No More Learning

While collective systems of affect convert revolt into participation within the paradigm of postmodern irony, those dissident, angry, socially isolated, and linguistically impoverished impulses are captured by numbness. In this
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situation the vandalistic relationship to impossible objects imposes itself as the most plausible one. Vandalism could be described as the negativity of the ignorant and thus as a form of rage that has given up once and for all any striving to understand.
THERE WAS NO EVENT IN THE MORE RECENT PAST IN WHICH THIS mechanism expressed itself more explicitly than in the Paris banlieue riots, which flamed up in late October 2005 and spread within a few days accord- ing to the rules of the media-rewarded imitation game to numerous cities or metropolitan areas in France. It was fully obvious that the unexpected explosions of violence by a group of exclusively male adolescents with Islamic Arab and Christian African origins were riots for the purpose of abreaction and provocative vandalism fun--that affective cocktail that the political hermeneutics of the hegemonic French center-left culture does not know how to deal with. Consequently, the Paris feuilleton was content with accessing the available language games, which are happy about every occa- sion in which they can quote themselves. ("They set cars on fire--we apply our favorite theories. ")
One thing was certain during all of this: none of the political parties could, nor wanted, to offer itself as gatherer or transformer of the emergent dirty energies. Yes, vague commitments to the obligations of a republican pedagogy could be heard, but nothing that would have pointed to a new strategy of a political use of rage. The only quick-witted interpreter of the psychopolitical situation was the then minister of the interior, Nicolas Sar- kozy, who bluntly referred to the rioters as "rabble" (racaille) who needed to be washed away with a power hose. Not only did he violate the rules of political beau parley, he also made clear that in line with the attitude of the new moral majority in the country, this time there would be no attempts of political integration, only uncompromising practices of elimination. It is possible that through this verbal outbreak a new paradigm of politi- cal semantics was born. The spokespersons of the center-right would thus have understood the postrepublican imperative according to which politics should not mean anything beyond a system of measures for militant con- sumer protection. On the rhetorical plane, the transition from social therapy to disposal of the abject is unmistakable--it expresses a current agreement between the conservative anxiety of a large stratum of the society and the neoliberal principle of being relentless, which the wealthy elite admits to.
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This alliance is confronted by a left that is not capable, in either its postcom- munist or its social-democratic form, of developing appropriate measures of rage collection and its investment in thymotically lucrative projects. 19
The weakness of the circulating ad hoc explanations for the unexpected eruptions of violence in France is revealed primarily by the fact that most of them attempted to identify the riots as mere momentous symbolic actions, though the interpretations of the symbolized affects varied significantly: depending on the inclination of the interpreter, they ranged from help- less anger through a subsequent need to revenge chronic humiliation up to manifestations of pure "pleasure in evil. " No less misleading is the allegation of some rightwing politicians that the burning of vehicles and buildings as well as other acts of vandalism were planned, if not also controlled actions.
In reality, the escalation of the violence goes back to occasional creations of rage objects, which were rewarded through feedback in the French mass media and with high attention and incentives for imitation. Assuming that this reconstruction of the events on the crucial night are fitting, the trigger- ing event consisted in the sudden dissemination of a rumor that the police had driven two suburban adolescents to their deaths on October 27, 2005. This suggestion (which turned out to be only half-true because there was no direct connection between the deaths of the young men and the persecution by the police) was sufficient to evoke a primitive us-them scenario among the numerous adolescents who were present. It quickly spread to other locations. The national police were naturally on the "they" side, as was, for understandable reasons, the eloquent minister of the interior. A confused complex arose that comprised people, symbols, and institutions in which the strangeness and hostility of the French environment crystallized.
The formation of a negative object was, in spite of its vagueness, suffi- ciently articulated to evoke, in numerous adolescents and for several weeks, the belief that there was a real battle scene on which one could play. During the course of the riots in the streets of Clichy-sous-Bois, Le Blanc Mesnil, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and so on, one could witness a form of theatrical col- lection with a high power of attraction, even though there was no political management giving orders. An appropriate interpretation of this phenome- non transcends standard sociologies; it rather appears as if only the swarm- logical, medialogical, and mimetological descriptions would be capable of casting light on the rhythm of the events. At any rate, what was decisive for the rapid escalation of the riot was that the typical action on the fight- ing scene, the random burning of parked cars, presented a long-rehearsed
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pattern, not to speak of the initiation qualities of a ritual. Through a strong influx of new players, the pattern of a communion suddenly entered the spotlight through destruction.
In a sharp commentary for the newspaper Liberation,20 Jean Baudrillard captured the essence of what was so scandalous about the scandal: it was only through the November riots that the French public became aware that in a series of cities in their country, an average of ninety cars were set on fire every night--during the course of 2005 alone there are said to have been more than 9,000 car burnings, of which approximately 2,800 took place during the banlieue riots and their provincial imitations. The peak of these pyromania games was reached during the night of November 7, when more than 1,400 cars burned across the entire country. Furthermore, the statis- tics for 2005 mention that until November, there were 17,500 arsons in gar- bage containers and almost 6,000 vandalistic acts against public telephone booths and bus stops. Although the sociology of the perpetrators presents a somewhat more complex depiction of the chronic attacks, there is a high measure of similarity between the actors of the acute riot and those of the chronic kindlings. In every case, we are dealing with the same angry young men into whose double misery of unemployment and excess adrenaline the explosive insight into their social superfluity was added. It would be careless not to want to understand that they are the potential recruits for any war, which provides them with a perspective for breaking out of the prison of their involuntary apathy.
Considering the daily arsons, which remained beneath the attention threshold of the media for years, Baudrillard sarcastically speaks of an eter- nal flame that burns in honor of the unknown immigrant, comparable to the flame at the Arc de Triomphe. The wild flames bear witness to the psy- chopolitical disasters of French "society," which cannot manage to com- municate to large portions of its Arabic and African immigrants and their children a consciousness of belonging to the political culture of the country. However, this is a mischaracterization of the situation; what is at stake here is not the French "political culture," whose splendors remain unseen by the angry adolescents. Rather, at stake are attractive social positions, which are impossible to get for the offspring of immigrants. When he asks, "Belonging to what? " Baudrillard already presupposes, with a provincial consciousness of detachment, that the republican ethos has vanished as a political force in French civil "society. " Regis Debray articulated a related diagnosis with a mediological-cultural-theoretical accent by diagnosing, not without a sense
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of melancholy, the lack of an effective civil religion in France. If his diag- nosis was correct, it would suggest nothing less than that the country has irrevocably entered a situation that bears not only post-Gaullist but also postrepublican characteristics. Baudrillard, on the other hand, reaches the provocative conclusion that the majority of the French already behave like insecure immigrants in their own country, immigrants who are plagued by resentment. They can only assert themselves as indigenous by discriminat- ing against other immigrants.
The excessive thesis according to which "society" has become a phantom collective to itself points to the psychopolitical consequences of capitalist eroticization. 21 It is quite likely that a more patient view of the democratic- republican reserves of political culture in France would prove that its regen- erative capacities are in a better state than the witty pessimist commenta- tors would have it. This is confirmed by the protest strikes throughout the country that forced the government of Prime Minister Villepin in March 2006 to withdraw a law that loosened the job market for entering workers (Contrat premier embauche), a law that had already been passed by the national assembly. Then again, the protests prove that the French adoles- cents are at home in an illusory bubble in which they protect privileges as if they were basic rights. The current level of subversive mass eroticization also illustrates, to be sure, how strongly the traditional thymotic ensemble of people, nation, party, and confession has been weakened, partially even destroyed, through the politics of desire in popular capitalism. Through this politics, every individual is turned into a consumption citizen who--unless uplifted by family, cultural, and cooperative counter-forces--is increasingly fixed to poisoned loneliness within a doomed irritation of desire. When the French voted no in the referendum in May 2005 to the European Constitu- tion, they engaged, following Baudrillard, in an act that, according to its political and gestural content, constituted the exact equivalent of the riots of the nonintegrated in the suburbs. In a large majority, they behaved like ballot-arsons. They responded to the praised object, Europe, hardly less scornfully than the banlieue adolescents responded to the attractions of the French Republic.
These observations, which are the basis of Baudrillard's and Debray's diagnoses, converge in a dark zone. They reveal an amorphous negativism whose phenomenology has been investigated sporadically for a long time while its therapy, as well as its politics, stagnates. In his 1993 essay Ausichten aufden Burgerkrieg (Expectations of civil war), Hans Magnus Enzensberger
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cited a social worker from the banlieue in Paris who vividly described the vandalistic dynamic:
They have already destroyed everything, the mailboxes, the doors, the stair- cases. They have demolished and looted the polyclinic where their smaller brothers and sisters are treated forfree. They do not recognize any rules. They smash medical and dental clinics to bits and pieces arid destroy their schools. If they are provided with a soccer field, they saw off the goal posts. 22
ENZENSBERGER INCLUDES THESE OBSERVATIONS IN A PANORAMA OF scenes of shabby violence, which he sums up under the title "molecular civil war. " The typical gesture of this "war" and its "warriors" is the aimless dev- astation of the terrain, which only seemingly resembles "their own. " Such behaviors constitute, according to the author, an answer to the dark insight that speaks from all the images from the crowded camps and dismal sub- urbs: "we are too many. '" This dubbing has to upset its bearers. If these fig- ures, until then often inconspicuous and marginal, finally want to take the "abolishment of the superfluous" into their own hands while lashing out blindly, they do it because "they secretly count themselves among them. "23
The signs of a "molecular civil war" initially increase almost unnoticed: more garbage on the streets, smashed beer bottles on the avenues and side- walks, discarded needles in parks, monotonous graffiti everywhere "whose sole message is autism. " In time, the symptoms of destruction reach a critical threshold: smashed school furniture, cut wires, public telephones that have been made useless with pliers, cars set on fire--now it becomes clear that a basic language of disgust has put up a sign for itself. However, these are not traces of a "civil war. " To speak of a civil war, formed parties of fighters would have to face each other as confrontable realities. Instead, waves of pre-objective negativity enter the picture as vandalistic impro- visations, which attest to the inability of their bearers to act as citizens, even as fighting citizens. As Enzensberger lucidly remarks, in all of these features is an element of "anger about what is in fact," a form of "hatred against everything that functions," a grudge against the circumstance "that forms an insoluble amalgam with self-hatred. "24 At this time he had already attested on television to a complicity among all forms of practiced vandalism, which function "like one single huge graffiti" scribbled on the wall by vengeful semilunatics who know how to get on the evening news
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with the help of a few beer bottles filled with gasoline, a lighter, and will- ing cameramen.
What I have referred to as the language of disgust with how things are describes an epidemic of negativity in which the spread of what in former times was called "cultural malaise" advances to a riot in a failed civiliza- tion. This form of negativity has little in common with the forms of mor- ally articulable and politically collectable rage that I have addressed so far. Retrospectively, this spreading disgust makes clear the extent to which the traditional left--especially its Bolshevist wing but also its more liberal forms--can be blamed for anthropological and political negligence since it had always assumed that its members as well as the so-called masses indis- criminately affirmed a natural and ambivalence-free human community in large social associations.
The least that would need to be said about these primarily sociophobic assumptions is that they rest on a one-sided perspective. Realistically speak- ing, no social politics would ever possess the slightest prospect for success if it did not understand that the goal of social organization has to be to restrain the molestation of human beings by human beings. The collectivist remains of the twentieth century have violated this precept by inventing an unprecedented sadism of constipation: the most extreme maliciousness of the camp universes, as they have been created by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, does not so much consist in the fact that human beings were reduced to the status of "bare life," as Giorgio Agamben attempted to show in an exaggerated interpretation. Rather, the camp rests on the intuition that hell is always other people as soon as they are mutually forced into unwelcome proximity. In Huis clos, Sartre merely replaces macro-hell with micro-hell. If one shoves one's enemies together into a state of total coexistence, one is responsible for each individual being burned in the small flame of induced hostility against his kin. Only saints survive camp situations without being dehumanized. "Camp" is only a conventional name for the modern forges of misanthropy. Without considering the occult misanthropist substrate-- which is only minimally concealed in the conviction that there is no need for human beings to be concerned for other human beings (Celine: "One asshole less")--the exterminist excesses of the more recent past would remain even more obscure, defying all previously attempted historical and psychological explanations. The proposition homo homini lupus loses its plausibility when considering these aspects. He who speaks of the twentieth century as the century of wolves still thinks too innocently.
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The xenophobia of the right is only one of the signs of the misanthropic element, which cannot become visible as long as it persists in concretely identifiable forms, which are, eo ipso, its pseudonyms, its ideological gar- ments. Taking offense only at the political and ideological costumes of social disgust misses the essential misanthropic message. The more obscure aspects of the misanthropic mood are systematically ignored. In reality, the sociophobic-misanthropic tendency is endemic to the left as well as the right. In all opportune idioms it rages against the imposition of coexisting with whomever and whatever. It is only with the epidemically amorphous vandalism that the negative primordial soup surfaces. With it a primary, unblended, and unmitigated misanthropy, the abysmal aversion to the social world and society, and even to the existence of the world in general, becomes identifiable as radical behavior. Hereby it becomes apparent how misanthropy itself is the special form of an amorphous negativity that could be determined with concepts such as misocosmics or misontics: animosities against the world and what exists in the world as a whole. It brings out the aversion to the imposition of existence and coexistence as such.
Rage is encountered in mollusk-like upsurges of this kind at the zero point of articulation. After its relapse to the level of diffuse universal aver- sion, it relinquishes any kind of collectability, transformability, and culti- vatability. It simply no longer remembers anything concerning the close connections among sensitivity for values, legal sensitivity, and a capabil- ity for indignation--the matrix of democratic cultures of irritation. It now seems sunken to a sub-thymotic level from which point there is no initia- tory power to redeem one's own value and claims. 25 At the "foundation" of the darkest form of rage, there lies, diffuse and inarticulable, the desire for an end of humiliation through the real. We are dealing with an extrem- ism of fatigue--a radical apathy that refrains from any attempt at form or cultivation. Its agents would in reality prefer not to lift a finger, as if playing dead could be the means of escaping the prison of failures. When they try to smash whatever happens to get close to them, it happens as if in a foreign tongue of gestures, the meaning of which not even they believe. To these extremists of tedium, their own massive quantity means nothing. They do not want to know that they could perhaps be the strongest of parties--if they could unify and take action for something in their own interests.
This International of human tedium exists in continuous self-dissolu- tion. Every night it decays in millions of isolated anestheticizations; every morning it formlessly erases itself and all its concerns from the day's menu.
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No constitutive assembly would be able to provide form and content to this excessive protest against the actual state of affairs. Wherever fragmentary gatherings occur, one recognizes the theses of the actors in broken glass, wreckage, and burned metal the day after. It is not surprising that the mem- bers of this impossible International do not feel addressed by the thought of an organized gathering at all. Every form of purposive cooperation with them would mean a step toward transcendence, not being weary, not being vanquished. Not taking this step is their most intimate revenge against the status quo.
THE GLOBAL THEATER OF THREATS
TO END, ALLOW ME TO ENGAGE IN A PANORAMIC VIEW IN THE STYLE of a world-historical investigation to look back at the fate of the thymotic during the last two hundred years and situate it against the background of the two monotheistic millennia. What will become clear is that the two most powerful organs of metaphysical and political rage collection in West- ern civilization, the Catholic teachings concerning the wrath of God and the communist organization of antibourgeois and anticapitalist rage masses, have not mastered the challenges of the time and the change in mentality.
Catholicism only survived the advance of modernity for the price of a reluctant accommodation to the present day, an accommodation that lasted for more than two centuries. During this long period it indulged in gestures of denial that in some aspects closely resemble the theocentric antimodern- ism of an Islamist type, which we know from contemporary sources. During its period of defiance it ravaged the hubris of the moderns longing to make religion into a private affair. It rebelled zealously against the tendencies to create a deliberately lay state culture or one that was distanced and neutral with regard to religion. However, the change in the basic attitude of Cathol- icism could not be avoided, even though it was not brought about before the second half of the twentieth century. It brought with it a profound theo- logical conversion: in order to be able to make peace with modernity, Rome needed to distance itself from what before seemed to be nonnegotiable anti- humanist and antiliberal traditions, which were rooted in the absolutism of God's law. The transformation reached a point at which Catholic theology defined itself as an "organon" for a more profound justification of human rights. Naturally this brought with it the surrender or degrading intimi- dation of the believers through apocalyptic threats and dreadful Dies irae
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pronouncements. Subsequently, the time-honored teachings of the wrath of God and images of a revenging Judgment Day at the end of time were withdrawn from within the Church--they have been degraded to the status of curiosities that one inspects as one would a metaphysical horror genre, assuming that one can still find an interest in them.
When it comes to communism's attempt to create a global collection point for thymotic energies with globally convincing human dividends, the disappointed and exasperated elderly witnesses of that spooky epoch are still too close to it to explain why any thought of an "improved" taking-up of similar experiments means for them pure stupidity. In the eyes of those who were born later, the communist adventure already appears like a dark curiosity. It seems to be as gothic as the forgotten Catholic eschatology.
I have addressed the themes, procedures, and promises of the two big rage collectives in the second and third chapters of this book. The effects of its dissolution were addressed in the first chapter, in which the free-floating rage in the early post-Christian situation was sketched out, and this fourth chapter focuses on the political homelessness of rage in the postcommunist situation. I did not pursue the possible and actual relationships between Catholicism and communism--in fact it would have been plausible to por- tray communism as the secularized form of Christian rage theology, even as a materialistic translation of the idea of the kingdom of God. Let us thus rest content here with the remark that communism did indeed share many characteristics of a second Catholicism. If in 1848 it was claimed with a tone of triumphant satisfaction that a specter was haunting Europe, which ter- rorized and frightened all governments between Paris and St. Petersburg, this phrase signaled that one was in a situation "after the death of God," a situation in which the function of the world's court of judgment--apart from numerous other professions of God--had to be passed on to secu- lar agencies. Under the circumstances, early communism was best suited to claim this heritage. The "spectral" character of this movement, which Jacques Derrida highlights in Specters of Marx, to which I have repeatedly referred, was, to be sure, not so much attributable to the fact that commu- nism presented a rationalist Utopia, as Derrida suggests, that is, a thought that could never emerge as a manifestation of flesh and blood. What made ascending communism spooky and what lent it the power to attract the paranoid reflexes of its adversaries was its ability, which could be detected early, to convincingly threaten the status quo with its downfall. When it had lost its capacity to threaten, it was finished as a ghost as well--and no
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animation of philosophical congresses will provide the hollow pumpkin with new haunting power.
After the collapse of communism the business of world-directed revenge and, generally speaking, the business of a universal balance of suffering had to slip out of the hands of human agencies. Consequently there were good reasons the Catholic Church could present itself as authentic after the fall of communism, even as the soul of an authentic and spiritual communism. To see and seize this opportunity was Karol Wojtyla's theatrical message. The Catholic message, of course, includes the return to the classical mor- ally conservative attitude according to which the man of the present would need to free himself from rage and revolt in order to rediscover what he had lost as a consequence of the events of 1789: patience and humility. What is most of the time overlooked concerning these recommendations is that highly praised virtues stand on shaky grounds if they are not supported by the threatening force of a convincingly delivered theology of the Day of Judgment.
These remarks suggest that Hegel's figure of a cunningness of reason still has a certain pragmatic appeal, however ascetic the expectations of a hid- den reason in history might be today. If one had to step back to sum up the achievements of communism, one would most importantly mention its external effects, which many times surpassed its internal effects in terms of productivity. These external effects were, to be sure, so paradoxical that they were hardly ever addressed. It is not necessary here to once again call to mind the much-appreciated efforts of the Soviet Union in the war on the armies of the National Socialist invader. The most important external effect of communism unfolded only after 1945, when an unprecedented chance opened up to expand the European welfare-state system against the back- ground of the saber-rattling regime of Stalin and its Middle and West Euro- pean outposts.
It is ironic that the communist world bank of rage achieved its most important success in the form of an unintended side effect. By accumulat- ing a truly intimidating political and ideological threat potential, it helped its former main adversaries, the Western, moderate socialists and social democrats, to reach the high point of their historical ability. It made it easy for the parliamentarily integrated socialist parties in Europe to extort an unprecedented amount of concessions from the liberal and conservative managers of capital in redistributing wealth and extending social networks. Within this constellation, it seemed plausible to the social partners of the
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Western world to transform large parts of their national industries, in par- ticular in France and Great Britain, to government control.
If it is correct to say that sovereignty refers to the capacity to convincingly threaten someone, then it is also true that the Western workers' parties and unions achieved their highest effects of sovereignty because of an indirect threat of class struggle, which they were able to include in the negotiations of the bargaining parties without having to clench the fist themselves. It suf- ficed for them to consider the realities ofthe Second World to make it clear to the employers that social peace has its price. It can be asserted without exag- geration that the social achievements of postwar Europe, in particular the often-cited Rhenish form of capitalism with its extensively extended welfare state and the excessive culture of therapy, were presents from Stalinism-- grapes of wrath that, it needs to be said, could only ripen and taste sweet after being exported to a freer climate.
The expenditures for social peace in the West needed to be recalculated from scratch when the threat potential of the left irresistibly continued to decline--not least because the Soviet Union was increasingly difficult to take seriously as a threat to the West. The ultimate phase of the Brezhnev era was the latest that the preconditions for some kind of successful missionary and expansionist activity from Moscow existed. Maoism outside of China never meant more than a straw fire of peasant romanticism in the Third World (think of Che Guevara's confused excursions to Africa and Bolivia) and the waywardness of wealth in Western universities. It was already evi- dent that the East--because of its dogmatic ignorance of the question of property--could not possibly win the confrontation between competing systems. Furthermore, the Russian army provided the proof during its futile ten-year campaign against the Afghan franc-tireurs, who were supported by the United States (1979-1989), how little it was able to live up to its former reputation.
Under these circumstances, the organs of the workers of the West lost their privilege of profiting from the fear of communism from the perspec- tive of capital without any effort. The liberal-conservative camp was able to understand: during the wage-negotiation talks it sat next to a debilitated, if not degenerated, counterpart. On the one hand, the latter was out of shape because of its relative level of saturation; on the other hand, it succumbed to a creeping paralysis that resulted from the ideological deflation of the left.
Since the early 1980s, this sense of exhaustion has determined the psy- chopolitical atmosphere of the West--its results multiply with the climate-
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changing fallout of September 11. It appears that a neo-authoritarian turn of capitalism with a liberal-bellicist background is more and more likely. The year 1979 needs to be seen from today's perspective as the key time of the twentieth century. The entry into the postcommunist situation begins then in a threefold sense: the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union after the invasion of its armies into Afghanistan, the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher, and the consolidation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini.
What is called neoliberalism was in fact nothing but a recalculation of the costs of inner peace in the countries of European capitalist and social- democratic "mixed economy" or of American-style "regulatory capital- ism. "26 This necessarily led to the result that Western entrepreneurialism had paid too high a price to attain social peace under passing political and ideological pressure from the East. The time for cost-reducing measures had come, measures that aimed to switch priorities from the primacy of full employment to that of corporate dynamics. In fact, a downright reversal of the Zeitgeist was brought about: it moved ever quicker away from the revolting and control-centered ethics of comfort during the decades after the war (which survived only in France) in order to give preference to a neo-entrepreneurial risk ethic.
The "market revolution" in Great Britain, which was designed by Joseph Keith and, starting in 1979, realized by Margaret Thatcher (a revolution that would soon spread to the Continent and large parts of the Western world, especially Reagan's and Clinton's America), makes clear how precisely the above diagnosis captures the situation and how radical were the conse^ quences that are to be drawn from it. This shows itself most strikingly in the permanent trend of neoliberalism--the long march to mass unemployment that has set the tone from a social-political perspective. The new circum- stances brought with it what could have hardly been imagined until then: unemployment rates of 10 percent and more are accepted more or less with- out a fight by the populations of European nations--even the increasingly visible decrease of welfare benefits has so far not provokes a flaring-up of the fire of class struggle. The relationships of sovereignty have been reversed overnight: organizations of employees have little power to threaten, because the privilege to threaten has, rather one-sidedly, passed onto the business side. The latter can now plausibly claim that everything will become much worse if the other side refuses to understand and abide by the new rules of the game.
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THE THIRD COLLECTION: CAN POLITICAL ISLAM SET UP A NEW WORLD BANK OF DISSIDENCE?
IT IS NECESSARY TO KEEP THIS SCENARIO IN MIND IN ORDER TO understand the conditions under which Islamic terrorism could celebrate its rise to become a power with the capacity to exert threats. Initially, the Islamists did not seem to be more than parasites of the postcommunist constellation. No one would have thought at the time of Islamism's first appearance that one was witnessing something like a third Catholicism or an Eastern alternative to communism. Nevertheless, day by day the Islamist activists successfully imposed themselves as the new enemy of the West, ini- tially the United States, and then helpless Europe. In this role they have been interpreted ambivalently from the beginning. For tragic-minded polit- ical scientists, who are convinced of the need to always have an enemy, the anger of Islamism seemed like a present from heaven. Although Islamism was initially not especially dangerous in a material sense (as long as its agents did not gain access to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons and the control of migration remained sufficiently strict), it keeps the psycho- political tone of irritated collectives in the West at the desired level. For the adherents of the liberal idyll, on the other hand, Islamist terror remains an unwelcome guest--a crazy graffiti sprayer who disfigures the facades of enemy-free societies with obscene messages.
However one may evaluate the ambivalent reception of the new terror by its Western addressees, it would never have advanced beyond the level of an irritating marginal phenomenon if it had not become an interesting asset in the recalculation of the costs for social peace in Western societ- ies. While the communist threat led to a significant increase in the social costs of peace, the threat of Islamist terror brings with it, at the bottom line, effects that help lower the costs. By exerting imaginary stressful pressure on the attacked collective, it contributes to a feeling of belonging to a real com- munity, a belonging based on solidarity, a survival unit wrestling for its own future in spite of recently severely deepened social differences. Addition- ally, the new terror creates, because of its undifferentiated hostility against Western forms of life, a climate of diffuse intimidation in which questions of political and existential security enjoy high priority over those of social justice--quod erat operandum.
With the exaggeration of the securitarian imperative to the level of being the omnipotent theme of contemporary media democracies, the Zeitgeist
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readjusted itself after September 11, 2001, to a new ecosystem of threats and defense mechanisms--while, this time, as frivolously as it might sound, the threat tendencies of Islamist terror in general point "in the right direction" when seen from the perspective of radicalized capitalism. To feel threatened by the Middle Eastern sources now means to see reasons why one could perhaps be ready to make peace with the drifting away of Western politi- cal culture into postdemocratic conditions. The "war on terror" possesses the ideal quality of not being able to be won--and thus never having to be ended. These prospects suggest that the postdemocratic trends will enjoy a long life. They create the preconditions with which democratically elected leaders can get away with presenting themselves as commanders in chief. If political thinking limits itself to advising the commander in chief, concepts such as democracy and independent judiciary cultures are only chips in a strategic game. 27
The psychopolitical fate of the United States during the Bush adminis- tration illustrates these relations with an abundance of unmistakable exam- ples. Within a few years the world became witness to how a democracy that is proud of its culture of dissent experienced a sudden extinction of political diversity of opinion because it was exposed to the knowingly and willingly induced fiction of a struggle for survival, which needed to be waged by the entire nation. The political field of the nation was influenced by homog- enizing forces. Reminiscent of real wars, in this drole de guerre there was a paralyzing of inner opposition through the patriotic imperative. This devel- opment to a large extent results from the work of the neoconservatives in the United States, who do not hesitate to proudly conjure up the specter of "World War IV,"28 to suffocate, wherever possible, every sign of a new opposition in light of growing social inequalities.
An investigation of the redistribution of threat potentials on the geo- political maps of the present raises the question of how the much-discussed Islamic danger is to be understood. By which media does it affect the psy- chopolitical system of the West and the Islamic countries? Does it really have the potential to "replace communism as the world dogma," as one can hear it in radical Islamic circles between Khartoum and Karachi for the last decade, and not only from behind closed doors? 29 The new specter, which is haunting Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world--from where does it take its power to threaten the leaders of the established pow- ers? Can political Islam--whether appearing with a terroristic component or without--unfold itself to become an alternative world bank of rage? Will it
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become a globally attractive collection point of antisystemic or postcapital- ist energies? Can Islamism be used for the continuation of the weary West- ern grand narratives concerning the uprising of the debased and humili- ated against their masters, old and new? Does it suffice to meditate on the concept of jihad as long as it turns into a pseudonym for class struggle? Or do the fronts, which emerge from the eruptions of the Islamic world, not possess a sense of obstinacy that can only be reconciled with Western forms of the narrative of continuing revolution, universalizing emancipation, and progressive realization of human rights at the price of misunderstandings and distortions.
What qualifies political Islam as a potential successor to communism are three advantages, which can be analogously identified with historical com- munism. The first is the fact that an inspiring mission dynamic is inherent to Islamism, a dynamic that predisposes it to become a quickly swelling col- lective of new converts, that is, a "movement" in the narrow sense of the term. It is not only the case that it quasi-universally addresses "all" without discriminating on the basis of nations and social classes. It attracts especially the disadvantaged, undecided, and outraged (insofar as they are not female, and sometimes even those). It does so by presenting itself as the advocate of the spiritually and materially neglected poor and by gaining sympathies as the heart in a heartless world. The low preconditions of admission play an impor- tant part here. As soon as a person has been admitted to the ranks of believ- ers, he is immediately usable for the purpose of the fighting community-- in some cases to be immediately used as a martyr. By plunging into a vibrant community, newcomers are often given for the first time the feeling of hav- ing found a home and of not playing an equal and detached spectator but a particular role in the dramas of the world.
The second attraction of political Islam emanates from the fact that it-- in a way only preceded by communism--is capable of offering its followers a clear, aggressive, and grandiosely theatrical "worldview" that rests on a clear differentiation of friend and enemy, an unmistakable mission to win, and an exhilaratingly Utopian final vision: the reconstitution of the global emirate, which is supposed to provide a shelter for the Islamic millennium, stretched out from Andalusia to the far East. With it the figure of the class enemy is replaced with that of the enemy of the faith, and class struggle is replaced by holy war--while keeping the dualistic schema of a war of prin- ciples, it demands a necessarily long war rich in casualties. As usual, in its last battle the party of the good is destined to win.
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It can easily be seen that when it is used for political purposes, so-called fundamentalism is less of a matter of faith than an appeal to act or, more specifically, a matter of providing roles through which great numbers of potential actors are put into a position in which they can move from the- ory to praxis--or rather from frustration to praxis. In general it is true what demographic research has brought to light: "religion provides . . . additional oil for a fire whose original fuel does not come from it. "30 As a matrix of radical activations, Islam is on a par with historical communism; perhaps it is even superior because it can present itself with regard to its culture of origin not as a movement of radical rupture but as one of a revo- lutionary reestablishment.
The third and politically most important reason for the inevitably grow- ing dramatics of political Islam (even if at this hour, after a series of defeats, it seems to have lost quite a bit of its initial attraction) results from the demographic dynamic of its field of recruitment. Just like the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, it is essentially a youth movement or, more specifically, a movement of young men. Its verve to a large degree results from the excess of vitality of an unstoppable giant wave of unem- ployed and, socially speaking, hopeless male adolescents between the ages of fifteen and thirty--in their majority second, third, and fourth sons, who can enact their futile rage only by participating in the next best aggression programs. By creating in their base countries counter-worlds to the existing one, Islamic organizations create a grid of alternative positions in which angry, ambitious young men can feel important--including the impulse to attack both close and faraway enemies today rather than tomorrow.
These numerically enormous groups constitute the natural allegiance of agitators from the elder generation, whose sermons derive their content almost automatically from the willingness among the members of their congregation to be outraged--whereas the Islamic tradition only provides the semantic forms to add captions to real anger and violence tensions. As in a laboratory experiment, it was possible to observe these conditions dur- ing a scheme to create "spontaneous riots" because of the Danish carica- tures of Mohammed in February 2006. While politically correct Europeans agonized over how to apologize to allegedly or actually offended Muslims, anonymous activists in Iraq continued to turn the wheel of provocation or, even better, the wheel of combative self-stimulation a bit further by way of destroying the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the most important Shiite sacred buildings in the north of Baghdad. They destroyed it with a
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bomb attack, which led to dozens of Sunni houses of worship being dev- astated during counterattacks. These events speak a clear language. They reveal more about the hunger for a triggering event among the groups who are ready to attack than about an allegedly inevitable clash of civilizations. The agitators would feel sorry if they had to realize that the external cata- lysts were in fact sorry.
From this perspective it is legitimate to claim that Islam, in its Islamist variation, could transform itself to become a religious readymade excel- lent for mobilizing purposes. 31 Its suitability comes from characteristics of Muslim dogmatic theology that from the start were publicly committed to the war against "infidels. " The unprepared reader of the Koran has to be amazed about how it is possible that a sacred book is not afraid to repudiate itself when almost on every page it threatens the enemies of the prophet and of the faith with suffering in the eternal flames. The explanations of schol- ars hardly help to get over this estrangement, even if they try to trace the polemical passages of the Koran back to their historical context: the prophet engages in these passages in a form of early-socialist criticism against the wealthy of his time, the arrogant and ruthless merchants from Mecca who did not want to hear anything anymore about the egalitarian and gener- ous values of the old Arab tribal culture. Mohammed's teachings, scholars argue, ties in with these values as it commits his followers to caring for the weak. The initially plausible reference to the monotheistic privilege of zeal- ousness both for God and against the infidels fails to provide a sufficient explanation. It is just as evident to claim that no human being would want to concern himself with the opaque passages in the Koran if it were not for the fact that millions of aggressive gangs of searchers for God choose their words so to fit their coming deeds (while the comparably heated passages of the psalms of rage in the Old Testament have left the small audience of churches and synagogues cold for a long time).
The new mobilization movements--whether legitimate or not from the standpoint of Koran theology--could, assuming that birth rates remain high, influence a reservoir of several million young men in the Arabic hemi- sphere by the middle of the twenty-first century, men who probably only find an existentially attractive horizon of meaning in departing to politically and religiously concealed projects of self-destruction. In thousands of Koran schools, which recently sprang up like mushrooms everywhere that has boiling excesses of adolescent men, the anxious cohorts are indoctrinated with the concepts of holy war. Only a small portion of them will be able to
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manifest themselves in external terrorism. The more significant portion will probably be invested in life-consuming civil wars on Arab soil--wars for which the Iran-Iraq massacre between 1980 and 1988 has provided a hint. In the case of the new wars, however, the quantitative proportions will, it can be predicted, skyrocket to a monstrous level. Giant battles of exterminations between Shiite and Sunni war parties are not unthinkable--the destruc- tion of the mosques and sacred sites of the other side provide the preamble for that. That Israel is anticipating further trials by fire cannot be missed. Without a far-sighted politics of sealing itself off, the Jewish enclave cannot survive the next decades. The truth is: even people who know the situation today do not have the slightest idea of how the approaching Muslim "youth bulge," the most extensive wave of genocidal excesses of adolescent men in the history of mankind, could be contained by peaceful means. 32
These references to the actual mass-basis of radical Islamic movements mark at the same time the limit at which their commensurability with historical communism ends. The coming adherents of the Islamic goal of expansion do not at all resemble a class of workers and employees who unite to seize governmental power in order to put an end to their misery. Rather, they embody an agitated subproletariat or, even worse, a desper- ate movement of economically superfluous and socially useless people for whom there are too few acceptable positions available in their own sys- tem, even if they should get to power through coups d'etat or elections. Because of demographic circumstances, concepts of the enemy in such movements cannot be sociologically defined, as was still possible within a Marxist conception of a "class of exploiters. " One can only define them by way of religion, political orientation, and culture--internally they are directed against the, in the eyes of the activists, despicable elites who make too many political concessions to the West. Externally they turn against the West as such, insofar as the latter is portrayed as the manifestation of humiliating, corrosive, and obscene cultural imports. Naturally, Islamist leaders will sooner or later attempt to gain power over the reserve coun- tries of the East in order to occupy positions of command over the redistri- bution of massive fortunes coming out of the oil business. Thus they could for some time appease their patronage by letting them participate in the oil manna. Since increasing energy prices during the coming decades will support a provocative laziness in bringing about reforms of the existing oil theocracies, riots in these countries are very likely. The case of Iran has shown what can happen next.
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However much it might be the case that Islamist theocracy insists on the formally and materially totalitarian demand to regulate all aspects of living in a virtually Islamized global society according to the law of the Koran, it is less capable of confronting the economical, political, technical, and artistic facts of the contemporary age. While communism presented an authentic expression of Western modernization tendencies and, in some respects, though not in terms of economy, was the avant-garde of these tendencies, political Islamism bears the obvious mark of an antimodern disposition and dissynchronicity with the modern world. Part of this is its problematic relationship to the global culture of knowledge, as well as its thoroughly parasitic relationship to the weapons technology of the West. This situation is, for the time being, not changed by the extreme demographic dynamic of the Islamic world, whose population increased between 1900 and 2000 from 150 million to 1. 2 billion--eight times its original size. Although the "popu- lation weapon" is, as Gunnar Heinsohn has shown, of modern origin,33 it turns against its owners in the case of a lack of opportunities to expand and emigrate. If one of the leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian physician Abdel
Aziz Rantisi, most recently announced that the forthcoming century would be that of Islam, he commits a fallacy common today of confusing culture and biomass. He would be right only in the unlikely case that the Islamic world as a whole is soon successful in escaping from its self-incurred back- wardness. Even the most sympathetic interpreters currently have only illu- sory ideas about how this is supposed to happen.
In considering the hijacking of the airplanes that were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York on the morning of Septem- ber 11, 2001, within the context of our observations, it becomes clear that it was not a demonstration of Islamic strength but a symbol of a sardonic lack of means, the compensation for which could only have been the sacrifice of human lives masked as being sacred. No Marx of political Islam will ever be able to argue that although modern technology emerged out of the lap of Western civilization, it will only reach its complete determination in the hands of Islamic operators. The lesson of September 11 is that the enemies of the West expect success exclusively from the vengeful reversal of Western tools against their creators. The Islamophile Friedrich Nietzsche would have to modify his judgments today. The accusations that he leveled in his curse against Christianity have, behind his back, arrived at a different address. Radical Islamism provides the first example of a purely vengeful ideology that only knows how to punish not how to create something new. 34
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The weakness of Islam as a political religion, be it in its modest or radi- cal variations, rests on its backward-looking orientation. So far its leaders have not been capable of formulating nontechnical, romantic, angry con- cepts for the world of tomorrow. Without a doubt it is possible to set the rising protest masses of the Near and Middle East on their feet by using a rhetoric that is angry and terrific during the forthcoming half century. As a moblilizer of thymotic reserves on a large scale, Islamism has in fact not at all reached its climax. The dream of the activists for a neo-medieval Great Islamic Empire will continue to inspire numerous dreamers, even if the political conditions for its realization are missing in every respect. On the other hand, it is possible that conventional central powers could emerge out of the likely regional formations of empires of Islamic countries. That they would be able to create cultural artifacts, which would awaken a libido of imitation in other places, is unlikely. What remains decisive for the course of events is the fact that the heads of Islamism are, in their current condition, completely incapable of contributing to the writing of the next chapters of cultural evolution, not to mention dictating them, even if their countries of origin carry the "victory banner of procreation"35 as proudly as possible in front of them.
So far Islamism has little to show that would enable it to creatively continue the technological, economic, and scientific conditions of exis- tence for humankind during the twenty-first century. It would already be a titanic achievement if it were able to realize in due time the modern- ization of its own inventory. What is certain is that Islam has awakened from its dogmatic slumber. After centuries of stagnation, it returns to the world stage--in order to discover with embarrassment that it is incapable of adding to the major achievements in the area of culture that the cos- mopolitan, moderate, and inventive Islam was responsible for up until the thirteenth century. It could take another hundred years until its mas- terminds will be talked about not because of their threats but because of their achievements.
It will not be an empty time of waiting for the West. Because in the Islamic world there are several demographically explosive countries with plans to implement aggressive empire politics--particularly Iran and Paki- stan, to a lesser degree Egypt and Morocco--we will be confronted in future decades with a number of incoherent but spontaneously allied offensives, reminiscent of the semimodern departure movements of angry losers from Italy and Germany during the most unpleasant of times.
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Under these circumstances, the expectations of Islamism as a potential successor of communism and its role as a global opposition movement should be set low. In reality they are absolutely illusory. It is not at all pos- sible to see how it would be capable of organizing a new universal collective of dissidence potentials in the countries of globalized capitalism. However, a number of regional major banks of rage will accumulate huge thymotic potentials over longer periods of time. But these will, most likely, waste their capital by spilling blood instead of investing it in promising culture and business companies. For the first half of the twenty-first century, the Islamist youth movements in dozens of countries in the Near and Middle East will be the radiating trouble spots on the crisis maps of strategic ana- lysts. However, whatever the Islamic advances will add to a politics of rage during the next decades--and the next twenty or thirty years could become one of the most fatal periods of all times if worst-case scenarios should materialize--their projects will hardly go beyond the level of a politically black romanticism based on immanent reasons. Thus the mobilization of those who choose a detour through God-given battles aims for a dark goal: the self-destruction of the superfluous.
Anyone holding onto the demand that world history has to proceed as the world's court of judgment is looking forward to disappointing times. In any case, one would have to look out for other judges. Because there is not much good one can hope for from criminal courts, the future will at most hold arbitration courts. Under these circumstances, only global capitalism qualifies for the role. It alone could grow to become its own enemy during the next round of the game, an enemy that excites itself to the point where it has to take itself as seriously as a contender who is deciding who is to be and who is not to be.
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AFTER EVERYTHING THAT HAS BEEN SAID DURING THE COURSE of this investigation, it would be absurd to claim that rage's best days are behind it. On the contrary, rage (together with its thymotic siblings, pride, the need for recognition, and resentment) is a basic force in the ecosystem of affects, whether interpersonal, political, or cultural. This thesis remains valid, even if rage cannot concentrate itself in the future in the form of uni- versal collectives of a communist type, but rather only in regional collec- tions. If regression from a certain achieved state of political psychology is not possible, the thymotic energies I have discussed here should be officially accredited as an adequate image of the real, inasmuch as they have fallen victim to an organized misinterpretation.
What has truly reached an end is the psychohistorical constellation of religiously and politically inflated retributive thinking that was characteris- tic ofthe Christian, socialist, and Communist courtrooms. Nietzsche found the right concept to characterize its essence when--with an eye to Paul and his invention of "Christianity"--he diagnosed that resentment could become a mark of genius. As long as the liaison of spirit and resentment
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was stable, the desire for justice in the world--beyond earthly life or within actual history--could find shelter in fictitious beliefs: the theology of the wrath of God and the thymotic global economy of communism. In both systems, nothing less was at stake than the correction of accounts of suffering and injustice in a world that is morally out of balance. Both sought to turn resentment into a positive emotion in order to keep awake the sense of the unacceptability of an unjust world. It is because of their efforts that the highly unlikely phenomenon of "criticism" came into existence in Western civilization--insofar as we understand "criticism" to mean the spirit that has been fueled by ingenious resentment of sub- mission to mere facts, in particular facts of injustice. "Criticism" in this sense is not an absolute privilege of the West, however much it unfolded paradigmatically in the West; it is present in every culture that was suc- cessful in withdrawing from domination by servile, holistic, monologi- cal, and masochistic motives. Anyone insisting that democratic politics and forms of life could be universal should consider the cultures of coun- seling, the practices of discussion, and the traditions of criticisin of "the others" as regional sources of democracy. 1
The following insight needs to be asserted like an axiom: under condi- tions of globalization no politics of balancing suffering on the large scale is possible that is built on holding past injustices against someone, no matter if it is codified by redemptive, social-messianic, or democratic-messianic ide- ologies. This insight sets narrow limits to the moral productivity of move- ments of accusation even if they--as in the case of socialism, feminism, and postcolonialism--advocate a cause that is, in itself, respectable. It is much more important to delegitimize the inherited fatal alliance of intelligence and resentment to create a space for future paradigms of detoxified worldly wisdom. The criteria are not all that new--John Locke, the mastermind of the liberal English bourgeoisie, expressed them in a simple language in 1690: the basic rights to life, freedom, and property. 2 With regard to the historical success of this triad, the evidence is clear: only in those areas of the world where these norms are respected do we have true forms of Enlightenment. Two centuries after Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche--although in a form that is, while fully justified from the standpoint of therapy, without doubt too pathetic--complemented these premises of successful civilizations with a hygienic program that puts the liberation from the spirit of resentment on the agenda. Nietzsche was concerned about the replacement of the toxic figure of "vengeful humility" with a form of intelligence that assures itself
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anew about its thymotic motives. It is obvious that without an open culture of ambition, this cannot be done. Such a culture would have to be post- monotheistic in the sense that it breaks open retributive metaphysics and its political reflexes with an appropriate level of thoroughness. The goal is a meritocracy, which balances, in an intercultural and transcultural way, an antiauthoritarian relaxed morality, on the one hand, and a distinctive normative consciousness and respect for inalienable personal rights, on the other. The adventure of morality takes place through the parallel pro- gram of elitist and egalitarian forces. Only within these parameters can a change of accent away from acquisition drives and toward giving virtues be conceived.
The investment costs for this education program are high. What is at stake in it is the creation of a code of conduct for multicivilizational com- plexes. Such a schema needs to be strong enough to cope with the fact that the condensed or globalized world remains, for the time being at least, structured in a multi-megalomaniac and inter-paranoid way. It is not possible to integrate a universe out of energetic, thymotic, irritable actors through ideal syntheses from the top. It is only possible to keep it at a bal- ance through power relationships. Great politics proceeds only by balanc- ing acts. To stay in balance means not evading any necessary fights and not provoking unnecessary ones. It also means not giving up on the course of the world with its entropic processes, primarily the destruction of the envi- ronment and the demoralization of human relationships. Part of this means learning to see oneself always through the eyes of others. What in former times was to be achieved by an overstrained religious humility will have to be accomplished by a culture of rationally built second-order observations. This alone could stop the malignant naivete by connecting the desire to be respected with the ability to see oneself in relative terms. Time is required to solve these tasks--but not the historical time of the epic and tragedy. Essen- tial time needs to be determined as the time of civilizational learning. Those who only want to make "history" remain below this definition.
The term "transition" should not mislead us into ignoring the fact that one always exercises under conditions of emergency in order to prevent emergency from happening wherever possible. Mistakes are not permitted and yet are likely. If the exercises go well, it might be the case that a set of interculturally binding disciplines emerge that could, for the first time, rightly be referred to with an expression that, until now, has been used pre- maturely: world culture.
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INTRODUCTION
I. Cf. Ralf Miggelbrink, Der zornige Gott. Die Bedeutung einer anstofiigen biblischen
Tradition (The wrathful god: The significance of a scandalous biblical tradition)
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 13.
2. I thus disagree with the legend, which is popular among theologians, that myth
always implies the transfiguration of the existing world. According to this leg- end myth only comes to being with prophetic speech because of myth's distance from the world and its critical dimension. In reality myth is already as prophetic as prophecy is still mythic.
3. Cf. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz. Den Krieg denken (Clausewitz: Thinking war) (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1980), as well as Robert Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002).
4. Concerning the unconscious nexus of humanism and bellicosity, see Bazon Brock and Gerlinde Koschick, eds. , Krieg und Kunst (War and art) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002).
5. Cf. Iliad 9. 328 f.
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6. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Bilder der Gewalt--Gewalt der Bilder: Von der antiken Mythologie zur postmodernen Bilderindustrie," in Iconic Turn: Die neueMachtder Bilder (The new power of images), ed. Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (Cologne: Dumont, 2004), 333-34, for a reference to the continuous existence of irruptive ancient rage in the "natural theology of explosion" of modern mass culture.
7. The later stoic phenomenology of rage states that rage does not allow for any past. One can hide all other vices, but "anger parades itself; it shows on the face [seprofert et infaciem exit); the greater it is, the more obviously it seethes o u t . . . . The other affections make themselves seen [apparent). Anger sticks right out [eminet]" (Seneca, "On Anger," in Moral and Political Essays, ed.