a generally significant tendency that forces a radical change of conditions on the planet of the practising. Cioran, as noted above, is a key witness to the ascetologically far-reaching shift that we are thematizing as the emergence of anthropotechnics. This shift draws our attention to the informalization of spirituality that I said we should grasp as a complementary counter-tendency to the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. Cioran is a new type of practising person whose originality and representative nature are evident in the fact that he practises rejecting every goal-directed way of practising. Methodical exercises, as is well known, are only possible if there is a fixed practice goal in sight. It is precisely the authority of this goal that Cioran contests. Accepting a practice goal would mean believing
77
THE PLANET THE PRACTISING to act
This running forwards to the goal is the fourth module of the 'reli- gious' behavioural complex. 77 The anticipation generally takes place as follows: one looks at someone perfect, from whom one receives, incredulous and credulous at once, the message that one could be the same one day. We will see in later chapters how the use of this inner operation set armies of practising humans in motion over millennia. 78 Without the module of running forwards to the goal there can be no vita contemplativa, no monastic life, no swarm of departures to other shores, no wanting to be the way someone greater once was. One can therefore not emphasize enough that the most effective forms of anthropotechnics in the world come from yesterday's world - and the genetic engineering praised or rejected loudly today, even if it becomes feasible and acceptable for humans on a larger scale, will long remain a mere anecdote compared to the magnitude of these phenomena.
The believer's running-ahead into perfection is not Cioran's concern. He certainly has a passionate 'interest' in the religious texts that speak of perfection and salvation, but he will not carry out the believing operation as such, the anticipation of one's own being-ready-later. His non-belief thus has two sides: that of not being able, because his own prevailing mood corrodes the naivete required for the supposition of perfection,79 and that of not being willing, because he has adopted the stance of the sceptic and does not want to abandon this definitive provisional state in favour of a position. His only option, then, is to experiment with the leftovers. He is forced to play on an instrument for which any purposeful training would be futile - the detuned instrument of his own existence. Yet it is precisely his performance on the unplayable instrument that shows the unsup- pressible universality of the practising dimension: for, by practising in the absence of a suitable instrument, the 'anti-prophet' develops an informal version of mastery.
He becomes the first master of not-getting-anywhere. Like Kafka's hunger artist, he turns his aversion into a virtuoso performance and develops the corresponding form of skill for his carard. Even in this form one hears the appeal that returns in all artistedam: 'I always wanted you to admire it . . . ' While Kafka's fasting master waits until the end before uttering the contrary injunction 'you shouldn't admire it', Cioran provides the material for demystifying his art from the outset by revealing it on almost every page as the act of letting
78
P ARISIAN BUDDHISM
~ h~
mood speaking when Cioran '1 am of not suffer- ing. '80 'My books express an attitude to life, not a vision. '81 He felt a contemptuous suspicion towards the possibility of therapeutically modifying attitudes towards life; he lived off the products of his disposition, after all, and could hardly have afforded an attempt to change it.
In contributing to the discovery that even letting oneself go can be art, and that, if it is accompanied by the will to skill, it also requires training, Ciaran helped the Order of Holy Foolhardiness to find a set of rules. It is preserved in his Precis de decomposition, this book of peculiar exercises that, as I intend to show, formulates the true charter of modern 'culture' as an aggregate of undeclared asceticisms - a book that exceeds any binding. The extent of Cioran's own awareness of his role in translating spiritual habitus into profane dis- content and its literary cultivation is demonstrated in A Short History ofDecay (whose title could equally have been rendered as 'A Guide to Decay'), the work that established his reputation. Originally this col- lection was to be entitled Exercices negatifs - which could refer both to exercises in negation and anti-exercises. What Cioran presented was no less than a set of rules intended to lead its adepts onto the path of uselessness. If this path had a goal, it would be: 'To be more unserviceable than a saint . . . '. 82
The tendency of the new set of rules is anti-stoic. While the stoic manner does everything in its power to get into shape for the universe - Roman Stoicism, after all, was primarily a philosophy for civil servants, attractive for those who wanted to believe that it was hon- ourable to hold out in the place assigned by providence as a 'soldier of the cosmos' - the Cioranian ascetic must reject the cosmic thesis as such. He refuses to accept his own existence as a component of a well-ordered whole; it should rather serve to prove that the uni- verse is a failure. Cioran only accepts the Christian reinterpretation of the cosmos as creation to the extent that God comes into playas the impeachable cause of a complete fiasco. For a moment, Cioran comes close to Kant's moral proof of God's existence, albeit with the opposite result: the existence of God must necessarily be postulated because God has to apologize for the world.
The procedure Cioran develops for his anti-exercises is based on the elevation of leisure to a practice form for existential revolt. What he calls 'leisure' is actually a conscious drift through the emotional states of the manic-depressive spectrum unencumbered by any form of structured work - a method that anticipates the later glorification
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
life in a state amounts to a practising reinforcement of sense of discontinuity that belonged to Cioran's disposition because of his moodiness. The reinforcing effect is further heightened dogmatically by the bellicose thesis that continuity is a 'delusional idea'83 - it would have sufficed to call it a construct. Hence existence means feeling ill at ease at constantly new
now-points.
The literary form that corresponds to the punctualism of Cioran's
self-observation, which alternates between moments of contraction and diffusion, is the aphorism, and its publicistic genre the aphorism collection. The author establishes a relatively simple and stable grid of six or eight themes early on, using it to comb his states in the drift and move from an experiential point to a corresponding thematic node. With time, the themes - like partial personalities or edito- rial offices working alongside one another - develop a life of their own that enables them to continue growing self-sufficiently without having to wait for an experiential occasion. The 'author' Cioran is merely the chief editor who adds the finishing touches to the products of his typing rooms. He produces books by compiling the texts pro- vided by his inner employees. They present their material in irregular sessions - aphorisms from the blasphemy department, observations from the misanthropy studio, gibes from the disillusionment section, proclamations from the press office of the circus of the lonely, theses from the agency for swindling on the edge, and poisons from the edi- torial office for the despisal of contemporary literature. Formulating the thought of suicide is the only job that remains in the chief edi- tor's hands; this involves the practice on which all further sequences of repetition depend. This thought alone permits, from one crisis to the next, the restoration of the feeling that one is still sovereign even in misery - a feeling that provides discontented life with a minimum of stability. In addition, those responsible for the different themes know what the neighbouring offices are producing, meaning that they increasingly quote and align themselves with one another. The 'author' Cioran simply invents the book titles that hint at the genre - syllogisms, curses, epitaphs, confessions, lives of the saints or guide- lines for failure. He also provides the section headings, which follow a similar logic. In everyday life he is much less of a writer than a reader, and if there was one activity in his life that, from a distance, resem- bled a regular employment or a formal exercise, it was the reading and rereading of books that served as sources of comfort and argu- ments to be rebutted. He read the life of St Teresa of Avila five times
80
P ARISIAN
BUDDHISM
m
process the and,
words, form a bundle of interactions to the nth degree.
The 'negative exercises' of the Romanian 'trumpery Buddha' - as he terms himself in All Gall Is Divided - are landmarks in the recent history of spiritual behaviour. All they require now is explication as valid discoveries, beyond the chummy comments about the prevail- ing mood that have dominated the reception of his work thus far. The scepticism attributed to the author in accordance with some of his own language games is anything but 'radical' - it is virtuosic and elegant. Cioran's approach may seem monotonous, but it almost never leads to the dullness that characterizes radicalisms. What he says and does serves to raise his suffering to the level of skill that corresponds to his abilities. Cioran's work appears far less self-contradictory as soon as one notes the emergence of the practice phenomenon - so once again we have 'one of the broadest and longest facts that exist' in an unusual declination. Even if his prevailing mood was that of a 'passive-aggressive bastard' - as group therapists occasionally put it in the 1970s - his ethos was that of a man of exercises, an artiste who even made a stunt out of sluggishness, who turned despair into an Apollonian discipline and letting oneself go into an etude almost classical in manner.
The effective history of Cioran's books shows that he was immedi- ately recognized as a paradoxical master of exercises. Naturally they only spoke to a small number of readers, but resonated very strongly with them. The small band of intensive recipients even discovered in the writings of this infamous author something whose existence he would probably have denied - a brotherly vibration, a hidden tendency to give the 'Trappist Order without faith', of which he play- fully and irresponsibly considered himself a member, a slightly denser consistency. There was a secret readiness in him to give advice to the despairing who were even more helpless than himself - and a far less concealed inclination to become famous for his exercises in escape from the world. While he may have resisted the tentation d'exister more or less resolutely - even in brothels, even in chic society - he was willing, with all due discretion, to succumb to the temptation of becoming a role model. It is thus not unreasonable to see in Cioran not merely the apprentice of an informalized asceticism, but also an informal trainer who affects others from a distance with his modus vivendi. While the ordinary trainer - as defined above - is the one 'who wants me to want',84 the spiritual trainer acts as the one who does not want me not to want. When I want to give up, it is he who
81
are into memories of own
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
it.
provided an form of suicide for numerous
readers - something that is also said of personal conversations with him. Those seeking advice may have sensed how he had discovered the healthiest way of being incurable.
I read Cioran's output of 'negative exercises' as a further indica- tion that the production of 'high culture', whatever that may mean in specific terms, has an indispensable ascetic factor. Nietzsche made it visible by reminding his readers of the immense system of rigid conditioning on which the superstructure of morality, art and all 'dis- ciplines' is based. This asceticism-based thought only becomes clearly visible when the most conspicuous standard exercises in culture, known as 'traditions', find themselves in the difficult situation of Kafka's hunger artist - as soon as one can say that interest in them 'has markedly diminished during these last decades', the conditions of possibility of their survival will themselves become conspicuous. When interest in a form of life dwindles, the ground on which the visible parts of the constructions erected themselves is revealed here and there.
82
TRANSITION RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST:
From Pierre de Coubertin to L Ron Hubbard
It is time to draw our conclusions from the indications we have discussed about an anthropotechnic re-description of the religious, ethical and ascetic-artistic phenomena. I will therefore return to the two main practice- and mentality-historical tendencies of the last century: the rise of the neo-athletic syndrome around 1900 and the explosion of informal mysticism, regardless of whether it manifests itself privatissime or in the network operations of psychotechnic sects. It is with reference to both of these that the hypothesis of the spectral 'return of religion' can be rendered more precise. I will begin by using the example of the neo-Olympic movement founded by Pierre de Coubertin to show how an undertaking initiated as a cult religion outgrew its religious design to become the most comprehen- sive organizational form for human behaviour of effort and practice that could always be observed outside the worlds of work and war - compared to the dimensions of the neo-Olympic sport cult, even the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages and the excesses of Spanish monastic culture in the seventeenth century (when a substantial part of the populace flooded the prison cells to rid themselves of their selves by all available means) are of a merely episodic character. Then, using the example of the Church of Scientology, founded by the science fiction author Lafayette Ron Hubbard, I will investigate what we can learn when a company for distributing well-known methods of auto- suggestion manages to expand into a worldwide psychagogic firm that claims to be a religion.
I will present the conclusions in advance: the fate of Olympism and the business of the Scientological 'churches' show that 'religion', as understood by those who exploit the notion, does not exist - and never has. Both de Coubertin and Hubbard fell for a modern mirage
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PLANET THE PRACTISING
into
rion in Both wanted to or to
something that cannot be, and which therefore, once 'founded', inevi- tably transpires as something other than what its founder thought it should be or should seek to become. Both founders made the same mistake in opposite ways: actual Olympism refused to become the religion planned by de Coubertin, while the Scientology movement resists being viewed merely as the psychotechnic firm that it in fact is. In the first step of analysing these two refusals, I will clarify the meaning of my claim that religion does not exist. What we are actu- ally dealing with - on a scale whose measurement has scarcely begun - are variously misinterpreted anthropotechnic practice systems and sets of rules for moulding one's inward and outward behaviour. Under the shelter of such forms, the practising work on improving their global immune status85 - which, both on European soil and in Asia, highlights the paradox of how destroying physical immunity has not infrequently been praised as the royal road to boosting meta- physical immunity (immortality): recall St Francis of Assisi's exercises of deliberate attrition for 'brother donkey' - as he was wont to call his body - and certain parasuicidal practices that brought notoriety to Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism and Lamaism.
Cioran's All Gall Is Divided contains the following remarks under the heading 'religion':
Without the vigilance of irony, how easy it would be to found a religion! Merely allow the gawkers to collect around our loquacious trances. 86
This note is instructive, for despite its modern sarcasm, it testifies to a premodern understanding of the phenomenon known as 'religion'. With his micro-theory of the genesis of religion from the commotion around ecstasy, Cioran, the son of an Orthodox priest, continues the line of Old European theories of supply. s7 The two components or 'raw materials' whose combination produces religion are thus an ecstatic performance by an individual and a corresponding curiosity among the masses. The first naturally takes priority, as it contains the more precious element. If one further interprets Cioran's observation, religion only comes about when the rare - the ecstatic offering - approaches the common - profane curiosity - and allows it to gather around it. It is plain that Cioran here reproduces, albeit on a cruder level, the conviction of the classical monotheisms that it is ultimately God, and God alone, who provokes and permits the assemblages whose congealed form we call churches. He organizes the assemblage by, as they say, revealing Himself to humans.
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
In typological terms, the supply-theoretical interpretation of the religious phenomenon corresponds to the Catholic position, in so far as the latter is based on a strictly hierarchical line of offer-conveyance running from God to humans, from the priests to the laypersons. The primacy of the giver and the priority of the gift remain unassailable in this universe. The believers here appear exclusively on the taking side, like the hungry at a soup kitchen. 88 In clericocratic times, the 'word of God' was not simply a sublime gift; it was simultaneously the model of an offer one cannot refuse. That is why the most Catholic of the Catholics still insist on the Latin mass today: it presents the diamond core of the religion of supply. It asks not what humans can under- stand, but rather what God wants to show. For the religion'S fol- lowers, the Most High is most present when the priest carries out his Latin mystery play with his back to the congregation - church Latin is the petrified form of the 'loquacious trances'. Cioran indicates quite openly that he often found himself in states that would have induced more naive natures to take church-founding steps.
Demand-theoretical interpretations of the religious phenomenon take us onto the soil of modernity. Here, to take up our image again, the crowd now takes precedence, and one asks oneself how best to meet the needs of the masses. Now there can no longer be any talk of permitting, from above, the common to be present at the appear- ances of the rare. Rather, it is a matter of giving the many what they want - or what they will want once they have been shown what they are entitled to expect. Those who wish to can see a democratic shift in this. Its consequence is the task of interpreting the assemblage as a demand and responding to it by offering an appropriate supply. To take up this position one must read faith as the updated version of a disposition that is inherent in human existence. Aside from that, it is plain enough why the priority of the demand means that the supply- ing side must be flexible and refrain from adopting any threatening tone.
This brings us into the field of Protestant practices, where, summa summarum, the meeting of demands - for a just God, an address for metaphysical needs, or a helper for a successful life - is the central concern. 89 This applies less in empirical than in typological terms, however; early Protestantism, especially in its Puritan variety, loved the apocalyptic communications characteristic of heartily fist-waving religions of supply. In truth, the Reformation had got under way as a restoration of the offer-theological motif against Catholic inefficiency. It only showed its demand-theoretical quality when the congregations changed into a religiously interested audience. Furthermore, modern
85
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
Protestant theology - the work of Karl Barth, for example - is responsible for the most radical formulation of the supply principle, combined with the harshest rejection of the humanely and undogmat- ically dissolving religiosity of demand that had defined the situation since the eighteenth century. Barth had recognized Schleiermacher, the wooer of the educated among those who despised religion, as the master theologian of the religion of demand - or worse still, the religion of talent - and devoted himself to opposing him as firmly as possible. 90
It was the same Karl Barth who arrived at the thesis - unheard-of in its time - that Christianity is not a religion, because 'religion is unbelief'. He had the right idea, but made the wrong point and pre- sented the most unsuitable of all possible justifications: that the 'word of God' strikes through the fabric of cultural machinations vertically from above, while mere religion is never more than a part of the system of humanities and all-too-humanities set up from below. The argument may seem impressive as a catastrophe-theological intensifi- cation of the situation after 1918, but as a description of the overall situation it would be misleading - for modernity is simply not known for being a time in which God shows Himself vertically to humans. This century the earth was struck by meteorites, plummeting down from the outermost and highest places; but there were no gods among them. Had Barth's claim been true, he would have been right in his resolute enmity towards all natural theologies. He would have had good reason to discard any derivation of religion from the structures of consciousness - and likewise any dissolution of Christianity into enlightened ethics. The reason why his thesis was wrong becomes evident upon closer inspection of the 'vertically from above' motif. We know from the phenomena described above that the entire complex of verticality in modernity is revised into a new version that permits a deeper understanding of the emergence of embodied improbability - Barth, however, did not participate sufficiently in its developments. He fell prey to the error that theologians are ex officio constrained to make: simply co-opting the dimension of vertical ten- sions for the 'call from above' in its Christian decoding.
Nonetheless, Barth must be considered the most important recent 'observer' of verticality after Nietzsche. He succeeded in producing a new presentation of Christian doctrine that presupposes the absolute precedence of God's self-representation. This means that the situation of humans can only be understood in the steepest vertical terms: the true God is the one who uncompromisingly overtaxes humans, while the devil meets them at their own level. Even Barth, however, did
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO EXIST
not existence
the non-religion Christianity. He the fact former were no more 'religions' than his favoured Christian brand. Whether Christian or non-Christian, all of them are both materially and for- mally nothing other than complexes of inner and outer actions, sym- bolic practice systems and protocols for regulating traffic with higher stressors and 'transcendental' powers - in short, forms of anthropo- technics in the implicit mode. They are constructs which, for purely pragmatic reasons - initially out of Roman-Christian opportuneness, then later due to Protestant confessional polemics and enlightened systematics - were given the name reiigio, a term dragged along from the millennium of Latinity, referring back both compulsively and arbitrarily to the language games and cultic pursuits of Roman state bigotry. 91 What reiigio (literally 'reverence') meant for the Romans, before St Augustine took the word out of their mouths and spoke of vera reiigio, can best be learned from a detail: that some of the most important Roman legions were allowed to bear the honorific pia fidelis, on the model of the Legio tertia Augusta, stationed in North Africa, which existed from the middle of the first century Be to the fourth century AD, as well as the Legio prima adiutrix, based first in Mainz and later in Pannonia, which existed from Nero's day until the middle of the fifth century. Owing to Christian alterations of meaning, Caesar's piously faithful followers became the legionaries of Christ, known in French as fideles to this day.
Recalling Pierre de Coubertin's neo-Olympism and Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology raises several questions: what is religion anyway, if the people next door can simply found one? What does religion mean if a Hellenophile educator with a taste for men's bodies in battle and a beaming smart aleck, known until then mainly as the author of cunning space crime novels, believed in all seriousness and unseriousness that they had called one into existence before our eyes? Would that not mean that the safest method of exposing all 'religions' is to found one's own? What do we learn about 'religion' in general by studying the blueprints of newly founded cuIts and observing their modus operandi in their long-term activities? Naturally these questions do not only arise with the two examples highlighted here. They could equally validly be directed at everyone of the many recent religious experiments that have drawn attention to themselves since the French Revolution - from the cult of the Supreme Being founded in 179392 via Saint-Simonism, Auguste Comte's sociological religion, Mormonism, theosophy and anthroposophy to the makeshift neo- Hindu cults and manifold networks of psychotechnic sects spanning
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THE PLANET O f THE PRACTISING
in vivo and in vitro if there been corresponding interest in doing so with the
suitable optics and methods.
As far as de Coubertin's neo-Olympism is concerned, its history has been recounted sufficiently often - most recently on the occasion of the centenary celebrations for the modern Olympic Games in 1996 - for there to be no need for me to reproduce more than some rudi- mentary aspects here. Three sources and elements of de Coubertin's sport-religious system have also been amply acknowledged: they can be found in John Ruskin's gymno-philosophical ideas on eurhyth- mics,93 in Dr Brooke's neo-Hellenistic Olympic Games in Shropshire (held from the mid-nineteenth century on) and in Wagner's Bayreuth Festival, where the archetype of a modern elitist-communitary edifi- cation cult was taken up in its full articulation - six thousand foot away from everyday industrial life and class divisions. Some have also referred to the inspiring effect of the Parisian Exposition universelle of 1889 in order to explain the transfer of the totalizing impulse. Viewed in this light, Olympism appears as a timely globalization of sport in action. 94
The famous Sorbonne congress of 1894 for the 'Reinstatement of the Olympic Games' had already gathered these ingredients together - augmented by de Coubertin's own socio-therapeutic and pedagogi- cal motifs - to form an effective mixture. De Coubertin recounts in his memoirs that at the opening session at the Sorbonne on 16 June, Gabriel Faure's Hymn to Apollo op. 63 for voice, harp, flute and two clarinets, specially composed for the occasion and based on an inscription found shortly beforehand at the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, was premiered before two thousand 'enchanted listeners':
A subtle feeling of emotion spread through the auditorium as if the antique eurhythmy were coming to us from the distant past. In this way, Hellenism infiltrated into the whole vast hal1. 95
At the same time, the Paris congress laid down the fundamental aspects of the games and the organization carrying them: the four- year rhythm, which would create a temporal structure for all future times like a new religious calendar; the enlightened dictatorship of the IOC presidency, later consolidated by the election of de Coubertin as president for life; modernism in the definition of sport; equality of dif- ferent sports; exclusion of children; the principle of circulating games; amateurism (which remained controversial, however, and was sus-
88
TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
pended in 1976); internationalism and the principle of pax olympica. Furthermore, Athens was chosen as the location of the first games and Paris as that of the second in order to draw sufficient attention to their place of birth and their place of rebirth. Little did those in charge know that the Paris Olympics of 1900 would be the low point in the history of Olympism: they were barely noticed alongside the simultaneous Exposition universelle. The lesson from this was that two world festivals at the same time are not feasible.
The first Olympic Games of the Modern Age were held in Athens a mere two years later, with great ceremony, under the patronage of the king of Greece - as a purely andrological festival, for the enthusiastic baron had a famously low opinion of women's sports; he wanted the female role in the games to be restricted to handing the winner the olive branch or placing the wreath on his head. De Coubertin's failure to establish his taceat mulier in arena was only the first of many in the practical realization of his 'muscle religion'. One of the most far-reaching consequences of the first games was that thanks to the donation of a major patron, the Panathenaic Stadium of Athens, from the time when Greece was a Roman province, could be restored and used again. This initiated the stadium and arena renaissance of the twentieth century, which is still producing ever new event architectures based on ancient primary forms to this day. 96 Even the monks of Mount Athos supposedly contributed money to the Olympic subscription, as if following the revelation that in distant Athens, the modern replicas of their own blurred archetypes were entering the stage again - had the first monks of Eastern Christianity not called themselves the 'athletes of Christ', and joined forces in training camps called asketerfa?
The notable and unforeseen climax of the Athenian games was the first marathon. The idea for this came from the French classical scholar and Hellenophile Michel Breart, who, at the closing banquet of the Sorbonne conference, had praised the establishment of a mara- thon trophy for the first winner in the new discipline. When the victor of the race, a twenty-three-year-old Greek shepherd by the name of Spiridion Louys, entered the shining white marble stadium on 10 Apri11896 wearing the fustanella, the traditional dress (the winning time was given as 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds), a state came about that it would scarcely be adequate to call 'exceptional'. It was as if a new form of energy had been discovered, a form of emotional electricity without which the way of life in the subsequent era would no longer be imaginable. What happened that scorching afternoon in the Panathenaic Stadium at around five o'clock must be classed as
89
new
the moment,
A previously itself to the
THE
OF THE PRACTISING
require no proof because they only exist for the duration of their manifestation and are not believed in, but experienced. In that hour a new chapter in the history of enthusiasm was opened - and whoever is unwilling to speak of this history must remain silent about the twentieth century. 97 The Greek crown princes ran the last metres of the race alongside the athlete amid the ecstatic cheering of almost 70,000 people; after he had crossed the finishing line, they carried him aloft before the king, who had stood up from his stadium throne. Had one wanted to prove that a new age of inverted hierarchies had begun, this would have provided the most spectacular evidence. For a moment, an athletic shepherd became king over the king - for the first time, one could witness the majesty, indeed the power of the monarch being transferred to the runner; in later decades, there was even a growing feeling that shepherds and their ilk were striving to rule the country alone. A sustained wave of rapture swept over the whole country; an enthusiastic barber promised to shave the victor for free for the rest of his life. An olive branch and a silver medal were the official marks of honour, and these were followed by a flood of gifts.
It is still unclear how Spiridion Louys acquired the necessary stamina; the shepherd boy had supposedly worked for an officer as a messenger or water-carrier and become accustomed to long distances as a result. In a test run two weeks before the games, he had come fifth. He would hardly ever have encountered the word 'training' until then - I take that as supporting my hypothesis that most varieties of practice behaviour take the form of undeclared asceticisms. 98 For the brothers on Mount Athos, it may have seemed like a confirmation of their intuitions when, not long afterwards, the rumour began to cir- culate that the runner had spent the night prior to the race in prayer before icons - even de Coubertin took this information seriously enough to begin reflecting on the mental and spiritual components of the greatest sporting achievements. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Hermann Unthan and Hans Wurtz, the founder of the games was also convinced that the will ultimately leads to success and victory. De Coubertin therefore made no secret of his aversion to the positiv- ism of sports physicians, who were too 'philistine' in their thinking to grasp the higher dimensions of sport in general and the new move- ment in particular. 99
Pierre de Coubertin believed that what he was invoking under the name of Olympism would amount to no less than a fully valid new
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TRANSITION: RELIGIONS DO NOT EXIST
"Hi~HJ,U. He this view religious of ancient games. During
year existence they had always been held coram deis; in fact, they not only took place before the gods, but also with their approval, perhaps even their participation - in so far as one can interpret the victories of athletes in the stadium and the palaestra as events that never took place without the consent of the divine, and why not their interven- tion too? De Coubertin's yet-to-be-created 'religion of the athlete' did not follow on directly from Greek mythology, however - the founder of the games was too educated not to know that the gods of Hellenism are dead. Its point of departure was the modern art religion of the Wagnerian variety, which had been conceived as a sacred act to reconcile the torn 'society' of the day. As every complete religion has an ordained clergy alongside its dogma and rituals, its embodiment became the function of the athletes. It was they who would adminis- ter the muscular sacraments to the ecstatic masses. This is my body, my struggle, my victory. Thus de Coubertin's Olympic dream unified Romantic Graecophilia, as well as the pedagogical pathos of the nineteenth century, with the aesthetic heathendom of the body cult to form an amalgam that would meet modern standards.
What de Coubertin expected from an effective new 'religion' can be seen in a memoir note on a visit to the Bayreuth Festival. Here he draws parallels between the two seemingly disparate spheres:
Music and sport have always been the most perfect 'isolators', the most fruitful aids to reflection and vision, as well as powerful stimuli, like 'massage of the will', encouraging me to persevere.