No More Learning

Because Althusser understood Marx sympathetically, the break in Marx's theory and exis- tence impressed itself with an almost symbiotic depth on his theory and his life. One may venture to say that Althusser was wrecked by this conflict. For years, the contradiction between his philosophical competence and his loyalty to the Communist Party put a strain on his theoretical work as well as on his very exis- tence. Married to a sociologist with "Bolshevist convictions," the conflict between orthodoxy and insight, between loyalty and freedom, pursued him even into his private life. Althusser recognized that, in a certain regard, Marx was no longer Marx and that a break, an ambiguity runs through his work that again and again makes its theoretical and practical validity problematic. In his loyalty to the truth and to the Communist Party, Althusser could no longer remain Althusser. Thus, the world-famous Marxist philosopher, in a "psychotic" attack of mental confu- sion, as they say, murdered his wife on 16 November 1980, perhaps in one of those desperate states in which one no longer knows where the other begins and the ego ends, where the boundaries betwen self-assertion and blind destruction dissolve.
Who is the murderer? Is it Althusser, the philosopher, who killed himself through his wife, the "dogmatist," in order to end the state of divided being that kept the philosopher from really living. Is it the murder of liberation by a prisoner who, as inner self-defense, killed what killed him? Is it a murder committed on Althusser, the famous man, who could destroy his own false identity, his own raise fame, his false signification only by plunging into the cynical sphere of criminality? As is known in psychology, there are suicides who are basically mur- derers of someone else; but there are also murderers who are basically suicides MI that they annihilate themselves in the other.
I will attempt to interpret the Althusserian "break" differently from the way in
92 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
which he himself interpreted it; in doing so I will pay attention to his example and the language of his act. I want to erect a monument to the philosopher by reconstructing his interpretation of Marx --the real break in Marx's theory. It is a monument for a murderer who, with confused violence, made visible a break that cannot be made to disappear by any act of will to mediate it, by any loyalty, or by any fear of separation.
In the Marxian oeuvre there is a rupture, not between an "ideological" and a "scientific" phase but between two modalities of reflection--a kynical-offensive, humanistic, emancipative reflection and an objectivistic, master-cynical reflec- tion, which derides the striving for freedom of others in the style of a functionalist ideology critique. On the one hand, Marx is something of a rebel, on the other, something of a monarch; his left half resembles Danton, his right half is reminis- cent of Bismarck. Like Hegel, who bore a similar double temperament of revolu- tionary and statesman within himself, Marx is one of the greatest dialectical thinkers because in him a fruitful inner polemic between at least two sparring thinker-souls was at work. Althusser's theoretical and existential tragedy starts from his partisanship for the "right" Marx, whom he discovered in his writings after the so-called coupure epistemologique. It is that "realist-political" Marx to whom Althusser attributes an absolutely "scientific" Realtheorie of capital, pu- rified of all humanist sentimentalities; this is the sense of his "structural reading. "
The work of the young Marx is rooted in his impressions of the Hegelian Logic, with which he went into battle against Hegelian idealism itself. Labor and praxis are the key concepts with which one finds one's way out of the casing of the system in a Hegelian way. They hold the hope of a new type of scientific ap- proach, an empiricism that does not fall back behind the summits of philosophical reflection. With these concepts of labor and praxis, which combine in the lofty concept of politics, the left-Hegelian generation went beyond its master. From this spirit grew a powerful, pugnacious social critique that understood itself as "real humanism," as a turning to the "real human being. "
The genius of the young Marx is shown in his not remaining content with a turning from the Hegelian "system" to a post-Hegelian humanist "critique. " His sharpest polemic, therefore, was directed initially against his greatest temptation, which he shared with his generation of intelligentsia, namely, to persist in mere "critical critique. " He sensed, and rationalized this perception, that a powerful critical theory must conquer the world of objects and reality itself in order to con- ceptualize them not only positively but also critically. This impulse was the rea- son, among other things, for his turning to political economy, which he took up in its naive, bourgeois form in order to surpass it with a reflected theory. The in- sipid phrase "learning process" fails to capture the drama of this creative reflec- tion. Marx's thinking traveled the path from the Hegelian system to the critique of political economy, from a contemplative conception of theory to an under- standing of theory as world-mover, from the sphere of ideas to the discovery of
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT Q 93
labor, from abstract to concrete anthropology, from the illusion of nature to the history of the self-creation of humanity. As theory of social emancipation, Marxian knowledge could secure recognition only if, at the same time, it named a mass ego that would recognize the possibility of its freedom in the mirror of this theory. Here, Marx made himself into the historical-logical teacher and pa- tron of the proletariat, which he identified as the predestined pupil of his theory. Through the proletariat, he wanted to become the great liberator by intervening in the course of European history as the teacher of the workers' movement.
Marx, however, stepped over dead bodies at least twice in a way that raises doubts as to his claim to teach and his realism. In Max Stirner and Bakunin I see the most intimate opponents of Marx because they were the theorists whom he could not simply surpass but whom, in order to exclude them, he had to practi- cally annihilate with his critique. For both represented clear logical and objective alternatives to Marx's solutions, Stirner with his question whether and how one can break through "private" alienation, and Bakunin with his question whether and how a way can be found to a future "alienation-free society. " Marx criticized both outright with a practically eviscerative hatred. The famous posthumous Ger- man Ideology, in large part directed against Stirner, contains the most intensive, detailed dispute Marx and Engels ever carried out with a thinker; and the annihila- tion of Bakunin was for Marx a preoccupation that stretched over many years. In Marx's hatred for both, in his scorn and his infinite contempt, an energy was at work that in no way can be explained by temperament and a feeling of competi- tiveness. Both showed him the systematic limits of his own approach -- experiences that he could neither integrate nor simply disregard. Here, elemen- tary and undeniable considerations came into play for which there was no place in Marx's plan and for which no place was to be made. Indeed, moreover, in Stirner, as in other representatives of critical critique and of the "Holy Family," Marx recognized something that was also present in himself, but whose right to exist he had to deny in order to become this Marx. With his right side, with his "realistic," statesmanlike, realist-political, and grand-theoretical side he sup- pressed the left, rebellious, vital, merely "criticistic" side, which, in the others, confronted him as a "position as such. " In his critical annihilation of Stirner and Bakunin, he stepped over his own corpse, so to speak, over the concrete, existen- tial, and in the last instance, "feminine" part of his intelligence. With this part he had revolted, critically and realistically-concretely, against Hegel; now he comes forward as master thinker against this side in its one-sidedness.
Stirner, like Marx, belongs to the "young Germany" generation that, in the cli- ate of Hegelian philosophy, with its subversive training in reflection, had devel- oped an extraordinary sense for everything that "takes place in the head" (Feuer- ? ach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Karl Griin, Heinrich Heine,
among others).
Hegel's logic had conquered a space that is neither only being nor only con-
m
94 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
sciousness but contains "something of both"; this is expressed in the figure of thought "mediated immediacy. " The magic word of the new logic is "mediation" (Vermittlung). We may translate it as "medium. " Between being and conscious- ness is something in the middle that is both and in which the illusory antithesis of spirit and matter disappears; Marx transposed this vision to his theory of capital.
Let us say it concretely: In people's heads, historically formed programs of thinking and perception are at work that "mediate" everything that moves from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. The human cognitive apparatus is, in a way, an inner relay, a switching station, a transformer in which perceptual sche- mata, forms of judgment, and logical structures are programmed. Concrete con- sciousness is never immediate but is mediated by the "inner structure. "
Reflection can assume basically three attitudes to this transmitted inner struc- ture: It can try to escape the inner structure by "deprogramming itself; it can move within the inner structure as alertly as possible; and it can surrender itself as reflection by accepting the thesis that the structure is everything.
We now have to treat these three attitudes. Stirner's idea is simply to throw all alien programming out of one's head. After this total self-purification of the head, a naked, so to speak empty, reflected egoism should remain. If society really has trained "kinks" into my head, then my emancipation, thought through quickly, must presumably consist in my dismantling this alien programming. What is one's own in ego consciousness tries thus to rid itself with a snap of the fingers of what is alien. Stirner aims for a liberation from alienation in one's own interior. What is alien makes itself at home in me; I thus win "myself back by expelling what is alien. For several hundred pages one can read how Marx and Engels got worked up about this basically simple thought. They criticized this neoegotistical position in a devastating way --not morally but epistemologically: as a new self-delusion. They showed that the Stirner egos, those "individuals" who have based their position on nothing and view themselves as their only prop- erty, leap into a new naivete that betrays itself not least of all in its petit- bourgeois, boasting standpoint of "I am the be-all and end-all. " The theoretical anarchism of the nineteenth century reached its first culmination in Stirner. Stirner effected an "existentialist" reduction to pure ego, but in doing this he very naively presupposed the ego as something that simply "exists. " Once I have thrown out of "me" what is alien (society), Stirner believes, then a beautiful ego of my own remains that revels in the "possession" of itself. In radiant naivete, Stirner speaks of the "property" that individuals have in themselves. But one can
only possess what exists in reality. Here, valid reflective experience and confused naivete stand next to each other, separated by a hairbreadth. Existentialist reflec- tion on one's "own" consciousness is as realistic as the transition to the idea of self-property is false. Self-reflection leaves nothing objective that one could possess.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 95
Marx and Engels dismantle this construction down to its atomic components. On wings of contempt, they prepare for themselves a feast of satirical reflection that, as alertly as possible, moves within the inner structure of consciousness. In the destruction of the Stirnerian illusion, however, they destroy more than the op- ponent; they destroy themselves in him. The way they do it, line for line, with intensive logic, meticulous philology, and a cruel pleasure in destruction--that is more than critique; it is the exorcism of a danger, the elimination of "another possibility. " In fact, Marxism could never shake off the anarchist and existen- tialist shadow that fell on Stirner. Only with Sartre and Marcuse did this shadow again gain a more intensive life in Marxist-inspired thinking.
Marx does not belong to that sort of naive-genius that, like Schelling, "de- velops its thought in public. " The German Ideology remained a private text. It was not published until 1932. Since then, Marx philologists have passed it around like a holy text. In the student movement, it was taken into battle as an antisubjectivis-
5
tic weapon-by the "strict" Marxists against the spontaneists and the academic
flower children. In fact, however, there was a good reason for Marx and Engels's discretion regarding their most intensive work in ideology critique. The German Ideology lets the cat out of the bag. One can learn from it that, on the question of subjectivity, Marx and Stirner went off in symmetrically false directions. Both know that human consciousness, as one initially finds it, is "alienated" and must be "appropriated" through patient reflection. Both think in the dialectic of the authentic and the alien; however, both fail to find the middle ground and plunge into exclusive alternative positions. Stirner chose the right, Marx the left path. Stirner believes he can overcome the expropriation of oneself (Enteignung) through an individualist act of purification. In his "adulthood," individuals learn how to expel their inner alien programming so that they have it and do not have it at the same time and thus "keep" it as its free masters and possessors. By surren- dering thoughts and things as their own, they are no longer under their power. In Stirner's thinking, realistic self-reflection and ideological ego-cult flow without clear boundaries into one another. What can be a productive experience of inner distancing from conditioning has become in Stirnerism dogmatically ossified to a new "short-circuited thinking. "
Marx's investigation of class consciousnesses is at its starting point equally realistic. Class consciousnesses, worldviews, and ideologies can indeed be un- derstood as "programming"; they are mediations, formed and forming schemata ? f consciousness, results in a world-historical process of the self-formation of all intellect. This way of seeing opens a path to a fruitful analysis of patterns in con- sciousness that can become free of the curse of naive idealism. With their "in the last instance" dogmatic materialism, however, Marx and Engels deviate from this approach again. They dissolve subjectivity in the historical process. This comes
ut in the harshness and contempt with which Marx treats his "existential" oppo-
e
nts. In this brutality, the other, master form of reflection begins to stir. Where
96 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The trial against the "Industry Party" in Moscow.
Stirner brought his rebellious, protesting ego out into the public arena, Marxism produced revolutionaries who, with the feeling of supreme slyness and an artful sense for reality, use themselves as means in the historical process. In the clinch with Stirner's false individual, the idea of the false Nobody arises in Marx's theory- those revolutionaries who themselves will become only grim instruments of the fetish: revolution. That is the break Althusser has discerned in the Marxian oeuvre after The German Ideology. Early on, at the latest since the polemic against Stirner, there begins a tendency in Marx's thinking to chain oneself, al- most like Jesuits of the revolution, to the process of historical development, in the belief of being able not only to recognize the development but also to direct it. Marx's theory sets its hope on domination by conceiving of the subject of the theory as a function of development. Through self-reification it believes it can achieve a mastery of history. By making itself into an instrument of a purported future, it believes it can make the future into its own tool.
This schizoid logic of master's cynicism has no historical parallel. Only an ex- tremely highly developed consciousness can deceive itself in such a way. The only thinker whose self-reflection reached similar heights of artful self-denial was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose historical influence is well known.
The philosophically significant pinnacle of this artful self-reification was reached by those courgeous old Communists who, in the Moscow Show Trials, in the face of certain death, falsely confessed to having conspired against "the revolution," a confession that was not merely extorted but possessed an aspect of freedom insofar as the accused, with their confessions, wanted to save the revolu- tion from greater damage than had already been done to it by accusation and exe-
? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 97
cution. The subtlety of this doubling of murder by the judiciary with suicide can- not be grasped with conventional conceptions of "tragedy. " They are murders in which it is clear only in the biological sense who is in fact killing whom. They are murders and suicides within a schizophrenic structure, where the ego that kills can no longer be clearly distinguished from the ego that is killed. Only one thing is certain: In the end the corpses of intelligent human beings are lying on the ground, strangled, shot, beaten. The case of Althusser is probably, among other things, a supplement to the psychopathology of Marxism. It takes place on an in- telligence level of murderous violence on which the revolution devours its cleverest children, not to mention the millions who lost their lives without know- ing exactly what they had to do with this revolution, except perhaps that what was killing them could not be quite the truth.
The young Marx expressed the logical root of these inversions in 1843 in a fully alert sentence that was written before that time of callousness, although it already betrayed a cynical tendency: " . . . communism has seen other socialist doctrines rise up against it not by accident but because it itself is only a particular, one-sided realization of the socialist principle. " (Letters from the Deutsch- Franzosischen Jahrbuchern, Marx to Ruge, September 1843). The word "one- sided" shows the elevated irony of Marxism at play. Those who say "one-sided" know that there are, and must be, at least two sides. Those who then decide for one side deceive themselves and others. Only a knowledge that is consumed by an enormous will to power can want to present conscious one-sidedness as the truth. In doing so, it profoundly denies its own pathos for genuine cognition. Thus, communism is that knowledge of power that tells it all before it has taken over the reins. This, and only this, constitutes, on a philosophical level, its affinity to fascism.
The Feeling toward Life in Twilight
The self-denial of enlightenment is a result of the most recent history, which has
ground up all nice illusions of a "rational Other. " Enlightenment must inevitably
be led astray by the principle of being Left as long as this is represented in reality
by despotic systems. Fundamental to enlightenment is that it prefers the principle
of freedom to that of equality. It cannot pretend not to see that socialism, to which
its sympathies belong, has lost its innocence almost as much as that against which
? t was originally directed. "Real existing socialism," as it exists today, in a way
makes the question of Left and Right superfluous. For it distinguishes itself from
capitalism presumably in recognizable forms that may have their pros and cons.
Bu
t it shares with capitalism, as with any political-economic order, the imprint hard reality, which can never be Left or Right in and of itself but, as something hat is also made by us, is always how it simply is. Only morality can take a stance toward realities that is Left or Right. Reality, insofar as it concerns us, is for us
or
98 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
welcome or hated, bearable or unbearable. And consciousness faced with what is given, has only the choice of recognizing it or not. This is what, crudely enough, the critique of cynical reason makes clear. The outlook for understanding the significance of the current demoralization from this vantage point does not re- main primitive. Only morality is prone to demoralization, only an awakening waits for illusions. The question is whether we, in this demoralization, come closer to the truth.
We have, in fact, plunged into a twilight of a peculiar existential disorienta- tion. The feeling toward life in the present-day intelligentsia is that of people who cannot grasp the morality of immorality because then everything would be "far too simple. " For that reason, too, deep down no one knows how things should go from here.
In the cynical twilight of a disbelieving enlightenment, a peculiar feeling of timelessness arises that is hectic and perplexed, enterprising and discouraged, caught in the middle of everything, alienated from history, unaccustomed to any optimism about the future. Tomorrow assumes the dual character of inconse- quence and probable catastrophe; somewhere in between, a small hope of getting through lingers. The past either becomes an academic spoiled child or is priva- tized together with culture and history and shrunk down at the flea market to curi- ous miniatures of those things that once were. The most interesting things are still biographies from the past and lost kings--particularly the pharaohs, with whose eternal life as the comfortable dead we can identify.
Against the principle of hope, the principle of life in the here and now rises up. On the way to work one hums, "Don't wait for better times" (Wolf Bier- mann; --Trans. ) or "There are days when I wish I were my dog. " In alternative bars one sees posters that say: Due to lack of interest, the future has been can- celed. Next to it one reads: We are the people whom our parents always warned us about. The late and cynical feeling of the times is that of the trip and of mun- dane everyday life, stretched between irritable realism and incredulous daydreams, present and absent, cool or meditative, down to earth or far out, de- pending entirely on the mood. Some are ambitious, and others just hang around. More than ever, we wait for something corresponding to that feeling of better days, that something has to happen. And more than a few want to add: It doesn't matter what. We feel catastrophic and catastrophile, bittersweet and private, if it is at all possible to keep the nearby area free from the worst. Good films are important. Yet it is not easy to imitate good examples because every case is differ- ent, especially one's own. We buy books for each other and are a little astonished when the pope comes to Germany, that he still exists at all. We do our work and say to ourselves, it would be better to get really involved. We live from day to day, from vacation to vacation, from news show to news show, from problem to problem, from orgasm to orgasm, in private turbulences and medium-term
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 99
affairs, tense, relaxed. With some things we feel dismay but with most things we can't really give a damn.
The newspapers write that we have to get ready to struggle for survival again, to tighten our belts, to lower our sights, and the ecologists say the same thing. Privileged society, to hell with it! In weak moments we donate something for Eritrea or for a ship for Vietnam, but we don't go there. We would still like to see a lot of the world and in general "to live a whole lot more. " We ask ourselves what to do next and what will happen next. In the feuilleton of the Zeit, the culture critics argue about the right way to be pessimistic. One emigrant from the East says to the other: "For a long time I've seen things as bleakly as you. But in spite of it all and everything. Where would we be if everybody despaired? " And the other says: "The time for 'in spite of is over. "
Some have been trying for a long time to bring their psychoanalysis to a close, and others have been asking themselves for a long time if they can justify not yet having begun analysis. But you also have to think about what it costs and how much the insurance pays, and whether afterward you can still get on as well as you think, in the middle of your misery, you should be able to get on, because you are not sure at the beginning whether you want to go on as you did before. Oh, and another thing: It turns out that good cooking is not a betrayal and that this stupid stuff about consumption and having a car is not really so . . .
In such a time of open secrets, where a crazy small-scale economy splits think- ing, where so-called society dissolves into hundreds of thousands of strands of planning and improvisation that mutually ignore one another but are related through all kinds of absurdities --in such a time it cannot do enlightenment, or what is left of it, any harm to reflect critically on its foundations. There have been impressive examples of such critical reflection for a long time. For a long time, the "public sphere" was one of the strongest themes of a renewed enlightenment, especially in connection with the word "experience" and even more so with "life context" (Lebenszusammenhang), which was so pleasant to write because you got the feeling that somehow or other life forms contexts, and context is like a prom- ise of meaning.
However, in the meantime, the intellectual hunting fever for the "life context" has faded because this life context represents a being at least as rare as the Wolper- tinger, a hare with antlers that lives in Bavaria and that Bavarian practical jokers used to hunt when vacationers from Prussia had become much too cocky and needed to be taught a lesson. But now that the Prussians stay away and build their
6
own "life context" behind self-activating shooting devices, hunting for Wolper-
tinger, the special enlightenment for sly Prussians, has slackened off just as much
as
enlightenment in general and enlightenment for non-Prussians.
What next? In the fifth preliminary reflection, which introduces the actual in- vestigation of the foundations of cynical reason, I want to try to name a source ?
f enlightenment in which the secret of its vitality is hidden: cheekiness {Freeh-
100 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
heit, a word whose meaning lies somewhere between cheekiness and impu- dence-Trans. )-
Notes
1. "It is misspent effort to try to enlighten humankind. One has to be content with being wise one- self, if one can, but leave the mob to error and strive only to keep it from crimes that disturb the social order" (Frederick II of Prussia in a letter to dAlembert, 1770).
2. Said less ceremoniously, in the great pell-mell, in the ambivalence of the factual.
3. Besides this I discuss the historical discrediting of the Marxist alternative ("Marxist Elegy," this chapter) and the clouding over of the sociopsychological atmosphere as a whole (chapter 5, sec- tion entitled "Unashamed Happiness").
4. See also Peter Jirak, "Zukunft als Provinz," Frankfurter Hefte, vol. 33 (April 4, 1978).
5. [The "Spontis" were the advocates of spontaneity in the West German student move- ment. -Trans. ]
6. [Prussia lies in present-day East Germany. --Trans. 1
Chapter 5
"In Search of Lost Cheekiness"
A timid arse seldom lets go with a joyful fart.
Lutheran saying
The objection, the side leap, light-hearted mistrust,
the pleasure in mockery are signs of health: Everything that is unqualified belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
They have laid their hands on my entire life; so let it stand up and confront them. . .
Danton, before sentence is passed on him
Greek Philosophy of Cheekiness: Kynicism
Ancient kynicism, at least in its Greek origins, is in principle cheeky. In its cheek- iness lies a method worthy of discovery. This first really "dialectical material- ism," which was also an existentialism, is viewed unjustly, beside the great sys- tems in Greek philosophy --Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoa--as a mere game of satyrs, as a half-jovial, half-dirty episode, and is passed over. In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is it not crude and grotesque to pick one's nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic the- ory of ideas-or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his medi- tation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophizing town bum answers Plato's subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public?
To understand these apparently irrelevantly provocative gestures, it is worth reflecting on a principle that called into being the doctrines of wisdom and that was regarded by the ancient world as a truism, before modern developments eradicated it. For the philosopher, the human being who exemplifies the love of truth and conscious living, life and doctrine must be in harmony. The core of ev- ery doctrine is what its followers embody of it. This can be misunderstood in an idealistic way as if it were philosophy's innermost aim to get people to chase after unattainable ideals. But if philosophers are called on to live what they say, their
101
102 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
task in a critical sense is much more: to say what they live. Since time im- memorial, every ideality must be materialized and every materiality idealized in order to be real for us, as beings in the middle. A separation of person and thing, theory and praxis at this elementary level cannot be taken into consideration at all-except perhaps as a sign of a corruption of truth. To embody a doctrine means to make oneself into its medium. This is the opposite of what is demanded in the moralistic plea for behavior guided strictly by ideals. By paying attention to what can be embodied, we remain protected from moral demagogy and from the terror of radical abstractions that cannot be lived out. (The question is not what is virtue without terror but what is terror other than consistent idealism. )
The appearance of Diogenes marks the most dramatic moment in the process of truth of early European philosophy: Whereas "high theory" from Plato on ir- revocably cuts off the threads to material embodiment in order instead to draw the threads of argumentation all the more tightly together into a logical fabric, there emerges a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme. The process of truth splits into a discursive phalanx of grand theory and a satirical-literary troupe of skirmishers. With Diogenes, the resistance against the rigged game of "discourse" begins in European philosophy. Desperately funny, he resists the "linguistifica- tion" of the cosmic universalism that called the philosopher to this occupation. Whether monologic or dialogic "theory," in both, Diogenes smells the swindle of idealistic abstractions and the schizoid staleness of a thinking limited to the head. Thus he creates, as the last archaic Sophist and the first in the tradition of satirical resistance, an uncivil enlightenment. He starts the non-Platonic dia- logue. Here, Apollo, the god of illumination, shows his other face, which escaped Nietzsche: as thinking satyr, oppressor, comedian. The deadly arrows of truth rain down on the places where lies lull themselves into security behind authori- ties. "Low theory" here for the first time seals a pact with poverty and satire.
From this perspective, the significance of cheekiness is easily shown. Since philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. In a culture in which hardened idealisms make lies into a form of living, the process of truth depends on whether people can be found who are aggressive and free ("shameless") enough to speak the truth. Those who rule lose their real self-confidence to the fools, clowns, and kynics; for this reason, an anecdote has Alexander the Great say that he would like to be Diogenes if he were not Alex- ander. If he were not the fool of his political ambition, he would have to play the fool in order to speak the truth to people, and to himself. (And when the powerful begin, for their part, to think kynically, when they know the truth about them- selves and, in spite of this, "go on as before," then they completely fulfill the mod- ern definition of cynicism. )
By the way, only in the last few centuries has the word "cheeky" (frech) gained a negative connotation. Initially, as for example in Old High German, it meant
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 103
a productive aggressivity, letting fly at the enemy: "brave, bold, lively, plucky, untamed, ardent. " The devitalization of a culture is mirrored in the history of this word. Those who are still cheeky today were not affected by the cooling off of the materialist heat as much as those who are inconvenienced by brazen people would like. The prototype of the cheeky is the Jewish David, who teases Goliath, "Come here, so I can hit you better. " He shows that the head has not only ears to hear and obey but also a brow with which to menacingly defy the stronger: re- bellion, affront, effrontery.
Greek kynicism discovers the animal body in the human and its gestures as ar- guments; it develops a pantomimic materialism. Diogenes refutes the language of philosophers with that of the clown: "When Plato put forward the definition of the human as a featherless biped and was applauded for it, he tore the feathers from a rooster and brought it into Plato's school saying, 'That is Plato's human'; as a result, the phrase was added: 'with flattened nails' " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 40). That--and not Aristotelianism --is the real-philosophical antithesis to Socrates and Plato. Plato and Aristotle are both master-thinkers, even if a spark of Socrates' plebeian street philosophy is still present in the Platonic ironies and dialectic mannerisms. Diogenes and his followers countered this with an essen- tially plebeian reflection. Only the theory of this cheekiness can open up access to a political history of combative reflections. This makes the history of philoso- phy possible as dialectical social history: It is the history of the embodiment and the splitting of consciousness.
Since, however, kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the fac- tors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, the process of truth gets caught in a previ- ously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition. Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together with their ideologists of domination, let go affectively --precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while kynics support their "cheekiness" with a life of ascetic integrity, they are answered, from the side of the attacked, by an idealism with a disinhibition that is disguised as outrage and that, in the most extreme case, can go as far as extermination. An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes.
Pissing Against the Idealist Wind
nas m
eekiness > principle, two positions, namely, above and below,
egemonic power and oppositional power, expressed in the language of the Mid-
e
ments" from the opposition, carried by the power that comes from below. The
yi'c farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athe-
lan
Ages: master and serf. Ancient kynicism begins the process of "naked argu-
market. He shows contempt for fame, ridicules the architecture, refuses re-
104 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
spect, parodies the stories of gods and heroes, eats raw meat and vegetables, lies
in the sun, fools around with the whores and says to Alexander the Great that he
1
should get out of his sun. What is this supposed to mean?
Kynicism is a first reply to Athenian hegemonic idealism that goes beyond the- oretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. Di- ogenes may well be a figure whose public appearance can be understood in terms of the competition with Socrates; his bizarre behavior possibly signifies attempts to outdo the cunning dialectician with comedy. But this is not enough: kynicism gives a new twist to the question of how to say the truth.
The academic conversation among philosophers does not concede the materi-
alist position a fitting place --indeed, it cannot because the conversation itself
presupposes something like an idealist agreement. An existential materialist feels
misunderstood from the start in a place where people only talk. In the dialogue
of heads, only head theories will ever come up, and a head dialectics will easily
rise above the clash of an idealism with a head materialism. Socrates copes quite
well with the Sophists and the theoretical materialists if he can entice them into
a conversation in which he, as a master of refutation, is undefeatable. However,
neither Socrates nor Plato can deal with Diogenes -- for he talks with them "differ-
ently too," in a dialogue of flesh and blood. Thus, for Plato there remained no
alternative but to slander his weird and unwieldy opponent. He called him a "So-
crates gone mad" (Socrates mainoumenos). The phrase is intended as an annihila-
tion, but it is the highest recognition. Against his will, Plato places the rival on
the same level as Socrates, the greatest dialectician. Plato's hint is valuable. It
makes it clear that with Diogenes something unsettling but compelling had hap-
pened with philosophy. In the dog philosophy of the kynic (kyon, dog in
Greek; -- Trans. ), a materialist position appears that is clearly a match for the ide-
alist dialectic. It possesses the wisdom of original philosophy, the realism of a
fundamental materialist stance, and the serenity of an ironic religiosity. For all
his crassness, Diogenes is not cramped in opposition or fixated on contradiction.
His life is marked by a humorous self-certainty characteristic only of great
2
spirits.
In idealism, which justifies social and world orders, the ideas stand at the top
and gleam in the light of attentiveness; matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity. How can living matter defend itself against this degradation? It is excluded from academic dialogue, admitted there only as theme, not as an existent. What can be done? The material, the alert body, begins to actively demonstrate its sovereignty. The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm! "Vegetate" like a dog, but live, laugh, and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.
Now, it could be objected that these animal matters are everyday private ex- periences with the body and do not warrant a public spectacle. That may be, but
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 105
? ? BUSH JBI ]iimm;mim.
? . i,. . .
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Hercules pissing.
it misses the point. This "dirty" materialism is an answer not only to an exagger- ated idealism of power that undervalues the rights of the concrete. The animalities are for the kynic a part of his way of presenting himself, as well as a form of ar- gumentation. Its core is existentialism. The kynic, as a dialectical materialist, has to challenge the public sphere because it is the only space in which the overcom- ing of idealist arrogance can be meaningfully demonstrated. Spirited materialism is not satisfied with words but proceeds to a material argumentation that rehabili- tates the body. Certainly, ideas are enthroned in the academy, and urine drips dis- creetly into the latrine. But urine in the academy! That would be the total dialecti- cal tension, the art of pissing against the idealist wind.
To take what is base, separated, and private out onto the street is subversive.
106 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
This is also, as we will see, the cultural strategy of the bourgeoisie, which
achieved cultural hegemony not only through the development of commodity
economy, science, and technology, but also through a publicizing of the
private--secretly inspired by materialism--of its inner world of love, feeling,
body, with all their sensual and moral complications. For over two hundred years
we have been observing a permanent, though always contested, movement of the
private into the public sphere. Sexual experiences play a key role in this because
the dialectic of the splitting off into privacy and the return to the public realm is
forced on them with exemplary violence. Bourgeois culture, oriented toward
reality, cannot help taking up the thread of the Icynical cultural revolution. Today
we are beginning to understand that again. Willy Hochkeppel has recently
sketched the parallels between ancient kynicism and the modern hippie and alter-
3
native movement. Neokynical elements have influenced bourgeois conscious-
ness of private life and existence since at least the eighteenth century. In them, a reserve of the bourgeois feeling toward life is articulated against politics-as an abstract form of life forced into false heights. For politics --of yesteryear, and more than ever, of today -- is just as the kynics of the degenerating Greek city- states experienced it: a threatening coercive relation between human beings, a sphere of dubious careers and questionable ambitions, a mechanism of alienation, the level of war and social injustice--in brief, a hell that imposes on us the exis- tence of Others above us who are capable of violence.
The public sphere of the Athenian market was electrified by the kynical offen-
sive. Although Diogenes did not accept pupils in the usual sense, his didactic im-
4
pulse, even if it was subliminal, became one of the most powerful in the history
of spirit.
When Diogenes urinates and masturbates in the marketplace, he does both-
because he does them publicly --in a model situation. To publicize something im- plies the unified act of showing and generalizing (the semantic system of art is
5
based on this).
rights to an unashamed experience of the corporeal that does well to defy all dis- crimination. Ethical living may be good, but naturalness is good too. That is all kynical scandal says. Because the teaching explicates life, the kynic had to take oppressed sensuality out into the market. Look, how this wise man, before whom Alexander the Great stood in admiration, enjoys himself with his own organ! And he shits in front of everybody. So that can't be all that bad. Here begins a laughter containing philosophical truth, which we must call to mind again if only because today everything is bent on making us forget how to laugh.
Later philosophies, at first the Christian, the post-Christian still more, suspend the rule of embodiment step by step. Finally, intellectuals expressly confessed the "nonidentity" of life and insight, most pointedly Adorno, who categorically dis- tinguished the validity of intellectual-spiritual (geistig) structures from the notori- ous "wretchedness" of the bearers of "spirit. " That the destruction of the principle
The philosopher thus gives the small man in the market the same
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 107
0f embodiment is an achievement of Christian-bourgeois-capitalist schizophre- nias does not have to be demonstrated at length. The principle of embodiment cannot be upheld anymore by modern intellectuals, for reasons of cultural consti- tution. An intelligentsia that has its social role to play must become, whether it is conscious of it or not, a pilot group for existential strife. Modern philosophers, insofar as they still lay claim to this name, have transformed themselves into schizoid brain-animals --even when they turn their theoretical attention toward negativity, the excluded, the downtrodden, and the conquered.
Bourgeois Neokynicism: The Arts
That the impulse toward sensual embodiment has not been fully eradicated is es- sentially an achievement of bourgeois art (in part also of social rebellion, which, however, does not concern us here). The bourgeois arts have a philosophical sig- nificance in that they call a neokynical current to life, although not under this name. Nevertheless, when they speak of "Nature" and genius, truth, life, expres- sion, etc. , that is the kynical impulse at play. It exploits the license provided by art to express the demand for existential undividedness. The Prometheus of the effusive young Goethe could be the new guiding symbol of the impulse. Like him, art tries to create human beings in the image of whole, embodied beings who laugh and cry, enjoy themselves and are glad, and who don't give a damn about gods and laws. The young Goethe, more than any other, sensed the vital secret of bourgeois neokynicism and lived it out as art. Nature, Nature! is the battle cry of sensual enlightenment that Goethe sounded in his fascinatingly moody, aggres- sive, and-in the truest sense of the word-cheeky speech on Shakespeare Day, 1771.
Give me air, so that I can speak!
And how does our century have the cheek to judge nature. How
could we know her, we who, from our youth, feel in ourselves and see in others everything laced up and affected? And now in conclusion, al- though I have not yet begun! What the noble philosophers have said about the world is also true of Shakespeare: What we call evil is only the other side of good; it is necessary for the existence of the good and belongs to the whole just as the Torrid Zone must burn and Lapland must freeze so that there may be a temperate zone. He leads us through the whole world, but we coddled and inexperienced human beings scream every time we see a grasshopper: Lord, he's going to eat us!
Gentlemen, rise up! Trumpet all the noble souls out of the Elysium of so-called good taste where they, drowsy and in dull twilight, are half there and half not; they have passions in the heart but no marrow in the bone. And because they are not tired enough to rest and yet are too
108 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
lazy to be active, their shadow life lazes and yawns away between myr- tle and laurel bushes.
In the Sturm und Drang of early bourgeois art, human beings not of the nobility announce --probably for the first time since antiquity --their claim to a full life, to the embodiment of their sensuousness, to undividedness. A stormy, aesthetic kynicism vents itself. It is a young, twenty-two-year-old man who attacks in an annihilatingly joyful way the rococo culture with its limp charm of inauthenticity, its cunning schizophrenias, and its moribund, manneristic theater. Goethe's speech reads like a manifesto for bourgeois neokynicism. It explodes everything that is mere morality by referring to the grand amoralism of nature; in nature, so-called evil also plays a positive role. (In chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics," I will interpret Goethe's Mephistopheles in a new light--as a perplexed figure created from the substance of kynical-cynical experience. )
Bourgeois art was, of course, condemned to represent sensuous totality in fiction, if at all. Because of this weakness, bourgeois antibourgeois repeatedly re- newed the attack of neokynicism against the splitting of and the defamation of the sensual. They wanted to embody the rights to existence of the excluded low ele- ments with body and soul --beyond the boundaries of illusion. That is one of the reasons why art has its eye on "life" so much; it is its kynical impulse that wants to jump out of fiction into reality. Aesthetic amoralism is only a prelude to life demanding its sensual rights practically. We can conclude that in a sensually balanced culture, art as a whole would be "less important," less lofty, and less laden with philosophical motifs. Perhaps we are on the way to this kind of art.
During their great period, bourgeois arts were influenced by an enormous hun- ger for negativity, not least of all because the secret of vitality pulsates in this negativity.