They were
thymotic
psychologists, like their successor, Alfred Adler.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
These techniques are proving much more fragile than was previously thought.
The book, however, is a medium that simply leaves you in peace for the first 100 years.
It stands the test as the reliable bearer of what is entrusted to it.
CASIMIR: Another line of defence is that books have to be tech- nologically updated as e-books. Is that a future prospect?
SLOTERDIJK: These are all ideas that may possibly work on the basis of data storage capacity, which has become terribly cheap. In the past, successful data storage media, such as marble tablets and paper, were the most rare and precious commodities. Today, data storage space is second only to Sahara Desert sand as the world’s cheapest and most plentiful commodity. That leads to an incred- ible inflation – and to universal conservation of things not worth conserving. We will have to live in that entropy in the future. The printed book will easily outlive its electronic rivals.
190 Making the Effort: The Reader
CASIMIR: But won’t the book itself become entropic? I’m think- ing of the flood of new things every year. How can we reliably decide on all the things we don’t have to read?
SLOTERDIJK: In the past, critics used to do that for us. They did the pre-selection. Criticism of that kind no longer exists today. Now each reader and each cultural agent has to be his or her own search engine. There’s no way to avoid this. We live in the age of hyper-publicity and over-documentation. That is the result of our endless luxury of storage space. Every petit bourgeois today can document his or her life better than Louis XIV could. Far too much is conserved. But this evokes a sort of terminator in us that goes on a shooting spree with a weapon of ignorance and liquidates every- thing he can’t use immediately.
CASIMIR: It’s a beautiful mission. But it results in us termina- tors missing a great deal.
SLOTERDIJK: We know that, whatever the circumstances, the great majority tends to leave aside the best, even if it is accessible. For example, there are intellectuals who haven’t read Moby Dick, perhaps the best book ever printed. That’s very strange, isn’t it? Most people live in the calm conviction that there is something more important than the best.
CASIMIR: We probably shouldn’t disturb that at all . . . SLOTERDIJK (laughing): There’s nothing to disturb. CASIMIR: You are an admirer of Jean Paul, who says books are
nothing but ‘thick letters to friends’. Yet trying to have an effect on one’s reader-friends only works if they are people who at least partly obey the text. Still, obedience to the text is vanishing rapidly.
SLOTERDIJK: Universal literacy has a side effect. The moment the art of reading and writing becomes a basic democratic technique and loses its special hierarchical and sacral function, we begin to see something like the secularization of written things and, in time, profanation as well. But even after profanation, a kind of difference persists between the author and the reader. As long as that differ- ence is felt clearly at a psychic level, the book has enough eroticism and authority to be able to create a gap in relation to the reader. This effect, that the author pre-empts the reader as it were, gives the book a head start. That is its opportunity, and will continue to be.
CASIMIR: What about friendship?
SLOTERDIJK: When Jean Paul said books are thick letters to friends, he was using a metaphor that expresses the transforma- tion of the book from an authoritarian to an amicable medium. Bourgeois reading culture lives on the basis of this transformation, and the result is what generates pleasure in books in the first place.
CASIMIR: The author Florian Illies claims that city-dwellers are
Making the Effort: The Reader 191
developing a rampant yearning for the countryside: being offline for a while, slowing down – the ideal conditions for thick books. Is the desire for reading having a comeback in Germany now?
SLOTERDIJK: You’re talking to somebody who has just pro- duced a book trilogy of 2,400 pages. One doesn’t do that totally naively, but very likely with something in mind. Among other things, I wanted to suggest that this project is just as important as an existential sabbatical. People who really want to read my Spheres project as a totality won’t be able to do it without taking unpaid leave. And it looks as if people are actually prepared to do that, oth- erwise the first volume, Sphären I, wouldn’t have sold 20,000 copies in Germany. There are fast books that act like injections. But there are also books that are something like a long holiday.
23
THUS SPOKE SLOTERDIJK Interview with Res Strehle*2
STREHLE: My compliments, Peter Sloterdijk: your world history of rage and resentment is a winner.
SLOTERDIJK: It began with my intuition that these topics con- tained a huge store of hidden insights. As soon as that intuition was confirmed, the book wrote itself. Rage is like Nietzsche’s Abgrund: the longer you stare into it the more steadily it will stare back at you.
STREHLE: Your book shifts the focus away from Freud’s Eros, which explains a great deal but leaves big blank patches, to thymos, an ancient Greek term that means pride as the source of positive energies.
SLOTERDIJK: We certainly live in an era of changing perspec- tives. The stage is revolving, not least in the field of psychology where a great paradigm shift from psychoanalysis to neurobiology is happening. In its own way, my interest in the thymotic pole of the human psyche expresses a great change in feeling about the present period. Many people feel they are witnessing a world crisis. In some periods we simply carry on living in a straight line. But at other times it seems that we are actually seeing the wheel of the world turning. Many people today can feel how the scene around them has changed. The time of naïve triumph over socialist rivals has ended everywhere in the liberal capitalist world order.
STREHLE: You talk about rage collecting, and you interpret
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Res Strehle appeared under the title ‘Also sprach Sloterdijk’, in Das Magazin, the weekly supplement of the Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger (4–10 November 2006): 46–55.
Res Strehle is a Swiss journalist and was editor-in-chief of the Tages- Anzeiger (Zurich) at the time of the interview.
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 193
political and religious movements as savings banks and rage banks where investors can deposit their grievances. This also creates a changed perspective on political parties, which you describe as ‘col- lection points of dissidence’.
SLOTERDIJK: Rather disappointingly, hardly any reviews of my book so far have mentioned its logical centre. Rage and Time basi- cally presents a general theory of collections. The ancient agrarian empires were already totally dominated by the theme of hoard- ing because the granaries were the places that housed the secret of royal power in the early theocracies, or regimes ruled by god-kings. Collections of weapons, jewellery, money and gold augmented this wealth. Works of art in museums, knowledge in academies, univer- sities and libraries, and religious salvation in the treasure house of the Church show that a great variety of non-monetary goods could be collected. I’m adding a dimension to this list that we haven’t paid enough attention to so far: rage. Some emotions seem only fleet- ing; in fact they are definitely collectible – as shown most of all by religious feelings. If we ask what happens when rage is collected and conserved, we discover a new view of modern political parties and movements. We understand more about their character and func- tion if we describe them as emotion collection points that manage the investments of the small rage owner.
STREHLE: You write that Catholicism and communism knew very well how to collect rage. Capitalism was not bad at it either. Early on, the classical economist Joseph Schumpeter described the dynamic of capitalism as creative destruction.
SLOTERDIJK: The spirit of capitalism is the spirit of reinvest- ment. That means people shouldn’t simply own their treasure quietly and enjoy its presence. Real capitalists must be able to let go of the treasure. We could also describe this as modernization of greed: modern owners really own their property when they send it off on a journey of valorization, if necessary in the form of floating capital that has to go around the world and return with a mighty plus on the home account – provided it doesn’t get dashed to pieces on a reef, always a risk. The modern spirit of realization demands that every potential should upgrade itself, which means that rage can also look forward to more cheerful times. If God is dead he is out of the picture as a collector, absorber and preserver of rage – but what should be done with protest potential? If there is no reward in the nether world, how can there be compensation for suffering, without which the notion of a sophisticated concept of justice can’t exist? In this situation we can expect a new page to be turned in the book of the history of ideas. On this page will be written in letters of blood: ‘World history is the world’s Last Judgement. ’
194 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
STREHLE: Political Islam seems to be at the start of a new chapter just now. Is it engaged in writing world history in letters of blood, as you say?
SLOTERDIJK: It incorporates the hallmarks of the two previ- ous collection points for revenge, the Catholic-metaphysical and the communist-activist. It shares the idea of post-mortal punishment with Catholicism because it rightly portrays Allah as a wrathful lord. The philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes commented ironi- cally on the resonance between leader and followers in monotheism: ‘As is the Lord, so is the common man. ’ He was saying that if we know Jehovah, the Jews shouldn’t be a surprise to us. The same applies to Christians and Muslims in their appropriate context. Islamism, however, has much in common with communism because both ideologies involve presentation of projects for political salva- tion. When it comes to salvation of the whole world, expansionism is on the agenda. Nobody knows where this will stop. Perhaps, like present-day Catholicism, in the long term it will be content for the world to stay permanently divided into Islam and non-Islam.
STREHLE: Do you mean political Islam doesn’t want to expand?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, in the twentieth century the Islamic hemi- sphere first had to come to terms with its own growth. When we talk about Islam today we’re always talking about an unprecedented population explosion. In the 1960s and 1970s we started discussing the new demographically conditioned world hunger problem, but we tended to overlook the fact that alongside the fertility of people living in poverty there was also a direct, offensive campaign for procreation. The Muslim population increased eightfold, from 150 million people in 1900 to 1. 2 billion in the year 2000. This was partly due to massive bio-political control that uses aggressive growth in national populations as a political means. If Islam had remained demographically where it was in 1900 we would hardly talk about it today. But meanwhile the population bomb has exploded. The young men who will bring trouble in the coming years have all been born already. The older ones among them recently left their mark during the riots over the Mohammed cartoons. We saw angry young men in their twenties on the streets. Millions upon millions will join them in the coming years.
STREHLE: Without any real perspective?
SLOTERDIJK: They are doing what anybody in their situation would do. They grab the first opportunity to play a role on some kind of stage – regardless of whether it is the local stage or a dream world stage. We must take their performances seriously. What we are seeing is rage in its purest form, as raw material. This is the expression of generalized anger against a world that is completely
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 195
and utterly divided up and occupied, and in which nobody can assign young people a place of their own. Nothing enrages people more than the idea of being superfluous, whereas they enter the stage with the idea of playing an important role. The sharpest lines of conflict occur when the demand for importance meets the threat of being superfluous.
(The telephone rings. ‘Hello? Yes, of course, I’ll be delighted to see you again after forty years. It has really been a long time. Well, see you then. ’)
STREHLE: It sounds like a school class reunion. SLOTERDIJK: Yes, it is.
STREHLE: As a philosopher, can you still make yourself under-
stood to your old schoolmates?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, of course. Incidentally, the graduation
year of 1966 was a very good year at Wittelsbacher Gymnasium in Munich. Everybody, without exception, has achieved something. We were the greatest possible contrast to today’s young people who feel the pressures of career and anxiety about making a living early on. If I can generalize, all that was very remote from our feelings. Many of us vowed solemnly and faithfully never to do alienated work. Nobody wanted to let the ‘system’ buy out his dissidence. Many young people today complain that no one guarantees them a job for life. Nothing in recent years has alienated me as much as the confused rebellion of young people in France in March 2006 against the proposed law for a more flexible first job contract that was designed to reduce employers’ reluctance to hire new employ- ees. The protestors’ revolt exposed their real dream of having total security from the very start. For an old veteran of the 1968 move- ment, that is obscene. But we were probably naïve. For some reason we were convinced nothing negative could happen to us. In those days dissidence was the surest way to success. People who disturbed the peace, if they did it right, could rely on being recognized as extremely useful members of society sooner or later.
STREHLE: Many people today are afraid of being losers. When it happens they explode with crazed anger, like the frenzied killers from the white lower-middle class in the USA who go on shooting sprees in schools or shopping malls. Is this anger comparable with that of Islamist attackers, who often choose their victims in a simi- larly random way?
SLOTERDIJK: No, I’m sure it’s something completely differ- ent. The berserk gunmen from the white middle class are usually just children who vent their injured feelings on the collective in a destructive, individualistic way. The American assassins are psy- chologically very different from the Muslim activists. They follow
196 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
a different script from the Islamist warrior assassins who only func- tion when and because their collective gives them support.
STREHLE: Do you see the response to this threat, the ‘war against terror’, as a rational strategy, or was it collective punishment at the time? In the end it didn’t shrink from torture, illicit killing, secret prisons and saturation bombing.
SLOTERDIJK: I’m convinced that our anti-terrorism policy is fundamentally wrong. Instead of giving the enemy a chance to identify themselves openly it makes them guilty from the very start. What’s more, it subjects them to the methods of waging war in a post-heroic fashion, in which battles are no longer fought, but instead the enemy is eliminated from a position of boundless superiority. That style of fighting suits societies with low biological reproductivity because on our side nowadays we have no sons to squander. But this makes waging war very similar to pest control. Instead, we should be doing everything possible to break out of this asymmetry which is insulting to people’s dignity – for example, by supporting the building of Islamic parties in Europe in which respectable forms of dissidence and representation of interests can be developed. That would be the best and most convincing response to terror – interrupting the spiral of reciprocal degradation and encouraging eye contact instead of a contest of scorn.
STREHLE: What role do the media play in these conflicts?
SLOTERDIJK: We should never forget that acts of terror like September 11 or the explosions in Atocha Station in Madrid are closely related to the Western entertainment industry. They operate in the field of our familiar horror clichés – the present terror is the translation of widespread fear-and-pleasure games from the cinema screen to the TV monitor. Real terror operates according to the game rules of a politicized snuff movie: real corpses, total entertain- ment. Evidence shows that terror profits from a monstrous reward system that follows the basic principle, ‘Threaten us and you’ll supply us with our most important topic. ’ As soon as something like that happens, all the channels of the Western world broadcast the message. The audience in the Middle East would have to be blind and deaf not to understand the invitation. Any attack from that quarter is rewarded with an orgy of attention.
STREHLE: You’re very sceptical about the role of the media and you demand that every journalist decide whether he or she wants to be an agent of enlightenment or a player in the incitement system.
SLOTERDIJK: A thought experiment could be useful here. As soon as there is news about terror, journalists have to be clearly aware of their complicity in terror. Should they simply pass on the immediate feeling of shock, or even enhance it in certain
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 197
circumstances? Or should they decide to play down the news – for example, by putting it in quarantine? That was an excellent old European method of fighting the plague. Perhaps the media plague is more dangerous than the bacterial one because it can create chaos in the motivation system of a whole civilization. The real point is not to reward serious crimes with excessive attention. That inevi- tably encourages repetition. Regrettably, the complicity between the media world and the terror scene has been so well harmonized for so long that we have to speak of genuine collusion and effective co-dependency – that’s how drug therapy describes the intermesh- ing between addiction and dealing or the alliances among addicts. At some point we have to say openly: you, the journalists, are the dealers in this game.
STREHLE: If you were an editor-in-chief, would you refuse the deal?
SLOTERDIJK: There are two options: Either you create a grand coalition of abstainers that goes on strike against the pressure to spread terror – or you denounce yourself for rabble-rousing.
STREHLE: But the media could also function as a way of letting off steam.
SLOTERDIJK: If emotions weren’t rational to some extent we wouldn’t have them at all. That also makes sense in terms of evolu- tionary biology: if nature equipped us with some impulse or other it must involve a fitness benefit. It follows that pride and rage belong to the human make-up just as eroticism does. Evolution wouldn’t have produced people capable of rage if that emotion were only senseless ballast. In fact, it is an important derivative of stress, and stress is the biological interpretation of acute danger, which means it is vital for survival. Normally a living being reacts to real present danger by fleeing or attacking. Both reactions require a high degree of energy, and that’s exactly what the stress reaction provides. The early heroic poems describe great stress like a divine gift – or like inspired enthusiasm that seems to flow into the soul from outside.
STREHLE: And things get dangerous when that rage is collected and frozen into resentment?
SLOTERDIJK: Quite right. When people’s need for validation is rejected they start feeling enraged. If they are prevented from expressing the rage, it is stored up. Since the nineteenth century that has been called resentment. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche started a new chapter in the study of the human soul with their investigations into the denigrated, insulted and revengeful person.
They were thymotic psychologists, like their successor, Alfred Adler. On a diversion via Kojève and Lacan, he left deep, hidden traces in French psycho- analysis. We can still get drunk on the ambiguity of the word désir.
198 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
Oddly enough, it describes two completely different things: first, erotic desire in terms of the Freudian libido, and, second, the desire for recognition described by Hegel.
STREHLE: At the end of your book you suggest psychological systems for healing injuries. Which direction should they take?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern civilization has already achieved a certain amount in this field. The possibility of a meritocracy con- trolled by money, as facilitated by the market economy, has done much to detoxify social relationships. When someone achieves something, others realize it as long as the achievements can be shown visibly. The Greeks created four theatrical arenas of ambition where gifted people could distinguish themselves: the agora as the stage for political debate, and the theatre, the stadium and the academy for debating scientific opinions. Willing and able people flourished in these arenas. Today, these forums are all fully functioning again. We can’t imagine any more how badly the old aristocratic society was psycho-dynamically screwed up. For centuries, social existence mainly consisted of absurd fights about privilege. People fought with family trees, rival illusions of nobility took the field against each other, and arguments about precedence were fought out in a space completely empty of achievement – hollow dreams of potency without a beginning or an end. The Europeans lost more than a thousand years with that kind of nonsense – we have to state that clearly once and for all.
STREHLE: In your book you go a step further and propose a sort of code of behaviour for world society.
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful. I would never go that far. I say that a behaviour code for the world must first be ground in the mills of the present debate between cultures. Incidentally, this culture clash would still be taking place even if Huntington hadn’t predicted it. 1 It’s in the nature of things. Friction exists between the West and the Far East as well as the Middle East. The game rules for coexistence of 8–10 billion human beings are being discovered in the process. Of course, this only works if the unavoidable conflicts between the great players don’t get too destructive. Then again, it is also not enough if a few omniscient experts in international law and some fervent Protestants meet in Washington to dictate the necessary measures and wait for the others to join in. Rage remains a basic force but it won’t continue collecting in the forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it developed into communism and
1 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 199
fascism. It has largely retreated into individual ambitions, and vents on the broadest front in mass culture. That’s why we always have to understand the function of mass culture for letting off steam and as a form of popular therapy.
STREHLE: Are you talking about computer games, for instance?
SLOTERDIJK: They are important too. Every individualist and collective form of mass culture can function to contain rage and let off steam. The only thing that doesn’t play a role any more is what some intellectuals still dream about: a new communism, a new World Bank of rage. The requisite possibilities of collection are lacking for this. A second wave of communism is less likely than a giant meteorite hitting the earth’s surface in the next thousand years.
STREHLE: When you mention conflict on the Asian–Western border, are you thinking of North Korea’s atom bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: No, North Korea is a very different problem. The country is a singular phenomenon and perhaps simply a brief episode in history. I’m convinced the Chinese will put an end to that irritating situation sooner or later. If the North Koreans really go crazy the Chinese will invade. We don’t have to lift a finger. The Western world’s hysterical reaction to the Korean threat seems rather absurd to me. The USA is too far away and beyond reach of any existing North Korean long-range missiles. Eastern Europe might be reachable – but for what?
STREHLE: Isn’t that more of a mythological horror image – a madman with a bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: A great deal of our politics still plays out in the cinema and in thrillers. Frankenstein appeared on the scene nearly 200 years ago, and since then the role is there to be filled in the mass imagination. No mass culture without horror. Real figures can also act in these scripts because the amusement system all around us has largely erased the difference between real and fictitious horror. We are constantly going back and forth through the revolving door from the horror genre to real terror. We could also say Washington and Hollywood have become too similar to each other. We must hope that one day people will be better able to distinguish again between real threats and fictitious ones.
STREHLE: Are Iran’s nuclear development plans a real threat? After the Iraq debacle, international sabre rattling won’t work in that case any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Iran is evidently not letting itself be intimidated. STREHLE: Do you see this as a danger?
SLOTERDIJK: Nuclear weapons are our invention. It is in the
nature of things that others imitate us in the most risky aspects
200 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
of our civilization. It is part of the risks of our ‘way of life’ that an Iranian driver comes driving down our lane towards us in the wrong direction. As we know, drivers going in the wrong direction are always convinced everybody else is driving in the wrong lane. This view is very widespread in the Middle East at the moment: the West is driving on the wrong side and they are on the right side.
STREHLE: It’s a matter of perception.
SLOTERDIJK: More than that – it’s a war about perception. To put it cautiously: the probability that something good will come out of an Iranian atom bomb isn’t very great. But the probability of it causing much harm isn’t that great either. So far all the nuclear powers have taken responsibility for their own weapons very seri- ously. Our experience up to now shows that anybody with nuclear weapons becomes part of the deterrent system. The only ones who have really used the bomb are the Americans. That’s why they tend to believe more than anyone else that other countries could repeat their lack of control and actually use the transcendent weapon. The mad enemy – that is, the actor who gets away with everything – is the personification of one’s own question.
STREHLE: And do you see the much-talked-about use of nuclear weapons by terrorists as an illusion?
SLOTERDIJK: The really annoying thing about terror is that it distracts us from much more important problems.
STREHLE: From questions of social development? From the destruction of the ecological system?
SLOTERDIJK: Naturally, in Europe the question of social development is taking a new form again. Inequalities have grown dramatically. In the Middle East, however, the question of social development is posed as a demographic question and therefore as the risk of civil war. Enormous psycho-political explosive material has collected there, and it is mostly religiously coded. In addition, in the coming fifty years humankind must make the transition to an economy based on post-fossil energy. Environmental problems are becoming more acute every year. There is a whole slew of such top- list priorities.
STREHLE: You conclude your book with a moral appeal: we should learn to see ourselves with others’ eyes.
SLOTERDIJK: That isn’t a moral appeal; it’s a totally normal intellectual attitude. Seeing yourself from the outside is a modus vivendi that requires a degree of asceticism. Asceticism means, purely and simply, exercising to achieve fitness. That’s what gives the expression a relation to morality. It is an obvious lesson: we have to keep fit for everything to come. We are facing a period
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 201
of tremendous friction. We can’t simply wish away the coming conflicts. Marx once said that the point is not to make the real con- tradictions disappear, but to create a form within which they can move.
24
FATHERS SHOULD BE KEPT OUT OF BROTHELS AND PUBS
Interview with Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang*2
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Mr Sloterdijk, what has put you in a rage this year?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m not sure – I’m not easily provoked. What I remember is the student protests in France against the introduction of the new contract for first-time employment. It was designed to give more scope to employers so as to overcome their reluctance to hire new employees. Absurdly, the workers affected saw this as an attack on their presumed basic right to employment for life from the first working day onwards. Their opposition was completely illusory, as if they wanted to demand top jobs for all.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But isn’t idealism typical for a student movement?
SLOTERDIJK: We should distinguish between illusionism and idealism. The attitude of younger people has changed. I come from a generation that grew up under totally different conditions. At the time of my school-leaving examination in 1966 nobody dreamed of making compromises with the world of permanent employment. Our motto was, ‘You’ll never get my labour power. ’
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But that only applied to left-wing activ- ists, not to the people they wanted to champion, the workers.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s true that a bohemian student scene evolved
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang appeared under the title ‘Väter weg von Puff und Kneipe’, in the daily taz newspaper (23 December 2006). Available at: <http://www. taz. de/1/ archiv/? dig=2006/12/23/a0209>.
At the time of the interview Jan Feddersen was a journalist and editor at the Berlin taz, and Susanne Lang was an editor at the taz.
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 203
in the early 1970s, during the period of so-called full employment. This bohemian group from the 1968 movement produced a political surplus that created fantastic opportunities. We’re still living from that today. The recent protests in France, however, showed that young people have become almost overwhelmingly petit bourgeois.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Because the young want to work rather than revolutionize?
SLOTERDIJK: Because they let the logic of the consumer world define their wishes. In life stories in the past, youth played the role of a psychosocial moratorium where people in a state of indecision, or even confusion, were tolerated and protected. There was always the assumption that they would make the best use of this in their careers later on. Nowadays eighteen-year-olds take to the streets and demand the right to a permanent job for life!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In France young people in the banlieus took to the streets as well, and set fire to cars. Are they the real angry ones in our society?
SLOTERDIJK: No. Both protests are primarily mimetic move- ments that mimic a kind of rage the actors themselves don’t always feel. France has a rich popular tradition of outrage.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We’re pretty good at that in Germany too, aren’t we?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but it has less of an impact here. The atmosphere in France is more rigid, and that leads to a dialectic of stagnation and explosion. Things are more fluid in Germany, which is why today, unlike in the 1980s, protest doesn’t have a broad basis any longer.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Are you referring particularly to the time when the Green Party was very vocal?
SLOTERDIJK: Anyone who wants to understand the Greens should realize that post-1945 Germany has achieved something extraordinary in the production of loser attitudes. In Germany, thymotic culture, which is based on self-affirmation and pride, was reduced to a stump. What remained of self-affirmative behaviour had to be expressed in terms of moralism. The Greens led the way in this – some of them were veritable Jacobins.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: This means the Greens as a party acted as a good rage bank, as you explain in your new essay, Rage and Time. Are they still playing that role?
SLOTERDIJK: The function of the political party as an institu- tion, not just the Green Party, has fundamentally changed today. From a historical perspective, parties were never just organs for expressing interests, but were collection points for emotions as well. They had the task of organizing collection of hopes, illusions,
204 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
wishes and rage. They used various combinations to address differ- ent segments of the public at different times. People who looked for national symbols to give them satisfaction took up position on the right wing. Others who identified with symbols of material progress, of developing justice and of the welfare state, assembled on the left wing. Finally, the liberals provided a meeting ground for people who pinned their hopes mostly on the advance of different kinds of freedom in the modern state. Interestingly, the middle-class parties acted as collection points for militant satisfaction.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: What does that involve?
SLOTERDIJK: The middle class is the class that turns its own satisfaction into defiance. How do we explain that? Modern society popularizes the possibility of comparison. That’s why there is asymmetrical growth between the reasons for being satisfied and the reasons for being dissatisfied. As soon as the means of satisfac- tion become more widespread, the means of comparison grow as well. We all compare ourselves with each other, with the result that we see people all around us who are ahead of us, and that seems unfair. This is how countless people who are objectively winners in terms of modernization and progress subjectively see themselves as protestors.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: That explains why we live in a German world. Do luxury and satisfaction lead to fear of social decline?
SLOTERDIJK: This question neatly points up the paradox of that wasted freedom. Dissatisfaction with luxury indicates that people don’t have an organ for calculating probabilities. We are oriented to facts on the one hand, and to hopes and expectations on the other, but we don’t have an internal mechanism for dealing with probability. This is why we can’t evaluate the unimaginable improbability of our own lifestyle. The only people who can do that are people who come from outside or who move between a culture of poverty and a culture of wealth.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In terms of political parties, does this mean that today they are advocates of the improbable?
SLOTERDIJK: I see them as service providers in the market of political illusions. Their pact with improbability is fateful and obsessive. Of course, the people who get elected are the ones who correspond most closely to the voters’ expectations. But expecta- tions of that kind all tend towards increasing improbability. The general product that each party must offer today, without excep- tion, is the plausible illusion that the party’s politics will optimize its clientele’s lifestyles.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Yet most politicians have stopped
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 205
pointing to any kind of optimization – they promise the status quo, in a very alarmist way, in fact.
SLOTERDIJK: Guaranteeing the status quo means a great deal in a situation where liberalism has been emptied of meaning. In a sit- uation where most ideologists have long since resorted to threats that things will get worse again, assurances that things will stay the same are nearly gospels. We must realize that in the political arena the forces that threaten have always wrestled with the forces that make promises. At present the threatening forces have the upper hand, which is why the two most suggestive topics for threats, international competition and terrorism, have such powerful connotations here in Germany. People would much rather hear beautiful promises, and by now they are happy when they aren’t threatened too often. And the same people were assertively making demands not long ago!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In other words, the myth of the general strike has no validity any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Even less so in Germany than in other countries. The left wing was powerful as long as its threats remained cred- ible. At that time, when communism appeared as the real existing alternative, the Western workers’ parties didn’t have to do much to demonstrate to the employers’ side that social peace had its price, even in Germany. Those times are over. Today the left wing is threatened, not threatening. Strategists define the threat as armed advice. Today people on the left are disarmed and confused.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: If the left wing isn’t holding any trump cards, does that mean it’s superfluous?
SLOTERDIJK: In the last third of the twentieth century the whole of politics in the Western world imploded into the centre. At the same time the communist system imploded in Eastern Europe. Resentment has become increasingly diffuse since then. That is the hallmark of the post-communist situation: the left wing has stopped functioning as the collection point for rage. What is it supposed to canvass with now? I think it must shift its focus away from revenge campaigns and towards civilization campaigns. From fighting to learning.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We understand immediately what you mean by ‘revenge campaigns’ – but what might left-wing civilization projects look like?
SLOTERDIJK: For instance, one could focus on the differences between religions. Why has Islam become so prominent in the post- communist situation? Because its activists have made an impression as potentially threatening factors. In my book I examined the ques- tion of whether Islam will succeed in becoming the third collection of rage after Catholicism and communism, and my answer is ‘No’.
206 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Why won’t it succeed?
SLOTERDIJK: Its assumptions are too regional. You can’t collect the resentment of jobless German or Polish people in an Islamic context. Of course, you can oppose modernity and you can retreat into Islam and build a stable existence there, but it can’t be constructed into a movement coming from the centre of moderniza- tion. It can’t promise a better modern age. That’s what communism succeeded in doing for a while.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But to what extent are the differences of religions a project of the left?
SLOTERDIJK: If there is a world war today, it takes the form of a clash of monotheisms.
CASIMIR: Another line of defence is that books have to be tech- nologically updated as e-books. Is that a future prospect?
SLOTERDIJK: These are all ideas that may possibly work on the basis of data storage capacity, which has become terribly cheap. In the past, successful data storage media, such as marble tablets and paper, were the most rare and precious commodities. Today, data storage space is second only to Sahara Desert sand as the world’s cheapest and most plentiful commodity. That leads to an incred- ible inflation – and to universal conservation of things not worth conserving. We will have to live in that entropy in the future. The printed book will easily outlive its electronic rivals.
190 Making the Effort: The Reader
CASIMIR: But won’t the book itself become entropic? I’m think- ing of the flood of new things every year. How can we reliably decide on all the things we don’t have to read?
SLOTERDIJK: In the past, critics used to do that for us. They did the pre-selection. Criticism of that kind no longer exists today. Now each reader and each cultural agent has to be his or her own search engine. There’s no way to avoid this. We live in the age of hyper-publicity and over-documentation. That is the result of our endless luxury of storage space. Every petit bourgeois today can document his or her life better than Louis XIV could. Far too much is conserved. But this evokes a sort of terminator in us that goes on a shooting spree with a weapon of ignorance and liquidates every- thing he can’t use immediately.
CASIMIR: It’s a beautiful mission. But it results in us termina- tors missing a great deal.
SLOTERDIJK: We know that, whatever the circumstances, the great majority tends to leave aside the best, even if it is accessible. For example, there are intellectuals who haven’t read Moby Dick, perhaps the best book ever printed. That’s very strange, isn’t it? Most people live in the calm conviction that there is something more important than the best.
CASIMIR: We probably shouldn’t disturb that at all . . . SLOTERDIJK (laughing): There’s nothing to disturb. CASIMIR: You are an admirer of Jean Paul, who says books are
nothing but ‘thick letters to friends’. Yet trying to have an effect on one’s reader-friends only works if they are people who at least partly obey the text. Still, obedience to the text is vanishing rapidly.
SLOTERDIJK: Universal literacy has a side effect. The moment the art of reading and writing becomes a basic democratic technique and loses its special hierarchical and sacral function, we begin to see something like the secularization of written things and, in time, profanation as well. But even after profanation, a kind of difference persists between the author and the reader. As long as that differ- ence is felt clearly at a psychic level, the book has enough eroticism and authority to be able to create a gap in relation to the reader. This effect, that the author pre-empts the reader as it were, gives the book a head start. That is its opportunity, and will continue to be.
CASIMIR: What about friendship?
SLOTERDIJK: When Jean Paul said books are thick letters to friends, he was using a metaphor that expresses the transforma- tion of the book from an authoritarian to an amicable medium. Bourgeois reading culture lives on the basis of this transformation, and the result is what generates pleasure in books in the first place.
CASIMIR: The author Florian Illies claims that city-dwellers are
Making the Effort: The Reader 191
developing a rampant yearning for the countryside: being offline for a while, slowing down – the ideal conditions for thick books. Is the desire for reading having a comeback in Germany now?
SLOTERDIJK: You’re talking to somebody who has just pro- duced a book trilogy of 2,400 pages. One doesn’t do that totally naively, but very likely with something in mind. Among other things, I wanted to suggest that this project is just as important as an existential sabbatical. People who really want to read my Spheres project as a totality won’t be able to do it without taking unpaid leave. And it looks as if people are actually prepared to do that, oth- erwise the first volume, Sphären I, wouldn’t have sold 20,000 copies in Germany. There are fast books that act like injections. But there are also books that are something like a long holiday.
23
THUS SPOKE SLOTERDIJK Interview with Res Strehle*2
STREHLE: My compliments, Peter Sloterdijk: your world history of rage and resentment is a winner.
SLOTERDIJK: It began with my intuition that these topics con- tained a huge store of hidden insights. As soon as that intuition was confirmed, the book wrote itself. Rage is like Nietzsche’s Abgrund: the longer you stare into it the more steadily it will stare back at you.
STREHLE: Your book shifts the focus away from Freud’s Eros, which explains a great deal but leaves big blank patches, to thymos, an ancient Greek term that means pride as the source of positive energies.
SLOTERDIJK: We certainly live in an era of changing perspec- tives. The stage is revolving, not least in the field of psychology where a great paradigm shift from psychoanalysis to neurobiology is happening. In its own way, my interest in the thymotic pole of the human psyche expresses a great change in feeling about the present period. Many people feel they are witnessing a world crisis. In some periods we simply carry on living in a straight line. But at other times it seems that we are actually seeing the wheel of the world turning. Many people today can feel how the scene around them has changed. The time of naïve triumph over socialist rivals has ended everywhere in the liberal capitalist world order.
STREHLE: You talk about rage collecting, and you interpret
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Res Strehle appeared under the title ‘Also sprach Sloterdijk’, in Das Magazin, the weekly supplement of the Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger (4–10 November 2006): 46–55.
Res Strehle is a Swiss journalist and was editor-in-chief of the Tages- Anzeiger (Zurich) at the time of the interview.
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 193
political and religious movements as savings banks and rage banks where investors can deposit their grievances. This also creates a changed perspective on political parties, which you describe as ‘col- lection points of dissidence’.
SLOTERDIJK: Rather disappointingly, hardly any reviews of my book so far have mentioned its logical centre. Rage and Time basi- cally presents a general theory of collections. The ancient agrarian empires were already totally dominated by the theme of hoard- ing because the granaries were the places that housed the secret of royal power in the early theocracies, or regimes ruled by god-kings. Collections of weapons, jewellery, money and gold augmented this wealth. Works of art in museums, knowledge in academies, univer- sities and libraries, and religious salvation in the treasure house of the Church show that a great variety of non-monetary goods could be collected. I’m adding a dimension to this list that we haven’t paid enough attention to so far: rage. Some emotions seem only fleet- ing; in fact they are definitely collectible – as shown most of all by religious feelings. If we ask what happens when rage is collected and conserved, we discover a new view of modern political parties and movements. We understand more about their character and func- tion if we describe them as emotion collection points that manage the investments of the small rage owner.
STREHLE: You write that Catholicism and communism knew very well how to collect rage. Capitalism was not bad at it either. Early on, the classical economist Joseph Schumpeter described the dynamic of capitalism as creative destruction.
SLOTERDIJK: The spirit of capitalism is the spirit of reinvest- ment. That means people shouldn’t simply own their treasure quietly and enjoy its presence. Real capitalists must be able to let go of the treasure. We could also describe this as modernization of greed: modern owners really own their property when they send it off on a journey of valorization, if necessary in the form of floating capital that has to go around the world and return with a mighty plus on the home account – provided it doesn’t get dashed to pieces on a reef, always a risk. The modern spirit of realization demands that every potential should upgrade itself, which means that rage can also look forward to more cheerful times. If God is dead he is out of the picture as a collector, absorber and preserver of rage – but what should be done with protest potential? If there is no reward in the nether world, how can there be compensation for suffering, without which the notion of a sophisticated concept of justice can’t exist? In this situation we can expect a new page to be turned in the book of the history of ideas. On this page will be written in letters of blood: ‘World history is the world’s Last Judgement. ’
194 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
STREHLE: Political Islam seems to be at the start of a new chapter just now. Is it engaged in writing world history in letters of blood, as you say?
SLOTERDIJK: It incorporates the hallmarks of the two previ- ous collection points for revenge, the Catholic-metaphysical and the communist-activist. It shares the idea of post-mortal punishment with Catholicism because it rightly portrays Allah as a wrathful lord. The philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes commented ironi- cally on the resonance between leader and followers in monotheism: ‘As is the Lord, so is the common man. ’ He was saying that if we know Jehovah, the Jews shouldn’t be a surprise to us. The same applies to Christians and Muslims in their appropriate context. Islamism, however, has much in common with communism because both ideologies involve presentation of projects for political salva- tion. When it comes to salvation of the whole world, expansionism is on the agenda. Nobody knows where this will stop. Perhaps, like present-day Catholicism, in the long term it will be content for the world to stay permanently divided into Islam and non-Islam.
STREHLE: Do you mean political Islam doesn’t want to expand?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, in the twentieth century the Islamic hemi- sphere first had to come to terms with its own growth. When we talk about Islam today we’re always talking about an unprecedented population explosion. In the 1960s and 1970s we started discussing the new demographically conditioned world hunger problem, but we tended to overlook the fact that alongside the fertility of people living in poverty there was also a direct, offensive campaign for procreation. The Muslim population increased eightfold, from 150 million people in 1900 to 1. 2 billion in the year 2000. This was partly due to massive bio-political control that uses aggressive growth in national populations as a political means. If Islam had remained demographically where it was in 1900 we would hardly talk about it today. But meanwhile the population bomb has exploded. The young men who will bring trouble in the coming years have all been born already. The older ones among them recently left their mark during the riots over the Mohammed cartoons. We saw angry young men in their twenties on the streets. Millions upon millions will join them in the coming years.
STREHLE: Without any real perspective?
SLOTERDIJK: They are doing what anybody in their situation would do. They grab the first opportunity to play a role on some kind of stage – regardless of whether it is the local stage or a dream world stage. We must take their performances seriously. What we are seeing is rage in its purest form, as raw material. This is the expression of generalized anger against a world that is completely
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 195
and utterly divided up and occupied, and in which nobody can assign young people a place of their own. Nothing enrages people more than the idea of being superfluous, whereas they enter the stage with the idea of playing an important role. The sharpest lines of conflict occur when the demand for importance meets the threat of being superfluous.
(The telephone rings. ‘Hello? Yes, of course, I’ll be delighted to see you again after forty years. It has really been a long time. Well, see you then. ’)
STREHLE: It sounds like a school class reunion. SLOTERDIJK: Yes, it is.
STREHLE: As a philosopher, can you still make yourself under-
stood to your old schoolmates?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, of course. Incidentally, the graduation
year of 1966 was a very good year at Wittelsbacher Gymnasium in Munich. Everybody, without exception, has achieved something. We were the greatest possible contrast to today’s young people who feel the pressures of career and anxiety about making a living early on. If I can generalize, all that was very remote from our feelings. Many of us vowed solemnly and faithfully never to do alienated work. Nobody wanted to let the ‘system’ buy out his dissidence. Many young people today complain that no one guarantees them a job for life. Nothing in recent years has alienated me as much as the confused rebellion of young people in France in March 2006 against the proposed law for a more flexible first job contract that was designed to reduce employers’ reluctance to hire new employ- ees. The protestors’ revolt exposed their real dream of having total security from the very start. For an old veteran of the 1968 move- ment, that is obscene. But we were probably naïve. For some reason we were convinced nothing negative could happen to us. In those days dissidence was the surest way to success. People who disturbed the peace, if they did it right, could rely on being recognized as extremely useful members of society sooner or later.
STREHLE: Many people today are afraid of being losers. When it happens they explode with crazed anger, like the frenzied killers from the white lower-middle class in the USA who go on shooting sprees in schools or shopping malls. Is this anger comparable with that of Islamist attackers, who often choose their victims in a simi- larly random way?
SLOTERDIJK: No, I’m sure it’s something completely differ- ent. The berserk gunmen from the white middle class are usually just children who vent their injured feelings on the collective in a destructive, individualistic way. The American assassins are psy- chologically very different from the Muslim activists. They follow
196 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
a different script from the Islamist warrior assassins who only func- tion when and because their collective gives them support.
STREHLE: Do you see the response to this threat, the ‘war against terror’, as a rational strategy, or was it collective punishment at the time? In the end it didn’t shrink from torture, illicit killing, secret prisons and saturation bombing.
SLOTERDIJK: I’m convinced that our anti-terrorism policy is fundamentally wrong. Instead of giving the enemy a chance to identify themselves openly it makes them guilty from the very start. What’s more, it subjects them to the methods of waging war in a post-heroic fashion, in which battles are no longer fought, but instead the enemy is eliminated from a position of boundless superiority. That style of fighting suits societies with low biological reproductivity because on our side nowadays we have no sons to squander. But this makes waging war very similar to pest control. Instead, we should be doing everything possible to break out of this asymmetry which is insulting to people’s dignity – for example, by supporting the building of Islamic parties in Europe in which respectable forms of dissidence and representation of interests can be developed. That would be the best and most convincing response to terror – interrupting the spiral of reciprocal degradation and encouraging eye contact instead of a contest of scorn.
STREHLE: What role do the media play in these conflicts?
SLOTERDIJK: We should never forget that acts of terror like September 11 or the explosions in Atocha Station in Madrid are closely related to the Western entertainment industry. They operate in the field of our familiar horror clichés – the present terror is the translation of widespread fear-and-pleasure games from the cinema screen to the TV monitor. Real terror operates according to the game rules of a politicized snuff movie: real corpses, total entertain- ment. Evidence shows that terror profits from a monstrous reward system that follows the basic principle, ‘Threaten us and you’ll supply us with our most important topic. ’ As soon as something like that happens, all the channels of the Western world broadcast the message. The audience in the Middle East would have to be blind and deaf not to understand the invitation. Any attack from that quarter is rewarded with an orgy of attention.
STREHLE: You’re very sceptical about the role of the media and you demand that every journalist decide whether he or she wants to be an agent of enlightenment or a player in the incitement system.
SLOTERDIJK: A thought experiment could be useful here. As soon as there is news about terror, journalists have to be clearly aware of their complicity in terror. Should they simply pass on the immediate feeling of shock, or even enhance it in certain
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 197
circumstances? Or should they decide to play down the news – for example, by putting it in quarantine? That was an excellent old European method of fighting the plague. Perhaps the media plague is more dangerous than the bacterial one because it can create chaos in the motivation system of a whole civilization. The real point is not to reward serious crimes with excessive attention. That inevi- tably encourages repetition. Regrettably, the complicity between the media world and the terror scene has been so well harmonized for so long that we have to speak of genuine collusion and effective co-dependency – that’s how drug therapy describes the intermesh- ing between addiction and dealing or the alliances among addicts. At some point we have to say openly: you, the journalists, are the dealers in this game.
STREHLE: If you were an editor-in-chief, would you refuse the deal?
SLOTERDIJK: There are two options: Either you create a grand coalition of abstainers that goes on strike against the pressure to spread terror – or you denounce yourself for rabble-rousing.
STREHLE: But the media could also function as a way of letting off steam.
SLOTERDIJK: If emotions weren’t rational to some extent we wouldn’t have them at all. That also makes sense in terms of evolu- tionary biology: if nature equipped us with some impulse or other it must involve a fitness benefit. It follows that pride and rage belong to the human make-up just as eroticism does. Evolution wouldn’t have produced people capable of rage if that emotion were only senseless ballast. In fact, it is an important derivative of stress, and stress is the biological interpretation of acute danger, which means it is vital for survival. Normally a living being reacts to real present danger by fleeing or attacking. Both reactions require a high degree of energy, and that’s exactly what the stress reaction provides. The early heroic poems describe great stress like a divine gift – or like inspired enthusiasm that seems to flow into the soul from outside.
STREHLE: And things get dangerous when that rage is collected and frozen into resentment?
SLOTERDIJK: Quite right. When people’s need for validation is rejected they start feeling enraged. If they are prevented from expressing the rage, it is stored up. Since the nineteenth century that has been called resentment. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche started a new chapter in the study of the human soul with their investigations into the denigrated, insulted and revengeful person.
They were thymotic psychologists, like their successor, Alfred Adler. On a diversion via Kojève and Lacan, he left deep, hidden traces in French psycho- analysis. We can still get drunk on the ambiguity of the word désir.
198 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
Oddly enough, it describes two completely different things: first, erotic desire in terms of the Freudian libido, and, second, the desire for recognition described by Hegel.
STREHLE: At the end of your book you suggest psychological systems for healing injuries. Which direction should they take?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern civilization has already achieved a certain amount in this field. The possibility of a meritocracy con- trolled by money, as facilitated by the market economy, has done much to detoxify social relationships. When someone achieves something, others realize it as long as the achievements can be shown visibly. The Greeks created four theatrical arenas of ambition where gifted people could distinguish themselves: the agora as the stage for political debate, and the theatre, the stadium and the academy for debating scientific opinions. Willing and able people flourished in these arenas. Today, these forums are all fully functioning again. We can’t imagine any more how badly the old aristocratic society was psycho-dynamically screwed up. For centuries, social existence mainly consisted of absurd fights about privilege. People fought with family trees, rival illusions of nobility took the field against each other, and arguments about precedence were fought out in a space completely empty of achievement – hollow dreams of potency without a beginning or an end. The Europeans lost more than a thousand years with that kind of nonsense – we have to state that clearly once and for all.
STREHLE: In your book you go a step further and propose a sort of code of behaviour for world society.
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful. I would never go that far. I say that a behaviour code for the world must first be ground in the mills of the present debate between cultures. Incidentally, this culture clash would still be taking place even if Huntington hadn’t predicted it. 1 It’s in the nature of things. Friction exists between the West and the Far East as well as the Middle East. The game rules for coexistence of 8–10 billion human beings are being discovered in the process. Of course, this only works if the unavoidable conflicts between the great players don’t get too destructive. Then again, it is also not enough if a few omniscient experts in international law and some fervent Protestants meet in Washington to dictate the necessary measures and wait for the others to join in. Rage remains a basic force but it won’t continue collecting in the forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it developed into communism and
1 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 199
fascism. It has largely retreated into individual ambitions, and vents on the broadest front in mass culture. That’s why we always have to understand the function of mass culture for letting off steam and as a form of popular therapy.
STREHLE: Are you talking about computer games, for instance?
SLOTERDIJK: They are important too. Every individualist and collective form of mass culture can function to contain rage and let off steam. The only thing that doesn’t play a role any more is what some intellectuals still dream about: a new communism, a new World Bank of rage. The requisite possibilities of collection are lacking for this. A second wave of communism is less likely than a giant meteorite hitting the earth’s surface in the next thousand years.
STREHLE: When you mention conflict on the Asian–Western border, are you thinking of North Korea’s atom bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: No, North Korea is a very different problem. The country is a singular phenomenon and perhaps simply a brief episode in history. I’m convinced the Chinese will put an end to that irritating situation sooner or later. If the North Koreans really go crazy the Chinese will invade. We don’t have to lift a finger. The Western world’s hysterical reaction to the Korean threat seems rather absurd to me. The USA is too far away and beyond reach of any existing North Korean long-range missiles. Eastern Europe might be reachable – but for what?
STREHLE: Isn’t that more of a mythological horror image – a madman with a bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: A great deal of our politics still plays out in the cinema and in thrillers. Frankenstein appeared on the scene nearly 200 years ago, and since then the role is there to be filled in the mass imagination. No mass culture without horror. Real figures can also act in these scripts because the amusement system all around us has largely erased the difference between real and fictitious horror. We are constantly going back and forth through the revolving door from the horror genre to real terror. We could also say Washington and Hollywood have become too similar to each other. We must hope that one day people will be better able to distinguish again between real threats and fictitious ones.
STREHLE: Are Iran’s nuclear development plans a real threat? After the Iraq debacle, international sabre rattling won’t work in that case any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Iran is evidently not letting itself be intimidated. STREHLE: Do you see this as a danger?
SLOTERDIJK: Nuclear weapons are our invention. It is in the
nature of things that others imitate us in the most risky aspects
200 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
of our civilization. It is part of the risks of our ‘way of life’ that an Iranian driver comes driving down our lane towards us in the wrong direction. As we know, drivers going in the wrong direction are always convinced everybody else is driving in the wrong lane. This view is very widespread in the Middle East at the moment: the West is driving on the wrong side and they are on the right side.
STREHLE: It’s a matter of perception.
SLOTERDIJK: More than that – it’s a war about perception. To put it cautiously: the probability that something good will come out of an Iranian atom bomb isn’t very great. But the probability of it causing much harm isn’t that great either. So far all the nuclear powers have taken responsibility for their own weapons very seri- ously. Our experience up to now shows that anybody with nuclear weapons becomes part of the deterrent system. The only ones who have really used the bomb are the Americans. That’s why they tend to believe more than anyone else that other countries could repeat their lack of control and actually use the transcendent weapon. The mad enemy – that is, the actor who gets away with everything – is the personification of one’s own question.
STREHLE: And do you see the much-talked-about use of nuclear weapons by terrorists as an illusion?
SLOTERDIJK: The really annoying thing about terror is that it distracts us from much more important problems.
STREHLE: From questions of social development? From the destruction of the ecological system?
SLOTERDIJK: Naturally, in Europe the question of social development is taking a new form again. Inequalities have grown dramatically. In the Middle East, however, the question of social development is posed as a demographic question and therefore as the risk of civil war. Enormous psycho-political explosive material has collected there, and it is mostly religiously coded. In addition, in the coming fifty years humankind must make the transition to an economy based on post-fossil energy. Environmental problems are becoming more acute every year. There is a whole slew of such top- list priorities.
STREHLE: You conclude your book with a moral appeal: we should learn to see ourselves with others’ eyes.
SLOTERDIJK: That isn’t a moral appeal; it’s a totally normal intellectual attitude. Seeing yourself from the outside is a modus vivendi that requires a degree of asceticism. Asceticism means, purely and simply, exercising to achieve fitness. That’s what gives the expression a relation to morality. It is an obvious lesson: we have to keep fit for everything to come. We are facing a period
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 201
of tremendous friction. We can’t simply wish away the coming conflicts. Marx once said that the point is not to make the real con- tradictions disappear, but to create a form within which they can move.
24
FATHERS SHOULD BE KEPT OUT OF BROTHELS AND PUBS
Interview with Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang*2
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Mr Sloterdijk, what has put you in a rage this year?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m not sure – I’m not easily provoked. What I remember is the student protests in France against the introduction of the new contract for first-time employment. It was designed to give more scope to employers so as to overcome their reluctance to hire new employees. Absurdly, the workers affected saw this as an attack on their presumed basic right to employment for life from the first working day onwards. Their opposition was completely illusory, as if they wanted to demand top jobs for all.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But isn’t idealism typical for a student movement?
SLOTERDIJK: We should distinguish between illusionism and idealism. The attitude of younger people has changed. I come from a generation that grew up under totally different conditions. At the time of my school-leaving examination in 1966 nobody dreamed of making compromises with the world of permanent employment. Our motto was, ‘You’ll never get my labour power. ’
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But that only applied to left-wing activ- ists, not to the people they wanted to champion, the workers.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s true that a bohemian student scene evolved
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang appeared under the title ‘Väter weg von Puff und Kneipe’, in the daily taz newspaper (23 December 2006). Available at: <http://www. taz. de/1/ archiv/? dig=2006/12/23/a0209>.
At the time of the interview Jan Feddersen was a journalist and editor at the Berlin taz, and Susanne Lang was an editor at the taz.
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 203
in the early 1970s, during the period of so-called full employment. This bohemian group from the 1968 movement produced a political surplus that created fantastic opportunities. We’re still living from that today. The recent protests in France, however, showed that young people have become almost overwhelmingly petit bourgeois.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Because the young want to work rather than revolutionize?
SLOTERDIJK: Because they let the logic of the consumer world define their wishes. In life stories in the past, youth played the role of a psychosocial moratorium where people in a state of indecision, or even confusion, were tolerated and protected. There was always the assumption that they would make the best use of this in their careers later on. Nowadays eighteen-year-olds take to the streets and demand the right to a permanent job for life!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In France young people in the banlieus took to the streets as well, and set fire to cars. Are they the real angry ones in our society?
SLOTERDIJK: No. Both protests are primarily mimetic move- ments that mimic a kind of rage the actors themselves don’t always feel. France has a rich popular tradition of outrage.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We’re pretty good at that in Germany too, aren’t we?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but it has less of an impact here. The atmosphere in France is more rigid, and that leads to a dialectic of stagnation and explosion. Things are more fluid in Germany, which is why today, unlike in the 1980s, protest doesn’t have a broad basis any longer.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Are you referring particularly to the time when the Green Party was very vocal?
SLOTERDIJK: Anyone who wants to understand the Greens should realize that post-1945 Germany has achieved something extraordinary in the production of loser attitudes. In Germany, thymotic culture, which is based on self-affirmation and pride, was reduced to a stump. What remained of self-affirmative behaviour had to be expressed in terms of moralism. The Greens led the way in this – some of them were veritable Jacobins.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: This means the Greens as a party acted as a good rage bank, as you explain in your new essay, Rage and Time. Are they still playing that role?
SLOTERDIJK: The function of the political party as an institu- tion, not just the Green Party, has fundamentally changed today. From a historical perspective, parties were never just organs for expressing interests, but were collection points for emotions as well. They had the task of organizing collection of hopes, illusions,
204 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
wishes and rage. They used various combinations to address differ- ent segments of the public at different times. People who looked for national symbols to give them satisfaction took up position on the right wing. Others who identified with symbols of material progress, of developing justice and of the welfare state, assembled on the left wing. Finally, the liberals provided a meeting ground for people who pinned their hopes mostly on the advance of different kinds of freedom in the modern state. Interestingly, the middle-class parties acted as collection points for militant satisfaction.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: What does that involve?
SLOTERDIJK: The middle class is the class that turns its own satisfaction into defiance. How do we explain that? Modern society popularizes the possibility of comparison. That’s why there is asymmetrical growth between the reasons for being satisfied and the reasons for being dissatisfied. As soon as the means of satisfac- tion become more widespread, the means of comparison grow as well. We all compare ourselves with each other, with the result that we see people all around us who are ahead of us, and that seems unfair. This is how countless people who are objectively winners in terms of modernization and progress subjectively see themselves as protestors.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: That explains why we live in a German world. Do luxury and satisfaction lead to fear of social decline?
SLOTERDIJK: This question neatly points up the paradox of that wasted freedom. Dissatisfaction with luxury indicates that people don’t have an organ for calculating probabilities. We are oriented to facts on the one hand, and to hopes and expectations on the other, but we don’t have an internal mechanism for dealing with probability. This is why we can’t evaluate the unimaginable improbability of our own lifestyle. The only people who can do that are people who come from outside or who move between a culture of poverty and a culture of wealth.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In terms of political parties, does this mean that today they are advocates of the improbable?
SLOTERDIJK: I see them as service providers in the market of political illusions. Their pact with improbability is fateful and obsessive. Of course, the people who get elected are the ones who correspond most closely to the voters’ expectations. But expecta- tions of that kind all tend towards increasing improbability. The general product that each party must offer today, without excep- tion, is the plausible illusion that the party’s politics will optimize its clientele’s lifestyles.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Yet most politicians have stopped
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 205
pointing to any kind of optimization – they promise the status quo, in a very alarmist way, in fact.
SLOTERDIJK: Guaranteeing the status quo means a great deal in a situation where liberalism has been emptied of meaning. In a sit- uation where most ideologists have long since resorted to threats that things will get worse again, assurances that things will stay the same are nearly gospels. We must realize that in the political arena the forces that threaten have always wrestled with the forces that make promises. At present the threatening forces have the upper hand, which is why the two most suggestive topics for threats, international competition and terrorism, have such powerful connotations here in Germany. People would much rather hear beautiful promises, and by now they are happy when they aren’t threatened too often. And the same people were assertively making demands not long ago!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In other words, the myth of the general strike has no validity any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Even less so in Germany than in other countries. The left wing was powerful as long as its threats remained cred- ible. At that time, when communism appeared as the real existing alternative, the Western workers’ parties didn’t have to do much to demonstrate to the employers’ side that social peace had its price, even in Germany. Those times are over. Today the left wing is threatened, not threatening. Strategists define the threat as armed advice. Today people on the left are disarmed and confused.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: If the left wing isn’t holding any trump cards, does that mean it’s superfluous?
SLOTERDIJK: In the last third of the twentieth century the whole of politics in the Western world imploded into the centre. At the same time the communist system imploded in Eastern Europe. Resentment has become increasingly diffuse since then. That is the hallmark of the post-communist situation: the left wing has stopped functioning as the collection point for rage. What is it supposed to canvass with now? I think it must shift its focus away from revenge campaigns and towards civilization campaigns. From fighting to learning.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We understand immediately what you mean by ‘revenge campaigns’ – but what might left-wing civilization projects look like?
SLOTERDIJK: For instance, one could focus on the differences between religions. Why has Islam become so prominent in the post- communist situation? Because its activists have made an impression as potentially threatening factors. In my book I examined the ques- tion of whether Islam will succeed in becoming the third collection of rage after Catholicism and communism, and my answer is ‘No’.
206 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Why won’t it succeed?
SLOTERDIJK: Its assumptions are too regional. You can’t collect the resentment of jobless German or Polish people in an Islamic context. Of course, you can oppose modernity and you can retreat into Islam and build a stable existence there, but it can’t be constructed into a movement coming from the centre of moderniza- tion. It can’t promise a better modern age. That’s what communism succeeded in doing for a while.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But to what extent are the differences of religions a project of the left?
SLOTERDIJK: If there is a world war today, it takes the form of a clash of monotheisms.
