No More Learning

Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Volume 40. Volume 39.
Volume 38.
Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason
Geza von Molna> Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy
Algirdas Mien Greimas On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semi- otic Theory
Volume 37. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy
Volume 36. Alice Yaeger Kaplan Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Litera- ture, and French Intellectual Life
Denis Hollier The Politics of Prose
Geoffrey Hartman The Unremarkable Wordsworth Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory
Volume 35.
Volume 34.
Volume 33.
Volume 32.
Volume 31.
Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor
Volume 29. Volume 28. Volume 27.
Volume 26. Volume 25.
Volume 24. Volume 23.
Literature
Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama
Edited by Jonathan Arac Postmodernism and Politics
Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism
Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement The Newly Born Woman Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyz- ing the White Terror
Djelal Kadir Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance Samuel Weber Institution and Interpretation
Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, I. Women, Floods, Bodies, History
Volume 21. Volume 20. Volume 19.
Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem
Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Be-
holder
Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renais-
sance Drama
Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies
For other books in the series, see pg. xl
Critique of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk
Translation by Michael Eldred Foreword by Andreas Huyssen
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 40
? Copyright (C) 1987 by the University of Minnesota
Originally published as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols. Copyright (C) 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
Fifth printing 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www. upress. umn. edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- Critique of cynical reason.
(Theory and history of literature ; v. 40) Translation of: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Includes index.
1. Cynicism. 2. Civilization, Modern-20th century.
I. Title. II. Series.
B809. 5. S5813 1987 149 86-24918 ISBN 0-8166-1585-3
ISBN 0-8166-1586-1 (pbk. )
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
? Contents
Foreword: The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual Andreas Huyssen ix
Preface xxvi Acknowledgments xxxix
1. 2.
3.
PART ONE: SIGHTINGS: FIVE PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness 3 Enlightenment as Dialogue: Critique of Ideology as Continuation of the Miscarried Dialogue through Other Means 10 Eight Unmaskings: A Review of Critiques 22 Critique of Revelation 23
Critique of Religious Illusion 26
Critique of Metaphysical Illusion 34 Critique of the Idealistic Superstructure 36 Critique of Moral Illusion 40
Critique of Transparency 47
Critique of Natural Illusion 53 Critique of the Illusion of Privacy 59
After the Unmaskings: Cynical Twilight. Sketches for the Self- repudiation of the Ethos of Enlightenment 76 Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment 76 Breaks in Enlightenment 82
4.
vi ? CONTENTS
Breaking Down Half-Open Doors 88
Marxist Elegy: Althusser and the "Break" in Marx 90 The Feeling toward Life in Twilight 97
5. "In Search of Lost Cheekiness" 101
Greek Philosophy of Cheekiness: Kynicism 101 Pissing against the Idealist Wind 103
Bourgeois Neokynicism: The Arts 107
Cynicism as Cheekiness That Has Changed Sides 110 Theory of the Double Agent 113
Cheeky Social History 115
Embodiment or Splitting 118
Psychopolitics of Schizoid Society 120
Unashamed Happiness 124
Meditation on the Bomb 128
PART TWO: CYNICISM IN WORLD PROCESS I. PHYSIOGNOMIC MAIN TEXT
6. Concerning the Psychosomatics of the Zeitgeist 139 Tongue, Stuck Out 141
Mouth, Smiling Maliciously, Crooked 142 Mouth, Bitter, Tight 143
Mouth, Laughing Loudly, Big-Mouthed 143 Mouth, Serene, Still 145
Eye Gazes, Eye Blinkers 145 Breasts 147
Arses 147
Fart 150
Shit, Refuse 151 Genitals 152
7. The Cabinet of Cynics 155
Diogenes of Sinope: Human Dog, Philosopher, Good-for-
Nothing 156
Lucian the Mocker, or: Critique Changes Sides 169 Mephistopheles, or: The Spirit That Always Denies and the Will to Knowledge 174
The Grand Inquisitor, or: The Christian Statesman as Jesus Hunter
and the Birth of the Institutional Doctrine out of the Spirit
of Cynicism 182
Anyone, or: The Most Real Subject of Modern Diffuse
Cynicism 195
II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL MAIN TEXT
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
8. The Cardinal Cynicisms 217 Military Cynicism 219
The Cynicism of State and Hegemonic Power 229 Sexual Cynicism 250
266
CONTENTS ? vii
Medical Cynicism
Religious Cynicism 275
The Cynicism of Knowledge 287
9. The Secondary Cynicisms 301
Minima Amoralia: Confession, Joke, Crime 301
The School of Arbitrariness: Information Cynicism, the Press 307 Exchange Cynicism, or: The Hardships of Life 315 III. LOGICAL MAIN TEXT
10. Black Empiricism: Enlightenment as Organization of Polemical Knowledge 329
Knowledge of War and Espionage 331
Police and the Optics of Class Struggle 336
Sexuality: The Enemy Is Within-Below 340
Medicine and Suspecting the Body 343
Nothingness and the Metaphysics of Naked Self-preservation 346 Espionage against Nature, Artillery Logic, Political Metallurgy 349
11. Transcendental Polemic: Heraclitian Meditations 357
Polemic against the Id, or: Think the Devil 361
Metapolemic: On the Foundations of European Dialectics in Polemics
and Rhythmics 367
IV. HISTORICAL MAIN TEXT
The Weimar Symptom: Models of Consciousness in German Modernity 384
12. Weimar Crystallization: Transition of a Period from Recollection into History 387
13. Dadaistic Chaotology: Semantic Cynicisms 391
Excursus 1. Bluff Twilight 401
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic 404
14. The Republic-as-If. Political Cynicisms I: The Struggle Goes On 410
15. The Front and Nothingness. Political Cynicisms II: Populist Dialectics and the Dissolution of the Front 414
16. Dead Souls without Testaments. Political Cynicisms III: Looking after War Graves in the Empty Interior 419
viii ? CONTENTS
17. Conspirators and Dissimulators. Political Cynicisms IV: Conviction as Disinhibition 424
Excursus 3. The Reasonable Bloodhound: A Social Democratic Elegy 429
18. Depersonalization and Alienation. Functionalist Cynicisms I 434
19. Artificial Limbs. Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology 443
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich--before the Third 453 Excursus 5. Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism 457
20. Political Algodicy: Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain 460
21. Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People 469
22. "Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness 477
23. On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception 483
Excursus 6. Political Coueism: The Modernization of Lying 488 Excursus 7. Spectral Analysis of Stupidity 493 Excursus 8. Actors and Characters 496
24. Hey! Are We Alive? New Matter-of-Fact Cynicisms and Stories about the Difficulties of Life 499
Excursus 9. Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness 509 Excursus 10. People in a Hotel 512
25. Postcoital Twilight: Sexual Cynicism and Stories of Intractable Love 515
26. Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter-of-Factness unto Death 521
Epilogue. The Pleural Shock: On the Archetype of Weimar Laughter 529 Conclusion. Under Way toward a Critique of Subjective Reason 534 Index 551
Foreword: The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual
Andreas Huyssen
The entire kynical mode of life adopted by Diogenes was noth- ing more or less than a product of Athenian social life, and what determined it was the way of thinking against which his whole manner protested. Hence it was not independent of social conditions but simply their result; it was itself a rude
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
product of luxury.
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, sec. 195
For the happiness of the animal, that thorough kynic, is the liv- ing proof of the truth ofkynicism. Nietzsche, Untimely Observations, 2, sec. 1
Reduced to his smallest dimension, the thinker survived the storm.
Brecht, Das Badener Lehrstilck vom Einverstdndnis
ISome two hundred years after the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a polemically written philosophical essay of nearly 1,000 pages, disrespectfully entitled Critique of Cynical Reason, captured the imagina- tion and the passions of readers in Germany. Contrary to Kant's philosophical treatise, which, over a hundred years after its appearance, still made Musil's Tor- less sweat with fear and nausea, Peter Sloterdijk's treatise became an immediate success offering German intellectuals a master lesson in the pleasures of the text. Within only a few months over 40,000 copies had been sold, and the liberal feuilletons outdid each other in heaping praise on the author by comparing him to Nietzsche, Spengler, Schopenhauer. Since much of this praise focused on Sloterdijk's critique of the Enlightenment, popular in West Germany since the conservative Tendenzwende of the 1970s, the Left responded by trying to relegate Sloterdijk's essay to the dustbin of history, as a rotten ware of late capitalist de- cline. Both readings sucked Sloterdijk's text back into the ideological and political confrontations of contemporary West German culture that Sloterdijk actually I wish to thank Martin Schwab for suggestions and criticisms.
ix
x ? FOREWORD
proposed to sidestep, and thus they missed important aspects of the book's chal- lenge to the status quo. Ironically, many of the negative responses were reminis- cent of an earlier conservative German Kulturkritik that held that anything suc- cessful could not possibly be any good and required ponderous seriousness of anything to be taken seriously. Thus the tongue-in-cheek reference to Kant in the title was predictably turned against the Critique of Cynical Reason, and it was at- tacked as simplistic, faddish, and pretentious, anti-theoretical, regressively irra- tional, and politically reactionary. There was controversy, and controversy, as any cynical observer of the culture industry will be quick to note, is the sine qua non of critical success.
But the success of Sloterdijk's essay has deeper roots. It has a lot to do with the fact that despite the recent revival of conservatism in Western countries, the old dichotomies of Left vs. Right, progress vs. reaction, rationality vs. irrational- ity have lost much of their explanatory power, moral appeal, and political persua- siveness. In its focus on a new type of postenlightened schizocynicism that re- mains immune to traditional forms of ideology critique, Sloterdijk's book articulates the pervasive malaise and discontent in contemporary culture that de- spite differences in local traditions and politics, is as much a reality today in the United States as in West Germany or, for that matter, in France. First and fore- most, the Critique of Cynical Reason should therefore be read as an attempt to theorize a central aspect of that culture we have come to call postmodern, as an intervention in the present aimed at opening up a new space for a cultural and po- litical discourse.
What then is Sloterdijk's project? The dismissive comparison with Kant, voiced by some German critics, is as much beside the point as the facile elevation of Sloterdijk to a Nietzsche of the late twentieth century. While he is strongly in- debted to a Nietzschean kind of Kulturkritik that focuses on the nexus of knowl- edge and power, he is not ready to forget the affinity between Nietzsche's subtle "cynicism of self-disinhibition" (chapter 3) and the brutal politics of imperialism, later fascism. Neither does he share Kant's intention to subject reason to critique in order to open up the way toward the final goal of all rational speculation, the advancement of science, progress, and emancipation. If anything, his posture is anti-Kantian in that it rejects all master narratives (with a Brechtian twist, Sloter- dijk calls them Grosstheorieri) of reason of which Kant's idealism and meta- physics is certainly a major example. The title's reference to the Kantian critiques makes sense only as a critical gesture.
However, there is another sense of the Kantian project that Michel Foucault has emphasized in an attempt to posit Kant against the Cartesian tradition, and which might describe Sloterdijk's project quite accurately. In his essay "The Sub- ject and Power," Foucault had this to say about Kant:
FOREWORD ? xi
When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklarung? , he meant, What's going on right now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?
Or in other words: What are we? as Aujkldrer, as part of the En- lightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant's question ap- pears as an
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
analysis of both us and our present. '
I think that we may read Sloterdijk with maximum benefit if we read him in the same way Foucault read Kant's programmatic essay. What is at stake in the Cri- tique of Cynical Reason is not a universal history of cynicism (as such the book would be seriously flawed), but rather a more limited investigation of the role of cynicism and its antagonist kynicism for contemporary critical intellectuals. Sloterdijk sees cynicism as the dominant operating mode in contemporary cul- ture, both on the personal and institutional levels, and he suggests reviving the tradition of kynicism, from Diogenes to Schweik, as a counterstrategy, as the only form of subversive reason left after the failures and broken promises of ideology critique in the tradition of Western Marxism. By focusing on cynicism as a central feature of the postmodern condition in the 1970s and 1980s and by searching for strategies to resist it, Sloterdijk attempts to theorize that which has often remained submerged in the recent debate about modernity and postmoder- nity: the pervasive sense of political disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of a lack of political and social alternatives in Western societies today. After all, the 1960s in West Germany--against the arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment--were once labeled a second ex- panded enlightenment that seemed to promise a major and long-lasting realign- ment in the country's political culture based on what Sloterdijk calls, with a sense of loss, the "public dispute about true living" (Preface). In the German context where illiberalism and reaction are usually perceived to be responsible for the march into fascist barbarism, the notion of Aufklarung carried a great potential of Utopian hopes and illusions with it at that time, both in relation to radical social and cultural change anticipated for the future and with regard to Germany's at- tempts to come to terms with its fascist past. Cynicism and resignation are there- fore indeed dangers for a generation that had its formative political experiences in the 1960s and that has since then seen its hopes not so much dashed as crumble and fade away. The situation is even worse for the subsequent generation, the no- future kids and dropouts (Aussteiger) of the 1970s who were too young then to feel anything but contempt today for the 1960s nostalgia of their elders who have the jobs, while they face diminished opportunities and an increasingly bleak labor market. While Sloterdijk's analysis is rooted in his perceptions of German cul- ture, it seems fairly clear that the German case of political disillusionment, cyni-
xii ? FOREWORD
cism, and an atrophied trust in the future has parallels in other Western countries today. In a certain sense, the growth of cynicism during the 1970s actually provided the cultural soil for the revival of the ideological conservatism of the 1980s, which has filled the void left by the post-1960s disillusionment with a simulacrum of homely old values.
Thus Sloterdijk perceives a universal, diffuse cynicism as the predominant mindset of the post-1960s era, and he takes the cynic not as the exception but rather as an average social character, fundamentally asocial, but fully integrated into the work-a-day world. Psychologically he defines him as a borderline melan- cholic able to channel the flow of depressive symptoms and to continue function- ing in society despite constant nagging doubts about his pursuits. I suspect that Sloterdijk's cynicism is less widespread than he might want to claim. But as an analysis of the prevailing mindset of a generation of middle-aged male profes- sionals and intellectuals, now in their late thirties to mid-forties and in increas- ingly influential positions, Sloterdijk's observations are perceptive and to the point. And who could resist the brilliance of an aphorism such as the following, which pinpoints this new unhappy sensibility:
Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, un- happy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both success- fully and unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well- off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered, (chapter 1)
Given this modernization of false consciousness, the old strategies of the Enlightenment--from the public exposure of lies to the benign correction of error to the triumphant unveiling of a structurally necessary false consciousness by ideology critique --will no longer do. They will no longer do not only because the false consciousness they attack is already reflexively buffered, nor simply be- cause ideology critique in the Marxian tradition, that once most radical heir to the Enlightenment, has mutated into a theory of political legitimation in the Soviet bloc. Even more objectionable to Sloterdijk is the subjective side of ideology cri- tique, which always rests on a problematic reification and depersonalization of the opponent in the first place: enlightenment as a war of consciousness aimed at annihilating the opponent. Thus the focus on the place of subjectivity in ideol- ogy critique reveals how the dialectic of domination and exclusion was always already inscribed into the enlightenment, vitiating its claims to universal emanci- pation. In this far-reaching critique of the deadly mechanisms of ideology cri- tique, Sloterdijk actually continues in an important tradition of Western Marxism that reaches back to Marx himself: the critique of reification. However, he gives it a Nietzschean twist by focusing not on reification through the commodity form
FOREWORD ? xiii
(which he accepts in a weaker, nontotalizing version), but on reification of self and other in presumably enlightened
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
discourse practices.
One of the consequences of Sloterdijk's concern with the subjective effects of cynical reason is that he attempts to address the creeping political disillusionment of the post-1960s era on an existential, subjective level rather than disembodying it into the realm of universal norms or agonistic, free-floating language games without subjects. One need not be fully convinced of Sloterdijk's somatic strate- gies for overcoming this enlightened false consciousness to see that his analysis of the post-1960s intellectual works as a productive irritant both against the defenders of a Habermasian modernity and against the advocates of a Nietzschean schizo-postmodernity. By addressing the problem of cynical disillusionment head-on and by articulating the basic intellectual problem of our time as that of an "enlightened false consciousness" rather than attacking or defending enlight- ened rationality, Sloterdijk's essay cuts across the false oppositions, accusations, and counteraccusations that have marred the modernity-postmodernity debate, pushing it ever deeper into a cul-de-sac. From an American perspective one might say that Sloterdijk offers us a sustained polemical reflection on a modernity gone sour and a postmodernity unable to stand on its own feet without constant groping back to what it ostensibly opposes. Rather than seeing enlightenment as the source of all evil in a perspective which became prevalent in France in the post-68 era or condemning the poststructuralist critique of reason as inescapably irrationalist and conservative, Sloterdijk engages the hostile camps in a dizzying dance in which frozen positions are productively set in motion and in which a new figura- tion of postmodernity emerges, a figuration that seems both more promising and less exclusive than most of the current accounts would seem to permit.
Sloterdijk's questions would then read something like this: How can intellec- tuals be Aufklarer at this precise moment in history? What has happened to en- lightenment, to the ideal of rational discourse since the 1960s, and how do we evaluate the strong antirationalist impulse visible in all Western countries today? How does the political and cultural experience of the 1960s stack up against the catastrophic history of the earlier twentieth century? Was the New Left's belief in a regeneration of the enlightenment perhaps naive in the first place? How and in what form can the values of the Enlightenment tradition be sustained in an age that has become more and more disillusioned with me project of enlightened modernity? What forces do we have at hand against the power of instrumental reason and against the cynical reasoning of institutionalized power? How do we define the subject of Aufklarung today? How can one remain an Aufklarer if the Enlightenment project of disenchanting the world and freeing it from myth and superstition must indeed be turned against enlightened rationality itself? How can we reframe the problems of ideology critique and of subjectivity, falling neither for the armored ego of Kant's epistemological subject nor for the schizosubjec- tivity without identity, the free flow of libidinal energies proposed by Deleuze and
xiv ? FOREWORD
Guattari? Where in history do we find examples that would anticipate our intellec- tual dilemma? How can historical memory help us resist the spread of cynical amnesia that generates the simulacrum side of postmodern culture? How can we avoid paralysis, the feeling of history at a standstill that comes with Critical The- ory's negative dialectic as much as with the positing of a carceral continuum that occupies central space in recent French accounts of posthistoire? No doubt, Sloterdijk wants to be an Aufklarer.
Functionalist Cynicisms II: On the Spirit of Technology 443
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich--before the Third 453 Excursus 5. Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism 457
20. Political Algodicy: Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain 460
21. Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People 469
22. "Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness 477
23. On the German Republic of Impostors: The Natural History of Deception 483
Excursus 6. Political Coueism: The Modernization of Lying 488 Excursus 7. Spectral Analysis of Stupidity 493 Excursus 8. Actors and Characters 496
24. Hey! Are We Alive? New Matter-of-Fact Cynicisms and Stories about the Difficulties of Life 499
Excursus 9. Media Cynicism and Training in Arbitrariness 509 Excursus 10. People in a Hotel 512
25. Postcoital Twilight: Sexual Cynicism and Stories of Intractable Love 515
26. Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter-of-Factness unto Death 521
Epilogue. The Pleural Shock: On the Archetype of Weimar Laughter 529 Conclusion. Under Way toward a Critique of Subjective Reason 534 Index 551
Foreword: The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual
Andreas Huyssen
The entire kynical mode of life adopted by Diogenes was noth- ing more or less than a product of Athenian social life, and what determined it was the way of thinking against which his whole manner protested. Hence it was not independent of social conditions but simply their result; it was itself a rude
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
product of luxury.
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, sec. 195
For the happiness of the animal, that thorough kynic, is the liv- ing proof of the truth ofkynicism. Nietzsche, Untimely Observations, 2, sec. 1
Reduced to his smallest dimension, the thinker survived the storm.
Brecht, Das Badener Lehrstilck vom Einverstdndnis
ISome two hundred years after the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a polemically written philosophical essay of nearly 1,000 pages, disrespectfully entitled Critique of Cynical Reason, captured the imagina- tion and the passions of readers in Germany. Contrary to Kant's philosophical treatise, which, over a hundred years after its appearance, still made Musil's Tor- less sweat with fear and nausea, Peter Sloterdijk's treatise became an immediate success offering German intellectuals a master lesson in the pleasures of the text. Within only a few months over 40,000 copies had been sold, and the liberal feuilletons outdid each other in heaping praise on the author by comparing him to Nietzsche, Spengler, Schopenhauer. Since much of this praise focused on Sloterdijk's critique of the Enlightenment, popular in West Germany since the conservative Tendenzwende of the 1970s, the Left responded by trying to relegate Sloterdijk's essay to the dustbin of history, as a rotten ware of late capitalist de- cline. Both readings sucked Sloterdijk's text back into the ideological and political confrontations of contemporary West German culture that Sloterdijk actually I wish to thank Martin Schwab for suggestions and criticisms.
ix
x ? FOREWORD
proposed to sidestep, and thus they missed important aspects of the book's chal- lenge to the status quo. Ironically, many of the negative responses were reminis- cent of an earlier conservative German Kulturkritik that held that anything suc- cessful could not possibly be any good and required ponderous seriousness of anything to be taken seriously. Thus the tongue-in-cheek reference to Kant in the title was predictably turned against the Critique of Cynical Reason, and it was at- tacked as simplistic, faddish, and pretentious, anti-theoretical, regressively irra- tional, and politically reactionary. There was controversy, and controversy, as any cynical observer of the culture industry will be quick to note, is the sine qua non of critical success.
But the success of Sloterdijk's essay has deeper roots. It has a lot to do with the fact that despite the recent revival of conservatism in Western countries, the old dichotomies of Left vs. Right, progress vs. reaction, rationality vs. irrational- ity have lost much of their explanatory power, moral appeal, and political persua- siveness. In its focus on a new type of postenlightened schizocynicism that re- mains immune to traditional forms of ideology critique, Sloterdijk's book articulates the pervasive malaise and discontent in contemporary culture that de- spite differences in local traditions and politics, is as much a reality today in the United States as in West Germany or, for that matter, in France. First and fore- most, the Critique of Cynical Reason should therefore be read as an attempt to theorize a central aspect of that culture we have come to call postmodern, as an intervention in the present aimed at opening up a new space for a cultural and po- litical discourse.
What then is Sloterdijk's project? The dismissive comparison with Kant, voiced by some German critics, is as much beside the point as the facile elevation of Sloterdijk to a Nietzsche of the late twentieth century. While he is strongly in- debted to a Nietzschean kind of Kulturkritik that focuses on the nexus of knowl- edge and power, he is not ready to forget the affinity between Nietzsche's subtle "cynicism of self-disinhibition" (chapter 3) and the brutal politics of imperialism, later fascism. Neither does he share Kant's intention to subject reason to critique in order to open up the way toward the final goal of all rational speculation, the advancement of science, progress, and emancipation. If anything, his posture is anti-Kantian in that it rejects all master narratives (with a Brechtian twist, Sloter- dijk calls them Grosstheorieri) of reason of which Kant's idealism and meta- physics is certainly a major example. The title's reference to the Kantian critiques makes sense only as a critical gesture.
However, there is another sense of the Kantian project that Michel Foucault has emphasized in an attempt to posit Kant against the Cartesian tradition, and which might describe Sloterdijk's project quite accurately. In his essay "The Sub- ject and Power," Foucault had this to say about Kant:
FOREWORD ? xi
When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklarung? , he meant, What's going on right now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?
Or in other words: What are we? as Aujkldrer, as part of the En- lightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant's question ap- pears as an
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
analysis of both us and our present. '
I think that we may read Sloterdijk with maximum benefit if we read him in the same way Foucault read Kant's programmatic essay. What is at stake in the Cri- tique of Cynical Reason is not a universal history of cynicism (as such the book would be seriously flawed), but rather a more limited investigation of the role of cynicism and its antagonist kynicism for contemporary critical intellectuals. Sloterdijk sees cynicism as the dominant operating mode in contemporary cul- ture, both on the personal and institutional levels, and he suggests reviving the tradition of kynicism, from Diogenes to Schweik, as a counterstrategy, as the only form of subversive reason left after the failures and broken promises of ideology critique in the tradition of Western Marxism. By focusing on cynicism as a central feature of the postmodern condition in the 1970s and 1980s and by searching for strategies to resist it, Sloterdijk attempts to theorize that which has often remained submerged in the recent debate about modernity and postmoder- nity: the pervasive sense of political disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of a lack of political and social alternatives in Western societies today. After all, the 1960s in West Germany--against the arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment--were once labeled a second ex- panded enlightenment that seemed to promise a major and long-lasting realign- ment in the country's political culture based on what Sloterdijk calls, with a sense of loss, the "public dispute about true living" (Preface). In the German context where illiberalism and reaction are usually perceived to be responsible for the march into fascist barbarism, the notion of Aufklarung carried a great potential of Utopian hopes and illusions with it at that time, both in relation to radical social and cultural change anticipated for the future and with regard to Germany's at- tempts to come to terms with its fascist past. Cynicism and resignation are there- fore indeed dangers for a generation that had its formative political experiences in the 1960s and that has since then seen its hopes not so much dashed as crumble and fade away. The situation is even worse for the subsequent generation, the no- future kids and dropouts (Aussteiger) of the 1970s who were too young then to feel anything but contempt today for the 1960s nostalgia of their elders who have the jobs, while they face diminished opportunities and an increasingly bleak labor market. While Sloterdijk's analysis is rooted in his perceptions of German cul- ture, it seems fairly clear that the German case of political disillusionment, cyni-
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cism, and an atrophied trust in the future has parallels in other Western countries today. In a certain sense, the growth of cynicism during the 1970s actually provided the cultural soil for the revival of the ideological conservatism of the 1980s, which has filled the void left by the post-1960s disillusionment with a simulacrum of homely old values.
Thus Sloterdijk perceives a universal, diffuse cynicism as the predominant mindset of the post-1960s era, and he takes the cynic not as the exception but rather as an average social character, fundamentally asocial, but fully integrated into the work-a-day world. Psychologically he defines him as a borderline melan- cholic able to channel the flow of depressive symptoms and to continue function- ing in society despite constant nagging doubts about his pursuits. I suspect that Sloterdijk's cynicism is less widespread than he might want to claim. But as an analysis of the prevailing mindset of a generation of middle-aged male profes- sionals and intellectuals, now in their late thirties to mid-forties and in increas- ingly influential positions, Sloterdijk's observations are perceptive and to the point. And who could resist the brilliance of an aphorism such as the following, which pinpoints this new unhappy sensibility:
Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, un- happy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both success- fully and unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well- off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered, (chapter 1)
Given this modernization of false consciousness, the old strategies of the Enlightenment--from the public exposure of lies to the benign correction of error to the triumphant unveiling of a structurally necessary false consciousness by ideology critique --will no longer do. They will no longer do not only because the false consciousness they attack is already reflexively buffered, nor simply be- cause ideology critique in the Marxian tradition, that once most radical heir to the Enlightenment, has mutated into a theory of political legitimation in the Soviet bloc. Even more objectionable to Sloterdijk is the subjective side of ideology cri- tique, which always rests on a problematic reification and depersonalization of the opponent in the first place: enlightenment as a war of consciousness aimed at annihilating the opponent. Thus the focus on the place of subjectivity in ideol- ogy critique reveals how the dialectic of domination and exclusion was always already inscribed into the enlightenment, vitiating its claims to universal emanci- pation. In this far-reaching critique of the deadly mechanisms of ideology cri- tique, Sloterdijk actually continues in an important tradition of Western Marxism that reaches back to Marx himself: the critique of reification. However, he gives it a Nietzschean twist by focusing not on reification through the commodity form
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(which he accepts in a weaker, nontotalizing version), but on reification of self and other in presumably enlightened
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discourse practices.
One of the consequences of Sloterdijk's concern with the subjective effects of cynical reason is that he attempts to address the creeping political disillusionment of the post-1960s era on an existential, subjective level rather than disembodying it into the realm of universal norms or agonistic, free-floating language games without subjects. One need not be fully convinced of Sloterdijk's somatic strate- gies for overcoming this enlightened false consciousness to see that his analysis of the post-1960s intellectual works as a productive irritant both against the defenders of a Habermasian modernity and against the advocates of a Nietzschean schizo-postmodernity. By addressing the problem of cynical disillusionment head-on and by articulating the basic intellectual problem of our time as that of an "enlightened false consciousness" rather than attacking or defending enlight- ened rationality, Sloterdijk's essay cuts across the false oppositions, accusations, and counteraccusations that have marred the modernity-postmodernity debate, pushing it ever deeper into a cul-de-sac. From an American perspective one might say that Sloterdijk offers us a sustained polemical reflection on a modernity gone sour and a postmodernity unable to stand on its own feet without constant groping back to what it ostensibly opposes. Rather than seeing enlightenment as the source of all evil in a perspective which became prevalent in France in the post-68 era or condemning the poststructuralist critique of reason as inescapably irrationalist and conservative, Sloterdijk engages the hostile camps in a dizzying dance in which frozen positions are productively set in motion and in which a new figura- tion of postmodernity emerges, a figuration that seems both more promising and less exclusive than most of the current accounts would seem to permit.
Sloterdijk's questions would then read something like this: How can intellec- tuals be Aufklarer at this precise moment in history? What has happened to en- lightenment, to the ideal of rational discourse since the 1960s, and how do we evaluate the strong antirationalist impulse visible in all Western countries today? How does the political and cultural experience of the 1960s stack up against the catastrophic history of the earlier twentieth century? Was the New Left's belief in a regeneration of the enlightenment perhaps naive in the first place? How and in what form can the values of the Enlightenment tradition be sustained in an age that has become more and more disillusioned with me project of enlightened modernity? What forces do we have at hand against the power of instrumental reason and against the cynical reasoning of institutionalized power? How do we define the subject of Aufklarung today? How can one remain an Aufklarer if the Enlightenment project of disenchanting the world and freeing it from myth and superstition must indeed be turned against enlightened rationality itself? How can we reframe the problems of ideology critique and of subjectivity, falling neither for the armored ego of Kant's epistemological subject nor for the schizosubjec- tivity without identity, the free flow of libidinal energies proposed by Deleuze and
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Guattari? Where in history do we find examples that would anticipate our intellec- tual dilemma? How can historical memory help us resist the spread of cynical amnesia that generates the simulacrum side of postmodern culture? How can we avoid paralysis, the feeling of history at a standstill that comes with Critical The- ory's negative dialectic as much as with the positing of a carceral continuum that occupies central space in recent French accounts of posthistoire? No doubt, Sloterdijk wants to be an Aufklarer. He advocates a type of enlight- enment that is enlightened about itself. He rejects the new fundamentalism of con- servatives and neoconservatives, and he criticizes the universalist claims of the classical Enlightenment. Thus he accepts certain important tenets of the post- structuralist critique of the Enlightenment, especially in its Foucaultian version. But he never falls for the facile and fashionable collapsing of reason and totalitari- anism, nor for the obsessive French focus, since the 1970s, on incarceration and le monde concentrationnaire, the world as concentration camp. (In a curious way this concern of French intellectuals displays the same fixation on the past of which they accuse German Left intellectuals whose obsession with fascism allegedly blinds them to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the world of the Gulag. ) Just as Sloterdijk rejects the timeworn Lukacsian argument that all the roads of irrationality lead into fascism, he also disagrees with "the French position. " He refuses to accept the surreptitiously teleological notion that all enlightenment ends in the Gulag or in a concentration camp, which is itself nothing but the reverse of the myth of revolution and emancipation that prevailed in the self- understanding of French intellectuals from Voltaire via Zola to Sartre. To the German critic who was nurtured on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse in the 1960s, such a one-dimensional proposition could only appear as the dialectic of enlightenment revisited--except that contrary to much of the French Nietz- scheanism of the 1970s, Horkheimer and Adorno always held on to a substantive notion of reason and truth that remained, in Kantian terms, the condition of possi- bility of Critical Theory itself.
While Sloterdijk takes freely from both Critical Theory and poststructuralism, his position remains crucially ambivalent in that he has as much trouble with the "truth" of Critical Theory as with the total dissolution of truth, reason, and subjec- tivity in certain radical forms of poststructuralism. His text oscillates provoca- tively between Frankfurt and Paris. At times it appears to blend Critical Theory with poststructuralism; at others it rather seems to operate like a
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collage of vari- ous theoretical objets trouves. At any rate, Sloterdijk's intention is to move be- yond the propositions of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and to evade the post- Nietzschean compulsion to collapse knowledge and power. In that aim--and only in the aim--he might be said to approach Habermas, whose model of consensus and free dialogue he accepts as a "heeling fiction" (chapter 2) but rejects as an adequate description of the post-1960s status quo. In an era of widespread diffuse cynicism in which the traditional subject of critical knowledge and all central per-
FOREWORD ? xv
spectives of critique seem to have been pulverized, Sloterdijk constructs a new model of localized conflict that seeks literally to embody another reason, another enlightenment, another subjectivity. He proposes to turn the disillusionment with enlightened modernity away from melancholy and cynicism and to make lost illu- sions productive for an enlightened thought on anodier level. He wants to achieve this goal by reclaiming a tradition of rationality from which the modern scientific enlightenment, much to its detriment, has cut itself loose: the tradition of kyni- cism, embodied in Diogenes, who privileged satirical laughter, sensuality, the politics of the body, and a pleasure-oriented life as forms of resistance to the mas- ter narratives of Platonic idealism, the values of me polis, and the imperial claims of Alexander the Great.
II
Nevertheless, Sloterdijk's starting point remains Adorno and Horkheimer's pes- simistic work and its radical critique of instrumental reason and identity metaphysics. The Critique of Cynical Reason could indeed be read as a post- modern pastiche of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a pastiche, however, that re- tains me memory of the pain and anger of Adorno's melancholy science and that sympathizes with the rejection of a patriarchal world in which reason has become a strategic tool for the domination of inner and outer nature. If it is pastiche, how- ever, it is not so in the sense that Jameson has defined as one of the major modes
2ofpostmodernculturalproduction. Jamesonseespasticheasimitatingapeculiar
mask, as speech in a dead language, as a neutral practice of mimicry that has abandoned the satirical impulse still inherent in parody, that major stylistic strategy of modernism out of which pastiche is said to evolve. And he goes on to claim that producers of culture today "have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up
3in the imaginary museum of a now global cultulre. " Jameson clearly sees post-
modern pastiche negatively as a "random cannibalization of all styles of the past," and much of postmodernism can indeed be described in this way. In fact, even Sloterdijk could be said to cannibalize a number of different styles and modes of expression-the polished aphorism, the anecdote, the suggestive style of the feuilleton, satire, serious philosophical discourse, the discourses of literary and intellectual history-mixing mem in a kind of patchwork that prevents the emer- gence of a unitary style in the traditional modernist sense and that evades the re- quirements of a rigorous philosophical discourse.
But this is also the point where Sloterdijk's pastiche is no longer grasped by Jameson's characterizations. The Critique of Cynical Reason is not "blank
4parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. "
very beginning, with a combative impulse, and his text asserts a notion of an em- bodied subjectivity. Memory and anamnesis keep it from going blind, and the
Sloterdijk's pastiche is endowed, from the
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kynical impulse of Frechheit makes this pastiche come alive as self-assertive body. It is a philosophical pastiche that remains self-consciously satirical and never denies its substantive ties to the tradition of literary modernism and the historical avant-garde. Rather than postmodern in Jameson's sense, suspended, as it were, in the gap between signifier and signified, Sloterdijk's relationship to the discourses of various disciplines and media is Brechtian, even though without Brecht's Leninist politics, in that it has definite purposes, makes contingent argu- ments, and uses traditions critically to its own advantage. In this sense, Sloter- dijk's work could be claimed for a critical and adversarial postmodernism, a post- modernism of resistance, as some critics have called it.
At the same time, Sloterdijk's text is postmodern in yet another sense. The Cri- tique of Cynical Reason lacks the metaphysical backlighting that still hovers on the horizon of Adorno's critique of the metaphysics of reason, and that in general haunts much of literary and philosophical modernism. Thus in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, mat central text of philosophical high modernism, the struggle of reason against mythic nature that brings about the inescapably fatal
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reversal of reason into myth, of self-preservation into self-denial, is itself a metaphysical figure. Adorno's relation to metaphysics as the pretext of his critical work is as emphatically strong as Derrida's two decades later. Both Critical Theory and deconstruction, primarily through their readings of Nietzsche, actually ground a whole philosophy of history in their ideas about the rise and fall of metaphysics. But as Sloterdijk says, this notion of a breakdown, of a collapse, is today inade- quate: "Metaphysical systems do not 'fall,' but fade, seep away, stagnate, become boring, old hat, unimportant, and improbable. " (chapter 10, n. 16).
Instead of a totalizing unraveling of enlightenment and Western metaphysics (interpreted along the lines, say, of "phallogocentrism") or of an equally one- sided normative defense of enlightened modernity (interpreted along the lines of communicative reason), Sloterdijk gives us an account of the operations of en- lightened reason in history as a series of combative constellations without ground, without beginning and without telos: enlightenment as the eternal return of the same. As he tries to avoid any teleological account of the history of enlighten- ment, he presents us with the ineradicable return of the struggle between opposing consciousnesses: the cynicism of power and its institutions (in the realms of poli- tics, the military, religion, knowledge, sexuality, and medicine) vs. the kynical revolt from below, which responds to the cynicism of domination with satirical laughter, defiant body action, or strategic silence. Sloterdijk's description of cyni- cism and kynicism, repression and resistance, as a constant of history can be criti- cized as lacking historical specificity, but given the parameters of the current de- bate on postmodernity it has the advantage of making the fear of total closure suddenly appear to be as delusive and irrelevant as the hope for total emancipa- tion, the first actually being nothing so much as a binary reversal of the latter, a reversal of the messianic millenarianisms of the early twentieth century into the
FOREWORD ? xvii
catastrophic dystopias of our own time. Sloterdijk would be the last to forget the experiences of twentieth-century totalitarianisms; after all, his thought is grounded in the tortured insights of Critical Theory and cannot be accused of amnesia. But he does refuse the metaphysics of totality that still characterizes so much of contemporary European thought, even if in the form of radical negation. He refuses it in order to salvage the discourse of emancipation, shorn of its universalist claims and brought down to a localizable human dimension. With Adorno, Sloterdijk insists that one of the main problems with the Enlightenment was its inability to include the body and the senses in its project of emancipation. He therefore attempts to reconstitute Aujklarung on the limited basis of what he calls physiognomic thought, embodied thought, arguing for enlightenment as Selbsterfahrung rather than self-denial. The mythic model for the kind of somatic anarchism he advocates is the Greek kynic Diogenes, the plebeian outsider inside the walls of the city who challenged state and community through loud satirical laughter and who lived an animalist philosophy of survival and happy refusal.
But let's make no mistake. We are not just facing a return of the tired existen- tialist notion of the individual vs. society, the outsider vs. the group, the margin vs. the center. Nor is Sloterdijk's resurrection of Diogenes merely a nostalgia for the protest strategies of the 1960s shorn of their collective dimension and reduced to a kind of Stirnerian philosophy of the individual, self-identical body. Sloterdijk fully grasps the dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, body and power, and the reproach, often leveled against him, that he constructs a merely binary opposition between cynicism and kynicism simply misses the mark. After all, the cynic as disillusioned and pessimistic rationalist is as far beyond the belief in idealism, stable values, and human emancipation as the kynic is. Thus rather than positing a binary opposition of cynicism vs. kynicism, Sloterdijk postulates the split within the cynical phenomenon itself, which pits the cynical reason of domination and self-domination against the kynic revolt of self-assertion and self- realization. He mobilizes the kynical potential of the Diogenes tradition against a prevailing cynicism that successfully combines enlightenment with resignation and apathy. But it is precisely the moment of a disillusioned enlightenment in cynicism itself that-and this must be Sloterdijk's hope-might make it suscepti- ble to the temptation of kynical self-assertion. Here it becomes clear that Sloter- dijk's Diogenes strategy is directed primarily at those who still suffer, however subliminally, from enlightened false consciousness, not at the real cynics of domination or at those leaders of the contemporary world who mistake their own cynical politics for a return to old values, a form of unenlightened cynicism to which Sloterdijk pays scant attention. Sloterdijk is right in reminding us that the domination through instrumental or cynical reason can never be total and that the masochism of refusal or the melancholy about an irrevocable loss of happiness, that double heritage of Critical Theory, has today lost its offensive potential and reinforces the enlightened false consciousness it should help to dismantle.
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Thus Sloterdijk answers Adorno's melancholy science with a kind of Erheiterungsarbeit, a "work that entertains" (Preface) and is based on what he calls the "embodying of reason" (Preface). He carnivalizes the frozen landscape of negative dialectics, and mobilizes the kynical body of Diogenes against the cunning of Odysseus, that master-cynic of
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the Dialectic of Enlightenment who pays the price of self-denial in order to survive in his struggles with the mythic powers, the Cyclops and the Sirens. Where Adorno's Odysseus embodies what Sloterdijk calls "self-splitting in repression" (chapter 8), the ultimately unhappy consciousness of the modern cynic, Diogenes comes to represent the "self- embodiment in resistance" (chapter 8), an enlightened affirmation of a laughing, excreting, and masturbating body that actually undercuts the modern notion of a stable identity, attacks the armored, self-preserving, and rationalizing ego of capitalist culture, and dissolves its strict separations of inside and outside, private and public, self and other.
On one level Sloterdijk's return to the kynic body may appear as a merely adolescent and regressive gesture whose potential for effective resistance is a pri- ori contained and even vitiated by the way in which sexuality, the body, the cor- poreal have been deployed, instrumentalized, and co-opted by the contemporary culture industry. If, as Sloterdijk would have to be the first to admit, the body itself is a historical construct, how can the mere impudence of the postmodern Diogenes hope to break through the layers of reification and power inscriptions which Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have so cogently analyzed? And how would Sloterdijk counter a Foucaultian claim that the resistance of the self- conscious body is produced by the culture of cynicism itself as a regenerating and legitimating device? It is indeed questionable to what extent Diogenesian protest gestures could be more effective politically than traditional ideology critique combined with organized mass protests and group politics. Unless, of course, Di- ogenes's aim were to create a "counterpublic sphere," a kind of Gegenoffentlich- keit as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have theorized it. Precisely this broader dimension is absent from Diogenes's politics.
But the return to the body in Sloterdijk is never an end in itself, and we may have to look for its politics on another level. Enlightenment as Selbsterfahrung through the body tries to unearth a register of subjectivity buried in the civilizing process that produced the Western self-identical subject over the centuries. To that rational male subject, whose ultimate manifestation for Sloterdijk is the nu- clear bomb and its identity of self-preservation and self- destruction, Sloterdijk opposes an alternative subjectivity, a vision of an actual softening and liquefying of subjects: Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, however, no life has a name. The self-conscious Nobody in us--who acquires names and identities
FOREWORD ? xix
only through its social birth --remains the living source of freedom. 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 in the course of individuation from an areflexive "nar- cissism" to a reflected "self-discovery in the world-cosmos. " In this No- body, the last enlightenment, as critique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. (chapter 3)
It is in the discussion of this self-conscious nobody that both Sloterdijk's closeness to and distance from Adorno become emblematically visible. He reinterprets the famous passage in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus, in a lightning flash of fore- sight, answers the Cyclops's request for his name by saying: "Nobody is my name. " This ruse saves Odysseus's and his companions' lives because the blinded Cyclops fails to get help from his peers when he tells them: "Friends, nobody slays me with cunning," thus causing them to walk away laughing and to ignore his predicament.
For Adorno, it is all in the name. In the struggle of reason against the mythic powers of nature, the very act of physical self-preservation implies the sacrifice of the self.