No More Learning

Thomas of Celano, First and Second Life ofSaint Francis, p. 143.
Ibid. , pp. 201£.
Peter Sioterdijk, 1m Weltinnenraum des Kapitals: Fur eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), ch. 11, 'Die Erfindung der Subjektivitiit - Die primiire Enthemmung und ihre Ratgeber', pp. 93f.
III THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
Maiora einem post omnia anteacta saecula et sperandi et tentandi tempus est. J. A. Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles, 1642 (Menston: Scolar, 1969), p. 22.
Quoted in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 103.
Leon Trotsky in a speech given to representatives of a Danish student organization on 27 November 1932: In Defense ofthe Russian Revolution (New York: Pioneer Press, 1933), p. 40.
L'homme en est venu atraiter l'humanite comme une matiere. Quoted in Lucien Gauthier, Von Montaigne bis Valery: Der geistige Weg Frankreichs (Reutlingen: Continental, 1949), p. xxvi.
472
5
6
7
8 9
10 11
12 13
14
15
16 17
18 19
A number of authors Paracelsus have been identified as sources of Comenius' the authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Theologia Naturalis (1615), as well as Benedictus Figuius, Pandora Magllalium Naturalium (Strasbourg: Zetzner, 1608). See Comenius, The Way of Light, trans. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool and London: Liverpool University Press/Hodder & Stoughton, 1938). Regarding Comenius' pedagogical metaphysics in the run-up to the Enlightenment, see also pp. 350f below.
Comenius' impatience can be attributed to the apocalyptic expectations of the late Reformation; that of his successors already presupposed the shift from the apocalypse to the philosophy of history, and hence both the bour- geoisification of apocalypticism and its revolutionary defusing, while the ideologues of revolution preached neo-apocalyptic escalation.
TN: the original French title of Foucault's Discipline and Punish is Surveiller et punir - 'Supervise and Punish', rendered accurately in the book's German title Oberwachen und Strafen, which Sloterdijk echoes here.
Concerning the formative effects of craftsmanly and instrumental exercises, see pp. 292f above.
See pp. 148f above. The tendency to associate the concept of discipline with despotism is not, incidentally, unique to the post-1945 or post-1968 zeit- geist. It is already evident in the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart, Kant's successor in Konigsberg, who discarded the term 'discipline' used in so carefree a manner by Kant, only to choose an even more problematic replacement like 'government', a suggestion that recalls Foucault's idea of self-government. See Christopher Korn, Bildung und Disziplin: Problemgeschichtlich-systematische Untersuchung zum Begriffder Disziplin in Erziehung und Unterricht (Frankfurt: Lang, 2003), pp. 105f.
Galatians 6:15 and 5:24.
Augustine, Confessiones, book IV, ch. 5; Confessions, trans. Francis Joseph Sheed, ed. Michael P. Foley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), p. 60.
Hamilton Club Speech, Chicago, 10 April 1899.
Peter Sloterdijk, 1m Weltinnenraum des Kapitals: Fur eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), p. 79.
As late as the nineteenth century, spokesmen for popular hygienic and gym- nastic systems stirred up the fear of exhaustion and overtaxing (fatigue, surmenage) through excessive exercises - not only because of their bias towards notions of equilibrium, but also because they did not yet under- stand the principle of supercompensation. See Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Korpers 1765-1914 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 317f.
See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Die Farbung der Burger', in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds. ), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
Matthew 25:29.
See Peter Nicki, Ordnung der Gefuhle: Studien zum Begriff des habitus (Hamburg: Meiner, 2005), pp. 48f.
See Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp. 113-23.
S0ren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. M. G. Piety (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 4.
NOTES TO PI>.
473
NOTE'} TO
Sartre contradicts this with his thesis that there are no because
habits are inertias and thus bad per se.
21 See pp. 272£ above.
22 This can be seen most clearly in one of the most influential works of moral
philosophy in recent decades: Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). The author has often been praised for a beneficially corrective return to a neo- Aristotelian ethics of virtue - which, it is argued, is a welcome development amidst the moral confusion of modern societies. If one takes MacIntyre's closing statement into account, however, where he asserts the necessity of unifying St Benedict and Trotsky in a single person in order to find a new guideline, it becomes clear that one is dealing here with anything but an over- coming of confusion; neither Benedict nor Trotsky can make any contribu- tion to a return to virtues. Both are subject to the eros of the impossible: the first in the mode of holiness, the second in the mode of political crimes in the service of good. One must be grateful to MacIntyre for revealing that behind the neo-Aristotelian juste milieu discourse, the ethics of holy excess from early Catholicism is still in effect. No figure could expose modern indecision more clearly: the Benedict-Trotsky hybrid would never be able to decide whether it should work on self-improvement in the monastery or strive to better the world through terrorist activities. The constructive impulse of MacIntyre's reflections, therefore, cannot be absorbed into a restorative ethics of virtue. What is on the agenda is rather a training ethics in response to the sublime metanoetic imperative of our time. See pp. 442f below.
23 Concerning the transitions between the monastic and the humanistic spheres in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Harald Mi. iller, Habit ulld Habitus: Monche und Humallisten im Dialog (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck,2006).
24 The term also appears in English-language sociology, where some authors refer to embedding, disembedding and re-embedding in the relationship between the individual and traditional life forms. See in particular Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990).
25 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 'Dine zu Coblenz im Sommer 1774', in Siimtliche Gedichte (Frankfurt: Insel, 2007), p. 326.
26 TN: 'habit' here refers exclusively to the monk's attire; no double meaning is intended.
27
28 29
Concerning the foundation of non-monetary banking phenomena, see Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 135£. On the philosophical deduction of the idea of the world museum, see Beat Wyss, Trauer der Vollendung: Von der Asthetik des Deutschen Idealismus zur Kulturkritik an der Moderlle (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 1985); on the metaphysics of the archive, see Boris Groys! Thomas Knoefel, Politik der Unsterblichkeit (Munich: Hanser, 2002); on the transformation of immortality into a practical idea, see the references to Nikolai Fedorov on pp. 353 and 395£ below.
'Bent am I and humbled', Regula Benedicti 7, 66-70.
Concerning the triad of habits, passions and mental inertias (also known as 'opinions') and their overcoming through the first ethical distinction, see p. 167 above.
474
30
whv their all relate to conditions
as by 'Hesiod, whereas modern civilization must
mrjprotn. rvi as a second Silver Age; this poses other questions and searches for other answers.
31 See Ulrich Brockling, Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungs(orm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007).
32 Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Joseph Jacobs (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1993), p. 171.
33 Ibid. , p. 1.
34 The word superhomo (from the Greek hyperanthropos) first appeared in a
papal document from the late thirteenth century, the canonization bull for
Louis IX issued by Boniface VIII in 1297.
35 Only Luhmann's systems theory, thanks to its metabiological approach,
integrated the immunological imperative into its foundations. See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 369£.
36 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book (or Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 13.
37 See Heinz-Theo Homann, Das funktionale Argument: Konzepte und Kritik funktionslogischer Religionsbegrundung (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1997).
38 Concerning Christian surrealism, see pp. 205£ above.
39 Trotsky took up this motif to explain the intended direction of socialist
technology: 'Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing "on faith," is actually able to cut down mountains and
move them [. . . J according to a general industrial and artistic plan. ' Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Trunsky (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), p. 204.
40 The word, which can be traced back to the 1820s, caused (along with its object) a furore from the mid-nineteenth century on (in French entraine- ment, in German usually the same word as in English, though initially also Trainirung on occasion).
41 Concerning the kinship between abstract labour and abstract fitness, see the Marxian thesis (cited in part II, n. 120 above) on the difference between slavery and jobbing. The author sees in this difference a historical move- ment whose interpretation requires the entire apparatus of a critique of production conditions; to understand the emergence of abstract fitness requires no less than a comprehensive reconstruction of practice conditions.
42 See Manfred Osten, 'Konfuzius oder Chinas neue Kulturrevolution', in China: Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 2009 (Frankfurt: Insel, 2009), pp. 266-97.
43 Concerning the antagonistic alliance of state and school, see pp. 348£ below.
44 TN: the author uses the English word in this context.
45 The current state of the enhancement debate is described from a pragmatic
perspective by Bernward Gesang in Perfektionierung des Menschen (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 2007).
46 TN: the double meaning of 'putting on' is intended.
47 See Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion
System, trans. Mark Hewson (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). 475
48
49
Concerning the connection between the symbolic order of 'society' and the theatricization of law, see Pierre Legendre, La fabrique de l'homme occi- dental (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1996).
Joseph de Maistre, Petersburg Dialogues, Or , Conversations on the Temporal Government ofProvidence, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 19.
NOTES TO PP. 339-44
50 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 33.
51 See Richard van Dulmen, Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale der Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995).
52 In ch. 8 of the first book of The Wealth of Nations, he writes that 'the demand for men, like that of any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men. ' Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations, ed. Jonathan B. Wight [Petersfield: Harriman House, 2007], p. 53. What Smith views as an effect of the market is in fact a consequence of demographic policy.
53 Gunnar Heinsohn, Rolf Knieper and Otto Steiger, Menschenproduktion: Allgemeine Bevolkerungslehre der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). The authors' thesis did not go uncontested, especially their argument that the documentation of the witch trials shows more denunciation of witches by neighbours and fellow villagers than by state investigators and inquisi- tors. This does not change the truth of the observation that the creation of the witch-hunting climate stems from clericocratically based political meas- ures.
54 TN: 'subject' is used here purely in the sense of subordination to power.
55 The German translation by Johannes Fischart appeared as early as 1591 under the title Yom ausgelassenen wUtigen Teufelsheer (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1973 [reprint]). See Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, Inflation and Witchcraft or The Birth o f Political Economy: The Case of Jean Bodin Reconsidered (Bremen: Institut fur Konjunktur- und
Strukturforschung, 1997).
56 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans.
Montague Summers (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 66.
57 Heinsohn et aI. , Menschenproduktion, p. 78.
58 For a macro-historical description of Europe's demographic anomaly
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen (Munich: Piper, 2008).
59 Michel Foucault, 'Lives of Infamous Men', in James D. Faubion (ed. ), Essential Works ofFoucault, vol. 3: Power (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 157-75:
60 See James L. Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century's End (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
61 Heinsohn et aI. , Menschenproduktion, pp. 70-7.
62 In this context, they point out that Foucault's analysis of the 'microphysics
of power' contains a dating error that, restricted by the methodological bar- riers of discourse analysis, he was no longer able to correct with its own methods. He directed questions at the eighteenth century that had already been answered by the sixteenth; for this reason, almost all of Foucault's statements about modern biopower are impaired in decisive aspects by anachronisms and explanatory gaps.
476
NOTES TO PP. 344-53
63 See Markus Krajewski (ed. ), Projektemacher: Zur Produktion von Wissen in der Vorform des Scheiterns (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004).
64 This failure is described by Herbart in The Application ofPsychology to the Science of Education (1832): 'the less useful an individual is, the less the State will trouble itself about him. Its schools are to provide it with those whom it requires. It chooses the most useful; the rest may look after them- selves. ' Johann Friedrich Herbart, The Application of Psychology to the Science of Education, trans. Beatrice Charlotte Mulliner (New York: Scribner's, 1898), p. 19.
65 It is no coincidence that the greatest metanoetic account to come from medi- eval Europe, La Divina Commedia, states that the poet's initiation into unearthly matters began when he lost his way in a forest at the midpoint of his life (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita).
66 TN: Bildung, from the verb bilden, 'to form' or 'to educate', usually refers to the academic aspect of education, as opposed to Erziehung, which conveys more the sense of upbringing or conditioning. Nonetheless, the word's origin suggests a moulding of character (as evident in the Bildungsroman).
67 Arnold Gehlen often pointed harshly to the tendency towards intellectual hyper-morality, accompanied by a massive moralizing disloyalty to the general interest. Niklas Luhmann speaks more detachedly of such phenom- ena: see Luhmann, 'The Morality of Risk and the Risk of Morality', International Review ofSociology 3 (1987), pp. 87-107.
68 See the pelle di asino aria in Act 4 of Le nozze di Figaro.
69 See Paul Konrad Liessmann, Theorie der Unbildung: Die Irrtumer der Wissensgesellschaft (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006); concerning the implosion of school in postmodernity, see pp. 429f below.
TN: there is a play on words concealed by the translation. Entgeisterung, meaning 'dismay' or 'dumb- foundedness', literally indicates a 'de-spiriting', in contrast to the Geist of
Zeitgeist.
70 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7.
71 Docentium et discentium utilia coetus.
72 Comenius, Via Lucis, Der Weg des Lichtes, ed. and trans. Uwe Voigt
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1997), pp. 21£. TN: because the aforementioned English translation is out of print and not accessible online, the author's references to the German edition have been retained and the corresponding passages newly translated.
73 Ibid. , p. 23.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid. , p. 93.
76 Ibid. , p. 95.
77 Schola est officina, in qua novelli animi ad virtutem formantur; from
Comenius, Via Lucis, p. 206.
78 Ibid. , p. 124.
79 Comenius offers a para-Baconian argument on this subject: 'But neither
should the artificial be ignored. For the arts express nature, or even place it under pressure or keep it captive, forcing it to confess its secrets gradually to us. Hence these secrets become ever more well known. In addition, the arts serve to multiply the comforts of life (and in the Age of Illumination, there would surely have to be a wealth rather than a lack of such comforts). ' Der Weg des Lichtes, pp. l10£.
477
86 87
88 89 90
91 92
in Enzyklopadien der Pruhen Neuzeit: Beitrage zu ihrer Erforschung, ed. Franz M. Eybl, Wolfgang Harms, Hans-Henrik Krummacher and Werner Welzig (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 15£.
See the section above on Sophism as a rhetorical version of the art of omnis- cience, pp. 288f.
See Klaus Schaller, Die Maschine als Demonstration des lebendigen Gottes: Johann Amos Comenius im Umgang mit der Technik (Hohenghren: Schneider, 1997).
See Klaus Volker (ed. ), Kunstliche Menschen: Dichtungen aber Golems, Homunculi, Androiden und Liebende Statuen (Munich: Hanser, 1971). See Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), part 2: Kontingenz und Sichtbarkeit, pp. 473-895.
In his youthful satire of 1798 - 'Einfaltige, aber gutgemeinte Biographie einer neuen angenehmen Frau von bloBem Holz, die ich liingst erfunden und geheiratet' - Jean Paul derived the possibility of legal bigamy from this circumstance: 'any man can marry two women at once, if one of them is made purely of wood'. Quoted in Volker, Kunstliche Menschen, p. 140.
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution ofDynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
This is one reason why psychoanalysis could only seem plausible in Western cultures with a historically grown technical awareness, while its reception was virtually impossible in Japan, China or Africa - that is, in cultures without significant ego--id polarizations or indigenous traditions of higher mechanical engineering.
NOTES TO
80 See Nikolai Fedorov, 'Das sein Sinn und seine , in
Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20" Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in collaboration with Anne von der Heiden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 127-232.
81 In her otherwise admirable book The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt failed to grasp the modernity-constituting relationship between flight from the world and flight into the world, and her misinterpretation of the new mode of futurized worldliness led her to the completely absurd conclusion that modern humans suffered from an unprecedented degree of 'worldlessness' .
82 Comenius, Der Weg des Lichtes, p. 125.
83 'Everything flows of its own accord - compulsion is absent from things. '
This shows the after-effects of Quintilian's conclusion that all learning is
based on the will, but this will cannot be forced.
84 Comenius, Der Weg des Lichtes, p. 126.
85 See Wilhelm Schmift-Biggeman, 'Enzyklopadie und Philosophia Perennis',
93 See Gotthard Gunther, Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen: Eine Metaphysik der Kybemetik (Baden-Baden: Agis, 1963). For Gunther, it is still uncertain whether the draining of subjectivity into the second machine should be read as a mere emptying of the inner world or as a deepening of subjectivity via its mirroring in spirit-mimetic machines of increasing complexity. See also Gunther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. and intr. Kurt Klagenfurt (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 2000).
94 One aspect of this has been mentioned by Bourdieu in his observations on habitus transfer.
478
TO PP. 3
95 See and L'Etat lienee (Paris: Grasset,
96 See pp. 295f above.
97 See Grete Wehmeyer, Carl C:z;erny und die Ein:z;eihaft am Klavier oder Die
Kunst der Fingerfertigkeit und die industrielle Arbeitsideologie (Kassel and
Zurich: Barenreiter & Atlantis, 1983), especially pp. 151-80.
98 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History ofthe Image Before the Era o f Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: Chicago University
Press, 1997).
99 Concerning the decline in the awareness of imitation in the visual art of the
twentieth century, see pp. 433£ below.
100 An example of this is a sequence of forty-three movements for musket train-
ing, with the corresponding commands, dating from the early seventeenth century; quoted in Werner Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike: Studien :z;ur Geschichte des Kriegswesens der Niederlande, Deutschlands, Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens, Spaniens und der Schwei:z; vom Jahre 1589 bis :z;um Dreissigjahrigen Kriege (1941) (Osnabruck: Biblio, 1987), pp. 34f.
101 For a presentation of the opposing argument, see Friedrich W. Heubach,
Das bedingte Leben: Theorie der psycho-logischen Gegenstandlichkeit der Dinge. Ein Beitrag :z;ur Psychologie des Alltags (Munich: Fink, 1987), as well as Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
102 See Chiara Frugoni, Books, Banks, Buttons and Other Inventions, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
103 Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994).
104 TN: a reference to a popular German saying whose meaning is equivalent to 'Rome wasn't built in a day. '
105 Blumenberg, Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988) (expanded edition).
106 See Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
107 Concerning evolutionary theory as a general way to make counter-intuitive assumptions about the 'current' of events plausible, see the passage about Nietzsche's combination of artistry and nature theory on pp. 121£ above.
108 This difference strikes me as a suitable replacement for Foucault's power- critical reflections on the autonomizing reversal of being dominated into self-domination. I am convinced that this translation is closer to the author's intentions than the formulation which his own terminological framework permitted. As a whole, the field of exercises and reflexive praxes must be moved away from the naive over-politicizations underlying the common ways of discussing 'biopolitics'. At the same time, this also refutes the feminist criticisms of Foucault's late works, which seize on his mislead- ing choice of terms without noting the emancipatory perspective of his work for both sexes. For example: Lin Foxhall, 'Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality', and Amy Richlin, 'Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women? ', both in David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter (eds. ),
479
Princeton
109 See Jean-Paul Sartre,
111
112
113
114
115
116 117
118
119 120
121
122 123
Ontology (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 377f.
TN: the word used here, Gelassenheit, is related to the verb lassen, meaning 'to let', in the sense both of allowing and of arranging for something to be done (it also combines with numerous prefixes to produce other verbs related in different ways to leaving and letting). This dialectic is reflected in the entire section on 'operating', where the German for 'having oneself operated on' is sich operieren lassen.
Bruno Latour acted on this by abandoning the object of classical sociology, 'society' as an association of subjects, and replacing it with networks of agents. See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Illustrierte Geschichte der Anasthesie, ed. Ludwig Brandt (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsanstalt, 1997), p. 63.
See Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1: Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), ch. 3: 'Humans in the Magic Circle: On the History of the Fascination with Closeness', pp. 207-62.
The only context in which even this step is exceeded is that of science fiction literature - for example, when human actors have themselves transformed from matter into energy in order to be projected to other locations in the universe via beaming.
Karl Marx, Critique o(Hegel's 'Philosophy ofRighf, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 137. One could then constructively adopt Friedrich August von Hayek's anti- socialist arguments from The Road to Serfdom (1944), and use them for a positive structural diagnosis of the modern welfare and therapy state. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945).
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 207.
Concerning the exemplary fate of Stalin's chief torturer Yagoda in 1938, see Bazon Brock, Lustmarsch durch Theoriegelande: Musealisiert Euch! (Cologne: DuMont, 2008), pp. 141-3.
The subject has been examined from many different angles by Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Vat, Andrei Sinyavsky, Boris Groys and most recently Michail Ryklin, to name only a few outstanding analysts. I added a footnote of my own to this literature with my essay God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), in which I interpret commu- nism as a fourth monotheism, or more precisely as the practical realization of Rousseau's 'religion of man'.
Quoted in Saral Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? (London: Zed, 1999), p. 58.
An echo of the new stage of anthropotechnics could still be discerned in the preference of the DDR elites for cybernetics and its further development in all areas.
NOTES PI', 3
and Classical
(or an Ethics, trans, David Pellauer (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 4. On the same page, he writes: 'Good habits: they are never good, because they are habits. ' 110 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
480
124
See Peter
Geschichte del'
Suhrkamp, 1988).
The third biopolitical emergency, that of National Socialism, combined the populationism of the Modern Age with exterminationism on the contempo- raneous Soviet model to form an operative complex - with weak results in the former category and devastating consequences in the latter. By com- parison, the 'constructive' attempts to cross humans with apes that had already been carried out in Stalin's time (after preludes in the colonial era) were merely episodes, barely different from the attempts to produce bio- logically correct offspring in certain breeding centres run by the S5. The historical evidence indicates that both the USSR and the Nazi state pursued the most large-scale policies of elimination, liquidation of 'unusable ele- ments' and eradication of 'life unworthy of life', but never eugenics in the true sense of the word. The factually indefensible equation of eugenics and extermination policy (conveyed in Germany via the intermediate step of 'racial hygiene') still defines current polemics against the humanistic genetic-therapeutic research conducted today, which stands accused of being a 'liberal eugenics'.
Andrei 5inyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1990).
Two lines from the poem 'TBC' (1929) by the Soviet poet Eduard Bagritsky, dedicated to the memory of Dzerzhinsky. Quoted in Peter Barenboim and Boris Meshcheryakov, Flanders in Moscow and Odessa: Poet Eduard
Bagritskii as the Till Ulenspiegel o f Russian Literature, at http://baruchim. narod. ru/Bagritsky. html (accessed 29 November 2011). Anyone seeking evidence for the explicit abolition of the commandment against killing in the twentieth century will find the first pieces among the intellectual ana- lysts of the Russian Revolution.
Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, p. 126.
A selection of writings by these authors was edited and published - almost a century after the event - as part of the project 'The Post-Communist Condition', directed by Boris Groys, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and under the patronage of Peter Weibel at the Karlsruhe Centre of Art and Media Technology, under the title Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russ/and zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (see n. 80 above).
Die Neue Menschheit, p. 393.
Ibid. , p. 395.
Ibid. , p. 403.
Concerning Bogdanov's politics of blood, see Margarete Vohringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der fruhen Sowjetunion (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2007), pp. 173-229; also, by the same author, '1m Proletformat - Medien fUr Transformationen und Transfusionen im Russland der 20er Jahre', in Transfusionen: Blutbilder und Biopolitik in der Neuzeit, ed. Anja Lauper (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2005), pp. 199-210.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia included the term 'anthropotechnics' in its third volume as early as 1926; it defines it as an 'applied branch of biology whose aim is to improve the physical and mental characteristics of humans
125
126 127
128 129
130
131 132 133
134
TO
481
135
136 137
138
139 140
141
former Pavel Blonski had
NOTES TO Pl'.
the same methods in zootechnics to in Die Neue
and breed new races As as the public in widely dis- seminated text 'Pedagogy': 'Education [. . . Jshould take its place along with veterinary medicine and phytoculture [plant breeding]. ' Quoted in Alexander Etkind, Eros o f the Impossible, trans. Noah and Maria Rubens
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), p. 265.
Die Neue Menschheit, p. 466. In this argument, Muraviev passes over what he knows about the bodily dimension of Indian practice systems - evidently under the influence of the dominant technicism, which ignores the differ- ence between self-operation and having-oneself-operated-on, relying exclu- sively on external treatments. The one-sidedness of this option is denied through simultaneous insistence on 'psychophysical' methods in the 'rebuilding of the human being'.
Ibid. , p. 468.
Leon Trotsky made the analogous Nietzsche-inspired claim that through communist 'psychophysical self-education', 'the average human type' would 'rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise. ' 'The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training. ' Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, pp. 207 and 206.
Concerning the role of European emigres in the restructuring of the American illusion industry, see Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988).
Aron Zalkind, 'Die Psychologie des Menschen der Zukunft' (1928), in Die Neue Menschheit, p. 612.
In the aforementioned text, Zalkind provides ambivalent examples of this art: on the one hand, he foresees 'colossal progress in transportation and communications technology, an unusual dynamization of life' (p. 645); on the other hand, he ventures the prediction that the socialist human being will be so infused with joie de vivre that the last otherworldly stirrings of 'mysticism' will die out, just as the tails of their primate ancestors disap- peared (p. 647). The upward trend in human development, he argues, no longer stems from competition between humans; it comes firstly from the declaration of outer space as the new 'cruel class enemy', and secondly from the systematic stimulation, through socialist education, of the indispensable discontent of all subsequent generations with the living standard of the previous ones. The motor of history must continue to run at full steam, but egotisms will be replaced by sociophilic forces (pp. 650£).
See Jean Ziegler's essay 'Gier gegen Vernunft', in Tugenden tmd Laster: Gradmesser der Menschlichkeit, ed. ZDF-Nachtstudio (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 252£: 'Where is there hope? Completely new social movements and a powerful civil society [. . . J are coming into being. Opposition fronts are setting out everywhere on the planet. They all have different fighting methods, but their motivation is the same: the moral imperative. [. . . JOver 100,000 people from five continents - representing over 8,000 farmers' syndicates, industrial unions, women's movements and non-government organizations fighting for human rights, the environment,
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last for the World Social Forum in no hierarchy, no central committee and no sophisticated imperative programme. As a brotherhood of the night, a living figure of solidarity.