39 TN: the football coach Giovanni
Trapattoni
became particularly well
known in Germany during the 1990s, as coach of Bayern Munich.
known in Germany during the 1990s, as coach of Bayern Munich.
Sloterdijk - You Must Change Your Life
It even seems that I am expected to make a fool of myself by identifying myself as a member of a seven-billion-person people - although my own nation is already too much for me.
I am meant to stand my ground as a citizen of the world, even if I barely know my neighbours and neglect my
448
OUTLOOK
most my new
me, 'mankind' is nor a
that can be encountered, I nonetheless have the mission of taking its real presence into consideration at every operation of my own. I am to develop into a fakir of coexistence with everyone and everything, and reduce my footprint in the environment to the trail of a feather.
The situation of overtaxing is fulfilled by these mandates as much as by the Old European imitatio Christi or the Indian mok~a ideal. As there is no escaping this demand - except by fleeing into narcosis - one faces the question of whether one can describe a sensible motif with whose aid the gulf between the sublime imperative and the practical exercise can be bridged. Such a motif - if one leaves aside the phantoms of abstract universalism - can only be gained from a consideration of General Immunology. Immune systems are embod- ied or institutionalized expectations of injury and damage based on the distinction between the own and the foreign. While biological immunity applies to the level of the individual organism, the two social immune systems concern the supra-organismic, that is to say the co-operative, transactional, convivial dimensions of human existence: the solidaristic system guarantees legal security, provision for existence and feelings of kinship beyond one's own family; the symbolic system provides security of worldview, compensation for the certainty of death, and cross-generational constancy of norms. At this level too, the definition applies that 'life' is the success phase of an immune system. Like biological immune systems, the solidaristic and symbolic systems can also pass through phases of weakness, even near-failure. These express themselves in human self-experience and world-experience as an instability of value consciousness and an uncertainty as to the resilience of our solidarities. Their collapse is tantamount to collective death.
The strong hallmark of systems of this type is that they no longer define the own in terms of organismic egotism, but rather place themselves in the service of an ethnic or multi-ethnic, institutionally and intergenerationally expanded self-concept. This enables us to understand why evolutionary approaches to an animal-like altru- ism, which manifest themselves in the natural readiness for species to procreate and care for one's brood, develop among humans into cultural altruisms. The rationale for this development lies in the magnification of the own: what seems altruistic from the individual's perspective is actually egotism at the level of the larger unit; to the
449
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
extent to act as
serve the own making concessions in the narrower
own. This implicit immunological calculus forms the basis of
fiees and taxes, manners and services, asceticisms and virtuosities. All substantial cultural phenomena are part of the competitions between supra-biological immunitary units.
This reflection necessitates an expansion of the concept of immu- nity: as soon as one is dealing with life forms in which the zoon politik6n man participates, one must reckon with the primacy of supra-individual immunity alliances. Under such conditions, individ- ual immunity is only possible as co-immunity. All social organizations in history, from the primal hordes to the world empires, can, from a systemic perspective, be explained as structures of co-immunity. One finds, however, that the distribution of concrete immune advantages in large layered 'societies' has always shown considerable inequali- ties. The inequality of access to immune chances was already felt early on as the deepest manifestation of 'injustice'. It was either external- ized as an obscure fate or internalized as a consequence of dark guilt. During the last millennia, such feelings could only be balanced out through supra-ethnic mental practice systems, vulgo the higher 'reli- gions'. Through sublime imperatives and abstract universalizations of salvific promise, they kept the paths to equal symbolic immune
opportunities open for all.
The current state of the world is characterized by the absence of
an efficient co-immunity structure for the members of the 'global society'. At the highest level, 'solidarity' is still an empty word. Here, then as now, the dictum of a controversial constitutional law theorist applies: 'Whoever says "humanity" seeks to deceive. '20o The reason for this is plain to see: the effective co-immunitary units, today as in ancient times, are formatted tribally, nationally and imperially, and recently also in regional strategic alliances, and function - assuming they do - according to the respective formats of the own-foreign dif- ference. Successful survival alliances, therefore, are particular for the time being - in keeping with the nature of things, even 'world reli- gions' cannot be more than large-scale provincialisms. Even 'world' is an ideological term in this context, as it hypostatizes the macro- egotism of the West and other major powers and does not describe the concrete co-immunitary structure of all survival candidates on the global stage. The subsystems still exist in mutual rivalry, following a logic that repeatedly turns the immune gains of some into the immune losses of others. Humanity does not constitute a super-organism, as some systems theorists prematurely claim; it is, for the time being,
450
OUTLOOK
no means order.
All history is the history of immune system battles. It is identical to the history of protectionism and externalization. Protection always refers to a local self, and externalization to an anonymous environ- ment for which no one takes responsibility. This history spans the period of human evolution in which the victories of the own could only be bought with the defeat of the foreign; it was dominated by the holy egotisms of nations and enterprises. Because 'global society' has reached its limit, however, and shown once and for all that the earth, with its fragile atmospheric and biospheric systems, is the limited shared site of human operations, the praxis of externalization comes up against an absolute boundary. From there on, a protection- ism of the whole becomes the directive of immunitary reason. Global immunitary reason is one step higher than all those things that its anticipations in philosophical idealism and religious monotheism were capable of attaining. For this reason, General Immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of 'religions'. It demands that one transcend all previous distinctions between own and foreign; thus the classical distinctions of friend and foe collapse. Whoever continues along the line of previous separations between the own and the foreign produces immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves.
The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth, spanned by networks and built over by foams, was con- ceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a co- operative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universal- ism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only
451
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
asceticisms to assert anew sooner or later. It presses a mac-
rostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism.
Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn
up now or never; they will encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.
452
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: ON THE ANTHROPOTECHNIC TURN
1 Incende quod adorasti et adora quod incendisti: according to the chronicle of Gregory of Tours, the bishop of Reims, Remigiu5, spoke these words while Clovis I, king of the Franks, convinced of Christ's hand in his victory, stepped into the baptismal font 'like another Constantine' after the Battle of Tolbiac.
2 Translator's note (henceforth: TN): the reference is to Thomas Mann, in Tanio Kroger (Death in Venice, Tonia Kroger and Other Writings, ed. Frederick Alfred Lubich [New York: Continuum, 1999], p. 12).
3 Reflections on the concept of practice can be found below in the sections on the discovery of pedagogy (pp. 197££), the formation of habit (pp. 182ff), the circulus virtuosus (pp. 320ff), and in the first three sections of ch. 12 (pp. 404-11).
4 TN: this phrase refers to the apocryphal fourteenth-century Austrian bailiff (Landvogt) Albrecht Gessler, who ruled the town of Altdort in a tyrannical fashion. It is said that he raised a pole in the market square, and all who passed it were obliged to bow before it (William Tell's legendary archery task was a result of his refusal to do so). In contemporary German usage, it denotes an arbitrary postulate that is blindly obeyed.
5 Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), author of De Veritate (1624), De Religione Gentilium and De Religione Laici (1645), can be considered the founding father of what was later termed 'philosophy of religion'.
6 A typical example is Oswald Spengler, who claims in The Decline of the West that Nietzsche's turn towards an awareness of life as art was sympto- matic of a 'Climacteric of the Culture'. He saw in it an example of the deca- dence that characterizes the 'civilisatory' phase of cultures: during this, the sublime metaphysical worldviews degenerate into mere guides for individu- als in their everyday and digestive worries. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1939), p. 359.
7 TN: the phrase 'life form' refers throughout the text to a form or way of life, not a living creature. The latter are usually termed 'organisms' here.
453
8
9
10 11
12
13
14 15
16 17
18
19
20 21
Concerning the legal system 'as society's immune system', see Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 374f.
Problems of this type are the domain of the new science of psychoneuroim- munology, which deals with the interplay of several systems of messenger substances (nervous system, hormone system, immune system).
Concerning the significance of cultural science for survival in the global context, see the section 'Outlook' below, pp. 442f.
See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1), pp. 12-28. The term was, incidentally, already in use during the heroic years of the Russian Revolution; it can be looked up in the third volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1926, where it refers especially to speculatively anticipated possibilities of biotechnical manipulations of human genes.
The underlying dichotomy of self-improvement and world improvement is explained in ch. 3, where I discuss the increasing externalization of the metanoetic imperative in modernity.
TN: the word for 'humanities', Geisteswissenschaften, literally means 'sci- ences of the spirit'; hence the author implying that they are merely so-called, not genuine, sciences.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Der Garten des Menschlichen: Beitriige zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie (Munich: Hanser, 1978).
Concerning extended parliamentarianism, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds. ), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), as well as Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the general pro- gramme of civilizing cultures, see Bazon Brock, Der Barbar als Kulturheld (Cologne: DuMont, 2002).
See also below, pp. 164f.
See Thomas Macho, 'Neue Askese? Zur Frage nach der Aktualitat des Verzichts', Merkur 54 (1994), pp. 583-93, in which, with reference to the culture-historically powerful alternative of satiation and hunger, the central distinction of full versus empty is examined.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75.
The best example being Heinz-Theo Homann, Das funktionale Argument: Konzepte und Kritik funktionslogischer Religionsbegrnndung (Paderborn: SchOningh, 1997).
See Detlef Linke, Religion als Risiko: Geist, Glaube und Gehirn (Reinbek: Rowohlt,2003).
See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005).
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISlNG
NOTES TO PP. 9-19
1 Paul Celan, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 181.
454
NOTES
2 Von Rodin KUllst
Cantz, 2001
3 Trans. 111 Art of the ed. Stephen Burt and David
Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 230.
4 'People did not speak to him. Stones spoke', Rilke had already written in his essay on Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. 3 [2]: Prosa (Frankfurt:
insel, 1980), p. 369.
5 Ibid. , p. 359.
6 Written in February 1921, published posthumously in 1933.
7 See Beat Wyss, Yom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2 vols. (Cologne: Walther
Konig, 2006).
8 TN: the word Reformhaus refers to a health food shop.
9 See Aaron Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1987).
10 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), p. 84 (translation modified).
11 Ibid. , p. 90.
12 Ibid. , p. 100. These notes acted as a stimulus for Alfred Adler's individual- psychological approach to psychotherapy, where neurosis is defined as a costly means of securing the inferior's illusion of superiority.
13 A reminder: under pressure from the politically correct zeitgeist, the well- known initiative of the German disability society, 'Aktion Sorgenkind' [Operation Problem Child], founded in 1964, was renamed 'Aktion Mensch' [Operation Human Being1 in March 2000.
14 Carl Hermann Unthan, Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern (Stuttgart: Lutz' Memoirenbibliothek, 1925), p. 73.
15 Ibid. , p. 147.
16 Ibid. , p. 97.
17 Ibid. , p. 306.
18 Ibid. , p. 307.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 TN: another reference to Tonia Kroger, where the narrator characterizes
gypsies as living 'in a green caravan' (p. 17).
23 Unthan, Das Pediskript, p. 72.
24 Nor is Wurtz mentioned in the most significant recent study on the subject:
Klaus E. Muller, Der Kruppel: Ethnologia Passionis Humanae (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 1996).
25 H. Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Krucken: Kruppel-Probleme der Menschheit.
Schicksalsstiefkinder aller Zeiten in Wort und Bild (Leipzig: Leopold Voss,
1932), p. 101.
26 Ibid. , p. 88.
27 Ibid. , p. 97.
28 Ibid. , p. 31.
29 Ibid. , p. 4.
30 Ibid. , p. 49.
31 Ibid. , p. 11.
32 Ibid. , p. 18.
455
PP.
known in
and Hermann
34 Ibid. , p. 67.
35 Ibid. , p. 37.
36 Thus the title [Siegreiche Lebenskiimpfer] of an earlier book by Hans Wurtz from 1919, when the problem of born cripples was somewhat overshad- owed by that of war cripples.
37 Otto Perl, Kriippeltum und Gesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit (Gotha: Leopold Klotz, 1926).
38 Concerning the problematics of masters and trainers, see ch. 8, pp. 291£.
39 TN: the football coach Giovanni Trapattoni became particularly well
known in Germany during the 1990s, as coach of Bayern Munich.
40 Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Kriicken, p. 50.
41 Ibid. , p. 63.
42 Ibid. , p. 34.
43 Ibid. , p. 36.
44 These ideas are developed into a general theory of existence in insulated
spaces in the third volume of my Sphiiren project. See Sphiiren III. Schiiume:
Plurale Sphiirologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 309-500.
45 Peter Schneider, Erhinken und erfliegen: Psychoanalytische Zweifel an der
Vernunft (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).
46 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1970).
47 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody,
trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 18.
48 Ibid.
49 See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).
50 The Ziirau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofmann, ed. Roberto Calasso (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006), p. 3.
51 These disclosures, which amount to the uncovering of a doping fraud, are laid out by Sergio Luzzatto in his book Miracoli e Politica nell'Italia del Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007). See Dirk Schumer, 'Ein Siiurenheiliger', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 October 2007.
52 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Nahum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 251.
53 Ibid. , p. 258.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid. , p. 259.
56 See the descriptions of the first two modules on pp. 23ff. above.
57 Concerning Tertullian, see pp. 205£. below.
58 In Biographia Literaria (1817). According to the author, this act creates 'poetic faith'.
59 Kafka, The Complete Stories, p. 268 (translation modified).
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid. , p. 271.
62 Ibid. , p. 276.
456
63 64 65 66
67
68
69
70 71 72
73
74 75
76 77
Ibid,
p,277.
Concerning the ascetic revolt against hunger, see pp. 4161. below.
TN: 'enlightenment' written in lower case should be considered synony- mous with illumination, satari.
The metaphor is misleading, as it is based on the confusion of oral and pre- oral searching intentions. The central distinction that applies to the hungry world, that of empty versus full, does not cover the whole field of searching: for the most spiritually demanding among them, the distinction between homeostatic-beyond-concern and restless-in-concern is a more applicable one.
With the combination of hunger genocide policies, forced collectivization and kulak persecution, Stalin's policies led to some 14 million deaths between 1929 and 1936 alone.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 271.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy ofMorals, p. 100.
Emile Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972 (paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 14.
Quoted in Bernd Mattheus, Cioran: Portrait eines radikalen Skeptikers (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 83.
Cioran, Cafard: Originaltonaufnahmen 1974-1990, ed. Thomas Knoefel and Klaus Sander, with an afterword by Peter Sioterdijk (audio CD) (Cologne: suppose, 1998).
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 130.
Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (London: Quartet, 1990), p. 168. SeeRobertSpaemann,DasunsterblicheGeri~cht:DieFragenachGottund die Tauschung der Modeme (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007).
I would like to remind the reader en passant of the three aforementioned modules of religioid inner operation: the assertion of a subject in the loca- tion of the thing; the assumption of a metamorphosis that enables the latter to 'appear' in the former; the modal positing by which the possibility of a matter follows from its impossibility. The fourth module mentioned here is the genuinely artiste-like one. It can be applied both to notions of artistic perfection and to the ideals of holiness. The fifth module consists in calling to mind the overwhelming; that is, in the inner operations with which one meditates upon the destructibility of one's own existence and its engulfment by the oversized. This is discussed further on pp. 332£ below.
See ch. 7 below.
He sometimes defines clear-sightedness as a 'vaccine against the absolute', though not without admitting that he occasionally succumbs to the first available mystery. See Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1999) p. 97.
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 210.
Ibid. , p. 219.
Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 95.
See Cioran, Entretiens avec Sylvie Jaudeau (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1990).
See pp. 54£ above, as well as ch. 8, pp. 291£.
I remind the reader of the hypothesis discussed in the introduction (pp. 8f)
78 79
80 81 82 83
84 85
NOTES TO PP.
457
that humans have not one immune system but three, with the religious
complex located almost entirely in the functional circle of the third.
86 Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 92.
87 TN: the word Angebot both means 'offer' and 'supply', especially in the
phrase Angebot und Nachfrage ('supply and demand'). It is usually trans- lated as 'supply' in this section, but sometimes 'offer' has been used to stress the gesture of giving implicit in the German word.
88 In his aforementioned essay ('Neue Askese? '), Thomas Macho argues that Catholic Christianity is essentially a 'hunger religion' organized around the question: what fills people?
89 This would mean that Protestantism is no longer a 'hunger religion' but a 'fitness religion', a spiritual surplus for the sated.
90 See Karl Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers: V orlesung Gottingen Wintersemester 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1978). Here the author derides his favourite enemy as a parliamentarian with a white flag in his hand, speaking to the educated about religion instead of declaring himself a Christian (p. 438). There is noticeable contempt when he quotes Schleiermacher's definition of being a Christian: seeking 'the utter lightness and constancy of pious excitements', and clear sarcasm when he quotes Schleiermacher's early characterization of himself as a 'virtuoso of religion', presenting him as a cross between Paganini and Jeremiah. Concerning Schleiermacher's definition of religion, see pp. 333f below.
91 After the Middle Ages had only spoken of religio to refer to the virtue of believers and the life form of professional ascetics in the holy orders, the Reformation introduced the word 'religion' to brand Catholicism a falsifi- cation of the 'true religion'. The Enlightenment finally generalized the concept of 'religion' to give a reasonable order to the tangle of confessions that culminated in the Thirty Years War, and the multitude of cults reported by seamen. Before 'religion' could be declared a private matter, it had to be generalized into an anthropological constant and defined as a natural talent.
92 Fran~ois-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la Raison et Ie culte de L'Etre Supreme (1793-1794) (Paris: Alcan, 1892).
93 De Coubertin occasionally refers to Olympism as a ruskianisme sportif.
94 See Walter Borger, 'Vom "World's Fair" zum olympischen Fair Play - Anmerkungen zur Vor- und Entwicklungsgeschichte zweier Weltfeste', in
Internationale Einflusse auf die WiedereinfUhrung der Olympischen Spiele durch Pierre de Coubertin, ed. Stephan Wassong (Kassel: Agon, 2005), pp. 125f.
95 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, ed. Norbert Muller (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), p. 319.
96 See Sloterdijk, Sphiiren III, pp. 626-46: 'Die Kollektoren: Zur Geschichte der Stadion-Renaissance'.
97 Concerning the phenomenon of gods of the moment, see Hermann Usener,
Gotternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiosen Begriffsbildung
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), pp. 279f.
98 See pp. 406f below.
99 De Coubertin, Olympism, p. 201.
100 Ibid. , p. 405 (translation modified).
101 Willi Daume, foreword to the German edition of de Coubertin's memoirs,
in Olympische Erinnerungen (Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1996), p. 10. 458
NOTES TO PI'. 5-104
102 See Hermann Reason
trans. Simon Kaplan (Ne;v F. Ungar, Mark recently described the modern religion of reason as the cult of a stillbirth in The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modem West (New York: Vintage, 2008).
103 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1976), p. 544.
104 As demonstrated by a number of Bible theme parks in the USA.
105 Documents whose authenticity we have no reason to doubt show that in 1943, while serving in the navy as an office worker, he suffered from psy- chotic states in the form of severe depressions with suicidal tendencies, which led him to file a request for treatment with an army medical author- ity. Allegedly he was severely wounded by a grenade shortly before the war's end, was temporarily blinded, but healed himself. No details are known about his convalescence or methods of self-treatment, but they are said to have contributed to his conviction that the mind forms matter. A report authored by Australian specialists from the 1960$ confirms Hubbard's presentiments: it attests to an abnormal personality structure with strong
paranoid and schizophrenic traits.
106 Gotthard Gunther, 'Seele und Maschine', in Beitrage ZUl' Grundlegung einer
operationsfahigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976),
pp. 75f.
107 It is not an absolute debut, however, as is shown by analogous, often more
brilliant projects in the avant-garde movements of the Russian Revolution, especially the writings of the Immortalists and Biocosmists. See Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in collaboration with Anne von der Heiden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). In addition, they can be taken as proof that communism, for its part, was a form of applied social science fiction.
108 The Church of Scientology is only an anachronism in one aspect: it repeats the historically overcome forms of compulsory membership in a cult collec- tive, indeed takes them so far that the organization virtually consumes its members cannibalistically. On the open market, by contrast, the 'religious experience' has itself become a kind of event commodity or consumable special effect.
109 The phrase 'politics fiction' has been used in a different context by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
110 See Dana Goodyear, 'Chateau Scientology: Inside the Church's Celebrity Center', New Yorker, 14 January 2008.
111 In 1979, L. Ron Hubbard himself was convicted of fraud in absentia by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. The FBI also fo~nd incriminating information in the sect's financial records; Hubbard's wife was sentenced to several years in prison in the USA during the 1970s.
112 Concerning the role of pseudo-transcendence in the modern art system, see Heiner Miihlmann, Countdown: 3 Generationen (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2008).
113 See Gotthard Gunther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. and intr. Kurt Klagenfurt (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 2000), p. 277.
459
TO Pl'.
14 Occult World
I THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
1 I made provisional reference to the enclosure constituted by the culture of writing, and its opening via post-literary techniques, in 1997 using the metaphor Menschenpark [human zooJ.
2 See the section 'Remote View of the Ascetic Planet' above, pp. 29-39.
3 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 60£.
4 It was presumably to avoid such semantic baggage that Gregory Stock, one
of the promoters of human genetic engineering in the USA, presented his vision under the title Metaman; The Merging ofHumans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
5 TN: 'onward propagation' is a literal rendering of Fortpflanzung, which is the standard term for procreation; Nietzsche was modifying a common word rather than presenting two idiosyncratic phrases.
6 See Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species; The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1998).
7 Jean Genet, 'The Funambulists', trans. Bernard Frechtman, Evergreen Review 32 (April-May 1964), p. 47.
8 TN: the German word Prominenz is most often used with reference to celebrities, so its connotations are somewhat more media-related than those of its English cognate.
9 TN: 'being there' and 'being up there' correspond in this case to Dasein and da oben sein.
10 See Deacon, The Symbolic Species, pp. 325-51.
11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 180.
448
OUTLOOK
most my new
me, 'mankind' is nor a
that can be encountered, I nonetheless have the mission of taking its real presence into consideration at every operation of my own. I am to develop into a fakir of coexistence with everyone and everything, and reduce my footprint in the environment to the trail of a feather.
The situation of overtaxing is fulfilled by these mandates as much as by the Old European imitatio Christi or the Indian mok~a ideal. As there is no escaping this demand - except by fleeing into narcosis - one faces the question of whether one can describe a sensible motif with whose aid the gulf between the sublime imperative and the practical exercise can be bridged. Such a motif - if one leaves aside the phantoms of abstract universalism - can only be gained from a consideration of General Immunology. Immune systems are embod- ied or institutionalized expectations of injury and damage based on the distinction between the own and the foreign. While biological immunity applies to the level of the individual organism, the two social immune systems concern the supra-organismic, that is to say the co-operative, transactional, convivial dimensions of human existence: the solidaristic system guarantees legal security, provision for existence and feelings of kinship beyond one's own family; the symbolic system provides security of worldview, compensation for the certainty of death, and cross-generational constancy of norms. At this level too, the definition applies that 'life' is the success phase of an immune system. Like biological immune systems, the solidaristic and symbolic systems can also pass through phases of weakness, even near-failure. These express themselves in human self-experience and world-experience as an instability of value consciousness and an uncertainty as to the resilience of our solidarities. Their collapse is tantamount to collective death.
The strong hallmark of systems of this type is that they no longer define the own in terms of organismic egotism, but rather place themselves in the service of an ethnic or multi-ethnic, institutionally and intergenerationally expanded self-concept. This enables us to understand why evolutionary approaches to an animal-like altru- ism, which manifest themselves in the natural readiness for species to procreate and care for one's brood, develop among humans into cultural altruisms. The rationale for this development lies in the magnification of the own: what seems altruistic from the individual's perspective is actually egotism at the level of the larger unit; to the
449
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
extent to act as
serve the own making concessions in the narrower
own. This implicit immunological calculus forms the basis of
fiees and taxes, manners and services, asceticisms and virtuosities. All substantial cultural phenomena are part of the competitions between supra-biological immunitary units.
This reflection necessitates an expansion of the concept of immu- nity: as soon as one is dealing with life forms in which the zoon politik6n man participates, one must reckon with the primacy of supra-individual immunity alliances. Under such conditions, individ- ual immunity is only possible as co-immunity. All social organizations in history, from the primal hordes to the world empires, can, from a systemic perspective, be explained as structures of co-immunity. One finds, however, that the distribution of concrete immune advantages in large layered 'societies' has always shown considerable inequali- ties. The inequality of access to immune chances was already felt early on as the deepest manifestation of 'injustice'. It was either external- ized as an obscure fate or internalized as a consequence of dark guilt. During the last millennia, such feelings could only be balanced out through supra-ethnic mental practice systems, vulgo the higher 'reli- gions'. Through sublime imperatives and abstract universalizations of salvific promise, they kept the paths to equal symbolic immune
opportunities open for all.
The current state of the world is characterized by the absence of
an efficient co-immunity structure for the members of the 'global society'. At the highest level, 'solidarity' is still an empty word. Here, then as now, the dictum of a controversial constitutional law theorist applies: 'Whoever says "humanity" seeks to deceive. '20o The reason for this is plain to see: the effective co-immunitary units, today as in ancient times, are formatted tribally, nationally and imperially, and recently also in regional strategic alliances, and function - assuming they do - according to the respective formats of the own-foreign dif- ference. Successful survival alliances, therefore, are particular for the time being - in keeping with the nature of things, even 'world reli- gions' cannot be more than large-scale provincialisms. Even 'world' is an ideological term in this context, as it hypostatizes the macro- egotism of the West and other major powers and does not describe the concrete co-immunitary structure of all survival candidates on the global stage. The subsystems still exist in mutual rivalry, following a logic that repeatedly turns the immune gains of some into the immune losses of others. Humanity does not constitute a super-organism, as some systems theorists prematurely claim; it is, for the time being,
450
OUTLOOK
no means order.
All history is the history of immune system battles. It is identical to the history of protectionism and externalization. Protection always refers to a local self, and externalization to an anonymous environ- ment for which no one takes responsibility. This history spans the period of human evolution in which the victories of the own could only be bought with the defeat of the foreign; it was dominated by the holy egotisms of nations and enterprises. Because 'global society' has reached its limit, however, and shown once and for all that the earth, with its fragile atmospheric and biospheric systems, is the limited shared site of human operations, the praxis of externalization comes up against an absolute boundary. From there on, a protection- ism of the whole becomes the directive of immunitary reason. Global immunitary reason is one step higher than all those things that its anticipations in philosophical idealism and religious monotheism were capable of attaining. For this reason, General Immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of 'religions'. It demands that one transcend all previous distinctions between own and foreign; thus the classical distinctions of friend and foe collapse. Whoever continues along the line of previous separations between the own and the foreign produces immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves.
The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth, spanned by networks and built over by foams, was con- ceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a co- operative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universal- ism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only
451
THE EXERCISES OF THE MODERNS
asceticisms to assert anew sooner or later. It presses a mac-
rostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism.
Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn
up now or never; they will encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.
452
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: ON THE ANTHROPOTECHNIC TURN
1 Incende quod adorasti et adora quod incendisti: according to the chronicle of Gregory of Tours, the bishop of Reims, Remigiu5, spoke these words while Clovis I, king of the Franks, convinced of Christ's hand in his victory, stepped into the baptismal font 'like another Constantine' after the Battle of Tolbiac.
2 Translator's note (henceforth: TN): the reference is to Thomas Mann, in Tanio Kroger (Death in Venice, Tonia Kroger and Other Writings, ed. Frederick Alfred Lubich [New York: Continuum, 1999], p. 12).
3 Reflections on the concept of practice can be found below in the sections on the discovery of pedagogy (pp. 197££), the formation of habit (pp. 182ff), the circulus virtuosus (pp. 320ff), and in the first three sections of ch. 12 (pp. 404-11).
4 TN: this phrase refers to the apocryphal fourteenth-century Austrian bailiff (Landvogt) Albrecht Gessler, who ruled the town of Altdort in a tyrannical fashion. It is said that he raised a pole in the market square, and all who passed it were obliged to bow before it (William Tell's legendary archery task was a result of his refusal to do so). In contemporary German usage, it denotes an arbitrary postulate that is blindly obeyed.
5 Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), author of De Veritate (1624), De Religione Gentilium and De Religione Laici (1645), can be considered the founding father of what was later termed 'philosophy of religion'.
6 A typical example is Oswald Spengler, who claims in The Decline of the West that Nietzsche's turn towards an awareness of life as art was sympto- matic of a 'Climacteric of the Culture'. He saw in it an example of the deca- dence that characterizes the 'civilisatory' phase of cultures: during this, the sublime metaphysical worldviews degenerate into mere guides for individu- als in their everyday and digestive worries. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1939), p. 359.
7 TN: the phrase 'life form' refers throughout the text to a form or way of life, not a living creature. The latter are usually termed 'organisms' here.
453
8
9
10 11
12
13
14 15
16 17
18
19
20 21
Concerning the legal system 'as society's immune system', see Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 374f.
Problems of this type are the domain of the new science of psychoneuroim- munology, which deals with the interplay of several systems of messenger substances (nervous system, hormone system, immune system).
Concerning the significance of cultural science for survival in the global context, see the section 'Outlook' below, pp. 442f.
See Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1), pp. 12-28. The term was, incidentally, already in use during the heroic years of the Russian Revolution; it can be looked up in the third volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1926, where it refers especially to speculatively anticipated possibilities of biotechnical manipulations of human genes.
The underlying dichotomy of self-improvement and world improvement is explained in ch. 3, where I discuss the increasing externalization of the metanoetic imperative in modernity.
TN: the word for 'humanities', Geisteswissenschaften, literally means 'sci- ences of the spirit'; hence the author implying that they are merely so-called, not genuine, sciences.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Der Garten des Menschlichen: Beitriige zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie (Munich: Hanser, 1978).
Concerning extended parliamentarianism, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds. ), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), as well as Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the general pro- gramme of civilizing cultures, see Bazon Brock, Der Barbar als Kulturheld (Cologne: DuMont, 2002).
See also below, pp. 164f.
See Thomas Macho, 'Neue Askese? Zur Frage nach der Aktualitat des Verzichts', Merkur 54 (1994), pp. 583-93, in which, with reference to the culture-historically powerful alternative of satiation and hunger, the central distinction of full versus empty is examined.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75.
The best example being Heinz-Theo Homann, Das funktionale Argument: Konzepte und Kritik funktionslogischer Religionsbegrnndung (Paderborn: SchOningh, 1997).
See Detlef Linke, Religion als Risiko: Geist, Glaube und Gehirn (Reinbek: Rowohlt,2003).
See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired into Our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005).
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISlNG
NOTES TO PP. 9-19
1 Paul Celan, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 181.
454
NOTES
2 Von Rodin KUllst
Cantz, 2001
3 Trans. 111 Art of the ed. Stephen Burt and David
Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 230.
4 'People did not speak to him. Stones spoke', Rilke had already written in his essay on Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. 3 [2]: Prosa (Frankfurt:
insel, 1980), p. 369.
5 Ibid. , p. 359.
6 Written in February 1921, published posthumously in 1933.
7 See Beat Wyss, Yom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2 vols. (Cologne: Walther
Konig, 2006).
8 TN: the word Reformhaus refers to a health food shop.
9 See Aaron Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1987).
10 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), p. 84 (translation modified).
11 Ibid. , p. 90.
12 Ibid. , p. 100. These notes acted as a stimulus for Alfred Adler's individual- psychological approach to psychotherapy, where neurosis is defined as a costly means of securing the inferior's illusion of superiority.
13 A reminder: under pressure from the politically correct zeitgeist, the well- known initiative of the German disability society, 'Aktion Sorgenkind' [Operation Problem Child], founded in 1964, was renamed 'Aktion Mensch' [Operation Human Being1 in March 2000.
14 Carl Hermann Unthan, Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern (Stuttgart: Lutz' Memoirenbibliothek, 1925), p. 73.
15 Ibid. , p. 147.
16 Ibid. , p. 97.
17 Ibid. , p. 306.
18 Ibid. , p. 307.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 TN: another reference to Tonia Kroger, where the narrator characterizes
gypsies as living 'in a green caravan' (p. 17).
23 Unthan, Das Pediskript, p. 72.
24 Nor is Wurtz mentioned in the most significant recent study on the subject:
Klaus E. Muller, Der Kruppel: Ethnologia Passionis Humanae (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 1996).
25 H. Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Krucken: Kruppel-Probleme der Menschheit.
Schicksalsstiefkinder aller Zeiten in Wort und Bild (Leipzig: Leopold Voss,
1932), p. 101.
26 Ibid. , p. 88.
27 Ibid. , p. 97.
28 Ibid. , p. 31.
29 Ibid. , p. 4.
30 Ibid. , p. 49.
31 Ibid. , p. 11.
32 Ibid. , p. 18.
455
PP.
known in
and Hermann
34 Ibid. , p. 67.
35 Ibid. , p. 37.
36 Thus the title [Siegreiche Lebenskiimpfer] of an earlier book by Hans Wurtz from 1919, when the problem of born cripples was somewhat overshad- owed by that of war cripples.
37 Otto Perl, Kriippeltum und Gesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit (Gotha: Leopold Klotz, 1926).
38 Concerning the problematics of masters and trainers, see ch. 8, pp. 291£.
39 TN: the football coach Giovanni Trapattoni became particularly well
known in Germany during the 1990s, as coach of Bayern Munich.
40 Wurtz, Zerbrecht die Kriicken, p. 50.
41 Ibid. , p. 63.
42 Ibid. , p. 34.
43 Ibid. , p. 36.
44 These ideas are developed into a general theory of existence in insulated
spaces in the third volume of my Sphiiren project. See Sphiiren III. Schiiume:
Plurale Sphiirologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 309-500.
45 Peter Schneider, Erhinken und erfliegen: Psychoanalytische Zweifel an der
Vernunft (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).
46 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1970).
47 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody,
trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 18.
48 Ibid.
49 See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).
50 The Ziirau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofmann, ed. Roberto Calasso (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006), p. 3.
51 These disclosures, which amount to the uncovering of a doping fraud, are laid out by Sergio Luzzatto in his book Miracoli e Politica nell'Italia del Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007). See Dirk Schumer, 'Ein Siiurenheiliger', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 October 2007.
52 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Nahum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 251.
53 Ibid. , p. 258.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid. , p. 259.
56 See the descriptions of the first two modules on pp. 23ff. above.
57 Concerning Tertullian, see pp. 205£. below.
58 In Biographia Literaria (1817). According to the author, this act creates 'poetic faith'.
59 Kafka, The Complete Stories, p. 268 (translation modified).
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid. , p. 271.
62 Ibid. , p. 276.
456
63 64 65 66
67
68
69
70 71 72
73
74 75
76 77
Ibid,
p,277.
Concerning the ascetic revolt against hunger, see pp. 4161. below.
TN: 'enlightenment' written in lower case should be considered synony- mous with illumination, satari.
The metaphor is misleading, as it is based on the confusion of oral and pre- oral searching intentions. The central distinction that applies to the hungry world, that of empty versus full, does not cover the whole field of searching: for the most spiritually demanding among them, the distinction between homeostatic-beyond-concern and restless-in-concern is a more applicable one.
With the combination of hunger genocide policies, forced collectivization and kulak persecution, Stalin's policies led to some 14 million deaths between 1929 and 1936 alone.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 271.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy ofMorals, p. 100.
Emile Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972 (paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 14.
Quoted in Bernd Mattheus, Cioran: Portrait eines radikalen Skeptikers (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 83.
Cioran, Cafard: Originaltonaufnahmen 1974-1990, ed. Thomas Knoefel and Klaus Sander, with an afterword by Peter Sioterdijk (audio CD) (Cologne: suppose, 1998).
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 130.
Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (London: Quartet, 1990), p. 168. SeeRobertSpaemann,DasunsterblicheGeri~cht:DieFragenachGottund die Tauschung der Modeme (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007).
I would like to remind the reader en passant of the three aforementioned modules of religioid inner operation: the assertion of a subject in the loca- tion of the thing; the assumption of a metamorphosis that enables the latter to 'appear' in the former; the modal positing by which the possibility of a matter follows from its impossibility. The fourth module mentioned here is the genuinely artiste-like one. It can be applied both to notions of artistic perfection and to the ideals of holiness. The fifth module consists in calling to mind the overwhelming; that is, in the inner operations with which one meditates upon the destructibility of one's own existence and its engulfment by the oversized. This is discussed further on pp. 332£ below.
See ch. 7 below.
He sometimes defines clear-sightedness as a 'vaccine against the absolute', though not without admitting that he occasionally succumbs to the first available mystery. See Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1999) p. 97.
Bernd Mattheus, Cioran, p. 210.
Ibid. , p. 219.
Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 95.
See Cioran, Entretiens avec Sylvie Jaudeau (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1990).
See pp. 54£ above, as well as ch. 8, pp. 291£.
I remind the reader of the hypothesis discussed in the introduction (pp. 8f)
78 79
80 81 82 83
84 85
NOTES TO PP.
457
that humans have not one immune system but three, with the religious
complex located almost entirely in the functional circle of the third.
86 Cioran, All Gall Is Divided, p. 92.
87 TN: the word Angebot both means 'offer' and 'supply', especially in the
phrase Angebot und Nachfrage ('supply and demand'). It is usually trans- lated as 'supply' in this section, but sometimes 'offer' has been used to stress the gesture of giving implicit in the German word.
88 In his aforementioned essay ('Neue Askese? '), Thomas Macho argues that Catholic Christianity is essentially a 'hunger religion' organized around the question: what fills people?
89 This would mean that Protestantism is no longer a 'hunger religion' but a 'fitness religion', a spiritual surplus for the sated.
90 See Karl Barth, Die Theologie Schleiermachers: V orlesung Gottingen Wintersemester 1923/24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1978). Here the author derides his favourite enemy as a parliamentarian with a white flag in his hand, speaking to the educated about religion instead of declaring himself a Christian (p. 438). There is noticeable contempt when he quotes Schleiermacher's definition of being a Christian: seeking 'the utter lightness and constancy of pious excitements', and clear sarcasm when he quotes Schleiermacher's early characterization of himself as a 'virtuoso of religion', presenting him as a cross between Paganini and Jeremiah. Concerning Schleiermacher's definition of religion, see pp. 333f below.
91 After the Middle Ages had only spoken of religio to refer to the virtue of believers and the life form of professional ascetics in the holy orders, the Reformation introduced the word 'religion' to brand Catholicism a falsifi- cation of the 'true religion'. The Enlightenment finally generalized the concept of 'religion' to give a reasonable order to the tangle of confessions that culminated in the Thirty Years War, and the multitude of cults reported by seamen. Before 'religion' could be declared a private matter, it had to be generalized into an anthropological constant and defined as a natural talent.
92 Fran~ois-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la Raison et Ie culte de L'Etre Supreme (1793-1794) (Paris: Alcan, 1892).
93 De Coubertin occasionally refers to Olympism as a ruskianisme sportif.
94 See Walter Borger, 'Vom "World's Fair" zum olympischen Fair Play - Anmerkungen zur Vor- und Entwicklungsgeschichte zweier Weltfeste', in
Internationale Einflusse auf die WiedereinfUhrung der Olympischen Spiele durch Pierre de Coubertin, ed. Stephan Wassong (Kassel: Agon, 2005), pp. 125f.
95 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, ed. Norbert Muller (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), p. 319.
96 See Sloterdijk, Sphiiren III, pp. 626-46: 'Die Kollektoren: Zur Geschichte der Stadion-Renaissance'.
97 Concerning the phenomenon of gods of the moment, see Hermann Usener,
Gotternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiosen Begriffsbildung
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), pp. 279f.
98 See pp. 406f below.
99 De Coubertin, Olympism, p. 201.
100 Ibid. , p. 405 (translation modified).
101 Willi Daume, foreword to the German edition of de Coubertin's memoirs,
in Olympische Erinnerungen (Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1996), p. 10. 458
NOTES TO PI'. 5-104
102 See Hermann Reason
trans. Simon Kaplan (Ne;v F. Ungar, Mark recently described the modern religion of reason as the cult of a stillbirth in The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modem West (New York: Vintage, 2008).
103 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1976), p. 544.
104 As demonstrated by a number of Bible theme parks in the USA.
105 Documents whose authenticity we have no reason to doubt show that in 1943, while serving in the navy as an office worker, he suffered from psy- chotic states in the form of severe depressions with suicidal tendencies, which led him to file a request for treatment with an army medical author- ity. Allegedly he was severely wounded by a grenade shortly before the war's end, was temporarily blinded, but healed himself. No details are known about his convalescence or methods of self-treatment, but they are said to have contributed to his conviction that the mind forms matter. A report authored by Australian specialists from the 1960$ confirms Hubbard's presentiments: it attests to an abnormal personality structure with strong
paranoid and schizophrenic traits.
106 Gotthard Gunther, 'Seele und Maschine', in Beitrage ZUl' Grundlegung einer
operationsfahigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976),
pp. 75f.
107 It is not an absolute debut, however, as is shown by analogous, often more
brilliant projects in the avant-garde movements of the Russian Revolution, especially the writings of the Immortalists and Biocosmists. See Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in collaboration with Anne von der Heiden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). In addition, they can be taken as proof that communism, for its part, was a form of applied social science fiction.
108 The Church of Scientology is only an anachronism in one aspect: it repeats the historically overcome forms of compulsory membership in a cult collec- tive, indeed takes them so far that the organization virtually consumes its members cannibalistically. On the open market, by contrast, the 'religious experience' has itself become a kind of event commodity or consumable special effect.
109 The phrase 'politics fiction' has been used in a different context by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
110 See Dana Goodyear, 'Chateau Scientology: Inside the Church's Celebrity Center', New Yorker, 14 January 2008.
111 In 1979, L. Ron Hubbard himself was convicted of fraud in absentia by a French court and sentenced to four years in prison. The FBI also fo~nd incriminating information in the sect's financial records; Hubbard's wife was sentenced to several years in prison in the USA during the 1970s.
112 Concerning the role of pseudo-transcendence in the modern art system, see Heiner Miihlmann, Countdown: 3 Generationen (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2008).
113 See Gotthard Gunther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. and intr. Kurt Klagenfurt (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 2000), p. 277.
459
TO Pl'.
14 Occult World
I THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPROBABLE
1 I made provisional reference to the enclosure constituted by the culture of writing, and its opening via post-literary techniques, in 1997 using the metaphor Menschenpark [human zooJ.
2 See the section 'Remote View of the Ascetic Planet' above, pp. 29-39.
3 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 60£.
4 It was presumably to avoid such semantic baggage that Gregory Stock, one
of the promoters of human genetic engineering in the USA, presented his vision under the title Metaman; The Merging ofHumans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
5 TN: 'onward propagation' is a literal rendering of Fortpflanzung, which is the standard term for procreation; Nietzsche was modifying a common word rather than presenting two idiosyncratic phrases.
6 See Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species; The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York and London: Norton, 1998).
7 Jean Genet, 'The Funambulists', trans. Bernard Frechtman, Evergreen Review 32 (April-May 1964), p. 47.
8 TN: the German word Prominenz is most often used with reference to celebrities, so its connotations are somewhat more media-related than those of its English cognate.
9 TN: 'being there' and 'being up there' correspond in this case to Dasein and da oben sein.
10 See Deacon, The Symbolic Species, pp. 325-51.
11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 180.
