On its
spiritual
journey, the subject is a nondivine nonsufferer searching for a divine patience ?
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
?
?
?
?
82 ?
PAIN AND JUSTICE
it is called "individual," "citizen," "entity with legal rights," "human being," or ? with this turn of events already been released from its fictional central position in the moral cosmos. It has become "decentered" into a great force within the play of subjective forces. Here the question of whether a surrender or release of the subject has taken place must remain unanswered; a decision on this could not be made readily in any case. It is not unthinkable that only a ? of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy, could lead to a legitimate constitution of sub-
ego and will. What seems at first a bitter expulsion from the center could be viewed on second glance as an adventurous ? it is correct that, in becoming conscious of having been decentered, the subject is anyway only giving up what it never possessed ? autonomy ? is gaining what it would have to lose to the illusion of autonomy: the play of its body and its dialogic-ecstatic status. Whereas the centered subject is the effect of a grammat- ical system that harasses to death the living consciousness between "Thou
and "I want," the decentered subject would perhaps be the first to have the right to say in reference to itself: I am.
What is to be gained from these speculations? Assuming that they pointed in the direction of fruitful insights, who would gain by learning to accept a cybernetic version of justice and seeing in it a radical, constructive, selective force that be- longs to the constructive nature of vital self-composition? The significance of these speculations lies presumably only in their ramifications for the self-defini- tion of the phenomenon of enlightenment. Because enlightenment represents a historic wager on the realization of a reasoning subjectivity, the subject of en- lightenment is radically moved by a transformation of the concept of the subject from a moral-legal center of will to a cybernetic and medial phenomenon. This is no small matter. It is presumably an all-or-nothing situation being put into play within the context of philosophical thought. The subject of enlightenment could from this point forward no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accor- dance with the rules of Apollonian as an autonomous source of mean- ing, ethos, logic, and instead, as something medial, cybernetic, ec- centric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal ? as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the self-composition of primordial ? speak poetically, as an eye through which Dionysus serves
Measured against such conceptions of medial subjectivity, the moral construc- tivism of the Enlightenment must appear naive. If, indeed, the vision of a uni- versal dominion of morality is derived from this, this ? becomes a hyste- procreation of demons in the air, an impotent ? of Apollonian illusion. In his critique of morality, Nietzsche presents us with a minimum of a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 83
second reflection, without which the Enlightenment for its part would remain only a natural illusion. A morality without morals is unthinkable, however, with- out an aesthetic relationship to the necessary illusion:
If we could imagine dissonance become what else is
this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty. (BT, p. 143)
The Apollonian veil is just as moral as it is aesthetic in nature and is woven in particular from the most magnificent of all ? which the En- lightenment had characterized as the moral autonomy of the subject. Thus man, according to his moral ecology, is a fragment of suffering, dreaming, building, and valuing nature ? order to endure ? the illusion of freedom from merely suffering naturalness.
These thoughts are anything but pleasant. They indicate that Nietzsche's doc- trine of the aesthetic exoneration of life does not represent a program of frivolity. To a much greater it is one of the most serious attempts -- perhaps the only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
promising think through the moral situation of modernity without being duped into the more complex swindle of a New Morality. The seriousness of this attempt is connected with the audacity of the attack against recent abstract sub- jectivism. There shines forth from Nietzsche's project the beginnings of a return to the physical foundation of ? to the return to the physical foundation of thought discussed in Chapter 4. In both cases, the truth is speaking as a truth from below, not as an idea in search of a body, but as an intelligent body that, out of respect, accelerates itself in the course of its composition of self toward language, toward the intellect, and toward justice in a manner that is strin- gently perspectival, "constructive," and How- ever, the notion that knowledge does not fall from ? but instead opens itself to us through the dramatic revelation of previously concealed worldly ? is the fundamental concept of authentic of whether it speaks a Marxist labor-oriented, anthropological, or fundamentally ontological idiom. In the ciphers of physicality, a Dionysian ma- terialism is announced, of which "dialectical" materialism is only a brutal car-
With these observations, we leave the realm within which we had been able to read The Birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic theory with cultural-philosophical side- lights. In my concluding remarks I will attempt to advance Nietzsche's model to level at which his book on tragedy will take on a profile.
It actually seems to us as if Nietzsche, along with the major portion of his work, belonged within a history of the "enlanguaging" and self-mobilization of ? that is incalculable but global in its implications
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 84 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
phenomenon, therefore, for which the expression "Dionysian materialism" was used, an expression whose plausibility goes hand in hand with its unapproacha- bility. And talk of materialism within modernity runs the risk of being complicit with the most brutal subjectivisms and the most cynical forms of objectifying thought. And yet, the materialist confession wanted, in accordance with its spirit, to reconcile with matter as the not-other of spirit; it strove to mediate the physics that was unhappily hovering above the physical basis with it, and to call home the logical ghosts. Modern materialism, outlined in a ? le- gitimate withdrawal of idealism, established itself almost universally as the form of thought for ultimate violation and the final seizure of power, and it seems to me that there belongs with it a belief that is more despairing than naive toward the historical potential and the power of self-control of modernity, in order to once again conjure up from beneath the unity of modernity in the spirit of a Dionysian materialism and a medial process of becoming universal.
Be that as it may, this thought always has the greater power, the more conse- quential structure, and the deeper universal capacity for containment vis-a-vis numerous retrogressive ? enclosures, and ? It is a thought that conceives of itself as materialist and Dionysian because it is permit- ted to believe in itself as a medium for a singularly phenomenal,
dramatic uni- versality. It knows that it has been incorporated into a planetary magnetism of physical universal candor (Weltqffenheit) that shows us that every delimitation of subjectivity that does not become superegotistical raving flows into trips around the world that parade before our eyes where our effective limits ? Within these trips around the world on the part of a cosmonautical and a psychonautical reason that are both limitless and final at ? the freedoms of the modern era find their first fragile meaning. Cosmonautical reason concerns itself with the planets as the source and basis of a worldwide communion, world trade, world communi- cation, and world ecology ? when in crisis, world ? Psychonautical reason, on the other hand, queries the individual as to his capacity to endure the universal citizenship into which he was born. For this reason, I believe, the psy- chologies that have been developing continuously on European terrain for the last two hundred years are the essential component of authentic enlightenment; they are the symbolic vehicle of psychonautical reason, that is, any form of self-re- flection that gives voice to our condition of being condemned to universality, even into the very depths of the subject. Within the phenomenon of Dionysian materialism, the individual psyche must be confronted with the advent of an in- creasingly violent and subtle contextualization of what constitutes the "world"; it must learn to liberate the unceasing unveiling of a world of worlds from its initial unendurability and recast it into something that can be endured. It must learn to accept into itself the impact of the ? which "arrives" from without, in order to correspond to the external opening of worlds through an increase in inner openness to the ? is the deity who also protects
? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 85
the ecstasies of ? The fundamental question for modern psychologies, which the Dionysians of an active materialism must render animate from the out- side in, is the following: how can individuals who are imprinted by regionality,
and fear of death in any way endure being affiliated with a planetary fact? To formulate this in the language of Heidegger: how can finite being (Dasein) endure being thrown into an irrepressible universality?
Nothing is more complicated than an answer to this question. But what does this help? The arrival of the God to come is accomplished today in Dionysians of complexity. He who concerns himself with modernity as the period in which he exists will more than ever have to find his way back in complicated stories.
I recently made an attempt to untangle one of the complicated threads of mo- dernity in a philosophical story. I wanted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to show how the depth-psychological mediation of body and world had been made obligatory for modern individuals before the models of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung existed. One has to reach back into the period of the French Revolution to observe the decisive moment at which the unconscious began to ? The unconscious is the name for the sources at which the modern ? ? retrogressive metamorphoses of subjec- tivity lead back to that which preceded it. The body and the drama are the ma- terial foundations of this modern consciousness of retrogressive metamorphoses; we experience in them the way in which the narrowness of the subject breaks open when it resigns itself nolens volens to the universal context, of which it has long since unconsciously been a part and from which it will never be permitted to
Any inwardness is interwoven deeply and somatically into the magnetism of the universal.
It has been said that the three decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century were the politicization of the proletariat, the cultural seizing of language by women, and the discovery of the unconscious. Could it not be that the same phenomenon was at work in all these movements, which would only now be apostrophied as Dionysian or dramatic materialism? Is it not in each case a matter of the surfacing of amorous and plural truths that, thanks to the revolutionary exonerations of technical civilization, are able to develop a modern ecology of expression?
It is probably impossible properly to understand Nietzsche's idea of justice if one views his work and his person as separate from these movements of emer- gence. It would above all else be an unjust abbreviation to explain Nietzsche's impulse as representing only an oscillating balancing with the immoralistic de- restraining tendencies of advanced capitalism that are produced in advance, whether this might also exhibit what belonged to the image of an active nihilism together with its ? "excluding," "exterminating" determinations of ? One would be much more likely to do justice to Nietzsche if one could conceive of his work as a play in the ? twilight of the idols of meta- physics and the collapse of idealisms. This would be appropriate to the emergent
? ? ? 86 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
movement of the excluded physical and dramatic forces. After having been wounded, banished into the darkness, and forgotten, the bodies that have all too long been abused as incarnation machines press toward the light; they make use of modern exonerations, authorizations, and symbolic constructs to prepare ? a new intervention by the lower elements ? a new presence of the
which cunningly and as a rule behaves as if it wanted something in particular
as if it were fighting for a place in the sun of subjectivities, while at bottom it is always only looking for a chance to once again become aesthetic and appear in the arena of absolute
But whereas, among these basis movements, the proletarian and feminist movements are more easily caught by the traps of subjectivity of abstract indi- vidualism, the emergent movement of the ? in its ego-psycho- logical reversal and its therapeutic ? the most promising man- ifestation of the three. The depth psychologies, which for two hundred years have increasingly left their mark on the physiognomy of intellectual Europe, are the characteristic impulse in the history here described as
They conceal the most important reasoning potential of an enlightenment that is not only instrumental and strategic: only they are prepared to consider properly the reality of the drama under the conditions of modernity. Wherever they remain true to their authentic impulse, they reject the deliberate indolence of rationalism and decline to cooperate with the abstract individualism that is only the psychic- legal form in which the universal domination of a nature-exploiting theoretical- moralistic subject wants to prevail. The depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the ? which must beat during the epochal history of re- fusing light to the physis if all bodies are not to atrophy into intersubjectivized fighting machines and self-consciously cold legal entities. This heart thinks in the center of Dionysian passion ? the memory of the ecology of suffering, among which are included even the reason of exonerations and the construction of what is ? It is the living memorial that the history of the wounding of civilization has accumulated within itself, along with all of what must be consol- idated of induration and obscuration in order to bring forth the dominant degree of intellectual armament and the armoring of the body.
Admittedly, this all sounds a trace too dark to satisfy the need for understand- ing, in case one anyway and of one's own accord does not know what could be meant. Is the author here making a game, following the example of the more recent French authors, of cultivating darkness as a genre of the beaux arts? Or is it plausible that the veil over these references to a depth-psychological drama of knowledge should not be understood as a malicious component of a literary nature but instead illuminated as a ways and means by which the "thing itself" is there for us? How could our thinking, if it questions the limitations of its per- formance, circumvent the insight that it cannot render everything transparent? With the acknowledgment that the rational world is situated before an
? ? ? ? ? ? AND JUSTICE ? 87
tional" background and that transparency is able to unfold only before the massif of what is ? enlightenment can leave behind it the arena of an om- nipotent illuminating infantilism and reach the level of a maturity that can criti- cize
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
reason. What ? has observed of the ? he car- ries with him a shadow that "signifies more than the factual absence of potential
be applied on the whole to enlightenment.
What does this all mean? It is easier to say what if does not mean. It does not
mean, for instance, that something like a depth-psychology-related enlighten- ment of society should be undertaken immediately; it does not mean that we should make something of the insight into the dramatic, dark structure of sub- jectivity, something like a psychotherapy in the spirit of the production of indi- viduals who are simultaneously Dionysian and socially functional. It also does not mean that it is high time to shift over into a loving interaction after centuries of organized ? These negations do not intend to posit anything against loving interaction, psychotherapy, or the spirit of enterprise. What is being ne-
at least interrupted and ceased in its impulse ? the indisputably false
reflexes that direct our behavior toward
These reflexes, which are all supported by the myths of procedures for problem solving and the ideologies of engagement.
No other phenomenon illustrates this more clearly than the dramatic
piece of modern ? against which even the depth psychologies have been defined. For depth-psychological processes define them in Nietzsche's
these are the drama, tragedy, and according to the type of their occurrence, precisely that into which no production process or business enterprise can reach. They are the ontological model for what, because of its own form of being, for us, cannot be achieved, induced, or produced in accordance with a method. They stand ? the dominant rationalism of availa-
monuments to the unavailability of what is most real. This remains always something that happens or does not happen beyond the subjectivities that are in operation: passionate love, spontaneous memory, phenomenological in- sight, pure success, a happy synchronicity, a clarifying failure, timely separation, the bursting forth of primordial pain ? of this paraphrases an area in which the Will is not able to have its way. We cannot be silent about the fact that, in any case, even depth-psychological consciousness has almost no defense against its attempts to establish itself in the form of technical praxis and to accept
tocratic social activism.
Here the recollection of Nietzsche's theory of the drama can once again prove For Nietzsche clearly realized at the beginning before he set out on the trail to power as the universal formula of nihilistic the sort of tragedy in which mere calculating subjects play themselves is no longer possible: the "show" of the individual is the end of theater (one is reminded here of Nietzsche's critique of ? The overpowering drama unfurls wherever in-
? ? ? ? ? and
precede modern
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 88 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
dividuals are not actors on their own but are rather conduits for a phe- nomenon that is older than their awareness of The authentic drama is consummated as a Dionysian passion of the physis, which phenomenologically reminds itself of its ? its "destiny," and its "future. " Accordingly, drama is by its very nature ? psychodrama, however, is the unity of memory and phenomenon, of knowledge and destiny. Therefore, enlightenment commands an indissoluble relationship to ? though the modern orga- nization of knowledge tends to reformulate all problems of enlightenment into questions pertaining to the power to dispose of information. Knowledge, how- ever, is the phenomenon of all phenomena and the destiny of all ? It con- tinually has the character of a psychonautical process that is spun out on the Ariadne's web of the terrible truth. We must remind ourselves that the search of the ? conqueror and patient of ? as a flight from the terrible truth; it can become a discovery if it leads to the conscious acceptance of the truth that has occurred and is occurring.
On its spiritual journey, the subject is a nondivine nonsufferer searching for a divine patience ? is only another way of expressing the Dionysian integrity of life within the unity of lust, pain, and knowledge. Thus Dionysian wisdom does not teach a release from suffering; it does not believe in an evasive movement that leads upward. To a much greater extent, it gives us an understanding that at least frees us from suffering on ac- count of our
Would it then follow that a therapeutics that is tragic, in Nietzsche's sense, would be the guiding light for an enlightened enlightenment? Would it provide the model for that understanding that could not be compelled by any procedure or rendered controllable by any method? One would not have to hesitate for a moment to write down this observation if a profession of a dramatic therapeutics were not once again being misunderstood by the activistically tainted Zeitgeist as a declaration of a position with a view to practicality. Thus ? more el- evated, enlightenment must begin with a hesitancy: an enlightened hesitancy is the glimmer of meditation and of epic patience that has more to do with the psy- chonautical
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
adventure than would be revealed at first glance. For psychoanalysis in the current sense of the term can occur only if the subject is set aside so that its history, its drama, can be told. The term "psychoanalysis" here of course refers not to the compromised Freudian undertaking but rather to the whole of psycho- nautics, that is, of depth-psychological enlightenment occurrences that, for ap- proximately two hundred years, have concerned themselves with the postreli- gious absorption of the subject into the space between aesthetics, therapeutics, and Dionysian reflection. To attribute such a high place value to depth-psycho- logical dramaturgy within the process of enlightenment is in no way intended to channel water toward the mills of therapeutic ? The psychonautical phe- nomena of modernity are not directed toward guidelines for action: their process is eventful enough in and of itself.
? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 89
We have in any case few models before us as suggestive of the fact that it is not rational action but rather a rational willingness to allow things to happen that can become the prerequisite for knowledge and enlightenment. He who knows from experience what this formulation "means" will perhaps be able to judge what elements are at stake in such speculations on the relationship between doing and permitting. It is a matter of nothing less than a sensible division of reason between the poles of subject and process; this is what must be characterized as postmetaphysical learning processes. A therapeutic drama at the level of univer- sal civilization, which would be carried out without anyone authorizing or order- ing it, would be a learning process that could bring to an end the assault of active nihilism, with its assignments of value, constructive measures, establishment of levels, and eliminations. Heidegger probably indirectly had something of this sort in mind when he cited ? "But wherever danger resides, there also grows ? A planetary therapeutics that would occur without having a new central subject positioned above it seems to be the only thing that could bring the race for the salvation of subjectivities to a halt on their own account. Any activity in this ? if it were the kind of "trust-building measures" that seem to have come directly from the vocabulary of ? ? would have to prove themselves as mere continuation, and in the meantime even chil- dren have learned that the great abysses of the present are all located as they were before on the straight line of ? Whether the name of the therapeutics of ? here the term takes on a fatal ring ? be "catastrophe" under any circumstances is the question of our age, if it is expressed in thought. One must let the thousand lesser devils for whom this is no longer a ? but rather a ? have their poor malevolent fun.
Our reading of Nietzsche's book on tragedy leads to a sort of guideline for Diony- sian learning, a term for which one could also say "therapeutics," "psycho- nautics," or ? ? yes, even "politics," insofar as one understands the expression in accordance with the concept of night elucidated earlier. Diony- sian learning intends the flaring of insight to the point of danger, to a knowledge at the razor's edge: it characterizes thought on that stage from which there is no running away, because it is reality itself. Life is the trap that is a stage, and the stage that is a trap.
It is precisely within Dionysian learning, however, that Apollonian safety measures are necessary. The dramatic impulses of the actors may not be trans- lated directly from the aesthetic (realm) to the political; Walter Benjamin's warn- ings on this point are still valid today. They must first be subjected to an Apol- lonian intervention that regulates the political ecology of suffering. Under today's conditions, a political act would have to slip all too rapidly from impulsiveness into fascism.
90 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
Let me put it this way: during the plunge from the body of the mother into late capitalism, the pain of individuation accumulates for which late capitalism as such cannot be held ? close this reflex may be and as nu- merous as the discourses may be that tell us, in the course of the instinctive search for the guilty party, where he can be found. To process this pain, which belongs not to the realm of social information but rather to the cycle of a subpolitical level, a self-aware antipolitical therapeutics is required ? to de- politicize individuals, but to deneuroticize politics, to protect the political from psychodynamic movements and Dionysian short ? By therapeutics I mean, of course, not only the operation of psychologizing subcultures, but all
rites, and games that contribute to the pleasure/pain ecology of social paths of conscious life and all lines of psychonautics. If mythological, poetic, shamanistic, and neoreligious lines now increasingly appear among
these, this does not indicate ? least from a functional viewpoint ? insult to the modern by a new irrationalism, but instead speaks to a well-meaning release of politics from the suspicion that it could be immediately responsible for the
and the sufferings caused by individuation in individual lives.
Within the new multiplicity of psychonautics, a mature sense of the distribu- tion of responsibilities is revealed. One's misery thus consists not so much in one's sufferings as in the inability to be responsible for ? inability to want to be responsible for them. The will to accept one's own responsibility -- which is, as it were, the psychonautical variant of the amor ? nei- ther narcissistic hubris nor fatalistic ? but rather the courage and the composure to accept one's own life in all its reality and potentiality. He who wants to be responsible for himself stops searching for guilty parties: he ceases to live theoretically and to constitute himself on missing origins and supposed causes. Through the drama, he himself
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
becomes the hero of ? pa- tient of truth. If enlightenment is carried out in this sense, it lea'ds to a Dionysian autonomy: this is as far removed from the autonomy of the subject of idealistic modernity as the embodied existence is from the illusion of "overcoming" ex-
The Dionysian therapeutics that has been spreading from European soil into the planetary standard for two hundred years contains the most pointed challenge to the dominant forms of pseudoenlightenment, which is continually searching for causes and other "guilty parties" in order to finally establish itself, driven by the dream of becoming a subject or a god, as ideal successor in the place of the guilty. Who can wonder that, in the course of this pseudoenlightenment, the ac- count books of suffering of humankind and nature are bulging to the point of
He who senses the ruinous element in this uncontrolled pseudoenlightenment will recognize that Nietzsche ? spite of his unpredictable deviations and his
? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 91
malevolent tones ? not preach a counterenlightenment; to a much greater degree he, like no one else among the greater figures of modernity, set about to understand the concept of enlightenment as adventurous thinking to the very limits of pain. Almost one hundred years after the onset of his illness, Nietzsche can finally be read as he deserves to be: as one of those who, because of a Diony- sian consciousness, raise their voices against the universal conspiracy of active indolence so that they can report to us on the loneliness and the "heavy, heavy happiness" of the unloved animal who says " I . " Even he, together with his hopeless hardness and his sad battle of separation, can be read as someone in whom the tender empire of the body wanted to learn to speak once again. With his pathos of integrity, his feeling for ? and his intellectual ? he is not so far from the "reciprocal ? ? take up ? ? beautiful formulation ? which those who were born later are able, with a little com- municative luck, to give their existence a better turn. It remains futile to ask what would have become of Nietzsche if he had unraveled the thread of Ariadne that led to her, the mistress of the ? His stage was from the very beginning constructed as a labyrinth, from which there was no escape to another. In his dra- matic coming out of himself before the eyes of everyone and no one, however, he burrowed through, turned around, pushed to the pinnacle, and brought to an end an entire system of values, an entire civilization, an entire era. Those who live after him have an easier time of it. He has warned them of the three unforgivable original sins of consciousness: idealism, moralism, and
But nothing in Nietzsche's writing can have as great a continuing effect as his own refutation of his theory of the will to power. His whole life contradicts it and testifies to a stimulating fragility that is turned toward us like the hardly disguised interior of the terrible truth. Wherever he is wounded, endangered, and ingenu- ous, it is there that he is still among us; wherever his icy abundance buries him alive, it is there that he anticipates the fate of all later individualisms. Wherever he walks with transparent optimism over abysses, it is there that he demonstrates what it means today to be contemporary. And wherever he affirms the course of the world that is crushing him to death so that he can thus create a space for his self-affirmation, it is there that he is a witness to the happiness of those who are without hope.
? r
? Notes
? citations from The Birth of Tragedy ? are taken from Walter ? standard translation (The Birth of ? and the Case of Wagner, translated and with commentary by Walter
[New York: Vintage Press, ? Wherever possible, quotations from other works by Nietzsche are taken from known translations, for which bibliographic information is included. Translated quo- tations that include only a reference to the German edition and are not cited in the notes are my
1. Centauric Literature
Letter from ? translated and quoted by Walter Kaufmann in his introduction to The Por- Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press. ? pp. 7-8. Notes for all subsequent quotations from
this volume will give the title of Nietzsche's text, PN, and pertinent page numbers.
2. "Homer's Contest," PN, p. 37.
3. Letter to Erwin Rohde, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss
and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 10.
2. The Philology of Existence, the Dramaturgy of Force
"Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious ? Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). p. 13.
2. This is not a simple "violation of self," as the psychologizing subjectivism of a popular critical mode of thinking would have it. It is at best an active acceptance of a "thrownness"
into a state of ? ? With this, something is being outlined that belongs characteristically to the psycho-ontologicial
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
phenomenon of masculinity. A very stimulating work on this theme is ? Schulte's ? ? euch
Nietzsches ? der ? ? des ? (Frankfurt/Paris: ? 1982). 3. The following comment betrays the extent to which Nietzsche consciously dealt with the his-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 95
? ? 96 NOTES
parallelism between Wagnerian modernity and Dionysian antiquity: "For me, the phenomenon of Wagner viewed in the flesh initially negatively illustrated the fact that we have up to now not yet understood the Greek world and, vice versa, that it is therein that we will ? the only analogies to our phenomenon of Wagner" ? Gesamtausgo. be Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino ? [Berlin: W. de Gruyter, ? 9, p. 232. Hereafter cited as Werke. )
4. I combine this statement with a question mark behind ? thesis, in accordance with which the postmodern condition is characterized by a radical loss of belief in all historical narratives," i. e. , all philosophies of history. But what if the philosophy of history possessed
at least no apparent -- narrative form? Perhaps history is not an epic phenomenon, but rather a the- atrical one, comparable not to the novel but to the commedia ? in which the plot is carried along from scene to scene thanks to the improvisational powers of an ensemble of actors. If this were true, the usual polemic against any sort of historical- philosophical tension would be reduced to the level of a battle with critical windmills.
? ? ? ? ? ? 5. Lou Andreas-Salome places my opinion,
self at the center of her psychological portrait of Friedrich
6. Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen 1982).
impulse toward release from the
in seinen Werken.
die Neue (Frankfurt:
? ? ? ? ? 7. Here 1 mean the languages/voices of a secular inwardness that was cultivated from the eigh- teenth through the twentieth ? symbolic space that extends from The Magic Flute to The Magic Mountain.
8. A twofold cultural defense mechanism can be perceived in Nietzsche"s Dionysian discourse. Specifically, the romantic aesthetic of genius and the psychology of an inner duality symbolically conceal an actual state of psychic disruption. In general, the establishment of the symbolic register regulates the real unchaining of Dionysian forces in a manner that is culturally acceptable. Only through this powerful symbolic guarding are the ? processes of emergence and release from inhibitions in their entirety possible, processes that characterize the modern psychologies. Since the eighteenth century, an enormous thrust toward the breaking down of barriers, toward loosening and unchaining, has been set in motion within the bourgeois revolution in ? under the protection of new, intensive, civilizing defense thrust whose unfolding we cur- rently discuss under the misleading rubric of postmodernism.
9. "The ? ? ? votary of Dionysus is understood only by his peers. With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld ?
it is called "individual," "citizen," "entity with legal rights," "human being," or ? with this turn of events already been released from its fictional central position in the moral cosmos. It has become "decentered" into a great force within the play of subjective forces. Here the question of whether a surrender or release of the subject has taken place must remain unanswered; a decision on this could not be made readily in any case. It is not unthinkable that only a ? of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy, could lead to a legitimate constitution of sub-
ego and will. What seems at first a bitter expulsion from the center could be viewed on second glance as an adventurous ? it is correct that, in becoming conscious of having been decentered, the subject is anyway only giving up what it never possessed ? autonomy ? is gaining what it would have to lose to the illusion of autonomy: the play of its body and its dialogic-ecstatic status. Whereas the centered subject is the effect of a grammat- ical system that harasses to death the living consciousness between "Thou
and "I want," the decentered subject would perhaps be the first to have the right to say in reference to itself: I am.
What is to be gained from these speculations? Assuming that they pointed in the direction of fruitful insights, who would gain by learning to accept a cybernetic version of justice and seeing in it a radical, constructive, selective force that be- longs to the constructive nature of vital self-composition? The significance of these speculations lies presumably only in their ramifications for the self-defini- tion of the phenomenon of enlightenment. Because enlightenment represents a historic wager on the realization of a reasoning subjectivity, the subject of en- lightenment is radically moved by a transformation of the concept of the subject from a moral-legal center of will to a cybernetic and medial phenomenon. This is no small matter. It is presumably an all-or-nothing situation being put into play within the context of philosophical thought. The subject of enlightenment could from this point forward no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accor- dance with the rules of Apollonian as an autonomous source of mean- ing, ethos, logic, and instead, as something medial, cybernetic, ec- centric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal ? as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the self-composition of primordial ? speak poetically, as an eye through which Dionysus serves
Measured against such conceptions of medial subjectivity, the moral construc- tivism of the Enlightenment must appear naive. If, indeed, the vision of a uni- versal dominion of morality is derived from this, this ? becomes a hyste- procreation of demons in the air, an impotent ? of Apollonian illusion. In his critique of morality, Nietzsche presents us with a minimum of a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 83
second reflection, without which the Enlightenment for its part would remain only a natural illusion. A morality without morals is unthinkable, however, with- out an aesthetic relationship to the necessary illusion:
If we could imagine dissonance become what else is
this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty. (BT, p. 143)
The Apollonian veil is just as moral as it is aesthetic in nature and is woven in particular from the most magnificent of all ? which the En- lightenment had characterized as the moral autonomy of the subject. Thus man, according to his moral ecology, is a fragment of suffering, dreaming, building, and valuing nature ? order to endure ? the illusion of freedom from merely suffering naturalness.
These thoughts are anything but pleasant. They indicate that Nietzsche's doc- trine of the aesthetic exoneration of life does not represent a program of frivolity. To a much greater it is one of the most serious attempts -- perhaps the only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
promising think through the moral situation of modernity without being duped into the more complex swindle of a New Morality. The seriousness of this attempt is connected with the audacity of the attack against recent abstract sub- jectivism. There shines forth from Nietzsche's project the beginnings of a return to the physical foundation of ? to the return to the physical foundation of thought discussed in Chapter 4. In both cases, the truth is speaking as a truth from below, not as an idea in search of a body, but as an intelligent body that, out of respect, accelerates itself in the course of its composition of self toward language, toward the intellect, and toward justice in a manner that is strin- gently perspectival, "constructive," and How- ever, the notion that knowledge does not fall from ? but instead opens itself to us through the dramatic revelation of previously concealed worldly ? is the fundamental concept of authentic of whether it speaks a Marxist labor-oriented, anthropological, or fundamentally ontological idiom. In the ciphers of physicality, a Dionysian ma- terialism is announced, of which "dialectical" materialism is only a brutal car-
With these observations, we leave the realm within which we had been able to read The Birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic theory with cultural-philosophical side- lights. In my concluding remarks I will attempt to advance Nietzsche's model to level at which his book on tragedy will take on a profile.
It actually seems to us as if Nietzsche, along with the major portion of his work, belonged within a history of the "enlanguaging" and self-mobilization of ? that is incalculable but global in its implications
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 84 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
phenomenon, therefore, for which the expression "Dionysian materialism" was used, an expression whose plausibility goes hand in hand with its unapproacha- bility. And talk of materialism within modernity runs the risk of being complicit with the most brutal subjectivisms and the most cynical forms of objectifying thought. And yet, the materialist confession wanted, in accordance with its spirit, to reconcile with matter as the not-other of spirit; it strove to mediate the physics that was unhappily hovering above the physical basis with it, and to call home the logical ghosts. Modern materialism, outlined in a ? le- gitimate withdrawal of idealism, established itself almost universally as the form of thought for ultimate violation and the final seizure of power, and it seems to me that there belongs with it a belief that is more despairing than naive toward the historical potential and the power of self-control of modernity, in order to once again conjure up from beneath the unity of modernity in the spirit of a Dionysian materialism and a medial process of becoming universal.
Be that as it may, this thought always has the greater power, the more conse- quential structure, and the deeper universal capacity for containment vis-a-vis numerous retrogressive ? enclosures, and ? It is a thought that conceives of itself as materialist and Dionysian because it is permit- ted to believe in itself as a medium for a singularly phenomenal,
dramatic uni- versality. It knows that it has been incorporated into a planetary magnetism of physical universal candor (Weltqffenheit) that shows us that every delimitation of subjectivity that does not become superegotistical raving flows into trips around the world that parade before our eyes where our effective limits ? Within these trips around the world on the part of a cosmonautical and a psychonautical reason that are both limitless and final at ? the freedoms of the modern era find their first fragile meaning. Cosmonautical reason concerns itself with the planets as the source and basis of a worldwide communion, world trade, world communi- cation, and world ecology ? when in crisis, world ? Psychonautical reason, on the other hand, queries the individual as to his capacity to endure the universal citizenship into which he was born. For this reason, I believe, the psy- chologies that have been developing continuously on European terrain for the last two hundred years are the essential component of authentic enlightenment; they are the symbolic vehicle of psychonautical reason, that is, any form of self-re- flection that gives voice to our condition of being condemned to universality, even into the very depths of the subject. Within the phenomenon of Dionysian materialism, the individual psyche must be confronted with the advent of an in- creasingly violent and subtle contextualization of what constitutes the "world"; it must learn to liberate the unceasing unveiling of a world of worlds from its initial unendurability and recast it into something that can be endured. It must learn to accept into itself the impact of the ? which "arrives" from without, in order to correspond to the external opening of worlds through an increase in inner openness to the ? is the deity who also protects
? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 85
the ecstasies of ? The fundamental question for modern psychologies, which the Dionysians of an active materialism must render animate from the out- side in, is the following: how can individuals who are imprinted by regionality,
and fear of death in any way endure being affiliated with a planetary fact? To formulate this in the language of Heidegger: how can finite being (Dasein) endure being thrown into an irrepressible universality?
Nothing is more complicated than an answer to this question. But what does this help? The arrival of the God to come is accomplished today in Dionysians of complexity. He who concerns himself with modernity as the period in which he exists will more than ever have to find his way back in complicated stories.
I recently made an attempt to untangle one of the complicated threads of mo- dernity in a philosophical story. I wanted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to show how the depth-psychological mediation of body and world had been made obligatory for modern individuals before the models of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung existed. One has to reach back into the period of the French Revolution to observe the decisive moment at which the unconscious began to ? The unconscious is the name for the sources at which the modern ? ? retrogressive metamorphoses of subjec- tivity lead back to that which preceded it. The body and the drama are the ma- terial foundations of this modern consciousness of retrogressive metamorphoses; we experience in them the way in which the narrowness of the subject breaks open when it resigns itself nolens volens to the universal context, of which it has long since unconsciously been a part and from which it will never be permitted to
Any inwardness is interwoven deeply and somatically into the magnetism of the universal.
It has been said that the three decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century were the politicization of the proletariat, the cultural seizing of language by women, and the discovery of the unconscious. Could it not be that the same phenomenon was at work in all these movements, which would only now be apostrophied as Dionysian or dramatic materialism? Is it not in each case a matter of the surfacing of amorous and plural truths that, thanks to the revolutionary exonerations of technical civilization, are able to develop a modern ecology of expression?
It is probably impossible properly to understand Nietzsche's idea of justice if one views his work and his person as separate from these movements of emer- gence. It would above all else be an unjust abbreviation to explain Nietzsche's impulse as representing only an oscillating balancing with the immoralistic de- restraining tendencies of advanced capitalism that are produced in advance, whether this might also exhibit what belonged to the image of an active nihilism together with its ? "excluding," "exterminating" determinations of ? One would be much more likely to do justice to Nietzsche if one could conceive of his work as a play in the ? twilight of the idols of meta- physics and the collapse of idealisms. This would be appropriate to the emergent
? ? ? 86 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
movement of the excluded physical and dramatic forces. After having been wounded, banished into the darkness, and forgotten, the bodies that have all too long been abused as incarnation machines press toward the light; they make use of modern exonerations, authorizations, and symbolic constructs to prepare ? a new intervention by the lower elements ? a new presence of the
which cunningly and as a rule behaves as if it wanted something in particular
as if it were fighting for a place in the sun of subjectivities, while at bottom it is always only looking for a chance to once again become aesthetic and appear in the arena of absolute
But whereas, among these basis movements, the proletarian and feminist movements are more easily caught by the traps of subjectivity of abstract indi- vidualism, the emergent movement of the ? in its ego-psycho- logical reversal and its therapeutic ? the most promising man- ifestation of the three. The depth psychologies, which for two hundred years have increasingly left their mark on the physiognomy of intellectual Europe, are the characteristic impulse in the history here described as
They conceal the most important reasoning potential of an enlightenment that is not only instrumental and strategic: only they are prepared to consider properly the reality of the drama under the conditions of modernity. Wherever they remain true to their authentic impulse, they reject the deliberate indolence of rationalism and decline to cooperate with the abstract individualism that is only the psychic- legal form in which the universal domination of a nature-exploiting theoretical- moralistic subject wants to prevail. The depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the ? which must beat during the epochal history of re- fusing light to the physis if all bodies are not to atrophy into intersubjectivized fighting machines and self-consciously cold legal entities. This heart thinks in the center of Dionysian passion ? the memory of the ecology of suffering, among which are included even the reason of exonerations and the construction of what is ? It is the living memorial that the history of the wounding of civilization has accumulated within itself, along with all of what must be consol- idated of induration and obscuration in order to bring forth the dominant degree of intellectual armament and the armoring of the body.
Admittedly, this all sounds a trace too dark to satisfy the need for understand- ing, in case one anyway and of one's own accord does not know what could be meant. Is the author here making a game, following the example of the more recent French authors, of cultivating darkness as a genre of the beaux arts? Or is it plausible that the veil over these references to a depth-psychological drama of knowledge should not be understood as a malicious component of a literary nature but instead illuminated as a ways and means by which the "thing itself" is there for us? How could our thinking, if it questions the limitations of its per- formance, circumvent the insight that it cannot render everything transparent? With the acknowledgment that the rational world is situated before an
? ? ? ? ? ? AND JUSTICE ? 87
tional" background and that transparency is able to unfold only before the massif of what is ? enlightenment can leave behind it the arena of an om- nipotent illuminating infantilism and reach the level of a maturity that can criti- cize
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
reason. What ? has observed of the ? he car- ries with him a shadow that "signifies more than the factual absence of potential
be applied on the whole to enlightenment.
What does this all mean? It is easier to say what if does not mean. It does not
mean, for instance, that something like a depth-psychology-related enlighten- ment of society should be undertaken immediately; it does not mean that we should make something of the insight into the dramatic, dark structure of sub- jectivity, something like a psychotherapy in the spirit of the production of indi- viduals who are simultaneously Dionysian and socially functional. It also does not mean that it is high time to shift over into a loving interaction after centuries of organized ? These negations do not intend to posit anything against loving interaction, psychotherapy, or the spirit of enterprise. What is being ne-
at least interrupted and ceased in its impulse ? the indisputably false
reflexes that direct our behavior toward
These reflexes, which are all supported by the myths of procedures for problem solving and the ideologies of engagement.
No other phenomenon illustrates this more clearly than the dramatic
piece of modern ? against which even the depth psychologies have been defined. For depth-psychological processes define them in Nietzsche's
these are the drama, tragedy, and according to the type of their occurrence, precisely that into which no production process or business enterprise can reach. They are the ontological model for what, because of its own form of being, for us, cannot be achieved, induced, or produced in accordance with a method. They stand ? the dominant rationalism of availa-
monuments to the unavailability of what is most real. This remains always something that happens or does not happen beyond the subjectivities that are in operation: passionate love, spontaneous memory, phenomenological in- sight, pure success, a happy synchronicity, a clarifying failure, timely separation, the bursting forth of primordial pain ? of this paraphrases an area in which the Will is not able to have its way. We cannot be silent about the fact that, in any case, even depth-psychological consciousness has almost no defense against its attempts to establish itself in the form of technical praxis and to accept
tocratic social activism.
Here the recollection of Nietzsche's theory of the drama can once again prove For Nietzsche clearly realized at the beginning before he set out on the trail to power as the universal formula of nihilistic the sort of tragedy in which mere calculating subjects play themselves is no longer possible: the "show" of the individual is the end of theater (one is reminded here of Nietzsche's critique of ? The overpowering drama unfurls wherever in-
? ? ? ? ? and
precede modern
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 88 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
dividuals are not actors on their own but are rather conduits for a phe- nomenon that is older than their awareness of The authentic drama is consummated as a Dionysian passion of the physis, which phenomenologically reminds itself of its ? its "destiny," and its "future. " Accordingly, drama is by its very nature ? psychodrama, however, is the unity of memory and phenomenon, of knowledge and destiny. Therefore, enlightenment commands an indissoluble relationship to ? though the modern orga- nization of knowledge tends to reformulate all problems of enlightenment into questions pertaining to the power to dispose of information. Knowledge, how- ever, is the phenomenon of all phenomena and the destiny of all ? It con- tinually has the character of a psychonautical process that is spun out on the Ariadne's web of the terrible truth. We must remind ourselves that the search of the ? conqueror and patient of ? as a flight from the terrible truth; it can become a discovery if it leads to the conscious acceptance of the truth that has occurred and is occurring.
On its spiritual journey, the subject is a nondivine nonsufferer searching for a divine patience ? is only another way of expressing the Dionysian integrity of life within the unity of lust, pain, and knowledge. Thus Dionysian wisdom does not teach a release from suffering; it does not believe in an evasive movement that leads upward. To a much greater extent, it gives us an understanding that at least frees us from suffering on ac- count of our
Would it then follow that a therapeutics that is tragic, in Nietzsche's sense, would be the guiding light for an enlightened enlightenment? Would it provide the model for that understanding that could not be compelled by any procedure or rendered controllable by any method? One would not have to hesitate for a moment to write down this observation if a profession of a dramatic therapeutics were not once again being misunderstood by the activistically tainted Zeitgeist as a declaration of a position with a view to practicality. Thus ? more el- evated, enlightenment must begin with a hesitancy: an enlightened hesitancy is the glimmer of meditation and of epic patience that has more to do with the psy- chonautical
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
adventure than would be revealed at first glance. For psychoanalysis in the current sense of the term can occur only if the subject is set aside so that its history, its drama, can be told. The term "psychoanalysis" here of course refers not to the compromised Freudian undertaking but rather to the whole of psycho- nautics, that is, of depth-psychological enlightenment occurrences that, for ap- proximately two hundred years, have concerned themselves with the postreli- gious absorption of the subject into the space between aesthetics, therapeutics, and Dionysian reflection. To attribute such a high place value to depth-psycho- logical dramaturgy within the process of enlightenment is in no way intended to channel water toward the mills of therapeutic ? The psychonautical phe- nomena of modernity are not directed toward guidelines for action: their process is eventful enough in and of itself.
? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 89
We have in any case few models before us as suggestive of the fact that it is not rational action but rather a rational willingness to allow things to happen that can become the prerequisite for knowledge and enlightenment. He who knows from experience what this formulation "means" will perhaps be able to judge what elements are at stake in such speculations on the relationship between doing and permitting. It is a matter of nothing less than a sensible division of reason between the poles of subject and process; this is what must be characterized as postmetaphysical learning processes. A therapeutic drama at the level of univer- sal civilization, which would be carried out without anyone authorizing or order- ing it, would be a learning process that could bring to an end the assault of active nihilism, with its assignments of value, constructive measures, establishment of levels, and eliminations. Heidegger probably indirectly had something of this sort in mind when he cited ? "But wherever danger resides, there also grows ? A planetary therapeutics that would occur without having a new central subject positioned above it seems to be the only thing that could bring the race for the salvation of subjectivities to a halt on their own account. Any activity in this ? if it were the kind of "trust-building measures" that seem to have come directly from the vocabulary of ? ? would have to prove themselves as mere continuation, and in the meantime even chil- dren have learned that the great abysses of the present are all located as they were before on the straight line of ? Whether the name of the therapeutics of ? here the term takes on a fatal ring ? be "catastrophe" under any circumstances is the question of our age, if it is expressed in thought. One must let the thousand lesser devils for whom this is no longer a ? but rather a ? have their poor malevolent fun.
Our reading of Nietzsche's book on tragedy leads to a sort of guideline for Diony- sian learning, a term for which one could also say "therapeutics," "psycho- nautics," or ? ? yes, even "politics," insofar as one understands the expression in accordance with the concept of night elucidated earlier. Diony- sian learning intends the flaring of insight to the point of danger, to a knowledge at the razor's edge: it characterizes thought on that stage from which there is no running away, because it is reality itself. Life is the trap that is a stage, and the stage that is a trap.
It is precisely within Dionysian learning, however, that Apollonian safety measures are necessary. The dramatic impulses of the actors may not be trans- lated directly from the aesthetic (realm) to the political; Walter Benjamin's warn- ings on this point are still valid today. They must first be subjected to an Apol- lonian intervention that regulates the political ecology of suffering. Under today's conditions, a political act would have to slip all too rapidly from impulsiveness into fascism.
90 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
Let me put it this way: during the plunge from the body of the mother into late capitalism, the pain of individuation accumulates for which late capitalism as such cannot be held ? close this reflex may be and as nu- merous as the discourses may be that tell us, in the course of the instinctive search for the guilty party, where he can be found. To process this pain, which belongs not to the realm of social information but rather to the cycle of a subpolitical level, a self-aware antipolitical therapeutics is required ? to de- politicize individuals, but to deneuroticize politics, to protect the political from psychodynamic movements and Dionysian short ? By therapeutics I mean, of course, not only the operation of psychologizing subcultures, but all
rites, and games that contribute to the pleasure/pain ecology of social paths of conscious life and all lines of psychonautics. If mythological, poetic, shamanistic, and neoreligious lines now increasingly appear among
these, this does not indicate ? least from a functional viewpoint ? insult to the modern by a new irrationalism, but instead speaks to a well-meaning release of politics from the suspicion that it could be immediately responsible for the
and the sufferings caused by individuation in individual lives.
Within the new multiplicity of psychonautics, a mature sense of the distribu- tion of responsibilities is revealed. One's misery thus consists not so much in one's sufferings as in the inability to be responsible for ? inability to want to be responsible for them. The will to accept one's own responsibility -- which is, as it were, the psychonautical variant of the amor ? nei- ther narcissistic hubris nor fatalistic ? but rather the courage and the composure to accept one's own life in all its reality and potentiality. He who wants to be responsible for himself stops searching for guilty parties: he ceases to live theoretically and to constitute himself on missing origins and supposed causes. Through the drama, he himself
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
becomes the hero of ? pa- tient of truth. If enlightenment is carried out in this sense, it lea'ds to a Dionysian autonomy: this is as far removed from the autonomy of the subject of idealistic modernity as the embodied existence is from the illusion of "overcoming" ex-
The Dionysian therapeutics that has been spreading from European soil into the planetary standard for two hundred years contains the most pointed challenge to the dominant forms of pseudoenlightenment, which is continually searching for causes and other "guilty parties" in order to finally establish itself, driven by the dream of becoming a subject or a god, as ideal successor in the place of the guilty. Who can wonder that, in the course of this pseudoenlightenment, the ac- count books of suffering of humankind and nature are bulging to the point of
He who senses the ruinous element in this uncontrolled pseudoenlightenment will recognize that Nietzsche ? spite of his unpredictable deviations and his
? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 91
malevolent tones ? not preach a counterenlightenment; to a much greater degree he, like no one else among the greater figures of modernity, set about to understand the concept of enlightenment as adventurous thinking to the very limits of pain. Almost one hundred years after the onset of his illness, Nietzsche can finally be read as he deserves to be: as one of those who, because of a Diony- sian consciousness, raise their voices against the universal conspiracy of active indolence so that they can report to us on the loneliness and the "heavy, heavy happiness" of the unloved animal who says " I . " Even he, together with his hopeless hardness and his sad battle of separation, can be read as someone in whom the tender empire of the body wanted to learn to speak once again. With his pathos of integrity, his feeling for ? and his intellectual ? he is not so far from the "reciprocal ? ? take up ? ? beautiful formulation ? which those who were born later are able, with a little com- municative luck, to give their existence a better turn. It remains futile to ask what would have become of Nietzsche if he had unraveled the thread of Ariadne that led to her, the mistress of the ? His stage was from the very beginning constructed as a labyrinth, from which there was no escape to another. In his dra- matic coming out of himself before the eyes of everyone and no one, however, he burrowed through, turned around, pushed to the pinnacle, and brought to an end an entire system of values, an entire civilization, an entire era. Those who live after him have an easier time of it. He has warned them of the three unforgivable original sins of consciousness: idealism, moralism, and
But nothing in Nietzsche's writing can have as great a continuing effect as his own refutation of his theory of the will to power. His whole life contradicts it and testifies to a stimulating fragility that is turned toward us like the hardly disguised interior of the terrible truth. Wherever he is wounded, endangered, and ingenu- ous, it is there that he is still among us; wherever his icy abundance buries him alive, it is there that he anticipates the fate of all later individualisms. Wherever he walks with transparent optimism over abysses, it is there that he demonstrates what it means today to be contemporary. And wherever he affirms the course of the world that is crushing him to death so that he can thus create a space for his self-affirmation, it is there that he is a witness to the happiness of those who are without hope.
? r
? Notes
? citations from The Birth of Tragedy ? are taken from Walter ? standard translation (The Birth of ? and the Case of Wagner, translated and with commentary by Walter
[New York: Vintage Press, ? Wherever possible, quotations from other works by Nietzsche are taken from known translations, for which bibliographic information is included. Translated quo- tations that include only a reference to the German edition and are not cited in the notes are my
1. Centauric Literature
Letter from ? translated and quoted by Walter Kaufmann in his introduction to The Por- Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press. ? pp. 7-8. Notes for all subsequent quotations from
this volume will give the title of Nietzsche's text, PN, and pertinent page numbers.
2. "Homer's Contest," PN, p. 37.
3. Letter to Erwin Rohde, in Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss
and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 10.
2. The Philology of Existence, the Dramaturgy of Force
"Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious ? Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). p. 13.
2. This is not a simple "violation of self," as the psychologizing subjectivism of a popular critical mode of thinking would have it. It is at best an active acceptance of a "thrownness"
into a state of ? ? With this, something is being outlined that belongs characteristically to the psycho-ontologicial
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
phenomenon of masculinity. A very stimulating work on this theme is ? Schulte's ? ? euch
Nietzsches ? der ? ? des ? (Frankfurt/Paris: ? 1982). 3. The following comment betrays the extent to which Nietzsche consciously dealt with the his-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 95
? ? 96 NOTES
parallelism between Wagnerian modernity and Dionysian antiquity: "For me, the phenomenon of Wagner viewed in the flesh initially negatively illustrated the fact that we have up to now not yet understood the Greek world and, vice versa, that it is therein that we will ? the only analogies to our phenomenon of Wagner" ? Gesamtausgo. be Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino ? [Berlin: W. de Gruyter, ? 9, p. 232. Hereafter cited as Werke. )
4. I combine this statement with a question mark behind ? thesis, in accordance with which the postmodern condition is characterized by a radical loss of belief in all historical narratives," i. e. , all philosophies of history. But what if the philosophy of history possessed
at least no apparent -- narrative form? Perhaps history is not an epic phenomenon, but rather a the- atrical one, comparable not to the novel but to the commedia ? in which the plot is carried along from scene to scene thanks to the improvisational powers of an ensemble of actors. If this were true, the usual polemic against any sort of historical- philosophical tension would be reduced to the level of a battle with critical windmills.
? ? ? ? ? ? 5. Lou Andreas-Salome places my opinion,
self at the center of her psychological portrait of Friedrich
6. Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen 1982).
impulse toward release from the
in seinen Werken.
die Neue (Frankfurt:
? ? ? ? ? 7. Here 1 mean the languages/voices of a secular inwardness that was cultivated from the eigh- teenth through the twentieth ? symbolic space that extends from The Magic Flute to The Magic Mountain.
8. A twofold cultural defense mechanism can be perceived in Nietzsche"s Dionysian discourse. Specifically, the romantic aesthetic of genius and the psychology of an inner duality symbolically conceal an actual state of psychic disruption. In general, the establishment of the symbolic register regulates the real unchaining of Dionysian forces in a manner that is culturally acceptable. Only through this powerful symbolic guarding are the ? processes of emergence and release from inhibitions in their entirety possible, processes that characterize the modern psychologies. Since the eighteenth century, an enormous thrust toward the breaking down of barriers, toward loosening and unchaining, has been set in motion within the bourgeois revolution in ? under the protection of new, intensive, civilizing defense thrust whose unfolding we cur- rently discuss under the misleading rubric of postmodernism.
9. "The ? ? ? votary of Dionysus is understood only by his peers. With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld ?
