No More Learning

The German public must long since be
well aware of the connections between science and espionage, at least since a
model concept of the secret services has permeated into general consciousness.
Those pieces of information collected by legal and illegal means, which are "at
hand" "against" a person or a group, are called "intimations" (Erkenntnis). Suspi-
cion guides the storing up of "intimations"; it constitutes the prosecution proce-
dure. What mistrust ferrets out lies at hand as "intimations" when the time comes
to take "measures. " This is no semantic lapse, no conceptual contingency. In a
broader sense, this way of speaking about "intimations" is only one of several ex-
posures of the primary connection between knowledge and (polemical) interest.
The English language uses at this point the compact word "intelligence. " "One un-
derstands by it particularly the gathering, assessment, and handing on of (publicly
accessible or secret) pieces of information in special bureaus (agencies or ser-
vices) for the purposes of the military and political leadership (general staff and
6government). " The "naked facts" ferreted out by intelligence build the first solid
layer of a cynical empiricism (Empirie). They must be naked because they are supposed to help keep the object in its dangerous enmity in its sights. The subjects must thus dissemble in order to eavesdrop on the ("naked") objects. Dissimulation of the subject is the common denominator of espionage and modern philosophy.
Police and the Optics of Class Struggle
Certainly, my fair miss,
the police want to know everything, especially secrets.
Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm
This observation can easily be carried over to inner-political enmities, fears, and struggles. Enlightenment is written in good part "psychohistorically," as a history of political fear and its emotional and practical-strategic offspring: suspicion and
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 337
? Olaf Gulbransson, Russian Secret Police, 1909.
mistrust, control and subversion, surveillance and secret, criminalization and outrage. Those who nurse suspicion can become collectors in a black (in the mul- tiple senses: secret, polemical, anarchist, directed at the bad) empiricism. On the side of the wielders of power: rulers, administrators, police, stooges, denoun- cers; on the side of the critics of power: revolutionaries, rebels, deviants, "dissi- dents. " Each of the two sides (properly speaking they are not mere
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"sides," as in a symmetrical relation, but classes superior and inferior, master and servant, ruler and oppressed; this asymmetry would play a significant role in a moral evaluation, but that is not our concern here) views the opponent through specta- cles of suspicion. Organs of state and representatives of hegemonic powers watch out for subversive, oppositional, deviant forces in the domain of their subjects, fueled by the worry that a "conspiracy" could be formed that gives expression to a will to change. The oppositional powers, by contrast, keep a transcript of the immoralism of the ruling power, of its capricious acts, infringements of justice, its corruptness and decadence. In times of open polemical tension, a mutual curi- osity to investigate can be spurred on by the element of enmity that inevitably (but more or less manifestly) clings to every domination. Both, although asymmetri- cally, are moved by a specific will to know that seeks to expose the political oppo- nent in his nakedness.
338 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
We know that Louis XIV maintained a complicated network of palace espi- onage, that spies had to inform him of his courtiers' every move, every secret word, and every possible ulterior motive --especially about the activities of peers, the great men of the realm, that is, potential rivals and aspirants to the throne. Since then, the incumbents of power have infinitely extended and refined the sys- tem of surveillance of the other candidates and participants in power. Modern so- cieties are permeated with organs of self-reconnaissance. In the time of Napoleon I, the police had stocked the Fouches Archive with files on all persons of actual or virtual political significance. The networks of the Russian secret police in the late nineteenth century traversed not only Russia itself but all countries in which Russian emigrants lived. The cross-examinations to which members of the public services are subjected have today become unquestioned
routine. All power ap-
7paratuses derive the right to fight against subversion from the principle of self- preservation. "Understandably enough, I am thinking of "internal security," of the protection of our state from subversion, by which I understand the undermining
8by enemies of the constitution. " Of course, the secret style of this inner-political
reconnaissance contains a certain risk of paranoia that is fundamentally related to a disturbance in the reciprocal relation of seeing and being seen. Being seen without being able to see belongs to the standard motifs of delusion (persecution),
9Political self-reconnaissance in modern societies is not precisely covered by today's concept of the police and its circle of duties, but is approximately covered by that of the police in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (when the concept was conceived more broadly). This also has something to do with the change in the structure of social opposition. After the disappearance of feudal absolutism and the emergence of political parties, political opposition became partially decriminalized; from then on, not every opponent or rival had to be suspected of being a threat. With the emergence of the party system in the nineteenth century, a situation arose in which "constitutions" and parliaments offered competing power groups a stage for self-representation. With the public institutionalization of the "opposition" as counterpart to the government, a dimension of inner-social reconnaissance was more or less abolished. In this system, the opponent takes over a part of the work that otherwise would have to be done by informers (with- out the latter becoming unemployed, but the domain of secrecy is displaced). Now the opponent himself must say what he thinks, what he plans, what his means are, and how strong his following is. Parliamentary systems do, in fact, have the advantage of lessening political paranoia through daily contact with the
opponent: integration through collaboration, trust through division of powers and
10
transparency.
position, the problem of subversion is displaced: Political fear now hovers around the possibility that "changes in the system" could take place gradually under the
just as conversely, seeing, without being seen, can slip into "seeing ghosts. "
Of course, the lessening is only partial because, with a legal op-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 339
protection of legality or, worse still, in the underground, in the extraparliamen- tary sphere, outside the transparent official oppositions. For this reason, mul- tiparty states also suffer, and not infrequently, from political paranoia (e. g. , McCarthy ism).
Black empiricism also knows the converse perspective. It keeps its eye on the bloody or crooked finger of the powerful. With a frequently justified suspicion, it inverts the principle of legitimation. It asks not only which principles, which right, is power based on, but also which rights the powerful infringe in their exer-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
11
cise of power. What is hidden behind the veil of legality?
lemical curiosity is a political trauma: to have been exposed without protection to the "legitimate" but brutal, painful, oppressive force and violence of others-- the power of parents, disciplinary force, political (military, police, executive) force and violence, sexual violence and coercion. The trauma gives birth to a crit- ical attitude. Its a priori: Never again be struck; never again swallow offenses without resisting; never again, if possible, allow a hegemonic power to do vio- lence to us. This critical stance is allied at its origins with Jewish kynicism against the arrogance of the more powerful: They may boast, they may present them- selves as the legitimate power, but at the core of their exercise of power is always "naked force," partly arrogant, partly hypocritical. This critique tends toward wanting to wring from the ruling powerful confessions of their violence and im- morality. It comes down to an inversion of the police and espionage: antipolice, social espionage, reconnoitering the lion's den, exposure of the wolves in sheeps' clothing by the "humbled and insulted. " Since the eighteenth century, there has been in Europe a strong current of such critical empiricism of power, especially in the form of a literary shadowing of the powerful. Early on, enlightenment be- gan to denounce the excessive sexual proclivities of the despots, to attack the un- scrupulousness of the courtiers and ministers who secure their careers by taking advantage of the wild pleasure principle of the rulers. Recall the cynical courtier, Marinelli, in Lessing's Emilia Galotti, the graphic masterpiece of German politi- cal psychology in the eighteenth century. Such a critique really provides "naked truth. " It shows the powerful in their despicableness, artfulness, egocentricity, lust, addiction to extravagance, lack of conscience, unreasonableness, greed for profit, misanthropy, duplicity . . . Earlier, the religious, ascetic kynic cast this gaze on the excessively worldly life-style of their time; then the bourgeois intel- ligentsia on the morbid aristocracy; later, the morally aggressive part of the wor- kers' movement on the "overstuffed imperialist bourgeoisie," and, most recently, anarchism and the antiauthoritarian movements on the state and the wielding of power per se. The dynamic of such research impulses can still be demonstrated in the modern social sciences. In them, the rulers and the ruled, the wielders of power and oppositional powers, observe each other in order to "rationally" objec- tify their political mistrust.
What drives this po-
340 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
Sexuality: The Enemy is Within--Below
When the word "enlightenment" is encountered for the first time, it is as a rule an indecent word. At some time or other, someone gets the idea that we are now old enough to know about "it": Life comes from fucking. There you have it. One can approach the topic innocuously, starting with the bee and the flower, then with cat and tomcat, cow and bull, finally with daddy and mommy, who, in doing it, love each other quite tenderly. No one says a word about it before, no one says a word about it afterwards; in between a gap: enlightenment.
Wherever things are so intensely hidden, there, under the covers, it becomes burningly naked. "Naked" is one of those words that are still sexually unsettled; we think of the atmosphere in a brothel, of skin and secrets. A "naked fact" in some way always resembles an undressed woman. What is naked is rare, desired, and magnetic. It remains an exception, a Utopia. The old sexual economy rested on the game of concealing-revealing, refusing-enticing. It created a deficiency and in doing so produced something valuable. The history of sexual relations therefore probably consists for the lesser part in the history of "eroticism"; the larger part consists in the history of the war between the sexes. For this reason, too, only the smaller part of concealment arises from the erotic game; the greater part comes from coercion, struggle, and oppression. We cannot speak realisti- cally of sexuality without treating animosities and polemics. In a society like ours, the attraction between the sexes seems to be linked from the start with power
12
struggles between "one's own and the alien,"
with exchanges of lust for security, with compromises between fear and sur- render. In the meantime, the word "relationship" has become almost synonymous with conflict.
The black empiricism of sexuality observes its objects through the keyhole, lustful, fearful, apprehensive. Because erotic facts were totally screened off be- fore thevso-called sexual revolution, like dangers and secrets, every access to them, whether one liked it or not, had a conflictual character. Anyone seeking sexual experience found it to be almost like a military adventure. It is no accident that our erotic tradition uses an abundance of martial metaphors -- attack, defense, siege, storm, victory, subjugation, giving over the key to the fortress, etc. The sexual body was thus in no way a simple, straightforward matter. Because it was made so difficult for the sexual body to conceive of itself as an opportunity and as happiness, it became instead a curse and a calamity. The sexual drive, dammed up in its own skin, became an agonizing "thorn in the side. " This is how the older sexual economy handed it down right up to the time of our puberty. In fact, pu- berty was actually the time when acquaintance with the misfortune of having this drive began. Here it helped
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
little to become "enlightened," especially not accord- ing to the formula: the bad news in brief. To be enlightened meant to have become cognizant of the essentials of a new, inner enemy. To learn how to cope with its
with duels over top and bottom,
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 341
? ? ? ? "Guardian Angel," by Roland Topor. Made for laterna-magica sequence in Fel- lini's Casanova. Ink and colored pencils. Copyright (C) 1975 by Roland Topor. Reprinted by permission of Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich. "Gefahrliche Vaginen" (Dangerous Vaginas), by Roland Topor. Copyright (C) 1975 by Roland Topor. Reprinted by permission of Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich.
urges was the strategically pressing task. Sexuality appeared from this perspec- tive as a vast danger zone. It was on the sexual level that you could be overtaken by every possible misfortune: the catastrophe of unwanted pregnancies; the dis- grace of inopportune seduction; the misery of repugnant infections that consumed you for the rest of your life; the humiliation through a premature, lonely drive without prospect; the risk of discovering a monster within oneself that harbored homosexual or perverse tendencies in its bowels; to say nothing of the degrada- tion of prostitution, and so on and so on. These risks became threateningly present with the beginning of sexual maturity. It is understandable that the thought of con- traception initially referred not to conception but to sexual contact, erotic ex-
? 342 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
? Salvador Dalf, The Puzzle of Desire, Ma mere, ma mere, ma mere, 1928. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
perience per se. Apart from a few liberal clever tricks that has been the Catholic position to the present day: contraception through abstinence. The inexperienced, it was thought, can scarcely ever be mature enough to deal with the sexual danger. Only marriage offers the necessary protection by directing sexuality, together with all its risks, into a secure channel. In it, the forbidden becomes allowed, dis- grace becomes duty, sin necessity, the danger of conception the joy of parent- hood, etc.
Whether this regime is fully past is not the question. Then as now, in our civili- zation sexuality is seen through a primarily pornographic visor--as if there were still something to spy out, to uncover, and to bring over to one's own side. Naked- ness becomes the symbol for the highest good. Our image world crawls with na- ked bodies that build up flourishing worlds of stimuli for voyeurism and the brain sensuality of the capitalist wish society. The remote, but already visible, naked body remains in the world where we have "contact" without touching each other, the epitome of the really desirable. Because the commodity society can only func- tion on the basis of disembodiment, its members are consumed by a hunger for images of the body, including one's own body image. Often one has the impres- sion that the images are already among themselves, in search of a complementing counterimage. Only in marginal groups and in parts of the intelligentsia does a type of people still live who know that the images are different from themselves --a knowledge not infrequently paid for with disorders, depressions, and who-am-I neuroses.
Would the addiction to images and the black sexual empiricism not cease at one stroke as soon as the concealments were removed and the prevention of sex-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 343
ual experience were stopped once and for all? Prohibition and concealment are really the driving forces of mechanisms of wishing that continually strive from the given to the other. Nudism and promiscuity therefore both have a subversive component that is worthy of investigation. They destroy the backdrops among which the wishes move when they make their appearance. Where everybody dis- arms from the start, unclothes, and becomes accessible, the wish-producing fan- tasies of prohibition, darkness, and remote goals vanish. Those who have ex- perienced such evaporations sense, if not freedom, then nonetheless an increase in possibilities among which freedom can choose. By tracking down their wish functions they can recognize themselves in the role of the producer of their wishes. It is not the objects that are responsible for the desire directed at them but rather: Wishing paints the objects with its longings, as if the objects were not themselves but simultaneously the remote other that inflames the wishes.
Medicine and Suspecting the Body
Even the doctor --at least the doctor who is markedly influenced by modern natu-
ral scientific medicine-exercises an activity of a polemical type. What in positive
terms is practiced as "healing therapy" appears from a pragmatic perspective as
the fight against disease. Healing (making whole) and fighting are two aspects of
13
the same thing.
today's doctor proceeds from the naked body in order to uncover the sources of danger in its interior. The analogies between modern medical diagnostics and the machinations of the secret services (to the point of linguistic details) are
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
glaringly obvious. The doctor undertakes, so to speak, somatic espionage. The body is the bearer of secrets and is to be shadowed until so much is known about its inner states that "measures" can be decided on. As in secret diplomacy and espionage, in medicine, too, things are "probed" a lot, listened in on, and observed. Medical apparatuses are "infiltrated" into bodies like agents --probes, cameras, connecting pieces, catheters, lamps, and tubes. With auscultations, the medico eavesdrops on the body like the listener on the wall. Reflexes are noted, secret(ion)s drawn off, tensions measured, organ data counted. Quantitative statements, whether they be about production figures, troop strengths, urine data, or diabetes points are particularly appreciated because of their "matter-of-factness," here as there. For the doctor as well as the secret agent, there is often no other way than to rum-
14
mage around in excrements and refuse because the investigations, as a rule,
must take place indirectly, without disturbing the normal running of the body or the overheard corporate entity. Only artful and often disreputable methods lead to important information about the inaccessible secret area. To be sure, more re- cent methods of spying on the interior of the body shrink back less and less from direct and aggressive advances. In places, the distinction between diagnostics and intervention becomes blurred: Foreign substances are infiltrated into the body.
Whereas for the voyeur the naked body is the image sought,
344 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
? Michael von Zichy (1827-1906).
For these reconnaissances and illuminations of the body, not only the natural in- lets and outlets are used as canals; often the body is even directly cut open, the safe broken into. And like spies, the medicos put great efforts into encoding their information so that the "object" does not know what is known about it. Learned bluff and intentional concealment for "therapeutic reasons" separate the doctor's knowledge and the patient's consciousness. Coding and secrecy characterize the medical secret service style. Both exercise formally analogous intelligence practices.
If, for diagnostic medicine, comparisons between medical and secret service optics suggest themselves, then, with operative medicine, still more clearly, po- lemical analogies are in place. Surgery shares the concept of "operation" with the military; conversely, concepts such as foreign body, plague boil, festering sore, poisoning, and decay connect the ideas of medicine and those of the police. The fight against crime has long used medical jargon. Evil, against which medicine, the police, and the army all fight, appears not only in the various manifestations of sickness, criminality, and opposition to war; these manifestations can also eas-
ily change from one form to the other. That also brings the "theoretical" polemical
disciplines --military sciences, intelligence services, police, medicine
15
--into a
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 345
partly thematic proximity, but even more so into a methodological proximity. They all follow the logic of suspicion, which promotes the development of strate- gies for theoretical and practical knowledge of the enemy. Modern medicine, too, even more than all its predecessors, is black empiricism. It is based on the a priori principle that between the subject and its sickness, only enmity can exist. To "help" the subject means, accordingly, to help it to a victory over the aggressor sickness. From this optics of hostility, sickness necessarily appears as an inva- sion, and it is self-evident that the only way to deal with it is polemically, defen- sively, aggressively --not integratedly or comprehensively. The idea that sickness --like any hostility --could also be an original and, in a certain sense, "true" self-expression of the "subject" is already excluded by modern medicine's approach. In practice, the idea is ridiculed that sickness, at a given time, can be a necessary and authentic relation of an individual to itself and an expression of its existence. Sickness must be thought of as the other and the alien, and this po- lemically split-off element is treated by medicine in an isolating and objectifying way, no differently from the way the organs of Internal Security treat suspects, no differently from the way the moral prohibitive authority treats sex drives.
The medicine of a latently paranoid society thinks of the body basically as a subversion risk. In it, the danger of sickness ticks like a time bomb; the body is suspected as the future murderer of the person living in it. My body is my assas- sin. If in the age of the first asepsis, bacteria and viruses were blown up into sym- bols for everything that stimulated evil-up to the point where politicians iden- tified their opponents as bacteria (for which Fascist rhetoric no less than Communist rhetoric provides examples: swarms of Jewish, foreign, revisionist, anarchist, decomposing bacteria)--then today, in the age of the second asepsis, not only the "foreign body" (germ) but even the body itself is conceived of as a suspected enemy. Because it could become sick, it is the problem child of Internal Security.
This suspicion creates the "medicinal" body, that is, the body as bat- tlefield of preventive and operative medicine. According to some statistics, most surgical
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
interventions consist in preventive and "security measure" operations, measures born of mistrust, whose superfluity is veiled by the relief that the worst fears have not been confirmed. One can call this procedure methodical pessi- mism. The secret of its procedere lies in painting a bogeyman on the wall with one hand while operating with the other hand. As with all security systems, such preventive measures exist because of the growth of the readiness to be afraid. If it can be said that societies manifest their feelings toward life in their medicine, then our society reveals that life is too dangerous to live but still also too precious to throw away. Between preciousness and danger, one seeks the safe middle ground. The more life secures itself, the more it becomes virtualized, pushed away, and abandoned. It becomes a mere potential that does not want to engage or realize itself because engagement cannot happen without risk. Preventive, operative, prosthetic, and sedative medicine hold up a mirror to our society: In
346 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
it, in a modernized form but archaically motivated, the existential fears of a civili- zation appear in which, openly or secretly, everyone has to fear a violent death.
16
With the fading of Christian European metaphysics,
these fears have or-
ganized themselves anew. Existence becomes plastered with ideologies of secu-
rity and sanitation. How police thinking and hygiene gracefully elide into one an-
other is expressed by Doctor Herold, the chief of the Federal Criminal Bureau,
in a disturbing way when he sees the police of the future confronted with "social
17
sanitary" tasks
prophylaxis. Behind the enlightened will to know, we thus still discover, to be sure in artfully unfettered forms, archaic fears of contact and wishes to eliminate. They give the polemical disciplines the energy, knowledge, and practices to ac- cumulate for the goal striven for. Scientific prognosis and polemical prevention are essentially related. Obstruction, avoidance, defusing, and suppression are the pragmatic a priori principles of the polemical preventive sciences. In them, en- lightenment has organized itself completely as combative knowledge.
To articulate this implies simultaneously the task of describing an integrating philosophy, namely, to go behind the polemical approach of these disciplines and "sciences" and to uncover the logic of hostility. In this return, the fears and efforts of the will, which precede hostility and prevention, emerge: They are the blind motives of self-preservation. Nothingness and the Metaphysics of Naked Self-preservation
All primary hostilities can be derived from the splitting off of death from life. The
inability of any modern, postmetaphysical, scientized thinking to conceive of any
death as one's own leads to two obviously ubiquitous attitudes: Death does not
belong to life but confronts it irreconcilably, or even more, disconnectedly, as
an absolute annihilation; and because there is no death of which I can say it is
"mine," thinking clings to the only death that remains thinkable as an objective
death: that of the other. "Live and let die," as the title of a James Bond story says.
The a priori principle of self-preservation --agents' cynicism enjoys the freedom
of being able to say it openly --functions according to this rule of thumb. Because
the modern subject, for psychological, ideological, and metaphysical reasons,
cannot think its "own death" (against this, Heidegger's philosophy seems (scheini)
only an impotent corrective), it becomes subsumed under the law to avoid it with
literally every means available. In a certain respect, all means are means for not
18
dying. As a logical consequence a total instrumentalism
that is not the ego, which wants to survive. It provides the technical-logical basis for the modern rulers' cynicism of "instrumental reason" (Horkheimer). If the subject is a priori that which cannot die, it transforms the world rigorously into the domain of its struggles for survival. What hinders me is my enemy; whoever is my enemy must be hindered from hindering me. In its ultimate consequence,
The idea of sanitation means nothing other than prevention and
pervades everything
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 347
this will to prevention implies the willingness to annihilate the other or "the Other. " With the alternative "them or us," the choice falls automatically on the death of the others since it, in the case of conflict, is the sensible, necessary, and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
sufficient condition of my survival.
The incapacity to die subjects the world, in its visible as well as invisible areas, to a radical transformation. If, on the one hand, it becomes the theater of human struggles for self-preservation, on the other, it is flattened simultaneously into the materialist backdrop behind which only so-called nothingness can be surmised. What in earlier times constituted the knowledge of priests, shamans, and mystics --insights and views into the beyond, into the sphere of spirits, angels, demons, powers, gods --now becomes impossible, if only because we can no
19
longer assume a stance to which such a beyond full of beings could be allotted. Only an ego that can "die" and go beyond itself and that experiences itself as a Being within a metaphysically expanded cosmos would be able to communicate with the "spaces" and events beyond death, beyond the empirical body and every- day understanding. However, the modern self-preserving ego, which produces itself through mistrust, criticism, rationality, and control (through universality), marks itself off from the start from such individual metaphysical "intercourse," from spiritual flights, night wanderings, and journeys beyond limits. The ego without metaphysics, to be sure, presents itself as cognitively modest by demon- strating (a la Kant) that and why we cannot know of such things. However, pre- cisely through this, it slides into an explosive self-expansion because, from this denial onward, it stands absolutely alone vis-a- vis the universe. Only with this does the modern self-preserving and knowing ego achieve world dimensions. Ego and world come to have the same extensionality; where a world is asserted, the ego that has it as its object must be designated.
Only with the subject without metaphysics, and not earlier, can Nietzsche's di- agnosis of a "will to power" be confirmed. For the subject of modern knowledge is explicitly megalomaniac--not in the sense of muddleheaded or exaggerated self-esteem, but in the sense of a collective, ontologically real plan of (technical) praxis. What the modern natural sciences and technologies have brought forth are palpable realizations of ideas that earlier were possible only as magic, metaphysi- cal, or occult ideas: flights into space, deep-sea diving, world travel, telecommu- nications, robots, thinking machines, rejuvenation magic, genetics, psychophar- macology, nuclear energy, reception of radiation from outer space. All these are precipitates of an earlier metaphysics, which, however, becomes real only through its retreat and through the elimination of its most important psychic thread: the consciousness of "my" mortality, which ineluctably links me with the hidden and the beyond. In modern thinking, however, death is not the door to somewhere else, but a pure rupture, a node between being and nothingness, not between the here and the beyond. Since the disintegration of death, everything that is non-ego must become potentially the reality of an enemy. The polemical
348 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
disciplines are called on to keep it in check. Since human beings in no respect could still think of themselves as partners of a beyond, their gaze has dimmed to the given world. Gloomily, humanity had to take every kind of (given) meaning from itself; thus the nihilistic shock when one realizes that there is no given mean- ing but that we manipulate it and then "consume" it ourselves. When things have gone so far, the ultimate wisdom in the middle of meaninglessness remains only blind self-preservation.
But with this the problem is not solved. To the extent that conventional images of transcendence were extinguished, hundreds of substitute transcendences spring out of the ground --in the middle of the process of enlightenment--and these were by no means in every case, as Gundolf once said of the spiritualists, merely "fishing in the beyond. " The concept of substitute transcendence could ground a phenomenology of modernity and order numerous phenomena into per- plexing connections: the unconscious as an individual and collective immanent beyond; history as the sphere of dark origins, of the bright future, the lost wealth, or the promised fullness, as that which gives, and simultaneously takes, our iden- tity; space travel as infantile technological and military psychedelics; eroticism as the maze where egos seek the you into which they could "go over"; drugs as explosions of the banal continuum and journeys into interior-outer worlds; the arts as the disciplines in which subjects can creatively climb into something they are "not yet," into shapes, fantasies, and expressions: competitive sports as an at- tempt to overcome the daily limits of bodily movement and performance; tourism as expansion of the world of experience.
However, besides such transformations of transcendence --we could say, into an extended humanity-there is also in modernity a thoroughgoing revenge of the occult. Precisely because no room was left in the world concept of enlightenment for the beyond (i. e. , there are no enigmas, only "problems," no mysteries, only "falsely formulated questions"), consciousness, which thus was left in the lurch, sought a thousand secret paths into dark regions. Respectable occultism is a typi- cal product of enlightenment, and its representatives are parodies of scientists who, against the skeptical world, try to defend the beyond, which for them is a certainty, and this they do by means of precisely that scientific skepticism that only acknowledges facts. Of course, that cannot work well, but that it is attempted at all shows at least a perhaps strongly justified urge. Occultism is the too often humorless and cramped
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
drastic defense of metaphysical sensibilities against the exactions of a materialist backdrop ontology and of a repression of one's own "death" in favor of a falsely enlarged and falsely modest ego: black metaphysics, border crossings between the psychotic and spiritual galaxies, black empiricism beyond empiricism. We can predict that these neomythical tendencies will in- crease. They are, in reality, the things that challenge what is traditionally called enlightenment. Enlightenment must be enlightened about what enlightenment dishes up. Catastrophic processes of forgetting follow enlightenment's trium-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 349
phant "learning processes" like a shadow. Because enlightenment, with its ir- resistable antimetaphysical thrust, has led to a polemical splitting off of death in the first person, it would today be apposite for it to go into the school of the oppo- nent and to learn what is at stake when living beings experience themselves to be in alliance with "powers" that go about their affairs beyond the narrow and simultaneously puffed-up world-subjugating ego.
Espionage against Nature, Artillery Logic, Political Metallurgy
With metals we are at an advantage in Europe and our metallic arts have risen to the highest level. We were the first to trans-
form iron into steel and copper into brass; we invented the gal- vanization of iron and discovered many other useful sciences, so that our artisans have become teachers to the whole world in noble chemistry and mining.
Gottfred Wilhelm Leibniz, Exhortation to the German People to Better Exercise Their Understanding and Their Language
If in numerous sciences, or better, knowledge disciplines, a latent or open decla- ration of enmity on the part of the knower against the objects has been uncovered, the concepts of conventional epistemology--subject, object--appear in another light. Subject means "the subjugated one"; in other languages, therefore, it is the homonym of Untertan (sujet, subject); in rhetoric, the subject is the topic; in po- lice jargon, the suspect. If this "subject" now rises to the nub of modern epistemol- ogies, that is not merely a word displacement. What is hidden behind it is nothing short of a revolution. Subjectivity strives for sovereignty, and to do this the sub- jugated wants to subjugate whatever it can subjugate. We observe a complete inversion--also with regard to suspicion: The suspect (subject) becomes the one who suspects. The subjugated one subjugates the surrounding world and makes it into the epitome of "data," of given facts for itself--given to whom? The com- manding subject. The data give themselves into its hands without its having to give itself back to them. Out of the subjugated arises the ruler over what is given.
This inversion (in latent form probably relatively old, in manifest form a mod- ern phenomenon) constitutes the a priori of the transcendental polemic. The war of the subjects who make the other, opponent or thing, into an object, produces for the first time the foil for the polemical objectivity of the "scientific," enlighten- ment disciplines. The thing that stands against (gegen) me becomes an object (Gegenstand). Every object-if we take it in itself or an sich- is a potential rebel, a counterego or a means in the struggle against me, just as the ego only became the subject in a philosophical sense, a maker of "subjects," as rebel against what subjugates it. In the will to knowledge, interests are always astir that do not ex- haust themselves in knowledge as such but serve the subjects as weapons against
350 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
the objects. "Objective knowledge" in this sense possesses the character of a weapon. (The concept "weapon" appears to me to have precedence over the con- cept "tool"; therefore, a mere critique of instrumental reason does not sufficiently grasp the domain of the polemical. )
Is all this supposed to hold also for the model sciences of modern rationality, the natural sciences? Can the assertion be defended that these sciences viewed na- ture, their object, primarily in a hostile or a hostilely neutral way? Precisely in the natural sciences, and all the more in biological and physical foundational re- search, a relatively "peaceful" self- understanding seems then as now to predomi- nate. But the appearance is deceiving. To be sure, all sciences also possess a con- templative wing, but they do not fly with it. What calls the sciences to life are the imperatives of praxis -- of competition in production, politics, war. One of the philosophical achievements of ecology is the demonstration that, no matter how they understand themselves, the modern natural sciences, as the fundamental sciences of industrial technology, are caught in a process that, if one weighs the facts, can only be described as a war of exploitation and annihilation of advanced civilization against the biosphere. By the way, it was a German-Jewish philoso- pher, Theodor Lessing (whose influence--if one can speak of such a thing--was felt in the time of the Weimar Republic), who laid the foundations for an
21
ecological-philosophical critique of predatory Western industry.
the superpredator can be followed up into the heights of epistemology -- the gaze of the plunderer who roams through organic as well as inorganic nature. Today, we see more and more how futile all attempts are to once again
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
contemplatively neutralize the results of research into nature, as if they were won in order to prop up a "natural scientific world picture. " The political, economic, and military en- tanglements of the natural sciences are all too clear. They were and are the recon- noitering patrol our civilization, desirous of domination, sent out into the previ- ously closed worlds of natural truths. What these patrols and pioneers of natural research have investigated and invented yields in toto something that threatens the existence of the object of research, nature, as a whole.
Am I speaking merely metaphorically here? Not at all. I want to exemplify the polemical character of natural scientific empiricism with the "object," earth, to which all natural sciences, right up to astronomy, refer, and which remains at the heart of our "interest in nature. " It can be relatively easily demonstrated that and how the "earth sciences" are motivated by polemical-practical interests. The ac- tivities of observing the surface of the earth as well as the spying out of the earth's interior serve, in many cases, political and military interests. For this reason, ge- ography belongs more to the domain of strategy and rulers' science, geology more to the domain of weapon technology.
The first accumulation of geographic knowledge probably takes place in the heads of monarchs, conquerors, and generals -- although they do not have to be the ones who carry out the empirical "research. " As political subjects of power,
The tracks of
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 351
however, they have a prime interest in collecting the geographic knowledge of
others --whether they be hunters, seafarers, merchants, or philosophers. The
unity of merchant, investigator, and spy has long been well known. Right at the
beginning of the European tradition of geography, we find a thought-provoking
episode. It is said of the Milesian philosopher of nature, Anaximander, that
around the sixth century (shortly before the beginning of the Ionian uprising and
before the entry of Greece into the decisive years of the Persian Wars), he con-
structed a "philosophical sculpture" (Nebel): "an iron tablet . . . in which the
entire globe, all seas and rivers were engraved" (Herodotus). The tyrant of Mile-
tus took this model of the earth with him on a visit to the Spartans during which
he wanted to request armed help from the Peloponnesian city-state. "Only the map
could make the Spartans at that time comprehend the magnitude and the means
of the Persian Empire. They learned to see themselves from the outside, became
aware of their tiny size and distanced themselves from the war" (Gerhard Nebel,
Die Geburt der Philosophic [Stuttgart, 1967], pp. 37-38). Even then, in the first
moment, the spark jumped from geography to strategic calculation, and if on this
occasion the philosopher maintains an advantage in knowledge over the strategist,
this relation will soon be reversed. Geographic knowledge will be found with
kings and generals, and hardly at all with philosophers. The travel diaries of the
monarchs of the Middle Ages show how at that time the "political ego" of a sys-
tem, its ruler, had to be literally "in search of his subjects. " In precentralized
times, not all scattered corners of a political realm looked onto an unambiguously
localized sovereign center of power ("capital," residence, absolutist castle a la the
Escorial, the Louvre, Versailles). As the most mobile component of the system,
the sovereign had to assert his power through his presence in various places. Only
with the later construction of systems of representation with administrative offices
and police forces does a stationary central power become possible that makes the
political realm, the state's "territory," transparent for the view and measures of
22
administration.
geographic, ethnographic, and demographic details can unite into a store of knowledge. Modern geography, finally, under the star of imperialism (discovery, conquest, missionary intervention, colonization, world trade) draws general in- terest from within the educational strata of capitalist states to itself. It continues the old strategic perspective, only now all the more intensively. For the rest, it is often only the accident of war that founds a new epistemic interest. For lack of usable preliminary work of their own, the U. S. Marines, before the landing of American troops in North Africa, had to ask the civilian population for photos, holiday films, and other information about the characteristics of the coast at the 23
Military-political interest founds a point of focus, around which
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the age of strategic satellites and military information
probable landing site.
systems, such archaic methods have become superfluous.
The principal means of spying out the earth's interior is metallurgy. In the "womb of the earth" rest the metals, often doubly inaccessible due to the depth
352 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
of their location and complicated bonding to rock. Behind the discovery, process- ing, and distribution of these difficult materials, a truly enormous pressure of in- terest must be present, as well as an exceptional use value that makes the effort of processing them worthwhile. Metallurgy is the technically central science in the history of war. With bronze and iron, the hot phase of cultural evolution as well as the escalation of the art of weapons and war begins. With the advent of the age of artillery finally, the latter reaches its ultimate sophistication. All deci- sive types of modern weaponry and military systems --tank divisions, air force, rocket bases, naval systems, etc. --are basically nothing more than the gigantic outgrowths of the way in which artillery makes use of metals and explosives:
24
swimming, flying, motorized artillery systems.
edge of metals can demonstrate the original connection between this central earth science and polemics. Knowledge of nature and of war are connected through a pragmatic chain of interests. Before iron weapons can be raised against an enemy, a campaign against the earth's crust must have taken place, a many-pronged, laborious, and dangerous process. Deposits must be dug up, the ore broken up into pieces; the masses are transported to the smelting plant where they are trans- formed through the violence of fire into liquid; the substances are separated and are hardened with new amalgams, mixtures, and coolings; they are heated red-hot once more, forged, formed, polished. Only the will to war is able to subject the natural substances to such transformations with such violence as the technology of smelting and forging requires. In metallurgy, a humanity thinking of war opens up its grand offensive against the given structures of matter. What it inflicts on the metals is nothing other than an anticipation of what it will inflict on the enemy with the metals. If the "Iron Age" (Ovid) begins with the emergence of war-- represented in the sword and the spear, the metallic weapons of striking and stabbing --the epoch before the emergence of gunpowder weapons is the Golden Age of war. With artillery, something like a second discovery of fire takes place in civilization. However, it is not the Promethean sunfire of long ago but a mod- ern volcanic underworld fire. Corresponding roughly to the invention of artillery is the development of the political centralized power and the spatial perspective at the beginning of modern times. For the first time, it allows the opponent to be "mastered" from a distance. Herein lies its functional relation to modern adminis- tration and surveillance. The shell corresponds to the sovereign's gaze and to the
25
Since the Industrial Revolution, which emanated from the English mining dis- tricts, the metallization of society again assumes new dimensions. At the same time, the spying out of the earth's interior proceeds with intermittent leaps. From now on, gigantic mines arise that eat into the blackest depths of the planet's bowels. Miners become the ghostly army of industrial civilization --the exploited exploiters. The laborers of the smelteries were advanced to the elite division of the capitalist attack against the earth's "miserly" crust. In the end, the modern
decisions of a centralized administration.
A political theory of the knowl-
1BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 353
? Illuminating artillery, in Felix Auerbach, Die Physik im Kriege, 3rd ed. (Jena, 1916).
form of economy capitalizes all mineral deposits, and with millions of breaches, borings, and extractions, it pushes on with the mineralogical war against the earth's crust in order to burn the extracted deposits or to work them into tools and weapon systems. Every day, industrial civilizations decide on death sentences against millions upon millions of living beings and millions of tons of substances. In these decisions, the predatory relation of domination of Western cultures to the earth is perfected.
We must take care not to view today's nuclear technology as exceptional. It is, in reality, nothing more than the consistent continuation of the mineralogical- metallurgical attack on the given structures of matter, the purest intensification of polemical theory. Here, there is no discontinuity. The transcendental- polemical framework of our technology comprises the bronze sword just as much as the neutron bomb. At most, the transition from the metal age to the nuclear age signifies a new technological stage within the polemical structure and a new order of magnitude in the offensive means of self-preservation. In order to keep up their war against the Other, modern competition egos and research egos con- quered the previously most secret structural forms and energy sources of matter. In fact, in going
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
beyond the metallurgical explosion of natural substances (ore, etc. ), they even overstepped the threshold of the natural structures of substances
354 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
in order to reach the point where the previously most puzzling cosmic powers were bound. But also on the nuclear level, the mistreatment of matter merely an- ticipates the mistreatment of the enemy. It projects the pressure for enmity be- tween the rival societies (by way of the "relatively autonomous" intermediate step of natural science) onto radioactive matter. What we are prepared to inflict on the enemy if need be sets the standard for which tools of annihilation are to be wrung from nature. What we have intended for the enemy--large-scale blanket annihilation through incineration, contamination, atomization--has to be first in- flicted on the weapon. It is basically only our message to our opponents; it com- municates what we intend to do to them. The weapon is therefore the enemy's proxy in one's own arsenal. Those who forge weapons make it clear to their ene- mies that they will treat them just as mercilessly as they treat the club, the anvil, the grenade, and the warhead. The weapon is already the maltreated opponent; it is the thing-for-you. Those who arm are already at war. This war takes place de facto continually in intervals of hot and cold phases, the latter being misnamed peace. Seen in the polemical cycle, peace means a period of arming, displacement of hostilities onto the metals; war means, accordingly, the implementation and consumption of arms products, the realization of the weapons on the opponent.
On the highest level of polemical technology, our process of enlightenment reaches the point where it takes leave of a thousand-year-old dualistic tradition of metaphysics: The antagonism between res cogitans and res extensa in the cybernetic age becomes altogether invalid. To the extent that the res (substance) that thinks actually can be represented and produced as machine, the antagonism toward the res that exists in space (extension) disappears. In the meantime, there are modern artillery systems that in strategic jargon are called "intelligent muni- tions" or "smart missiles," that is, rockets that perform classic thought functions (perception, decision making) in flight and behave "subjectively" toward the enemy target. The existence of these systems signifies a metaphysical statutory declaration of our civilization: We have, in fact, become in large part subjects who think of themselves as "thinking things," and it is these thinking things that exchange blows in modern warfare. The difference between the hero and his weapon disappears; the megalomaniac self-preservation egos of our culture have externalized their own being as weapon.