No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: People live in capitalism as if they were staying in a hothouse. This makes the assumption that there must be an exterior occur all the more spontaneously. The interesting thing to note here is that people paint this exterior just like another interior where they can have exciting experiences under pleasant conditions.
MISIK: Must experiences remain consumable?
SLOTERDIJK: They should be paid into the account of one’s
Under a Brighter Sky 185
own personality, which wants to be enriched, not to collect trauma- tizing experiences.
MISIK: You almost insist that for the world interior, there is also a world exterior. That is your response to Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, whose book Empire assumes a capitalist orbit without a centre, but without an outside either. What is the outside you are talking about?
SLOTERDIJK: Negri has a strategic interest in reclaiming the worlds of poverty and the non-comfort zones for the empire because that’s where he finds recruits for his multitude, the people who are opposed, tomorrow’s revolutionaries.
MISIK: He finds them inside as well.
SLOTERDIJK: The dream of the coalition of the internal with the external opposition is the sequel to the dream of the communist gathering. I have devoted a forthcoming new book to this idea; the title is Zorn und Zeit [Rage and Time]. In this book I show that the classical left operated as a rage bank in which everybody who knew that helpless anger was not enough could deposit their rage. Rage banks in the form of left-wing parties are needed to make the anger of the disadvantaged operate on the political level. That is why the principle of the left doesn’t work any more today, because the left itself behaves more like part of the system of well-being and not as the agency for collecting and transforming rage.
MISIK: What exactly is the reason for this rage?
SLOTERDIJK: The welfare state’s promise is that unemploy- ment doesn’t mean poverty but at worst the descent into the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie under conditions that may be sad, but aren’t miserable. The tension has grown since it has become clear that this guarantee can’t be honoured. But first of all, those in the interior who have been excluded sink into depression. At the moment there is no language of rage, no historical perspective for moving from depression to pride.
MISIK: One reflex reaction to globalization is particularism. Is the resistance of the local region the opposing truth to globalization? SLOTERDIJK: It applies at least for places that are not totally devastated, not completely turned into transit spaces, into places without a self – such as airports, hotels, etc. I distinguish between places without a self, the transit wastes – and the self without a place, that is, the groups deprived of territory, groups that people like to call nomads. In between are the middle zones where place and self are connected by shared cultivation. We can still see that very impressively in Central and Western Europe – pleasant, civilized communities where the arts of living are comfortably established. Incidentally, astonishing examples of cultivated activity emerge
186 Under a Brighter Sky
even in the area of transit life, particularly in upscale international hotel chains where numerous oases of luxury have been opened to offer a relatively good lifestyle for people who travel too much.
MISIK: Do you know people who are happy in places like that?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, happiness is a fleeting thing. Freud even suggested that evolution didn’t plan it for Homo sapiens. Humans should be quite happy when they live in a state of ordinary unhappi- ness rather than neurotic misery.
MISIK: As regards your controversy with the Frankfurt School, you once remarked that it is mainly about contrasting moods. Whereas one always has to approach Critical Theory prepared to be depressed, you are more of a philosopher of good cheer. So how can you say humans are destined for unhappiness?
SLOTERDIJK: Critical Theory was once my theoretical home- land. It was influenced by the experience of the Holocaust, by the universal dehumanization. This gave rise to the experiences that characterized the generations of the first half of the twenti- eth century. Incidentally, the mood of French existentialism was not much lighter either. The years after 1968 tested how far such definitions are still valid – and revealed that they aren’t really valid. At some point our changed experiences must be translated into a new attitude. That’s why the left wing after 1968 appeared as the hedonist left. They were sure that human happiness was achieved by unchaining a person’s own libido.
MISIK: At the end of the 1970s, you were a Sanyassin and spent some time living with the Bhagwan in Poona.
SLOTERDIJK: In my case, the Indian adventure was a product of that seventies atmosphere. Added to that was the conviction that a purely materialistic concept of revolution is not enough. In those days, we wanted to reverse base and superstructure and make the mental factor the central focus.
MISIK: There are metaphors for influences. Some people say: ‘Once a Trotskyist, always a Trotskyist. ’ Can we also say: ‘Once a Sanyassin, always a Sanyassin’?
SLOTERDIJK: Basically, yes. The experience of transposition that occurred then is irreversible. Having that experience made you immune to theories in which depression is always right. And you stop wanting to win the competition about who is the unhappiest person at all costs. You live under a brighter sky. What it means for me is that India has completely faded into the background, but the transposition I went through then still affects me today.
Making the Effort: The Reader
22
MAKING THE EFFORT The Reader
Interview with Torsten Casimir*1
CASIMIR: In neurobiological terms, reading books is closely related to reading traces in tribal history, which dates back much further. What does it mean when a society increasingly dismantles these abilities?
SLOTERDIJK: We are seeing a transformation in the system of finding things. The old system of reading traces has been replaced several times: first, the farmer forced out the hunter; then urban humans forced out the farmers; and now the finders and looters are forcing out the urban reader in monitor space.
CASIMIR: In the past century, books still gave the urban reader deep insights into the world. Today we guard against depth and are often exonerated from the need to understand. Times are hard for books.
SLOTERDIJK: I think the crisis of the bourgeois personality is the main explanation for the crisis of the book. In the humanist age there was a hidden but very effective equivalence between the individual and the book. Being educated meant having the ability to write the novel of one’s own life, or having done so. Educated people could present the sum of their experience in a literary form. But it means the people of the humanist age were people who had experiences in the first place. The basic idea is that people pay the
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Torsten Casimir appeared under the title ‘Ein Freund der Mühe: Der Leser’, in the magazine Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels, 173/36 (2006): 10–13.
Torsten Casimir was editor-in-chief of Börsenblatt at the time of the interview.
188 Making the Effort: The Reader
high price of effort to turn their own life into art and thus become individuals to begin with.
CASIMIR: That sounds like sports.
SLOTERDIJK: In a way it is really about bringing sport into our existence. The idea of experience dates right back to the Greek concept of paideia, which concerns the translation of athleticism into the world of letters. Humans are taken in hand in the sense of athletics and made into all-round athletes of competence in writing. That works on the basis of a connection between pride and resil- ience. The Greek athletes, and the Greek teachers, had a term for this: ponos. Just as philosophers were called ‘friends of wisdom’, athletes were called ‘friends of effort’. In other words, the idea of the educated person is a form of glorification of suffering based on athleticism.
CASIMIR: But nobody today likes putting effort into things.
SLOTERDIJK: What we are seeing, above all in the computer world today, is the incursion of untrained people into culture. With computers, lack of fitness can pose as fitness, or inability as ability. This brings enormous relaxation and pampering. The modern situ- ation is characterized by the idea of education disappearing because nobody nowadays is prepared to pay the toll costs for education, that is, to suffer for experience.
CASIMIR: People suffer all the same. The strain of remaining stupid – is that a topic you share with Odo Marquard? 1
SLOTERDIJK: People today suffer from all kind of things, but not from education. They suffer, for instance, from not getting a job any more. But they aren’t prepared to go through the educa- tion system to get the qualifications they would need for a job. They prefer downloading. The word means that people in search of expe- rience no longer go to the source of knowledge but let knowledge come to them – the same way you order a pizza for home delivery.
CASIMIR: You are rather sceptical yourself in relation to overdoing educational efforts. But your advice is about being eco- nomical with the little lights we call intelligence.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s certainly true. We should note the change of metaphors: from the sun of enlightenment to the little control lamps of electronic systems. We don’t illuminate our lives with the floodlight of truth any more. We choose to rely on numerous little control lamps of everyday cleverness.
1 Odo Marquard (1928–2015) was a conservative German philosopher known for his work on philosophical anthropology and finiteness.
Making the Effort: The Reader 189
CASIMIR: Less light. Does that mean another big project for relief?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely! On the other hand, there’s a new form of education that I call hyper-alphabetization, which involves learning reading and writing all over again, as it were. The first time we did it as school pupils; the second time we do it as typographers. The fact is, with computers the ancient Homo orthographicus is overlaid by a new Homo typographicus that not only learns reading and writing but also acts as a designer of his or her symbolic image. This shows that the computer is certainly not a rejection of the Gutenberg tradition but quite the opposite, its enhancement. Nowadays everybody in the Western world learns reading, writing, printing and design.
CASIMIR: Is this a higher form of media competence?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. And that is one reason why we can definitely welcome the computer into a meaningful educational alliance with Gutenberg culture. The point is to re-combine media alliances intelligently. You can rot your brain very quickly with television, but no law dictates that. You can regress at the computer but nothing is forcing you to do that.
CASIMIR: Conservation-minded people would like to defend the good old book against the new, technically superior media. You have also remarked somewhat ironically that books are better than other media for killing flies. Is that enough?
SLOTERDIJK: It would be quite mistaken merely to defend the old media with irony. Many colleagues I have discussed this with have told me that while they approached the new media with open arms, they are far more sceptical today about what electronic media can achieve in terms of preserving knowledge. 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.