the concept, the ethical teaching, and the
sympathetic
emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self- annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the image that he is seeing a single image of the world" (N ?
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
In his view, the aesthetic as the traditional medium in which ?
expresses itself, may serve, if conceived differently, as a medium in which subjects reflect their own structural makeup.
He attempts to shortcircuit aesthetic culture with theory.
The conception and institutionalization of autonomous art as comfort do not allow for a radical reflexivity.
The conception of such a radical reflexivity,
? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xiii
which, as I will argue in detail here, is at the center of Nietzsche's Birth of Trag- edy, had to position Nietzsche in the eyes of social modernists in the camp of modernity's enemies.
nNietzsche's (and Sloterdijk's) renewed effort to uncover the basic conflicts and tensions in modernity leads to a reassessment of the dialectic of enlightenment. Habermas has also recently dealt with this issue by staging a rereading of Hork-
and ? Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here, he denies that the basic (dialectical)tension of rationality and myth characteristic of modernity is insur- mountable. His ? of the dialectic of enlightenment essentially con- tends that the functional differentiation of modernity defuses and deactivates such tensions to the benefit of society, thus changing their dialectical
terdijk, on the other hand, insists with Nietzsche that the dialectic of enlighten- ment may be repressed but never overcome; he tries to recuperate an
overlooked aspect of the project of enlightenment ? idea of an enlightenment that resists repression and stresses the necessity for a stage on which the drama of the conflict is portrayed and worked through. As stated earlier, the principle that governs the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and that guaran- tees the primacy of the former is that of the necessity of representation or bolization. What determines the nature of aesthetic representation in modernity most strongly is the fact that a mode of representation enlightened by the basic tension between the Dionysian and the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Apollonian can no longer claim to be a mimetic one. A split subjectivity can even less be "imitated," (i. e. , objectively portrayed for an individual) than ? since the relationship between sub- ject and artistic object can no longer be one of an encounter with beauty; rather, the artistic object serves as a mirror in whose image the subject reflects his or her own constitution ? constitution that by definition cannot be " h a d " in a unified image. The existence of the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces aesthetic representations to incorporate into their being a reflection upon their nonspatial and nontemporal relationship. "Thus, Apollo is the calculating subject who enters into a daring game with his own dissolution" (S ? Since a reflection, in the medium of the aesthetic, on the nature of this contradictory re- lationship introduces the only possibility of initiating awareness of the strictures of the system, Nietzsche can contend, in Sloterdijk's words, that through the "el- evation into the ? the world becomes more than it ? The substitution
superior to what it replaces; what has arisen from the original surpasses it" (S 30).
It should be obvious at this point that Sloterdijk reads Nietzsche as Lyotard reads Kant. The Dionysian and the sublime are both unrepresentable, at least not without being ? changed by ? Lyo-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xiv FOREWORD
notion of the sublime, although never mentioned by Sloterdijk, seems to be an important point of reference in Sloterdijk's discourse. For both Lyotard, in his reading of Kant, and Sloterdijk, in his reading of Nietzsche, emphasize the im- possibility of symbolically representing an "other" space that is located outside reality ? representation that would enable us, by making a thinking of "oth- erness" possible, to intervene in reality. As a result, both Lyotard and Sloterdijk are concerned with the possibility of resistance after it has been acknowledged once and for all that it is impossible to represent a Utopia. The belief in the pos- sibility of such representations moved, as one will recall, the Enlightenment to hope that individuals and society ? the help of such and through rational debates and actions based on such debates ? be led to a better future. In this sense, enlightenment and its philosophies of history have become "impossible" for both authors. However, ? as Sloterdijk reads him, insists that this is an impoverished notion of enlightenment that tends to deflate the concept of critique as well as that of
Sloterdijk's reading of Nietzsche is an uncustomary one. In order to assess the validity of this reading and to grasp the nature and importance of the aesthetic state of radical reflexivity that Sloterdijk sees expressed in Nietzsche's book, I will turn to Nietzsche's text for a while and add my own reading of Nietzsche as a critic of modernity. As I will try to show, Nietzsche is a surprisingly structura- listic reader of modernity, an aspect somewhat neglected in Sloterdijk's restating of Nietzsche's project.
I already indicated that Nietzsche's reading of modernity, taken as a practice of structuralistic analysis, hides itself behind two rhetorical devices: first, behind the figures of Dionysus, Apollo, and Socrates, thus disguising its analytic force as a mythical narrative, and, second, behind a (pseudoscholarly) reading of an- tiquity. At first glance, Socrates' attitude toward Dionysus seems designed to i l - lustrate and narrate the relationship between the functionally differentiated realms of the ? ? and ? on the one hand, and the aes- thetic, on the other. Seen as a one-dimensional tension between two structurally unfolded realms, the aesthetic and the theoretical complement each other. The longing for ego transgression is, thus, the product of a structural factor. "The idyllic shepherd of modern man is merely a counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that are allegedly nature" (N 62). Idyllic scenes address "the abstract man, untutored by myth" and burdened by "abstract education; abstract moral- ity; abstract law; the abstract state" (N ? They are an expression of the " d i - version-craven luxuriousness" of modern individuals (N ? Speaking about the opera, which he sees as the "thoroughly modern variety of art," Nietzsche maintains that modern ? ? ? responds to a powerful need, but it is a nonaes-
? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xv
thetic need: the yearning for the idyllic, the faith in the primordial existence of artistic and ? man" (N ? In light of his appraisal of the opera as the genre of compensatory art, he calls the historical emergence of opera, seemingly contradicting his earlier reading of Socrates as the paradigmatic figure of theoretical culture, "the birth of the theoretical man" (N ? Yet
Nietzsche is never interested in following a chronology or telling a
since every story is necessarily entangled in a nondialectical notion of enlight- enment. Both Socrates and the opera are mere figures in whose images he strives to understand a structure without falling into the trap of a linear diachronic and synchronic thinking. "The [theoretical] man incapable of art creates for himself a kind of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as such" (N ? thus compensating the one-sidedness of his theoretical existence. Like opera, the fea- tures of compensatory art "do not by any means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the comfortable delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least always imagine as real" (N Nietzsche's attack on such art could be and has been understood as an attack on the sentimentality of ? opposed to genuine art. Yet such a reading would not do justice to Nietzsche's argument; on the contrary, it would com- pletely
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
remain within the framework of modern "theoretical" culture, thus ally- ing and implicating itself with that ? In such a ? a fully domesticated and structurally integrated art "rises like a sweetishly seductive column of vapor from the depth of the Socratic world view" (N ? When Nietzsche contends that such a perception of art lies "entirely outside of the aesthetic province," since it is being "stolen over from a ? sphere into the artistic domain" (N ? he accurately refers to the aestheticization of morality that had been taking place since the early eighteenth century and that found its earliest expres- sion in writers like Shaftesbury. In this tradition, ? ? concept that was from the first decade of the eighteenth century to the ? undoubtedly the most important aesthetic ? ? could serve as an aesthetic notion stripped of its Dionysian dimension; it could represent an aesthetic experience that, as sen- timentalized and thus domesticated desire, does not disrupt the system of moder- nity. Moreover, it could link the aesthetic with a philosophy of history in which modernity dreamed its own sublation in a future state of primordial unity.
Surprisingly enough, Nietzsche introduces the Dionysian principle in a termi- nology and from a viewpoint that is not only compatible with the Enlightenment notion of a pleasurable experience of community; it seems at times even identical to it: "Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. ? ? ? Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice,
have fixed between man and man are ? Now, with
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xvi FOREWORD
the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, recon- ciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him" (N 37). Nietzsche, the most outspoken polemicist imaginable when it comes to the Enlightenment notion of morality, introduces the Dionysian here in a language reminiscent of the
celebration of community with which Schiller ends his essay The Theater as a Moral Institution. These initial similarities can be stretched even further. For Nietzsche's description of the Dionysian is also compatible with the enlightened or modern perception of the aesthetic as compensatory. Nietzsche starts from the same observations as Addison, Rousseau, Lord ? (Henry Home), and Schiller, among ? Yet, Enlightenment philosophers tend to view the rela- tionship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as a linear relationship be- tween intoxication and constraint, transgression and delimitation, even then when ? it, they turn it into a pseudodialectical relationship between present and future. They not only tend to identify the Dionysian with the moral and political (sympathy), but also with the natural sign, thus erasing a problem- atic most essential for Nietzsche: the necessary and insurmountable delimitation and splitting of the Dionysian in and through
However, the similarities do not and could not last long. For Nietzsche, the indispensable polarity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian began to swing out of balance in modernity. The occasion that induced this development was the grad- ual unconditional dominance of the Apollonian, restricted to the realm of auton- omous art, thus stifling a mode of reflection that was geared toward human cul- ture as a whole. The Dionysian, only simmering in art from afar, is ? the rhetorical strategies of aesthetic ideology ? repressed by the constant affirmation of a newly differentiated and separated aesthetic ? For Nietz- sche, human culture has, ever since Socrates, been marked by what can be called a Dionysus oblivion. Therefore, no matter to what extent the concept of the Dionysian is seen in the tradition of aesthetic ego transgressions ? the En- lightenment, Nietzsche vehemently opposes the Enlightenment's aspirations to transform and project the "mysterious primordial unity" into a historicophiloso- phical state that can be anticipated by "enlightened" intellectuals. He brands the transformation of the Dionysian into a ? projection as an un- founded, structurally motivated optimism, "which, having once penetrated trag- edy must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and impel it necessarily to self-destruction ? the death-leap into the bourgeois drama" (N 91). Wherever Nietzsche polemicizes against the Enlightenment and its global moralism, he does so because it deflates the dialectical nature of the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian as the two basic principles of life, thus striving to neu- tralize the only space from which resistance might emerge. "For with respect to art," Socrates, "that despotic logician" and incarnation of the "theoretical man" (i. e. , of the modern alienated individual Schiller describes in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of ? feels "a ? a void, half a ? a
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xvii
possibly neglected duty" (N 92). This very Socrates is therefore forced, at the end of his ? to address a question that he had constantly repressed and to ask himself: "Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science? " (N 93). In short, Nietzsche saw the structural integration of the aesthetic into the system of modernity as a compensatory realm surprisingly clearly. Insofar as he attempts to rescue the aesthetic from such an integration, Nietzsche's project co- incides with the project of the historical
Nietzsche blocks an "enlightened" reading of the Dionysian by radicalizing the opposition between aesthetic and daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
experiences: "For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of exist- ence ? while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experi- ences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will- negating mood is the fruit of these states" (N 59- 60). The aesthetic introduces the possibility of transcending agonistic individualism; as such it is a precondi- tion for the acceptance of
Unlike the avant-garde, Nietzsche employs myths in order to understand the necessity for myths; he narrates myths in order to illuminate the nonmythical par excellence: social structures. The myth of the destruction of tragedy represents the functional integration of art as compensatory. Nietzsche, of course, could never agree with such a reading of his analytic method since it necessarily turns the mythical into an analogical construct that "imitates" a structural "reality" outside itself, thus defusing the disruptive power of the mythical. For if "our understanding is to content itself with the perception ? ? ? analogies" between history and society, on the one hand, and myth, on the other, then "we are re- duced to a frame of mind which makes impossible any reception of the
for the myth wants to be experienced vividly as a unique example of a universal- ity and truth that gaze into the infinite" (N ? Reading myth, as I have done, as a means of explaining the structure of modernity ends, in Nietzsche's view, in being caught in the premises of a nondialectical enlightenment. A structuralistic description of modernity that claims to explain the structure as a whole is an im- possibility for him. The gap between the "theoretical" and the "tragic" can nei- ther be comprehended scientifically nor deactivated. Only if we do not attempt to explain this gap away can society, "leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually [begin] to tremble with wanton agitations and desires" (N ? However, Nietzsche's inclination to avoid a structuralistic understand- ing of his own reading of modernity is, as I will argue later, based on the premise that a redefined aesthetic has to be kept from being contaminated by a social structure that remains "outside" and by discourses implicated by that structure. The analysis itself has to be turned into an aesthetic phenomenon. This assumes,
? ? ? ? ? xviii FOREWORD
I would like to suggest, a problematic distinction between discursive genres. If one reconceives the same project as a strategy that can be employed within a the- oretical discourse, Nietzsche's reluctance to employ means other than myth might turn out to be an unfounded epistemological precaution.
Nietzsche's essay displays an acute understanding of both the indispensable function and problematic status of ? Viewing the "impulse which calls art into being as the complement and consummation of existence ? a transfiguring mirror" (N 43), he conceives of the sign as a necessary comple- ment to existence, since only in the mirror of the sign can humans free them- selves reflectively from strictures inscribed upon their existence. Nietzsche's conception of the mythical or aesthetic sign as mirror has to be read as a political gesture of resistance. The sign, necessarily confining that which it signifies, is per definition of an Apollonian nature. By stressing the Apollonian nature of rep- resentation, Nietzsche insists on the necessity of delimitation; he even insists on the necessity of agonistic interaction: "For Apollo wants to grant repose to indi- vidual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to mind as the most sacred laws of the world, with his de- mands for self-knowledge and measure" (N 72). Self-knowledge and measure, however, cannot be attained in the ? fashion of mirrorless reflection. Nietzsche cloaks even his epistemological and methodological reflections on the problematic status of analytic rationality in a mythical narrative. Thus, he ex- presses the status of mythical figures, prerequisite to cognition, in the figure of Socrates, whose image serves as a mirror in which Nietzsche can unfold his methodological ? If the Greeks had wanted to erase the influence of Socrates, Nietzsche maintains, they should have exiled him. The living, but geographically removed, Socrates could not have served as a sign (or, from the hindsight of a culture of the spectacle one might contend: at least not before the advent of mass communication). However, the "dying Socrates," being turned into an image through his death, "became the new ideal, never seen before"; and Greek youths prostrated themselves "before this image" (N 89). "Hence the image of the dying ? as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission ? to make existence appear com- prehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the ? which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science" (N 96). Nietzsche argues repeatedly for a two- fold necessity of myth. The image of the dying Socrates is a mythical represen- tation that strengthens the realm of science. Only in the image of its mythical representation can science sustain itself as a delimited unit; myth is a prerequisite for delimitations. The mythical image as mirror is the ? individua- tionis. In addition to such an internal mythical supplement, scientific or theoret-
? ? FOREWORD xix
thinking needs an external complement: the Dionysian tamed by its artistic
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Representation ? the Apollonian as a philosophical reflection in the guise of myth is simply a mythical circumscription of the unavoidability of represen- us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in in- dividuals ? it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they ? With the immense impact of the ?
the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self- annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the image that he is seeing a single image of the world" (N ? Representation detains and obstructs that which it aims to
express.
Art as representation is ? ? mirror image in which the Dionysian man con-
templates himself" (N 63). Like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, the Dionysian of modern beings "ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images" (N 65). Aesthetic representation is "ethical" and as such, it "exacts measure"; and, "to be able to maintain" measure, ? is required (N 46). That is, self-knowledge can be obtained only through the critical reflec- tion of one's own split constitution in the medium of the aesthetic. Remaining aware that a poem is merely a ? a ? of sem- blance" only (N 50), protects against dissolution and complete "destruction of the ? ? When one "conceives of all nature," oneself included, "as willing, as desiring, as eternal longing ? by means of images,"
one "rests in the calm sea of Apollinian
In opposition to Kant's notion of an aesthetic idea and to the classical, related notion of the aesthetic contemplation of internally always complex artistic struc- tures, Nietzsche insists that aesthetic experience should be one in which we "see at the same time" that we "also [long] to transcend all seeing" (N 140). What he expects of the tragic artist is a feature of all nondomesticated art: "With the Apollinian art sphere he [the tragic artist] shares the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appear- ance" (N 140). In regard to the necessity of representation, Apollo is indeed "the ruler in the antithetical relationship with his Other" (S 25). However, Nietz- sche aims at establishing an aesthetic culture that allows Apollonian control to be momentarily, yet elusively suspended. Such moments are supposedly able to transform the dispersion of the (modern) psyche into the productive gesture of reflexivity. In this sense, Sloterdijk's remark that "Nietzsche's dramatic thought is in the process of discovering that it is absolutely impossible for self-reflection and identity the sense of an experience of unity that could lead to content-
occur 32) is even more pertinent. When aesthetic experience is turned into a reflection of the structural interdependence of subject
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xx FOREWORD
and society/history, it generates a capacity to resist. Radical reflexivity leads to a split aesthetic state.
Nietzsche's own project wants to adhere to the possibility that "at the most essential point this Apollinian illusion" can be "broken and annihilated" (N By reflecting upon the double necessity of delimitation and transgression in the medium of tragedy, "the Apollinian delusion reveals itself as what it really is ? veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian Through such a reflection we force "the Apollinian drama ? ? ? into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility" (130). Again, Nietzsche's dream turns out to be the dream of avant-garde art, namely, that art might be employed to sublate its rep- resentational nature and to open up a space of structural independence. In this sense Nietzsche's statement that "Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally, the language of Dionysus" is the poetic veiling of a culture-rev-
olutionary dream.
IV
Nietzsche's thinking starts from the tension between a phallic armoring of sub- jectivity and a boundary-dissolving ego ? Again, this distinction can be located in the tradition of the Enlightenment, particularly in the tradition of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. In Burke's essay A Philo- sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from
for instance, which presents the first major (and most influential) theory of the sublime in the eighteenth century, the "sublime" refers to an aesthetic expe- rience based on an armored subjectivity, the "beautiful" to one implying ego Burke bases his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful on that between "self-preservation and ? in which ? means community. Whereas the beautiful implies a pleasurable relaxation of bound- aries, the sublime connotes a painful drawing of boundaries: "The passions which belong to ? turn on pain and danger; they are simply pain- ful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such ? He sees the source of this painful delight in the "absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all ? concluding that "whatever ex- cites this delight" is called sublime: "The passions belonging to self- preserva- tion are the strongest of all the
It is not by chance that Burke closely relates the human drive for "self-pres- ervation" to the antisocial or agonistic
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
behavior of (male) individuals; that is, he sees agonistic behavior as a necessary attribute of the competitive and isolated existence of males. The sublime is the mode of experience in which males can enjoy aesthetically the peculiarities of their existence: "Whatever is fitted in any
? ? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxi
sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analo- gous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of Interestingly enough, Burke values the sublime more than the To him, the aesthetic reconciliation of the male principle of competitiveness with community seems to be more impor- tant than any reconciliation concerning woman. On the background of such val- uations, it follows almost logically that Burke at one point defines the sublime as a phallic representation of a fortified, agonistic male consciousness: "Now what- ever either on good or upon bad grounds tends to raise a man in his own
produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it
I mention Burke's notion of the sublime here because it can serve as an excel- lent background for Nietzsche's recanting of this tradition. Nietzsche set out to dislodge an aesthetic culture that is centered on male fortifications, even where it institutionalizes momentary forms of ego ? He tries to establish an aesthetic culture that undermines the fortification of subjectivity. In this sense he conceives of the "rebirth of Dionysus ? as the end of individuation" (N 74). Quoting Schopenhauer, he revalues "the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an ? The terror of psychic fortifications should be corrected by "the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depth of man, indeed of nature, at [the] collapse of the principium individuationis" (N 36).
However, the Dionysian does not realize itself as forgetful ecstasy, but does so in decentering reflections. That is to say, in reflecting upon our split subjectivity, we release energies that dislodge an identity-bound perception of our selves. It is this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking that understandably interests Sloterdijk most. If a "decentering of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy," is the sole means "to a legitimate constitution of subjectivity - - beyond ego and will," then the enlightened subject can "no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accordance with the rules of Apollonian
as an autonomous source of meaning, ethos, logic, and truth instead, as something medial, cybernetic, eccentric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal antagonisms, as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the ? of primordial pleasure" (S 82). An aesthetic cul- ture conceived as the site of such a decentering of subjectivity is incompatible ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxii FOREWORD
with the aesthetic culture of modernity, which functions as an imaginary projec- tion of the fulfillment of our dreams, be they personal or
Nietzsche's and Sloterdijk's readings of modernity's aesthetic culture are rel- evant to a number of current debates in the United ? To name just one: they are closely connected to crucial readings of narrative culture suggested by critics like Hayden White. In arguing "that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, White, for instance, holds that the narrativizing of events has nothing to do with an understanding of "reality" but is determined by a human desire to achieve a masterful, dominat- ing position vis-a-vis external events, which, in turn, will allow the cognizing subject to conceive of his or her own ego as a knowledgeable, ? identity. The constant attempts by human beings to arrest meaning in ideological dis- courses and, thus, to interpret the texts of the world as transparent meanings is here viewed as the result of our anxieties that we may lose our identities. Falling into the other extreme, humans tend to fortify themselves as centered identities that enter communicative interactions as contests. As in the Greek competition, the agonia, the participants in communicative struggles are necessarily interested in boosting their identities, not only by winning in their struggle against each other, ? this is supposedly the unsublatable presupposition of the agonis- tic character of human winning in the struggle against the perpetually mobile structure of language as Both the ? of lan- guage and the structural dispersal of subjectivity lead to a need to safeguard human identity from what might become a dangerous vertigo. The result of this need to protect human identity is a return to a one-sidedly rational methodology based on the epistemological premise of absolute the primacy of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the ? of binary
and homogeneity over difference, ? and heterogeneity.
Such considerations are closely related to concerns that any "value attached to narrativity in the representation of real
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be ? White suggests, in the words of the vol- ume's editor, that "narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions and that the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a revolt against the authority of the social
The issues raised by White are, in the face of neoconservative and fundamen- talist attempts at reviving cultural politics that are more suited to the erection of strong superegos, indeed seminal. Totalizing narratives which have a closed ideological structure unfolding in a narrative action from an ideologically distinct starting point to an equally distinct goal are the equivalent of a centered subjec- tivity; they function within the system of modernity as lightning rods and points
the priority of identity, unity,
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxiii
of ? for a desire to achieve a unified identity ? desire generated by a split subjectivity. The narrative of ideological closure that assumes the possi- bility of "a point of view from which the whole can be comprehended, a posi- tion, therefore, that must be essentially detached from and outside of what it seeks to return to Nietzsche's terminology objecti-
of the "Apollinian that the subject can be ? autonomous source of meaning, ? logic, and The fluctuation in aesthetic expe- rience between Apollonian and Dionysian readings is far removed from a cogni- tion or knowledge of an aesthetic object; it has nothing to do with the "acqui- sition of information about an object so that our subjecthood is defined in the cognition of objects, be they things, ideas, or other human ? The only way to suspend the defusing effect of the institutionalization of autonomous art as a means of compensation might lie in the radical reflexivity unfolded in Nietzsche's project.
According to Nietzsche, disarming humans of polemical identities should be modernity's most urgent project. It is here where Sloterdijk can connect his read- ing of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a fundamental text of modernity with his own project as developed in the Critique of Cynical Reason, where he maintains that in order to survive, we will have to disidentify ourselves from everything that arms itself. The price for surviving in tomorrow's society might have to be paid in a psychic currency ? not at ? We might have to give up the security of all local identifications such as jingoistic patriotism that we achieve only at the cost of repressing alterity. Whatever fortifies itself in order to remain what it imagines itself to be, might dig its own grave. In Nietzsche's view, disarmament can be realized only as an aesthetic ? least if and when an aesthetic culture can be established that releases the radical potential of the dialectic be- tween the Apollonian and Dionysian dimension of art.
Notes
Using the abbreviations N and S, I will quote Sloterdijk and Nietzsche in the text; the Nietz- sche text according to ? Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Walter
and comm. (New York: Vintage, 1967).
2. Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ? p.
120.
3. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, in die 37 (1983), p. 759.
4. Habermas, p. 760.
5. Cf. my essays "The Prestige of the Artist under Conditions of Modernity," in Cultural Cri-
tique no. 12 (Spring 1989); "Imagination and Modernity, Or the Taming of the Human Mind," in Critique no. 5 (Winter 1987); and "Art and the Sacrificial Structure of Modernity," after- word to Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: The Genealogy of the Beholder in Diderot (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
6. SeePeterBurger,TheoryoftheAvant-Garde,trans. MichaelShaw(Minneapolis:University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxiv FOREWORD
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and ed. J. T. ? (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 38.
p.
p. 39. pp.
Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," On Narrative, J. T. Mitchell, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 23.
Mitchell, "Foreword," ? p. viii.
Sam Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 54.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
14. Cf. ? Godzich, "After the Storyteller ? ? ? ? foreword to Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xviii-xix.
7.
8.
9. 10.
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xiii
which, as I will argue in detail here, is at the center of Nietzsche's Birth of Trag- edy, had to position Nietzsche in the eyes of social modernists in the camp of modernity's enemies.
nNietzsche's (and Sloterdijk's) renewed effort to uncover the basic conflicts and tensions in modernity leads to a reassessment of the dialectic of enlightenment. Habermas has also recently dealt with this issue by staging a rereading of Hork-
and ? Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here, he denies that the basic (dialectical)tension of rationality and myth characteristic of modernity is insur- mountable. His ? of the dialectic of enlightenment essentially con- tends that the functional differentiation of modernity defuses and deactivates such tensions to the benefit of society, thus changing their dialectical
terdijk, on the other hand, insists with Nietzsche that the dialectic of enlighten- ment may be repressed but never overcome; he tries to recuperate an
overlooked aspect of the project of enlightenment ? idea of an enlightenment that resists repression and stresses the necessity for a stage on which the drama of the conflict is portrayed and worked through. As stated earlier, the principle that governs the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and that guaran- tees the primacy of the former is that of the necessity of representation or bolization. What determines the nature of aesthetic representation in modernity most strongly is the fact that a mode of representation enlightened by the basic tension between the Dionysian and the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Apollonian can no longer claim to be a mimetic one. A split subjectivity can even less be "imitated," (i. e. , objectively portrayed for an individual) than ? since the relationship between sub- ject and artistic object can no longer be one of an encounter with beauty; rather, the artistic object serves as a mirror in whose image the subject reflects his or her own constitution ? constitution that by definition cannot be " h a d " in a unified image. The existence of the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces aesthetic representations to incorporate into their being a reflection upon their nonspatial and nontemporal relationship. "Thus, Apollo is the calculating subject who enters into a daring game with his own dissolution" (S ? Since a reflection, in the medium of the aesthetic, on the nature of this contradictory re- lationship introduces the only possibility of initiating awareness of the strictures of the system, Nietzsche can contend, in Sloterdijk's words, that through the "el- evation into the ? the world becomes more than it ? The substitution
superior to what it replaces; what has arisen from the original surpasses it" (S 30).
It should be obvious at this point that Sloterdijk reads Nietzsche as Lyotard reads Kant. The Dionysian and the sublime are both unrepresentable, at least not without being ? changed by ? Lyo-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xiv FOREWORD
notion of the sublime, although never mentioned by Sloterdijk, seems to be an important point of reference in Sloterdijk's discourse. For both Lyotard, in his reading of Kant, and Sloterdijk, in his reading of Nietzsche, emphasize the im- possibility of symbolically representing an "other" space that is located outside reality ? representation that would enable us, by making a thinking of "oth- erness" possible, to intervene in reality. As a result, both Lyotard and Sloterdijk are concerned with the possibility of resistance after it has been acknowledged once and for all that it is impossible to represent a Utopia. The belief in the pos- sibility of such representations moved, as one will recall, the Enlightenment to hope that individuals and society ? the help of such and through rational debates and actions based on such debates ? be led to a better future. In this sense, enlightenment and its philosophies of history have become "impossible" for both authors. However, ? as Sloterdijk reads him, insists that this is an impoverished notion of enlightenment that tends to deflate the concept of critique as well as that of
Sloterdijk's reading of Nietzsche is an uncustomary one. In order to assess the validity of this reading and to grasp the nature and importance of the aesthetic state of radical reflexivity that Sloterdijk sees expressed in Nietzsche's book, I will turn to Nietzsche's text for a while and add my own reading of Nietzsche as a critic of modernity. As I will try to show, Nietzsche is a surprisingly structura- listic reader of modernity, an aspect somewhat neglected in Sloterdijk's restating of Nietzsche's project.
I already indicated that Nietzsche's reading of modernity, taken as a practice of structuralistic analysis, hides itself behind two rhetorical devices: first, behind the figures of Dionysus, Apollo, and Socrates, thus disguising its analytic force as a mythical narrative, and, second, behind a (pseudoscholarly) reading of an- tiquity. At first glance, Socrates' attitude toward Dionysus seems designed to i l - lustrate and narrate the relationship between the functionally differentiated realms of the ? ? and ? on the one hand, and the aes- thetic, on the other. Seen as a one-dimensional tension between two structurally unfolded realms, the aesthetic and the theoretical complement each other. The longing for ego transgression is, thus, the product of a structural factor. "The idyllic shepherd of modern man is merely a counterfeit of the sum of cultural illusions that are allegedly nature" (N 62). Idyllic scenes address "the abstract man, untutored by myth" and burdened by "abstract education; abstract moral- ity; abstract law; the abstract state" (N ? They are an expression of the " d i - version-craven luxuriousness" of modern individuals (N ? Speaking about the opera, which he sees as the "thoroughly modern variety of art," Nietzsche maintains that modern ? ? ? responds to a powerful need, but it is a nonaes-
? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xv
thetic need: the yearning for the idyllic, the faith in the primordial existence of artistic and ? man" (N ? In light of his appraisal of the opera as the genre of compensatory art, he calls the historical emergence of opera, seemingly contradicting his earlier reading of Socrates as the paradigmatic figure of theoretical culture, "the birth of the theoretical man" (N ? Yet
Nietzsche is never interested in following a chronology or telling a
since every story is necessarily entangled in a nondialectical notion of enlight- enment. Both Socrates and the opera are mere figures in whose images he strives to understand a structure without falling into the trap of a linear diachronic and synchronic thinking. "The [theoretical] man incapable of art creates for himself a kind of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as such" (N ? thus compensating the one-sidedness of his theoretical existence. Like opera, the fea- tures of compensatory art "do not by any means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the comfortable delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least always imagine as real" (N Nietzsche's attack on such art could be and has been understood as an attack on the sentimentality of ? opposed to genuine art. Yet such a reading would not do justice to Nietzsche's argument; on the contrary, it would com- pletely
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
remain within the framework of modern "theoretical" culture, thus ally- ing and implicating itself with that ? In such a ? a fully domesticated and structurally integrated art "rises like a sweetishly seductive column of vapor from the depth of the Socratic world view" (N ? When Nietzsche contends that such a perception of art lies "entirely outside of the aesthetic province," since it is being "stolen over from a ? sphere into the artistic domain" (N ? he accurately refers to the aestheticization of morality that had been taking place since the early eighteenth century and that found its earliest expres- sion in writers like Shaftesbury. In this tradition, ? ? concept that was from the first decade of the eighteenth century to the ? undoubtedly the most important aesthetic ? ? could serve as an aesthetic notion stripped of its Dionysian dimension; it could represent an aesthetic experience that, as sen- timentalized and thus domesticated desire, does not disrupt the system of moder- nity. Moreover, it could link the aesthetic with a philosophy of history in which modernity dreamed its own sublation in a future state of primordial unity.
Surprisingly enough, Nietzsche introduces the Dionysian principle in a termi- nology and from a viewpoint that is not only compatible with the Enlightenment notion of a pleasurable experience of community; it seems at times even identical to it: "Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. ? ? ? Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice,
have fixed between man and man are ? Now, with
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xvi FOREWORD
the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, recon- ciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him" (N 37). Nietzsche, the most outspoken polemicist imaginable when it comes to the Enlightenment notion of morality, introduces the Dionysian here in a language reminiscent of the
celebration of community with which Schiller ends his essay The Theater as a Moral Institution. These initial similarities can be stretched even further. For Nietzsche's description of the Dionysian is also compatible with the enlightened or modern perception of the aesthetic as compensatory. Nietzsche starts from the same observations as Addison, Rousseau, Lord ? (Henry Home), and Schiller, among ? Yet, Enlightenment philosophers tend to view the rela- tionship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as a linear relationship be- tween intoxication and constraint, transgression and delimitation, even then when ? it, they turn it into a pseudodialectical relationship between present and future. They not only tend to identify the Dionysian with the moral and political (sympathy), but also with the natural sign, thus erasing a problem- atic most essential for Nietzsche: the necessary and insurmountable delimitation and splitting of the Dionysian in and through
However, the similarities do not and could not last long. For Nietzsche, the indispensable polarity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian began to swing out of balance in modernity. The occasion that induced this development was the grad- ual unconditional dominance of the Apollonian, restricted to the realm of auton- omous art, thus stifling a mode of reflection that was geared toward human cul- ture as a whole. The Dionysian, only simmering in art from afar, is ? the rhetorical strategies of aesthetic ideology ? repressed by the constant affirmation of a newly differentiated and separated aesthetic ? For Nietz- sche, human culture has, ever since Socrates, been marked by what can be called a Dionysus oblivion. Therefore, no matter to what extent the concept of the Dionysian is seen in the tradition of aesthetic ego transgressions ? the En- lightenment, Nietzsche vehemently opposes the Enlightenment's aspirations to transform and project the "mysterious primordial unity" into a historicophiloso- phical state that can be anticipated by "enlightened" intellectuals. He brands the transformation of the Dionysian into a ? projection as an un- founded, structurally motivated optimism, "which, having once penetrated trag- edy must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and impel it necessarily to self-destruction ? the death-leap into the bourgeois drama" (N 91). Wherever Nietzsche polemicizes against the Enlightenment and its global moralism, he does so because it deflates the dialectical nature of the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian as the two basic principles of life, thus striving to neu- tralize the only space from which resistance might emerge. "For with respect to art," Socrates, "that despotic logician" and incarnation of the "theoretical man" (i. e. , of the modern alienated individual Schiller describes in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of ? feels "a ? a void, half a ? a
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xvii
possibly neglected duty" (N 92). This very Socrates is therefore forced, at the end of his ? to address a question that he had constantly repressed and to ask himself: "Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science? " (N 93). In short, Nietzsche saw the structural integration of the aesthetic into the system of modernity as a compensatory realm surprisingly clearly. Insofar as he attempts to rescue the aesthetic from such an integration, Nietzsche's project co- incides with the project of the historical
Nietzsche blocks an "enlightened" reading of the Dionysian by radicalizing the opposition between aesthetic and daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
experiences: "For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of exist- ence ? while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experi- ences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will- negating mood is the fruit of these states" (N 59- 60). The aesthetic introduces the possibility of transcending agonistic individualism; as such it is a precondi- tion for the acceptance of
Unlike the avant-garde, Nietzsche employs myths in order to understand the necessity for myths; he narrates myths in order to illuminate the nonmythical par excellence: social structures. The myth of the destruction of tragedy represents the functional integration of art as compensatory. Nietzsche, of course, could never agree with such a reading of his analytic method since it necessarily turns the mythical into an analogical construct that "imitates" a structural "reality" outside itself, thus defusing the disruptive power of the mythical. For if "our understanding is to content itself with the perception ? ? ? analogies" between history and society, on the one hand, and myth, on the other, then "we are re- duced to a frame of mind which makes impossible any reception of the
for the myth wants to be experienced vividly as a unique example of a universal- ity and truth that gaze into the infinite" (N ? Reading myth, as I have done, as a means of explaining the structure of modernity ends, in Nietzsche's view, in being caught in the premises of a nondialectical enlightenment. A structuralistic description of modernity that claims to explain the structure as a whole is an im- possibility for him. The gap between the "theoretical" and the "tragic" can nei- ther be comprehended scientifically nor deactivated. Only if we do not attempt to explain this gap away can society, "leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually [begin] to tremble with wanton agitations and desires" (N ? However, Nietzsche's inclination to avoid a structuralistic understand- ing of his own reading of modernity is, as I will argue later, based on the premise that a redefined aesthetic has to be kept from being contaminated by a social structure that remains "outside" and by discourses implicated by that structure. The analysis itself has to be turned into an aesthetic phenomenon. This assumes,
? ? ? ? ? xviii FOREWORD
I would like to suggest, a problematic distinction between discursive genres. If one reconceives the same project as a strategy that can be employed within a the- oretical discourse, Nietzsche's reluctance to employ means other than myth might turn out to be an unfounded epistemological precaution.
Nietzsche's essay displays an acute understanding of both the indispensable function and problematic status of ? Viewing the "impulse which calls art into being as the complement and consummation of existence ? a transfiguring mirror" (N 43), he conceives of the sign as a necessary comple- ment to existence, since only in the mirror of the sign can humans free them- selves reflectively from strictures inscribed upon their existence. Nietzsche's conception of the mythical or aesthetic sign as mirror has to be read as a political gesture of resistance. The sign, necessarily confining that which it signifies, is per definition of an Apollonian nature. By stressing the Apollonian nature of rep- resentation, Nietzsche insists on the necessity of delimitation; he even insists on the necessity of agonistic interaction: "For Apollo wants to grant repose to indi- vidual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to mind as the most sacred laws of the world, with his de- mands for self-knowledge and measure" (N 72). Self-knowledge and measure, however, cannot be attained in the ? fashion of mirrorless reflection. Nietzsche cloaks even his epistemological and methodological reflections on the problematic status of analytic rationality in a mythical narrative. Thus, he ex- presses the status of mythical figures, prerequisite to cognition, in the figure of Socrates, whose image serves as a mirror in which Nietzsche can unfold his methodological ? If the Greeks had wanted to erase the influence of Socrates, Nietzsche maintains, they should have exiled him. The living, but geographically removed, Socrates could not have served as a sign (or, from the hindsight of a culture of the spectacle one might contend: at least not before the advent of mass communication). However, the "dying Socrates," being turned into an image through his death, "became the new ideal, never seen before"; and Greek youths prostrated themselves "before this image" (N 89). "Hence the image of the dying ? as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission ? to make existence appear com- prehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the ? which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science" (N 96). Nietzsche argues repeatedly for a two- fold necessity of myth. The image of the dying Socrates is a mythical represen- tation that strengthens the realm of science. Only in the image of its mythical representation can science sustain itself as a delimited unit; myth is a prerequisite for delimitations. The mythical image as mirror is the ? individua- tionis. In addition to such an internal mythical supplement, scientific or theoret-
? ? FOREWORD xix
thinking needs an external complement: the Dionysian tamed by its artistic
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Representation ? the Apollonian as a philosophical reflection in the guise of myth is simply a mythical circumscription of the unavoidability of represen- us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in in- dividuals ? it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they ? With the immense impact of the ?
the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self- annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the image that he is seeing a single image of the world" (N ? Representation detains and obstructs that which it aims to
express.
Art as representation is ? ? mirror image in which the Dionysian man con-
templates himself" (N 63). Like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, the Dionysian of modern beings "ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images" (N 65). Aesthetic representation is "ethical" and as such, it "exacts measure"; and, "to be able to maintain" measure, ? is required (N 46). That is, self-knowledge can be obtained only through the critical reflec- tion of one's own split constitution in the medium of the aesthetic. Remaining aware that a poem is merely a ? a ? of sem- blance" only (N 50), protects against dissolution and complete "destruction of the ? ? When one "conceives of all nature," oneself included, "as willing, as desiring, as eternal longing ? by means of images,"
one "rests in the calm sea of Apollinian
In opposition to Kant's notion of an aesthetic idea and to the classical, related notion of the aesthetic contemplation of internally always complex artistic struc- tures, Nietzsche insists that aesthetic experience should be one in which we "see at the same time" that we "also [long] to transcend all seeing" (N 140). What he expects of the tragic artist is a feature of all nondomesticated art: "With the Apollinian art sphere he [the tragic artist] shares the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appear- ance" (N 140). In regard to the necessity of representation, Apollo is indeed "the ruler in the antithetical relationship with his Other" (S 25). However, Nietz- sche aims at establishing an aesthetic culture that allows Apollonian control to be momentarily, yet elusively suspended. Such moments are supposedly able to transform the dispersion of the (modern) psyche into the productive gesture of reflexivity. In this sense, Sloterdijk's remark that "Nietzsche's dramatic thought is in the process of discovering that it is absolutely impossible for self-reflection and identity the sense of an experience of unity that could lead to content-
occur 32) is even more pertinent. When aesthetic experience is turned into a reflection of the structural interdependence of subject
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xx FOREWORD
and society/history, it generates a capacity to resist. Radical reflexivity leads to a split aesthetic state.
Nietzsche's own project wants to adhere to the possibility that "at the most essential point this Apollinian illusion" can be "broken and annihilated" (N By reflecting upon the double necessity of delimitation and transgression in the medium of tragedy, "the Apollinian delusion reveals itself as what it really is ? veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian Through such a reflection we force "the Apollinian drama ? ? ? into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility" (130). Again, Nietzsche's dream turns out to be the dream of avant-garde art, namely, that art might be employed to sublate its rep- resentational nature and to open up a space of structural independence. In this sense Nietzsche's statement that "Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally, the language of Dionysus" is the poetic veiling of a culture-rev-
olutionary dream.
IV
Nietzsche's thinking starts from the tension between a phallic armoring of sub- jectivity and a boundary-dissolving ego ? Again, this distinction can be located in the tradition of the Enlightenment, particularly in the tradition of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. In Burke's essay A Philo- sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from
for instance, which presents the first major (and most influential) theory of the sublime in the eighteenth century, the "sublime" refers to an aesthetic expe- rience based on an armored subjectivity, the "beautiful" to one implying ego Burke bases his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful on that between "self-preservation and ? in which ? means community. Whereas the beautiful implies a pleasurable relaxation of bound- aries, the sublime connotes a painful drawing of boundaries: "The passions which belong to ? turn on pain and danger; they are simply pain- ful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such ? He sees the source of this painful delight in the "absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all ? concluding that "whatever ex- cites this delight" is called sublime: "The passions belonging to self- preserva- tion are the strongest of all the
It is not by chance that Burke closely relates the human drive for "self-pres- ervation" to the antisocial or agonistic
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
behavior of (male) individuals; that is, he sees agonistic behavior as a necessary attribute of the competitive and isolated existence of males. The sublime is the mode of experience in which males can enjoy aesthetically the peculiarities of their existence: "Whatever is fitted in any
? ? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxi
sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analo- gous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of Interestingly enough, Burke values the sublime more than the To him, the aesthetic reconciliation of the male principle of competitiveness with community seems to be more impor- tant than any reconciliation concerning woman. On the background of such val- uations, it follows almost logically that Burke at one point defines the sublime as a phallic representation of a fortified, agonistic male consciousness: "Now what- ever either on good or upon bad grounds tends to raise a man in his own
produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it
I mention Burke's notion of the sublime here because it can serve as an excel- lent background for Nietzsche's recanting of this tradition. Nietzsche set out to dislodge an aesthetic culture that is centered on male fortifications, even where it institutionalizes momentary forms of ego ? He tries to establish an aesthetic culture that undermines the fortification of subjectivity. In this sense he conceives of the "rebirth of Dionysus ? as the end of individuation" (N 74). Quoting Schopenhauer, he revalues "the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an ? The terror of psychic fortifications should be corrected by "the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depth of man, indeed of nature, at [the] collapse of the principium individuationis" (N 36).
However, the Dionysian does not realize itself as forgetful ecstasy, but does so in decentering reflections. That is to say, in reflecting upon our split subjectivity, we release energies that dislodge an identity-bound perception of our selves. It is this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking that understandably interests Sloterdijk most. If a "decentering of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy," is the sole means "to a legitimate constitution of subjectivity - - beyond ego and will," then the enlightened subject can "no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accordance with the rules of Apollonian
as an autonomous source of meaning, ethos, logic, and truth instead, as something medial, cybernetic, eccentric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal antagonisms, as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the ? of primordial pleasure" (S 82). An aesthetic cul- ture conceived as the site of such a decentering of subjectivity is incompatible ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxii FOREWORD
with the aesthetic culture of modernity, which functions as an imaginary projec- tion of the fulfillment of our dreams, be they personal or
Nietzsche's and Sloterdijk's readings of modernity's aesthetic culture are rel- evant to a number of current debates in the United ? To name just one: they are closely connected to crucial readings of narrative culture suggested by critics like Hayden White. In arguing "that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, White, for instance, holds that the narrativizing of events has nothing to do with an understanding of "reality" but is determined by a human desire to achieve a masterful, dominat- ing position vis-a-vis external events, which, in turn, will allow the cognizing subject to conceive of his or her own ego as a knowledgeable, ? identity. The constant attempts by human beings to arrest meaning in ideological dis- courses and, thus, to interpret the texts of the world as transparent meanings is here viewed as the result of our anxieties that we may lose our identities. Falling into the other extreme, humans tend to fortify themselves as centered identities that enter communicative interactions as contests. As in the Greek competition, the agonia, the participants in communicative struggles are necessarily interested in boosting their identities, not only by winning in their struggle against each other, ? this is supposedly the unsublatable presupposition of the agonis- tic character of human winning in the struggle against the perpetually mobile structure of language as Both the ? of lan- guage and the structural dispersal of subjectivity lead to a need to safeguard human identity from what might become a dangerous vertigo. The result of this need to protect human identity is a return to a one-sidedly rational methodology based on the epistemological premise of absolute the primacy of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the ? of binary
and homogeneity over difference, ? and heterogeneity.
Such considerations are closely related to concerns that any "value attached to narrativity in the representation of real
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be ? White suggests, in the words of the vol- ume's editor, that "narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions and that the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a revolt against the authority of the social
The issues raised by White are, in the face of neoconservative and fundamen- talist attempts at reviving cultural politics that are more suited to the erection of strong superegos, indeed seminal. Totalizing narratives which have a closed ideological structure unfolding in a narrative action from an ideologically distinct starting point to an equally distinct goal are the equivalent of a centered subjec- tivity; they function within the system of modernity as lightning rods and points
the priority of identity, unity,
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxiii
of ? for a desire to achieve a unified identity ? desire generated by a split subjectivity. The narrative of ideological closure that assumes the possi- bility of "a point of view from which the whole can be comprehended, a posi- tion, therefore, that must be essentially detached from and outside of what it seeks to return to Nietzsche's terminology objecti-
of the "Apollinian that the subject can be ? autonomous source of meaning, ? logic, and The fluctuation in aesthetic expe- rience between Apollonian and Dionysian readings is far removed from a cogni- tion or knowledge of an aesthetic object; it has nothing to do with the "acqui- sition of information about an object so that our subjecthood is defined in the cognition of objects, be they things, ideas, or other human ? The only way to suspend the defusing effect of the institutionalization of autonomous art as a means of compensation might lie in the radical reflexivity unfolded in Nietzsche's project.
According to Nietzsche, disarming humans of polemical identities should be modernity's most urgent project. It is here where Sloterdijk can connect his read- ing of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a fundamental text of modernity with his own project as developed in the Critique of Cynical Reason, where he maintains that in order to survive, we will have to disidentify ourselves from everything that arms itself. The price for surviving in tomorrow's society might have to be paid in a psychic currency ? not at ? We might have to give up the security of all local identifications such as jingoistic patriotism that we achieve only at the cost of repressing alterity. Whatever fortifies itself in order to remain what it imagines itself to be, might dig its own grave. In Nietzsche's view, disarmament can be realized only as an aesthetic ? least if and when an aesthetic culture can be established that releases the radical potential of the dialectic be- tween the Apollonian and Dionysian dimension of art.
Notes
Using the abbreviations N and S, I will quote Sloterdijk and Nietzsche in the text; the Nietz- sche text according to ? Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Walter
and comm. (New York: Vintage, 1967).
2. Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ? p.
120.
3. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, in die 37 (1983), p. 759.
4. Habermas, p. 760.
5. Cf. my essays "The Prestige of the Artist under Conditions of Modernity," in Cultural Cri-
tique no. 12 (Spring 1989); "Imagination and Modernity, Or the Taming of the Human Mind," in Critique no. 5 (Winter 1987); and "Art and the Sacrificial Structure of Modernity," after- word to Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: The Genealogy of the Beholder in Diderot (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
6. SeePeterBurger,TheoryoftheAvant-Garde,trans. MichaelShaw(Minneapolis:University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxiv FOREWORD
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and ed. J. T. ? (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 38.
p.
p. 39. pp.
Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," On Narrative, J. T. Mitchell, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 23.
Mitchell, "Foreword," ? p. viii.
Sam Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 54.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
14. Cf. ? Godzich, "After the Storyteller ? ? ? ? foreword to Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xviii-xix.
7.
8.
9. 10.
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
