Looking back over the years these interviews cover, my first
impression
of myself is defencelessness, or the ability to be enticed.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
Selected Exaggerations
Peter Sloterdijk Selected Exaggerations Conversations and Interviews
1993–2012
Edited by Bernhard Klein Translated by Karen Margolis
polity
First published in German as Ausgewählte Übertreibungen. Gespräche und Interviews 1993-2012 © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2013
This English edition © Polity Press, 2016
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9165-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9166-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author.
Title: Selected exaggerations : conversations and interviews, 1993-2012 /
Peter Sloterdijk.
Description: English edition. | Malden : Polity, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015024410| ISBN 9780745691657 (hardback) | ISBN
9780745691664 (pbk. )
Subjects: LCSH: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947---Interviews. |
Philosophers--Germany--Interviews. | Philosophy, German--21st century. Classification: LCC B3332. S254 A5 2016 | DDC 193--dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn. loc. gov/2015024410
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Contents
In Place of a Preface vii
1 The Half-Moon Man 1
2 Why Are People Media? 7
3 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 12
4 Uterus on Wheels 23
5 Fire Your Shrink! 25
6 Philosophical Retuning 33
7 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 40
8 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 49
9 On Wealth and Self-Respect 56
10 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 65
11 Postmen and Fallen Towers 76
12 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts 82
13 Good Theory Doesn’t Complain 106
14 There Are No Individuals 113
15 Confused People Spread Confusion 119
16 Germans Want To Be Compelled: Theory for the Year’s
End 125
17 Comparatists of Happiness 139
18 Image and Perspective: An Experiment in Atmospheric
Seeing 152
19 On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 164
20 A Team of Hermaphrodites 175
21 Under a Brighter Sky 183
22 Making the Effort: The Reader 187
23 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 192
24 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 202
vi Contents
25 The Athletics of Dying 211
26 Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 218
27 Even a God Can’t Save Us 226
28 A Plug for Higher Energies 232
29 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 237
30 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 256
31 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 265
32 Humans in Repetition: The Twenty-first Century Will Be
Acrobatic 305
33 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background 313
Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note 323 Appendix 327
IN PLACE OF A PREFACE1
Bernhard Klein in conversation with Peter Sloterdijk
Karlsruhe, 17 December 2012
KLEIN: Mr Sloterdijk, after extensive research I have compiled a selection of your interviews over the past two decades, a very compact selection from an enormous wealth of material, but still a weighty volume. I am aware that interviews are only a small part of your publishing activity – the phrase ‘tip of the iceberg’ is very apt here. You have more than forty books to your name, and have also written a large number of essays for a wide range of newspa- pers, periodicals and anthologies. You have held professorships in Karlsruhe and Vienna for the past twenty years, and you only resigned from the position in Austria quite recently. Aside from this you have had a full timetable as a speaker at all kinds of events, and you have participated in numerous conferences, conventions and symposia. You have given readings from your latest books, and held seminars, ceremonial addresses and after-dinner speeches. You have done interviews in many media and for over ten years you moder- ated your own TV programme.
According to the general wisdom, ‘less is more’. Why, in your case, is more more? Does your almost frantic creative energy express something of the powerlessness every writer feels when faced with the silence of the library?
1 Translator’s Note: Some of the original interview titles have been changed in the German edition of this book and in the present English translation.
All notes are by the translator, with the exception of those marked with an asterisk, which are provided by the German editor.
viii In Place of a Preface
SLOTERDIJK: I think the real answer to the question of the main impetus for my work is connected more to an inner state rather than an actual motive. Looking back over the years these interviews cover, my first impression of myself is defencelessness, or the ability to be enticed. The cliché of the born writer’s endogenous, ebullient productivity certainly doesn’t apply to me, and nor does the model of committed literature. What people see as productivity in my case is usually only my inability to defend myself against suggestions from other people. It starts from a degree of over-compliance. This is ultimately responsible for the constant transition from passivity to production. But this state would not be sustainable without some cockiness. If I took on an additional task, it meant I was prepared to say I could manage that. In the process I sometimes got exhausted, of course, but that was superseded by an incredibly reckless trust in my powers of regeneration. That, incidentally, is the only dif- ference worth mentioning between my earlier life and the present: for a while now, I have noticed that regeneration demands its own time.
KLEIN: Take us into your creative workshop. Can you describe your working technique and explain how you organize your library? How do you remember things?
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can really know how his memory works. I only know I must have a well-organized internal archive even if it might seem chaotic to other people. My inner archivist finds access to the important files fairly regularly. He is one collaborator who has never disappointed me. He fortuitously retrieves documents I didn’t even know had been filed ready for reference. Sometimes he unwittingly discovers nearly finished pieces of writing that I only have to copy up.
KLEIN: To what extent does your relation to language enhance your zest for writing and publishing?
SLOTERDIJK: Language is generally seen as a medium for understanding – an assumption that writers shouldn’t accept unquestioningly. A critical minority sees language as the starting point of all misunderstandings. Wittgenstein even thought that philosophical problems arose when language goes on holiday – although he didn’t reveal to us what he meant by ‘going on holiday’. Does it mean being nonsensical? Or poring over pseudo-problems, firing excessive volleys into the air? Anyway, he toyed with the idea that one could just as well do without language; the deflationary tendency is clearly evident. Reading that, I can imagine a wrinkled janitor entering the scene who wants to put an end to the silliness of youth. Statements like that seem narrow to me. You really don’t know what might happen if you get involved in going on holiday. I
In Place of a Preface ix
prefer the opinion of Wittgenstein’s fellow Austrian, Egon Friedell, who said: ‘Culture is a wealth of problems. ’ We can try to economise on everything, but not on problems.
KLEIN: So far I have managed to trace around 300 of your inter- views in various newspaper archives and on the Internet. Staying with the iceberg image, if we present over thirty selected pieces in this book, this is indeed only the part of the iceberg visible above water. What role do the interviews play in your work as a writer and media personality? Are they there to promote the ‘management of your own name’, as you yourself once expressed it?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, some highly reputable authors never gave interviews, and some did so only rarely. But there are others who accept interview proposals easily. I count myself among the latter. It involves brand-name management, and that is an off- shoot one accepts. With most interviews the reader will notice that even if I thought about that aspect beforehand, I forgot it after a minute at most. The interview is one form of literary pro- duction among others, and I see it as a subgenus of the essay. I have practised it frequently since the time I overcame my reluc- tance and accepted the role of public intellectual that ensued from my first publications. As you can see, I enjoy formulating things and making propositions, and once I am immersed in the flow of speech I stop worrying about the effect. My worries only become acute in the reworking phase. I’m sensitive about failed expressions.
KLEIN: True, your interviews are not one-to-one live publica- tions. You always check them over.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s say they are a mixed form composed of improvisation and edited work. In some cases the editing is limited to just one or two slight touches, but others involve a completely new version.
KLEIN: Over the years, the young, shy Sloterdijk we see in old videotapes has become a star. To me he is like a colossus of expres- sive force, verbally and in writing. This creative energy, it seems to me, can’t be explained by normal standards. It is still a mystery how you have managed this.
SLOTERDIJK: I admit that I have felt many things blowing through me. Now and then I enjoy the powerful cross-draughts, but by no means always. My basic feeling, as I have said, is not of excessive productivity but of receptiveness to evidence from all directions, what I just called defencelessness. In the early stage I usually like the things I am doing, but I quickly lose sight of them. It might sound odd, but if a major work is in the making I only have brief feelings of achievement, and they only happen rarely. I am
x In Place of a Preface
incapable of developing such emotions, or of holding on to them. I am always faced with the blank sheet of paper that shows I haven’t done anything yet. So I put out my feelers and start from scratch. It may sound absurd, but I usually suspect myself of not doing enough. This probably shows I am lacking in hindsight intelligence. As I don’t see my past, I have no choice but to keep moving. Maybe that would be the next lesson: slowing down and returning to the moment. But I’m still wary of such suggestions and dismiss them scornfully as ideas for retired folk.
KLEIN: I have heard you shared a communal apartment when you were younger. How did you manage to be creative in the midst of the chaos? Many people would say in that kind of environment they could never put anything down on paper.
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t actually live in that apartment in Munich but I visited it every day. What I noticed about myself then was the ability not to let anything put me off course. I always had intense relationships, I had close ties to women and male friends, and we went out a lot and travelled frequently. For the past twenty years the family has been my main form of life, and that’s not pure soli- tude either. I can well remember the time when a boisterous toddler ran around my study. It was entertaining for me – I couldn’t be disturbed. Today I find it odd that I get irritated more easily. In the past the telephone didn’t disturb me, nor did workmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saw everything as inspiration, not interruption. A miraculous superstition was at work: whatever happened would immediately be transformed into part of the production. In that middle phase I seemed to be living in a protective shell; I was sure of my own topics, or the topics were sure of me. Nothing could distract me.
KLEIN: When you say ‘defencelessness’, it suggests being tired and giving up. Evidently you have constantly used the creativity of writing to banish this eventuality.
SLOTERDIJK: Old working animals know that even tired- ness can become a motive force if it activates regeneration. Once you have really rested, let’s say for a whole day, it feels as if you have gained the energy for three new lives. In the past I used to emphasize the difference between regeneration and a vaca- tion. I saw the latter as illegitimate and thought it had no reason to exist. To put it arrogantly, I used to think you only need a vacation from the wrong life. Today I have changed my mind. Gradually I am coming round to admitting that vacations are justified.
KLEIN: Let me return to your interviews again. At the moment, Suhrkamp Verlag, which has been your publishing house since your
In Place of a Preface xi
first book thirty years ago, is in the headlines. 2 There was a time at Suhrkamp when its authors were horrified at the idea of publishing anything in a Springer Press newspaper. Now, however, you publish in practically every medium that asks you, almost at random it seems, and you even published something once in Bild-Zeitung and Playboy. How do you judge yourself in this context? How has the Suhrkamp author changed over the years since the time it was unthinkable to give interviews to Springer Press newspapers?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing is clear: the typical Suhrkamp author no longer exists, if he or she ever did. Actually, the publishing house used to be the imprint for a collection of highly idiosyncratic char- acters. What do you suppose Bloch and Beckett had in common? Or Hesse and Luhmann? By now the diversity has increased, if any- thing. Some Suhrkamp authors have retained the spirit of the sixties or seventies and represent softer versions of latter-day Marxism. You can see they are children of the zeitgeist as well because, almost unnoticed, they have changed their topic from utopia to justice – this is where the remnants of the Frankfurt School of civil theology live on. On the other hand, many new shades of personality have emerged in the spectrum, both at the literary and the scholarly ends.
The success of my book in 1983 was a signal for me to look at future fields of action elsewhere. Why not in the previously unthinkable media? Over time I have increasingly discarded inher- ited aversions. I have met with interview partners from the most politically heterogeneous media without having a hidden agenda of ideological criticism, and, wherever possible, on an equal footing. The only exception is the press of the neo-nationalist strand – in that case my personal background had an influence. Perhaps I should have cast off this inhibition as well, and made occasional home visits to confused extreme right-wing souls.
KLEIN: Many of the interviews in the present volume relate to your new publications at the time, while others take their cue from topics in the air at that particular juncture. Do you remember inter- views that especially influenced you?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of the conversations and interviews in the present book happened so long ago that I can’t remember the situations they occurred in or, at best, only vaguely. I still have a vivid memory of the circumstances of the wide-ranging two-part interview with Ulrich Raulff, the director of the German Literature
2 Klein is referring to developments in a lengthy legal battle over owner- ship and editorial control of Suhrkamp Verlag that began in 2002 and was finally resolved in 2015.
xii In Place of a Preface
Archive. The theme was ‘Fate’, and it took place about two years ago, the first part in Karlsruhe and the second in Marbach, where Raulff sat opposite me as the host and guardian of his treasures. Those were moments of pure intellectual happiness. At such points one realizes more keenly than usual what literature can be, including in the form of the spoken word. It is a syntactic technique of happi- ness. The levitation begins with combining two or three words in a non-prosaic fashion.
KLEIN: The present volume is an anthology of trenchant for- mulations. We get the impression that, for you, dialogue is always a metalogue as well. Many voices come and go in it. The interviews take the form of conversations between two people, but it seems to me you would be most comfortable in conversation with several partners.
SLOTERDIJK: True, I experience dialogue as a polylogue, a conversation with many people. After all, aside from their own voice, good interviewers usually bring all kinds of other voices with them. They are already a chorus of subjectivity themselves. This inevitably creates echoes in the interviewee. If there is anything I really don’t like, it is an exchange of empty phrases that sound like official pronouncements.
KLEIN: We can guarantee there are no empty phrases to be found anywhere in this book.
SLOTERDIJK: Let me explain where my aversion to empty phrases comes from. For as long as I can remember, I have had a childish fear of boredom. I have always thought the most boring things possible are the kind of set speeches you hear in the aca- demic discourse market, not to mention the chipboard sheets from the political DIY store. To avoid misunderstandings, I should say I know a good kind of boredom that is calming and integrating. You can entrust yourself to it like to an old nursery school teacher. I am thinking of the subtle boredom of a landscape, the liberating boredom of the sea, the lofty boredom of the mountains and the boredom of great narrative literature when it sometimes demands patience. An evil boredom emanates from the intrusive bigotry of conceited empty phrasemongers – it is just as deadly as it is reputed to be. Do you know this kind of situation? You exchange a few words with somebody whom you may not even dislike a priori. After three or four sentences back and forth you feel incredibly world-weary. It is as if your vitality battery has been used up within seconds and you don’t know why. I avoid that sort of boredom like the plague. It is a pathological condition that takes away your pleasure in speaking, in expressing opinions, in being able to say what you see, indeed, in life itself. The symptom of severe boredom is speech breakdown. All
In Place of a Preface xiii
at once the words refuse to come out in the right order, you barely manage to squeeze out a noun but the verb doesn’t follow, there is an overwhelming, awful feeling of not wanting to say anything else – which should definitely not be confused with the good state of just having nothing to say. Sometimes I almost hit the danger point when I notice a conversation partner is digging up totally hackneyed questions, questions that are essentially ways of dumbing down. They always have the subtext: come and share our misery! I have made a great effort to learn to evade such attacks by reformulating the questions until I regain the desire to react to them.
KLEIN: Do you mean there are questions like vampires that suck the life out of the respondent?
SLOTERDIJK: There are questions like that and questioners like that. In theosophical circles such negatively charged people are called prana suckers, vampires of life’s breath. Sometimes the ques- tioner’s mental exhaustion is clear from the start. In the best case I try to answer like a tour director or an emergency doctor.
KLEIN: I am absolutely sure there are no interviews in the present book in which you had to play the role of emergency doctor, and nobody who reads these pieces would think of speech break- down. But I wonder whether we can sense a kind of respect, not to say awe, in your interview partners now and then.
SLOTERDIJK: If it were ever the case, it would have been wrong to leave it like that. Interviews in public are a form of sport in which the point is not to win, but to play for a draw on a higher plane. In every sophisticated question–answer flow the discussion partners remind each other of their more intelligent options. One discovers the pleasure of being able to navigate in a problem space.
KLEIN: I’d like to refer again to the enthusiasm that’s often dis- cernible in what you say, whether we call it youthful or not. Your drive for expression started exploding after your India trip in early 1980. Could it be that, after India, you experienced a quasi-archaic pre-lingual enthusiasm that converged with later academic influ- ences? You have probably often been asked this question.
Looking back over the years these interviews cover, my first impression of myself is defencelessness, or the ability to be enticed. The cliché of the born writer’s endogenous, ebullient productivity certainly doesn’t apply to me, and nor does the model of committed literature. What people see as productivity in my case is usually only my inability to defend myself against suggestions from other people. It starts from a degree of over-compliance. This is ultimately responsible for the constant transition from passivity to production. But this state would not be sustainable without some cockiness. If I took on an additional task, it meant I was prepared to say I could manage that. In the process I sometimes got exhausted, of course, but that was superseded by an incredibly reckless trust in my powers of regeneration. That, incidentally, is the only dif- ference worth mentioning between my earlier life and the present: for a while now, I have noticed that regeneration demands its own time.
KLEIN: Take us into your creative workshop. Can you describe your working technique and explain how you organize your library? How do you remember things?
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can really know how his memory works. I only know I must have a well-organized internal archive even if it might seem chaotic to other people. My inner archivist finds access to the important files fairly regularly. He is one collaborator who has never disappointed me. He fortuitously retrieves documents I didn’t even know had been filed ready for reference. Sometimes he unwittingly discovers nearly finished pieces of writing that I only have to copy up.
KLEIN: To what extent does your relation to language enhance your zest for writing and publishing?
SLOTERDIJK: Language is generally seen as a medium for understanding – an assumption that writers shouldn’t accept unquestioningly. A critical minority sees language as the starting point of all misunderstandings. Wittgenstein even thought that philosophical problems arose when language goes on holiday – although he didn’t reveal to us what he meant by ‘going on holiday’. Does it mean being nonsensical? Or poring over pseudo-problems, firing excessive volleys into the air? Anyway, he toyed with the idea that one could just as well do without language; the deflationary tendency is clearly evident. Reading that, I can imagine a wrinkled janitor entering the scene who wants to put an end to the silliness of youth. Statements like that seem narrow to me. You really don’t know what might happen if you get involved in going on holiday. I
In Place of a Preface ix
prefer the opinion of Wittgenstein’s fellow Austrian, Egon Friedell, who said: ‘Culture is a wealth of problems. ’ We can try to economise on everything, but not on problems.
KLEIN: So far I have managed to trace around 300 of your inter- views in various newspaper archives and on the Internet. Staying with the iceberg image, if we present over thirty selected pieces in this book, this is indeed only the part of the iceberg visible above water. What role do the interviews play in your work as a writer and media personality? Are they there to promote the ‘management of your own name’, as you yourself once expressed it?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, some highly reputable authors never gave interviews, and some did so only rarely. But there are others who accept interview proposals easily. I count myself among the latter. It involves brand-name management, and that is an off- shoot one accepts. With most interviews the reader will notice that even if I thought about that aspect beforehand, I forgot it after a minute at most. The interview is one form of literary pro- duction among others, and I see it as a subgenus of the essay. I have practised it frequently since the time I overcame my reluc- tance and accepted the role of public intellectual that ensued from my first publications. As you can see, I enjoy formulating things and making propositions, and once I am immersed in the flow of speech I stop worrying about the effect. My worries only become acute in the reworking phase. I’m sensitive about failed expressions.
KLEIN: True, your interviews are not one-to-one live publica- tions. You always check them over.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s say they are a mixed form composed of improvisation and edited work. In some cases the editing is limited to just one or two slight touches, but others involve a completely new version.
KLEIN: Over the years, the young, shy Sloterdijk we see in old videotapes has become a star. To me he is like a colossus of expres- sive force, verbally and in writing. This creative energy, it seems to me, can’t be explained by normal standards. It is still a mystery how you have managed this.
SLOTERDIJK: I admit that I have felt many things blowing through me. Now and then I enjoy the powerful cross-draughts, but by no means always. My basic feeling, as I have said, is not of excessive productivity but of receptiveness to evidence from all directions, what I just called defencelessness. In the early stage I usually like the things I am doing, but I quickly lose sight of them. It might sound odd, but if a major work is in the making I only have brief feelings of achievement, and they only happen rarely. I am
x In Place of a Preface
incapable of developing such emotions, or of holding on to them. I am always faced with the blank sheet of paper that shows I haven’t done anything yet. So I put out my feelers and start from scratch. It may sound absurd, but I usually suspect myself of not doing enough. This probably shows I am lacking in hindsight intelligence. As I don’t see my past, I have no choice but to keep moving. Maybe that would be the next lesson: slowing down and returning to the moment. But I’m still wary of such suggestions and dismiss them scornfully as ideas for retired folk.
KLEIN: I have heard you shared a communal apartment when you were younger. How did you manage to be creative in the midst of the chaos? Many people would say in that kind of environment they could never put anything down on paper.
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t actually live in that apartment in Munich but I visited it every day. What I noticed about myself then was the ability not to let anything put me off course. I always had intense relationships, I had close ties to women and male friends, and we went out a lot and travelled frequently. For the past twenty years the family has been my main form of life, and that’s not pure soli- tude either. I can well remember the time when a boisterous toddler ran around my study. It was entertaining for me – I couldn’t be disturbed. Today I find it odd that I get irritated more easily. In the past the telephone didn’t disturb me, nor did workmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saw everything as inspiration, not interruption. A miraculous superstition was at work: whatever happened would immediately be transformed into part of the production. In that middle phase I seemed to be living in a protective shell; I was sure of my own topics, or the topics were sure of me. Nothing could distract me.
KLEIN: When you say ‘defencelessness’, it suggests being tired and giving up. Evidently you have constantly used the creativity of writing to banish this eventuality.
SLOTERDIJK: Old working animals know that even tired- ness can become a motive force if it activates regeneration. Once you have really rested, let’s say for a whole day, it feels as if you have gained the energy for three new lives. In the past I used to emphasize the difference between regeneration and a vaca- tion. I saw the latter as illegitimate and thought it had no reason to exist. To put it arrogantly, I used to think you only need a vacation from the wrong life. Today I have changed my mind. Gradually I am coming round to admitting that vacations are justified.
KLEIN: Let me return to your interviews again. At the moment, Suhrkamp Verlag, which has been your publishing house since your
In Place of a Preface xi
first book thirty years ago, is in the headlines. 2 There was a time at Suhrkamp when its authors were horrified at the idea of publishing anything in a Springer Press newspaper. Now, however, you publish in practically every medium that asks you, almost at random it seems, and you even published something once in Bild-Zeitung and Playboy. How do you judge yourself in this context? How has the Suhrkamp author changed over the years since the time it was unthinkable to give interviews to Springer Press newspapers?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing is clear: the typical Suhrkamp author no longer exists, if he or she ever did. Actually, the publishing house used to be the imprint for a collection of highly idiosyncratic char- acters. What do you suppose Bloch and Beckett had in common? Or Hesse and Luhmann? By now the diversity has increased, if any- thing. Some Suhrkamp authors have retained the spirit of the sixties or seventies and represent softer versions of latter-day Marxism. You can see they are children of the zeitgeist as well because, almost unnoticed, they have changed their topic from utopia to justice – this is where the remnants of the Frankfurt School of civil theology live on. On the other hand, many new shades of personality have emerged in the spectrum, both at the literary and the scholarly ends.
The success of my book in 1983 was a signal for me to look at future fields of action elsewhere. Why not in the previously unthinkable media? Over time I have increasingly discarded inher- ited aversions. I have met with interview partners from the most politically heterogeneous media without having a hidden agenda of ideological criticism, and, wherever possible, on an equal footing. The only exception is the press of the neo-nationalist strand – in that case my personal background had an influence. Perhaps I should have cast off this inhibition as well, and made occasional home visits to confused extreme right-wing souls.
KLEIN: Many of the interviews in the present volume relate to your new publications at the time, while others take their cue from topics in the air at that particular juncture. Do you remember inter- views that especially influenced you?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of the conversations and interviews in the present book happened so long ago that I can’t remember the situations they occurred in or, at best, only vaguely. I still have a vivid memory of the circumstances of the wide-ranging two-part interview with Ulrich Raulff, the director of the German Literature
2 Klein is referring to developments in a lengthy legal battle over owner- ship and editorial control of Suhrkamp Verlag that began in 2002 and was finally resolved in 2015.
xii In Place of a Preface
Archive. The theme was ‘Fate’, and it took place about two years ago, the first part in Karlsruhe and the second in Marbach, where Raulff sat opposite me as the host and guardian of his treasures. Those were moments of pure intellectual happiness. At such points one realizes more keenly than usual what literature can be, including in the form of the spoken word. It is a syntactic technique of happi- ness. The levitation begins with combining two or three words in a non-prosaic fashion.
KLEIN: The present volume is an anthology of trenchant for- mulations. We get the impression that, for you, dialogue is always a metalogue as well. Many voices come and go in it. The interviews take the form of conversations between two people, but it seems to me you would be most comfortable in conversation with several partners.
SLOTERDIJK: True, I experience dialogue as a polylogue, a conversation with many people. After all, aside from their own voice, good interviewers usually bring all kinds of other voices with them. They are already a chorus of subjectivity themselves. This inevitably creates echoes in the interviewee. If there is anything I really don’t like, it is an exchange of empty phrases that sound like official pronouncements.
KLEIN: We can guarantee there are no empty phrases to be found anywhere in this book.
SLOTERDIJK: Let me explain where my aversion to empty phrases comes from. For as long as I can remember, I have had a childish fear of boredom. I have always thought the most boring things possible are the kind of set speeches you hear in the aca- demic discourse market, not to mention the chipboard sheets from the political DIY store. To avoid misunderstandings, I should say I know a good kind of boredom that is calming and integrating. You can entrust yourself to it like to an old nursery school teacher. I am thinking of the subtle boredom of a landscape, the liberating boredom of the sea, the lofty boredom of the mountains and the boredom of great narrative literature when it sometimes demands patience. An evil boredom emanates from the intrusive bigotry of conceited empty phrasemongers – it is just as deadly as it is reputed to be. Do you know this kind of situation? You exchange a few words with somebody whom you may not even dislike a priori. After three or four sentences back and forth you feel incredibly world-weary. It is as if your vitality battery has been used up within seconds and you don’t know why. I avoid that sort of boredom like the plague. It is a pathological condition that takes away your pleasure in speaking, in expressing opinions, in being able to say what you see, indeed, in life itself. The symptom of severe boredom is speech breakdown. All
In Place of a Preface xiii
at once the words refuse to come out in the right order, you barely manage to squeeze out a noun but the verb doesn’t follow, there is an overwhelming, awful feeling of not wanting to say anything else – which should definitely not be confused with the good state of just having nothing to say. Sometimes I almost hit the danger point when I notice a conversation partner is digging up totally hackneyed questions, questions that are essentially ways of dumbing down. They always have the subtext: come and share our misery! I have made a great effort to learn to evade such attacks by reformulating the questions until I regain the desire to react to them.
KLEIN: Do you mean there are questions like vampires that suck the life out of the respondent?
SLOTERDIJK: There are questions like that and questioners like that. In theosophical circles such negatively charged people are called prana suckers, vampires of life’s breath. Sometimes the ques- tioner’s mental exhaustion is clear from the start. In the best case I try to answer like a tour director or an emergency doctor.
KLEIN: I am absolutely sure there are no interviews in the present book in which you had to play the role of emergency doctor, and nobody who reads these pieces would think of speech break- down. But I wonder whether we can sense a kind of respect, not to say awe, in your interview partners now and then.
SLOTERDIJK: If it were ever the case, it would have been wrong to leave it like that. Interviews in public are a form of sport in which the point is not to win, but to play for a draw on a higher plane. In every sophisticated question–answer flow the discussion partners remind each other of their more intelligent options. One discovers the pleasure of being able to navigate in a problem space.
KLEIN: I’d like to refer again to the enthusiasm that’s often dis- cernible in what you say, whether we call it youthful or not. Your drive for expression started exploding after your India trip in early 1980. Could it be that, after India, you experienced a quasi-archaic pre-lingual enthusiasm that converged with later academic influ- ences? You have probably often been asked this question. I am fascinated that, from then on, there seemed to be no way back for you. Suddenly the only open road led towards productivity.
SLOTERDIJK: It would be better to say, the road to practical testing of a presentiment. I was latently aware that I was living on the quiet. After 1980, the time was ripe for me to start striking out. Back then I found the right note for myself, if one can put it so naively. It was as if I had discovered the instrument for making my kind of music. The instrument was tuned at the moment I realized what my opportunity consisted in.
KLEIN: Naturally, we’d like you to explain that in more detail.
xiv In Place of a Preface
SLOTERDIJK: Let me try. I was born in 1947 and as a young man I grew up almost without any paternal influence. At the right moment I realized I should decide to be a sort of father to myself. I already had a good idea of what mothering is, whether pre-existing or chosen, and how one gradually leaves it behind. I had no idea what fathering meant. I had to find my fathers and mentors, which meant I had to look in the world around me. Fathers are models we seek to have something to conquer later on, aren’t they? So I set off, with admiration as my guideline. Nobody who had something to say was safe from my admiration – or from my disappointment either. The breakthrough came when I understood that I had to explain the world to myself. In my case it could only happen by taking myself in hand – as teacher and student in one. Somehow I managed to duplicate myself into a bigger and a smaller part. So I took myself by the hand and explained the world and life to myself. Evidently this made sense to many observers who enjoyed reading what I said to myself. They probably laughed at how I slipped into the role of the wise old man for the sake of the junior. I still think this method wasn’t the worst way to approach the philosophical sphere. It was particularly useful in my case because it fitted the situ- ation of a young person who, like many of his generation, grew up with a strong sense of cultural insecurity.
KLEIN: What made you go East after you finished your disser- tation under the professors in Hamburg? What did you learn from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho, as he was also known? Why did you go to India at that time instead of staying at the university?
SLOTERDIJK: That is a long story I can only sketch briefly here. In 1974 I was offered a post as a temporary assistant professor at Hamburg University. I accepted, and moved to Hamburg. The fol- lowing year in Hamburg was a very fruitful time for me, a watershed in my life. I was very lucky to become a close associate of Klaus Briegleb, the tenured professor for modern German literature. I knew him from Munich and in my opinion, and not only mine, he was the foremost literary scholar in the country and at the peak of his art in his years in Hamburg. The constellation with my older colleagues was equally auspicious, an intellectual spiral nebula with enormous energy. It was also interesting in terms of group eroti- cism. As regards the university, from then on I knew it was not my kind of patch. I went back to Munich when my contract expired.
Peter Sloterdijk Selected Exaggerations Conversations and Interviews
1993–2012
Edited by Bernhard Klein Translated by Karen Margolis
polity
First published in German as Ausgewählte Übertreibungen. Gespräche und Interviews 1993-2012 © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2013
This English edition © Polity Press, 2016
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author.
Title: Selected exaggerations : conversations and interviews, 1993-2012 /
Peter Sloterdijk.
Description: English edition. | Malden : Polity, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015024410| ISBN 9780745691657 (hardback) | ISBN
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Contents
In Place of a Preface vii
1 The Half-Moon Man 1
2 Why Are People Media? 7
3 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 12
4 Uterus on Wheels 23
5 Fire Your Shrink! 25
6 Philosophical Retuning 33
7 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 40
8 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 49
9 On Wealth and Self-Respect 56
10 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 65
11 Postmen and Fallen Towers 76
12 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts 82
13 Good Theory Doesn’t Complain 106
14 There Are No Individuals 113
15 Confused People Spread Confusion 119
16 Germans Want To Be Compelled: Theory for the Year’s
End 125
17 Comparatists of Happiness 139
18 Image and Perspective: An Experiment in Atmospheric
Seeing 152
19 On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction 164
20 A Team of Hermaphrodites 175
21 Under a Brighter Sky 183
22 Making the Effort: The Reader 187
23 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 192
24 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 202
vi Contents
25 The Athletics of Dying 211
26 Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 218
27 Even a God Can’t Save Us 226
28 A Plug for Higher Energies 232
29 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 237
30 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 256
31 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 265
32 Humans in Repetition: The Twenty-first Century Will Be
Acrobatic 305
33 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background 313
Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note 323 Appendix 327
IN PLACE OF A PREFACE1
Bernhard Klein in conversation with Peter Sloterdijk
Karlsruhe, 17 December 2012
KLEIN: Mr Sloterdijk, after extensive research I have compiled a selection of your interviews over the past two decades, a very compact selection from an enormous wealth of material, but still a weighty volume. I am aware that interviews are only a small part of your publishing activity – the phrase ‘tip of the iceberg’ is very apt here. You have more than forty books to your name, and have also written a large number of essays for a wide range of newspa- pers, periodicals and anthologies. You have held professorships in Karlsruhe and Vienna for the past twenty years, and you only resigned from the position in Austria quite recently. Aside from this you have had a full timetable as a speaker at all kinds of events, and you have participated in numerous conferences, conventions and symposia. You have given readings from your latest books, and held seminars, ceremonial addresses and after-dinner speeches. You have done interviews in many media and for over ten years you moder- ated your own TV programme.
According to the general wisdom, ‘less is more’. Why, in your case, is more more? Does your almost frantic creative energy express something of the powerlessness every writer feels when faced with the silence of the library?
1 Translator’s Note: Some of the original interview titles have been changed in the German edition of this book and in the present English translation.
All notes are by the translator, with the exception of those marked with an asterisk, which are provided by the German editor.
viii In Place of a Preface
SLOTERDIJK: I think the real answer to the question of the main impetus for my work is connected more to an inner state rather than an actual motive. Looking back over the years these interviews cover, my first impression of myself is defencelessness, or the ability to be enticed. The cliché of the born writer’s endogenous, ebullient productivity certainly doesn’t apply to me, and nor does the model of committed literature. What people see as productivity in my case is usually only my inability to defend myself against suggestions from other people. It starts from a degree of over-compliance. This is ultimately responsible for the constant transition from passivity to production. But this state would not be sustainable without some cockiness. If I took on an additional task, it meant I was prepared to say I could manage that. In the process I sometimes got exhausted, of course, but that was superseded by an incredibly reckless trust in my powers of regeneration. That, incidentally, is the only dif- ference worth mentioning between my earlier life and the present: for a while now, I have noticed that regeneration demands its own time.
KLEIN: Take us into your creative workshop. Can you describe your working technique and explain how you organize your library? How do you remember things?
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can really know how his memory works. I only know I must have a well-organized internal archive even if it might seem chaotic to other people. My inner archivist finds access to the important files fairly regularly. He is one collaborator who has never disappointed me. He fortuitously retrieves documents I didn’t even know had been filed ready for reference. Sometimes he unwittingly discovers nearly finished pieces of writing that I only have to copy up.
KLEIN: To what extent does your relation to language enhance your zest for writing and publishing?
SLOTERDIJK: Language is generally seen as a medium for understanding – an assumption that writers shouldn’t accept unquestioningly. A critical minority sees language as the starting point of all misunderstandings. Wittgenstein even thought that philosophical problems arose when language goes on holiday – although he didn’t reveal to us what he meant by ‘going on holiday’. Does it mean being nonsensical? Or poring over pseudo-problems, firing excessive volleys into the air? Anyway, he toyed with the idea that one could just as well do without language; the deflationary tendency is clearly evident. Reading that, I can imagine a wrinkled janitor entering the scene who wants to put an end to the silliness of youth. Statements like that seem narrow to me. You really don’t know what might happen if you get involved in going on holiday. I
In Place of a Preface ix
prefer the opinion of Wittgenstein’s fellow Austrian, Egon Friedell, who said: ‘Culture is a wealth of problems. ’ We can try to economise on everything, but not on problems.
KLEIN: So far I have managed to trace around 300 of your inter- views in various newspaper archives and on the Internet. Staying with the iceberg image, if we present over thirty selected pieces in this book, this is indeed only the part of the iceberg visible above water. What role do the interviews play in your work as a writer and media personality? Are they there to promote the ‘management of your own name’, as you yourself once expressed it?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, some highly reputable authors never gave interviews, and some did so only rarely. But there are others who accept interview proposals easily. I count myself among the latter. It involves brand-name management, and that is an off- shoot one accepts. With most interviews the reader will notice that even if I thought about that aspect beforehand, I forgot it after a minute at most. The interview is one form of literary pro- duction among others, and I see it as a subgenus of the essay. I have practised it frequently since the time I overcame my reluc- tance and accepted the role of public intellectual that ensued from my first publications. As you can see, I enjoy formulating things and making propositions, and once I am immersed in the flow of speech I stop worrying about the effect. My worries only become acute in the reworking phase. I’m sensitive about failed expressions.
KLEIN: True, your interviews are not one-to-one live publica- tions. You always check them over.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s say they are a mixed form composed of improvisation and edited work. In some cases the editing is limited to just one or two slight touches, but others involve a completely new version.
KLEIN: Over the years, the young, shy Sloterdijk we see in old videotapes has become a star. To me he is like a colossus of expres- sive force, verbally and in writing. This creative energy, it seems to me, can’t be explained by normal standards. It is still a mystery how you have managed this.
SLOTERDIJK: I admit that I have felt many things blowing through me. Now and then I enjoy the powerful cross-draughts, but by no means always. My basic feeling, as I have said, is not of excessive productivity but of receptiveness to evidence from all directions, what I just called defencelessness. In the early stage I usually like the things I am doing, but I quickly lose sight of them. It might sound odd, but if a major work is in the making I only have brief feelings of achievement, and they only happen rarely. I am
x In Place of a Preface
incapable of developing such emotions, or of holding on to them. I am always faced with the blank sheet of paper that shows I haven’t done anything yet. So I put out my feelers and start from scratch. It may sound absurd, but I usually suspect myself of not doing enough. This probably shows I am lacking in hindsight intelligence. As I don’t see my past, I have no choice but to keep moving. Maybe that would be the next lesson: slowing down and returning to the moment. But I’m still wary of such suggestions and dismiss them scornfully as ideas for retired folk.
KLEIN: I have heard you shared a communal apartment when you were younger. How did you manage to be creative in the midst of the chaos? Many people would say in that kind of environment they could never put anything down on paper.
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t actually live in that apartment in Munich but I visited it every day. What I noticed about myself then was the ability not to let anything put me off course. I always had intense relationships, I had close ties to women and male friends, and we went out a lot and travelled frequently. For the past twenty years the family has been my main form of life, and that’s not pure soli- tude either. I can well remember the time when a boisterous toddler ran around my study. It was entertaining for me – I couldn’t be disturbed. Today I find it odd that I get irritated more easily. In the past the telephone didn’t disturb me, nor did workmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saw everything as inspiration, not interruption. A miraculous superstition was at work: whatever happened would immediately be transformed into part of the production. In that middle phase I seemed to be living in a protective shell; I was sure of my own topics, or the topics were sure of me. Nothing could distract me.
KLEIN: When you say ‘defencelessness’, it suggests being tired and giving up. Evidently you have constantly used the creativity of writing to banish this eventuality.
SLOTERDIJK: Old working animals know that even tired- ness can become a motive force if it activates regeneration. Once you have really rested, let’s say for a whole day, it feels as if you have gained the energy for three new lives. In the past I used to emphasize the difference between regeneration and a vaca- tion. I saw the latter as illegitimate and thought it had no reason to exist. To put it arrogantly, I used to think you only need a vacation from the wrong life. Today I have changed my mind. Gradually I am coming round to admitting that vacations are justified.
KLEIN: Let me return to your interviews again. At the moment, Suhrkamp Verlag, which has been your publishing house since your
In Place of a Preface xi
first book thirty years ago, is in the headlines. 2 There was a time at Suhrkamp when its authors were horrified at the idea of publishing anything in a Springer Press newspaper. Now, however, you publish in practically every medium that asks you, almost at random it seems, and you even published something once in Bild-Zeitung and Playboy. How do you judge yourself in this context? How has the Suhrkamp author changed over the years since the time it was unthinkable to give interviews to Springer Press newspapers?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing is clear: the typical Suhrkamp author no longer exists, if he or she ever did. Actually, the publishing house used to be the imprint for a collection of highly idiosyncratic char- acters. What do you suppose Bloch and Beckett had in common? Or Hesse and Luhmann? By now the diversity has increased, if any- thing. Some Suhrkamp authors have retained the spirit of the sixties or seventies and represent softer versions of latter-day Marxism. You can see they are children of the zeitgeist as well because, almost unnoticed, they have changed their topic from utopia to justice – this is where the remnants of the Frankfurt School of civil theology live on. On the other hand, many new shades of personality have emerged in the spectrum, both at the literary and the scholarly ends.
The success of my book in 1983 was a signal for me to look at future fields of action elsewhere. Why not in the previously unthinkable media? Over time I have increasingly discarded inher- ited aversions. I have met with interview partners from the most politically heterogeneous media without having a hidden agenda of ideological criticism, and, wherever possible, on an equal footing. The only exception is the press of the neo-nationalist strand – in that case my personal background had an influence. Perhaps I should have cast off this inhibition as well, and made occasional home visits to confused extreme right-wing souls.
KLEIN: Many of the interviews in the present volume relate to your new publications at the time, while others take their cue from topics in the air at that particular juncture. Do you remember inter- views that especially influenced you?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of the conversations and interviews in the present book happened so long ago that I can’t remember the situations they occurred in or, at best, only vaguely. I still have a vivid memory of the circumstances of the wide-ranging two-part interview with Ulrich Raulff, the director of the German Literature
2 Klein is referring to developments in a lengthy legal battle over owner- ship and editorial control of Suhrkamp Verlag that began in 2002 and was finally resolved in 2015.
xii In Place of a Preface
Archive. The theme was ‘Fate’, and it took place about two years ago, the first part in Karlsruhe and the second in Marbach, where Raulff sat opposite me as the host and guardian of his treasures. Those were moments of pure intellectual happiness. At such points one realizes more keenly than usual what literature can be, including in the form of the spoken word. It is a syntactic technique of happi- ness. The levitation begins with combining two or three words in a non-prosaic fashion.
KLEIN: The present volume is an anthology of trenchant for- mulations. We get the impression that, for you, dialogue is always a metalogue as well. Many voices come and go in it. The interviews take the form of conversations between two people, but it seems to me you would be most comfortable in conversation with several partners.
SLOTERDIJK: True, I experience dialogue as a polylogue, a conversation with many people. After all, aside from their own voice, good interviewers usually bring all kinds of other voices with them. They are already a chorus of subjectivity themselves. This inevitably creates echoes in the interviewee. If there is anything I really don’t like, it is an exchange of empty phrases that sound like official pronouncements.
KLEIN: We can guarantee there are no empty phrases to be found anywhere in this book.
SLOTERDIJK: Let me explain where my aversion to empty phrases comes from. For as long as I can remember, I have had a childish fear of boredom. I have always thought the most boring things possible are the kind of set speeches you hear in the aca- demic discourse market, not to mention the chipboard sheets from the political DIY store. To avoid misunderstandings, I should say I know a good kind of boredom that is calming and integrating. You can entrust yourself to it like to an old nursery school teacher. I am thinking of the subtle boredom of a landscape, the liberating boredom of the sea, the lofty boredom of the mountains and the boredom of great narrative literature when it sometimes demands patience. An evil boredom emanates from the intrusive bigotry of conceited empty phrasemongers – it is just as deadly as it is reputed to be. Do you know this kind of situation? You exchange a few words with somebody whom you may not even dislike a priori. After three or four sentences back and forth you feel incredibly world-weary. It is as if your vitality battery has been used up within seconds and you don’t know why. I avoid that sort of boredom like the plague. It is a pathological condition that takes away your pleasure in speaking, in expressing opinions, in being able to say what you see, indeed, in life itself. The symptom of severe boredom is speech breakdown. All
In Place of a Preface xiii
at once the words refuse to come out in the right order, you barely manage to squeeze out a noun but the verb doesn’t follow, there is an overwhelming, awful feeling of not wanting to say anything else – which should definitely not be confused with the good state of just having nothing to say. Sometimes I almost hit the danger point when I notice a conversation partner is digging up totally hackneyed questions, questions that are essentially ways of dumbing down. They always have the subtext: come and share our misery! I have made a great effort to learn to evade such attacks by reformulating the questions until I regain the desire to react to them.
KLEIN: Do you mean there are questions like vampires that suck the life out of the respondent?
SLOTERDIJK: There are questions like that and questioners like that. In theosophical circles such negatively charged people are called prana suckers, vampires of life’s breath. Sometimes the ques- tioner’s mental exhaustion is clear from the start. In the best case I try to answer like a tour director or an emergency doctor.
KLEIN: I am absolutely sure there are no interviews in the present book in which you had to play the role of emergency doctor, and nobody who reads these pieces would think of speech break- down. But I wonder whether we can sense a kind of respect, not to say awe, in your interview partners now and then.
SLOTERDIJK: If it were ever the case, it would have been wrong to leave it like that. Interviews in public are a form of sport in which the point is not to win, but to play for a draw on a higher plane. In every sophisticated question–answer flow the discussion partners remind each other of their more intelligent options. One discovers the pleasure of being able to navigate in a problem space.
KLEIN: I’d like to refer again to the enthusiasm that’s often dis- cernible in what you say, whether we call it youthful or not. Your drive for expression started exploding after your India trip in early 1980. Could it be that, after India, you experienced a quasi-archaic pre-lingual enthusiasm that converged with later academic influ- ences? You have probably often been asked this question.
Looking back over the years these interviews cover, my first impression of myself is defencelessness, or the ability to be enticed. The cliché of the born writer’s endogenous, ebullient productivity certainly doesn’t apply to me, and nor does the model of committed literature. What people see as productivity in my case is usually only my inability to defend myself against suggestions from other people. It starts from a degree of over-compliance. This is ultimately responsible for the constant transition from passivity to production. But this state would not be sustainable without some cockiness. If I took on an additional task, it meant I was prepared to say I could manage that. In the process I sometimes got exhausted, of course, but that was superseded by an incredibly reckless trust in my powers of regeneration. That, incidentally, is the only dif- ference worth mentioning between my earlier life and the present: for a while now, I have noticed that regeneration demands its own time.
KLEIN: Take us into your creative workshop. Can you describe your working technique and explain how you organize your library? How do you remember things?
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can really know how his memory works. I only know I must have a well-organized internal archive even if it might seem chaotic to other people. My inner archivist finds access to the important files fairly regularly. He is one collaborator who has never disappointed me. He fortuitously retrieves documents I didn’t even know had been filed ready for reference. Sometimes he unwittingly discovers nearly finished pieces of writing that I only have to copy up.
KLEIN: To what extent does your relation to language enhance your zest for writing and publishing?
SLOTERDIJK: Language is generally seen as a medium for understanding – an assumption that writers shouldn’t accept unquestioningly. A critical minority sees language as the starting point of all misunderstandings. Wittgenstein even thought that philosophical problems arose when language goes on holiday – although he didn’t reveal to us what he meant by ‘going on holiday’. Does it mean being nonsensical? Or poring over pseudo-problems, firing excessive volleys into the air? Anyway, he toyed with the idea that one could just as well do without language; the deflationary tendency is clearly evident. Reading that, I can imagine a wrinkled janitor entering the scene who wants to put an end to the silliness of youth. Statements like that seem narrow to me. You really don’t know what might happen if you get involved in going on holiday. I
In Place of a Preface ix
prefer the opinion of Wittgenstein’s fellow Austrian, Egon Friedell, who said: ‘Culture is a wealth of problems. ’ We can try to economise on everything, but not on problems.
KLEIN: So far I have managed to trace around 300 of your inter- views in various newspaper archives and on the Internet. Staying with the iceberg image, if we present over thirty selected pieces in this book, this is indeed only the part of the iceberg visible above water. What role do the interviews play in your work as a writer and media personality? Are they there to promote the ‘management of your own name’, as you yourself once expressed it?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, some highly reputable authors never gave interviews, and some did so only rarely. But there are others who accept interview proposals easily. I count myself among the latter. It involves brand-name management, and that is an off- shoot one accepts. With most interviews the reader will notice that even if I thought about that aspect beforehand, I forgot it after a minute at most. The interview is one form of literary pro- duction among others, and I see it as a subgenus of the essay. I have practised it frequently since the time I overcame my reluc- tance and accepted the role of public intellectual that ensued from my first publications. As you can see, I enjoy formulating things and making propositions, and once I am immersed in the flow of speech I stop worrying about the effect. My worries only become acute in the reworking phase. I’m sensitive about failed expressions.
KLEIN: True, your interviews are not one-to-one live publica- tions. You always check them over.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s say they are a mixed form composed of improvisation and edited work. In some cases the editing is limited to just one or two slight touches, but others involve a completely new version.
KLEIN: Over the years, the young, shy Sloterdijk we see in old videotapes has become a star. To me he is like a colossus of expres- sive force, verbally and in writing. This creative energy, it seems to me, can’t be explained by normal standards. It is still a mystery how you have managed this.
SLOTERDIJK: I admit that I have felt many things blowing through me. Now and then I enjoy the powerful cross-draughts, but by no means always. My basic feeling, as I have said, is not of excessive productivity but of receptiveness to evidence from all directions, what I just called defencelessness. In the early stage I usually like the things I am doing, but I quickly lose sight of them. It might sound odd, but if a major work is in the making I only have brief feelings of achievement, and they only happen rarely. I am
x In Place of a Preface
incapable of developing such emotions, or of holding on to them. I am always faced with the blank sheet of paper that shows I haven’t done anything yet. So I put out my feelers and start from scratch. It may sound absurd, but I usually suspect myself of not doing enough. This probably shows I am lacking in hindsight intelligence. As I don’t see my past, I have no choice but to keep moving. Maybe that would be the next lesson: slowing down and returning to the moment. But I’m still wary of such suggestions and dismiss them scornfully as ideas for retired folk.
KLEIN: I have heard you shared a communal apartment when you were younger. How did you manage to be creative in the midst of the chaos? Many people would say in that kind of environment they could never put anything down on paper.
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t actually live in that apartment in Munich but I visited it every day. What I noticed about myself then was the ability not to let anything put me off course. I always had intense relationships, I had close ties to women and male friends, and we went out a lot and travelled frequently. For the past twenty years the family has been my main form of life, and that’s not pure soli- tude either. I can well remember the time when a boisterous toddler ran around my study. It was entertaining for me – I couldn’t be disturbed. Today I find it odd that I get irritated more easily. In the past the telephone didn’t disturb me, nor did workmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I saw everything as inspiration, not interruption. A miraculous superstition was at work: whatever happened would immediately be transformed into part of the production. In that middle phase I seemed to be living in a protective shell; I was sure of my own topics, or the topics were sure of me. Nothing could distract me.
KLEIN: When you say ‘defencelessness’, it suggests being tired and giving up. Evidently you have constantly used the creativity of writing to banish this eventuality.
SLOTERDIJK: Old working animals know that even tired- ness can become a motive force if it activates regeneration. Once you have really rested, let’s say for a whole day, it feels as if you have gained the energy for three new lives. In the past I used to emphasize the difference between regeneration and a vaca- tion. I saw the latter as illegitimate and thought it had no reason to exist. To put it arrogantly, I used to think you only need a vacation from the wrong life. Today I have changed my mind. Gradually I am coming round to admitting that vacations are justified.
KLEIN: Let me return to your interviews again. At the moment, Suhrkamp Verlag, which has been your publishing house since your
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first book thirty years ago, is in the headlines. 2 There was a time at Suhrkamp when its authors were horrified at the idea of publishing anything in a Springer Press newspaper. Now, however, you publish in practically every medium that asks you, almost at random it seems, and you even published something once in Bild-Zeitung and Playboy. How do you judge yourself in this context? How has the Suhrkamp author changed over the years since the time it was unthinkable to give interviews to Springer Press newspapers?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing is clear: the typical Suhrkamp author no longer exists, if he or she ever did. Actually, the publishing house used to be the imprint for a collection of highly idiosyncratic char- acters. What do you suppose Bloch and Beckett had in common? Or Hesse and Luhmann? By now the diversity has increased, if any- thing. Some Suhrkamp authors have retained the spirit of the sixties or seventies and represent softer versions of latter-day Marxism. You can see they are children of the zeitgeist as well because, almost unnoticed, they have changed their topic from utopia to justice – this is where the remnants of the Frankfurt School of civil theology live on. On the other hand, many new shades of personality have emerged in the spectrum, both at the literary and the scholarly ends.
The success of my book in 1983 was a signal for me to look at future fields of action elsewhere. Why not in the previously unthinkable media? Over time I have increasingly discarded inher- ited aversions. I have met with interview partners from the most politically heterogeneous media without having a hidden agenda of ideological criticism, and, wherever possible, on an equal footing. The only exception is the press of the neo-nationalist strand – in that case my personal background had an influence. Perhaps I should have cast off this inhibition as well, and made occasional home visits to confused extreme right-wing souls.
KLEIN: Many of the interviews in the present volume relate to your new publications at the time, while others take their cue from topics in the air at that particular juncture. Do you remember inter- views that especially influenced you?
SLOTERDIJK: Most of the conversations and interviews in the present book happened so long ago that I can’t remember the situations they occurred in or, at best, only vaguely. I still have a vivid memory of the circumstances of the wide-ranging two-part interview with Ulrich Raulff, the director of the German Literature
2 Klein is referring to developments in a lengthy legal battle over owner- ship and editorial control of Suhrkamp Verlag that began in 2002 and was finally resolved in 2015.
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Archive. The theme was ‘Fate’, and it took place about two years ago, the first part in Karlsruhe and the second in Marbach, where Raulff sat opposite me as the host and guardian of his treasures. Those were moments of pure intellectual happiness. At such points one realizes more keenly than usual what literature can be, including in the form of the spoken word. It is a syntactic technique of happi- ness. The levitation begins with combining two or three words in a non-prosaic fashion.
KLEIN: The present volume is an anthology of trenchant for- mulations. We get the impression that, for you, dialogue is always a metalogue as well. Many voices come and go in it. The interviews take the form of conversations between two people, but it seems to me you would be most comfortable in conversation with several partners.
SLOTERDIJK: True, I experience dialogue as a polylogue, a conversation with many people. After all, aside from their own voice, good interviewers usually bring all kinds of other voices with them. They are already a chorus of subjectivity themselves. This inevitably creates echoes in the interviewee. If there is anything I really don’t like, it is an exchange of empty phrases that sound like official pronouncements.
KLEIN: We can guarantee there are no empty phrases to be found anywhere in this book.
SLOTERDIJK: Let me explain where my aversion to empty phrases comes from. For as long as I can remember, I have had a childish fear of boredom. I have always thought the most boring things possible are the kind of set speeches you hear in the aca- demic discourse market, not to mention the chipboard sheets from the political DIY store. To avoid misunderstandings, I should say I know a good kind of boredom that is calming and integrating. You can entrust yourself to it like to an old nursery school teacher. I am thinking of the subtle boredom of a landscape, the liberating boredom of the sea, the lofty boredom of the mountains and the boredom of great narrative literature when it sometimes demands patience. An evil boredom emanates from the intrusive bigotry of conceited empty phrasemongers – it is just as deadly as it is reputed to be. Do you know this kind of situation? You exchange a few words with somebody whom you may not even dislike a priori. After three or four sentences back and forth you feel incredibly world-weary. It is as if your vitality battery has been used up within seconds and you don’t know why. I avoid that sort of boredom like the plague. It is a pathological condition that takes away your pleasure in speaking, in expressing opinions, in being able to say what you see, indeed, in life itself. The symptom of severe boredom is speech breakdown. All
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at once the words refuse to come out in the right order, you barely manage to squeeze out a noun but the verb doesn’t follow, there is an overwhelming, awful feeling of not wanting to say anything else – which should definitely not be confused with the good state of just having nothing to say. Sometimes I almost hit the danger point when I notice a conversation partner is digging up totally hackneyed questions, questions that are essentially ways of dumbing down. They always have the subtext: come and share our misery! I have made a great effort to learn to evade such attacks by reformulating the questions until I regain the desire to react to them.
KLEIN: Do you mean there are questions like vampires that suck the life out of the respondent?
SLOTERDIJK: There are questions like that and questioners like that. In theosophical circles such negatively charged people are called prana suckers, vampires of life’s breath. Sometimes the ques- tioner’s mental exhaustion is clear from the start. In the best case I try to answer like a tour director or an emergency doctor.
KLEIN: I am absolutely sure there are no interviews in the present book in which you had to play the role of emergency doctor, and nobody who reads these pieces would think of speech break- down. But I wonder whether we can sense a kind of respect, not to say awe, in your interview partners now and then.
SLOTERDIJK: If it were ever the case, it would have been wrong to leave it like that. Interviews in public are a form of sport in which the point is not to win, but to play for a draw on a higher plane. In every sophisticated question–answer flow the discussion partners remind each other of their more intelligent options. One discovers the pleasure of being able to navigate in a problem space.
KLEIN: I’d like to refer again to the enthusiasm that’s often dis- cernible in what you say, whether we call it youthful or not. Your drive for expression started exploding after your India trip in early 1980. Could it be that, after India, you experienced a quasi-archaic pre-lingual enthusiasm that converged with later academic influ- ences? You have probably often been asked this question. I am fascinated that, from then on, there seemed to be no way back for you. Suddenly the only open road led towards productivity.
SLOTERDIJK: It would be better to say, the road to practical testing of a presentiment. I was latently aware that I was living on the quiet. After 1980, the time was ripe for me to start striking out. Back then I found the right note for myself, if one can put it so naively. It was as if I had discovered the instrument for making my kind of music. The instrument was tuned at the moment I realized what my opportunity consisted in.
KLEIN: Naturally, we’d like you to explain that in more detail.
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SLOTERDIJK: Let me try. I was born in 1947 and as a young man I grew up almost without any paternal influence. At the right moment I realized I should decide to be a sort of father to myself. I already had a good idea of what mothering is, whether pre-existing or chosen, and how one gradually leaves it behind. I had no idea what fathering meant. I had to find my fathers and mentors, which meant I had to look in the world around me. Fathers are models we seek to have something to conquer later on, aren’t they? So I set off, with admiration as my guideline. Nobody who had something to say was safe from my admiration – or from my disappointment either. The breakthrough came when I understood that I had to explain the world to myself. In my case it could only happen by taking myself in hand – as teacher and student in one. Somehow I managed to duplicate myself into a bigger and a smaller part. So I took myself by the hand and explained the world and life to myself. Evidently this made sense to many observers who enjoyed reading what I said to myself. They probably laughed at how I slipped into the role of the wise old man for the sake of the junior. I still think this method wasn’t the worst way to approach the philosophical sphere. It was particularly useful in my case because it fitted the situ- ation of a young person who, like many of his generation, grew up with a strong sense of cultural insecurity.
KLEIN: What made you go East after you finished your disser- tation under the professors in Hamburg? What did you learn from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho, as he was also known? Why did you go to India at that time instead of staying at the university?
SLOTERDIJK: That is a long story I can only sketch briefly here. In 1974 I was offered a post as a temporary assistant professor at Hamburg University. I accepted, and moved to Hamburg. The fol- lowing year in Hamburg was a very fruitful time for me, a watershed in my life. I was very lucky to become a close associate of Klaus Briegleb, the tenured professor for modern German literature. I knew him from Munich and in my opinion, and not only mine, he was the foremost literary scholar in the country and at the peak of his art in his years in Hamburg. The constellation with my older colleagues was equally auspicious, an intellectual spiral nebula with enormous energy. It was also interesting in terms of group eroti- cism. As regards the university, from then on I knew it was not my kind of patch. I went back to Munich when my contract expired.
