No More Learning

300 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
RAULFF: . . . sharing and guarding.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, ‘share and guard’ is the secretary’s oath. It is both his motto and the basis of his profession. He knows two things that the nation and the court should not know on penalty of losing their power: the first is that exercise of power includes willing- ness to contravene morality and the law, if necessary . . .
RAULFF: The willingness to be a criminal . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps it must be expressed in such a dramatic way. The second, maybe even more embarrassing secret, is that having power usually means not knowing what to do.
RAULFF: Helplessness increases as power increases?
SLOTERDIJK: That is precisely the secret that has to be shared and guarded. The secretario is the person who best understands the difficult position of the mighty. This is the origin of the second source of the modern consultation: it stops giving advice on life from a general literary standpoint and starts providing concrete consultation on power instead. The core idea is the insight that there is no continuity between a plan of action and its execution. When the powerful want to move into action, they are not standing at the beginning of a paved road but in front of a precipice or a wide gap. The break in continuity means we can’t walk into action; we can only leap into it. The secretario is the person who helps the mighty to find the jumping-off point. There are almost always ditches of indecision, of hesitation, of risk awareness to overcome if we want to act practically, and nobody knows this better than the man in the exposed position. His intimate confidant knows it as well. Having power means always being conscious of how far things can go wrong.
RAULFF: This means we should look up the old literature on the secretary if we want to know what happened to fate once consult- ants and risk managers became involved in shaping it.
SLOTERDIJK: Recently I happened to look at one of the funda- mental books of the dawn of the modern era: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia – On the Family – written around 1460. It seems to be a simple text by the father of a family for use by his own offspring. In reality, this book reveals nothing less than the face of the eco- nomic modern age that is about to begin, reflected in the language games of classical philosophy. The author was one of the actors who had long since understood that people have to enter the playing field themselves if they expect Fortune’s favours – especially if they want to secure its favours on a long-term basis. The fourth part of the book is about friendship, which might make us think that the author is offering nothing but typical contemporaneous variations on the Aristotelian theme of philía. At first glance it merely seems to be a
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free restatement of the subject of friendship, using topical examples. In reality, we are looking at the first theory of networking. Alberti’s considerations have a clear starting point: to successfully conclude business in the widening world, the entrepreneur must have friends everywhere in faraway places. What is interesting here is that Alberti didn’t envisage the entrepreneur as the Faustian individual but as the active family, the power-conscious clan. At that time, the only method of ensuring the loyalty of employees in nearby and distant places of work consisted of situating one’s own family members at key points where possible. We should remember that, as had been common since Greek and Roman antiquity, the family and friendship circles at that time were still closely intertwined, linguistically and in real terms. Loyalty was the greatest asset for people at the centre of entrepreneurial clans. It was the mercantile variant of the classical philía. The loyalty and esteem of a house or a firm could only be preserved if the merchants knew that alongside monetary capital and monetary credit there was another, subtle capital, a second kind of credit that was probably more important than the first – a good reputation. The reputation capital ultimately determined the good or bad luck of a firm, that is, a solid, firmly established and viable entrepreneurial unit in the modern markets. In fact, economic relationships between distant partners can’t be established and can’t flourish in the long term without that good reputation and its carefully nurtured growth. The type of successful long-distance relationships that traders engage in are only possible in the long run if the partners have more reason to trust than to mistrust. Securing trust by making friends is one of the processes for domesticating Fortune. The other successful procedures are in the field of risk management, which was already taking shape at that time. That is what the merchants are talking about on the Rialto in Venice in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This much is clear: a merchant couldn’t go far with the Gospels alone. Reflections on Christian teaching couldn’t make the new market predictable. That is why, around 1500, a perfectly functioning clandestine system of double theology was established in many places in Europe. For the critical moments in life there was Christianity, and for the business and private spheres there was the cult of Fortune.
RAULFF: In other words, people learned to be Christians and fatalists at the same time.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, fatalist in the clear sense of the word. RAULFF: In the entrepreneurial sense?
SLOTERDIJK: In a very practical sense, in which both the busi-
nessman and the courtier always did what was necessary to gain and keep Fortune’s favours. But, as we have shown, at the beginning of
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the Enlightenment the suppression of such intellectual constructs had become unavoidable. The eighteenth century tried to break with feudal categories on a broad front, including the favouritism of Fortune. The ideology of equality had as little use for Fortune and its royal court as early Christianity had for Fate.
RAULFF: The early Enlightenment neutralized amor fati, while the democracy of the twentieth century doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.
SLOTERDIJK: All in all, we can rightly say that the modern age initially had to abolish fate because it brought the dawn of the period in which people decided to direct their own fate. We have discussed how this led to neo-fatalist movements and that it was equally inevitable that they would be clarified in the Enlightenment via enlightenment and counter-enlightenment. Yet the pattern of abolition, return and clarification of the idea of fate is ultimately unsatisfying. I think that the most important thing is missing in this smooth narrative. I admit I have only realized recently what the real fascination of fatalism for people of all periods consists in, and people of the modern age are no exception to this. Fichte once remarked that the philosophy we choose depends on what kind of person we are. He distinguished between determinists, who he regarded as slaves who enjoyed their lack of freedom, and ideal- ists for whom freedom was the most important thing. However problematic this distinction may be, it contains a significant psycho- logical discovery. Strangely enough, there are countless people who see the statement ‘There is absolutely nothing we can do’ as good news. Whereas others resist this thesis with every inch of their being, fans of fatalism welcome it as absolution from the requirement to do anything.
RAULFF: There is a desire to overcome things that yields a kind of relief. Roland Barthes invented a lovely phrase for it: ‘the will to hibernation’.
SLOTERDIJK: The tendency to hibernate at the nadir of the will doesn’t only exist in the form of the desire to overcome things. The quietist acceptance of fatality was just as attractive for countless people in the twentieth century. Many people are happy to obtain proof that simply nothing can be done. Everything goes as it goes; everything comes as it comes. I suspect this doesn’t only apply to the fatalism of ordinary people who want a quiet life; a large part of the intellectual movements of the twentieth century also felt the longing for hibernation. Switching off the subject is a curious theo- retical passion we always have to bear in mind, not only among the mystics of the Middle Ages but also among people of the modern era. The vulgar version of Marxism was a massive kind of fatalism,
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according to which the revolution simply had to come sooner or later.
RAULFF: The will to fatalism is present both on the left and the right wing. But in the latter case, the role of Fate is often taken by the homme fatal, a Duce, the strong figure of an aggressor . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . a personification of world destiny or national appeal. After the Second World War, fatalism changed camps and settled into theories with a quietist structure, without further refer- ence to the strong perpetrator. Since then, fate has anonymously determined the intellectual scene. Let’s remember the 1950s, when the ‘post-histoire’ theories that had been advanced in Cournot’s work in the nineteenth century and in the works of de Man and others in the twentieth century reappeared. 18 They argued that we had entered an era of crystallization, the historical alternatives had been exhausted and all that remained were minor variations. Gehlen’s phrase, ‘movement on a stationary basis’, sums up this view. At the same time Kojève once again reintroduced the idea of the end of history in the Hegelian sense. 19 Then came structuralism with its conviction that anonymous structures are ultimately deci- sive: humans imagine they are doing something, but in reality they aren’t doing anything because their internal structures are doing it. Back then, people celebrated the death of the author of structural- ism and rejoiced in the expulsion of the subject from the humanities. Still later came system theory made in Bielefeld. It elegantly rel- egated the whole of the old European semantics of freedom, will, decision-making, commitment and the like to the archive where doctoral candidates are busy with old European phantoms. Finally, our friends the neuroscientists entered the scene and put the lid on old European illusions of action. Maybe Marbach is the ideal place to come face-to-face with these developments. The history of the free subject comes to an end behind steel doors. The excitement is over and the era of shrugging our shoulders and happily saying ‘Can’t-do-anything-more’ can begin. Maybe this is the way we will arrive at the secret last horizon of our topic.
18 Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801–77) was a French mathematician and economic theorist and a founder of mathematical economic theory. Paul De Man (1919–83) was a Flemish-born literary theorist and philosopher known as a leading representative of the Yale critics.
19 Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) was a German philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist and a leading proponent of philosophical anthropology. Alexandre Kojève (1902–68) was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose ideas influenced French philosophy. He was a founding figure of the European Union.
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RAULFF: Is this the point where we should stop?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but without resignation. The best way to conclude would be to make a proposal to the contradictory spirit of the observer. I’m fond of quoting another statement by Fichte, who once sarcastically remarked that it would be easier to persuade most people to think of themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ego. Fichte understood that naturalism is a kind of hypnosis we can’t wake up from without philosophical advice. Nowadays we would say it is easier to convince most people that they are an epiphenomenon of sticky nerve fibres than for them to be prepared to see themselves as free individuals. Anybody who talks about the brain is a traitor to freedom. We have earned the right to this pro- vocative attitude, haven’t we?
RAULFF: Wanting to be an individual is very exhausting.
SLOTERDIJK: The individual is a futile passion, but it should still remain a passion.
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HUMANS IN REPETITION The Twenty-first Century Will Be Acrobatic
For an anthropology of exercises Interview with Philippe Nassif*20
NASSIF: When Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead at the end of the nineteenth century, he prophesied two centuries of nihilism. As a person who sometimes claims to be a proponent of ‘left-wing Nietzscheanism’, would your outlook for the twenty-first century be equally pessimistic?
SLOTERDIJK: When Nietzsche spoke of nihilism it was because he had understood that at the bottom of things one finds chance, and not the divine and wise necessity that was so highly esteemed from the beginning of time. Our age has caught up with this impor- tant intuition. In this sense, the inflation of ‘renown’ – or, better still, celebrity – which will be accepted as the most important expression of fate in the coming decades and centuries, is very illuminating. In the twenty-first century anybody can become a world star, and can do so for the most unpredictable and often most ridiculous reasons. In other words, it will be the century of the tyranny of chance. Of course, chance was always in power, but it has never been observed in its naked state before. As long as people accepted their fate in relation to what they couldn’t control, chance always appeared to them in a religious light, as a revelation of an act of God – la forza del destino, as it were. But the second half of the twentieth century produced a human species that is convinced that
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Philippe Nassif appeared under the title ‘L’homme dans la repetition/Le XXIe siecle sera acroba- tique’, in Cles, Trouver du Sens, Retrouver du Temps, at: <http://www. cles. com/enque tes/article/le-xxie-siecle-sera-acrobatique>. Interview date: 8 July 2010.
Philippe Nassif is a French philosopher.
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the first human right consists of living in a world liberated from the moods of fate. The scandal of chance – that great creator of inequality – will have an increasingly strong effect in a rationalized world. It will be the act of God of the future. We can already see this in the culture of the twentieth century: inequalities, which merely express the reign of chance, evoke the feeling of living in an absurd world.
NASSIF: Still, the present age seems to be turning its back on the absurd. What is being expressed today has more to do with people wanting to create meaningfulness.
SLOTERDIJK: The individualism of the twenty-first century will actually be revealed in the desire to present chance as a deliberate and premeditated act. That will be a new form of eternal mystifica- tion. In the past, people lived with the feeling of an all-pervading necessity, a global providence that acted as the great director of the world and of the story of salvation. But then Nietzsche pulled aside the curtain for us: if we get to the bottom of things we find repetition and chance. That is the absolute novelty of modern thought.
NASSIF: A novelty that is difficult to digest.
SLOTERDIJK: It is easier to digest if we consider that alongside the comedy of absolute chance, whose culmination is the world as it is and I myself with all my characteristics, the increasing density of cultures on earth has become the other factor of fate that will shape the future. ‘Density’ means that the probabilities of encounters and clashes have become almost infinite. At any given moment you can have an encounter that will reshape your life.
NASSIF: In your Spheres trilogy you present the iconoclastic idea that the urban dweller is never alone, despite the huge growth of single households.
SLOTERDIJK: My project is based on a philosophical hostility to the ideology of the solitary individual. My thesis is that ulti- mately the individual does not exist. I reject the fallacious idea of ontological solitude that the society of the modern age is based on. In reality, Being always means being accompanied, but not neces- sarily by a visible companion. An invisible couple is always hiding in the apparent solitude of the individual. Being single therefore means forming a couple with a hidden Other – even if it is only my unknown ‘I’. Modern, urban, available and active subjectivity cor- responds perfectly to the idea of the inward-projected couple. The ability to live alone basically implies you have found the means, the media and the exercises to complete yourself self-referentially. I am never alone with my books; never alone with the music I want to hear; never alone with my interior polylogue. I discussed all these things in detail in Foam, the third volume of my trilogy. The
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Americans are aware of this: when they say ‘Take care’ to us on leaving, they are addressing our unconscious twin.
NASSIF: The French are more likely to say ‘Bon courage’ [‘Good luck’]. Should we take it as a sign that the idea of individual solitude is more entrenched here in Europe than on the other side of the Atlantic?
SLOTERDIJK: Why shouldn’t we see courage as a more or less faithful companion? My courage and I, we get on quite well together! Courage is the good spirit of everyday life.
NASSIF: If the public sees psychology as having had a great influence on philosophy in recent decades, could it be because it has proposed a model of the internal couple ‘Me and my unconscious’ instead of the idea of an autonomous, and therefore solitary, uncon- scious that philosophers have been tied to for years?
SLOTERDIJK: The whole problem of European First Philosophy stems from the fact that the Greeks called human beings ‘mortals’. When the decision is made to emphasize human mortality, the focus is on adults, on the finished version of the human being. Given that humans know they will die, we always have the impression that soli- tude is the ultimate truth of existence. However, it would be quite conceivable to focus on the other pole of human existence: birth. This theme was only appreciated at a late date in the history of ideas. It was raised in the twentieth century by Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and myself. From this perspective, it is no longer mortal- ity but the fact of being born that is decisive. Yet this has no trace of loneliness: being born means getting involved with a welcome committee. The proto-idea of the newborn human is usually: there are people here. First people, then things. In other words, there are newborn babies, and they experience this profound way of being received into the bosom of the family that shapes what will later become ‘the world’. From a philosophical perspective, we experi- ence a great turning point that leads from a priority of mortality to a priority of being born. The people of the twenty-first century will not be mortals but will be people who were born, natal beings. To rethink our state of knowledge in accordance with human rights, we have to imagine a kind of humanity beyond the dictates of pure mortality – a human race whose members express the will to come into the world completely.
NASSIF: Are you telling us to live our lives as a result of birth instead of as little deaths?
SLOTERDIJK: This leads us to take an additional step towards the demystification of fate. To borrow the morose but brilliant term used by the young Heidegger, Fate used to consist of being ‘thrown’ into the world. But the person who was thrown forward can never
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appropriate the forces that threw him or her, just as a missile can’t take possession of the gun behind it.
NASSIF: Does this mean that demystifying fate allows us to reappropriate the forces that threw us into the world?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, starting with the biological gun, with sexual- ity. However, we should use the word ‘appropriation’ very carefully. It is not by chance that the twentieth century secularized sexuality: it was a matter of halting the destiny that fundamentally consisted in people producing children – and very often producing too many. They didn’t know what they were doing in bringing children into the world to whom they couldn’t promise what the Americans call ‘a decent life’. A decent life – that’s exactly what parents should be able to promise their children. In other words, handling procreation is the secret of destiny. Misfortune is usually an inheritance. These mechanisms have never been fully explained, but we now have enough information to know that it is possible to avoid necessarily creating a legacy for our successors from our physical and psycho- logical illnesses. The large range of therapeutic techniques today allows us to break the curse. And that is exactly what is at stake: the Enlightenment is an attempt to sabotage fate. We can interrupt the bad repetition. As we can see in Western countries in the second age of contraception, destiny can also be interrupted by eliminating the overproduction of human beings.
NASSIF: But isn’t it continuing everywhere else as it did previously?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The twenty-first century will give rise to a new division of roles between the cultures that produce too many children and those that don’t produce enough. Currently, as far as I know, around sixty-two nations are shrinking demographi- cally and around 130 have a positive reproduction rate, whether moderate or excessive. Assuming optimistically that the twenty-first century will not experience a series of terrible catastrophes like the previous century, we can hope that the majority of those 130 coun- tries will soon join the club of those producing fewer children.
NASSIF: Tunisia and Iran, for example, have already fallen to the level of France.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s totally surprising, yet totally logical at the same time.
Instead of discussing the madness of the ayatollahs, it would be better to talk about the extraordinary rationality shown by Iranian families in producing only two children for every married couple. This is something the ayatollahs have underestimated – a kind of biological strike by Iranian women. By conceiving not more than two children they are robbing the state of its future believers. And in that corner of the world being a believer means you can be
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sacrificed in a holy war. Still, there will be no holy war in Iran if there are no young men to fight it, even if the country’s leaders persist with the idea for some years to come. The Iranians are catching up with the French and Americans, who have long since represented the society of the only son. You can’t fight wars that demand heavy sacrifices with armies of only sons – which is why the art of warfare in the West is increasingly turning towards automatic weapons. In the past, a family with six or seven children could sacrifice one or two if need be, because nobody knew what to do with them anyway.
NASSIF: Aren’t you painting a very cruel picture of bygone cultures?
SLOTERDIJK: In world history, the second and third sons usually were the great troublemakers. Cultures with only a single son are more peaceful. Why did France abandon the idea of revo- lution in the 1880s and 1890s? Because it was the first country in Europe, and therefore in the world, that practised the principle of the two-child family. The other nations joked about the French way of love, for example, the way to prevent a third child when having sex. Europe sniggered about anal or oral sexual practices, which were seen as French adult secrets. However, this kind of love- making was pure pacifism because it meant people didn’t produce further children for waging war. You will object that this didn’t stop France from plunging into the First World War. Yet those who ended up in the trenches were actually from the generations born before the demographic change. One of the reasons France lost the Second World War was because the country was in a transitional phase in relation to Germany. The big fall in the birth rate took place somewhat later in Germany, at the beginning of the First World War, in fact. The last massive demographic cohorts, born between 1910 and 1914, were around twenty years old when Hitler came to power. That provided him with 2–3 million young men who were ready for incitement, and he was deeply convinced they were destined for nothing else.
NASSIF: If we see birth as the motif of a philosophy based on privilege, does that mean demographic curves become a fundamen- tal explanatory structure of the evolution of human societies?
SLOTERDIJK: The Greeks said the best fate is not to be born. We can interpret this statement as a confession of optimism. From the perspective of those who are already alive, the best thing in the world is not to populate the earth with people who can’t be fed. This elementary act of omission is the true essence of humankind. On this issue, we have to fight against the ‘mortalist’ ideology embodied by the papacy. The Catholic Church has not achieved the decisive turn towards the modern age: it still wants to protect sperm to reserve it
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exclusively for procreation. If Italy is one of the countries with the lowest birth rate today, this is despite the Vatican and thanks to Italian women who have decided to delay their wish to have chil- dren, risking the chance that there may never be a right moment.
NASSIF: Given the growing opportunities for Asian types of spiritual therapy or psychoanalysis in our affluent societies, aren’t we being offered the privilege of experiencing a second birth?
SLOTERDIJK: Take care with the expression ‘second birth’. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the setting for the end of so-called religions of redemption. From a spiritual viewpoint we are entering a period where what matters is no longer salvation, but relief. Classical redemption proposed a way of healing that tears us out of our world and orients us to another world. In the past, the point was to turn your back on your first life to devote yourself to a radically different lifestyle. But, for several centuries, we have been going through a gigantic spiritual transformation that has led from a spirituality infused with denial of life and the world to a form of spirituality based on affirmation. Consequently, the religion of relief, of alleviation, of easing of life, of well-being or of ‘caring’ – to adopt a term that, curiously enough, appears in today’s politics – will play an essential role in humankind’s rituals in the future. There is no second birth for us any more. Everyone will concentrate on the first, which will be quite enough to allow a new spirituality to blossom.
NASSIF: This new way of regarding spirituality – isn’t it the subject of your latest book, You Must Change Your Life, in which you state that the economic crisis is obliging us to do what politics hasn’t managed: to change our life?
SLOTERDIJK: After assessing the results of thirty years of spir- itual and physical exercises, I chose the direction of a new kind of philosophical anthropology. In my new book I show that there is a concept missing from the basic concepts of our culture, from our sociologists’ classical theory of action. Without this concept it will always be impossible to describe how we live. The classic authors of sociology were concerned with two things: communication on the one hand and work on the other. We can either talk to each other or turn our backs on each other to put our energies into developing a product. But what the modernists have forgotten is the third dimen- sion of our activities, which we can summarize with the concept of ‘exercise’.
NASSIF: What do you mean by exercise?
SLOTERDIJK: Exercise consists of repeated operations that result in stabilizing or improving the subject’s ability to perform the operation at the next repetition. People who do exercises develop
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their own form. But we have to understand that humans are beings that aren’t in a position not to exercise: they are condemned to repetition. The only alternatives they have are to repeat things con- sciously or to be pushed into things by routine. Passive habits are simply unconscious exercises, or even dependency or obsessions. By contrast, every culture begins with the discovery that we are able to educate ourselves with specific exercises. Personal culture means having the will to liberate the acrobat inside us.
NASSIF: Doesn’t that explain the growing importance of train- ing? Finding somebody who jerks us out of our unconscious exercises and guides us into conscious exercises?
SLOTERDIJK: From the spiritual perspective, I think people’s consciousness of this dimension of exercise in human existence will become more clearly emphasized. Unexpectedly, sport was probably the great harbinger in this movement. Due to its relative novelty, sport was the most exciting event in the defining character of modern culture. Its democratization shows that self-referential activities have achieved the highest status. My prophecy is that in twenty years’ time sociology will hardly be talking about work, or about communication, but instead about the group of activities we call exercises.
NASSIF: Exercises that are no longer just sport, but will also be spiritual?
SLOTERDIJK: Sport is a metaphor for something that goes far beyond it. Of course, the robust, primitive dimension of sport is evident. But the simplicity of sports professionals shouldn’t be an excuse any more for intellectuals to take no interest in sport. In fact, through the mediation of sport we can observe the emergence of a form of spirituality based on affirmation – more precisely, the affirmation of form. But, as we have known since Nietzsche, Being means being-in-form. Moreover, being in form is a more complex phenomenon that covers nearly the totality of what we usually called religion. However, the necessity of getting into form without being compelled to do so by others can only come from daily culture, that is, from a system of good habits. This opens up long-term perspec- tives for us. On this point we should amend Malraux’s dictum: the twenty-first century will be acrobatic or it will be nothing. 1
NASSIF: Doesn’t the consumer culture propagated by the mass
1 Sloterdijk is referring to a famous saying of André Malraux (1901–76): ‘Le 21ème siècle sera spirituel ou ne sera pas. ’ (‘The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will be nothing. ’)
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media tend to discourage the need for each individual to achieve his or her own form?
SLOTERDIJK: The media that disseminate mass culture are reacting to the need to offer training to those who don’t really want to make an effort. That is training for lazy people. We know the outcome: we are heading for a global population in which 50 per cent of people are overweight. Still, an important insight is being communicated, even by the mass media: any kind of wisdom, any kind of personal achievement, starts with the choice of trainer. We are suddenly realizing that we can’t train completely on our own. From this perspective, even an instrument can play the teacher’s role: a piano, a violin, a drum or a video game.
NASSIF: Aren’t you using a rather broad concept of spiritual exercises?
SLOTERDIJK: Looking at things broadly is the only way for us to understand the laws of our cognitive biographies. Let’s not forget that a modern spiritual career normally involves several conversions. The classical conversion followed a pattern of people moving from worshipping Roman or Germanic gods to the God of Christianity. Incidentally, Buddha, Mohammed and Christ are the names of the great trainers, and their successors are only second- class trainers, better known under the title of apostle or priest. What people called conversion turns out to have been a change of trainer. Nowadays people often can’t be satisfied with a single conversion.
NASSIF: Your daughter, who was born in the mid-1990s, will live most of her life in the twenty-first century. What experiences can you wish for her?
SLOTERDIJK: As she has understood it is not enough to be beautiful, she has made the intelligent choice of a boarding school where she can do all the necessary things to assure her future: friendship exercises, hoping exercises, knowledge exercises and telephoning exercises with her overjoyed parents.
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WITH THE BABBLE OF BABYLON IN THE BACKGROUND
Interview with Manfred Osten*2
OSTEN: Mr Sloterdijk, your libretto seems like an archaeological work. It has a multitude of different layers. For most people today, the Babylonian world is terra incognita. You wrote in your recently published journal collection, Zeilen und Tage:
Mesopotamian studies seem to be in a completely desolate situation. After flourishing briefly around 1900, they contain almost nothing that explains definitively what it was all about between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and this is both trou- bling and absurd, because two things were discovered there that we couldn’t imagine being without in the world we live in today – namely, the week, and friendship.
Another remark concerns the ‘background radiation’ of the Epic of Gilgamesh that we can feel throughout your libretto. The sensational thing about your project is that you try to rehabilitate Babylon in a sense. Indeed, Babylon takes us into contaminated terrain. The Old Testament story has given the Mesopotamian metropolis a negative image. Today it is cursed as the ‘Whore of Babylon’.
SLOTERDIJK: I really like the concept of ‘background radia- tion’, especially applied to cultural structures. Astrophysicists may rack their brains about what background radiation means in
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Manfred Osten appeared under the title ‘Babylon Humming in the Background’, in Max Joseph. Magazin der Bayerischen Staatsoper 1 (2012/2013): 32–40.
Manfred Osten is a German author, lawyer and art historian.
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cosmological terms. However, that there is something like cultural radiation from a darkened background – patterns of order that are so deeply hidden in the oldest things, so strongly embedded in the sediment of what we think is self-evident that they seem to escape any reflection – we can gain experience of that when we get involved in Mesopotamian culture. In doing so, we enter a world much older than that of the Old Testament. We no longer realize what we owe to this world: to this very day we are users of a technique of temporal ordering that was developed in Babylon. We live in the Babylonian week apparently naturally, without thinking that it was predicated on a theology of the Heavenly Seven, that is, on a kind of septemtheism, which means the worship of seven deities. The seven- day week is a cultural creation because, unlike the day, the month and the year, it has no cosmic basis, but represents a freely made decision that fixes the arrangement of social time.
OSTEN: The opera also has seven scenes.
SLOTERDIJK: Jörg Widmann and I played around with this portentous number. We are presenting a planet septet as a stage production for which Widmann has written sublime music. We revive the Babylonian carnival with seven monkeys that play the part of oracle regulators. We have created seven phalli and their female counterparts for the Babylonian carnival, all dramatically larger than life – which gives the theatre audience the opportunity to observe genitalia in the rank of ancillary gods. The stage direc- tions say that the presence of these objects on the stage should give a sacral, solemn impression without a hint of obscenity. In short, the word ‘background radiation’ has an alternative meaning in this context: it invites us to reflect on an immensely successful pro- posal for a world order that has come down to us from the culture between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The Mediterranean cultures have picked up on the Babylonian seven, the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans and, following them, all the European peoples.
OSTEN: In the Old Testament the genesis unfolds in a week, as if that time period were also self-evident for the God of the Jews.
SLOTERDIJK: In the last scene of the opera I suggest that even the great Oneness, beside whom you shall have no other gods, has rented a space in the Babylonian week. This is the day on which Jehovah rests after the effort of creation.
OSTEN: Does that mean he lives rent-free in the Babylonian week?
SLOTERDIJK: He is allowed to celebrate his peaceful Sabbath on one of the seven days – Babylonian tolerance is generous enough for that. As we know, the Christians moved the holy day of rest one day further on, and inserted their Lord’s Day into the old Sun worship
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theology. A trace of this still lingers in the German and English names for the days of the week, while the Romance languages scan- dalously renamed the pagan-sounding day of the Sun as the day of the Lord, the dies domenica, from which the French dimanche and the Spanish domingo derive. That raised the question of whether Sunday is the last or first day of the week: as Sunday, according to astral pro- tocol, takes precedence over the day of the Moon, rest then claimed precedence over activity, whereas in older mythology rest followed after energy had been exhausted. One figure that still understood the original scheme of things very well was Goethe’s Mephisto: ‘Why, surely, if a god first plagues himself six days / Then, self-contented, Bravo! says / Must something clever be created. ’1
OSTEN: Another point about the ‘background radiation’ that emanates from the Gilgamesh epic: the epic describes Gilgamesh’s great friendship with Enkidu, his soulmate, whom he follows into the Underworld after the latter’s death. A further proof of friend- ship is crucially important in your libretto: Inanna descends to the Underworld to demand the return of her sacrificed lover, Tammu. Will the audience recognize the deep dimension of this fascinating mirror effect?
SLOTERDIJK: As long as the surface is understandable enough, anyone is free to delve down into a second, third or fourth mytholog- ical layer. As regards the phrase ‘background radiation’, we should bear in mind that time is something that can be translated into spatial relationships. The German language allows us to distinguish between history and the layering of the past [die Geschichte and das Geschichte]. The latter is spatialized time. It forms the archaeological dimension in which the historian’s spade digs when he or she investi- gates the past that has been deposited. In my opinion the author of a libretto would be well advised only to present understandable sur- faces. He or she should never hide behind deeper meanings. Nothing is more boring than a sign that says: Double meaning! Signs like that should never stand on a libretto roadside. But that doesn’t exclude hidden associations below the surface.
OSTEN: The opera includes overtones and side tones from musical history, ranging from Monteverdi’s Orpheus to The Magic Flute, where Pamina follows her beloved through an ‘underworld’ of trials.
SLOTERDIJK: With regard to The Magic Flute, the librettist, Schikaneder, had no idea where the big snake that follows poor Tamino at the beginning came from – for him it was simply a
1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, VI.
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fairy-tale motif he could use for a theatrical beginning. Looking at Mesopotamia, we immediately grasp the reference to the monster that devoured a prince: it is the Tiamat, the female primal dragon whose dismembered parts were once used to create Heaven and Earth.
OSTEN: What is the meaning of the Tiamat?
SLOTERDIJK: The great snake belongs on the side of original chaos and its little relatives behave accordingly. In Mesopotamian mythology the primary difference between chaos and cosmos is embodied in the antagonism between the Tiamat, the dragon of primal chaos, and Marduk, the god of creation. Marduk appears in our opera as the figure of the sacrificial priest god. In terms of mythological psychology, we are playing with the possibility of each figure having a dual identity. Most of the persons in the ensemble are naturally themselves, first of all, but they also embody a mythi- cal figure, sometimes with the same name. Inanna is the priestess that she is, but in the sixth scene she becomes the goddess of the same name.
OSTEN: She mirrors the figure of the rejected love goddess from the Gilgamesh epic, who was also called Inanna.
SLOTERDIJK: We take this even further with Tammu, the male protagonist. At first he is Inanna’s lover, a Jewish youth who became friendly with the king, like Joseph and Pharaoh. He is sac- rificed during the Babylonian Festival in obedience to the dictates of local myths. At the same time he is a prefiguration of Christ, as he is allowed to return after his sacrificial death, or, as the New Testament says, ‘to rise from the dead’. Moreover, he is a revised version of Christ, because for him – and indirectly for us – the point is not to ascend rapidly to heaven but to return to the world of daily life. For this reason, after his return he has not merely forty days on earth like the resurrected Jesus, but a time-span of fifty years to play his part. Even after the miracle he remains a mortal individual who lives out ‘a human term’.
OSTEN: What does that mean for our idea of death and life?
SLOTERDIJK: The philosophical punchline is obvious: exist- ence means returning from eternity. To really live, a person must have death behind him or her. As long as we regard death as exter- mination that lies ahead of everybody, pessimism will engulf us sooner or later. Then the Tiamat, the exterminating chaos that is on our trail, will win out in the end.
OSTEN: That reminds me of Goethe’s classic saying: ‘Death is the stratagem nature employs for having as much life as possible. ’2
2 The quotation is from Goethe’s fragment, ‘Die Natur’ (1780).
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SLOTERDIJK: That saying can be accentuated even more – I attempted it in the seventh scene of the opera, where I made the soul, the child and the rainbow septet declare the consequences of the mythological process of Babylon. Human existence can only be understood when the individual has liquidated his or her credit at the bank of illusions about eternity. To really live we must have returned from eternity.
OSTEN: Nonetheless, in your Babylonian story, the path through Hell comes before this existentially affirmative return.
SLOTERDIJK: That happens in the sixth scene, in which Inanna embarks on her journey to the Underworld. The Babylonian myth of Inanna’s descent into Hell is probably the oldest example of an Underworld journey in an early high culture. It may give a special thrill to opera lovers because the story of that art form began in the seventeenth century, thanks to the Orpheus legend with the liaison between music and the descent into Hell.
OSTEN: There is one important difference that you introduce into the Babylon libretto: to bring Tammu back to the light of day, Inanna must constantly ‘keep an eye’ on the returnee during his ascent – unlike in the Orpheus story where he wasn’t allowed to turn back towards Eurydice.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, we had to amend something there: at the beginning it is not the singing man who brings his deceased beloved back from the Underworld, but the staunch, loving woman who reclaims her lover. In principle the conventional narrative of the story of Orpheus and his beloved includes a disastrous message. It reveals why the poet ultimately prefers his mourning for Eurydice to the real return of his beloved. The artist clings to his state of melancholy. If Eurydice really rose from the dead, he would have to relinquish it. That is why he must turn round, so that she falls back into the realm of shadows. Poets’ love is impossible without poets’ lies. We have created an alternative primal scene: it is the eye of the woman that carries the dead man back into the light. Inanna does not need the loss of her lover to be creative. We have to beware of the old web of deceit that binds art to loss and culture to depriva- tion. Of course, Romanticism cast suspicion on the topos of the redemption of man through woman – Gottfried Benn said every- thing that has to be said about the notorious need that men have for redemption, in the case of neurotics in general and Richard Wagner in particular, when he commented that first they behave like pigs and then they want to be redeemed.
OSTEN: But do things look different in Babylon?
SLOTERDIJK: The whole piece is arranged like an appeals procedure against traditional misunderstandings of the myth. We
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establish the fact that the Babylonian gods had nothing to do with the Flood at all. In the old accounts we read that they fled shivering to the mountaintops to await the end of the catastrophe. First and foremost, the God of Israel had no connection with the Flood – he was only associated with this Mesopotamian story later, in the post- exile period. It follows that he didn’t send the Flood and that he had no powers to promise it would never return. In fact, he is completely outside this story – even though people might have perpetuated the false version of it for the past 2,500 years. The real point is that neither the gods of the Babylonians nor the God of Judaism were involved in causing the Flood. The Flood, with all its awe-inspiring astral drama, was an external cosmological event that was later internalized by means of religion and translated into the language of guilt and sacrificial duty. As regards the feeling of guilt, human beings seem to have been sensitive to it already in the Mesopotamia of pre-antiquity.
OSTEN: This means there was already a connection between guilt, sacrifice and willingness to suffer persecution. That disposed the Babylonians to sacrificial acts, even to human sacrifice.
SLOTERDIJK: If we are not wholly mistaken, those people had an unprecedented talent for feeling guilty – even for things they couldn’t help. If establishing this fact about a people is a compli- ment, we can pass it on to the Babylonians, and if it is a reproach, the Babylonians have to accept that as well.