Only he can speak with
authority
and call a bad match a really bad match.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
Continuing to talk about ‘society’ today is a form of conceptual pretension.
GÄCHTER: Isn’t your spheres theory ultimately the attempt to cushion the existential-philosophical shock by bedding it in foam, so to speak?
SLOTERDIJK: The existential philosophers have greatly over- exaggerated homelessness. In fact, people sit in their apartments with their delusions and cushion themselves as best they can. Living means continuously updating the immune system – and that is pre- cisely what foam theory can help to show more clearly than before.
GÄCHTER: If we grant the media the function of a control system, that is, an immune system in a way, they have functioned extremely well recently. The widespread publication of photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad provoked unprecedented concern worldwide, more than all the pictures from the Balkan War,
116 There Are No Individuals
Rwanda or various suicide-bomber attacks. Why? Because people never expected the Americans to do something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: Since the first Gulf War, the Americans have changed the rules of warfare by starting to manipulate pictures from the war. What used to be called theatrum belli is identified today by a mental field: all the generals in the age of the American wars start from the assumption there are always two wars in one, and two superimposed battlefields, with the battlefield of images playing an increasingly bigger role. The American generals of the image are required to wipe everything that could publicly damage the morale of the American troops or the reputation of the USA.
GÄCHTER: That plan failed spectacularly in the recent case of the torture pictures from Baghdad. Anyway, it’s not about wartime pictures but post-war pictures.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but the scene of the pictures, the theatrum belli of the imagination, can no longer be clearly separated from material war events. The war of images has now become the actual, perpetual war. Realpolitik today must be constructed in the area of ideas, of fantasy. This is why the factions from the Pentagon and Hollywood, which have worked entirely separately so far, have converged through events during the Bush administration. The torture videos, in turn, were partly the revenge of auteur film on the Pentagon/Hollywood complex: a naïve, amateurish production that follows its own laws – and its own conscience. As for torture, traditionally an area of discretion behind closed doors, it has now entered the age of images – ‘Sex, Torture and Videotape’.
GÄCHTER: What is remarkable is that the torturers themselves are now part of the production, especially shooting star Lynndie England, the grim US reservist.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. Lynndie England, the illegitimate sister of Monica Lewinsky as it were, has become world famous overnight like an amateur porn star. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you flirt with the president or the enemy, under present media con- ditions you have similar shooting star potential.
GÄCHTER: Producer, accomplice or victim of the picture war?
SLOTERDIJK: First-hand reporting is losing importance in relation to the reporting on the reporting. According to the modern logic of the mass media, only reports that have already been made can document that anything at all has happened that is worth looking at twice. From this perspective, in functional terms the media world is moving ever closer to the stock exchange where, as we know, securities that are already high are especially popular. The same applies to pictures, and shocking pictures in particular: if they are already getting good bids this will tend to continue. In my life as
There Are No Individuals 117
a viewer of pictures, I have seen few photos with such high aesthetic ambitions and such a macabre sense of the amateur aesthetics of horror as those from Abu Ghraib.
GÄCHTER: The photo of the Iraqi prisoner with the three- cornered cap on his head, the black cowl and the hands attached to cables probably has its place in the iconography of cruelty. But why was the effect of those particular torture pictures so devastating? What do you think?
SLOTERDIJK: The world had probably waited for those pic- tures. Anybody who wasn’t totally wallowing in self-hypnotized solidarity with the Americans realized quite early on that the ostensible motives advanced for the Iraq War were a strange and unique case. You could guess that the war was a construct designed according to a particular logic of action whose beginnings preceded George W. Bush taking up office – I nearly said, ‘seizing power’ in the way Hitler did. The global public knows we are dealing with a distorted picture of the United States at the moment. The effect of the torture pictures fits into this scenario: they confirm the partly mindless, partly articulated background awareness that this war has involved a great deception.
GÄCHTER: In barely two and a half years the Bush administra- tion has managed to create unprecedented atmospheric damage. Do you see this as a fleeting episode or a historical break, in the sense that the damage will not be reparable for a long time?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans are in the position today of the Europeans in the High Middle Ages: that of the corrupt Crusader. The idea of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of the most powerfully motivating ideas ever. It was discharged in a series of bloody wars. In the end they were not very successful, but they did result in Jerusalem being captured by the Christians for a while. The Europeans were granted the satisfaction of feeling like liberators and owners of the ‘most important place in the world’ – the Holy Sepulchre. The burial place of Our Lord was the ‘ground zero’ of the Middle Ages. Incidentally, Hegel dated the secret core idea of the European, the idea of religiously enlightened spirit, back to disappointment with the Crusades: the spirit that tried to possess the absolute stood before the empty grave and realized there was really nothing inside, and God could no longer be sought in the form of external things, of materiality. This is what paved the way that led from the internalization of mysticism to the Reformation, and finally to modern subject philosophy. Hegel saw the disillu- sionment about Jerusalem as constitutive for the character of the West.
GÄCHTER: Do you mean the new hasn’t reached the Americans
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yet, that they are reviving the crusade idea the Europeans long since abandoned, and their ‘Jerusalem disillusionment’ is yet to come?
SLOTERDIJK: We are dealing with a rascals’ crusade that may possibly evoke earlier experiences in Europe’s collective memory. But we don’t have to descend into the historical subconscious – the facts of the present situation speak for themselves. A rhetoric of sal- vation that combines themes from the Old and the New Testament is being used to justify an extremely shabby and, perhaps even worse, a profoundly dilettantish version of so-called global politics.
GÄCHTER: Dilettantism is probably the most cutting insult towards a practitioner of realpolitik like Donald Rumsfeld.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of realpolitik was introduced in the late nineteenth century to establish professionalism in the craft of politics . . .
GÄCHTER: You are referring to Bismarck . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Who, in every critical situation, first asked his advisers to present around twelve alternatives that he studied carefully before choosing the most appropriate one. Realpolitik according to Bismarck means emancipating ourselves, for reasons that lie in the nature of the case, from the imperative of common- sense morality. By contrast, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their neo-conservative think tanks have succeeded in placing professionalism completely at the service of dilettantism. They assemble everything from the fields of military technology, media manipulation, administration and law that helps to give their basic dilettantish position a veneer of competence.
GÄCHTER: But where does the principle of dilettantism come from? Those people are by no means stupid in the accepted sense. Even George W. Bush can’t be as stupid as people like to portray him.
SLOTERDIJK: The core of dilettantism is the feeling of being chosen: that you don’t stand on stage because you are able to do something, but because you believe you have a vision that justi- fies everything. The vision is the working hypothesis of the chosen person. This seems all the more absurd in the case of the USA because the Bush administration didn’t come to power due to their vision but through a more or less obvious electoral fraud, which was amateurish at the time. The Bush government took office under premises that were democratically very ambiguous and in reality impossible, and that had already caused serious moral damage to the system. And it continued like that.
15
CONFUSED PEOPLE SPREAD CONFUSION
Interview with Matthias Matussek*1
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, the last essay in your new book that completes your major three-volume work, Sphären [Spheres], contains the provocative thesis that our society is ‘beyond need’. In the light of the new discussion about poverty, aren’t you afraid of getting attacked for this?
SLOTERDIJK: At worst, by over-zealous spokespersons for fed- erations. In fact, I am making a therapeutic proposal to the public: let’s examine the mechanisms that cause one of the materially and mentally richest nations of all time to sink into a state of permanent grumpiness and agitation. Let’s use the break in pampering that the present recession has brought to investigate distortions in con- sciousness in this civilization when the pressure is off.
MATUSSEK: Many intellectuals at the moment pride themselves on being economic experts, and debate about safeguarding pros- perity and returns. Do you think it’s wrong to prioritize economic issues?
SLOTERDIJK: Caring about material affairs is definitely not an unimportant matter for human beings. We live in a politico- economic system that plausibly promises affluence to four fifths of the population.
MATUSSEK: Which is unprecedented in human history. SLOTERDIJK: The present pampering culture no longer
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Matthias Matussek appeared under the title ‘Verwirrte geben Verwirrung Weiter’, in Der Spiegel maga- zine 35 (2004): 122–5.
Matthias Matussek is an author and a journalist at Der Spiegel.
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concerns just a tiny aristocratic group but the majority of the popu- lation. In anthropological terms, this is a world novelty. But one of the business secrets of this culture seems to be that we shouldn’t talk about this unprecedented collective luxury. Instead, fictitious news about shortages has to be published all the time. Incidentally, warnings about shortages used to be something for intellectuals, but federation officers have taken over from them now.
MATUSSEK: Despite the present demonstrations, recent system critique has been from the top downwards – numerous entre- preneurs who don’t agree with the nation, with society and with politicians sit in Sabine Christiansen’s talk show and moan. 1
SLOTERDIJK: Talking of the media system, Spheres III also tells us about that. The media system exploits the entertainment value of complaining in the comfort sphere.
MATUSSEK: At one time you annoyed the cultural press with your books or with an essay lecture about cloning. Today you moderate the TV programme Das philosophische Quartett [The Philosophical Quartet] in the position of a ‘national moderator’, as you once put it. Where do you see your role in the present discussion?
SLOTERDIJK: For two decades I fought quite a last-ditch battle after saying in my first book that enlightenment works by cheering people up. Some people wanted to set me up as the fool who doesn’t recognize the gravity of the situation. Meanwhile, many people have realized that in everything we do, we have to begin with the atmospheric facts. We can’t live in one-sided negativity all the time. In this respect we could use a bit of emission control for the intel- lectual climate.
MATUSSEK: The philosopher as expert for the positive approach?
SLOTERDIJK: As long as the media business lives from moaning and meta-moaning there is no danger of the positive approach gaining ground.
MATUSSEK: Critics pour cold water on everything by nature. It’s part of their profession.
SLOTERDIJK: But we should never forget that German criti- cism represents a late form of German idealism. In the latter, the soul is part of the base while the economy belongs to the superstruc- ture. It follows that we are surrounded here in Germany by noble
1 Television personality Sabine Christiansen (b. 1957) was moderator of Germany’s most famous political talk show on ARD, the first German public TV channel, from 1998 to 2007.
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depreciators who are convinced that one has to address the feeble base. People run things down because they themselves belong to the good. Being a German critic means being able to give an admoni- tory sermon off the cuff.
MATUSSEK: Does it worry you that Germany, the economic giant, is stumbling, and our European neighbours are watching with a mixture of concern and schadenfreude?
SLOTERDIJK: Actually, I’m relieved that people treat us with totally normal malice. It shows that the people from countries all around us have got used to their previously frightening neighbours. In the past, during the phase of German resocialization, it was thought better not to offend the former delinquents. People watched more or less nervously to see what would become of the bad child of the international family. Now we Germans, the notorious outliers of history, have finally been brought into the main field.
MATUSSEK: Do you mean the country has become normalized in the crisis?
SLOTERDIJK: Whatever the case, because the Germans have dropped down from the top, they have stopped being students of democracy with special needs that require the school psycholo- gists to be called in constantly. Even the vigilant admonishers who wanted to attribute recidivist tendencies and murderers’ genes to the Germans are finding it difficult now in many respects. No nation can be more ordinary than the Germans today.
MATUSSEK: In the 1980s, you described prevailing conditions as ‘unhappily enlightened’ – and contrasted that with cheerful, subversive protest. Today the left wing is in the doldrums. What happened to the great urge for change?
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t exaggerate in retrospect. At the time that my Critique of Critical Reason appeared in 1983, the radical left had been largely occupied with tragicomic repetition of scenarios from the 1930s. From 1967 until the Baader-Meinhof crisis of 1977, we acted out the People’s Front and bravely pre- vented the rise of Hitler. 2 All the same, we had a script – even if it was half a century behind the times. Today, however, we don’t have a repertoire for the left, whether moderate or radical. The age group
2 Andreas Baader (1943–77) and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76) were the leaders of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), an extreme left-wing political group formed in 1968 that was responsible for violent attacks in West Germany. Meinhof hanged herself in her prison cell in 1976. The 1977 ‘crisis’ refers to the violent political unrest in many West German cities after Baader and three other imprisoned members of the group were found hanged in their cells in October 1977.
122 Confused People Spread Confusion
at the helm now is the most confused generation in German intel- lectual history.
MATUSSEK: The generation of 1968 has reached the top of society. Is that a lamentable situation?
SLOTERDIJK: The confused generation can only spread confu- sion. It does that successfully.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t Schröder introducing reforms right now that the ruling CDU [Christian Democratic Union] should really have carried through in the 1980s?
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe we should realize that for nearly twenty- five years the German party system has been offering voters the choice between four varieties of social democracy: the unity party of prosperity spreads across the whole so-called political spectrum.
MATUSSEK: The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the first to understand that, by turning his politics towards social democracy. His era was marked by the lucky accident of German unification – and everything that wasn’t dealt with.
SLOTERDIJK: Kohl remains the undisputed lord of German lethargy. He led the Germans to the end of history. He turned the promise of post-history, general lethargy with a high level of afflu- ence, into reality, with visible success. Things have become decidedly more uncomfortable since slimmer men have been in government. We are even being threatened with history starting all over again.
MATUSSEK: The new men are getting fatter again as well.
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can beat Kohl on the scales. But now the new uncomfortable types have arrived and want to put the German lethargocracy back into competition with the best in the world. No wonder the great majority says, predictably: ‘Wait, that’s not what we signed up for! We haven’t trained for the top! ’ That’s why so many journalists and sociologists seriously consider German football as the oracle of the nation. On the football pitch we can see that simply praising ourselves isn’t always enough to get by.
MATUSSEK: It seems poverty is being officially tolerated for the first time in Germany – this was previously unheard-of in Germany’s centrist society of consensus.
SLOTERDIJK: Agenda 20103 contains nothing that Kohl shouldn’t have already introduced twenty years ago. Now his suc- cessor has to take over the other side’s operations. That is the usual SPD [Social Democratic Party] tragedy, by the way. As for the new
3 Agenda 2010 was a reform programme for the German welfare system and labour relations. It was launched in 2003 by the Social Democrat/ Green Party coalition led by the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Confused People Spread Confusion 123
visibility of poverty, it is related to the disappearance of the special German climate after 1945. Back then, when the whole country con- sisted of losers, the socio-psychological grip on the whole thing was much tighter than it is today. The post-war reconstruction was a collective effort. By now, being a loser is seen more as an individual issue again.
MATUSSEK: Is the thesis of the completed reconstruction actu- ally right? Berlin, for example, has not been recreated at all, and is a city of construction sites, strips overgrown with weeds, and wasteland, which local politicians are actually selling as a prime opportunity.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s always devastating when politicians talk like gallery owners. People in the special Berlin biotope have had half a century’s practice at being kettled as an attraction. After the border opened, along with all the impressive new buildings there was con- stant competition over the memorials that were supposed to make historical remembrance impressive as well.
MATUSSEK: Remorse, made in Germany.
SLOTERDIJK: German remorse used to be a brand-name article in the moral markets of the world. Meanwhile it is only rarely in demand.
MATUSSEK: What is much more visible is German self- confidence, at least in foreign policy, which has even taken the liberty of resisting American messianic ideology.
SLOTERDIJK: I made a lot of enemies before the Iraq War started by saying that Schröder’s vote against the US-British policy represented the voice of free and reasonable Europe – against the opportunists in the South, in the East, and in the German Parliament.
MATUSSEK: Is that the new German role, perhaps even a German identity: to push on with Europe as a kind of self- dissolution in the European project?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe’s nation-states, including Germany, do not have to liquidate themselves. But they should remember their great common script: this is the home of the anti-miserabilism project, which should bring humankind as a whole, or a large part of it, into a worldwide community of comfort. Let’s note that behind human rights are always rights to comfort that are wrongly described merely as ‘material interests’.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t that a rather harsh de-mystification of noble human rights?
SLOTERDIJK: Not at all. Human rights begin with the right to a lawyer; in the first place, they protect those who aren’t able to speak for themselves yet. Once people can speak for themselves, they
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immediately start making material demands. This is an unavoidable sequence. It’s impossible to imagine a majority that is full of human rights down to the tips of their toes but remains as poor as beggars. People who say and mean human rights are also affirming the trend towards opening up access to the affluence zone.
MATUSSEK: Is the new Federal German President on the right track in announcing that ‘The nation needs the courage to change’? SLOTERDIJK: He’s humming the right theme tune. However, even the best speeches about courage and rolling up our sleeves are fundamentally flawed. If our new president has a good relationship to courage then he has to do something courageous, maybe pardon somebody unexpectedly or visit a proscribed country. Just urging
courage on its own would be too German.
MATUSSEK: What can a German President do in this context? SLOTERDIJK: He has to stay on the beaten track. The fact is,
people in the affluence zone only accept changes that give them the security of knowing things will generally stay the same as they were. Comfort systems are controlled by tautologies. If, for example, Günter Netzer4 comments after a bad football match: ‘We have been watching a bad match’, a light goes on all over the country because we have all seen the same thing. He probably says ‘A seri- ously bad match’ to boost his intellectual status.
MATUSSEK: He says what everybody wants to hear.
SLOTERDIJK: He says what everybody has seen. Right now he holds the highest informal national office – that of chief tautologist.
Only he can speak with authority and call a bad match a really bad match. Right now the country’s highest office is shared – Günter Netzer occupies one half and the German President the other. The latter holds the prerogative of saying that we can win anyway.
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, thank you for this interview.
4 Günter Netzer is a famous ex-football player from the German national team who later became a TV football commentator.
16
GERMANS WANT TO BE COMPELLED
Theory for the Year’s End
Interview with Ulf Poschardt*1
POSCHARDT: The year 2004 is coming to an end. What did the philosopher see in it?
SLOTERDIJK: To start with, three deaths in the autumn that may form a constellation. First, the death of Jacques Derrida: the last of the greats of our discipline. A distant colleague, but still present like a friend or a conscience. When we heard the news of his death from Paris during the Frankfurt Book Fair there was a hushed silence at the Suhrkamp stand, as if time had stood still. A few weeks later, the macabre death agony of Yasser Arafat began. He lay brain dead in a French military hospital, a living corpse, but was not allowed to be officially dead. As a head of state he had to remain in office while the jockeying for positions and millions took place over his near-corpse. This recalls the medieval legend of El Cid, whose dead body was tied to a horse’s back to lead his troop into battle. The question is, on which horse’s back Arafat’s corpse sat during those days.
The third death happened several days earlier: the murder of a moderately talented but famous film director, slaughtered on the street in public view in a way that showed this was not just an execu- tion but an excommunication of a man consigned to the animals for slaughter. The letter claiming responsibility was less a sign of terror than of enraged violated faith.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulf Poschardt appeared under the title ‘Deutsche wollen müssen’ [‘Germans want to be compelled’], in the Welt am Sonntag (12 December 2004).
Ulf Poschardt is a journalist and author.
126 Theory for the Year’s End
POSCHARDT: What do those three deaths have in common?
SLOTERDIJK: They form a kind of thanatological colloquium because they express something about exemplary deaths in our time. The philosopher Derrida died after a long, very consciously organ- ized farewell to the scourge of postmodern humankind, cancer – an evil that has not yielded to any enlightenment or deconstruction. Yasser Arafat died as an icon and zombie, and Theo van Gogh as a victim of fanaticism because he tried to apply Voltaire’s battle cry against the repressive Church – écrasez l’infame! – to Islam.
POSCHARDT: Which death did you think about most?
SLOTERDIJK: On the personal level, Derrida, of course, but nothing can compare to Arafat’s end as an emblem of the state of the world. He died as the enemy of countless people, as a repository for the curses of millions, however much he was a votive image, a repository of hope, for many others. In ethnological terms he was a Nail Man, like one of those Congolese fetishes in which curses are hammered with nails. He was the perfect Fetish Man of the last quarter-century.
POSCHARDT: In the end he was merely his wife’s puppet. Is that a neat punchline against the latent disrespect of women in Islam?
SLOTERDIJK: The woman’s revenge occurred when she married him. Nietzsche used to say, ‘A married philosopher belongs in a comedy. ’ Where does a married terrorist belong? Someone like that only fits into the chilling satire of the Middle East. Arafat was, incidentally, the only statesman of recent times who secretly bore the name ‘terrorist’ as an honorary title. Nobody else has done that since Churchill.
POSCHARDT: Churchill?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. He described himself as a terrorist when he gave the order for the bomb warfare against Germany. In those days the history of the word ‘terrorism’ was more open than it is now, and since Churchill usually knew what he was doing he identified clearly with his methods.
POSCHARDT: Didn’t the word ‘terrorist’ exist earlier?
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, modern terror has a long history dating back to the Jacobins’ use of the guillotine. In nineteenth-century Italy an anarchist who planted bombs was called a dinamitario – a beautiful job description, totally hardware oriented. Today’s concept of terror, however, is very zeitgeisty, that is, it focuses on software and is designed for aesthetic effect. Churchill’s admission shows that the word’s history had not yet been decided. If terror is the means of conquering Hitler, one should admit it and wear the title of terrorist like a medal. Churchill did that. Arafat had his own particular ideas about that.
Theory for the Year’s End 127
POSCHARDT: But in this sense terror would always be a means or an aspect of politics. In the sense of the defence capability of a constitutional state, it is part of its monopoly of power.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s quite right. Politics is always a mode in which the state organizes how it appears to the people. The lofty state has to administer the terror it evokes itself. It is responsible for the aura that surrounds it as the ‘coldest monster’, to quote Nietzsche again. That means it not only has to keep its symbols of sovereignty intact, but also to manage the epiphanies of its violent core – think of the military parades in France on 14 July. Carl Schmitt wrote that ‘The sovereign is the person who decides on the state of emergency. ’ Such a situation occurs when the latent means of terror are transformed into actually existing ones. In other words, the sovereign is the person who has the possibility of making con- vincing threats.
POSCHARDT: Would that make the democratic politician a kind of castrated terrorist?
SLOTERDIJK: Democracy means not having a need for terror any more. The careers of Castro and Arafat, but also of Menachim Begin, show the trajectory from terror to legality. The title of castrated terrorist suits figures like Castro and Arafat very well, although it is more about pacification than about castration.
POSCHARDT: Was Arafat a supremely skilful Machiavellian?
SLOTERDIJK: He was already head of the PLO in 1972, at the time of the attack on the Olympic village in Munich in which several Israeli athletes died. Back then he already showed his talent as a media politician, because anyone who successfully disrupts the Olympic Games becomes a global star. In November 1974, Arafat spoke to the UNO assembly in New York, scoring an enormous prestige victory for the PLO. The Munich drama was also the beginning of the hot phase of the alliance between terror and the media – that was the zero hour of terror as a media event. This has no connection any longer with the terror of the French Revolution that Hegel examined, and that was partly legitimated, or with the conservative nihilists who made regular attacks on the Czars. As we know, the author of The Phenomenology of Mind described the Jacobin murders as the frenzy of abstract subjectivity that wipes away everything obstructing freedom.
POSCHARDT: Did that shock Hegel the Swabian?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think so. Hegel was cold-blooded, or he understood everything, which is the same thing. He saw terror as the price for a learning process modern people had to go through before they could live as citizens in a constitutional state. The terror of pure conscience is a stage in the curriculum that leads to the modern
128 Theory for the Year’s End
state: terror is the way that the spirit of freedom, which is simply abstract, first learns about its own state and learns to appreciate the indispensability of the law. This stage is a necessary experience because bourgeois society and its state only become consolidated in the post-terrorist stage. Expressed in educational terms, we could say that terror is an episode in the preparatory period for human- kind’s high-school certificate.
POSCHARDT: Do constitutional states react so vigorously to terror because they recognize their own previous existence in it?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. They recognize in terrorism what they have dispensed with. But the present terror is basically very roman- tic. It is conceived as a hero cult and its aim is to found a new community through inflammatory theatrical acts of violence.
POSCHARDT: What about Bin Laden? The al-Qaeda fighters of September 11 were mostly fellow Saudis.
SLOTERDIJK: Bin Laden is an activist of the third dream. He places an Islamist dream alongside the American dream and the Saudi dream.
POSCHARDT: What dreams do the Saudis have?
SLOTERDIJK: Next to the Americans with their religion of success, the ruling Saudi cliques are the greatest escapists of our time. Because their money never runs out, they can live in an absolute dream world in which they are free to move through the centuries like sleepwalkers. They escape from the present to the past and then return again. At one moment they are in the seventh century riding through the desert with Mohammed, their minds full of plans; then they are in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flirt with Wahhabi asceticism; and then they plunge into the twenty-first century and get high on the goods of the liberal world. They can endlessly afford that Arabo-Disney lifestyle feeling and can arrange themselves in a total virtual reality.
POSCHARDT: Does Bin Laden have anything in common with those Disney Arabs?
SLOTERDIJK: He is a creation of Saudi escapism, but a ren- egade from it at the same time. His goal is to destroy the most bizarre alliance in world history, the entente cordiale between the USA and Saudi Arabia. This alliance binds the world’s two great escapist powers together in a kind of synchronized sleepwalking. We shouldn’t forget that in its own way the USA is also a purely escapist nation. From the perspective of the Old World, the reason is obvious. The majority of the country’s population consists of people who fled from miserable circumstances to make a new start elsewhere. The country itself is founded on the flight to happi- ness. Basically, the people are refugees from poverty in their home
Theory for the Year’s End 129
country, people who think they are escaping, whether from bad to better or from good to fantastic. But the dependence on oil means the American way of life is tied to the Gulf region, which forms an ironic bond between the earth’s two great escapist extremes. The Saudi and the American dream mutually support each other. Such countries inevitably create their corresponding dream factories. The Arabs have also reached their own stage of myth creation and are beginning to give themselves a poetic image. They are inventing themselves as agents of a great history. The air is full of fairy tales and imperial epics – including the epic hostilities essential for any great story. The young men become soaked in a heroic fairy-tale paranoia that requires them to fight the nearby enemy at home and the faraway enemy across the Atlantic.
What makes Bin Laden so interesting is that he torpedoes the magical sense of fellowship between the two escapist powers. He has understood that dream factories can only be fought with the aid of alternative dream factories. Citizens of a genuine escapist power are no longer interested in resistances of yesterday. Escapism is the model for movement by which people can live away from resistance. If there are still obstacles left to face, it is only because the old evil followed you to your new home. You fled from the Old World and left all your old troubles behind and now what you left has caught up with you. The best thing would be to eliminate the evil at its own source.
POSCHARDT: Then the story of America’s creation is based first of all on the flight of Europeans to a desired place that turns out successfully. It starts on the East Coast and flees further westwards until it reaches the Pacific coast. That is where Hollywood arose, where the escape was dematerialized and continued in imagination.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, going West is fundamental for the entire modern age: from Europe across the Atlantic and further from the East Coast to the West Coast. But that was not the end of the great escapist drift by a long way. The escape energies accumulated at the Pacific wall and rose upwards. California emerged as the first land of ‘get high, go easy, get rich, get famous’. Everything has the same dynamic, the same flight into the easy, magnificent, glorified life. People always want to get away from the old powers of depression. Still, the Americans sense that something is creeping up behind us that we can’t get rid of completely. Persecutory forces are at work, pursuing us into the heartland of evasion. Many of those who are fleeing are tired and at risk of giving up the race. Is it coincidence that the USA is the paradise of psychotropic drugs – and the hell of overweight people? The scales tell them they don’t look fit for escape.
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POSCHARDT: From that perspective, would nation-building, the idea of exporting democracy – by armed force, if necessary – also be a consequence of that escapism?
SLOTERDIJK: Nation-building is the attempt to sedate possible pursuers on the spot.
POSCHARDT: Do you believe that?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course not. Not because I don’t trust the Americans and don’t wish them success in what they do. On the contrary, one wishes the agenda as such the best of luck. But, as Europeans, we know a few things that dampen our confidence in political engineering. Nation-building isn’t a stupid concept in itself. We could use it to sum up a good part of what has happened in Europe since Napoleon. Above all, he characterized French world politics in the offensive phase after the revolution of 1789. The French democratic messianic ideology that Napoleon embodied is absolutely comparable to the America of today, and its conse- quences make us think. It took 150 years after Napoleon’s death to get rid of the last detritus of his politics.
POSCHARDT: Can you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s consider Spain and Germany, both objects of Napoleonic nation-building. In Spain the effects lasted until the death of Franco in 1975. In 1808, Napoleon stood outside Madrid with an army of three hundred thousand men, as a liberator and herald of human rights, of course. All at once the miserable Spanish could participate in the achievements of the French Revolution, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, the end of exploitation of the people by a parasitical clergy. The conquerors didn’t utter a single wrong word. What happened then? The downtrodden Spanish peasants, the poorest of the poor, ganged up together and picked out young men from the liberators’ army and, full of hate, massa- cred them. We are reminded of this story today every time we say the word ‘guerrilla’. After that, Spain needed nearly 170 years to find its own path to democracy. In Germany things weren’t much better, because anti-French emotions led to the ideas of the German national movement splitting off from the ideas of the Enlightenment – with consequences that could be observed in 1945. Briefly, the Europeans know, or should know, what to think about import exemptions and import democracies. At best we get dictatorships in democratic clothing with a substructure of a market economy.
POSCHARDT: That sounds as if it would apply to us Germans as well.
SLOTERDIJK: At a distance, the Wilhelmine Empire prob- ably seemed to be a construct like that. The Federal Republic of Germany, however, was fortunate and bypassed the usual
Theory for the Year’s End 131
emotional backlash against the liberator. But this is a historical peculiarity that the present propaganda mongers of nation-building mistakenly hold up as a model. We can’t derive anything at all from the German case. The world in the twenty-first century will most probably become a form of global authoritarian capitalism. With the war on terror and the Islamists’ jihad romanticism, war capital- ism is already palpably close. The circumstances are such that there will soon be attempts to increase non-democracy.
POSCHARDT: Is it the task of intellectuals to remind democracy of its own roots?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, but the intellectuals themselves don’t really know any longer where the roots lie.
POSCHARDT: That leads to the question: who are we Germans? Cosiness is more important to us than freedom. We would rather live nice and warm in a little shack than freezing in huge rooms. We are like Oblomov, the nineteenth-century Russian hero who spends his life on the sofa.
SLOTERDIJK: I think the Russian association leads to the issue itself, for modern Germans are actually much more Russian than they imagine. We resemble the romantic cliché of Russians from nineteenth-century literature. They probably slipped into us by a kind of soul migration during the Cold War. However, the Germans are cosy in a completely different way than their Eastern cousins. They stay away from the precipice; their cosiness remains compat- ible with work. German motivation is a reliable constant as long as it goes along with a strong imperative, because Germans don’t want to get involved voluntarily. They want to be compelled.
POSCHARDT: They first have to hit the rock bottom of necessity.
SLOTERDIJK: If the rock bottom has spoken to them, they’re capable of anything.
POSCHARDT: Where are we now? Have we hit rock bottom or are we still going down further?
SLOTERDIJK: I think the country’s own success mechanisms are in such good shape that we can’t fall much further. The German export economy, German science, the German legal system, the German social system, all of that is firmly established in positive routines that keep going even when a few individuals dig their heels in.
POSCHARDT: And what about freedom?
SLOTERDIJK: By now, most goals for freedom are defined apo- litically or post-politically.
POSCHARDT: Strange things happen in Germany: People work illegally and complain there are no jobs. They moan about the col- lapse of the inner cities and go shopping in malls outside the city.
132 Theory for the Year’s End
They complain about jobs migrating away and save money by going shopping in Poland. Are many Germans incapable of understand- ing their own actions and the consequences?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people are not particularly good at grasp- ing if-then relationships – I wouldn’t restrict that to Germans. In our case we have the added factor of the general infantilizing ten- dency of the social climate. The drug subculture offers the paradigm for the radical separation of one’s own behaviour and awareness of consequences, and the open consumer society has more in common with this subculture than it realizes. Drug consumers have learned to ignore the consequences of their addiction, whether physical or moral. Their own ruin doesn’t bother them: just watch how you cope with my self-destruction! ‘You’ means the legendary unreal collective of the Others that is to blame for everything and respon- sible for everything. This collective contains the so-called ‘society’, the biggest of all vague addresses. It is the perfect imaginary recipi- ent for passing on blame that can’t be addressed. I actually think our beloved homeland consists to a large extent of people who practise the art of passing things on. We blame our bad mood on the conjuncture; we pass on our own consumer behaviour to the desola- tion of the inner cities.
POSCHARDT: What can politics do in that case? Isn’t it, in fact, the motive force of this infantilization?
SLOTERDIJK: Social policy is an enterprise for eliminating the serious case.
GÄCHTER: Isn’t your spheres theory ultimately the attempt to cushion the existential-philosophical shock by bedding it in foam, so to speak?
SLOTERDIJK: The existential philosophers have greatly over- exaggerated homelessness. In fact, people sit in their apartments with their delusions and cushion themselves as best they can. Living means continuously updating the immune system – and that is pre- cisely what foam theory can help to show more clearly than before.
GÄCHTER: If we grant the media the function of a control system, that is, an immune system in a way, they have functioned extremely well recently. The widespread publication of photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad provoked unprecedented concern worldwide, more than all the pictures from the Balkan War,
116 There Are No Individuals
Rwanda or various suicide-bomber attacks. Why? Because people never expected the Americans to do something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: Since the first Gulf War, the Americans have changed the rules of warfare by starting to manipulate pictures from the war. What used to be called theatrum belli is identified today by a mental field: all the generals in the age of the American wars start from the assumption there are always two wars in one, and two superimposed battlefields, with the battlefield of images playing an increasingly bigger role. The American generals of the image are required to wipe everything that could publicly damage the morale of the American troops or the reputation of the USA.
GÄCHTER: That plan failed spectacularly in the recent case of the torture pictures from Baghdad. Anyway, it’s not about wartime pictures but post-war pictures.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but the scene of the pictures, the theatrum belli of the imagination, can no longer be clearly separated from material war events. The war of images has now become the actual, perpetual war. Realpolitik today must be constructed in the area of ideas, of fantasy. This is why the factions from the Pentagon and Hollywood, which have worked entirely separately so far, have converged through events during the Bush administration. The torture videos, in turn, were partly the revenge of auteur film on the Pentagon/Hollywood complex: a naïve, amateurish production that follows its own laws – and its own conscience. As for torture, traditionally an area of discretion behind closed doors, it has now entered the age of images – ‘Sex, Torture and Videotape’.
GÄCHTER: What is remarkable is that the torturers themselves are now part of the production, especially shooting star Lynndie England, the grim US reservist.
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. Lynndie England, the illegitimate sister of Monica Lewinsky as it were, has become world famous overnight like an amateur porn star. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you flirt with the president or the enemy, under present media con- ditions you have similar shooting star potential.
GÄCHTER: Producer, accomplice or victim of the picture war?
SLOTERDIJK: First-hand reporting is losing importance in relation to the reporting on the reporting. According to the modern logic of the mass media, only reports that have already been made can document that anything at all has happened that is worth looking at twice. From this perspective, in functional terms the media world is moving ever closer to the stock exchange where, as we know, securities that are already high are especially popular. The same applies to pictures, and shocking pictures in particular: if they are already getting good bids this will tend to continue. In my life as
There Are No Individuals 117
a viewer of pictures, I have seen few photos with such high aesthetic ambitions and such a macabre sense of the amateur aesthetics of horror as those from Abu Ghraib.
GÄCHTER: The photo of the Iraqi prisoner with the three- cornered cap on his head, the black cowl and the hands attached to cables probably has its place in the iconography of cruelty. But why was the effect of those particular torture pictures so devastating? What do you think?
SLOTERDIJK: The world had probably waited for those pic- tures. Anybody who wasn’t totally wallowing in self-hypnotized solidarity with the Americans realized quite early on that the ostensible motives advanced for the Iraq War were a strange and unique case. You could guess that the war was a construct designed according to a particular logic of action whose beginnings preceded George W. Bush taking up office – I nearly said, ‘seizing power’ in the way Hitler did. The global public knows we are dealing with a distorted picture of the United States at the moment. The effect of the torture pictures fits into this scenario: they confirm the partly mindless, partly articulated background awareness that this war has involved a great deception.
GÄCHTER: In barely two and a half years the Bush administra- tion has managed to create unprecedented atmospheric damage. Do you see this as a fleeting episode or a historical break, in the sense that the damage will not be reparable for a long time?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans are in the position today of the Europeans in the High Middle Ages: that of the corrupt Crusader. The idea of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of the most powerfully motivating ideas ever. It was discharged in a series of bloody wars. In the end they were not very successful, but they did result in Jerusalem being captured by the Christians for a while. The Europeans were granted the satisfaction of feeling like liberators and owners of the ‘most important place in the world’ – the Holy Sepulchre. The burial place of Our Lord was the ‘ground zero’ of the Middle Ages. Incidentally, Hegel dated the secret core idea of the European, the idea of religiously enlightened spirit, back to disappointment with the Crusades: the spirit that tried to possess the absolute stood before the empty grave and realized there was really nothing inside, and God could no longer be sought in the form of external things, of materiality. This is what paved the way that led from the internalization of mysticism to the Reformation, and finally to modern subject philosophy. Hegel saw the disillu- sionment about Jerusalem as constitutive for the character of the West.
GÄCHTER: Do you mean the new hasn’t reached the Americans
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yet, that they are reviving the crusade idea the Europeans long since abandoned, and their ‘Jerusalem disillusionment’ is yet to come?
SLOTERDIJK: We are dealing with a rascals’ crusade that may possibly evoke earlier experiences in Europe’s collective memory. But we don’t have to descend into the historical subconscious – the facts of the present situation speak for themselves. A rhetoric of sal- vation that combines themes from the Old and the New Testament is being used to justify an extremely shabby and, perhaps even worse, a profoundly dilettantish version of so-called global politics.
GÄCHTER: Dilettantism is probably the most cutting insult towards a practitioner of realpolitik like Donald Rumsfeld.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of realpolitik was introduced in the late nineteenth century to establish professionalism in the craft of politics . . .
GÄCHTER: You are referring to Bismarck . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Who, in every critical situation, first asked his advisers to present around twelve alternatives that he studied carefully before choosing the most appropriate one. Realpolitik according to Bismarck means emancipating ourselves, for reasons that lie in the nature of the case, from the imperative of common- sense morality. By contrast, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their neo-conservative think tanks have succeeded in placing professionalism completely at the service of dilettantism. They assemble everything from the fields of military technology, media manipulation, administration and law that helps to give their basic dilettantish position a veneer of competence.
GÄCHTER: But where does the principle of dilettantism come from? Those people are by no means stupid in the accepted sense. Even George W. Bush can’t be as stupid as people like to portray him.
SLOTERDIJK: The core of dilettantism is the feeling of being chosen: that you don’t stand on stage because you are able to do something, but because you believe you have a vision that justi- fies everything. The vision is the working hypothesis of the chosen person. This seems all the more absurd in the case of the USA because the Bush administration didn’t come to power due to their vision but through a more or less obvious electoral fraud, which was amateurish at the time. The Bush government took office under premises that were democratically very ambiguous and in reality impossible, and that had already caused serious moral damage to the system. And it continued like that.
15
CONFUSED PEOPLE SPREAD CONFUSION
Interview with Matthias Matussek*1
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, the last essay in your new book that completes your major three-volume work, Sphären [Spheres], contains the provocative thesis that our society is ‘beyond need’. In the light of the new discussion about poverty, aren’t you afraid of getting attacked for this?
SLOTERDIJK: At worst, by over-zealous spokespersons for fed- erations. In fact, I am making a therapeutic proposal to the public: let’s examine the mechanisms that cause one of the materially and mentally richest nations of all time to sink into a state of permanent grumpiness and agitation. Let’s use the break in pampering that the present recession has brought to investigate distortions in con- sciousness in this civilization when the pressure is off.
MATUSSEK: Many intellectuals at the moment pride themselves on being economic experts, and debate about safeguarding pros- perity and returns. Do you think it’s wrong to prioritize economic issues?
SLOTERDIJK: Caring about material affairs is definitely not an unimportant matter for human beings. We live in a politico- economic system that plausibly promises affluence to four fifths of the population.
MATUSSEK: Which is unprecedented in human history. SLOTERDIJK: The present pampering culture no longer
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Matthias Matussek appeared under the title ‘Verwirrte geben Verwirrung Weiter’, in Der Spiegel maga- zine 35 (2004): 122–5.
Matthias Matussek is an author and a journalist at Der Spiegel.
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concerns just a tiny aristocratic group but the majority of the popu- lation. In anthropological terms, this is a world novelty. But one of the business secrets of this culture seems to be that we shouldn’t talk about this unprecedented collective luxury. Instead, fictitious news about shortages has to be published all the time. Incidentally, warnings about shortages used to be something for intellectuals, but federation officers have taken over from them now.
MATUSSEK: Despite the present demonstrations, recent system critique has been from the top downwards – numerous entre- preneurs who don’t agree with the nation, with society and with politicians sit in Sabine Christiansen’s talk show and moan. 1
SLOTERDIJK: Talking of the media system, Spheres III also tells us about that. The media system exploits the entertainment value of complaining in the comfort sphere.
MATUSSEK: At one time you annoyed the cultural press with your books or with an essay lecture about cloning. Today you moderate the TV programme Das philosophische Quartett [The Philosophical Quartet] in the position of a ‘national moderator’, as you once put it. Where do you see your role in the present discussion?
SLOTERDIJK: For two decades I fought quite a last-ditch battle after saying in my first book that enlightenment works by cheering people up. Some people wanted to set me up as the fool who doesn’t recognize the gravity of the situation. Meanwhile, many people have realized that in everything we do, we have to begin with the atmospheric facts. We can’t live in one-sided negativity all the time. In this respect we could use a bit of emission control for the intel- lectual climate.
MATUSSEK: The philosopher as expert for the positive approach?
SLOTERDIJK: As long as the media business lives from moaning and meta-moaning there is no danger of the positive approach gaining ground.
MATUSSEK: Critics pour cold water on everything by nature. It’s part of their profession.
SLOTERDIJK: But we should never forget that German criti- cism represents a late form of German idealism. In the latter, the soul is part of the base while the economy belongs to the superstruc- ture. It follows that we are surrounded here in Germany by noble
1 Television personality Sabine Christiansen (b. 1957) was moderator of Germany’s most famous political talk show on ARD, the first German public TV channel, from 1998 to 2007.
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depreciators who are convinced that one has to address the feeble base. People run things down because they themselves belong to the good. Being a German critic means being able to give an admoni- tory sermon off the cuff.
MATUSSEK: Does it worry you that Germany, the economic giant, is stumbling, and our European neighbours are watching with a mixture of concern and schadenfreude?
SLOTERDIJK: Actually, I’m relieved that people treat us with totally normal malice. It shows that the people from countries all around us have got used to their previously frightening neighbours. In the past, during the phase of German resocialization, it was thought better not to offend the former delinquents. People watched more or less nervously to see what would become of the bad child of the international family. Now we Germans, the notorious outliers of history, have finally been brought into the main field.
MATUSSEK: Do you mean the country has become normalized in the crisis?
SLOTERDIJK: Whatever the case, because the Germans have dropped down from the top, they have stopped being students of democracy with special needs that require the school psycholo- gists to be called in constantly. Even the vigilant admonishers who wanted to attribute recidivist tendencies and murderers’ genes to the Germans are finding it difficult now in many respects. No nation can be more ordinary than the Germans today.
MATUSSEK: In the 1980s, you described prevailing conditions as ‘unhappily enlightened’ – and contrasted that with cheerful, subversive protest. Today the left wing is in the doldrums. What happened to the great urge for change?
SLOTERDIJK: We shouldn’t exaggerate in retrospect. At the time that my Critique of Critical Reason appeared in 1983, the radical left had been largely occupied with tragicomic repetition of scenarios from the 1930s. From 1967 until the Baader-Meinhof crisis of 1977, we acted out the People’s Front and bravely pre- vented the rise of Hitler. 2 All the same, we had a script – even if it was half a century behind the times. Today, however, we don’t have a repertoire for the left, whether moderate or radical. The age group
2 Andreas Baader (1943–77) and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76) were the leaders of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), an extreme left-wing political group formed in 1968 that was responsible for violent attacks in West Germany. Meinhof hanged herself in her prison cell in 1976. The 1977 ‘crisis’ refers to the violent political unrest in many West German cities after Baader and three other imprisoned members of the group were found hanged in their cells in October 1977.
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at the helm now is the most confused generation in German intel- lectual history.
MATUSSEK: The generation of 1968 has reached the top of society. Is that a lamentable situation?
SLOTERDIJK: The confused generation can only spread confu- sion. It does that successfully.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t Schröder introducing reforms right now that the ruling CDU [Christian Democratic Union] should really have carried through in the 1980s?
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe we should realize that for nearly twenty- five years the German party system has been offering voters the choice between four varieties of social democracy: the unity party of prosperity spreads across the whole so-called political spectrum.
MATUSSEK: The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the first to understand that, by turning his politics towards social democracy. His era was marked by the lucky accident of German unification – and everything that wasn’t dealt with.
SLOTERDIJK: Kohl remains the undisputed lord of German lethargy. He led the Germans to the end of history. He turned the promise of post-history, general lethargy with a high level of afflu- ence, into reality, with visible success. Things have become decidedly more uncomfortable since slimmer men have been in government. We are even being threatened with history starting all over again.
MATUSSEK: The new men are getting fatter again as well.
SLOTERDIJK: Nobody can beat Kohl on the scales. But now the new uncomfortable types have arrived and want to put the German lethargocracy back into competition with the best in the world. No wonder the great majority says, predictably: ‘Wait, that’s not what we signed up for! We haven’t trained for the top! ’ That’s why so many journalists and sociologists seriously consider German football as the oracle of the nation. On the football pitch we can see that simply praising ourselves isn’t always enough to get by.
MATUSSEK: It seems poverty is being officially tolerated for the first time in Germany – this was previously unheard-of in Germany’s centrist society of consensus.
SLOTERDIJK: Agenda 20103 contains nothing that Kohl shouldn’t have already introduced twenty years ago. Now his suc- cessor has to take over the other side’s operations. That is the usual SPD [Social Democratic Party] tragedy, by the way. As for the new
3 Agenda 2010 was a reform programme for the German welfare system and labour relations. It was launched in 2003 by the Social Democrat/ Green Party coalition led by the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
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visibility of poverty, it is related to the disappearance of the special German climate after 1945. Back then, when the whole country con- sisted of losers, the socio-psychological grip on the whole thing was much tighter than it is today. The post-war reconstruction was a collective effort. By now, being a loser is seen more as an individual issue again.
MATUSSEK: Is the thesis of the completed reconstruction actu- ally right? Berlin, for example, has not been recreated at all, and is a city of construction sites, strips overgrown with weeds, and wasteland, which local politicians are actually selling as a prime opportunity.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s always devastating when politicians talk like gallery owners. People in the special Berlin biotope have had half a century’s practice at being kettled as an attraction. After the border opened, along with all the impressive new buildings there was con- stant competition over the memorials that were supposed to make historical remembrance impressive as well.
MATUSSEK: Remorse, made in Germany.
SLOTERDIJK: German remorse used to be a brand-name article in the moral markets of the world. Meanwhile it is only rarely in demand.
MATUSSEK: What is much more visible is German self- confidence, at least in foreign policy, which has even taken the liberty of resisting American messianic ideology.
SLOTERDIJK: I made a lot of enemies before the Iraq War started by saying that Schröder’s vote against the US-British policy represented the voice of free and reasonable Europe – against the opportunists in the South, in the East, and in the German Parliament.
MATUSSEK: Is that the new German role, perhaps even a German identity: to push on with Europe as a kind of self- dissolution in the European project?
SLOTERDIJK: Europe’s nation-states, including Germany, do not have to liquidate themselves. But they should remember their great common script: this is the home of the anti-miserabilism project, which should bring humankind as a whole, or a large part of it, into a worldwide community of comfort. Let’s note that behind human rights are always rights to comfort that are wrongly described merely as ‘material interests’.
MATUSSEK: Isn’t that a rather harsh de-mystification of noble human rights?
SLOTERDIJK: Not at all. Human rights begin with the right to a lawyer; in the first place, they protect those who aren’t able to speak for themselves yet. Once people can speak for themselves, they
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immediately start making material demands. This is an unavoidable sequence. It’s impossible to imagine a majority that is full of human rights down to the tips of their toes but remains as poor as beggars. People who say and mean human rights are also affirming the trend towards opening up access to the affluence zone.
MATUSSEK: Is the new Federal German President on the right track in announcing that ‘The nation needs the courage to change’? SLOTERDIJK: He’s humming the right theme tune. However, even the best speeches about courage and rolling up our sleeves are fundamentally flawed. If our new president has a good relationship to courage then he has to do something courageous, maybe pardon somebody unexpectedly or visit a proscribed country. Just urging
courage on its own would be too German.
MATUSSEK: What can a German President do in this context? SLOTERDIJK: He has to stay on the beaten track. The fact is,
people in the affluence zone only accept changes that give them the security of knowing things will generally stay the same as they were. Comfort systems are controlled by tautologies. If, for example, Günter Netzer4 comments after a bad football match: ‘We have been watching a bad match’, a light goes on all over the country because we have all seen the same thing. He probably says ‘A seri- ously bad match’ to boost his intellectual status.
MATUSSEK: He says what everybody wants to hear.
SLOTERDIJK: He says what everybody has seen. Right now he holds the highest informal national office – that of chief tautologist.
Only he can speak with authority and call a bad match a really bad match. Right now the country’s highest office is shared – Günter Netzer occupies one half and the German President the other. The latter holds the prerogative of saying that we can win anyway.
MATUSSEK: Mr Sloterdijk, thank you for this interview.
4 Günter Netzer is a famous ex-football player from the German national team who later became a TV football commentator.
16
GERMANS WANT TO BE COMPELLED
Theory for the Year’s End
Interview with Ulf Poschardt*1
POSCHARDT: The year 2004 is coming to an end. What did the philosopher see in it?
SLOTERDIJK: To start with, three deaths in the autumn that may form a constellation. First, the death of Jacques Derrida: the last of the greats of our discipline. A distant colleague, but still present like a friend or a conscience. When we heard the news of his death from Paris during the Frankfurt Book Fair there was a hushed silence at the Suhrkamp stand, as if time had stood still. A few weeks later, the macabre death agony of Yasser Arafat began. He lay brain dead in a French military hospital, a living corpse, but was not allowed to be officially dead. As a head of state he had to remain in office while the jockeying for positions and millions took place over his near-corpse. This recalls the medieval legend of El Cid, whose dead body was tied to a horse’s back to lead his troop into battle. The question is, on which horse’s back Arafat’s corpse sat during those days.
The third death happened several days earlier: the murder of a moderately talented but famous film director, slaughtered on the street in public view in a way that showed this was not just an execu- tion but an excommunication of a man consigned to the animals for slaughter. The letter claiming responsibility was less a sign of terror than of enraged violated faith.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulf Poschardt appeared under the title ‘Deutsche wollen müssen’ [‘Germans want to be compelled’], in the Welt am Sonntag (12 December 2004).
Ulf Poschardt is a journalist and author.
126 Theory for the Year’s End
POSCHARDT: What do those three deaths have in common?
SLOTERDIJK: They form a kind of thanatological colloquium because they express something about exemplary deaths in our time. The philosopher Derrida died after a long, very consciously organ- ized farewell to the scourge of postmodern humankind, cancer – an evil that has not yielded to any enlightenment or deconstruction. Yasser Arafat died as an icon and zombie, and Theo van Gogh as a victim of fanaticism because he tried to apply Voltaire’s battle cry against the repressive Church – écrasez l’infame! – to Islam.
POSCHARDT: Which death did you think about most?
SLOTERDIJK: On the personal level, Derrida, of course, but nothing can compare to Arafat’s end as an emblem of the state of the world. He died as the enemy of countless people, as a repository for the curses of millions, however much he was a votive image, a repository of hope, for many others. In ethnological terms he was a Nail Man, like one of those Congolese fetishes in which curses are hammered with nails. He was the perfect Fetish Man of the last quarter-century.
POSCHARDT: In the end he was merely his wife’s puppet. Is that a neat punchline against the latent disrespect of women in Islam?
SLOTERDIJK: The woman’s revenge occurred when she married him. Nietzsche used to say, ‘A married philosopher belongs in a comedy. ’ Where does a married terrorist belong? Someone like that only fits into the chilling satire of the Middle East. Arafat was, incidentally, the only statesman of recent times who secretly bore the name ‘terrorist’ as an honorary title. Nobody else has done that since Churchill.
POSCHARDT: Churchill?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. He described himself as a terrorist when he gave the order for the bomb warfare against Germany. In those days the history of the word ‘terrorism’ was more open than it is now, and since Churchill usually knew what he was doing he identified clearly with his methods.
POSCHARDT: Didn’t the word ‘terrorist’ exist earlier?
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, modern terror has a long history dating back to the Jacobins’ use of the guillotine. In nineteenth-century Italy an anarchist who planted bombs was called a dinamitario – a beautiful job description, totally hardware oriented. Today’s concept of terror, however, is very zeitgeisty, that is, it focuses on software and is designed for aesthetic effect. Churchill’s admission shows that the word’s history had not yet been decided. If terror is the means of conquering Hitler, one should admit it and wear the title of terrorist like a medal. Churchill did that. Arafat had his own particular ideas about that.
Theory for the Year’s End 127
POSCHARDT: But in this sense terror would always be a means or an aspect of politics. In the sense of the defence capability of a constitutional state, it is part of its monopoly of power.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s quite right. Politics is always a mode in which the state organizes how it appears to the people. The lofty state has to administer the terror it evokes itself. It is responsible for the aura that surrounds it as the ‘coldest monster’, to quote Nietzsche again. That means it not only has to keep its symbols of sovereignty intact, but also to manage the epiphanies of its violent core – think of the military parades in France on 14 July. Carl Schmitt wrote that ‘The sovereign is the person who decides on the state of emergency. ’ Such a situation occurs when the latent means of terror are transformed into actually existing ones. In other words, the sovereign is the person who has the possibility of making con- vincing threats.
POSCHARDT: Would that make the democratic politician a kind of castrated terrorist?
SLOTERDIJK: Democracy means not having a need for terror any more. The careers of Castro and Arafat, but also of Menachim Begin, show the trajectory from terror to legality. The title of castrated terrorist suits figures like Castro and Arafat very well, although it is more about pacification than about castration.
POSCHARDT: Was Arafat a supremely skilful Machiavellian?
SLOTERDIJK: He was already head of the PLO in 1972, at the time of the attack on the Olympic village in Munich in which several Israeli athletes died. Back then he already showed his talent as a media politician, because anyone who successfully disrupts the Olympic Games becomes a global star. In November 1974, Arafat spoke to the UNO assembly in New York, scoring an enormous prestige victory for the PLO. The Munich drama was also the beginning of the hot phase of the alliance between terror and the media – that was the zero hour of terror as a media event. This has no connection any longer with the terror of the French Revolution that Hegel examined, and that was partly legitimated, or with the conservative nihilists who made regular attacks on the Czars. As we know, the author of The Phenomenology of Mind described the Jacobin murders as the frenzy of abstract subjectivity that wipes away everything obstructing freedom.
POSCHARDT: Did that shock Hegel the Swabian?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t think so. Hegel was cold-blooded, or he understood everything, which is the same thing. He saw terror as the price for a learning process modern people had to go through before they could live as citizens in a constitutional state. The terror of pure conscience is a stage in the curriculum that leads to the modern
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state: terror is the way that the spirit of freedom, which is simply abstract, first learns about its own state and learns to appreciate the indispensability of the law. This stage is a necessary experience because bourgeois society and its state only become consolidated in the post-terrorist stage. Expressed in educational terms, we could say that terror is an episode in the preparatory period for human- kind’s high-school certificate.
POSCHARDT: Do constitutional states react so vigorously to terror because they recognize their own previous existence in it?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. They recognize in terrorism what they have dispensed with. But the present terror is basically very roman- tic. It is conceived as a hero cult and its aim is to found a new community through inflammatory theatrical acts of violence.
POSCHARDT: What about Bin Laden? The al-Qaeda fighters of September 11 were mostly fellow Saudis.
SLOTERDIJK: Bin Laden is an activist of the third dream. He places an Islamist dream alongside the American dream and the Saudi dream.
POSCHARDT: What dreams do the Saudis have?
SLOTERDIJK: Next to the Americans with their religion of success, the ruling Saudi cliques are the greatest escapists of our time. Because their money never runs out, they can live in an absolute dream world in which they are free to move through the centuries like sleepwalkers. They escape from the present to the past and then return again. At one moment they are in the seventh century riding through the desert with Mohammed, their minds full of plans; then they are in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flirt with Wahhabi asceticism; and then they plunge into the twenty-first century and get high on the goods of the liberal world. They can endlessly afford that Arabo-Disney lifestyle feeling and can arrange themselves in a total virtual reality.
POSCHARDT: Does Bin Laden have anything in common with those Disney Arabs?
SLOTERDIJK: He is a creation of Saudi escapism, but a ren- egade from it at the same time. His goal is to destroy the most bizarre alliance in world history, the entente cordiale between the USA and Saudi Arabia. This alliance binds the world’s two great escapist powers together in a kind of synchronized sleepwalking. We shouldn’t forget that in its own way the USA is also a purely escapist nation. From the perspective of the Old World, the reason is obvious. The majority of the country’s population consists of people who fled from miserable circumstances to make a new start elsewhere. The country itself is founded on the flight to happi- ness. Basically, the people are refugees from poverty in their home
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country, people who think they are escaping, whether from bad to better or from good to fantastic. But the dependence on oil means the American way of life is tied to the Gulf region, which forms an ironic bond between the earth’s two great escapist extremes. The Saudi and the American dream mutually support each other. Such countries inevitably create their corresponding dream factories. The Arabs have also reached their own stage of myth creation and are beginning to give themselves a poetic image. They are inventing themselves as agents of a great history. The air is full of fairy tales and imperial epics – including the epic hostilities essential for any great story. The young men become soaked in a heroic fairy-tale paranoia that requires them to fight the nearby enemy at home and the faraway enemy across the Atlantic.
What makes Bin Laden so interesting is that he torpedoes the magical sense of fellowship between the two escapist powers. He has understood that dream factories can only be fought with the aid of alternative dream factories. Citizens of a genuine escapist power are no longer interested in resistances of yesterday. Escapism is the model for movement by which people can live away from resistance. If there are still obstacles left to face, it is only because the old evil followed you to your new home. You fled from the Old World and left all your old troubles behind and now what you left has caught up with you. The best thing would be to eliminate the evil at its own source.
POSCHARDT: Then the story of America’s creation is based first of all on the flight of Europeans to a desired place that turns out successfully. It starts on the East Coast and flees further westwards until it reaches the Pacific coast. That is where Hollywood arose, where the escape was dematerialized and continued in imagination.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, going West is fundamental for the entire modern age: from Europe across the Atlantic and further from the East Coast to the West Coast. But that was not the end of the great escapist drift by a long way. The escape energies accumulated at the Pacific wall and rose upwards. California emerged as the first land of ‘get high, go easy, get rich, get famous’. Everything has the same dynamic, the same flight into the easy, magnificent, glorified life. People always want to get away from the old powers of depression. Still, the Americans sense that something is creeping up behind us that we can’t get rid of completely. Persecutory forces are at work, pursuing us into the heartland of evasion. Many of those who are fleeing are tired and at risk of giving up the race. Is it coincidence that the USA is the paradise of psychotropic drugs – and the hell of overweight people? The scales tell them they don’t look fit for escape.
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POSCHARDT: From that perspective, would nation-building, the idea of exporting democracy – by armed force, if necessary – also be a consequence of that escapism?
SLOTERDIJK: Nation-building is the attempt to sedate possible pursuers on the spot.
POSCHARDT: Do you believe that?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course not. Not because I don’t trust the Americans and don’t wish them success in what they do. On the contrary, one wishes the agenda as such the best of luck. But, as Europeans, we know a few things that dampen our confidence in political engineering. Nation-building isn’t a stupid concept in itself. We could use it to sum up a good part of what has happened in Europe since Napoleon. Above all, he characterized French world politics in the offensive phase after the revolution of 1789. The French democratic messianic ideology that Napoleon embodied is absolutely comparable to the America of today, and its conse- quences make us think. It took 150 years after Napoleon’s death to get rid of the last detritus of his politics.
POSCHARDT: Can you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s consider Spain and Germany, both objects of Napoleonic nation-building. In Spain the effects lasted until the death of Franco in 1975. In 1808, Napoleon stood outside Madrid with an army of three hundred thousand men, as a liberator and herald of human rights, of course. All at once the miserable Spanish could participate in the achievements of the French Revolution, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, the end of exploitation of the people by a parasitical clergy. The conquerors didn’t utter a single wrong word. What happened then? The downtrodden Spanish peasants, the poorest of the poor, ganged up together and picked out young men from the liberators’ army and, full of hate, massa- cred them. We are reminded of this story today every time we say the word ‘guerrilla’. After that, Spain needed nearly 170 years to find its own path to democracy. In Germany things weren’t much better, because anti-French emotions led to the ideas of the German national movement splitting off from the ideas of the Enlightenment – with consequences that could be observed in 1945. Briefly, the Europeans know, or should know, what to think about import exemptions and import democracies. At best we get dictatorships in democratic clothing with a substructure of a market economy.
POSCHARDT: That sounds as if it would apply to us Germans as well.
SLOTERDIJK: At a distance, the Wilhelmine Empire prob- ably seemed to be a construct like that. The Federal Republic of Germany, however, was fortunate and bypassed the usual
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emotional backlash against the liberator. But this is a historical peculiarity that the present propaganda mongers of nation-building mistakenly hold up as a model. We can’t derive anything at all from the German case. The world in the twenty-first century will most probably become a form of global authoritarian capitalism. With the war on terror and the Islamists’ jihad romanticism, war capital- ism is already palpably close. The circumstances are such that there will soon be attempts to increase non-democracy.
POSCHARDT: Is it the task of intellectuals to remind democracy of its own roots?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, but the intellectuals themselves don’t really know any longer where the roots lie.
POSCHARDT: That leads to the question: who are we Germans? Cosiness is more important to us than freedom. We would rather live nice and warm in a little shack than freezing in huge rooms. We are like Oblomov, the nineteenth-century Russian hero who spends his life on the sofa.
SLOTERDIJK: I think the Russian association leads to the issue itself, for modern Germans are actually much more Russian than they imagine. We resemble the romantic cliché of Russians from nineteenth-century literature. They probably slipped into us by a kind of soul migration during the Cold War. However, the Germans are cosy in a completely different way than their Eastern cousins. They stay away from the precipice; their cosiness remains compat- ible with work. German motivation is a reliable constant as long as it goes along with a strong imperative, because Germans don’t want to get involved voluntarily. They want to be compelled.
POSCHARDT: They first have to hit the rock bottom of necessity.
SLOTERDIJK: If the rock bottom has spoken to them, they’re capable of anything.
POSCHARDT: Where are we now? Have we hit rock bottom or are we still going down further?
SLOTERDIJK: I think the country’s own success mechanisms are in such good shape that we can’t fall much further. The German export economy, German science, the German legal system, the German social system, all of that is firmly established in positive routines that keep going even when a few individuals dig their heels in.
POSCHARDT: And what about freedom?
SLOTERDIJK: By now, most goals for freedom are defined apo- litically or post-politically.
POSCHARDT: Strange things happen in Germany: People work illegally and complain there are no jobs. They moan about the col- lapse of the inner cities and go shopping in malls outside the city.
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They complain about jobs migrating away and save money by going shopping in Poland. Are many Germans incapable of understand- ing their own actions and the consequences?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people are not particularly good at grasp- ing if-then relationships – I wouldn’t restrict that to Germans. In our case we have the added factor of the general infantilizing ten- dency of the social climate. The drug subculture offers the paradigm for the radical separation of one’s own behaviour and awareness of consequences, and the open consumer society has more in common with this subculture than it realizes. Drug consumers have learned to ignore the consequences of their addiction, whether physical or moral. Their own ruin doesn’t bother them: just watch how you cope with my self-destruction! ‘You’ means the legendary unreal collective of the Others that is to blame for everything and respon- sible for everything. This collective contains the so-called ‘society’, the biggest of all vague addresses. It is the perfect imaginary recipi- ent for passing on blame that can’t be addressed. I actually think our beloved homeland consists to a large extent of people who practise the art of passing things on. We blame our bad mood on the conjuncture; we pass on our own consumer behaviour to the desola- tion of the inner cities.
POSCHARDT: What can politics do in that case? Isn’t it, in fact, the motive force of this infantilization?
SLOTERDIJK: Social policy is an enterprise for eliminating the serious case.
