What motivates his or her curiosity --and even
assuming
that Homo sapiens has a natural hunger for experience, desire to experiment, and an excess of curiosity, the question still remains, Why precisely this curiosity, this wanting to know?
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
In order to take the polemical realism of his analysis to the limit, Marx could have even spoken of the struggle value of a commodity instead of its exchange value.
This is revealed in particular, of course, with the commodity-producing commodities --the means of production in the narrower sense, which always also represent means of struggle and pressure for their possessor.
Moreover, it is also shown with the strategic main goods of economies such as wheat, iron, etc.
(one only has to think of the apparently harmless examples in the commodity analysis in volume 1 of Capital), to say nothing of the military weapon commodities and commodity weapons.
Due to their functional relatedness, weapons and commodi- ties are frequently interchangeable.
So, seduction and rape are supposed to be the two modi of capitalist cynicism? Circulation cynicism here, production cynicism there? Here the selling out of values; there the arbitrary pulping of the living time and labor power of the masses for the sake of blind accumulations? A moral overstraining is noticeable in these formulations, no matter how deftly aimed they may be. Whoever stresses the importance of encountering reality with as few illusions as possible may not cite it before an idealistic court even when it is amoral. The moral paradox of capitalism is, in addition, the peculiar tolerability of the "intolerable," comfort in devastation, and high life in permanent catastrophe. Capitalism has long since swallowed up its critics, especially since it can be certain of the failure of all alter- natives initiated by revolutions. "Whenever it has to be pointed out to capitalism
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 321
that it cannot help the world, it in turn can point out that communism cannot even help itself. " (Martin Walser, Biichner Prize speech, 1981).
Does what has been described here as capital cynicism in the last analysis mean nothing other than the final historical pupation of the experience that, since time immemorial, human life has been exposed to a lot of hardship and cruelties? Is the existence of human beings on a bloody globe at all subject to moral criteria? Does not this cynicism possibly present to us the most recent form of what the friendly pessimist, Sigmund Freud, called the reality principle ? And accordingly, would an explicitly cynical consciousness not be simply the form of "adulthood" complying with a modern world torn more than ever by power struggles, which undisheartedly hardens itself enough to cope with the given relations?
Those who speak of the hardships of life land almost automatically in a realm beyond moral and economic reason. What in the physical world is the law of gravity appears in the moral world as the law that the survival of societies always demands its sacrifices. Every survival demands to be paid for, and it exacts a price that no merely moral consciousness
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
can approve of and no merely economic cal- culation can compute. The laboring and struggling groups in human society must experience the price of survival as such a bitter tribute to the reality principle be- cause they pay it with their own blood, sweat, and tears. They scrape it together in the form of subjugations to "higher" forces and facticities; they bear it in the form of pains, accommodations, privations, and hardening self-limitations. They continually pay this price in living currency that cuts into the flesh. In the struggle for survival, calluses, wounds, and losses are well-known phenomena. Indeed, where a struggle is waged, the strugglers cannot help but make themselves, with their own existence, into a means and weapon of survival. The price of survival is always paid with life itself. Life sacrifices itself everywhere to the conditions of its preservation. Everywhere we look, it bends to the coercion to toil; in class societies, it subjugates itself to the given relations of domination and exploitation; in militarized societies, it hardens under the compulsion of armament and war. What common sense calls the hardships of life is deciphered by philosophical analysis as self-reification. In obedience to the reality principle, the living being internalizes the external harshness. Thus, it itself becomes the tool of tools and the weapon of weapons.
Those who are lucky enough, in a generally hard world, to live in a niche in which even self-dehardenings are possible must of necessity look with horror out- side at the worlds of reification and objective cruelty. The perception of these de- velops most sensitively in those who stand between social worlds of varying degrees of hardness and who want to work their way out of the more strongly reified and alienated world into the milder zone. These people come ineluctably into conflict with a reality principle that requires greater self-hardenings from them than would be necessary in the mild zone. They get caught in a front against the versions of the reality principle that demand nothing but sacrifice and harden-
322 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
ing from individuals. That is the dialectic of privilege. The privileged person who does not become cynical must wish for a world in which the advantages of soften- ing can be enjoyed by the greatest possible number of people. To bring the reality principle itself into movement is the deepest characteristic of progressivity. Those who know the douceur de vivre become witnesses against the necessity of the hardships in life that always reproduce the hardened ones anew. Thus, real conservatives can be recognized, above all, by the fact that they have a horror of the dehardening of people and their conditions of life. The neo conservatives of today fear that we could become too delicate for a nuclear war. They seek a "dialogue with the young," whom they suspect of being possibly already too flabby for the distribution brawls of tomorrow.
In the descent to the deepest layers of the reality principle, we discover com- pulsions to subjugate oneself, to labor, to exchange, and to arm that have imposed themselves on societies in various historical forms. Even exchange, which bour- geois thinking imagines as one of its models of freedom, is rooted more deeply in coercion than in freedom, and this since ages past. Long before we can properly speak of cynicism, we encounter in archaic, exogamous groups the "use" of women of childbearing age as a living "means of circulation. " The principle of equivalence inserts itself in human cultural history in a way that shocks us: as childbearing means of production, women are traded "like cattle" for goods and cattle. However, this exchange does not so much serve the acquisition of herds and riches by the group that exchanges the women. Mostly, the establishment of kinship relations among the dispersed tribes retains its functional priority. Al- ready in the first "economy," a "politics" of survival and pacification manifests itself. The transformation of women into exchange objects contains an embryonic
political "economy" --if you like, a tribal foreign politics. Well before any value calculation, archaic groups in this way pay the price for the conditions of survival.
Modernity distinguishes itself from a macrohistorical perspective, among other things, by the way in which it becomes increasingly unclear how societies can sensibly scrape together the price of survival. The "hardships" they subject themselves to today in the interest of self-preservation in the meantime possess such a fatal inner dynamic that they work toward self-annihilation rather than to- ward security. How can that be? A degradation of the reality principle in the mod- ern world has to be diagnosed. As yet, no new modus has been worked out for societies under today's conditions to sensibly secure an economy of survival. For not only is the era of the exchange of women long past, but the succeeding sur- vival economy is also approaching an absolute limit. I call it the economy of the militaristic age. (This corresponds to the "class societies" of Marxist historiogra- phy, but the perspective is different. ) This age is characterized by the fact that in it, by means of enormous amounts of surplus value from the labor of slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, or from taxes, military-aristocratic strata (or standing ar-
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 323
mies) are supported that, in the classical sense of the word "parasitic," represent nonlaboring groups; they have instead the task of securing the living space of their aggregate group. The last millennia belong to the interactions of competing mili- tary parasitisms. In this economy, a new price for survival is established: The sur- vival of the whole is paid for
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
with the subjugation of the masses under political- military structures and with the readiness of the peoples to read surplus-value robbery and tax extortion as the handwriting in which "harsh reality" communi- cates its intentions to them. The violence of wars translated itself into a realism that acknowledges the fact of war as a "higher power. " The necessity of "thinking in terms of war," in the last millennia, constituted the indissoluble core of a tragic positivism. The latter knows, before any philosophy, that we do not primarily have to interpret or change the world, but endure it. War is the backbone of the conventional reality principle. With all its burdening consequences for the con- struction of social institutions, it represents the innermost, most bitter core of ex- perience of life in class societies. During the age of feudalism and nation-states, a society that could not defend itself was doomed to perish or to be conquered. Without a military "protective blanket," none of the groups that have been power- ful in history could have survived.
The direct transmission of surplus values to military-aristocratic strata ("ruling class") is characteristic of feudal societies. But nowhere to date has the modern world that developed out of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism been able to decisively overcome this transmission process. Everything it has achieved in this point exhausts itself in the transformation of direct surplus-value transmis- sion into an indirect transmission. Instead of the direct exploitation of the people by a stratum of nobles and a soldiery maintained by them, we now have modern peoples' armies, run by professional soldiers and financed with the aid of taxes. But it is precisely here that the modern state, as bearer of society's military "pro- tective blanket," increasingly conducts its task ad absurdum. For in the age of the total war, of universal "military service" and nuclear strategy, the military ap- paratuses of the major states are no longer protective shells for social life but de- velop day by day more clearly into the greatest source of danger for survival in any form. Because it has become possible to annihilate without a trace whole soci- eties through blanket bombardments and the effacement of every difference be- tween combatants and noncombatants (i. e. , between troops and the "civilian" population), the modern states, which call themselves democratic or socialist, play with the lives of their populations in a way that not even the most brutal of feudal systems would have been able to do.
If, in fact, the transfer of surplus value from the working populations to the political military apparatus were the price we had to pay for our survival, then even today, in the last instance, it would still have to be scraped together with a gnashing of teeth. In reality, this does not work. Vast sums of surplus value are pumped into political-military structures that incessantly entangle themselves in
324 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
more and more risky mutual threatening. Today, therefore, working means, whether we like it or not, supporting a system that in the long run can by no means be the system of our survival. For a long time now we have not been paying a price for our survival but rather creating surplus value for a suicide machine. In this I see a disaster for our traditional concept of reality and rationality. With a thousand voices, this disaster is answered by the rampant irrationalism in the Western superstructure. Total social irrationality has reached a level that not only leaves the explanatory power of individual intellects behind but even conjures up the question whether the world's centers of action can at all still muster enough rational energy to overcome the irrationality that is active within them. Every- thing that today would have the power to loosen the knot is itself part of the knot. What today is called rationality is comprised down to its deepest layers by the fact that it reveals itself to be the form of thinking of the principle of self-preservation gone wild.
The fate of the last great attempt--publicly announced as rational-to break up the deep layers of social irrationality is cause for dismay. In the attempt to dis- entangle the contradictions of the capitalist system with the aid of the Marxist di- alectic, the knot not only did not loosen but became twisted to the point of total absurdity (see the section on the Grand Inquisitor, chapter 7; and the second sec- tions of chapters 8 and 11). In the wrangle of the great powers, the Marxist fac- tion, which had undertaken to solve the problems of capitalism, has possibly even become the more hopeless part of the problem. If we look for the reasons for this, it becomes clear how fatefully and illusionistically the moralizing aspect of the surplus-value theory has outflanked its analytic aspect. For what this theory works out as the "objective perfidy" of the capitalist robbery of time from the laboring masses is, at the same time, a description of what happens in all societies with political-military superstructures, even if they call themselves socialist a thousand times. The channeling of surplus-value into armaments is more likely to flourish even better with the complete state ownership of productive property --as the Russian example shows.
Do not the Marxist theories of revolution rest on a tragic misinterpretation of the theory of surplus value? The latter, according to its strategic intent, was essen- tially the attempt to formulate an objective (i. e. , quantitative) language in which a moral-social relation (exploitation) could be treated. It wants to develop the con- cept of exploitation in a computable way so as to show that this exploitation cannot go on forever. But the problem of exploitation basically cannot be located on the level of quantitative considerations. Who wants to "calculate" what people are prepared to put up with? There is no mathematics that can be used to calculate how long the thread of patience will hold out, and there also is no arithmetic of self-consciousness. For thousands of years, people in military and class societies
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 325
have been trained through toughening and education to allow surplus value to be squeezed out of them under the pressure of domination, and the people on the in- finite expanses of today's Russian agrarian archipelagoes are scarcely any differ- ent from the slaves and fellahin of antiquity. This demands not so much a theory of surplus value as an analysis of "voluntary servitude. " The problem of exploita- tion touches more on political psychology than on political economy. Resignation is stronger than revolution. What could be said about the damned of the Russian soil comes not from Lenin's quill but from Flaubert's: "Resignation is the worst of all virtues. "
Since, therefore, the military reality principle, and with it the entire rationality of previous calculi for self-preservation, is on the point of dissolving before our eyes in a shocking way, we can ask whether the spiritual resources of our civiliza- tion will suffice to erect a new transmilitary and postindustrial reality principle. Atomic, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as the entire system of hostile artillery, are nothing more than outgrowths of a world- historical process of indu- ration in which the imperial-polemical cultures have represented their essence technically. The overkill realism that lies at the bottom of today's interactions be- tween the great powers can, in the long run, only be the reality principle of
12
The age of military survival rationality, together with
politicking psychopaths.
all its corollaries, is gradually moving toward a fatal end.
But is what is dying here not already pregnant with a new reason? If survival as a whole in the future in no way can be subsumed under the law of warring and exploitative, callous systems, does this not foreshadow a new reality principle? The world situation itself puts our survival in the hands of another ratio. We can no longer pay the price for survival within the framework of the polemical reality principle. The principle of self-preservation is on the point of a world- historical overthrow that leads all induration and armaments ad absurdum. That is the twi- light of the idols of cynicism. The hour has come for hard subjects, hard facts, hard politics, and hard business. Cultures that have armed themselves with nu- clear weapons are being caught in the feedback of their arming. Those who con- trol the splitting of the atom can no longer afford not to control the splitting of humanity, the systematic self-hardening through making enemies. For this rea- son, I have designated the nuclear bomb as the Buddha machine of our civiliza- tion. It stands facing us imperturbably and sovereignly as a mute guarantor of negative illuminations. In it, the ontological maximum of our defensivity on a technical path has gained representation. It embodies the extreme to which the armed subjectivity of our rationality of induration was able to develop. If we do not learn from it to create soft facts by means of a new principle of reality and rationality, it could be that in the near future the hard facts will see to our downfall.
326 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
Notes
1. See on this also chapter 24, "Hey! Are we Alive? " as well as Excursus 9, '"Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness. "
2. Foucault has portrayed this age nicely in Les mots et les choses (1966; The order of things), chapter 2.
3. From this comes the accusation of "escapism" leveled against the nonrealistic arts.
4. That they nevertheless do not present "everything" is an effect of their still considerable selec- tivity. Lying through selection?
5. Wertquale, value of a definitive kind; here, of the economic kind, expressed in money and commodity.
6. Simmel designates as cynical only the domain of subjective, quasi-nihilistic, and frivolous atti- tudes. My work definitely wants to get away from such a subjective concept of cynicism. I try to un- derstand cynicism as rooted in the real and relatively-universal social-intellectual process, so that be- ing kynical or cynical does not come "out" of individuals-that would be psychologistic rubbish-but offers itself to individuals, grows in them, and develops itself through them, i. e. , by means of their energies, but above and beyond them.
7. Here the statement holds that money stinks in principle and not only when it is a matter of Vespasian's latrine tax. What is intended is a fundamental critique of private property (of the means of luxury and production), a critique that consolidates itself from the unwieldy slogan Property Is Theft to the subtleties of the theory of surplus value.
8. For this reason, the lottery is the greatest moral achievement of capitalist society. It shows the untold numbers of people who obviously do not achieve anything through labor that luck is the only thing that promises justice.
9. In the twentieth century, Marxist oletism has obtained protection from psychoanalysis, which conceives of money and shit as symbolic equivalents and subsumes the money complex under the anal sphere. It has not reaped a harvest of gratitude for this aid, especially since the Russian Revolution when a Marxistically disguised non oletism emerged overnight that proclaims that exploitation in Rus- sian is no longer exploitation. Socialist surplus value sails under the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
libidinous flag of construction lust.
10. When Baudrillard remarks that seduction is stronger than production, it sounds more surpris- ing than it really is. In its mass-consumption phase, capitalism can move much more smoothly with the aid of seductions (i. e. , pampering, stupefaction, brothelization of minds) than if it used naked force. Fascism was only a thunderstorm; seduction by the rapist. Consumerism is seduction by the pimp.
11. See chapter 11 (the second section). The systematic analysis of capital opens up three polemi- cal fronts: capital against wage labor, competition among the individual capitals, and war between national capitals.
12. See chapter 5 (the final section), chapter 8 (the first section), and chapter 10 (the final section).
III. Logical Main Text
Chapter 10
Black Empiricism: Enlightenment as Organization of Polemical Knowledge
Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons not to let her reasons be seen ?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft
A spy in the right place replaces twenty thousand men at the
front. Napoleon Bonaparte
Agents must be intellectuals; in the decisive moment, they must not shrink from making the ultimate sacrifice.
Directive No. 185796 of the Soviet intelligence service, quoted from B. Newman, Spione: Gestern, heute, morgen (Stuttgart, 1952)
Enlightenment? Good. Science? Research? Good, very good! But who enlightens about the enlightener? Who researches the research, who undertakes science about science? By posing such questions, are we demanding more enlightenment, science, research, or less, or of another type? Is it an appeal to philosophy? To metascience? To sound common sense? To morality? My plea is for a continua- tion of the phenomenological path. We ask, Who is interested in what? Which forms of knowledge or sciences arise through these interests? Who wants to know what? Why?
What motivates his or her curiosity --and even assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural hunger for experience, desire to experiment, and an excess of curiosity, the question still remains, Why precisely this curiosity, this wanting to know? If, in ideology critique, it is always asked, Who is speaking? (in order to reduce the words to the speaker's social position), then, in the critique of en- lightenment, we ask, Who is seeking? Who is researching? Who is struggling?
Here a rather remarkable field of kinship relations emerges --a rare clan of cu- rious persons, of trackers of knowledge and curiosities. From this perspective, the philosopher and the spy, the policeofficer and the journalist, the detective and the psychologist, the historian and the moralist present themselves as the children of the same, although quarreling, family. All appear like the various lines in the spectrum of enlightenment knowledge. Curiosity seeks the reasons for curiosity --it too seeks! - f o r enlightenment about enlightenment, and must there- fore in turn let itself be interrogated as to the reasons for its own curiosity. Coun- terenlightenment inclinations? Reaction? Discontent within enlightenment? We want to know what the point is of this wanting to know. There is too much "knowl-
329
330 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
edge" about which we could wish, for the most diverse reasons, that we had not discovered it and had not gained "enlightenment" about it. All too many insights are fear inducing. If knowledge is power, then today, what was once eerie, in- scrutable power, confronts us in the form of insights, transparency, obvious con- nections . If at one time enlightenment -- in every sense of the word--lessened fear through the increase of knowledge, then today we have reached a point where en- lightenment turns into what it undertook to hinder: the increase of fear. The un- canny that was supposed to be banned comes to the fore again out of the means used to protect against it.
Enlightenment develops in the form of a collective training in mistrust of ep- ochal proportions. Rationalism and mistrust are related impulses, both bound tightly to the social dynamic of the rising bourgeoisie and the modern state. In the struggle of hostile and competing subjects and states for self-preservation and hegemony, a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered. Everything that "appears" to us could be a deceptive maneuver of an overpowering, evil enemy. In his proof through doubt Descartes goes as far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world of appearance is only the work of a genius malignus, calculated to deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective on reality cannot be comprehended without a thorough cooling down of the ego-world relation, with- out the deep penetration of suspicion and fear about self- preservation to the very roots of the modern will to know. An overpowering concern with certainty and an equally irresistible expectation to be deceived drive modern epistemology on to search at any price for absolute and unshakably secure sources of certainty-as if its primary concern were to overcome a downright world-annihilating doubt. Enlightenment possesses at its core a polemical realism that declares war on ap- pearances: Only the naked truths, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
naked facts should be regarded as valid. For the deceptions that the enlightener expects are considered artful but neverthe- less transparent, exposable maneuvers. Verum etfictum convertuntur. The decep-
tions are transparent because they are self-made. What is self-evident in this world is fraud, threats, dangers-not openness, generosity, security. Truth is thus never to be had straight off but only through a second effort, as the product of critique that destroys what seemed before to be the case. Truth is not "discovered" innocently and without struggle, but rather is won in a toilsome victory over its predecessors, which are its concealment and antipode. The world bursts at the seams with problems, dangers, deceptions, and abysses as soon as the gaze of mistrusting investigation penetrates it. In the universe of modern knowledge, the backdrops, trapdoors, panoramas, deceptive images, dissembling gestures, hid- den feelings, concealed motives, enveloped bodies predominate--all of these phenomena make "reality itself more inaccessible precisely because, with in- creasing complexity, it is composed of ambiguous, concocted, and contrived acts and signs. This forces us all the more to separate the obvious from the concealed.
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 331
I am deceived, therefore I am. And: I unmask deceptions, I myself deceive; there- fore, I preserve myself. The Cartesian cogito, ergo sum can also be translated in this way.
We follow roughly the sequence of chapter 8, "The Cardinal Cynicisms," in treating the essential manifestations and dimensions of "enlightenment" as polem- ical empiricism in six steps: war and espionage; police and enlightenment in class struggle; sexuality and hostility toward self; medicine and suspecting the body; death and metaphysics; and natural science and weapon technology. That this po- lemical phenomenology makes a circle from the knowledge of war to the natural science of weaponry is no accident; we are preparing here the "Transcendental Polemic" of chapter 11. It describes how, behind a series of curiosities, compul- sions to struggle are at work that guide "epistemic interests. " In this phenomenol- ogy, we go through the characteristic tapping-in-the-dark movements of a "full modernity" that is still in search of itself and that is learning to doubt the produc- tivity of Cartesian doubt and to mistrust the measurelessness of enlightenment mistrust.
Knowledge of War and Espionage
. . . Instead, in May 1869 he sent his confidant, Theo von Bernardi, to Madrid, a historian and national economist whom, under the mask of the scientist, Bismarck and Moltke had already often used for secret missions . . . .
However, such [emissaries] required the greatest capacities in observation, knowledge of people, combination, dissimula- tion; indeed, a general cunning and artfulness . . .
Wilhelm J. C. E. Stieber Spion des Kanzlers (Munich, 1981)
For every warlord, the questions are, What is the enemy doing? What is he plan- ning? What condition is he in? How can it be found out? Direct communication is not possible. To ask the enemy himself is ultimately impossible or at least point- less, since he will always simply give deceptive answers.
For this reason, an outstanding intelligence service is required whose chief is an extraordinarily intelligent man but not necessarily a fighter. He should be able to think clearly in order to separate what is essential from the mass of the accidental that is always present where the prob-
1In the case of enmity, the probability, indeed, the certainty, of being deceived is a priori a given. The enemy will pretend to be stronger or weaker than he really is so as to provoke or deter. He will take up illusory positions and suddenly attack
lems of the opponent are concerned.
332 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
from an unexpected side. It is thus part of the logic of survival of each side in a dyad of opponents to see through and circumvent the deceptive maneuvers of the opponent through enlightenment in the sense of espionage and to outdo him with one's own exposures, counterdeceptions, and operative measures. Espi- onage in its most immediate form is set up as a science of survival. What the po- lemical realism of "enlightenment" wants can be seen most clearly through its ex- ample. Enlightenment as espionage is research on the enemy --the accumulation of knowledge about an object to which I am bound not through well-wishing, or through disinterested neutrality, but through a direct, hostile tension with a threatening effect. It nourishes a special kind of wanting-to-know and necessitates a series of peculiarly "indirect" methods of research: dissimulation, secrecy, in- filtration of positions of trust, misuse of friendships. Espionage exercises the art of getting the other to talk, works through surveillance and searches, spies on others' intimate and private domains, seeks levers for extortion, looks for vulner- able points and the weak link in the opponent's chain. It banks on the readiness of individuals on the other side to betray it. All this belongs to the methodology of espionage. The spy, the "subject of knowledge," comes forth in a mask vis-a- vis a hostile reality, that is, the reality of the enemy. We see at once how the approach of enlightenment as espionage to "truth" is distinct from that of science and even more
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
so from that of philosophy. For the truths that the spy brings together are, from the start, subject to a passionate and special "interest. " War of powers, war of consciousnesses. The migration of knowledge from subject A to subject B is already part of a struggle or an arming. Accordingly this amoral direction of research appeals openly to martial law and situation ethics, which says that whatever serves self-preservation is allowed. For this knowledge, the grand gesture of disinterestedness and contemplative objec- tivity, which science is particularly fond of, does not come into question. The spy seems to stand closer to the man of war than to the philosopher or the researcher. When he wants to know something, the disinterestedness he presents to the world is in every case only an illusion; the cases in which it is otherwise with researchers and philosophers remain to be examined.
But what attitude do the warrior and the philosopher assume toward the spy? Most of the time they have contemptfully chastised him; and with good reason as the spy's research work violates the ethical norms of the metier on both sides. On the one side, it is the generals who, in going about their "heroic, upright, manly, brave" business, never like having to deal with people who, because of their profession, do not really care about all that stuff. For the spy, another moral- ity always holds, although he fights the same fight. The hero does not want the corrupt spy as a fellow fighter; that would make him feel soiled. Strategy and tac- tics, which are certainly also familiar with deceptions and ruses, belong ambiva- lently to the heroic-masculine side. The spy, by contrast, appears merely as cun- ning and sly in the low sense of these words. He seduces; he does not carry out
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 333
frontal breakthroughs. Napoleon was at least honest enough to confess that be- hind some of his great victories stood not only military genius but also the diplo- matic art of deception of his master-spy, Karl Schulmeister (he contributed decid- edly to the hoodwinking of the Austrians, which led to their defeats at Ulm and Austerlitz). It is said that General von Moltke, Bismarck's veteran fighter, did not like spies in general, and particularly not that Wilhelm Stieber, who from 1863
on was Bismarck's chief spy (his nickname was "Most Superior Security Su- perior"; Oberster Sicherheits-Oberer and who, under the cover of a news service, that is, a kind of press agency, built up the international network of the Prussian secret police. If one reads Stieber's recently published memoirs, one can estimate the significance of modern intelligence networks for "Realpolitik. " Not only did Stieber repeatedly save Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I from assassination, but
in organizing the intelligence work on the Austrian army according to new princi- ples, he laid the groundwork for the Prussian campaign against Austria in the "fraternal war" of 1866. It was also his duty to organize the intelligence prerequi- sites and the reconnaissance of the terrain on which the German campaign against France in 1870-71 was to take place. Nevertheless, the more distinctions he reaped through his extraordinarily successful activity, the more he was snubbed by the Prussian officer caste. The heroes could not bear that their naive (? ) sol- diers' ethos should have anything to do with the systematic amoralism of the chief
2spy. Thehighertheoffice,thegreaterthecompulsionstolie. Oneactedasifone
were blind to Machiavelli's realism: "In war, fraud is laudable" {Discorsi, Book III, p. 40).
Scientists and philosophers who do not deign to look on the spy and the phenomenon of espionage, however, proceed in a way that is scarcely any differ- ent. For dirt sticks to the spy's hands, namely, an all-to-clear, all-too-special "small" interest. The high seekers of truth, by contrast, do everything to avoid resembling the spy; they would rather admit to no self-"interest" at all and not put themselves as tools at the disposal of any "aim. " If the true philosopher had con- tempt even for the paid academic (see Schiller's lecture on the study of universal history), then the spy was really beneath all criticism. But how would it be if the spy proved to be in reality the shadow and obscure double of the enlightenment philosopher?
On the surface, of course, one can hardly think of an opposition greater than that between the spy, who, being quite "interest" oriented, commits himself to a particular party, nation, a mere fraction of humanity, and the investigator of truth, who looks only at the whole and claims to serve only the universal well- being of humanity, or even "pure truth" itself. Not until this century did science and philosophy of enlightenment become conscious of their own limited biases and narrower polemical and pragmatic commitments. In the age of class struggles at the end of the nineteenth century, the keepers of the seal of high knowledge had to feel the ground shake under their feet for the first time: A nasty suspicion
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
334 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
arose that they, the bourgeois scientists, might be agents of bourgeois class domination --deluded helpers of a political system who naively, idealistically un- covered "universal" truths that, when applied, however, served only, or for the main, the particular interests of the ruling classes. When in August 1914 the First World War "broke out," many professional "seekers of truth" dropped their masks. The wave of "ideas of 1914" tore them along and found them more than willing to consciously take over the role of "ideologue," of spiritual weaponsmith in the slaughter of the peoples. What was committed to paper as theory in the years 1914-18 remains unimaginable --the extent to which culturally chauvinistic
3nationalization of "pure truths" suddenly became possible.
In subsequent decades, the sciences as a whole have largely lost their passion
for truth. Moreover, they have to live under constant suspicion of being agents, a suspicion that was and is determined to unmask them as helpers of the powerful. Since then, associations that place the spy and the philosopher, the secret agent and the researcher side by side no longer seem so misguided. At the same time the military became detheorized, the consciousness of researchers began to be- come more pragmatic. Knowledge and interest were allowed to, indeed should, have something to do with each other, with the proviso that the interests take it on themselves to prove their legitimacy. Nietzsche had begun to undermine every will to know through the suspicion of the will to power. Students of the First World War cannot fail to notice the acknowledged role espionage and martial "en- lightenment" played -- cognitive warfare, psychological warfare, treason, propaganda. General Moshe Dayan finally declared both openheartedly and secretively after the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War that intelligence services had played just as important a role as the air force and tank divisions. The taboo seems to be broken. It is no different with countless scientists all over the world who, obviously without professional ethical scruples, work on weapon research and projects with the potential for annihilation. If science too has to earn its daily
4bread, then at least a part of it discovers the coming war as employer. Military enlightenment as provocation to philosophical enlightenment? What is the situation with the subjection of knowledge to interests and how universal, how particular, do these interests have to be? Is every gathering of "truths," knowledges, and insights bound to polemical, defensive-aggressive subjects (here states)? Certainly, espionage is the furthest from the illusion of "universal" interest. It therefore emphatically puts its knowledge under lock and key. Scien- tists, by contrast, are categorically publication crazy, and some metatheories even construct a fundamental connection between universality, truth, and the publicness of assertions. Whereas science boasts of universality, the secret ser- vices know that "knowledge" has value only as long as others do not know that
they know it.
From this vantage point, a connection between the theory of knowledge and
the intelligence service can be seen: Both devise postures of "objectivity" toward
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 335
the object of knowledge, postures that would remain incomprehensible without the influence of the hostile stance toward the object. Both are set on separating the obvious from the concealed. Both worry that error and delusion can lie in wait everywhere. In both, deception is a rival of suspicion. To have an enemy thus means to define an object of research (the converse of the sentence holds only with qualifications). War channels curiosity into a polemical course and equates what is unknown about the enemy with his dangerousness. To know him is half the job of holding him in check. Out of enmity, specialized domains of curiosity, areas of research and epistemic interests are built up: through the keyhole to the naked facts. Without making enemies and a corresponding concealment, there is no un- masking; without darkening, there is no naked truth. The striving of "enlighten- ment" to reveal the truth obeys a dialectical principle: Only through a specific, polemically forced concealment does a space "behind" arise--the "naked facts. " What is naked is what was previously secret: the enemy, eavesdropped on in his privacy; the hidden power here, the conspiracy there; the naked women, the geni- tals made visible; the confessions of the amoral; the true intentions, the real mo- tives, the hard statistics, the relentless standards. Those who enlighten do not rely on what "people say"; the naked facts will probably always be different from what "people say. " The enemy is everywhere: powers of nature that are too powerful, too dangerous for us to rely on; rivals who, when it comes to the crunch, will show no mercy and who already envision us as corpses over whom they, deter- mined to "survive," will walk if necessary; traditions that fog up our minds and cause us to "believe," but forbid us to know what "the case really is. "
If secretiveness is a striking characteristic in the theory of knowledge of the intelligence services, then here a bifurcation of enlightenment into naive and reflected, gullible and artful directions becomes clear. The naive assume that they are a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
priori nobody's enemy and would let nothing force them to become some- one's enemy. When enlighteners of this type "know something," they automati- cally think that everyone else should also be allowed to know it. More reflective forms of enlightenment (e. g. , the earlier Freemasons) from the start understood themselves in this regard differently: They accepted the facts of the (even though always only relative) enmity and consciously reckoned with the compulsion to be secretive; they accepted the need to think in the logic of struggle during unavoida- ble conflicts. They knew that knowledge was to be treated as a weapon, prefer- ably as a secret weapon. The other side does not have to know what we know. With the spy this becomes most striking: to gain knowledge without letting it be known that one knows. Hence also the often fascinating, Romanesque masquer- ades in espionage. Agents are trained to see without being seen, to recognize without being recognized. Stieber was not only a sly organizer but also an actor with talent-- who even visited Karl Marx in his London exile and played, success- fully, it seems--the comic role of a doctor who, due to his revolutionary convic-
336 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
tions, had had to flee Germany. Stieber noted smugly in his memoirs that Herr Marx did not waste a word inquiring about his revolutionary vicissitudes and the situation in Germany, but only asked Doctor Schmidt about a prescription for
5hemorrhoids. Stieber also occasionally appeared at scenes of unrest as a land-
scape painter. He is even supposed to have turned up as a street vendor who car- ried devotional knickknacks and pornographic postcards on his cart--one of the two could always be used to lure soldiers into confidential conversations. We have also heard how Stieber's descendants do it today in the socialist Prussian se- cret police: In psychological Casanova courses, East German agents are said to study the art of curing the weekend neuroses of top Bonn secretaries so tenderly that even the East Berlin State Security Service profits from it.
Are we preaching to the converted? The German public must long since be
well aware of the connections between science and espionage, at least since a
model concept of the secret services has permeated into general consciousness.
Those pieces of information collected by legal and illegal means, which are "at
hand" "against" a person or a group, are called "intimations" (Erkenntnis). Suspi-
cion guides the storing up of "intimations"; it constitutes the prosecution proce-
dure. What mistrust ferrets out lies at hand as "intimations" when the time comes
to take "measures. " This is no semantic lapse, no conceptual contingency. In a
broader sense, this way of speaking about "intimations" is only one of several ex-
posures of the primary connection between knowledge and (polemical) interest.
The English language uses at this point the compact word "intelligence. " "One un-
derstands by it particularly the gathering, assessment, and handing on of (publicly
accessible or secret) pieces of information in special bureaus (agencies or ser-
vices) for the purposes of the military and political leadership (general staff and
6government). " The "naked facts" ferreted out by intelligence build the first solid
layer of a cynical empiricism (Empirie). They must be naked because they are supposed to help keep the object in its dangerous enmity in its sights. The subjects must thus dissemble in order to eavesdrop on the ("naked") objects. Dissimulation of the subject is the common denominator of espionage and modern philosophy.
Police and the Optics of Class Struggle
Certainly, my fair miss,
the police want to know everything, especially secrets.
Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm
This observation can easily be carried over to inner-political enmities, fears, and struggles. Enlightenment is written in good part "psychohistorically," as a history of political fear and its emotional and practical-strategic offspring: suspicion and
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 337
? Olaf Gulbransson, Russian Secret Police, 1909.
mistrust, control and subversion, surveillance and secret, criminalization and outrage. Those who nurse suspicion can become collectors in a black (in the mul- tiple senses: secret, polemical, anarchist, directed at the bad) empiricism. On the side of the wielders of power: rulers, administrators, police, stooges, denoun- cers; on the side of the critics of power: revolutionaries, rebels, deviants, "dissi- dents. " Each of the two sides (properly speaking they are not mere
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"sides," as in a symmetrical relation, but classes superior and inferior, master and servant, ruler and oppressed; this asymmetry would play a significant role in a moral evaluation, but that is not our concern here) views the opponent through specta- cles of suspicion. Organs of state and representatives of hegemonic powers watch out for subversive, oppositional, deviant forces in the domain of their subjects, fueled by the worry that a "conspiracy" could be formed that gives expression to a will to change. The oppositional powers, by contrast, keep a transcript of the immoralism of the ruling power, of its capricious acts, infringements of justice, its corruptness and decadence. In times of open polemical tension, a mutual curi- osity to investigate can be spurred on by the element of enmity that inevitably (but more or less manifestly) clings to every domination. Both, although asymmetri- cally, are moved by a specific will to know that seeks to expose the political oppo- nent in his nakedness.
338 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
We know that Louis XIV maintained a complicated network of palace espi- onage, that spies had to inform him of his courtiers' every move, every secret word, and every possible ulterior motive --especially about the activities of peers, the great men of the realm, that is, potential rivals and aspirants to the throne. Since then, the incumbents of power have infinitely extended and refined the sys- tem of surveillance of the other candidates and participants in power.
So, seduction and rape are supposed to be the two modi of capitalist cynicism? Circulation cynicism here, production cynicism there? Here the selling out of values; there the arbitrary pulping of the living time and labor power of the masses for the sake of blind accumulations? A moral overstraining is noticeable in these formulations, no matter how deftly aimed they may be. Whoever stresses the importance of encountering reality with as few illusions as possible may not cite it before an idealistic court even when it is amoral. The moral paradox of capitalism is, in addition, the peculiar tolerability of the "intolerable," comfort in devastation, and high life in permanent catastrophe. Capitalism has long since swallowed up its critics, especially since it can be certain of the failure of all alter- natives initiated by revolutions. "Whenever it has to be pointed out to capitalism
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 321
that it cannot help the world, it in turn can point out that communism cannot even help itself. " (Martin Walser, Biichner Prize speech, 1981).
Does what has been described here as capital cynicism in the last analysis mean nothing other than the final historical pupation of the experience that, since time immemorial, human life has been exposed to a lot of hardship and cruelties? Is the existence of human beings on a bloody globe at all subject to moral criteria? Does not this cynicism possibly present to us the most recent form of what the friendly pessimist, Sigmund Freud, called the reality principle ? And accordingly, would an explicitly cynical consciousness not be simply the form of "adulthood" complying with a modern world torn more than ever by power struggles, which undisheartedly hardens itself enough to cope with the given relations?
Those who speak of the hardships of life land almost automatically in a realm beyond moral and economic reason. What in the physical world is the law of gravity appears in the moral world as the law that the survival of societies always demands its sacrifices. Every survival demands to be paid for, and it exacts a price that no merely moral consciousness
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
can approve of and no merely economic cal- culation can compute. The laboring and struggling groups in human society must experience the price of survival as such a bitter tribute to the reality principle be- cause they pay it with their own blood, sweat, and tears. They scrape it together in the form of subjugations to "higher" forces and facticities; they bear it in the form of pains, accommodations, privations, and hardening self-limitations. They continually pay this price in living currency that cuts into the flesh. In the struggle for survival, calluses, wounds, and losses are well-known phenomena. Indeed, where a struggle is waged, the strugglers cannot help but make themselves, with their own existence, into a means and weapon of survival. The price of survival is always paid with life itself. Life sacrifices itself everywhere to the conditions of its preservation. Everywhere we look, it bends to the coercion to toil; in class societies, it subjugates itself to the given relations of domination and exploitation; in militarized societies, it hardens under the compulsion of armament and war. What common sense calls the hardships of life is deciphered by philosophical analysis as self-reification. In obedience to the reality principle, the living being internalizes the external harshness. Thus, it itself becomes the tool of tools and the weapon of weapons.
Those who are lucky enough, in a generally hard world, to live in a niche in which even self-dehardenings are possible must of necessity look with horror out- side at the worlds of reification and objective cruelty. The perception of these de- velops most sensitively in those who stand between social worlds of varying degrees of hardness and who want to work their way out of the more strongly reified and alienated world into the milder zone. These people come ineluctably into conflict with a reality principle that requires greater self-hardenings from them than would be necessary in the mild zone. They get caught in a front against the versions of the reality principle that demand nothing but sacrifice and harden-
322 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
ing from individuals. That is the dialectic of privilege. The privileged person who does not become cynical must wish for a world in which the advantages of soften- ing can be enjoyed by the greatest possible number of people. To bring the reality principle itself into movement is the deepest characteristic of progressivity. Those who know the douceur de vivre become witnesses against the necessity of the hardships in life that always reproduce the hardened ones anew. Thus, real conservatives can be recognized, above all, by the fact that they have a horror of the dehardening of people and their conditions of life. The neo conservatives of today fear that we could become too delicate for a nuclear war. They seek a "dialogue with the young," whom they suspect of being possibly already too flabby for the distribution brawls of tomorrow.
In the descent to the deepest layers of the reality principle, we discover com- pulsions to subjugate oneself, to labor, to exchange, and to arm that have imposed themselves on societies in various historical forms. Even exchange, which bour- geois thinking imagines as one of its models of freedom, is rooted more deeply in coercion than in freedom, and this since ages past. Long before we can properly speak of cynicism, we encounter in archaic, exogamous groups the "use" of women of childbearing age as a living "means of circulation. " The principle of equivalence inserts itself in human cultural history in a way that shocks us: as childbearing means of production, women are traded "like cattle" for goods and cattle. However, this exchange does not so much serve the acquisition of herds and riches by the group that exchanges the women. Mostly, the establishment of kinship relations among the dispersed tribes retains its functional priority. Al- ready in the first "economy," a "politics" of survival and pacification manifests itself. The transformation of women into exchange objects contains an embryonic
political "economy" --if you like, a tribal foreign politics. Well before any value calculation, archaic groups in this way pay the price for the conditions of survival.
Modernity distinguishes itself from a macrohistorical perspective, among other things, by the way in which it becomes increasingly unclear how societies can sensibly scrape together the price of survival. The "hardships" they subject themselves to today in the interest of self-preservation in the meantime possess such a fatal inner dynamic that they work toward self-annihilation rather than to- ward security. How can that be? A degradation of the reality principle in the mod- ern world has to be diagnosed. As yet, no new modus has been worked out for societies under today's conditions to sensibly secure an economy of survival. For not only is the era of the exchange of women long past, but the succeeding sur- vival economy is also approaching an absolute limit. I call it the economy of the militaristic age. (This corresponds to the "class societies" of Marxist historiogra- phy, but the perspective is different. ) This age is characterized by the fact that in it, by means of enormous amounts of surplus value from the labor of slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, or from taxes, military-aristocratic strata (or standing ar-
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 323
mies) are supported that, in the classical sense of the word "parasitic," represent nonlaboring groups; they have instead the task of securing the living space of their aggregate group. The last millennia belong to the interactions of competing mili- tary parasitisms. In this economy, a new price for survival is established: The sur- vival of the whole is paid for
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
with the subjugation of the masses under political- military structures and with the readiness of the peoples to read surplus-value robbery and tax extortion as the handwriting in which "harsh reality" communi- cates its intentions to them. The violence of wars translated itself into a realism that acknowledges the fact of war as a "higher power. " The necessity of "thinking in terms of war," in the last millennia, constituted the indissoluble core of a tragic positivism. The latter knows, before any philosophy, that we do not primarily have to interpret or change the world, but endure it. War is the backbone of the conventional reality principle. With all its burdening consequences for the con- struction of social institutions, it represents the innermost, most bitter core of ex- perience of life in class societies. During the age of feudalism and nation-states, a society that could not defend itself was doomed to perish or to be conquered. Without a military "protective blanket," none of the groups that have been power- ful in history could have survived.
The direct transmission of surplus values to military-aristocratic strata ("ruling class") is characteristic of feudal societies. But nowhere to date has the modern world that developed out of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism been able to decisively overcome this transmission process. Everything it has achieved in this point exhausts itself in the transformation of direct surplus-value transmis- sion into an indirect transmission. Instead of the direct exploitation of the people by a stratum of nobles and a soldiery maintained by them, we now have modern peoples' armies, run by professional soldiers and financed with the aid of taxes. But it is precisely here that the modern state, as bearer of society's military "pro- tective blanket," increasingly conducts its task ad absurdum. For in the age of the total war, of universal "military service" and nuclear strategy, the military ap- paratuses of the major states are no longer protective shells for social life but de- velop day by day more clearly into the greatest source of danger for survival in any form. Because it has become possible to annihilate without a trace whole soci- eties through blanket bombardments and the effacement of every difference be- tween combatants and noncombatants (i. e. , between troops and the "civilian" population), the modern states, which call themselves democratic or socialist, play with the lives of their populations in a way that not even the most brutal of feudal systems would have been able to do.
If, in fact, the transfer of surplus value from the working populations to the political military apparatus were the price we had to pay for our survival, then even today, in the last instance, it would still have to be scraped together with a gnashing of teeth. In reality, this does not work. Vast sums of surplus value are pumped into political-military structures that incessantly entangle themselves in
324 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
more and more risky mutual threatening. Today, therefore, working means, whether we like it or not, supporting a system that in the long run can by no means be the system of our survival. For a long time now we have not been paying a price for our survival but rather creating surplus value for a suicide machine. In this I see a disaster for our traditional concept of reality and rationality. With a thousand voices, this disaster is answered by the rampant irrationalism in the Western superstructure. Total social irrationality has reached a level that not only leaves the explanatory power of individual intellects behind but even conjures up the question whether the world's centers of action can at all still muster enough rational energy to overcome the irrationality that is active within them. Every- thing that today would have the power to loosen the knot is itself part of the knot. What today is called rationality is comprised down to its deepest layers by the fact that it reveals itself to be the form of thinking of the principle of self-preservation gone wild.
The fate of the last great attempt--publicly announced as rational-to break up the deep layers of social irrationality is cause for dismay. In the attempt to dis- entangle the contradictions of the capitalist system with the aid of the Marxist di- alectic, the knot not only did not loosen but became twisted to the point of total absurdity (see the section on the Grand Inquisitor, chapter 7; and the second sec- tions of chapters 8 and 11). In the wrangle of the great powers, the Marxist fac- tion, which had undertaken to solve the problems of capitalism, has possibly even become the more hopeless part of the problem. If we look for the reasons for this, it becomes clear how fatefully and illusionistically the moralizing aspect of the surplus-value theory has outflanked its analytic aspect. For what this theory works out as the "objective perfidy" of the capitalist robbery of time from the laboring masses is, at the same time, a description of what happens in all societies with political-military superstructures, even if they call themselves socialist a thousand times. The channeling of surplus-value into armaments is more likely to flourish even better with the complete state ownership of productive property --as the Russian example shows.
Do not the Marxist theories of revolution rest on a tragic misinterpretation of the theory of surplus value? The latter, according to its strategic intent, was essen- tially the attempt to formulate an objective (i. e. , quantitative) language in which a moral-social relation (exploitation) could be treated. It wants to develop the con- cept of exploitation in a computable way so as to show that this exploitation cannot go on forever. But the problem of exploitation basically cannot be located on the level of quantitative considerations. Who wants to "calculate" what people are prepared to put up with? There is no mathematics that can be used to calculate how long the thread of patience will hold out, and there also is no arithmetic of self-consciousness. For thousands of years, people in military and class societies
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 325
have been trained through toughening and education to allow surplus value to be squeezed out of them under the pressure of domination, and the people on the in- finite expanses of today's Russian agrarian archipelagoes are scarcely any differ- ent from the slaves and fellahin of antiquity. This demands not so much a theory of surplus value as an analysis of "voluntary servitude. " The problem of exploita- tion touches more on political psychology than on political economy. Resignation is stronger than revolution. What could be said about the damned of the Russian soil comes not from Lenin's quill but from Flaubert's: "Resignation is the worst of all virtues. "
Since, therefore, the military reality principle, and with it the entire rationality of previous calculi for self-preservation, is on the point of dissolving before our eyes in a shocking way, we can ask whether the spiritual resources of our civiliza- tion will suffice to erect a new transmilitary and postindustrial reality principle. Atomic, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as the entire system of hostile artillery, are nothing more than outgrowths of a world- historical process of indu- ration in which the imperial-polemical cultures have represented their essence technically. The overkill realism that lies at the bottom of today's interactions be- tween the great powers can, in the long run, only be the reality principle of
12
The age of military survival rationality, together with
politicking psychopaths.
all its corollaries, is gradually moving toward a fatal end.
But is what is dying here not already pregnant with a new reason? If survival as a whole in the future in no way can be subsumed under the law of warring and exploitative, callous systems, does this not foreshadow a new reality principle? The world situation itself puts our survival in the hands of another ratio. We can no longer pay the price for survival within the framework of the polemical reality principle. The principle of self-preservation is on the point of a world- historical overthrow that leads all induration and armaments ad absurdum. That is the twi- light of the idols of cynicism. The hour has come for hard subjects, hard facts, hard politics, and hard business. Cultures that have armed themselves with nu- clear weapons are being caught in the feedback of their arming. Those who con- trol the splitting of the atom can no longer afford not to control the splitting of humanity, the systematic self-hardening through making enemies. For this rea- son, I have designated the nuclear bomb as the Buddha machine of our civiliza- tion. It stands facing us imperturbably and sovereignly as a mute guarantor of negative illuminations. In it, the ontological maximum of our defensivity on a technical path has gained representation. It embodies the extreme to which the armed subjectivity of our rationality of induration was able to develop. If we do not learn from it to create soft facts by means of a new principle of reality and rationality, it could be that in the near future the hard facts will see to our downfall.
326 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
Notes
1. See on this also chapter 24, "Hey! Are we Alive? " as well as Excursus 9, '"Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness. "
2. Foucault has portrayed this age nicely in Les mots et les choses (1966; The order of things), chapter 2.
3. From this comes the accusation of "escapism" leveled against the nonrealistic arts.
4. That they nevertheless do not present "everything" is an effect of their still considerable selec- tivity. Lying through selection?
5. Wertquale, value of a definitive kind; here, of the economic kind, expressed in money and commodity.
6. Simmel designates as cynical only the domain of subjective, quasi-nihilistic, and frivolous atti- tudes. My work definitely wants to get away from such a subjective concept of cynicism. I try to un- derstand cynicism as rooted in the real and relatively-universal social-intellectual process, so that be- ing kynical or cynical does not come "out" of individuals-that would be psychologistic rubbish-but offers itself to individuals, grows in them, and develops itself through them, i. e. , by means of their energies, but above and beyond them.
7. Here the statement holds that money stinks in principle and not only when it is a matter of Vespasian's latrine tax. What is intended is a fundamental critique of private property (of the means of luxury and production), a critique that consolidates itself from the unwieldy slogan Property Is Theft to the subtleties of the theory of surplus value.
8. For this reason, the lottery is the greatest moral achievement of capitalist society. It shows the untold numbers of people who obviously do not achieve anything through labor that luck is the only thing that promises justice.
9. In the twentieth century, Marxist oletism has obtained protection from psychoanalysis, which conceives of money and shit as symbolic equivalents and subsumes the money complex under the anal sphere. It has not reaped a harvest of gratitude for this aid, especially since the Russian Revolution when a Marxistically disguised non oletism emerged overnight that proclaims that exploitation in Rus- sian is no longer exploitation. Socialist surplus value sails under the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
libidinous flag of construction lust.
10. When Baudrillard remarks that seduction is stronger than production, it sounds more surpris- ing than it really is. In its mass-consumption phase, capitalism can move much more smoothly with the aid of seductions (i. e. , pampering, stupefaction, brothelization of minds) than if it used naked force. Fascism was only a thunderstorm; seduction by the rapist. Consumerism is seduction by the pimp.
11. See chapter 11 (the second section). The systematic analysis of capital opens up three polemi- cal fronts: capital against wage labor, competition among the individual capitals, and war between national capitals.
12. See chapter 5 (the final section), chapter 8 (the first section), and chapter 10 (the final section).
III. Logical Main Text
Chapter 10
Black Empiricism: Enlightenment as Organization of Polemical Knowledge
Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons not to let her reasons be seen ?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft
A spy in the right place replaces twenty thousand men at the
front. Napoleon Bonaparte
Agents must be intellectuals; in the decisive moment, they must not shrink from making the ultimate sacrifice.
Directive No. 185796 of the Soviet intelligence service, quoted from B. Newman, Spione: Gestern, heute, morgen (Stuttgart, 1952)
Enlightenment? Good. Science? Research? Good, very good! But who enlightens about the enlightener? Who researches the research, who undertakes science about science? By posing such questions, are we demanding more enlightenment, science, research, or less, or of another type? Is it an appeal to philosophy? To metascience? To sound common sense? To morality? My plea is for a continua- tion of the phenomenological path. We ask, Who is interested in what? Which forms of knowledge or sciences arise through these interests? Who wants to know what? Why?
What motivates his or her curiosity --and even assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural hunger for experience, desire to experiment, and an excess of curiosity, the question still remains, Why precisely this curiosity, this wanting to know? If, in ideology critique, it is always asked, Who is speaking? (in order to reduce the words to the speaker's social position), then, in the critique of en- lightenment, we ask, Who is seeking? Who is researching? Who is struggling?
Here a rather remarkable field of kinship relations emerges --a rare clan of cu- rious persons, of trackers of knowledge and curiosities. From this perspective, the philosopher and the spy, the policeofficer and the journalist, the detective and the psychologist, the historian and the moralist present themselves as the children of the same, although quarreling, family. All appear like the various lines in the spectrum of enlightenment knowledge. Curiosity seeks the reasons for curiosity --it too seeks! - f o r enlightenment about enlightenment, and must there- fore in turn let itself be interrogated as to the reasons for its own curiosity. Coun- terenlightenment inclinations? Reaction? Discontent within enlightenment? We want to know what the point is of this wanting to know. There is too much "knowl-
329
330 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
edge" about which we could wish, for the most diverse reasons, that we had not discovered it and had not gained "enlightenment" about it. All too many insights are fear inducing. If knowledge is power, then today, what was once eerie, in- scrutable power, confronts us in the form of insights, transparency, obvious con- nections . If at one time enlightenment -- in every sense of the word--lessened fear through the increase of knowledge, then today we have reached a point where en- lightenment turns into what it undertook to hinder: the increase of fear. The un- canny that was supposed to be banned comes to the fore again out of the means used to protect against it.
Enlightenment develops in the form of a collective training in mistrust of ep- ochal proportions. Rationalism and mistrust are related impulses, both bound tightly to the social dynamic of the rising bourgeoisie and the modern state. In the struggle of hostile and competing subjects and states for self-preservation and hegemony, a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered. Everything that "appears" to us could be a deceptive maneuver of an overpowering, evil enemy. In his proof through doubt Descartes goes as far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world of appearance is only the work of a genius malignus, calculated to deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective on reality cannot be comprehended without a thorough cooling down of the ego-world relation, with- out the deep penetration of suspicion and fear about self- preservation to the very roots of the modern will to know. An overpowering concern with certainty and an equally irresistible expectation to be deceived drive modern epistemology on to search at any price for absolute and unshakably secure sources of certainty-as if its primary concern were to overcome a downright world-annihilating doubt. Enlightenment possesses at its core a polemical realism that declares war on ap- pearances: Only the naked truths, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
naked facts should be regarded as valid. For the deceptions that the enlightener expects are considered artful but neverthe- less transparent, exposable maneuvers. Verum etfictum convertuntur. The decep-
tions are transparent because they are self-made. What is self-evident in this world is fraud, threats, dangers-not openness, generosity, security. Truth is thus never to be had straight off but only through a second effort, as the product of critique that destroys what seemed before to be the case. Truth is not "discovered" innocently and without struggle, but rather is won in a toilsome victory over its predecessors, which are its concealment and antipode. The world bursts at the seams with problems, dangers, deceptions, and abysses as soon as the gaze of mistrusting investigation penetrates it. In the universe of modern knowledge, the backdrops, trapdoors, panoramas, deceptive images, dissembling gestures, hid- den feelings, concealed motives, enveloped bodies predominate--all of these phenomena make "reality itself more inaccessible precisely because, with in- creasing complexity, it is composed of ambiguous, concocted, and contrived acts and signs. This forces us all the more to separate the obvious from the concealed.
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 331
I am deceived, therefore I am. And: I unmask deceptions, I myself deceive; there- fore, I preserve myself. The Cartesian cogito, ergo sum can also be translated in this way.
We follow roughly the sequence of chapter 8, "The Cardinal Cynicisms," in treating the essential manifestations and dimensions of "enlightenment" as polem- ical empiricism in six steps: war and espionage; police and enlightenment in class struggle; sexuality and hostility toward self; medicine and suspecting the body; death and metaphysics; and natural science and weapon technology. That this po- lemical phenomenology makes a circle from the knowledge of war to the natural science of weaponry is no accident; we are preparing here the "Transcendental Polemic" of chapter 11. It describes how, behind a series of curiosities, compul- sions to struggle are at work that guide "epistemic interests. " In this phenomenol- ogy, we go through the characteristic tapping-in-the-dark movements of a "full modernity" that is still in search of itself and that is learning to doubt the produc- tivity of Cartesian doubt and to mistrust the measurelessness of enlightenment mistrust.
Knowledge of War and Espionage
. . . Instead, in May 1869 he sent his confidant, Theo von Bernardi, to Madrid, a historian and national economist whom, under the mask of the scientist, Bismarck and Moltke had already often used for secret missions . . . .
However, such [emissaries] required the greatest capacities in observation, knowledge of people, combination, dissimula- tion; indeed, a general cunning and artfulness . . .
Wilhelm J. C. E. Stieber Spion des Kanzlers (Munich, 1981)
For every warlord, the questions are, What is the enemy doing? What is he plan- ning? What condition is he in? How can it be found out? Direct communication is not possible. To ask the enemy himself is ultimately impossible or at least point- less, since he will always simply give deceptive answers.
For this reason, an outstanding intelligence service is required whose chief is an extraordinarily intelligent man but not necessarily a fighter. He should be able to think clearly in order to separate what is essential from the mass of the accidental that is always present where the prob-
1In the case of enmity, the probability, indeed, the certainty, of being deceived is a priori a given. The enemy will pretend to be stronger or weaker than he really is so as to provoke or deter. He will take up illusory positions and suddenly attack
lems of the opponent are concerned.
332 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
from an unexpected side. It is thus part of the logic of survival of each side in a dyad of opponents to see through and circumvent the deceptive maneuvers of the opponent through enlightenment in the sense of espionage and to outdo him with one's own exposures, counterdeceptions, and operative measures. Espi- onage in its most immediate form is set up as a science of survival. What the po- lemical realism of "enlightenment" wants can be seen most clearly through its ex- ample. Enlightenment as espionage is research on the enemy --the accumulation of knowledge about an object to which I am bound not through well-wishing, or through disinterested neutrality, but through a direct, hostile tension with a threatening effect. It nourishes a special kind of wanting-to-know and necessitates a series of peculiarly "indirect" methods of research: dissimulation, secrecy, in- filtration of positions of trust, misuse of friendships. Espionage exercises the art of getting the other to talk, works through surveillance and searches, spies on others' intimate and private domains, seeks levers for extortion, looks for vulner- able points and the weak link in the opponent's chain. It banks on the readiness of individuals on the other side to betray it. All this belongs to the methodology of espionage. The spy, the "subject of knowledge," comes forth in a mask vis-a- vis a hostile reality, that is, the reality of the enemy. We see at once how the approach of enlightenment as espionage to "truth" is distinct from that of science and even more
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
so from that of philosophy. For the truths that the spy brings together are, from the start, subject to a passionate and special "interest. " War of powers, war of consciousnesses. The migration of knowledge from subject A to subject B is already part of a struggle or an arming. Accordingly this amoral direction of research appeals openly to martial law and situation ethics, which says that whatever serves self-preservation is allowed. For this knowledge, the grand gesture of disinterestedness and contemplative objec- tivity, which science is particularly fond of, does not come into question. The spy seems to stand closer to the man of war than to the philosopher or the researcher. When he wants to know something, the disinterestedness he presents to the world is in every case only an illusion; the cases in which it is otherwise with researchers and philosophers remain to be examined.
But what attitude do the warrior and the philosopher assume toward the spy? Most of the time they have contemptfully chastised him; and with good reason as the spy's research work violates the ethical norms of the metier on both sides. On the one side, it is the generals who, in going about their "heroic, upright, manly, brave" business, never like having to deal with people who, because of their profession, do not really care about all that stuff. For the spy, another moral- ity always holds, although he fights the same fight. The hero does not want the corrupt spy as a fellow fighter; that would make him feel soiled. Strategy and tac- tics, which are certainly also familiar with deceptions and ruses, belong ambiva- lently to the heroic-masculine side. The spy, by contrast, appears merely as cun- ning and sly in the low sense of these words. He seduces; he does not carry out
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 333
frontal breakthroughs. Napoleon was at least honest enough to confess that be- hind some of his great victories stood not only military genius but also the diplo- matic art of deception of his master-spy, Karl Schulmeister (he contributed decid- edly to the hoodwinking of the Austrians, which led to their defeats at Ulm and Austerlitz). It is said that General von Moltke, Bismarck's veteran fighter, did not like spies in general, and particularly not that Wilhelm Stieber, who from 1863
on was Bismarck's chief spy (his nickname was "Most Superior Security Su- perior"; Oberster Sicherheits-Oberer and who, under the cover of a news service, that is, a kind of press agency, built up the international network of the Prussian secret police. If one reads Stieber's recently published memoirs, one can estimate the significance of modern intelligence networks for "Realpolitik. " Not only did Stieber repeatedly save Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I from assassination, but
in organizing the intelligence work on the Austrian army according to new princi- ples, he laid the groundwork for the Prussian campaign against Austria in the "fraternal war" of 1866. It was also his duty to organize the intelligence prerequi- sites and the reconnaissance of the terrain on which the German campaign against France in 1870-71 was to take place. Nevertheless, the more distinctions he reaped through his extraordinarily successful activity, the more he was snubbed by the Prussian officer caste. The heroes could not bear that their naive (? ) sol- diers' ethos should have anything to do with the systematic amoralism of the chief
2spy. Thehighertheoffice,thegreaterthecompulsionstolie. Oneactedasifone
were blind to Machiavelli's realism: "In war, fraud is laudable" {Discorsi, Book III, p. 40).
Scientists and philosophers who do not deign to look on the spy and the phenomenon of espionage, however, proceed in a way that is scarcely any differ- ent. For dirt sticks to the spy's hands, namely, an all-to-clear, all-too-special "small" interest. The high seekers of truth, by contrast, do everything to avoid resembling the spy; they would rather admit to no self-"interest" at all and not put themselves as tools at the disposal of any "aim. " If the true philosopher had con- tempt even for the paid academic (see Schiller's lecture on the study of universal history), then the spy was really beneath all criticism. But how would it be if the spy proved to be in reality the shadow and obscure double of the enlightenment philosopher?
On the surface, of course, one can hardly think of an opposition greater than that between the spy, who, being quite "interest" oriented, commits himself to a particular party, nation, a mere fraction of humanity, and the investigator of truth, who looks only at the whole and claims to serve only the universal well- being of humanity, or even "pure truth" itself. Not until this century did science and philosophy of enlightenment become conscious of their own limited biases and narrower polemical and pragmatic commitments. In the age of class struggles at the end of the nineteenth century, the keepers of the seal of high knowledge had to feel the ground shake under their feet for the first time: A nasty suspicion
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
334 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
arose that they, the bourgeois scientists, might be agents of bourgeois class domination --deluded helpers of a political system who naively, idealistically un- covered "universal" truths that, when applied, however, served only, or for the main, the particular interests of the ruling classes. When in August 1914 the First World War "broke out," many professional "seekers of truth" dropped their masks. The wave of "ideas of 1914" tore them along and found them more than willing to consciously take over the role of "ideologue," of spiritual weaponsmith in the slaughter of the peoples. What was committed to paper as theory in the years 1914-18 remains unimaginable --the extent to which culturally chauvinistic
3nationalization of "pure truths" suddenly became possible.
In subsequent decades, the sciences as a whole have largely lost their passion
for truth. Moreover, they have to live under constant suspicion of being agents, a suspicion that was and is determined to unmask them as helpers of the powerful. Since then, associations that place the spy and the philosopher, the secret agent and the researcher side by side no longer seem so misguided. At the same time the military became detheorized, the consciousness of researchers began to be- come more pragmatic. Knowledge and interest were allowed to, indeed should, have something to do with each other, with the proviso that the interests take it on themselves to prove their legitimacy. Nietzsche had begun to undermine every will to know through the suspicion of the will to power. Students of the First World War cannot fail to notice the acknowledged role espionage and martial "en- lightenment" played -- cognitive warfare, psychological warfare, treason, propaganda. General Moshe Dayan finally declared both openheartedly and secretively after the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War that intelligence services had played just as important a role as the air force and tank divisions. The taboo seems to be broken. It is no different with countless scientists all over the world who, obviously without professional ethical scruples, work on weapon research and projects with the potential for annihilation. If science too has to earn its daily
4bread, then at least a part of it discovers the coming war as employer. Military enlightenment as provocation to philosophical enlightenment? What is the situation with the subjection of knowledge to interests and how universal, how particular, do these interests have to be? Is every gathering of "truths," knowledges, and insights bound to polemical, defensive-aggressive subjects (here states)? Certainly, espionage is the furthest from the illusion of "universal" interest. It therefore emphatically puts its knowledge under lock and key. Scien- tists, by contrast, are categorically publication crazy, and some metatheories even construct a fundamental connection between universality, truth, and the publicness of assertions. Whereas science boasts of universality, the secret ser- vices know that "knowledge" has value only as long as others do not know that
they know it.
From this vantage point, a connection between the theory of knowledge and
the intelligence service can be seen: Both devise postures of "objectivity" toward
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 335
the object of knowledge, postures that would remain incomprehensible without the influence of the hostile stance toward the object. Both are set on separating the obvious from the concealed. Both worry that error and delusion can lie in wait everywhere. In both, deception is a rival of suspicion. To have an enemy thus means to define an object of research (the converse of the sentence holds only with qualifications). War channels curiosity into a polemical course and equates what is unknown about the enemy with his dangerousness. To know him is half the job of holding him in check. Out of enmity, specialized domains of curiosity, areas of research and epistemic interests are built up: through the keyhole to the naked facts. Without making enemies and a corresponding concealment, there is no un- masking; without darkening, there is no naked truth. The striving of "enlighten- ment" to reveal the truth obeys a dialectical principle: Only through a specific, polemically forced concealment does a space "behind" arise--the "naked facts. " What is naked is what was previously secret: the enemy, eavesdropped on in his privacy; the hidden power here, the conspiracy there; the naked women, the geni- tals made visible; the confessions of the amoral; the true intentions, the real mo- tives, the hard statistics, the relentless standards. Those who enlighten do not rely on what "people say"; the naked facts will probably always be different from what "people say. " The enemy is everywhere: powers of nature that are too powerful, too dangerous for us to rely on; rivals who, when it comes to the crunch, will show no mercy and who already envision us as corpses over whom they, deter- mined to "survive," will walk if necessary; traditions that fog up our minds and cause us to "believe," but forbid us to know what "the case really is. "
If secretiveness is a striking characteristic in the theory of knowledge of the intelligence services, then here a bifurcation of enlightenment into naive and reflected, gullible and artful directions becomes clear. The naive assume that they are a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
priori nobody's enemy and would let nothing force them to become some- one's enemy. When enlighteners of this type "know something," they automati- cally think that everyone else should also be allowed to know it. More reflective forms of enlightenment (e. g. , the earlier Freemasons) from the start understood themselves in this regard differently: They accepted the facts of the (even though always only relative) enmity and consciously reckoned with the compulsion to be secretive; they accepted the need to think in the logic of struggle during unavoida- ble conflicts. They knew that knowledge was to be treated as a weapon, prefer- ably as a secret weapon. The other side does not have to know what we know. With the spy this becomes most striking: to gain knowledge without letting it be known that one knows. Hence also the often fascinating, Romanesque masquer- ades in espionage. Agents are trained to see without being seen, to recognize without being recognized. Stieber was not only a sly organizer but also an actor with talent-- who even visited Karl Marx in his London exile and played, success- fully, it seems--the comic role of a doctor who, due to his revolutionary convic-
336 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
tions, had had to flee Germany. Stieber noted smugly in his memoirs that Herr Marx did not waste a word inquiring about his revolutionary vicissitudes and the situation in Germany, but only asked Doctor Schmidt about a prescription for
5hemorrhoids. Stieber also occasionally appeared at scenes of unrest as a land-
scape painter. He is even supposed to have turned up as a street vendor who car- ried devotional knickknacks and pornographic postcards on his cart--one of the two could always be used to lure soldiers into confidential conversations. We have also heard how Stieber's descendants do it today in the socialist Prussian se- cret police: In psychological Casanova courses, East German agents are said to study the art of curing the weekend neuroses of top Bonn secretaries so tenderly that even the East Berlin State Security Service profits from it.
Are we preaching to the converted? The German public must long since be
well aware of the connections between science and espionage, at least since a
model concept of the secret services has permeated into general consciousness.
Those pieces of information collected by legal and illegal means, which are "at
hand" "against" a person or a group, are called "intimations" (Erkenntnis). Suspi-
cion guides the storing up of "intimations"; it constitutes the prosecution proce-
dure. What mistrust ferrets out lies at hand as "intimations" when the time comes
to take "measures. " This is no semantic lapse, no conceptual contingency. In a
broader sense, this way of speaking about "intimations" is only one of several ex-
posures of the primary connection between knowledge and (polemical) interest.
The English language uses at this point the compact word "intelligence. " "One un-
derstands by it particularly the gathering, assessment, and handing on of (publicly
accessible or secret) pieces of information in special bureaus (agencies or ser-
vices) for the purposes of the military and political leadership (general staff and
6government). " The "naked facts" ferreted out by intelligence build the first solid
layer of a cynical empiricism (Empirie). They must be naked because they are supposed to help keep the object in its dangerous enmity in its sights. The subjects must thus dissemble in order to eavesdrop on the ("naked") objects. Dissimulation of the subject is the common denominator of espionage and modern philosophy.
Police and the Optics of Class Struggle
Certainly, my fair miss,
the police want to know everything, especially secrets.
Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm
This observation can easily be carried over to inner-political enmities, fears, and struggles. Enlightenment is written in good part "psychohistorically," as a history of political fear and its emotional and practical-strategic offspring: suspicion and
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 337
? Olaf Gulbransson, Russian Secret Police, 1909.
mistrust, control and subversion, surveillance and secret, criminalization and outrage. Those who nurse suspicion can become collectors in a black (in the mul- tiple senses: secret, polemical, anarchist, directed at the bad) empiricism. On the side of the wielders of power: rulers, administrators, police, stooges, denoun- cers; on the side of the critics of power: revolutionaries, rebels, deviants, "dissi- dents. " Each of the two sides (properly speaking they are not mere
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"sides," as in a symmetrical relation, but classes superior and inferior, master and servant, ruler and oppressed; this asymmetry would play a significant role in a moral evaluation, but that is not our concern here) views the opponent through specta- cles of suspicion. Organs of state and representatives of hegemonic powers watch out for subversive, oppositional, deviant forces in the domain of their subjects, fueled by the worry that a "conspiracy" could be formed that gives expression to a will to change. The oppositional powers, by contrast, keep a transcript of the immoralism of the ruling power, of its capricious acts, infringements of justice, its corruptness and decadence. In times of open polemical tension, a mutual curi- osity to investigate can be spurred on by the element of enmity that inevitably (but more or less manifestly) clings to every domination. Both, although asymmetri- cally, are moved by a specific will to know that seeks to expose the political oppo- nent in his nakedness.
338 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
We know that Louis XIV maintained a complicated network of palace espi- onage, that spies had to inform him of his courtiers' every move, every secret word, and every possible ulterior motive --especially about the activities of peers, the great men of the realm, that is, potential rivals and aspirants to the throne. Since then, the incumbents of power have infinitely extended and refined the sys- tem of surveillance of the other candidates and participants in power.
