No More Learning

See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1), pp. 12-28. The term was, incidentally, already in use during the heroic years of the Russian Revolution; it can be looked up in the third volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1926, where it refers especially to speculatively anticipated possibilities of biotechnical manipulations of human genes.
The underlying dichotomy of self-improvement and world improvement is explained in ch. 3, where I discuss the increasing externalization of the metanoetic imperative in modernity.
TN: the word for 'humanities', Geisteswissenschaften, literally means 'sci- ences of the spirit'; hence the author implying that they are merely so-called, not genuine, sciences.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Der Garten des Menschlichen: Beitriige zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie (Munich: Hanser, 1978).
Concerning extended parliamentarianism, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds. ), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), as well as Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the general pro- gramme of civilizing cultures, see Bazon Brock, Der Barbar als Kulturheld (Cologne: DuMont, 2002).
See also below, pp. 164f.
See Thomas Macho, 'Neue Askese? Zur Frage nach der Aktualitat des Verzichts', Merkur 54 (1994), pp. 583-93, in which, with reference to the culture-historically powerful alternative of satiation and hunger, the central distinction of full versus empty is examined.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75.
The best example being Heinz-Theo Homann, Das funktionale Argument: Konzepte und Kritik funktionslogischer Religionsbegrnndung (Paderborn: SchOningh, 1997).
See Detlef Linke, Religion als Risiko: Geist, Glaube und Gehirn (Reinbek: Rowohlt,2003).
See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005).
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISlNG
NOTES TO PP. 9-19
1 Paul Celan, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 181.
454
NOTES
2 Von Rodin KUllst
Cantz, 2001
3 Trans. 111 Art of the ed. Stephen Burt and David
Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 230.
4 'People did not speak to him. Stones spoke', Rilke had already written in his essay on Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. 3 [2]: Prosa (Frankfurt:
insel, 1980), p. 369.
5 Ibid. , p. 359.
6 Written in February 1921, published posthumously in 1933.
7 See Beat Wyss, Yom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2 vols. (Cologne: Walther
Konig, 2006).
8 TN: the word Reformhaus refers to a health food shop.
9 See Aaron Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1987).
10 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), p. 84 (translation modified).
11 Ibid. , p. 90.
12 Ibid. , p. 100. These notes acted as a stimulus for Alfred Adler's individual- psychological approach to psychotherapy, where neurosis is defined as a costly means of securing the inferior's illusion of superiority.
13 A reminder: under pressure from the politically correct zeitgeist, the well- known initiative of the German disability society, 'Aktion Sorgenkind' [Operation Problem Child], founded in 1964, was renamed 'Aktion Mensch' [Operation Human Being1 in March 2000.
14 Carl Hermann Unthan, Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern (Stuttgart: Lutz' Memoirenbibliothek, 1925), p. 73.
15 Ibid. , p. 147.
16 Ibid. , p. 97.
17 Ibid. , p. 306.
18 Ibid. , p. 307.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 TN: another reference to Tonia Kroger, where the narrator characterizes
gypsies as living 'in a green caravan' (p. 17).
23 Unthan, Das Pediskript, p. 72.
24 Nor is Wurtz mentioned in the most significant recent study on the subject:
Klaus E. Muller, Der Kruppel: Ethnologia Passionis Humanae (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 1996).
25 H. Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Krucken: Kruppel-Probleme der Menschheit.
Schicksalsstiefkinder aller Zeiten in Wort und Bild (Leipzig: Leopold Voss,
1932), p. 101.
26 Ibid. , p. 88.
27 Ibid. , p. 97.
28 Ibid. , p. 31.
29 Ibid. , p. 4.
30 Ibid. , p. 49.
31 Ibid. , p. 11.
32 Ibid. , p. 18.
455
PP.
known in
and Hermann
34 Ibid. , p. 67.
35 Ibid. , p. 37.
36 Thus the title [Siegreiche Lebenskiimpfer] of an earlier book by Hans Wurtz from 1919, when the problem of born cripples was somewhat overshad- owed by that of war cripples.
37 Otto Perl, Kriippeltum und Gesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit (Gotha: Leopold Klotz, 1926).
38 Concerning the problematics of masters and trainers, see ch. 8, pp. 291£.
39 TN: the football coach Giovanni Trapattoni became particularly well
known in Germany during the 1990s, as coach of Bayern Munich.
40 Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Kriicken, p. 50.
41 Ibid. , p. 63.
42 Ibid. , p. 34.
43 Ibid. , p. 36.
44 These ideas are developed into a general theory of existence in insulated
spaces in the third volume of my Sphiiren project. See Sphiiren III. Schiiume:
Plurale Sphiirologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 309-500.
45 Peter Schneider, Erhinken und erfliegen: Psychoanalytische Zweifel an der
Vernunft (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).
46 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1970).
47 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody,
trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 18.
48 Ibid.
49 See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).
50 The Ziirau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofmann, ed. Roberto Calasso (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006), p. 3.
51 These disclosures, which amount to the uncovering of a doping fraud, are laid out by Sergio Luzzatto in his book Miracoli e Politica nell'Italia del Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007). See Dirk Schumer, 'Ein Siiurenheiliger', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 October 2007.
52 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Nahum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 251.
53 Ibid. , p. 258.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid. , p. 259.
56 See the descriptions of the first two modules on pp. 23ff. above.
57 Concerning Tertullian, see pp. 205£. below.
58 In Biographia Literaria (1817). According to the author, this act creates 'poetic faith'.
59 Kafka, The Complete Stories, p. 268 (translation modified).
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid. , p. 271.
62 Ibid. , p. 276.
456
63 64 65 66
67
68
69
70 71 72
73
74 75
76 77
Ibid,
p,277.
Concerning the ascetic revolt against hunger, see pp. 4161. below.
TN: 'enlightenment' written in lower case should be considered synony- mous with illumination, satari.
The metaphor is misleading, as it is based on the confusion of oral and pre- oral searching intentions. The central distinction that applies to the hungry world, that of empty versus full, does not cover the whole field of searching: for the most spiritually demanding among them, the distinction between homeostatic-beyond-concern and restless-in-concern is a more applicable one.
With the combination of hunger genocide policies, forced collectivization and kulak persecution, Stalin's policies led to some 14 million deaths between 1929 and 1936 alone.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 271.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy ofMorals, p. 100.
Emile Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972 (paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 14.
Quoted in Bernd Mattheus, Cioran: Portrait eines radikalen Skeptikers (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 83.
Cioran, Cafard: Originaltonaufnahmen 1974-1990, ed. Thomas Knoefel and Klaus Sander, with an afterword by Peter Sioterdijk (audio CD) (Cologne: suppose, 1998).
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 130.
Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (London: Quartet, 1990), p. 168. SeeRobertSpaemann,DasunsterblicheGeri~cht:DieFragenachGottund die Tauschung der Modeme (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007).
I would like to remind the reader en passant of the three aforementioned modules of religioid inner operation: the assertion of a subject in the loca- tion of the thing; the assumption of a metamorphosis that enables the latter to 'appear' in the former; the modal positing by which the possibility of a matter follows from its impossibility. The fourth module mentioned here is the genuinely artiste-like one. It can be applied both to notions of artistic perfection and to the ideals of holiness. The fifth module consists in calling to mind the overwhelming; that is, in the inner operations with which one meditates upon the destructibility of one's own existence and its engulfment by the oversized. This is discussed further on pp. 332£ below.
See ch. 7 below.
He sometimes defines clear-sightedness as a 'vaccine against the absolute', though not without admitting that he occasionally succumbs to the first available mystery. See Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1999) p. 97.
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 210.
Ibid. , p. 219.
Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 95.
See Cioran, Entretiens avec Sylvie Jaudeau (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1990).
See pp. 54£ above, as well as ch. 8, pp. 291£.
I remind the reader of the hypothesis discussed in the introduction (pp. 8f)
78 79
80 81 82 83
84 85
NOTES TO PP.
457
that humans have not one immune system but three, with the religious
complex located almost entirely in the functional circle of the third.
86 Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 92.
87 TN: the word Angebot both means 'offer' and 'supply', especially in the
phrase Angebot und Nachfrage ('supply and demand'). It is usually trans- lated as 'supply' in this section, but sometimes 'offer' has been used to stress the gesture of giving implicit in the German word.
88 In his aforementioned essay ('Neue Askese? '), Thomas Macho argues that Catholic Christianity is essentially a 'hunger religion' organized around the question: what fills people?
89 This would mean that Protestantism is no longer a 'hunger religion' but a 'fitness religion', a spiritual surplus for the sated.
90 See Karl Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers: V orlesung Gottingen Wintersemester 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1978). Here the author derides his favourite enemy as a parliamentarian with a white flag in his hand, speaking to the educated about religion instead of declaring himself a Christian (p. 438). There is noticeable contempt when he quotes Schleiermacher's definition of being a Christian: seeking 'the utter lightness and constancy of pious excitements', and clear sarcasm when he quotes Schleiermacher's early characterization of himself as a 'virtuoso of religion', presenting him as a cross between Paganini and Jeremiah. Concerning Schleiermacher's definition of religion, see pp. 333f below.
91 After the Middle Ages had only spoken of religio to refer to the virtue of believers and the life form of professional ascetics in the holy orders, the Reformation introduced the word 'religion' to brand Catholicism a falsifi- cation of the 'true religion'. The Enlightenment finally generalized the concept of 'religion' to give a reasonable order to the tangle of confessions that culminated in the Thirty Years War, and the multitude of cults reported by seamen. Before 'religion' could be declared a private matter, it had to be generalized into an anthropological constant and defined as a natural talent.
92 Fran~ois-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la Raison et Ie culte de L'Etre Supreme (1793-1794) (Paris: Alcan, 1892).
93 De Coubertin occasionally refers to Olympism as a ruskianisme sportif.
94 See Walter Borger, 'Vom "World's Fair" zum olympischen Fair Play - Anmerkungen zur Vor- und Entwicklungsgeschichte zweier Weltfeste', in
Internationale Einflusse auf die WiedereinfUhrung der Olympischen Spiele durch Pierre de Coubertin, ed. Stephan Wassong (Kassel: Agon, 2005), pp. 125f.
95 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, ed. Norbert Muller (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), p. 319.
96 See Sloterdijk, Sphiiren III, pp. 626-46: 'Die Kollektoren: Zur Geschichte der Stadion-Renaissance'.
97 Concerning the phenomenon of gods of the moment, see Hermann Usener,
Gotternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiosen Begriffsbildung
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), pp. 279f.
98 See pp. 406f below.
99 De Coubertin, Olympism, p. 201.
100 Ibid. , p. 405 (translation modified).
101 Willi Daume, foreword to the German edition of de Coubertin's memoirs,
in Olympische Erinnerungen (Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1996), p. 10. 458
NOTES TO PI'. 5-104
102 See Hermann Reason
trans. Simon Kaplan (Ne;v F. Ungar, Mark recently described the modern religion of reason as the cult of a stillbirth in The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modem West (New York: Vintage, 2008).
103 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1976), p. 544.
104 As demonstrated by a number of Bible theme parks in the USA.
105 Documents whose authenticity we have no reason to doubt show that in 1943, while serving in the navy as an office worker, he suffered from psy- chotic states in the form of severe depressions with suicidal tendencies, which led him to file a request for treatment with an army medical author- ity. Allegedly he was severely wounded by a grenade shortly before the war's end, was temporarily blinded, but healed himself. No details are known about his convalescence or methods of self-treatment, but they are said to have contributed to his conviction that the mind forms matter. A report authored by Australian specialists from the 1960$ confirms Hubbard's presentiments: it attests to an abnormal personality structure with strong
paranoid and schizophrenic traits.
106 Gotthard Gunther, 'Seele und Maschine', in Beitrage ZUl' Grundlegung einer
operationsfahigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976),
pp. 75f.
107 It is not an absolute debut, however, as is shown by analogous, often more
brilliant projects in the avant-garde movements of the Russian Revolution, especially the writings of the Immortalists and Biocosmists. See Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in collaboration with Anne von der Heiden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). In addition, they can be taken as proof that communism, for its part, was a form of applied social science fiction.
108 The Church of Scientology is only an anachronism in one aspect: it repeats the historically overcome forms of compulsory membership in a cult collec- tive, indeed takes them so far that the organization virtually consumes its members cannibalistically. On the open market, by contrast, the 'religious experience' has itself become a kind of event commodity or consumable special effect.
109 The phrase 'politics fiction' has been used in a different context by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
110 See Dana Goodyear, 'Chateau Scientology: Inside the Church's Celebrity Center', New Yorker, 14 January 2008.
111 In 1979, L. Ron Hubbard himself was convicted of fraud in absentia by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. The FBI also fo~nd incriminating information in the sect's financial records; Hubbard's wife was sentenced to several years in prison in the USA during the 1970s.
112 Concerning the role of pseudo-transcendence in the modern art system, see Heiner Miihlmann, Countdown: 3 Generationen (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2008).
113 See Gotthard Gunther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. and intr. Kurt Klagenfurt (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 2000), p. 277.
459
TO Pl'.
14 Occult World
I THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
1 I made provisional reference to the enclosure constituted by the culture of writing, and its opening via post-literary techniques, in 1997 using the metaphor Menschenpark [human zooJ.
2 See the section 'Remote View of the Ascetic Planet' above, pp. 29-39.
3 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 60£.
4 It was presumably to avoid such semantic baggage that Gregory Stock, one
of the promoters of human genetic engineering in the USA, presented his vision under the title Metaman; The Merging ofHumans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
5 TN: 'onward propagation' is a literal rendering of Fortpflanzung, which is the standard term for procreation; Nietzsche was modifying a common word rather than presenting two idiosyncratic phrases.
6 See Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species; The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1998).
7 Jean Genet, 'The Funambulists', trans. Bernard Frechtman, Evergreen Review 32 (April-May 1964), p. 47.
8 TN: the German word Prominenz is most often used with reference to celebrities, so its connotations are somewhat more media-related than those of its English cognate.
9 TN: 'being there' and 'being up there' correspond in this case to Dasein and da oben sein.
10 See Deacon, The Symbolic Species, pp. 325-51.
11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 180.
12 Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York and London:
Norton, 1996).
13 TN: the connection is more obvious in German, as the word for 'survival' is
Oberleben.
14 Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 236.
15 From this moment on, the metaphysical misinterpretation of slowness, its
consignment to the realm of transcendence, can be abandoned. See Heiner Miihlmann, 'The Economics Machine', in 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times ofTerror, ed. Gerd de Bruyn (Basle, Boston and Berlin: Birkhiiuser, 2006), p. 228. See also Peter Sloterdijk, God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 5-7.
16 Concerning the take-off of innovation affirmation in the European Renaissance, see pp. 334£ below.
17 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 181.
18 Nietzsche, Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufman
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 483.
19 Ibid.
20 Moroccan circus troupes also have a famous pyramid tradition, in which up 460
21
22
23
24 25
26 27 28
29 30
to fifteen artistes form towers of five or six 'storeys'. Catalan artistes are famous for erecting human pyramids with up to eight or nine storeys. The Canadian Cirque du Solei! has even featured tightrope-walking pyramids. The grammatical comparative stands for a logical superlative of the adjec- tive deinon, which was used in rhetoric to refer to the wonderful and alarm- ing (mirabile). Heidegger modernized the translation tradition by giving the word back its meaning with his choice of unheimlich [uncanny] - which permits numerous connections to the discourses of philosophical topology, psychoanalysis, architectural theory and systems irritation theory. Concerning the motif of city-overstepping and over-giftedness, see Peter Sloterdijk, 'Die Stadt und ihr Gegenteil: Apolitologie im Umriss', in Der asthetische Imperativ: Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Peter Weibel (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2007), pp. 221-4.
Scheler's astUte term was later taken over by the speech therapy based on the work of Victor Frankl (Frankl himself used it from 1938 onwards) and twisted into a retort against the methods of Freud et al. - in line with the solid paternal maxim that complicated people should do more and think less; assistance in doing more is here called 'healing', and assistance in thinking less 'de-reflection'.
TN: all biblical quotations are taken from the New International Version. See Thomas Macho, 'Himmlisches Gefliigel - Betrachtungen zu einer Motivgeschichte der Engel', in Engel: Legenden der Gegenwart, ed. Cathrin Pichler (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1997), pp. 83-100.
See Giorgio Agamben, II Regno e la Gloria (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007). Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 21.
As well as this, Nietzsche coined some twenty other terms with the prefix tiber-.
TN: again, all words with the prefixes 'super-' or 'over-' listed here begin with aber- in German.
Even Martin Luther still saw the Areopagite as his enemy, the trainer of ecclesiastical high acrobatics. In his early writings he sought to co-opt him for his own simplistic mysticism of darkness, inspired by the Theologia Germanica: 'Unde in Dionysio frequens verbum est hyper quia super omnem cogitatum oportet simpliciter in caliginem entrare. ' Later he under- stood that Pseudo-Dionysius was not concerned with a quick entrance into pious darkness, but with a higher-order logic created for virtuosos of reli- gion that bore firm marks of exclusivity. From that point on, Luther had a horror of the founder of negative theology, and viewed him more as a Platonist than a Christian. See Thomas Reinhuber, Studien zu Luthers Bekenntnis am Ende von De Servo Arbitrio (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), p. 102. A word like 'hyper-Marxism', by contrast, which Foucault coined to describe French ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, was always satirically intended.
See Ernst Benz, 'Das Bild des Dbermenschen in der Europaischen Geistesgeschichte', in Der Obermensch: Eine Diskussion, ed. Ernst Benz (Stuttgart: Rhein-Verlag, 1961), pp. 21-161.
This would be no simple task: for antiquity, because we have enough infor- mation about the gymnastic and agonal disciplines to appreciate the immensity of the manifestations of athletism, but too little to put together an authentic picture; and for the Middle Ages, because the history of
31
32
NOTES TO PP. 124-9
461
NOTES TO PP. 129-50
monasticism exceeds the attempt
and its wealth of details.
33 Hugo Ball, Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei
Wacker (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2010), p. 271.
breadth
34 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter
Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 83e (translation modified). See Thomas Macho, "'Kultur ist eine Ordensregel": Zur Frage nach der Lesbarkeit von Kulturen als Texten', in Gerhard Neumann and Sigrid Weigel (eds. ), Lesbarkeit der Kultur: Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Kulturteclmik und Ethnographie (Munich: Fink, 2000), pp. 223-44.
36 Eckhard Nordhofen, Der Engel der Bestreittmg: Uber das Verhaltnis von Kunst und negativer Theologie (Wurzburg: Echter, 1993), p. 144.
37 Paul Engelmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefe und Begegnungen (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), p. 32.
38 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 84e.
39 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 236 (translation modified).
40 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 10e.
41 Ibid. , p. 33e.
42 Ibid. , pp.