No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps because modern philosophers are so fixated on existence and its mortality that they find it difficult to imagine life with a purely expansive dynamic. But even if they lack the ability to do so, it doesn’t mean that type of life doesn’t exist – a life without blockages, without reflection, without exaggerated self-absorption and, above all, without the engram of a near-death experience.
SCHEU: Did you have to confront the possibility of death early on?
SLOTERDIJK: You could say I began as a dead person. It was
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and René Scheu appeared under the title ‘Die Athletik der Sterbens’, in Schweizer Monatshefte 6 (2007): 34–9.
At the time of the interview René Scheu was editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine Schweizer Monat.
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a complicated birth. My parents were Rhesus-incompatible, and that’s sufficient for starting off as a near-dead person. I developed severe jaundice immediately after I was born, which led people who saw me to comment that blue eyes look particularly good with yellow skin. To be honest, I didn’t see it as an aesthetic privilege. From the first moment of my life I was already reminded of its end. When the beginning evokes the end it makes a starting point that colours everything.
SCHEU: In dark colours?
SLOTERDIJK: It was a dark beginning, but it was followed by brighter intervals that kept getting larger. These clearings have meant most to me as a philosopher. Incidentally, Emil Cioran used a similar trope in one of his darkest books, The Trouble with Being Born, where he says: ‘We do not rush toward death,’ but ‘We flee the catastrophe of birth. ’
SCHEU: You have spoken of the possibility of a life in which death casts no shadow. Isn’t that merely the fantasy of a philoso- pher whose birth was a death agony?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to distinguish between death and dying. In the end, nobody can know death – anybody who knows it is already beyond all knowing. We simply observe its protocol, its attendant circumstances, at most the process of annihilation, from the internal perspective up to the critical boundary. Dying has a claustrophobic dimension that is difficult to overestimate. The Romantics suppressed it by always emphasizing the agoraphiliac dimensions of dying: everything becomes big, beautiful and open, you stand on a field of blooms in May, you have more space than you ever had and you fill it with your soul. The truth is, in the death agony, space becomes narrower; you have no place any more, either in this world or in this time. The feeling of a choking point like that is the most unbearable thing imaginable.
SCHEU: Is a life without relation to death really a life worth living? Or would it be something like the infinite extension of thoughtlessness?
SLOTERDIJK: It would be worth living – I use the conjunctive because I personally feel different about this. Yet I can definitely imagine a life like that. Making appreciation of life dependent on its inner relation to death is an old European quirk. Life also exists with its very own intensity and wakefulness, without morbidity and backlog, and without interest in what is beyond death, even without the need for reunion in the world beyond with loved ones who have died. If we look at our concept of life in relation to the Hindu her- meneutics of death, for example, we become startlingly aware of our dependence on our own history and culture. In the Hindu concept,
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the wish is to be delivered from life and released from the wheel of rebirth. In Western culture, by contrast, dreams of reunion are a major source of thanatological fantasies. By the way, it seems to me that in constructing ideas of the world beyond, the fear of negative encounters has been just as powerful as the positive dimension . . .
SCHEU: We want to live forever but are afraid to meet really nasty people in the hereafter . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Then let’s rather live forever on earth. That would be the conclusion of a thanatological explanation of the will to life. The fear of meeting people we hate in the nether world has roused some people’s hopes that there is absolutely no hereafter. People never give up hoping that heaven may be a labyrinth in which the inhabitants lose their way. That reminds me of a popular joke. St Peter is taking a new arrival around heaven and shows him the different sections: the Jews here, the Muslims there, and the Hindus on the other side. At the end of the tour, he points to a grim- faced group behind a wall and says, ‘Hush, those are the Catholics. They think they’re alone here. ’
SCHEU: We can see something like the birth of real life from the spirit of consciousness of death, not only in Western philosophy but also in our popular fantasies – look at Hollywood. Which cultural influences do you think are responsible for this?
SLOTERDIJK: A strong heroic-athletic pathos developed in Greek culture and extended to all areas of life. Since then life has meant being in good form and our greatest hope is a chance to die at our peak. That is the hidden message of the Iliad. The two strongest warriors on the plain of Troy, Hector and Achilles, depart this life at the right moment. They both escape an existence after their best form.
SCHEU: In Christianity, however, people achieve their triumph not in the perfect timing of death but in God, the guarantor of the triumph over death.
SLOTERDIJK: Our modern consciousness of death is indeed a secular relic of the Catholic memento mori culture. If you will allow me a brief digression into philosophical history about an author who combined both the Greek and Christian legacies . . .
SCHEU: Go ahead . . .
SLOTERDIJK: It is interesting that Martin Heidegger, who was a former acolyte, was at his least Catholic at the time when he spoke most about death. This radical communion with oneself, death not only as one’s own possibility but superlatively enhanced as the ‘most deeply personal possibility’, as the possibility of impossibility, to some extent as the anticipation of the Last Judgement in one’s own soul, was also fascinating for the Protestants of the 1920s. As
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a result they believed – wrongly – that Heidegger was their man. Heidegger’s idea culminated in something extremely un-Christian: the heroic appropriation of one’s own death. In Christianity, on the other hand, death was celebrated as casting off the trappings of life, as relinquishing any form of property rights. Heidegger made dying into a borderline case of skill, an appropriation of expropria- tion. This leads, of course, to a heroic attitude that fitted the general political situation of military nationalism between the two world wars.
SCHEU: But the Christian attitude towards death seems more ambiguous to me than you have depicted it so far. Christianity heroized death as well.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s quite correct. In the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Messiah dies on the cross in a pose of extreme self-sacrifice, and the expropriation he suffers is emphasized with great clarity, whereas, strangely enough, in the Gospel according to St John, there is an athletic conclusion in the phrase the Redeemer uttered on the cross: ‘It is finished. ’ This statement is typical of the Hellenization of Christianity. The man on the cross becomes like an athlete who raises his arms at the moment he crosses the finish- ing line. (At this point Sloterdijk fetches the Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and checks the relevant text. ) ‘Tetelestai’, ‘con- summatum est’: it sounds as if Jesus is summing up his own dying performance at the moment he arrives at his goal.
SCHEU: To be able to die, the facility of death – are you saying that the techniques you call ‘anthropotechnics’ in your books, the techniques of self-domestication of humans, are ultimately directed towards overcoming death? Thanks to genetic engineering, will death soon become an option: the only people who must die are those who want to?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern technology undoubtedly has an inner teleology. If we want to understand it, we have to go beyond the usual perception of technology as an extension of our bodily organs. Organ extensions are also dream or fantasy extensions. There is nothing in the results of technology that was not previously con- tained in metaphysics; and there is nothing in metaphysics that was not previously contained in magic. In other words, there is a line from magic to technology, and we have to ask what the magical and the bio-technological disposition of consciousness have in common.
SCHEU: And what would be the answer?
SLOTERDIJK: Probably that we can see magical thought expressed in the most up-to-date technologies. Magical thought starts from the assumption that there is no natural death. Death is always the result of an occult scandal . . .
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SCHEU: Scandal?
SLOTERDIJK: Something evil, a dirty trick, manipulation. Death is a result of external machinations that can be attributed to evil actors. People wouldn’t die if there weren’t somebody who meant harm to them. From this perspective, the naturalization of death is a remarkable achievement of higher metaphysics. It understands nature as a neutral force for order that is powerful enough to put even death in its place. Incidentally, any modern neurotic person would agree with the magical idea that there is no natural death. He knows that unfortunately he is living under one roof with his murderer – his own body. The lung, that old devil! I know exactly what it’s planning. It will murder me one day – but it shouldn’t think I’m going to give up smoking just to please it! Or the prostate, the projected time bomb in the male body that could have been invented by the nastiest feminists. The domestication of death is the greatest cultural achievement of metaphysical thought. It has taken over from the original paranoia. Today this function has been delegated to medicine.
SCHEU: The first human being will be cloned some time in the near future. Do you see a danger in human genetics?
SLOTERDIJK: Keep calm. The domesticating forces that were constructed around these technologies are so great that it would be absurd to assume some crazy despot could seize control of the world using an army of biological robots.
SCHEU: When humans interfere with their genetic make-up it can sometimes have irreversible consequences. For example, they could decide on specific characteristics that would deprive them of their natural openness.
SLOTERDIJK: Agreed. But we have long since been familiar with this problem in another form. It is good old alienation. To a great extent, human living conditions are nothing more than large- scale attacks on the openness of the world. The traditional victims of these attacks are farmers and proletarians – or, at least, that is how critical social theory has portrayed these groups. For thousands of years, they have been deprived of the possibility of living up to their real potential. In short, that humans undercut other humans is a his- torical finding that has troubled class societies from way back when.
SCHEU: That sounds as if you believe in a classless society in which everybody can achieve his or her potential.
SLOTERDIJK: No. The only reason I don’t believe in that is because many people reject openness. This is what all those who criticized exploitation in the name of justice refused to see. If people choose alienation they shouldn’t be forced into liberation.
SCHEU: Does that mean there will be two kinds of people in
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the future: those who are for openness and those who vote for bio- technological alienation?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s possible, but I don’t think that’s the decisive question. I would like to refer to the issue of a life liberated by death in its present bio-technological form. In other words, the discussion about the gene for longevity. The first big fraud case in the still young history of human bio-technology concerned precisely this object. The Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk was supposed to have achieved sensational findings related to this gene. A whole battalion of scientists in California worked on the decoding of the longevity gene, which people obviously believed to exist. The tech- nology prophet Ray Kurzweil described the present as the moment just before the breakthrough to immortality. The idea was: keep going, just don’t slack. The slogan was: ‘Live long enough to live forever! ’ Now let’s assume a scenario in which all human beings can soon live for 150 or 200 years. We would have exactly the situation we discussed earlier. Death would no longer be a natural end. Instead, it would always be left to the discretion of individu- als themselves or an external agent. Where there was once death, there will be murder or suicide. Stone Age logic turns out to be right.
SCHEU: Would you describe these techno-biological imaginings as naïve but not reprehensible?
SLOTERDIJK: The childishness of the belief in a very long life, what we call eternal life, is rather touching. But we Europeans have ourselves to blame. We should never have let the people who later became Americans go. It was clear that they moved away to be able to dream in peace somewhere else. Now we have to deal with their flights of fancy.
SCHEU: You argue in your books for collaboration between humans and technology. You say there is nothing a priori wrong with people acquiring technical equipment and engaging in biologi- cal optimization and digital networking.
SLOTERDIJK: My technicism, or support for technology, is part of my blueprint for General Immunology. It mainly concerns what I call the ‘incubator system’. We must look at human history as a series of attempts to optimize the human incubator. After all, we have been incubator creatures since the earliest times. That is why Homo sapiens was made into a hybrid from the beginning. Humans first became the exceptional beings they are as part of a long, unconscious self-breeding sequence, and this experiment has always taken place in an incubator facilitated by the use of tools. Today we are slowly realizing this – and it would be naïve, if not reactionary, to refuse to acknowledge it.
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SCHEU: What once occurred unconsciously is now coming close to conscious manipulation.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. That’s why I think there should be an absolute ban on fraudulent claims in relation to human bio- technology. Only what can be done with high precision is ethically responsible. But if people could really be trusted to do what they must be able to do, for example, to eliminate certain dreadful forms of inherited pathologies, they wouldn’t be infringing any human rights. There is no human obligation to be ill! I would strongly advocate a second Hippocratic oath. Doctors should pledge not only to benefit health as such but also to benefit the conditions of the possibility of health. Anyone infringing this, by neglecting research, for instance, would be guilty of denial of assistance.
SCHEU: You have made yourself very unpopular in Germany with statements like that.
SLOTERDIJK: In this country people are quick to label you as an ogre. Fortunately, the Swiss have a more pragmatic attitude.
26
DO YOUR DUTY TO ENJOY! Interview with Christoph Bopp*1
BOPP: Professor Sloterdijk, how do philosophers express themselves nowadays? I remember reading the word ‘explication’ somewhere, but I think you’re not an analytical philosopher con- cerned with the meaning of words. What defines a philosophical author now?
SLOTERDIJK: You’re starting right at the beginning with ques- tions that should be left until the end! The rules say you should start by asking things like: what do you think about the fact that autumn is coming? Or: what is your relationship to Switzerland? But you want to know fundamental things immediately and if I gave the right answers you would only be able to respond with enlightened silence.
BOPP: Let’s avoid that. However, a journalist can hope for indulgence if he starts head on. Given the scope of your work, he is certainly at risk of asking about things he should really have known. And if you pose the question of the author’s self-image you can be fairly sure that it has already been answered, at least indirectly.
SLOTERDIJK: So how does the author see himself? Seeing oneself as an author is a statement with its own implications. Most people can’t or don’t want to claim authorship. I can only do it myself by looking back at a life trajectory marked by around thirty occasions on which my books first entered the public arena. With a
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Christoph Bopp appeared under the title ‘Der neue Kategorische Imperativ: “Erfülle deine Genießerpflicht! ”’, in <litart. twoday. net/files/Peter-Sloterdijk-/>
Christoph Bopp is a Swiss journalist.
Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 219
long track record like that you can hardly deny you are an author – even if your career was affected by a trend that ran through the cultural superstructure in the 1970s. At that time people used to talk seriously about a sad event called the ‘death of the author’.
BOPP: Well, by now the subject is already dead philosophically as well.
SLOTERDIJK: Its wretched end is part of the same wave of declarations of death. Yet the subject is still around, haunting, very much alive, just like the ghostly ‘author’. Take my own specific case: how can a dead man write thirty books? At which desk could he have done that?
BOPP: Anyway, you coined the phrase ‘thinker on stage’ for Nietzsche.
SLOTERDIJK: That expression contains part of my author theory. I described Nietzsche as a thinker who not only performed like an actor on stage but actually also saw his psyche as a stage on which rival ‘artistic drives’ duelled with each other. He offered his own self to these drives as a theatrum belli and let the conflicting energies fight each other. This is an image I was able to adapt for household use.
We shouldn’t envisage the author as a river flowing calmly and untroubled from source to estuary. True, there are states of fluidity, but the clashes are more important for production. The author is actually a moderator of the partial energies at work inside him, and his writing oversees the collisions.
BOPP: Does he describe them like an accident reporter?
SLOTERDIJK: He looks into his inner self and reports which corpses are lying on the street again today.
BOPP: In your book, Rage and Time, whose title alludes to Heidegger’s Being and Time, you casually remarked that Heidegger was not the kind of author who – to quote Nietzsche again – would have been able to deal with such ‘dangerous truths’. Do you mean Heidegger would have sidestepped such clashes or avoided them?
SLOTERDIJK: To avert any possible misunderstanding: Heidegger made an enormous contribution to contemporary phi- losophy. I was a follower of Critical Theory, however, and that means I was only able to concentrate on Heidegger after my return from India, after 1980. He had previously been regarded as a non- person in our circles and was buried under an obscure taboo. That’s why I only discovered later what he had to offer – for example, a very inspiring theory of moods [Stimmungen]. This involves pre- logical shades of Dasein that precede all individual cognitions. Such gains in the scope of philosophical discourse are significant because they help to correct the over-exaggerated rationalism of tradition. They allow philosophy to connect up with a large variety
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of life experiences that were previously inaccessible to philosophical discourse.
BOPP: But aren’t you very critical of Heidegger in Rage and Time?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, I try to show that the founding of histori- cal time – in fact, ‘historicity’ is one of the pathos-imbued words Heidegger used in his youth and middle period – didn’t occur in the way he imagined it. We do not receive either a ‘call of Being’ or a ‘call of care’. Instead, great history arises through the memory of injustice and the process of resentment. When the sediment of unprocessed and unrequited experience of suffering forms in human memories, a history-making mechanism goes into motion, a sort of ‘causality of fate’, as the early observers of tragic events described it. The effect is that the consequences of an evil deed reappear at a later time in another place.
BOPP: The timespan stretches from the suffered and remembered injustice to its retribution.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. We can’t comprehend the original process of the founding of time at all without investigating those feelings of setback and the transactions for reparation. At this point a gap opens up in Heidegger’s studies, and I tried to close it in Rage and Time. In doing so, I couldn’t avoid moving Heidegger closer to Nietzsche again. The latter broached the major moral topic of the epoch in the twentieth century with his theory of resentments. But aside from Max Scheler’s contributions,1 there was hardly any advance in the area of resentment analysis after Nietzsche’s great intervention. It was high time to take a new approach to the phe- nomenon in the light of our experiences with the gigantic conflicts in the twentieth century. If we don’t show how resentment could become the primary historical power in it, the whole epoch remains obscure.
BOPP: That seems to me not just a type of analysis, but also a totally different perspective on history. It means no longer looking at it as development, as an unfolding process. We can’t explain any more how something became but, rather, in retrospect, we can see stages and events happen that become realized to some extent and become, in turn, the seeds for further realizations.
SLOTERDIJK: We should be mindful here of the synergy between involuntary and voluntary memory. The phenomenon of
1 Max Scheler (1874–1928) was a German philosopher, psychologist, soci- ologist and anthropologist. He is known as the founder of philosophical anthropology.
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resentment itself is composed of moments of voluntary and invol- untary memory. Europeans were able to observe this recently in the remarkable process of the break-up of Yugoslavia. At that time Miloševic preached the myth of lordly defeat to the Serbs. In his infamous speech at the Gazemistan memorial on the 600th anniver- sary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, he said that the more the Serbs had lost back then, the more they had won since. That was a sort of admission of failure of all histories fuelled by resentment: ‘We’ – whoever he actually meant by that, but in any case ‘a collective of chosen losers’ –
BOPP: ‘We’ have entered history . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I have speculatively deduced far-reaching con- sequences from those kinds of ‘entries’. I proposed describing the historical collective that is generally called ‘peoples’ or, more recently, ‘nations’, as groups processing resentment that put them- selves under stress by remembrance of collectively experienced traumata. For most people, those traumata are something inherited from far away, something they could certainly not have suffered themselves. As an individual, I can’t remember humiliation inflicted 600 years ago, but somehow I acquire joint ownership of this trauma.
BOPP: Identities that already carry the seed of violence within them to some extent. . . .
SLOTERDIJK: After the Second World War the Germans showed in an exemplary fashion that there is an alternative way out of humiliation. They have worked on their trauma so intensively that they have completely broken out of the repetition compulsion. In the truest sense of the expression, they have become a different nation.
BOPP: You spoke earlier of ‘ownership of a trauma’, and you also work with economic metaphors in Rage and Time. The book features ‘rage banks’ where people can deposit their savings. That makes rage into ‘capital’ that can be invested. And investments are made to increase the capital. But if we talk about ‘banks’ there have to be ‘bankers’ who manage the resentment capital. Who would these ‘historical subjects’ be? Great figures? Lenin or Hitler?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, it is the political parties that use the function of resentment banks. The best way to describe the differ- ences between parties is this: the more they move towards the edge of the spectrum, the more we can justly suspect them of making deposits in the collection of ‘dirty energies’. In this context, what distinguishes the extreme left and the extreme right is that the left takes up the dirty energies to refine them whereas the right expresses them more or less unfiltered. The political pathologist’s findings
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show that the left tends to dream and be hypocritical while the right tends to brawl and stink. That doesn’t say anything about the criminal energies at work on both sides. Historical experi- ence reveals that, in the twentieth century, for every murder in the name of race there were two or three murders in the name of class.
BOPP: Can you explain once again how this bank scheme functions?
SLOTERDIJK: To begin with, not only money can be accu- mulated but also affects such as rage. Moreover, knowledge or art collections have functions analogous to capitalism. Similarly, the Church collects the treasures of salvation. We can always talk of capital when values are accumulated at a collection point to be transferred from the form of treasures to the form of capital. A treasure lies passively on a pile, as in Scrooge McDuck’s storehouse, or in the legendary gold cellars under Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Capital, on the other hand, is always travelling, always on invest- ment tours.
BOPP: Does this imply that knowledge, too, is not inherently ‘value free’?
SLOTERDIJK: As research it is structured in the form of knowl- edge capital. Accumulated knowledge is used as capital to create more knowledge.
BOPP: The crises are the essence of capitalism.
SLOTERDIJK: Valorization crises can also be seen in the non- monetary banking system. Knowledge loses value when what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm shift’ occurs, when new basic assumptions for the organization of realizations are established. In art history the crisis appears as a modernization boost that leads to a new relationship between the existing and the new. I am trying to show that an accumulation process and the related capital forma- tion have also existed in the area of political affects. Above all, the classical internationalist left has positioned itself as the ‘world bank of rage’. It has tried to operate a kind of emancipatory politics on a transnational scale with the outrage assets and rage assets of mil- lions of small owners.
BOPP: With the promise that ordinary people will also have a share in the privileges of the rich.
SLOTERDIJK: Bank transactions are not the only context in which we can talk about yields and dividends. Interest should also accrue when the rage and anger account is in credit. That occurs when appropriate political practice leads customers’ deposits to be converted into enhanced self-esteem. If my outrage credit is deposited in an efficiently managed rage bank, which means a party
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that works determinedly towards its goals, I am not just abstractly participating in an enterprise to improve the world, I also become part of a project that I am proud of and that improves my affec- tive position. My rage is transformed into enhanced self-esteem. Unfortunately, the left-wing parties have often failed to achieve this. Then the clients withdraw their deposits. They either become apolitical or take their savings to a right-wing bank, which then practises direct revenge politics and chooses the uncensored form of expressing rage. The right-wing bank directors appear relatively uncensored as rowdies, populists, provocateurs and rabble-rousers, drawing in the frustrated voters and rabble sympathizers. At any rate, a person who identifies with the party boss’s rabble-rousing gets gratification very directly. My rage will no longer be idealisti- cally ennobled but at least I will be able to express it openly as part of my life. It’s obvious that such scenarios must end in disappoint- ment. For every slap in the face the populist gives he gets one and a half slaps back – a classic loss-making business. Generally speaking, the problem of political parties seen as rage banks is the mismanage- ment of affects. That can go as far as open investment fraud.
BOPP: Could you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: From the perspective of the philosophy of history, the biggest emotional fraud in twentieth-century history occurred in August 1914. This triggered the implosion of left-wing interna- tionalism, following which the parliamentary left in Germany and elsewhere granted the war credits, falling into step with the policy of waging nationalist warfare. This meant that the left wing’s transna- tional and progressively invested emotional credit was misused for a nationalist-imperialist war. The left-wing system has basically never recovered from that disaster. It also partly explains the pathological radicalization that occurred in Russia after 1917 and the daydream- ing on the extreme flanks of politics.
BOPP: The thymotic impulses seem to have died down to some extent in Western Europe today. We have accepted that the capital- ist system satisfies our needs adequately and we can safely leave it to shape the future. There are still conflicts now and then, but they are ritualized and occur periodically between labour unions and the state. Labour-union bosses have to be credible and convince their clientele that they have fought and haven’t let themselves be cheated.
SLOTERDIJK: But these negotiating rituals are much more important than people generally think because they are about a thy- motic yield. Conflicts between social partners are never just about percentages. Wrangling for recognition and satisfying frustrated expectations is always important as well.
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BOPP: We really have it so good. After all, we’ve got everything. Everything is always available. Consumerism instead of commu- nism. . . . (A woman’s voice over the loudspeaker says, ‘Would you like breakfast? We’re happy to serve you. ’)
SLOTERDIJK: There’s the answer to your question! A voice from above tells you your needs. That’s consumerism personified. For sure you would like breakfast? Yes? Then it’s your damned duty to enjoy it. And if you can’t enjoy it, our job is to show you ways and possibilities to enjoy things anyway. This is the new categorical imperative: do your duty to enjoy!
BOPP: Can this imperative be generalized?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. All it needs is for us to recognize that we are being called on to metabolize. There’s not much to object to in that. People used to see it as a mortal curse that human beings – as metabolic beings – are bound to the material sphere. The spirit, however, knows no hunger and is driven at most by a longing to see the higher things. Today, things are shown in reverse. Now you are supposed to forget everything that could release you from needs. Avoid the temptation of not needing anything at all costs. Don’t get the idea you can cheat your way out of the permanent cycle of consumption. Your body has to do its consumer duty.
BOPP: Only the body?
SLOTERDIJK: No, the senses were also recruited for duty a long time ago. The eye is on image duty day and night. The ear is on music and sound duty and, since the wellness wave started rolling, the skin is permanently on feeling duty as well. The modern angel of prosperity floats above everything. It no longer says, ‘Fear not! ’ as it did to the shepherds way back then, but instead, ‘Enjoy it! ’
BOPP: Is it a monotheistic angel?
[Peter Sloterdijk’s latest book has the title Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen. 2]
SLOTERDIJK: Consumerism is a kind of behaviour with a high capacity for anthropological connectivity. I suspect that all cul- tures that have involved a high degree of superego formation can veer towards consumerism relatively easily. People who are used to thinking in terms of service and performance can extend these principles to consumption as well. First you achieve something, and then you can afford something.
BOPP: But isn’t the capitalist the ascetic and the aristocrat the epicure?
2 English edition: Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms (Cambridge: Polity), 2009.
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SLOTERDIJK: That was Max Weber’s opinion, but his view was one-sided. At the very least, capitalism was driven just as much by the luxury of the epicurean classes. We still get instructive illus- trations of this today: a psycho-historical phenomenon has spread in Africa and the Arabian oil states – an overabundance of epicu- rean uselessness. Overnight, the pride of Arabian manhood was swamped with unexpected wealth, and this created the oil sheikhs, the newcomers to extreme consumerism who can be compared with the Russian nouveau riche that emerged recently. These people have never had work experience. This shows how easily consumer- ism penetrates into the psyche: people are evidently beings attuned to luxury by nature. Accession to wealth is possible from all sides. Whether Shintoist, Calvinist, Catholic or animist – people react very similarly once they get rich: they finally feel understood and accepted!
BOPP: Is luxury capable of globalization? Could it bring eternal peace?
SLOTERDIJK: That is psychologically and economically impos- sible. Part of the nature of luxury is that it creates strong paradoxes. Satisfaction with life can never be derived from net luxury. It lives chiefly from comparison: most people would gladly do without absolute advantages as long as they are relatively better off than others. Not everybody can take first place. This paradox is insur- mountable, and no kind of egalitarianism can get around it. There will always be a group of people that are more ‘equal’ than all the others.
27
EVEN A GOD CAN’T SAVE US Interview with Julia Encke*
ENCKE: Mr Sloterdijk, why must we change our life?
SLOTERDIJK: The global crisis dictates change. We must change our life decisively because otherwise we are participating in an economic and ecological programme of self-annihilation. In the ancient history of humankind there also were stern authori- ties, gods, gurus and teachers who troubled their followers with enormous demands. Nowadays, we have to deal with an ungodly goddess called ‘crisis’ who demands that we evolve new forms of life. Human groups usually have a long-term project, a will to continued existence. But that project of permanence is completely incompat- ible with the present modus vivendi. Incredible things are happening in this context.
ENCKE: What exactly do you mean?
SLOTERDIJK: For example, the state has reached such a peak of helplessness that it is openly considering whether to give its citi- zens money to go shopping. Unbelievable! We have to be publicly reminded to maintain at all costs the level of extravagance we once achieved. I can still remember how Edmund Stoiber1 told the people of Munich during an earlier crisis, ‘Go on, give your wife a fur coat
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Julia Encke appeared under the title ‘Uns hilft kein Gott’ [‘No God will Help Us’], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (22 March 2009): 21.
At the time of the interview Julia Encke was a member of the FAZ news- paper’s editorial team in Berlin.
1 The southern German politician Edmund Stoiber was Minister President of the Federal State of Bavaria from 1993 to 2007 and head of the German Christian Democratic Party from 1999 to 2007.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 227
now! ’ The reason was that Rieger Pelze, a leading fur goods store in Munich, had a financial crisis, and Minister President Stoiber, who was a stalwart supporter of the Bavarian system of nepotism and a personal friend of the firm, thought almost like an old comrade from 1968 that ‘the personal is political’. The present procedures for rescuing the extravagant society aren’t any less incredible. Overnight we have been catapulted into a giant seminar on econom- ics and anthropology where people reflect on how global and real expenditure can continue.
ENCKE: Who is supposed to change their life? Do you really mean everybody? Or do you mean a specific ‘elite’?