It is
productive
without being creative.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Looking back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now gets an idea of the extent to which creative and coquettish narcissism permeates bourgeois cul- ture.
At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie also followed the nobility in es- sential respects, not least of all in its concept of honor, through which the duel came into bourgeois life and even into the realm of student life.
Without doubt, honor became for the bourgeoisie, too, an essential socionarcissistic factor, with which the national militarization of bourgeois society is connected.
That this type of bourgeois is dying out today is felt in every nook and cranny of civilization.
Those who still know such a latecomer should regard themselves as ethnologists; with wonder they may hear how the last specimens even today cannot walk through the forest without speaking of God.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent. On the one hand it is linked to a merit that, through a permanent straining of moral, cultural, nd economic creativity, tries to earn cultural hegemony; on the other, it is na- tionalistically degraded. Thus, a will to power is not necessarily a will to govern, as was revealed by the notorious reluctance of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to get involved in politics; the bourgeois nar- cissisms can remain content with the will to profit, to success, and to "culture. " Finally, for the laborer ego, the will to power and especially the will to govern are only secondary motives, in which calculation rather than passion is at work. From the beginning, proletarian realism has two mutually contradictory dimensions. The first realism says: So that you get what you deserve, you your- self must make the move; "no God, no kaiser, no tribune" will give you what you need; you will only come out of your misery when you wake up politically and being to participate in the game of power--as Pottier said in the Internationale. The second realism knows that politics means being called on to make sacrifices; politics happens at levels where my immediate interests count for nothing and where, according to Lenin, people are counted by the millions. In workers' real- ism, an ancient, deep-rooted mistrust of political politics lives on. The maxim "If you don't concern yourself with politics, then politics will concern itself with you"--the basic formula for the politicization of the proletariat--has indeed been heard by laborers but in the last instance it sounds like cynicism to them, like a well-formulated but vulgar notion. That they are the ones who must pay and sac- rifice for politics is no secret to them. A primal wish, childlike and hyperrealistic at the same time, would be by contrast that such politics finally cease and that, in good conscience, one finally would not have to bother about such things. All "little" people, not only laborers in the narrower sense, have felt the urge to stick out their tongues at the whole of politics. For this reason, in popular realism, jokes about politicians, including those about one's own party big shots, have pro-
voked the heartiest laughter.
The antipolitical streak in laborer's consciousness already knows, of course,
that politics represents a coercive relation that grows out of distress and conflict. Politics arises from a social clinch that can only satisfy those who are a priori the winners-the elite, the rich, the ambitious, those who feel they are the best at making politics. The socialist encouragement of the laborer to get involved in pol- itics thus always means a partial muzzling of proletarian realism. To experience the clinch of classes, parties, and blocs "willingly" would be truly a harsh demand-and something of the kind is often an undertone in socialist politics, in- sofar as they are not already merely a language for new nationalisms.
Herein lies one of the reasons why the political programming of the laborer
ego in the sense intended by ideologists has failed throughout almost the whole ? nd. It is obvious that the workers' movement, wherever it has become strong,
as pushed through wage increases, social security benefits, chances to partici-
68 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
pate, and the first steps toward the redistribution of wealth. To date, however, no ideology has been able to talk it into a real political will to power. Apolitical realism is not so easily deceived. Large-scale political mobilizations of the masses either presuppose wars or have their roots in a fascistoid-theatrical orchestration of the masses. A symptom of this is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
that people are almost nowhere so nauseated by politics as in the so-called socialist countries, that is, in countries where the laborer ego officially is supposed to be in power. They perceive the party rhetoric largely as a prayerwheel and as a parody of what they really want--a somewhat higher standard of living, a slackening of compulsions to work, liberalizations. It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that no Western proletariat has been able to generate such spontaneous and disciplined strike movements as the socialist Poles of 1980, whose strike in fact expressed not a will to power but rather the will to reduce suffering at the hands of power. It is the paradigm of proletarian realism--a strike against political politics and against the ideology of the eternal victim.
This paradigm, of course, has its prehistory. In the workers' movement of the nineteenth century, two rival currents competed; these currents were based on the opposing realisms of proletarian consciousness: Marxism and anarchism. Marx- ism outlines the most consistent strategy of a socialist will to power as a will to govern and even goes so far as to support a "duty to power," so long as it is realis- tic to assume the existence of states and state politics. By contrast, anarchism has struggled since the very beginning against the state and political power machines as such. The Social Democratic (later Communist) line thought it knew that the "winning of bread" (Kropotkin) the anarchists talked about could lead only by way of hegemonic power in the state and the economic order. They believed that only as rulers of the state could the "producers" distribute social wealth to themselves indirectly through the state. None of the great Communist theoreticians and poli- ticians foresaw realistically enough that this strategy would probably end up in the exploitation of the workers by the agents of the state and military. In anar- chism, by contrast, the need to be antipolitical and the idea of self-determination were affirmed, and both were radically opposed to the idea: "Oh God! Another state, once again a state! "
The overprogramming of proletarian realism into a "party identity" can be studied since the nineteenth century as if it were a lab experiment. At first, the laborer ego finds in itself feelings of deficiency that can be politically stimulated: undernourishment, legislative demands, an awareness of being disadvantaged, claims on the fruits of one's own labor, etc. These basic motivations are now threaded into various strategies. The strategies are different because it is not clear from the motivations alone which path one can follow the fulfillment of these de- mands. The paths reflect the principal bifurcation in proletarian realism. Thus, against the tendency to class consciousness there is a powerful privatism; against the tendency toward a strategy in the state, a tendency toward a strategy against
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 69
the state; against the parliamentary way, an antiparliamentary way; against the idea of representation, the idea of self- management, and so on. Today, the alter- natives are called authoritarian and libertarian socialism. Splits in the workers' movement are rooted in such oppositions.
The splitting is grounded in objectivity. Those who want to educate the proletarian ego to a party identity do violence to a part of its fundamental ex- periences and motivations. The Communist branch of the workers' movement is, in fact, marked by a characteristically cynical cadre politics in which the leader- ship functions like a "new brain" that demands only precise functioning from the rest of the party body and that often even carries out a putsch against the basic programs of the "old brain. " The weakness in anarchism, on the other hand, is its inability to effectively organize the real life interests of the proletariat, which it surely understands better; for organization is the domain of the authoritarian wing. Under the given conditions, there is no way to realize the ideas of self- management and self-sufficiency--or only on a small scale. It was no accident, therefore, that anarchism addressed not so much the proletarian antipolitical in-
10
The forces causing the split have systematically ruined the workers' move-
ment. Of course these forces not only follow the lines of the primal split as out-
lined here, but are soon involved in a higher dynamic of splitting, a dynamic that
is of a reflective nature. The formation of the proletarian ego is a process that,
even more than the self-formation of the bourgeoisie between the seventeenth and
the nineteenth centuries, takes place in the laboratory of the public sphere. Here,
no naivete is safe from reflection. In the long run, no swindle can occur here.
What was true for nationalism holds even more for socialism. One looks on as
it takes form and as soon as it begins to make politics through fictions, it is struck
by a contradiction --and that by no means merely from the outside but even more
from within. Every exclusive, self-satisfied, and dogmatic self-programming can
and must be broken down. A political movement does not base itself on existential
realism and a science of society without paying a price. As soon as a fraction of
the workers' movement appeared with the claim of knowing and executing the
correct politics, an opposing fraction had to arise that contradicted the first and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
claimed to have better insight. That is the blind, purely mechanical-reflexive tragedy of the socialist movement. Werner Sombart, a bourgeois economist whose fame today has faded, sarcastically counted at least 130 different varieties of socialism, and a satirist today could easily keep on counting. The splits are the pnce of progress in reflection. Every half-alert person recognizes that party egos are produced in the test tube of propaganda and cannot be congruent with the real- ls
m at the base and the most elementary feelings toward life. One can see it with the naked eye: Here are programs searching for naivetes that are supposed to Kientify themselves. But no politics can, on the one hand, base itself on critique and science and, on the other, set its hopes on naivete and a system of blind devo-
stinct which it wanted to support and strengthen, as petit-bourgeois "revoltism. "
70 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
tion. Because every socialism wants to be a "scientific Weltanschauung," it perma- nently regurgitates its own poison; its realistic stomach spits out the slop of mere dogmatics.
For most people today, the inner-socialist debates from the revisionism dispute of the old social democracy up to the conglomerations of Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals are as curious as the dispute among theologians of the six- teenth century over the interpretation of Holy Communion. They see in them what the historian also discovers through dispassionate research: that the forma- tion of a unified proletarian ego oriented toward its own vital interests has failed. Up to now, the will to live and the will to power have set up two different ac- counts. Precisely in the case of the proletarian ego, the fictions were weaker than the realisms. The programmers of political identity fought with each other from the beginning and got entangled in their printouts. The unified proletarian class ego is not a reality but a myth. One recognizes this myth easily when one observes the programmers in their public activities; indeed, for a while they called them- selves, with refreshing candor, propagandists, disseminators of ideology.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value.
It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths. Anything else would not be worth the trouble.
I will forgo presenting the establishment of inwardness in other areas--erotics, ethics, aesthetics-in the way in which I have briefly attempted to present it in the instance of the paradoxical inwardness of class narcissisms. In any case, the scheme of the critique would be the same: investigation of collective program- ming and self-programming. Today the sociocultural conditioning of the sexes is a common topic of discussion. The naive masculinity and femininity in the members of less-developed cultures may strike us as charming; in our own con- text we trip over the "stupid" factor in the results of such training. Today it can be expected of everyone to know that masculinity and femininity are formed in drawn-out social self-training, just like class consciousnesses, professional ethics, character, and personal tastes. Every person goes through years of appren- ticeship in inwardness, every newborn child years of apprenticeship in gender identity. Later, in becoming aware of oneself, men and women discover a spon- taneity of feeling constituted in such and such a way: I like her; I don't like him; those are my impulses; this turns me on; those are my wishes; I can satisfy them to this extent. From the first look we take at our experiences we believe we can say who we are. The second look will make it clear that education is behind every particular way of being. What seemed to be nature, on closer observation reveals itself as code. Why is that important? Well, those who enjoy advantages from their programming and that of others, naturally feel no impulse to reflect. But those who suffer disadvantages will refuse in the future to make sacrifices based on a mere training in bondage. The disadvantaged are immediately motivated to reflect. One can say that the universal discontent in relations between the sexes today has led to a strong increase in the readiness to reflect on the causes of problematic relationships --in both sexes. Wherever one gets "involved" with problems, one finds both sides sunk in reflection.
And after reflection? Well, I know no one who could be said to be "finished with reflecting. " The "labor" of reflection never ends. It appears to be infinite; of course, I believe it is a "benign infinity," which implies growth and maturation. In innumerable respects, people have reasons to get to know themselves better.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 73
? Pellegrino Tibaldi, Polyphem, around 1555.
Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally"
11
"idiots of the family," in the broadest sense: educated people. In the last in-
stance, enlightenment has to do with the idiocy of the ego. It is difficult to disperse inner automatisms; it takes effort to penetrate the unconscious. A permanent criti- cal self-reflection would be necessary in the end to counter the tendency
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to sub- merge oneself in new lacks of awareness, new automatisms, new blind identifica- tions. Life, which also searches for new stability through revolutions and moments of awareness, obeys an inclination to inertia. The impression can thus arise that the history of spirit (Geistesgeschichte) constitutes a simple dance of ideologies and not a systematically worked out movement of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "postenlightenment," the idiocy of egos twists itself into postures that are more and more artful and more and more convoluted --into a conscious unconsciousness, into defensive identities.
The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious program- mings, so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, pro- grammed into us. It guarantees in almost every aspect the priority of what is alien over what is one's own. Where "I" seem to be, others always went before me in order to automatize me through socialization. Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, how- ever, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us --who acquires names and identities only through its "social birth"-remains the living source of free- dom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop m the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-
74 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
discovery in the world cosmos. " In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as cri- tique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. If mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of preindividual emptiness used to be exclusively a matter for meditative minorities, today there are good reasons for hoping that in our world, torn by struggling identifications, majorities for such enlightenment will finally be found.
It is not infrequently necessary for the pure interest in surviving to be able to be Nobody. The Odyssey demonstrates this in its funniest and most grandiose pas- sage. Odysseus, the mentally alert hero, in the decisive moment of his wanderings after fleeing from the cave of the blinded Cyclops, calls to him: It was Nobody who blinded you! In this way, one-eyedness and identity can be overcome. With this call, Odysseus, the master of clever self-preservation, reaches the summit of mental alertness. He leaves the sphere of primitive moral causalities, the web of revenge. From then on he is safe from the "envy of the gods. " The gods mock Cyclops when he demands that they take revenge. On whom? On Nobody.
The Utopia of conscious life was and remains a world in which we all have the right to be Odysseus and to let that Nobody live, in spite of history, politics, na- tionality, and Somebodiness. In the shape of our bodies, we should embark on the wanderings of a life that spares itself nothing. When in danger, mentally and spiritually alert persons discover Being-as-Nobody in themselves. Between the poles of Nobodiness and Somebodiness, the adventures and vicissitudes of con- scious life are strung. In conscious life, every fiction of an ego is dissolved once and for all. For this reason, Odysseus, and not Hamlet, is the true founding father of modern and everlasting intelligence.
Notes
1. This holds for Bruno Bauer's classic polemic, Theologische Schamlosigkeiten (1841), in Bauer, Feldziige der reinen Kritik, ed. H. M. Sass (Frankfurt, 1968).
2. There is already a precursor of this doctrine among Greek Sophists: Critias.
3. The extension of the Kantian critique always proceeded from the narrowness of its physically oriented concept of experience. Whenever one moved beyond Kant, one did so in the name of an en- riched concept of experience that was extended to historical, cultural, symbolic, emotional, and reflective phenomena.
4. [See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. -Trans. ]
5. At one point in chapter 5 I will hint at the relation that could exist between present-day, re- spectable cynicism of the politics of armament and peace and a third world war.
6. In chapter 8 ("The Cynicism of Knowledge"), I will describe Freud as the protagonist of a kynical theory. See in the same chapter, "Sexual Cynicism. " [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse imjahr 1785 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). --Trans. 1
7. It is the cultural strategy of all neoconservativisms. See chapters 15, 16, and 23 ("Political Coueism").
8. [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Denker aufder Btihne. Nietzsches Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). -- Trans. ]
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 75
9. Most recently, Jean Plumyene has impressively sketched the drama of early nationalisms: Les nations romantiques. Histoire du nationalisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1979).
10. Its development can be studied through the example of the "individualist" anarchism inspired by Stirner.
11. [This refers to a phrase from Marx concerning "rural idiocy. " Initially we cannot help having been made by the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
family into the "idiots" we are. -Trans. ]
Chapter 4
After the Unmaskings: Cynical Twilight. Sketches for the Self-repudiation of the Ethos of Enlightenment
You are still there! No, that is unheard of, Disappear, we have after all enlightened!
The pack of devils, it does not ask for rules.
We are clever enough, and still Tegel is haunted.
Goethe, Faust I, Walpurgisnacht
"I look on, is that nothing? "
"Who can be helped by it? "
"Who can be helped? " said Fabian.
Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931) For they know what they do.
Ernst Ottwald, Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (1931)
These eight turbulent and hard-won advances of reflective enlightenment have made history just like the great breakthroughs in natural science and technology with which they have combined in the last 250 years into a permanent industrial and cultural revolution. Just as urbanization, motorization, electrification, and the information revolution have radically altered life in societies, so the labor of reflection and critique has structurally broken up consciousnesses and forced a new, dynamic constitution on them. "Nothing is solid anymore. " It has plowed up an intellectual-psychic field on which old forms of tradition, identity, and character can no longer exist. Its effects add up to the complex of a modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis.
Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment
Enlightenment has certainly been enormously successful. In its arsenal, the weapons of critique stand ready; those who want to view these even in isolation would have to think that a party so armed would inevitably win the "struggle of opinions. " But no party can appropriate these weapons solely for itself. Critique does not have a unified bearer but rather is splintered into a multitude of schools, factions, currents, avant-gardes. Basically, there is no unified and unambiguous enlightenment "movement. " One feature of the dialectic of enlightenment is that
76
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 77
"This is what they have refused to accept from me . . . these ignoramuses! "
it was never able to build a massive front; rather, early on, it developed, so to speak, into its own opponent.
As shown in the second preliminary reflection, enlightenment is broken by the resistance of opposing powers (hegemonic power, tradition, prejudice). Because knowledge is power, every hegemonic power challenged by "another knowledge" must try to stay in the center of knowledge. However, not every power is the right center for every knowledge. Reflective knowledge cannot be separated from its subject. Thus, only one means remains available to hegemonic powers: to sepa- rate the subjects of possible oppositional power from the means of their self- reflection. This is the reason for the age-old history of "violence against ideas". It is violence neither against persons nor against things in the trivial sense; it is violence against the self-experience and the self-expression of persons who are in danger of learning what they should not know. The history of censorship can be summarized in this phrase. It is the history of the politics of antireflection. At that moment when people become ripe for experiencing the truth about them- selves and their social relations, those in power have always tried to smash the mirrors in which people would recognize who they are and what is happening to
them.
Enlightenment, no matter how impotent the mere means of reason seem, is subtly irresistible, like the light, after which, in sound mystical tradition, it is named: les lumieres, illumination. Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays. Thus, enlightenment tries first to light the lamps and then to clear the obstacles out of the way that prevent the light's diffusion.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge. They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti- Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent. On the one hand it is linked to a merit that, through a permanent straining of moral, cultural, nd economic creativity, tries to earn cultural hegemony; on the other, it is na- tionalistically degraded. Thus, a will to power is not necessarily a will to govern, as was revealed by the notorious reluctance of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to get involved in politics; the bourgeois nar- cissisms can remain content with the will to profit, to success, and to "culture. " Finally, for the laborer ego, the will to power and especially the will to govern are only secondary motives, in which calculation rather than passion is at work. From the beginning, proletarian realism has two mutually contradictory dimensions. The first realism says: So that you get what you deserve, you your- self must make the move; "no God, no kaiser, no tribune" will give you what you need; you will only come out of your misery when you wake up politically and being to participate in the game of power--as Pottier said in the Internationale. The second realism knows that politics means being called on to make sacrifices; politics happens at levels where my immediate interests count for nothing and where, according to Lenin, people are counted by the millions. In workers' real- ism, an ancient, deep-rooted mistrust of political politics lives on. The maxim "If you don't concern yourself with politics, then politics will concern itself with you"--the basic formula for the politicization of the proletariat--has indeed been heard by laborers but in the last instance it sounds like cynicism to them, like a well-formulated but vulgar notion. That they are the ones who must pay and sac- rifice for politics is no secret to them. A primal wish, childlike and hyperrealistic at the same time, would be by contrast that such politics finally cease and that, in good conscience, one finally would not have to bother about such things. All "little" people, not only laborers in the narrower sense, have felt the urge to stick out their tongues at the whole of politics. For this reason, in popular realism, jokes about politicians, including those about one's own party big shots, have pro-
voked the heartiest laughter.
The antipolitical streak in laborer's consciousness already knows, of course,
that politics represents a coercive relation that grows out of distress and conflict. Politics arises from a social clinch that can only satisfy those who are a priori the winners-the elite, the rich, the ambitious, those who feel they are the best at making politics. The socialist encouragement of the laborer to get involved in pol- itics thus always means a partial muzzling of proletarian realism. To experience the clinch of classes, parties, and blocs "willingly" would be truly a harsh demand-and something of the kind is often an undertone in socialist politics, in- sofar as they are not already merely a language for new nationalisms.
Herein lies one of the reasons why the political programming of the laborer
ego in the sense intended by ideologists has failed throughout almost the whole ? nd. It is obvious that the workers' movement, wherever it has become strong,
as pushed through wage increases, social security benefits, chances to partici-
68 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
pate, and the first steps toward the redistribution of wealth. To date, however, no ideology has been able to talk it into a real political will to power. Apolitical realism is not so easily deceived. Large-scale political mobilizations of the masses either presuppose wars or have their roots in a fascistoid-theatrical orchestration of the masses. A symptom of this is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
that people are almost nowhere so nauseated by politics as in the so-called socialist countries, that is, in countries where the laborer ego officially is supposed to be in power. They perceive the party rhetoric largely as a prayerwheel and as a parody of what they really want--a somewhat higher standard of living, a slackening of compulsions to work, liberalizations. It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that no Western proletariat has been able to generate such spontaneous and disciplined strike movements as the socialist Poles of 1980, whose strike in fact expressed not a will to power but rather the will to reduce suffering at the hands of power. It is the paradigm of proletarian realism--a strike against political politics and against the ideology of the eternal victim.
This paradigm, of course, has its prehistory. In the workers' movement of the nineteenth century, two rival currents competed; these currents were based on the opposing realisms of proletarian consciousness: Marxism and anarchism. Marx- ism outlines the most consistent strategy of a socialist will to power as a will to govern and even goes so far as to support a "duty to power," so long as it is realis- tic to assume the existence of states and state politics. By contrast, anarchism has struggled since the very beginning against the state and political power machines as such. The Social Democratic (later Communist) line thought it knew that the "winning of bread" (Kropotkin) the anarchists talked about could lead only by way of hegemonic power in the state and the economic order. They believed that only as rulers of the state could the "producers" distribute social wealth to themselves indirectly through the state. None of the great Communist theoreticians and poli- ticians foresaw realistically enough that this strategy would probably end up in the exploitation of the workers by the agents of the state and military. In anar- chism, by contrast, the need to be antipolitical and the idea of self-determination were affirmed, and both were radically opposed to the idea: "Oh God! Another state, once again a state! "
The overprogramming of proletarian realism into a "party identity" can be studied since the nineteenth century as if it were a lab experiment. At first, the laborer ego finds in itself feelings of deficiency that can be politically stimulated: undernourishment, legislative demands, an awareness of being disadvantaged, claims on the fruits of one's own labor, etc. These basic motivations are now threaded into various strategies. The strategies are different because it is not clear from the motivations alone which path one can follow the fulfillment of these de- mands. The paths reflect the principal bifurcation in proletarian realism. Thus, against the tendency to class consciousness there is a powerful privatism; against the tendency toward a strategy in the state, a tendency toward a strategy against
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 69
the state; against the parliamentary way, an antiparliamentary way; against the idea of representation, the idea of self- management, and so on. Today, the alter- natives are called authoritarian and libertarian socialism. Splits in the workers' movement are rooted in such oppositions.
The splitting is grounded in objectivity. Those who want to educate the proletarian ego to a party identity do violence to a part of its fundamental ex- periences and motivations. The Communist branch of the workers' movement is, in fact, marked by a characteristically cynical cadre politics in which the leader- ship functions like a "new brain" that demands only precise functioning from the rest of the party body and that often even carries out a putsch against the basic programs of the "old brain. " The weakness in anarchism, on the other hand, is its inability to effectively organize the real life interests of the proletariat, which it surely understands better; for organization is the domain of the authoritarian wing. Under the given conditions, there is no way to realize the ideas of self- management and self-sufficiency--or only on a small scale. It was no accident, therefore, that anarchism addressed not so much the proletarian antipolitical in-
10
The forces causing the split have systematically ruined the workers' move-
ment. Of course these forces not only follow the lines of the primal split as out-
lined here, but are soon involved in a higher dynamic of splitting, a dynamic that
is of a reflective nature. The formation of the proletarian ego is a process that,
even more than the self-formation of the bourgeoisie between the seventeenth and
the nineteenth centuries, takes place in the laboratory of the public sphere. Here,
no naivete is safe from reflection. In the long run, no swindle can occur here.
What was true for nationalism holds even more for socialism. One looks on as
it takes form and as soon as it begins to make politics through fictions, it is struck
by a contradiction --and that by no means merely from the outside but even more
from within. Every exclusive, self-satisfied, and dogmatic self-programming can
and must be broken down. A political movement does not base itself on existential
realism and a science of society without paying a price. As soon as a fraction of
the workers' movement appeared with the claim of knowing and executing the
correct politics, an opposing fraction had to arise that contradicted the first and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
claimed to have better insight. That is the blind, purely mechanical-reflexive tragedy of the socialist movement. Werner Sombart, a bourgeois economist whose fame today has faded, sarcastically counted at least 130 different varieties of socialism, and a satirist today could easily keep on counting. The splits are the pnce of progress in reflection. Every half-alert person recognizes that party egos are produced in the test tube of propaganda and cannot be congruent with the real- ls
m at the base and the most elementary feelings toward life. One can see it with the naked eye: Here are programs searching for naivetes that are supposed to Kientify themselves. But no politics can, on the one hand, base itself on critique and science and, on the other, set its hopes on naivete and a system of blind devo-
stinct which it wanted to support and strengthen, as petit-bourgeois "revoltism. "
70 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
tion. Because every socialism wants to be a "scientific Weltanschauung," it perma- nently regurgitates its own poison; its realistic stomach spits out the slop of mere dogmatics.
For most people today, the inner-socialist debates from the revisionism dispute of the old social democracy up to the conglomerations of Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals are as curious as the dispute among theologians of the six- teenth century over the interpretation of Holy Communion. They see in them what the historian also discovers through dispassionate research: that the forma- tion of a unified proletarian ego oriented toward its own vital interests has failed. Up to now, the will to live and the will to power have set up two different ac- counts. Precisely in the case of the proletarian ego, the fictions were weaker than the realisms. The programmers of political identity fought with each other from the beginning and got entangled in their printouts. The unified proletarian class ego is not a reality but a myth. One recognizes this myth easily when one observes the programmers in their public activities; indeed, for a while they called them- selves, with refreshing candor, propagandists, disseminators of ideology.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value.
It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths. Anything else would not be worth the trouble.
I will forgo presenting the establishment of inwardness in other areas--erotics, ethics, aesthetics-in the way in which I have briefly attempted to present it in the instance of the paradoxical inwardness of class narcissisms. In any case, the scheme of the critique would be the same: investigation of collective program- ming and self-programming. Today the sociocultural conditioning of the sexes is a common topic of discussion. The naive masculinity and femininity in the members of less-developed cultures may strike us as charming; in our own con- text we trip over the "stupid" factor in the results of such training. Today it can be expected of everyone to know that masculinity and femininity are formed in drawn-out social self-training, just like class consciousnesses, professional ethics, character, and personal tastes. Every person goes through years of appren- ticeship in inwardness, every newborn child years of apprenticeship in gender identity. Later, in becoming aware of oneself, men and women discover a spon- taneity of feeling constituted in such and such a way: I like her; I don't like him; those are my impulses; this turns me on; those are my wishes; I can satisfy them to this extent. From the first look we take at our experiences we believe we can say who we are. The second look will make it clear that education is behind every particular way of being. What seemed to be nature, on closer observation reveals itself as code. Why is that important? Well, those who enjoy advantages from their programming and that of others, naturally feel no impulse to reflect. But those who suffer disadvantages will refuse in the future to make sacrifices based on a mere training in bondage. The disadvantaged are immediately motivated to reflect. One can say that the universal discontent in relations between the sexes today has led to a strong increase in the readiness to reflect on the causes of problematic relationships --in both sexes. Wherever one gets "involved" with problems, one finds both sides sunk in reflection.
And after reflection? Well, I know no one who could be said to be "finished with reflecting. " The "labor" of reflection never ends. It appears to be infinite; of course, I believe it is a "benign infinity," which implies growth and maturation. In innumerable respects, people have reasons to get to know themselves better.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 73
? Pellegrino Tibaldi, Polyphem, around 1555.
Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally"
11
"idiots of the family," in the broadest sense: educated people. In the last in-
stance, enlightenment has to do with the idiocy of the ego. It is difficult to disperse inner automatisms; it takes effort to penetrate the unconscious. A permanent criti- cal self-reflection would be necessary in the end to counter the tendency
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to sub- merge oneself in new lacks of awareness, new automatisms, new blind identifica- tions. Life, which also searches for new stability through revolutions and moments of awareness, obeys an inclination to inertia. The impression can thus arise that the history of spirit (Geistesgeschichte) constitutes a simple dance of ideologies and not a systematically worked out movement of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "postenlightenment," the idiocy of egos twists itself into postures that are more and more artful and more and more convoluted --into a conscious unconsciousness, into defensive identities.
The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious program- mings, so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, pro- grammed into us. It guarantees in almost every aspect the priority of what is alien over what is one's own. Where "I" seem to be, others always went before me in order to automatize me through socialization. Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, how- ever, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us --who acquires names and identities only through its "social birth"-remains the living source of free- dom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop m the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-
74 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
discovery in the world cosmos. " In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as cri- tique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. If mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of preindividual emptiness used to be exclusively a matter for meditative minorities, today there are good reasons for hoping that in our world, torn by struggling identifications, majorities for such enlightenment will finally be found.
It is not infrequently necessary for the pure interest in surviving to be able to be Nobody. The Odyssey demonstrates this in its funniest and most grandiose pas- sage. Odysseus, the mentally alert hero, in the decisive moment of his wanderings after fleeing from the cave of the blinded Cyclops, calls to him: It was Nobody who blinded you! In this way, one-eyedness and identity can be overcome. With this call, Odysseus, the master of clever self-preservation, reaches the summit of mental alertness. He leaves the sphere of primitive moral causalities, the web of revenge. From then on he is safe from the "envy of the gods. " The gods mock Cyclops when he demands that they take revenge. On whom? On Nobody.
The Utopia of conscious life was and remains a world in which we all have the right to be Odysseus and to let that Nobody live, in spite of history, politics, na- tionality, and Somebodiness. In the shape of our bodies, we should embark on the wanderings of a life that spares itself nothing. When in danger, mentally and spiritually alert persons discover Being-as-Nobody in themselves. Between the poles of Nobodiness and Somebodiness, the adventures and vicissitudes of con- scious life are strung. In conscious life, every fiction of an ego is dissolved once and for all. For this reason, Odysseus, and not Hamlet, is the true founding father of modern and everlasting intelligence.
Notes
1. This holds for Bruno Bauer's classic polemic, Theologische Schamlosigkeiten (1841), in Bauer, Feldziige der reinen Kritik, ed. H. M. Sass (Frankfurt, 1968).
2. There is already a precursor of this doctrine among Greek Sophists: Critias.
3. The extension of the Kantian critique always proceeded from the narrowness of its physically oriented concept of experience. Whenever one moved beyond Kant, one did so in the name of an en- riched concept of experience that was extended to historical, cultural, symbolic, emotional, and reflective phenomena.
4. [See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. -Trans. ]
5. At one point in chapter 5 I will hint at the relation that could exist between present-day, re- spectable cynicism of the politics of armament and peace and a third world war.
6. In chapter 8 ("The Cynicism of Knowledge"), I will describe Freud as the protagonist of a kynical theory. See in the same chapter, "Sexual Cynicism. " [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse imjahr 1785 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). --Trans. 1
7. It is the cultural strategy of all neoconservativisms. See chapters 15, 16, and 23 ("Political Coueism").
8. [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Denker aufder Btihne. Nietzsches Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). -- Trans. ]
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 75
9. Most recently, Jean Plumyene has impressively sketched the drama of early nationalisms: Les nations romantiques. Histoire du nationalisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1979).
10. Its development can be studied through the example of the "individualist" anarchism inspired by Stirner.
11. [This refers to a phrase from Marx concerning "rural idiocy. " Initially we cannot help having been made by the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
family into the "idiots" we are. -Trans. ]
Chapter 4
After the Unmaskings: Cynical Twilight. Sketches for the Self-repudiation of the Ethos of Enlightenment
You are still there! No, that is unheard of, Disappear, we have after all enlightened!
The pack of devils, it does not ask for rules.
We are clever enough, and still Tegel is haunted.
Goethe, Faust I, Walpurgisnacht
"I look on, is that nothing? "
"Who can be helped by it? "
"Who can be helped? " said Fabian.
Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931) For they know what they do.
Ernst Ottwald, Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (1931)
These eight turbulent and hard-won advances of reflective enlightenment have made history just like the great breakthroughs in natural science and technology with which they have combined in the last 250 years into a permanent industrial and cultural revolution. Just as urbanization, motorization, electrification, and the information revolution have radically altered life in societies, so the labor of reflection and critique has structurally broken up consciousnesses and forced a new, dynamic constitution on them. "Nothing is solid anymore. " It has plowed up an intellectual-psychic field on which old forms of tradition, identity, and character can no longer exist. Its effects add up to the complex of a modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis.
Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment
Enlightenment has certainly been enormously successful. In its arsenal, the weapons of critique stand ready; those who want to view these even in isolation would have to think that a party so armed would inevitably win the "struggle of opinions. " But no party can appropriate these weapons solely for itself. Critique does not have a unified bearer but rather is splintered into a multitude of schools, factions, currents, avant-gardes. Basically, there is no unified and unambiguous enlightenment "movement. " One feature of the dialectic of enlightenment is that
76
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 77
"This is what they have refused to accept from me . . . these ignoramuses! "
it was never able to build a massive front; rather, early on, it developed, so to speak, into its own opponent.
As shown in the second preliminary reflection, enlightenment is broken by the resistance of opposing powers (hegemonic power, tradition, prejudice). Because knowledge is power, every hegemonic power challenged by "another knowledge" must try to stay in the center of knowledge. However, not every power is the right center for every knowledge. Reflective knowledge cannot be separated from its subject. Thus, only one means remains available to hegemonic powers: to sepa- rate the subjects of possible oppositional power from the means of their self- reflection. This is the reason for the age-old history of "violence against ideas". It is violence neither against persons nor against things in the trivial sense; it is violence against the self-experience and the self-expression of persons who are in danger of learning what they should not know. The history of censorship can be summarized in this phrase. It is the history of the politics of antireflection. At that moment when people become ripe for experiencing the truth about them- selves and their social relations, those in power have always tried to smash the mirrors in which people would recognize who they are and what is happening to
them.
Enlightenment, no matter how impotent the mere means of reason seem, is subtly irresistible, like the light, after which, in sound mystical tradition, it is named: les lumieres, illumination. Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays. Thus, enlightenment tries first to light the lamps and then to clear the obstacles out of the way that prevent the light's diffusion.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge. They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti- Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
