No More Learning

12. Concerning the ancient conception of genius, see the work of the Roman rheto- rician Censorinus, De die natali, as well as Peter Sloterdijk, Spharen I, Blasen (Spheres I: Bubbles) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), chap. 6, "Divider of Soul Space," 421-85.
13. Seneca De ira 1. 6: "Non est ergo natura hominis poenae appetens; ideo ne ira qui- dem secundum naturam hominis, quia poenae appetens est [therefore punish- ment does not go with being a good man. Nor, for that reason, does anger, since punishment does go with anger]. " One can establish a distant analogy between the philosophical domestication of anger in the Greeks and the civilization of the
232
? INTRODUCTION
rage of God in the theology of "the priestly writings" of post-Babylonian Juda- ism. The change of emphasis toward individualized repentance withdraws the conditions of the prophetic speeches of threat from the divine penalization and destructive rage. See Miggelbrink, Derzornige Gott, 48-49.
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 146-50.
15. The classic catalogue of cardinal sins still provides an image that balances between erotic and thymotic vices. This is based on the assumption that one rightly can assign avaritia (avarice), luxuria (voluptuousness), and gula (intemperance) to the erotic pole, while superbia (arrogance, pride), ira (rage), and invidia (jeal- ousy, enviousness) belong to the thymotic pole. Only acedia (melancholia) does not fit into this categorization because it expresses a sadness without subject and object.
16. The classic expression of this idea is the slogan that was common among bour- geois of the eighteenth century: "Felix mentis": happy because of one's owns achievements. This expression decorates the facade of one of the most beauti- ful classicist buildings in Amsterdam for a good reason. This temple of enlight- enment, located at the street Kaisergracht, the canal of the king, was built in 1787 and after 1945 was temporarily the headquarters of the Dutch Communist Party. Today it is the location of one of the most lively cultural centers of the Netherlands.
17. Cf. Robert Shaeffer, The Resentment Against Achievement: Understanding the Assault Upon Ability (Buffalo, N. Y. : Prometheus Books, 1988).
18. Cf. Heiner Miihlmann, Die Natur derKulturen. Entwurfeiner kulturdynamischen Theorie (The Nature of civilizations: An attempt of a culture-dynamic theory) (Vienna: Springer, 1996).
19. We also owe one of the best summaries of the ancient and more recent discourses about thymos to a student of Strauss, Francis Fukuyama. See the rich passages of the unread best-seller The End ofHistory and the Last Man (1992; New York: Pen- guin, 2006). Also see the final section of the introduction, "The Postcommunist Situation," this volume.
20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 7. 7.
21. Seneca, who cites this passage from Aristotle's treatise On the Soul (De anima) in
his work De ira (1. 9), objects to the Greek thinker with the argument that affects
are just as bad as helpers as they are as leaders.
22. Cf. Fukuyama, The End of History, 165-66.
23. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in EnglisTi^tmns. Bruce Fink
(New York: Norton, 2006); Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of 233
? INTRODUCTION
Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H.
Nichols (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1980).
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other
Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2005), 145.
25. Ibid. , 144.
26. Concerning the invention of the "symbolic" as the domain of the (holy) father
in a situation of an actual weakening of the paternal function, see Michel Tort, Fin du dogme paternal (The End of the paternal dogma) (Paris: Aubier, 2005), 123-24.
27. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (New York: Penguin, 1994).
28. Cf. the deduction of modern entrepreneurial psychology from the innovation that arises from the pressure of paying off one's debts in Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger's essential work, Eigentum, Zins und Geld: Ungeloste Riitsel der Wirschaftswissenscha. fi (Property, interest, and money: unsolved riddles of eco- nomics) (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996).
29. See Walter Burkert, ccVergeltung" zwischen Ethologie und Ethik. Reflexe und Reflexionen in Texten und Mythologien desAltertums ("Retaliation" between eth- nology and ethics: reflexes and reflections in texts and mythologies of antiquity) (Munich: Siemens Stiftung 1992), 21-22.
30. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Old and New Tablets," in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2006), 159.
31. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 42.
32. Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (The communist postscript) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006).
33. See the discursive justification of this metaphor in Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, Eigentumsokonomik (Property economics) (Marburg: Metropolis, 2006).
34. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 157.
35. Boris Groys, Anne von der Heyden, and Peter Weibel, eds. , Zurueck aus der
Zukunft. Osteuropaeische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus (Back from the future: Eastern European cultures during the age of postcommunism) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005).
36. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 61-95.
234
? 1. RAGE TRANSACTIONS
37- Ibid. , 73.
38. Fukuyama, The End of History, 284.
39. Cf. Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht. Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der
Nationen (Sons and Global power: terror within the rise and fall of nations) (Zurich: Orell Fiissli, 2003), and his Finis Germaniae, Kursbuch 162 (Hamburg: Zeit, 2005), 18-29.
40. The proposition concerning the end of history exists in at least four different ver- sions: two are from Kojeve: the end of history in Stalinism and the end of history in the American way of life and in Japanese snobbism; one is in Dostoevsky: the end of history in the "Crystal Palace"; and one in Heidegger: the end of history in boredom. Concerning the last two versions, see Peter Sloterdijk, "Heideggers Politik: Das Ende der Geschichte vertagen" (Heidegger's politics: coping with the end of history), closing statement at the conference Heidegger. Le danger et la promesse, Strasbourg, December 5, 2004; as well as Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltin- nenraum des Kapitals. Fur eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (In the world interior of capital: for a philosophical theory of globalization) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), 258-348. There you also find the technical definition of "world history" as the successful phase of unilateralism and the constituting phase of the world system (1492-1944).
41. Cf. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004); Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. , Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005).
1. RAGE TRANSACTIONS
1. Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Every-
man's Library, 2005), 538.
2. Robert A. F. Thurman, Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
3. Cf. Juliane Vogel, Die Furie und das Gesetz. Zur Dramaturgie der "grossen Szene' in
der Tragoedie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Fury and law: On the dramaturgy of the "great
scene" in the tragedy of the nineteenth century) (Freiburg: Rombach, 2002).
4. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans.
Harry Zorn, (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 392; Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2001).
5. Concerning the source of the formula "x as such--x pure and simple," see Karl
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique ofPolitical Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 105. ^
235
? 6. 7.
8.
1. 2.
3.
4. 5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10.
Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, 537.
Quoted according to Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56; Conquest is doubtful about the authenticity of this statement.
See the doubts concerning the authenticity of the classic quotation in Christo- pher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005), 11.
2. THE WRATHFUL GOD
Cf. Regis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004).
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Penguin, 2003).
Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St Martin's Press 1990).
Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary ofReceived Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: New Directions, 1968).
Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Lfber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune (On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer, 1992), 73-74; "Simuli- erte Ready-mades von Fischli und Weiss," in Kunst-Kommentare (Vienna: Pas- sagen, 1977), 131-32; "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch-und Mas- senkulture," in Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Logic of collection: at the end of the age of the museum) (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 63-64; "On the New," Research Journal ofAnthology and Aesthetics 38 (2000): 5-17.
Cf. Raffaele Pettazonni, The All-Knowing God: Researches Into the Early Religion and Culture, trans. H. J. Rose (London: Methuen, 1956).
Cf. Jan Assmann, Politische Theologie zwischen Agypten und Israel (Political the- ology between Egypt and Israel) (Munich: Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Stiftung, 1992), 85. RuedigerSafranski,DasBoseoderdasDramaderFreiheit(Evil;or,thedramaof freedom) (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 32.
The concept of the "archive" is further explained through the cultural philo- sophical works of Boris Groys in chapter 3.
See, especially, Erich Zenger, A God of Vengeance? trans. Linda M. Maloney (Louisville, Ky. : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Zenger vehemently and for good hermeneutic reasons turns against the elimination of Jewish prayers of hatred from the Christian canon as well as from the hourly prayer of the Church. The theological arguments of the author are not as convincing as his herme- neutic ones. It is not clear what it is supposed to mean when he writes that the
1. RAGE TRANSACTIONS
236
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
"shrill tones of the psalms of enmity can serve to shock Christianity out of the
well-regulated slumber of its structural amnesia about God" (74).
11. 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), 450.
12. Isaiah's argument that God only keeps a remainder is taken up again at a deci- sive passage of Augustine in his merciless teaching of mercy in the year 397: "To Simplician: On Various Questions. Book I (De Diversis Quaestionibus)," in
Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press, 1953) 370-406,1. 2.
13. Gerd Theifien and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus.
Ein Lehrbuch (The his-
torical Jesus: a textbook) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), 249. 14. Concerning the metaphysical implications of the figure of speech "this world" (or "this life"), see Peter Sloterdijk, "1st die Welt verneinbar? Uber den Geist Indiens und die abendlandische Gnosis" (Can the world be unified? on the spirit of India and occidental gnosis), in Weltfremdheit (Unworldliness) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 220-33, especially section 1, "Fingerspitzengedanen" (Fingertip
thoughts).
15. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, ed.
Helmut Werner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 287.
16 In this context the works of Jacques Le Goff are most impotant. See his The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986).
17. TertuUian, Apology, De spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover
(Cambridge Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 297-301.
18. Cf. Nicholas Kwame Apetorgbor, TertuUian: Die Rache Gottes und die Verpflich- tung des Menschen zum Verzicht auf Rache. Die Bedeutung der Theologie Tertul-
liansfur das heutige afrikanische Christentum (TertuUian: The wrath of god and the human duty to renounce revenge. The significance of Tertullian's theology for contemporary African Christianity), (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 2004).
19. "Thence we came forth to rebehold the start": Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, trans. Henry W. Longfellow (New York: Chartwell, 2009), 34. 139,161.
3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION:
ON THE COMMUNIST WORLD BANK OF RAGE^""
1. TertuUian, Apology, De spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2003), 297-99.
2. Ibid. , 295.
237
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
3. Restif de la Bretonne, Revolutionare Nachte in Paris, ed. Ernst Gerhards (Bremen: Manholt, 1989). During the turmoil of 1848 similar slogans were used. Alexis de Tocqueville tells the story of a poor young country farmer who found work as servant for a family from Paris. "On the evening of the day when the insurrection started, he heard this child say as he was clearing away after the family dinner: 'Next Sunday (it was on a Thursday) it is we who will be eating the chicken's wings. ' To which a little girl who was working in the house answered: 'And it is we who will wear lovely silk dresses'" (Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. and trans. J. -P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr [New Bruns- wick, N. J. : Transaction, 1987], 143).
4. Antonio Negri, "The Specter's Smile," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium
on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso,
1999), 15.
5. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005), 103.
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Correspondence, 1844-1851, in Collected Works
(New York: International Publishers, 1982), 38:289.
7. Ibid. , 38:289.
8. Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner,
(Boulder, Colo. : Wesrview Press, 1978), 172.
9. FritzJ. Raddatz,ed. ,MohranGeneral:MarxundEngelsinihrenBriefen(Vienna:
Molden 1980), 203.
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 159.
11. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New
York: Vintage, 1984), 165 and 171.
12. Ibid. , 22.
13. Heiner Miiller, Der Auftrag (The mission), in Werke (Works) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 5:40.
14. Mikhail Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), in Staatlichkeit und Anarchie {Statism and Anarchy, note that this pamphlet is not included in English-language translations of Statism and Anarchy) ed. Horst Stuke (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), 103.
15. Concerning the significance of Methodism for democratic history, see Gertrud Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlighten- ments (New York: Knopf, 2004), 116-30.
16. Heinrich Heine, letter dated June 15,1843, in Sakularausgabe: Werke, Briefwech- sel, Lebenszeugnisse (Berlin: Akademie, 1970), 202.
17. Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), 101-2.
238
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
18. Ibid. , 95-99.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 195.
20. Bakunin, "Die Prinzipien der Revolution" (Principles of revolution), 101.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1996), 354-55-
25. Concerning the early phase of the British workers' movement, which used reli-
gious justifications as well as those pertaining to human rights, see Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), 19-203.
26. This expression occurs, among other places, in Thomas Mann's diagnostic com- mentaries during the 1930s and 1940s. Concerning the continuing development
of the concept of a worldwide civil war, see Nikolaus Sombart, Rendezvous mit dem Weltgeist. Heidelberger Reminiszenzen 1945-1951 (Rendezvous with the world spirit: reminiscences from Heidelberg, 1945-1951) (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 268-76.
27. Concerning Lenin's intensification of the concept of class and the resulting com- promise, see this chapter, pages 162-63.
28. Cf. Karl Marx, Critique of HegeVs "Philosophy of Right," ed. Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 137.
29. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cam- bridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1971), 51.
30. One year after Stalin's death, Lukacs published his book Die Zerstorung der Ver- nung {The Destruction of Reason, 1954), which shows how a form of thinking, compromised by Leninist and Stalinist convictions, absolves itself. Concerning the ideological show trial as trial of absolution, see this volume, page 167.
31. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 75-76.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid. , 41.
34. Karlheinz Weifimann, Schwarze Fahnen, Runenzeichen: Die Entwicklng der poli-
tischen Symbolik der deutschen Rechten zwischen 1890 und 1945 (Black flags, rune symbols: the development of political symbolism of the German right between 1890 and 1945) (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1991).
35. Cf. Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken? Fine Untersuchung zur Risikoverar- beiung in der Wirtschaft (What is it that banks trade? an investigation into the
239
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
processing of risk in the economy), intro. Niklas Luhmann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1991).
36. See Boris Groys, "Readymade," in Uber das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturkommune
(On the new: a study of cultural economics) (Munich: Fischer Verlag, 1992); "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch-und Massenkulture," in Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Logic of collection: at the end of the age of the museum) (Munich: Hanser, 1997); and Politik der Unsterblichkeit. Vier Gesprache mit Thomas Knoefel (Politics of immortality: four conversations with Thomas Knoefel) (Munich: Hanser, 2002).
37. See the section "The new as the valuable other," in Groys, Uber das Neue, 42-43. 38. For a systematic examination of the art world, see Beat Wyss, Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem (From image to the system of art) (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2006),
1:117-284.
39. Heiner Muhlmann, Die Natur der Kulturen. Entwurf einer kulturgenetischen
Theorie (The Nature of civilizations: An attempt of a culture-dynamic theory)
(Vienna: Springer, 1996).
40. Quoted by Ernst Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg 1917-1945. Nationalsozial-
ismus und Bolschewismus (The European civil war, 1917-1945: National Socialism
and Bolshevism), 6th ed. (Munich: Herbig, 2000), 339.
41. Quoted in Read, Lenin, 178.
42. See Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt. Philosophischer Extremis-
mus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Exit from the disenchanted world: philosophical
extremism between the world wars) (Munich: Fink, 1989), 13-20.
43. According to Stalin, the Communist Party had three to four thousand highest leaders ("the generals of our party"). Additionally, there were thirty to forty- thousand middle leaders ("our party officers") and a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand lower command personnel ("the sergeants of our party").
44. According to a consulted source, this hunnish thesis is attributed to Grigorij Sinowjew, one of Lenin's closest confidants. At a party meeting in Petrograd on
September 17, he declared, "We have to win over ninety of the one hundred mil- lion citizens of Soviet Russia. We should not speak to the others; we extermi- nate them. " According to a newspaper article, Sinowjew's speech was very well received. Quoted in Nolte, Der europaeische Buergerkrieg, 89, 513-14.
45. Cf. Alexander Jakowlew, Die Abgrundemeines Jahrhunderts. Eine Autobiographie
(The abysses of my century: an autobiography) (Leipzig: Faber und Faber, 2003),
154-55.
46. This is still depicted in the postcommunist literature, e. g. , in the satirical novel
about the Putin era by Victor Pelewin, Die Dialektik der Ubergangsperiode von 240
? 3. THE RAGE REVOLUTION
Nirgendwoher nach Nirgendwohin (The dialectics of the transitional period from
nowhere to nowhere) (Munich: Luchterhand, 2004).
47. The thesis that Lenin inaugurated fascism was developed during the 1950s by
such Soviet scholars as the Nobel laureate in physics Lew Davidowitsch Landau. After his mysterious encounter with Stalin in July 1935, Romain Rolland was the figurehead of Western pro-Sovietism. At the end of the 1920s he noted that com- munism had created fascism insofar as fascism was nothing but a "reverse Bol- shevism" (un bolchevisme au rebours). See Francois Furet, Le passe d'une illusion. Essai sur Videe Communiste au XXe siecle (Paris: Laffont 1995), 321.