We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the
respectable
games.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Their showing them-
110 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
position of the unruly Diogenes. Against the most insightful theory these-it is to be hoped --intelligent bodies willfully positioned themselves.
Cynicism as Cheekiness That Has Changed Sides
Cheekiness from below is effective when it expresses real energies as it advances. It must consciously embody its power and alertly create a reality that can at most be resisted but not denied. When the dissatisfied "serf'jokingly picks up his mas- ter in his arms, he gives a foretaste of the violence his revolt would have. A cheeky neckline, which reveals naked female skin, plays with the power that the rare exerts over the commonplace. In the old sexual economy, the strength of the weaker sex lay in the deficiency that it involuntarily-voluntarily imposed on the needs of the "stronger" sex. Finally, religious cheekiness, blasphemy, causes pi- ous seriousness to collapse when the physiologically irresistible energy of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
laugh- ter attacks it.
Certain small phrases irrefutably advance cheeky realism from below against the "law," two sets of two words, each of which deflates false pretensions: So What? and Why Not? With a persistent So What? many young people have driven their incorrigible parents enlighteningly to frustration. Children's play groups are often good schools for enlightenment because they train the saying of So What? incidentally in a natural way. That would be nothing other than the practice the
6fully socialized find so difficult: to say No always at the right moment. The fully
developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom being to take form.
That which has power can take liberties. Power, however, is above and below, of course, in distorted proportions; the serf is not nothing and the masters are not everything; subjugation is just as real as domination. The power of the underdog comes into its own individually as that cheekiness that constitutes the core of power in kynicism. With it, those who are disadvantaged can anticipate their own sovereignty. A second level on which the underdogs try out possibilities of will- fulness is subversion, willful praxis in the sense of semiliberties that stretch the law. We probably only seldomly make clear to ourselves how immense the factor of subversion in our society can be--a world in shadows, full of secretive cheeki- ness and realisms of all kinds, full of resistances, discharges, machinations, and a sense for one's own advantage. Half of normality consists of microscopic devia- tions from the norms. This field of willfulness, of the little tricks in life, and of black morality is almost just as unresearched as, on the other side, the expansion of corruption. Both are, in the nature of things, scarcely accessible. We know about them but do not speak about them.
The freedom of the hegemonic powers is also a double freedom. In the first place, it comprises the privileges and liberties of masters that are connected with hegemonic power itself. There is no cheekiness involved in taking such liberties
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D i l l
? Cynicism as rulers' joke: "Condemned! "
BEBEL: The teacher asked the small boy why he wanted to go to heaven, and what
was the answer? There I wouldn't be hungry anymore! Is there anything more outrageous, is there anything that incites more against today's social order than the statement of this child?
LORD v. ARNIM: Perhaps the father had drunk everything! (Stormy boos from the Social Democrats. )
BEBEL: That is an infamy! The gentleman laughs, that is a coarseness of tempera- ment! (Stormy approval to the left. Noise to the right. )
but there is tact in not being ostentatious in enjoying them. Most of the old seig- neurs, for example, did not exercise the right of sexual feudalism, the "right to the first night" with the brides of serfs, and the high life of today's superrich is discreetly concealed behind middle-class facades, or in closed milieus.
But also for the powerful there is something that amounts to semiliberties. As a rule, they allow themselves such liberties only under pressure because, in so doing, they betray themselves to opposing consciousness. The consciousness of the master knows its own specific cheekiness: master cynicism in the modern sense of the word, as distinct from the kynical offensive. Ancient kynicism, pri- mary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebeian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the masters' antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adver- sary, and suppresses him. C'est la vie. Noblesse oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of "things"! In its cynicisms hegemonic Power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all.
7Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. Now it is not David who
challenges Goliath, but the Goliaths of all times --from the arrogant Assyrian
112 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
? Thomas Theodor Heine. Through Darkest Germany, 2. An Execution, 1899 (Sim- plicissimus No. 35, title page). "Now, be calm, my good fellow. Be glad that you aren't a Social Democrat; then things would get even nastier for you. " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military kings to modern bureaucracy --who show the brave but doomed David who is on top and who is on the bottom. Cynicism in public service. The wittiness of those who are in any case on top assumes some strange forms. When Marie Antoinette inquired about the reasons for the unrest among the people, she was told: "The people are starving, Your Majesty, they have no bread. " Her reply: "If the people have no bread, why don't they eat cake? " (Conversely, F. J. Strauss says, "In life we cannot eat Black Forest cake every day. ")
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As soon as master consciousness has unmasked itself even slightly with its cynicisms, it betrays itself to the oppositional power. But what if there is no such power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where poten- tial oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. "Basic values" and excuses merge imperceptibly. The
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 113
bearers of hegemonic power in the political and economic scene become hollow, schizoid, unconvincing. We live under the management of respectable players. If, earlier, great politicians were those who were "free" enough to become cynics so that they could play coolly with means and ends, today every functionary and backbencher is as experienced in this regard as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Bis- marck put together.
Jiirgen Habermas, with his theory of the crisis of legitimation, has undoubt- edly struck the nerve of nerves in modern political systems. The question re- mains, Who can be the subject of knowledge about the legitimation crisis? Who enlightens, and who is the enlightened? Cynicism proceeds by way of a diffusion of the subject of knowledge, so that the present-day servant of the system can very well do with the right hand what the left hand never allowed. By day, colonizer, at night, colonized; by occupation, valorizer and administrator, during leisure time, valorized and administered; officially a cynical functionary, privately a sen- sitive soul; at the office a giver of orders, ideologically a discussant; outwardly a follower of the reality principle, inwardly a subject oriented toward pleasure; functionally an agent of capital, intentionally a democrat; with respect to the sys- tem a functionary of reification, with respect to the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), some- one who achieves self-realization; objectively a strategist of destruction, subjec- tively a pacifist; basically someone who triggers catastrophes, in one's own view, innocence personified. With schizoids anything is possible, and enlightenment and reaction do not make much difference. With the enlightened integrated person --in this world of clever, instinctive conformists--the body says no to the compulsions of the head, and the head says no to the way in which the body pro- cures its comfortable self-preservation. This mixture is our moral status quo. Theory of the Double Agent
It is time to speak of a phenomenon that seemingly manages to survive only on the margins of political systems; in fact, however, it touches on the existential core of societies: the phenomenon of secret agents. The psychology of agents, especially of the double agent, would be the most important chapter in present- day political psychology. Incredible stories are told of conspiratorial groups in Switzerland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where an im- penetrable snarl of czarist, anticzarist, Communist, anarchist, and Western Euro- pean groups of agents had arisen. They all kept their eyes on each other, and their calculations and consciousnesses reflected on and into one another. In the heads of the conspiratorial party cells as well as in the secret police planted among them, fantastically convoluted tactics and metatactics were spun out. One has heard of double and triple agents who themselves in the end no longer exactly knew for whom they were really working and what they were seeking for themselves in this double and triple role playing. They were initally committed to one side, were
114 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
then bought off, and were finally enticed back by their own original party, etc. There was basically no longer any self that would have been able to "self- seekingly obtain advantages from all sides. What is self-interest in someone who no longer knows where his "self is?
But much the same thing can be said, I believe, for anyone who takes a place in the body politic (Staatskorper) or in corporations or institutions and knows roughly in which direction the state is heading. Between loyalties and insights an ever-widening gulf is opening that makes it difficult to know where one stands. On which side do our loyalties lie? Are we agents of the state and of institutions? Or agents of enlightenment? Or agents of monopoly capital? Or agents of our own vital interests that secretly cooperate in constantly changing double binds with the state, institutions, enlightenment, counterenlightenment, monopoly capital, so- cialism, etc. , and, in so doing, we forget more and more what we our"selves" sought in the whole business?
It was no accident that it was Walter Benjamin, that great expert in polyvalent meaning who built secret bridges between Judaism and sociology, Marxism and messianism, art and critique, who introduced the agent motif into the human sciences --recall, for example, his famous and cunning interpretation of Baudelaire in which he characterized the poet as a secret agent of his class. The multiple-agent activity of the intelligentsia is characteristic of modernity-- a fact that has always seemed threatening to those simplifiers who were determined to do battle and to those who think in terms of friend and foe. (Was Stalinism not, among other things, an attempt to break out of the ineluctable multiple binds of every intelligentsia by means of a paranoic simplification of the fronts so that once again everything would become simple enough for even Stalin to comprehend? This could be called, somewhat more elegantly, "the reduction
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
of complexity. ")
Who is subjectively, objectively, implicitly, and explicitly whose agent, func- tionary of which link in the system, helper of which tendency? In Stalinist think- ing, to this day, one uses the word "objective" when one wants to dissolve double binds and ambivalences by force. Those who deny complex realities like to pre- tend to be "objective" and accuse those who are conscious of problems of fleeing from reality and daydreaming. Not even with the seemingly most unambiguous and most decisive figures can it be "objectively" determined which tendency they have ultimately signed themselves up for, especially when one considers that his- tory, in spite of all plans, obeys the rules of a game that escapes our grasp. The parties and groups that present themselves to the public with decisive programs are themselves masks of tendencies that reach beyond them and about whose final results one can say little in advance. Marxists like to fantasize in this twilight about a great, secret demiurge, a supercynical trickster who sits in the association of German industrialists, or who even has a ministerial post without portfolio in the chancellor's office and makes the state dance to the tune of the large industries. This projective strategy of simplification is as innocently naive as it is innocently
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 115
artful. It has a grand history - right up to Balzac with his mysterious thirteen who, behind the scenes, held the strings in their hands like a cosa nostra of capital.
The most devastating of such fantasies was an invention from the world of Rus- sian secret agents before the turn of the century: the fantasy of the "wise men of Zion," an anti-Semitic fabrication in which an originally Enlightenment satire (by M. Joly) wandered by way of the mind of a cynical chief of the secret service in Paris, who forged the alleged "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," into the mind of a confused Russian philosopher of religion. From there the "Protocols" made the return journey to Europe, where they became the main document of anti-Semitic paranoia and had an impact on Hitler and from there to Auschwitz. That was a subterfuge in the simplifications of German fascism that projected the anonymous effects of the system onto demonic "intentions" so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the "overview. "
Cheeky Social History
The history of cheekiness is not a discipline of historiography, and I do not know whether it would do the matter a favor if it were to become one. History is always a secondary force that must be preceded by an impulse of the moment. As far as cynicism is concerned, the impulse should be obvious; with respect to kynicism and cheekiness, the impulse will probably be sought in vain.
Since antiquity, the role of the city in the genesis of satirical consciousness is sociohistorically uncontroversial. However, in Germany after the decline of the cities during the Thirty Years' War, there was for a long time no city with a metropolitan character. As late as 1831, Heinrich Heine had to emigrate to Paris-the principal city of the nineteenth century-in order to breathe liberating city air. "I went because I had to. "
As the northern Italian city cultures, which Jakob Burckhardt described, ex-
ploded with sarcasm and Roman and Florentine wit rang shrill in their citizens'
ears, Germany possessed, apart from Eulenspiegel, the plebeian protokynic of
modern times, admittedly no Aretino but nevertheless a cobbler from Nuremberg
who wrote droll stories: old Hans Sachs who, somewhat unjustly, is remembered
as the progenitor of narrow-minded, middle-class humor. This Sachs, perhaps
guided by good instinct, had also written a dialogue about Diogenes --and thus
already at the beginning of bourgeois culture there is a link to the kynical impulse.
Hut Nuremberg degenerated and rose to prominence again only with the coming
? f the railway and as the site of the Nazi rallies. In that place, where the first
Presentiments of the bourgeois principle of culture had flourished, kynical real-
ism and urban laughter, petit-bourgeois master cynicism was perfected in the hu-
man city that, as far as cheekiness goes, left no possibility unexhausted, was-and ls
orless mass parade of columns for subsequent war cemeteries. The only Ger-
to the present day-Berlin. For the spirit of those who paraded in Nuremberg,
116 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
? Till Eulenspiegel.
this city was always a little eerie. Gottfried Benn captures the provincialism of the marchers when he caricatures their ideas: "Thinking is cynical, it takes place above all in Berlin; in its place the Weser song is recommended. "
Cheekiness always had a rougher time in Germany than in the Latin countries. More often than not, it came on stage as
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
master cynicism, as disinhibition of the powerful. Heinrich Heine, who represents the exception (but he was a child of the French-tinged Rhineland), had to content himself in his search for indigenous models and allies with other traditional German characteristics --embodied in the snarled truthfulness of Voss, in the morally strong clarity of Lessing, and in Luther's courageous confessional power. Nevertheless, not without justification, a characteristic tradition of German cheekiness could be connected to Luther, for his Protestantism came at a time when it was not usual to say to kaisers: "Here
I stand, I cannot do otherwise," --an act of reckless courage and the most willful
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 117
frivolity. Moreover, in Luther an animal element, a power, appears that approves itself--a vital archetype of swinishness that is inseparable from kynical motifs. Apart from the city, three social dies of serene refractoriness have played an essential role in the history of cheekiness: the carnival, the universities, and the Bohemians. All three function as safety valves through which needs that other- wise are not given their due in social life can achieve a limited release. Here, cheekiness has had a space in which it has been tolerated, even if the tolerance
has lasted only a short time and can be rescinded.
The old carnival was a substitute revolution for the poor. A kingly fool was
elected who reigned over a thoroughly inverted world for a day and a night. In this inverted world, the poor and the decent brought their dreams to life, as costumed oafs and bacchanals, forgetting themselves to the point of truth, cheeky, lewd, turbulent, and disgraceful. One was allowed to lie and to tell the truth, to be obscene and honest, drunken and irrational. From the carnival of the late Middle Ages, as Bachtin has shown, satirical motifs flow into art. The color- ful languages of Rabelais and other Renaissance artists draw on the parodistic spirit of carnivalism. It inspires macabre and satirical traditions and makes fools and harlequins, buffoons and Punches into standard figures of a great comical tra- dition that fulfills its task in the life of society even when it is not Shrove Tuesday. Class societies can scarcely survive without the institution of the inverted world and the crazy day --as the Indian and Brazilian carnivals demonstrate. Likewise since the late Middle Ages, universities have become important in the social economy of cheekiness and kynical intelligence. They were by no means simply places of teaching and research. In them, there romped also a va- grant, extravagant, youthful intelligence that was clever enough to know some- thing better than just cramming. In this respect, the Sorbonne in Paris enjoys spe- cial fame. It formed a city within a city, the Latin Quarter, in which we recognize the forerunners of all later Bohemians. In the bourgeois epoch, the years at the university were for the students a time when they could defer the serious things in life, when they could take liberties before going on to careers and an orderly life. Those adults who later, as respectable gentlemen, maintain that they too were young are thinking back on student larks, student freedoms, and intrigues. Life around the universities gave the concept of "youth" a particular color in the bourgeois period. The Old Gentlemen tore their hair only officially, but they secretly noted with satisfaction when their sons did exactly the same things. The dignitaries find it eerie to be confronted by a young generation that is too cool lor nonsense and that, precociously cynical, gets straight to the heart of the mat- ter. The twentieth century has known several such cool generations, starting with the Nazi fraternity in which a troupe of cool snot-noses mingled with the populist 'dealists; later they became fighter pilots or jurists in the system, and still later, Democrats. Following them came the "skeptical Generation" of the fifties, which stands today at the helm, and following them, the generations of the seventies and
118 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
eighties, among whom the early developers in cynicism are already making them- selves noticed as New Wave.
The Bohemians, a relatively recent phenomenon, played a prominent role in the regulation of the tensions between art and bourgeois society. Bohemianism was the space in which the transition from art into the art of living was tried out. For a century, Bohemianism gave the neokynical impulse a social shelter. As a regulator for bourgeois careers, it was above all important because, similarly to the universities, it served as a "psychosocial moratorium" (Erikson) in which young bourgeois could live out their crises of adjustment in the transition from the world of school and home to the world of serious occupations. Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians; for the great majority of Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up "yes, but" took its place.
If we look today at these nurturing soils and living spaces in which deviation and critique, satire and cheekiness, kynicism and willfulness thrive, it becomes immediately clear why we must fear the worst for embodied cheeky enlighten- ment. Before our very eyes, cities have been transformed into amorphous clumps where alienated streams of traffic transport people to the various scenes of their attempts and failures in life. For a long time now carnival has meant not "inverted world" but flight into safe world, of anesthesia from a permanently inverted world full of daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
absurdities. We know that, at least since Hitler, Bohemianism is dead, and in its offshoots in the subcultures cheeky moods are to be found less than the cheerless attitudes of withdrawal. And as far as the universities are concerned--oh, let's not talk about that!
These mutilations of cheeky impulses indicate that society has entered a stage of organized seriousness in which the playgrounds of lived enlightenment are be- coming increasingly clogged. This is what dampens the climate of this country so much.
We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the respectable games. Cynicism prickles beneath the monotony. A clear-sighted coquetting with its own schizophrenia betrays the unhappy consciousness, in academia and elsewhere. The provocations seem to be exhausted, all bizarre twists of modern existence seem to be already tried out. A state of public, respect- able torpor has been entered. A tired, schizoidly demoralized intelligentsia plays at realism by contemplatively walling itself up in harsh circumstances.
Embodiment or Splitting
The embodied is that which wants to live. But life is fundamentally different from the postponement of suicide. Those who live in societies armed with atomic weapons become, whether they want to or not, at least semiagents of a cynical "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 119
community of suicides, that is, unless they were to decide to resolutely turn their backs on it. That is precisely what a continually growing number of people are doing, people who have emigrated since the fifties--to Provence, Italy, the Ae- gean, California, Goa, the Caribbean, Auroville, Poona, Nepal, and, last but not least, to Tibetan highlands in the interior of Germany and France.
Two questions arise in connection with these phenomena, the first cynical, the second concerned. First, when it comes to the crunch, will that be far enough? And second, who is helped when the morally most sensitive people abandon the sinking ship of cynical society? We have "good" reasons to ask these questions, for the growing expectation of war nourishes both the cynical and the concerned view on what is coming. Emigration could be useful for both sides if we under- stand it correctly: for the emigrants, who will find out whether the greener pastures they seek exist; for those who remain behind, to whom the departure of the others says: There where you are, life is not possible--for us. Is it for you? Emigration could be taken somewhat less seriously if it were really only a fringe phenomenon. However, nothing permits this innocuous view of things. What is happening on the fringe today comes from the middle. Emigration has become a fact of mass psychology. Entire strata of the population have been living for a considerable period in an inner somewhere-else, just not in this country. They do not feel bound to what are called the fundamental values of society. One hears "fundamental values" and involuntarily sees mushroom clouds rise up. One hears those who are responsible proclaim their readiness to negotiate and feels, looking into their faces, the ice of the end of the world in their eyes. The main body of society has long since chosen to emigrate into leisure time, and for them the word "life" gets its bright color from memories of certain moments on happy vacations --when the horizon opened up . . .
What is to be done? Get out or collaborate? "Flee or stand firm? " Both alterna- tives seem inadequate. Their expressions are all overused and ambivalent. Are the "escapists" really comprehended with this word? Is there not infrequently a lot of cowardliness and melancholy, collaboration and opportunism in what is called "standing firm"? Is escapism without exception a conscious act--and don't a lot of so-called escapists (Aussteiger) already find themselves on the outside be- fore they are asked about their own attitude? Is collaboration really cynically tinged everywhere? Is it not also motivated by the need for something "positive" and the need to belong?
But it is also worthwhile to see the elements of truth in the expressions on both sides. Escapists are justified, because they do not want to be entangled with open
eyes in the intolerable cynicisms of a society in which the distinction between producing and destroying is becoming blurred. Collaboration is justified because individuals are also permitted to orient themselves toward survival in the short run. To flee is justified because it rejects a stupid courage and because only fools let themselves be consumed by hopeless struggles -- when there are spaces that are
120 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
more amenable to life. Standing firm is justified because experience shows that every conflict that is merely avoided will catch up with us at every point of our flight.
For this reason, the alternative that corresponds to our view of life must be grasped in a different way-- it is that between embodiment or splitting. It is an al- ternative that addresses itself first to consciousness, and only afterward to be- havior. It demands a radical priority of self-experience over morality. It is a mat- ter of either consciously letting what is already torn apart grow together again or unconsciously surrendering what is split off to the schizoid process. Integration or schizophrenia. Choose life or celebrate at the party of suicides. That may sound like a spiritual diet for individuals, and those who take it this way have heard right. Initially enlightenment has no other addressees than those
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
individuals who elude blind socialness (Gesellschaftlichkeit) without thereby being able to cease playing a role in society. One must therefore keep the idea of enlightenment alive-through embodied enlightenment, of course. Enlightenment means to affirm all antischizophrenic movements. The universities are scarcely the place where this happens. The universitas vitae is taught in other places, there, where people oppose the cynicism of split official consciousness, where they try out forms of living that open up a chance for conscious life in minds, bodies, and souls. It unfolds in a broad field of individuals and groups who carry on the kyni- cal impulse and who attempt what no politics and no mere art can take from them: to tackle, with their alertness, the splits and unconscious elements that seep into individual existence; to grow into one's own possibilities; and to participate in en- lightenment's labor of cheering up, a part of which is to pay attention to the wishes
that are the premonition of the possible.
Psychopolitics of Schizoid Society
What are the signs of a prewar period? How do the psychopolitical constitutions of capitalist societies before world wars reveal themselves? German history offers an exemplary lesson in how world wars ferment in the psychic (seelisch) tensions of a nation. On the basis of two --viewed pessimistically, three --cases we can study what it means to live in the prelude to great military explosions. The main psychopolitical symptom is an increasing heaviness in the social atmosphere, which becomes charged with schizoid tensions and ambivalences to the point where it is no longer tolerable. In such a climate, an eerie readiness for catas- trophes flourishes; I call it, alluding to Erich Fromm, the catastrophile complex. It attests to a collective disturbance of vitality through which the energies of the living are displaced into a sympathy with the catastrophic, the apocalyptic, and the violently spectacular.
The historian knows that political history cannot be the site of human happi- ness. Nevertheless, if we want to ask when in our century Europeans experienced
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 121
? their happiest hour, we will be embarrassed by the answer. But the signs and the documents speak for themselves. We stand at first perplexed before the phenome- non of August 1914: What the peoples of Europe, on entering the war, ex- perienced at that time is designated by historiographers ashamedly as "war psy- chosis. " If we look closer, we see it was a matter of indescribable storms of affect that took hold of the masses, of outbreaks of jubilation and of national emotion, of pleasure in fear and the ecstasy of fate. There were moments of pathos and a presentiment of life beyond comparison. The slogan of the times was an ecstatic one: Finally things have gone so far. The masses probably also experienced fear, but above all a feeling of basic change into something that promised "life. " The slogans were rejuvenation, putting to the test, cleansing bath, purgative cure. In the first year, the war was waged by purely volunteer armies; no one had to be forced to go to the front. The catastrophe enticed the Wilhelminian youth. When the catastrophe occurred, the people recognized themselves in it and understood that they had waited for it.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the people of that time were so very different from people of today. Only arrogance could allow us to deceive ourselves that we would be smarter in existentially decisive matters than those volunteers from Langemarck who, by the thousands, pathetically ran into the fire ? r the machine guns. The only difference is that the psychic mechanisms of later generations operate more subtly. That is why we are initially astounded that the Processes then ran so naively and unrestrained on the surface. The war enthusiasts
nought they were experiencing the qualitative difference between provisional ar-
ra
between inauthentic and supposedly authentic life. Even after the war, the talk
ngements and decision, a sultriness and clarification --in a word, the difference
of as
>> was felt by the men of August 1914, there would finally be something at stake wat made living worthwhile.
"battle as inner experience" wafted through pre-Fascist literature. In the war,
122 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
The First World War signals the turning point in modern cynicism. With it the up-tempo phase of the decomposition of old naivetes begins-such as those about the nature of war, the nature of social order, of progress, of bourgeois values, indeed, of bourgeois civilization itself. Since this war, the diffuse schizoid climate around the major European powers has not become any less intense. Since then, those who have spoken of cultural crisis, etc. , have had that mental disposition of postwar shock unquestionably in mind that knows that the naivete of yesterday will never exist again. Irrevocably, mistrust, disillusion, doubt, and distanced stances have infiltrated into the sociopsychological "hereditary substance. " Everything positive will be from then on an "In-spite-of," laced with latent desper- ation. Since that time, the broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia, voluntarism, resignation to the lesser evil, depression and anesthesia as a conscious choice of uncon- sciousness.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the few years of the Weimar Republic the catastrophile complex built up again until finally the economic crisis ignited the kindling. The joyless republic granted an end to itself. In the myth of revolution and in the myth of the people, catastrophile tendencies found their "respectable" underpinnings. Whoever secretly accepted the catastrophe loudly claimed to know where the course of events was heading and which drastic cure was the proper one. Those who saw the catastrophe approaching tried, before it broke, to get the most out of life. In 1931, Erich Kastner captured the voice of a man who was beyond the cliffs of naive morality and who, with his private lust for life, swam with the current as it flowed toward the next cataract.
"Serious conversations, how? Is there a life after death? Confidentially, there isn't. Everything must be settled before death. There's a heap of things to do, day and night. . . . Better to amuse yourselves than to redeem humanity. As I said, life has to be settled before death. More
8That is a contemporary voice that in fifty years has not become outmoded. This is how a person speaks who knows that he does not change history. In spite of everything he wants to live--before the end, which is disguised as an uprising. Today, the latent will to catastrophe on all sides has taken cover under the official respectability of the politics of peace. The mechanisms whose relatively brutal openness characterized the Fascist style have sunk into the subliminal and the atmospheric under the masks of accommodation, good will, and sincere senti- ments. Naive stimuli have disappeared from the surface of consciousness. The increasing socialization of reactions represses open gestures; what is called democracy means, psychologically, an increase in self-control, which is probably necessary in dense populations. However, we should not be deceived by the calmed surface. The catastrophile complex lives on, and if not all signs are mis-
information glady given. Don't be so serious, my boy. "
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 123
leading, its mass is caught up in incessant accumulation. Perhaps it is the "accom- plishment of terrorism"--to speak frivolously--to have made the catastrophile currents, at least here and there, tangible and recognizable. One can refer to what is clearly there.
Recall the kidnapping and murder of the president of the Employers' Associa- tion, Hans-Martin Schleyer--the feverish climate of those months when terrorism approached its peak in Germany. At that time, the psychopolitical scenario that belongs to the catastrophile complex again came crassly to light, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War. The media and the voices of state were spontaneously and completely united in their respectable tone of indignation and dismay. Among millions of published sentences, there was hardly a passage in which the truth of the masses in the atmosphere forced its way through. This truth consisted, as every whispered conversation, every scene at a kiosk, dialogues in canteens and bars, chats in lobbies, etc. , proved, in a flickering ambivalence of feelings in which existential fears and desire for catastrophe were indistinguisha- bly entwined. The avidness of the reporting, the measureless breadth of the dis- cussion, and the excess of state and private reactions, even viewed in retrospect, speak an unmistakable language. Here something had happened that touched the feeling toward life. A nameless hunger for drama in history and a desperate long- ing for conflict on the right front had so confused hearts and minds that for months on end, an event was gnawed away at that in its criminal and political content did not justify such agitation. Through the political staging of the crime and the spec- tacular interaction of state and terror group, it took on the significance of an epoch-making event. It nourished itself on powerful catastrophile currents and swelled up, becoming the dominant emotional theme of endless days. Sociopsy- chologically, it brought an hour of truth. It was the substitute for a history in which something moves, the caricature of a "liberation struggle," an idiotic- criminal parody of that which social democracy under Wilhelm II, Hindenberg, and Hitler had neglected--battle on the wrong front, at the wrong time, by the wrong attackers against the wrong opponents, and yet, in spite of the sum of all these distortions, it was greedily lapped up by society as a substitute for struggle, conflict drug, and political catastrophe film.
At one point, the universal consensus in the cynically mute delirium around
9the "event" was torn open. I here refer to the paper by "Mescalero," who had
been naive enough to believe that, without being punished, one could break through conspiracies of silence of this magnitude with honesty and throw open the ambivalences for debate. He thus spoke in a formulation that has become fa- mous and that was repeated incessantly by the media to millions and millions of ears, of his "deep, secret joy" {klammheimlichen Freude) he discovered in himself in the first moment on hearing of the Buback murder, in order then, in the next moment of reflection, to distance himself from it. Mescalero was shocked at him- self and wanted to speak reasonably about this shock. With the Mescalero explo-
124 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
sion, the collective ambivalence discharged itself in a grand parade of lies. That was a historical moment of learning- from then on it could no longer be sup- pressed that society again lived in a prewar period in which all conflicts that had to do with life feelings were decisively postponed to that moment when the exter- nal war would make the encounter with inner reality superfluous. In the ballet of rectifications, shieldings, repudiations, and protestations, the attitude of respecta- bility celebrated a paper victory over the honesty that had said the other part of the truth, if not for everybody, then at least for many. Since that time, we can imagine how the papers will rustle in which, at the outbreak of war, those with responsibility will read of their dismay, shock, and resolution--if there is enough time for this before the atomic burial of the Federal Republic (Atom-BRDigung).
Unashamed Happiness
Does cheekiness, which recalls the rights to happiness, still have a chance? Is the kynical impulse really dead, and is it only cynicism that has a grand, deadly fu- ture? Can enlightenment --the idea that it would be reasonable to be happy -- be reincarnated in our gloomy modernity? Are we defeated once and for all, and will the cynical twilight of harsh reality and moral dream never again grow lighter?
These questions touch on the feeling toward life in the atomically armed civili- zations. These civilizations are going through a crisis of their innermost vitality that is probably without historical parallel. The tip of this uneasiness can perhaps be felt most keenly in Germany, the country that has lost two world wars and in which the atmospheric conditions register most sensitively how it feels to live be- tween catastrophes.
Modernity is losing, in addition to its feeling of vitality, the distinction be- tween crisis and stability. No longer do any positive experiences of our situation take place, no feeling that existence can extend into an immeasurably wide and firm horizon without exhausting itself. A feeling of the provisional, the specula- tive, at best medium-term, lies at the bottom of all public and private strategies. Even those who are optimists by constitution are beginning to quote Luther, who said he would plant an apple tree today anyway, even if he knew that tomorrow the world would come to an end. Periods of chronic crisis demand of the human will to live that it accept perma- nent uncertainty as the unchangeable background of its striving for happiness. Then the hour of kynicism arrives; it is the life philosophy of crisis. Only under its sign is happiness in uncertainty possible. It teaches moderation of expecta- tions, adaptability, presence of mind, attention to what the moment offers. It knows that the expectation of long-term careers and the defense of social assets must entangle one in an existence "as care" (Sorge). It was no accident that Heidegger, in the days of the precarious Weimar Republic, revealed the "struc- ture of cares" in existence. (Sein undZeit, 1927). Care absorbs the motif of happi- "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 125
? We're alive, we're alive, 1945.
ness. Those who want to hold on to the latter must learn, following the kynical model, to break the hegemonic power of cares. But socialized consciousness sees itself at the mercy of an incessant agitation by themes of care. These themes create the subjective lighting of the crisis in which even the well-to-do have already ac- quired the mentality of the shipwrecked. Never were such well-heeled people so much in a mood of termination.
This widespread disturbance of vitality and this bleakening of the life feeling provide the general background to the demoralization of enlightenment. "Care" clouds existence so persistently that the idea of happiness cannot be made socially plausible any more. The atmospheric presupposition for enlightenment- cheering up--is not present. Those who, like Ernst Bloch, spoke of the "principle of hope" would have to be able to find this climatic a priori of enlightenment, the view of a clear sky, at least in themselves; and that Bloch found it makes him different from the mainstream of intellectuals. Even when everything became gloomy, he knew the private secret of cheering up, trusting in life, letting expres- sion flow, believing in development. It was his power to rediscover the "current of warmth"--which he carried in himself--everywhere in human history. That made his view of things more optimistic than they deserve. The current of warmth is what separates him so much from the Zeitgeist. The intelligentsia is exposed to the cold currents of universal demoralization almost without protection; in- deed, it can almost seem as if, as far as defeatism and disorientation are con- cerned, it is still out in front. Now, no one can be talked into believing in the
spirit of utopia" or a "principle of hope" who can discover no experiences in him- self that give these expressions meaning. But it can be asked for which existential disposition Utopia and hope stand. Is it a "dissatisfaction in principle," as some
126 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
say? Is the Blochian hope ? as is claimed--a creation of resentment? I believe, if it is taken that way, the report from the current of warmth was not listened to care- fully enough. Its message is not the principle of denial. Principled hope stands for "biophilia" (Fromm); it is a code word for creative friendliness toward life. With it, that which lives follows an unquestioned permission to be and to become. That establishes its opposition to the predominant mentality of care and self- inhibition (Selbsthemmung).
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Self-inhibition is the symptom that perhaps best characterizes the rest of the "critical" intelligentsia in the tired column of enlightenment. It knows it is in a two-front situation: On the one side, it is at pains to resist the cynicism of "late capitalism," which has coagulated into a system; on the other side, it is anxious about the radicalness of the emigrants and escapists who seek other ways and who break off cooperation. In such an in-between position, the temptation to defend
10
its "identity" through forced moralism is great.
renders oneself more than ever to the overserious and depressive mood. The scen- ery of the critical intelligentsia is therefore populated by aggressive and depres- sive moralists, problematists, "problemoholics," and soft rigorists whose predominant existential stimulus is No. From this group there is not much hope for the correction of the vitally false course.
From Walter Benjamin comes the aphorism: "To be happy means to be able
11
to look into oneself without being frightened.
110 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
position of the unruly Diogenes. Against the most insightful theory these-it is to be hoped --intelligent bodies willfully positioned themselves.
Cynicism as Cheekiness That Has Changed Sides
Cheekiness from below is effective when it expresses real energies as it advances. It must consciously embody its power and alertly create a reality that can at most be resisted but not denied. When the dissatisfied "serf'jokingly picks up his mas- ter in his arms, he gives a foretaste of the violence his revolt would have. A cheeky neckline, which reveals naked female skin, plays with the power that the rare exerts over the commonplace. In the old sexual economy, the strength of the weaker sex lay in the deficiency that it involuntarily-voluntarily imposed on the needs of the "stronger" sex. Finally, religious cheekiness, blasphemy, causes pi- ous seriousness to collapse when the physiologically irresistible energy of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
laugh- ter attacks it.
Certain small phrases irrefutably advance cheeky realism from below against the "law," two sets of two words, each of which deflates false pretensions: So What? and Why Not? With a persistent So What? many young people have driven their incorrigible parents enlighteningly to frustration. Children's play groups are often good schools for enlightenment because they train the saying of So What? incidentally in a natural way. That would be nothing other than the practice the
6fully socialized find so difficult: to say No always at the right moment. The fully
developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom being to take form.
That which has power can take liberties. Power, however, is above and below, of course, in distorted proportions; the serf is not nothing and the masters are not everything; subjugation is just as real as domination. The power of the underdog comes into its own individually as that cheekiness that constitutes the core of power in kynicism. With it, those who are disadvantaged can anticipate their own sovereignty. A second level on which the underdogs try out possibilities of will- fulness is subversion, willful praxis in the sense of semiliberties that stretch the law. We probably only seldomly make clear to ourselves how immense the factor of subversion in our society can be--a world in shadows, full of secretive cheeki- ness and realisms of all kinds, full of resistances, discharges, machinations, and a sense for one's own advantage. Half of normality consists of microscopic devia- tions from the norms. This field of willfulness, of the little tricks in life, and of black morality is almost just as unresearched as, on the other side, the expansion of corruption. Both are, in the nature of things, scarcely accessible. We know about them but do not speak about them.
The freedom of the hegemonic powers is also a double freedom. In the first place, it comprises the privileges and liberties of masters that are connected with hegemonic power itself. There is no cheekiness involved in taking such liberties
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D i l l
? Cynicism as rulers' joke: "Condemned! "
BEBEL: The teacher asked the small boy why he wanted to go to heaven, and what
was the answer? There I wouldn't be hungry anymore! Is there anything more outrageous, is there anything that incites more against today's social order than the statement of this child?
LORD v. ARNIM: Perhaps the father had drunk everything! (Stormy boos from the Social Democrats. )
BEBEL: That is an infamy! The gentleman laughs, that is a coarseness of tempera- ment! (Stormy approval to the left. Noise to the right. )
but there is tact in not being ostentatious in enjoying them. Most of the old seig- neurs, for example, did not exercise the right of sexual feudalism, the "right to the first night" with the brides of serfs, and the high life of today's superrich is discreetly concealed behind middle-class facades, or in closed milieus.
But also for the powerful there is something that amounts to semiliberties. As a rule, they allow themselves such liberties only under pressure because, in so doing, they betray themselves to opposing consciousness. The consciousness of the master knows its own specific cheekiness: master cynicism in the modern sense of the word, as distinct from the kynical offensive. Ancient kynicism, pri- mary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebeian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the masters' antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adver- sary, and suppresses him. C'est la vie. Noblesse oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of "things"! In its cynicisms hegemonic Power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all.
7Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. Now it is not David who
challenges Goliath, but the Goliaths of all times --from the arrogant Assyrian
112 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
? Thomas Theodor Heine. Through Darkest Germany, 2. An Execution, 1899 (Sim- plicissimus No. 35, title page). "Now, be calm, my good fellow. Be glad that you aren't a Social Democrat; then things would get even nastier for you. " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military kings to modern bureaucracy --who show the brave but doomed David who is on top and who is on the bottom. Cynicism in public service. The wittiness of those who are in any case on top assumes some strange forms. When Marie Antoinette inquired about the reasons for the unrest among the people, she was told: "The people are starving, Your Majesty, they have no bread. " Her reply: "If the people have no bread, why don't they eat cake? " (Conversely, F. J. Strauss says, "In life we cannot eat Black Forest cake every day. ")
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As soon as master consciousness has unmasked itself even slightly with its cynicisms, it betrays itself to the oppositional power. But what if there is no such power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where poten- tial oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. "Basic values" and excuses merge imperceptibly. The
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 113
bearers of hegemonic power in the political and economic scene become hollow, schizoid, unconvincing. We live under the management of respectable players. If, earlier, great politicians were those who were "free" enough to become cynics so that they could play coolly with means and ends, today every functionary and backbencher is as experienced in this regard as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Bis- marck put together.
Jiirgen Habermas, with his theory of the crisis of legitimation, has undoubt- edly struck the nerve of nerves in modern political systems. The question re- mains, Who can be the subject of knowledge about the legitimation crisis? Who enlightens, and who is the enlightened? Cynicism proceeds by way of a diffusion of the subject of knowledge, so that the present-day servant of the system can very well do with the right hand what the left hand never allowed. By day, colonizer, at night, colonized; by occupation, valorizer and administrator, during leisure time, valorized and administered; officially a cynical functionary, privately a sen- sitive soul; at the office a giver of orders, ideologically a discussant; outwardly a follower of the reality principle, inwardly a subject oriented toward pleasure; functionally an agent of capital, intentionally a democrat; with respect to the sys- tem a functionary of reification, with respect to the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), some- one who achieves self-realization; objectively a strategist of destruction, subjec- tively a pacifist; basically someone who triggers catastrophes, in one's own view, innocence personified. With schizoids anything is possible, and enlightenment and reaction do not make much difference. With the enlightened integrated person --in this world of clever, instinctive conformists--the body says no to the compulsions of the head, and the head says no to the way in which the body pro- cures its comfortable self-preservation. This mixture is our moral status quo. Theory of the Double Agent
It is time to speak of a phenomenon that seemingly manages to survive only on the margins of political systems; in fact, however, it touches on the existential core of societies: the phenomenon of secret agents. The psychology of agents, especially of the double agent, would be the most important chapter in present- day political psychology. Incredible stories are told of conspiratorial groups in Switzerland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where an im- penetrable snarl of czarist, anticzarist, Communist, anarchist, and Western Euro- pean groups of agents had arisen. They all kept their eyes on each other, and their calculations and consciousnesses reflected on and into one another. In the heads of the conspiratorial party cells as well as in the secret police planted among them, fantastically convoluted tactics and metatactics were spun out. One has heard of double and triple agents who themselves in the end no longer exactly knew for whom they were really working and what they were seeking for themselves in this double and triple role playing. They were initally committed to one side, were
114 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
then bought off, and were finally enticed back by their own original party, etc. There was basically no longer any self that would have been able to "self- seekingly obtain advantages from all sides. What is self-interest in someone who no longer knows where his "self is?
But much the same thing can be said, I believe, for anyone who takes a place in the body politic (Staatskorper) or in corporations or institutions and knows roughly in which direction the state is heading. Between loyalties and insights an ever-widening gulf is opening that makes it difficult to know where one stands. On which side do our loyalties lie? Are we agents of the state and of institutions? Or agents of enlightenment? Or agents of monopoly capital? Or agents of our own vital interests that secretly cooperate in constantly changing double binds with the state, institutions, enlightenment, counterenlightenment, monopoly capital, so- cialism, etc. , and, in so doing, we forget more and more what we our"selves" sought in the whole business?
It was no accident that it was Walter Benjamin, that great expert in polyvalent meaning who built secret bridges between Judaism and sociology, Marxism and messianism, art and critique, who introduced the agent motif into the human sciences --recall, for example, his famous and cunning interpretation of Baudelaire in which he characterized the poet as a secret agent of his class. The multiple-agent activity of the intelligentsia is characteristic of modernity-- a fact that has always seemed threatening to those simplifiers who were determined to do battle and to those who think in terms of friend and foe. (Was Stalinism not, among other things, an attempt to break out of the ineluctable multiple binds of every intelligentsia by means of a paranoic simplification of the fronts so that once again everything would become simple enough for even Stalin to comprehend? This could be called, somewhat more elegantly, "the reduction
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
of complexity. ")
Who is subjectively, objectively, implicitly, and explicitly whose agent, func- tionary of which link in the system, helper of which tendency? In Stalinist think- ing, to this day, one uses the word "objective" when one wants to dissolve double binds and ambivalences by force. Those who deny complex realities like to pre- tend to be "objective" and accuse those who are conscious of problems of fleeing from reality and daydreaming. Not even with the seemingly most unambiguous and most decisive figures can it be "objectively" determined which tendency they have ultimately signed themselves up for, especially when one considers that his- tory, in spite of all plans, obeys the rules of a game that escapes our grasp. The parties and groups that present themselves to the public with decisive programs are themselves masks of tendencies that reach beyond them and about whose final results one can say little in advance. Marxists like to fantasize in this twilight about a great, secret demiurge, a supercynical trickster who sits in the association of German industrialists, or who even has a ministerial post without portfolio in the chancellor's office and makes the state dance to the tune of the large industries. This projective strategy of simplification is as innocently naive as it is innocently
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 115
artful. It has a grand history - right up to Balzac with his mysterious thirteen who, behind the scenes, held the strings in their hands like a cosa nostra of capital.
The most devastating of such fantasies was an invention from the world of Rus- sian secret agents before the turn of the century: the fantasy of the "wise men of Zion," an anti-Semitic fabrication in which an originally Enlightenment satire (by M. Joly) wandered by way of the mind of a cynical chief of the secret service in Paris, who forged the alleged "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," into the mind of a confused Russian philosopher of religion. From there the "Protocols" made the return journey to Europe, where they became the main document of anti-Semitic paranoia and had an impact on Hitler and from there to Auschwitz. That was a subterfuge in the simplifications of German fascism that projected the anonymous effects of the system onto demonic "intentions" so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the "overview. "
Cheeky Social History
The history of cheekiness is not a discipline of historiography, and I do not know whether it would do the matter a favor if it were to become one. History is always a secondary force that must be preceded by an impulse of the moment. As far as cynicism is concerned, the impulse should be obvious; with respect to kynicism and cheekiness, the impulse will probably be sought in vain.
Since antiquity, the role of the city in the genesis of satirical consciousness is sociohistorically uncontroversial. However, in Germany after the decline of the cities during the Thirty Years' War, there was for a long time no city with a metropolitan character. As late as 1831, Heinrich Heine had to emigrate to Paris-the principal city of the nineteenth century-in order to breathe liberating city air. "I went because I had to. "
As the northern Italian city cultures, which Jakob Burckhardt described, ex-
ploded with sarcasm and Roman and Florentine wit rang shrill in their citizens'
ears, Germany possessed, apart from Eulenspiegel, the plebeian protokynic of
modern times, admittedly no Aretino but nevertheless a cobbler from Nuremberg
who wrote droll stories: old Hans Sachs who, somewhat unjustly, is remembered
as the progenitor of narrow-minded, middle-class humor. This Sachs, perhaps
guided by good instinct, had also written a dialogue about Diogenes --and thus
already at the beginning of bourgeois culture there is a link to the kynical impulse.
Hut Nuremberg degenerated and rose to prominence again only with the coming
? f the railway and as the site of the Nazi rallies. In that place, where the first
Presentiments of the bourgeois principle of culture had flourished, kynical real-
ism and urban laughter, petit-bourgeois master cynicism was perfected in the hu-
man city that, as far as cheekiness goes, left no possibility unexhausted, was-and ls
orless mass parade of columns for subsequent war cemeteries. The only Ger-
to the present day-Berlin. For the spirit of those who paraded in Nuremberg,
116 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
? Till Eulenspiegel.
this city was always a little eerie. Gottfried Benn captures the provincialism of the marchers when he caricatures their ideas: "Thinking is cynical, it takes place above all in Berlin; in its place the Weser song is recommended. "
Cheekiness always had a rougher time in Germany than in the Latin countries. More often than not, it came on stage as
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
master cynicism, as disinhibition of the powerful. Heinrich Heine, who represents the exception (but he was a child of the French-tinged Rhineland), had to content himself in his search for indigenous models and allies with other traditional German characteristics --embodied in the snarled truthfulness of Voss, in the morally strong clarity of Lessing, and in Luther's courageous confessional power. Nevertheless, not without justification, a characteristic tradition of German cheekiness could be connected to Luther, for his Protestantism came at a time when it was not usual to say to kaisers: "Here
I stand, I cannot do otherwise," --an act of reckless courage and the most willful
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 117
frivolity. Moreover, in Luther an animal element, a power, appears that approves itself--a vital archetype of swinishness that is inseparable from kynical motifs. Apart from the city, three social dies of serene refractoriness have played an essential role in the history of cheekiness: the carnival, the universities, and the Bohemians. All three function as safety valves through which needs that other- wise are not given their due in social life can achieve a limited release. Here, cheekiness has had a space in which it has been tolerated, even if the tolerance
has lasted only a short time and can be rescinded.
The old carnival was a substitute revolution for the poor. A kingly fool was
elected who reigned over a thoroughly inverted world for a day and a night. In this inverted world, the poor and the decent brought their dreams to life, as costumed oafs and bacchanals, forgetting themselves to the point of truth, cheeky, lewd, turbulent, and disgraceful. One was allowed to lie and to tell the truth, to be obscene and honest, drunken and irrational. From the carnival of the late Middle Ages, as Bachtin has shown, satirical motifs flow into art. The color- ful languages of Rabelais and other Renaissance artists draw on the parodistic spirit of carnivalism. It inspires macabre and satirical traditions and makes fools and harlequins, buffoons and Punches into standard figures of a great comical tra- dition that fulfills its task in the life of society even when it is not Shrove Tuesday. Class societies can scarcely survive without the institution of the inverted world and the crazy day --as the Indian and Brazilian carnivals demonstrate. Likewise since the late Middle Ages, universities have become important in the social economy of cheekiness and kynical intelligence. They were by no means simply places of teaching and research. In them, there romped also a va- grant, extravagant, youthful intelligence that was clever enough to know some- thing better than just cramming. In this respect, the Sorbonne in Paris enjoys spe- cial fame. It formed a city within a city, the Latin Quarter, in which we recognize the forerunners of all later Bohemians. In the bourgeois epoch, the years at the university were for the students a time when they could defer the serious things in life, when they could take liberties before going on to careers and an orderly life. Those adults who later, as respectable gentlemen, maintain that they too were young are thinking back on student larks, student freedoms, and intrigues. Life around the universities gave the concept of "youth" a particular color in the bourgeois period. The Old Gentlemen tore their hair only officially, but they secretly noted with satisfaction when their sons did exactly the same things. The dignitaries find it eerie to be confronted by a young generation that is too cool lor nonsense and that, precociously cynical, gets straight to the heart of the mat- ter. The twentieth century has known several such cool generations, starting with the Nazi fraternity in which a troupe of cool snot-noses mingled with the populist 'dealists; later they became fighter pilots or jurists in the system, and still later, Democrats. Following them came the "skeptical Generation" of the fifties, which stands today at the helm, and following them, the generations of the seventies and
118 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
eighties, among whom the early developers in cynicism are already making them- selves noticed as New Wave.
The Bohemians, a relatively recent phenomenon, played a prominent role in the regulation of the tensions between art and bourgeois society. Bohemianism was the space in which the transition from art into the art of living was tried out. For a century, Bohemianism gave the neokynical impulse a social shelter. As a regulator for bourgeois careers, it was above all important because, similarly to the universities, it served as a "psychosocial moratorium" (Erikson) in which young bourgeois could live out their crises of adjustment in the transition from the world of school and home to the world of serious occupations. Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians; for the great majority of Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up "yes, but" took its place.
If we look today at these nurturing soils and living spaces in which deviation and critique, satire and cheekiness, kynicism and willfulness thrive, it becomes immediately clear why we must fear the worst for embodied cheeky enlighten- ment. Before our very eyes, cities have been transformed into amorphous clumps where alienated streams of traffic transport people to the various scenes of their attempts and failures in life. For a long time now carnival has meant not "inverted world" but flight into safe world, of anesthesia from a permanently inverted world full of daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
absurdities. We know that, at least since Hitler, Bohemianism is dead, and in its offshoots in the subcultures cheeky moods are to be found less than the cheerless attitudes of withdrawal. And as far as the universities are concerned--oh, let's not talk about that!
These mutilations of cheeky impulses indicate that society has entered a stage of organized seriousness in which the playgrounds of lived enlightenment are be- coming increasingly clogged. This is what dampens the climate of this country so much.
We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the respectable games. Cynicism prickles beneath the monotony. A clear-sighted coquetting with its own schizophrenia betrays the unhappy consciousness, in academia and elsewhere. The provocations seem to be exhausted, all bizarre twists of modern existence seem to be already tried out. A state of public, respect- able torpor has been entered. A tired, schizoidly demoralized intelligentsia plays at realism by contemplatively walling itself up in harsh circumstances.
Embodiment or Splitting
The embodied is that which wants to live. But life is fundamentally different from the postponement of suicide. Those who live in societies armed with atomic weapons become, whether they want to or not, at least semiagents of a cynical "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 119
community of suicides, that is, unless they were to decide to resolutely turn their backs on it. That is precisely what a continually growing number of people are doing, people who have emigrated since the fifties--to Provence, Italy, the Ae- gean, California, Goa, the Caribbean, Auroville, Poona, Nepal, and, last but not least, to Tibetan highlands in the interior of Germany and France.
Two questions arise in connection with these phenomena, the first cynical, the second concerned. First, when it comes to the crunch, will that be far enough? And second, who is helped when the morally most sensitive people abandon the sinking ship of cynical society? We have "good" reasons to ask these questions, for the growing expectation of war nourishes both the cynical and the concerned view on what is coming. Emigration could be useful for both sides if we under- stand it correctly: for the emigrants, who will find out whether the greener pastures they seek exist; for those who remain behind, to whom the departure of the others says: There where you are, life is not possible--for us. Is it for you? Emigration could be taken somewhat less seriously if it were really only a fringe phenomenon. However, nothing permits this innocuous view of things. What is happening on the fringe today comes from the middle. Emigration has become a fact of mass psychology. Entire strata of the population have been living for a considerable period in an inner somewhere-else, just not in this country. They do not feel bound to what are called the fundamental values of society. One hears "fundamental values" and involuntarily sees mushroom clouds rise up. One hears those who are responsible proclaim their readiness to negotiate and feels, looking into their faces, the ice of the end of the world in their eyes. The main body of society has long since chosen to emigrate into leisure time, and for them the word "life" gets its bright color from memories of certain moments on happy vacations --when the horizon opened up . . .
What is to be done? Get out or collaborate? "Flee or stand firm? " Both alterna- tives seem inadequate. Their expressions are all overused and ambivalent. Are the "escapists" really comprehended with this word? Is there not infrequently a lot of cowardliness and melancholy, collaboration and opportunism in what is called "standing firm"? Is escapism without exception a conscious act--and don't a lot of so-called escapists (Aussteiger) already find themselves on the outside be- fore they are asked about their own attitude? Is collaboration really cynically tinged everywhere? Is it not also motivated by the need for something "positive" and the need to belong?
But it is also worthwhile to see the elements of truth in the expressions on both sides. Escapists are justified, because they do not want to be entangled with open
eyes in the intolerable cynicisms of a society in which the distinction between producing and destroying is becoming blurred. Collaboration is justified because individuals are also permitted to orient themselves toward survival in the short run. To flee is justified because it rejects a stupid courage and because only fools let themselves be consumed by hopeless struggles -- when there are spaces that are
120 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
more amenable to life. Standing firm is justified because experience shows that every conflict that is merely avoided will catch up with us at every point of our flight.
For this reason, the alternative that corresponds to our view of life must be grasped in a different way-- it is that between embodiment or splitting. It is an al- ternative that addresses itself first to consciousness, and only afterward to be- havior. It demands a radical priority of self-experience over morality. It is a mat- ter of either consciously letting what is already torn apart grow together again or unconsciously surrendering what is split off to the schizoid process. Integration or schizophrenia. Choose life or celebrate at the party of suicides. That may sound like a spiritual diet for individuals, and those who take it this way have heard right. Initially enlightenment has no other addressees than those
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
individuals who elude blind socialness (Gesellschaftlichkeit) without thereby being able to cease playing a role in society. One must therefore keep the idea of enlightenment alive-through embodied enlightenment, of course. Enlightenment means to affirm all antischizophrenic movements. The universities are scarcely the place where this happens. The universitas vitae is taught in other places, there, where people oppose the cynicism of split official consciousness, where they try out forms of living that open up a chance for conscious life in minds, bodies, and souls. It unfolds in a broad field of individuals and groups who carry on the kyni- cal impulse and who attempt what no politics and no mere art can take from them: to tackle, with their alertness, the splits and unconscious elements that seep into individual existence; to grow into one's own possibilities; and to participate in en- lightenment's labor of cheering up, a part of which is to pay attention to the wishes
that are the premonition of the possible.
Psychopolitics of Schizoid Society
What are the signs of a prewar period? How do the psychopolitical constitutions of capitalist societies before world wars reveal themselves? German history offers an exemplary lesson in how world wars ferment in the psychic (seelisch) tensions of a nation. On the basis of two --viewed pessimistically, three --cases we can study what it means to live in the prelude to great military explosions. The main psychopolitical symptom is an increasing heaviness in the social atmosphere, which becomes charged with schizoid tensions and ambivalences to the point where it is no longer tolerable. In such a climate, an eerie readiness for catas- trophes flourishes; I call it, alluding to Erich Fromm, the catastrophile complex. It attests to a collective disturbance of vitality through which the energies of the living are displaced into a sympathy with the catastrophic, the apocalyptic, and the violently spectacular.
The historian knows that political history cannot be the site of human happi- ness. Nevertheless, if we want to ask when in our century Europeans experienced
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 121
? their happiest hour, we will be embarrassed by the answer. But the signs and the documents speak for themselves. We stand at first perplexed before the phenome- non of August 1914: What the peoples of Europe, on entering the war, ex- perienced at that time is designated by historiographers ashamedly as "war psy- chosis. " If we look closer, we see it was a matter of indescribable storms of affect that took hold of the masses, of outbreaks of jubilation and of national emotion, of pleasure in fear and the ecstasy of fate. There were moments of pathos and a presentiment of life beyond comparison. The slogan of the times was an ecstatic one: Finally things have gone so far. The masses probably also experienced fear, but above all a feeling of basic change into something that promised "life. " The slogans were rejuvenation, putting to the test, cleansing bath, purgative cure. In the first year, the war was waged by purely volunteer armies; no one had to be forced to go to the front. The catastrophe enticed the Wilhelminian youth. When the catastrophe occurred, the people recognized themselves in it and understood that they had waited for it.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the people of that time were so very different from people of today. Only arrogance could allow us to deceive ourselves that we would be smarter in existentially decisive matters than those volunteers from Langemarck who, by the thousands, pathetically ran into the fire ? r the machine guns. The only difference is that the psychic mechanisms of later generations operate more subtly. That is why we are initially astounded that the Processes then ran so naively and unrestrained on the surface. The war enthusiasts
nought they were experiencing the qualitative difference between provisional ar-
ra
between inauthentic and supposedly authentic life. Even after the war, the talk
ngements and decision, a sultriness and clarification --in a word, the difference
of as
>> was felt by the men of August 1914, there would finally be something at stake wat made living worthwhile.
"battle as inner experience" wafted through pre-Fascist literature. In the war,
122 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
The First World War signals the turning point in modern cynicism. With it the up-tempo phase of the decomposition of old naivetes begins-such as those about the nature of war, the nature of social order, of progress, of bourgeois values, indeed, of bourgeois civilization itself. Since this war, the diffuse schizoid climate around the major European powers has not become any less intense. Since then, those who have spoken of cultural crisis, etc. , have had that mental disposition of postwar shock unquestionably in mind that knows that the naivete of yesterday will never exist again. Irrevocably, mistrust, disillusion, doubt, and distanced stances have infiltrated into the sociopsychological "hereditary substance. " Everything positive will be from then on an "In-spite-of," laced with latent desper- ation. Since that time, the broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia, voluntarism, resignation to the lesser evil, depression and anesthesia as a conscious choice of uncon- sciousness.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the few years of the Weimar Republic the catastrophile complex built up again until finally the economic crisis ignited the kindling. The joyless republic granted an end to itself. In the myth of revolution and in the myth of the people, catastrophile tendencies found their "respectable" underpinnings. Whoever secretly accepted the catastrophe loudly claimed to know where the course of events was heading and which drastic cure was the proper one. Those who saw the catastrophe approaching tried, before it broke, to get the most out of life. In 1931, Erich Kastner captured the voice of a man who was beyond the cliffs of naive morality and who, with his private lust for life, swam with the current as it flowed toward the next cataract.
"Serious conversations, how? Is there a life after death? Confidentially, there isn't. Everything must be settled before death. There's a heap of things to do, day and night. . . . Better to amuse yourselves than to redeem humanity. As I said, life has to be settled before death. More
8That is a contemporary voice that in fifty years has not become outmoded. This is how a person speaks who knows that he does not change history. In spite of everything he wants to live--before the end, which is disguised as an uprising. Today, the latent will to catastrophe on all sides has taken cover under the official respectability of the politics of peace. The mechanisms whose relatively brutal openness characterized the Fascist style have sunk into the subliminal and the atmospheric under the masks of accommodation, good will, and sincere senti- ments. Naive stimuli have disappeared from the surface of consciousness. The increasing socialization of reactions represses open gestures; what is called democracy means, psychologically, an increase in self-control, which is probably necessary in dense populations. However, we should not be deceived by the calmed surface. The catastrophile complex lives on, and if not all signs are mis-
information glady given. Don't be so serious, my boy. "
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 123
leading, its mass is caught up in incessant accumulation. Perhaps it is the "accom- plishment of terrorism"--to speak frivolously--to have made the catastrophile currents, at least here and there, tangible and recognizable. One can refer to what is clearly there.
Recall the kidnapping and murder of the president of the Employers' Associa- tion, Hans-Martin Schleyer--the feverish climate of those months when terrorism approached its peak in Germany. At that time, the psychopolitical scenario that belongs to the catastrophile complex again came crassly to light, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War. The media and the voices of state were spontaneously and completely united in their respectable tone of indignation and dismay. Among millions of published sentences, there was hardly a passage in which the truth of the masses in the atmosphere forced its way through. This truth consisted, as every whispered conversation, every scene at a kiosk, dialogues in canteens and bars, chats in lobbies, etc. , proved, in a flickering ambivalence of feelings in which existential fears and desire for catastrophe were indistinguisha- bly entwined. The avidness of the reporting, the measureless breadth of the dis- cussion, and the excess of state and private reactions, even viewed in retrospect, speak an unmistakable language. Here something had happened that touched the feeling toward life. A nameless hunger for drama in history and a desperate long- ing for conflict on the right front had so confused hearts and minds that for months on end, an event was gnawed away at that in its criminal and political content did not justify such agitation. Through the political staging of the crime and the spec- tacular interaction of state and terror group, it took on the significance of an epoch-making event. It nourished itself on powerful catastrophile currents and swelled up, becoming the dominant emotional theme of endless days. Sociopsy- chologically, it brought an hour of truth. It was the substitute for a history in which something moves, the caricature of a "liberation struggle," an idiotic- criminal parody of that which social democracy under Wilhelm II, Hindenberg, and Hitler had neglected--battle on the wrong front, at the wrong time, by the wrong attackers against the wrong opponents, and yet, in spite of the sum of all these distortions, it was greedily lapped up by society as a substitute for struggle, conflict drug, and political catastrophe film.
At one point, the universal consensus in the cynically mute delirium around
9the "event" was torn open. I here refer to the paper by "Mescalero," who had
been naive enough to believe that, without being punished, one could break through conspiracies of silence of this magnitude with honesty and throw open the ambivalences for debate. He thus spoke in a formulation that has become fa- mous and that was repeated incessantly by the media to millions and millions of ears, of his "deep, secret joy" {klammheimlichen Freude) he discovered in himself in the first moment on hearing of the Buback murder, in order then, in the next moment of reflection, to distance himself from it. Mescalero was shocked at him- self and wanted to speak reasonably about this shock. With the Mescalero explo-
124 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
sion, the collective ambivalence discharged itself in a grand parade of lies. That was a historical moment of learning- from then on it could no longer be sup- pressed that society again lived in a prewar period in which all conflicts that had to do with life feelings were decisively postponed to that moment when the exter- nal war would make the encounter with inner reality superfluous. In the ballet of rectifications, shieldings, repudiations, and protestations, the attitude of respecta- bility celebrated a paper victory over the honesty that had said the other part of the truth, if not for everybody, then at least for many. Since that time, we can imagine how the papers will rustle in which, at the outbreak of war, those with responsibility will read of their dismay, shock, and resolution--if there is enough time for this before the atomic burial of the Federal Republic (Atom-BRDigung).
Unashamed Happiness
Does cheekiness, which recalls the rights to happiness, still have a chance? Is the kynical impulse really dead, and is it only cynicism that has a grand, deadly fu- ture? Can enlightenment --the idea that it would be reasonable to be happy -- be reincarnated in our gloomy modernity? Are we defeated once and for all, and will the cynical twilight of harsh reality and moral dream never again grow lighter?
These questions touch on the feeling toward life in the atomically armed civili- zations. These civilizations are going through a crisis of their innermost vitality that is probably without historical parallel. The tip of this uneasiness can perhaps be felt most keenly in Germany, the country that has lost two world wars and in which the atmospheric conditions register most sensitively how it feels to live be- tween catastrophes.
Modernity is losing, in addition to its feeling of vitality, the distinction be- tween crisis and stability. No longer do any positive experiences of our situation take place, no feeling that existence can extend into an immeasurably wide and firm horizon without exhausting itself. A feeling of the provisional, the specula- tive, at best medium-term, lies at the bottom of all public and private strategies. Even those who are optimists by constitution are beginning to quote Luther, who said he would plant an apple tree today anyway, even if he knew that tomorrow the world would come to an end. Periods of chronic crisis demand of the human will to live that it accept perma- nent uncertainty as the unchangeable background of its striving for happiness. Then the hour of kynicism arrives; it is the life philosophy of crisis. Only under its sign is happiness in uncertainty possible. It teaches moderation of expecta- tions, adaptability, presence of mind, attention to what the moment offers. It knows that the expectation of long-term careers and the defense of social assets must entangle one in an existence "as care" (Sorge). It was no accident that Heidegger, in the days of the precarious Weimar Republic, revealed the "struc- ture of cares" in existence. (Sein undZeit, 1927). Care absorbs the motif of happi- "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 125
? We're alive, we're alive, 1945.
ness. Those who want to hold on to the latter must learn, following the kynical model, to break the hegemonic power of cares. But socialized consciousness sees itself at the mercy of an incessant agitation by themes of care. These themes create the subjective lighting of the crisis in which even the well-to-do have already ac- quired the mentality of the shipwrecked. Never were such well-heeled people so much in a mood of termination.
This widespread disturbance of vitality and this bleakening of the life feeling provide the general background to the demoralization of enlightenment. "Care" clouds existence so persistently that the idea of happiness cannot be made socially plausible any more. The atmospheric presupposition for enlightenment- cheering up--is not present. Those who, like Ernst Bloch, spoke of the "principle of hope" would have to be able to find this climatic a priori of enlightenment, the view of a clear sky, at least in themselves; and that Bloch found it makes him different from the mainstream of intellectuals. Even when everything became gloomy, he knew the private secret of cheering up, trusting in life, letting expres- sion flow, believing in development. It was his power to rediscover the "current of warmth"--which he carried in himself--everywhere in human history. That made his view of things more optimistic than they deserve. The current of warmth is what separates him so much from the Zeitgeist. The intelligentsia is exposed to the cold currents of universal demoralization almost without protection; in- deed, it can almost seem as if, as far as defeatism and disorientation are con- cerned, it is still out in front. Now, no one can be talked into believing in the
spirit of utopia" or a "principle of hope" who can discover no experiences in him- self that give these expressions meaning. But it can be asked for which existential disposition Utopia and hope stand. Is it a "dissatisfaction in principle," as some
126 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
say? Is the Blochian hope ? as is claimed--a creation of resentment? I believe, if it is taken that way, the report from the current of warmth was not listened to care- fully enough. Its message is not the principle of denial. Principled hope stands for "biophilia" (Fromm); it is a code word for creative friendliness toward life. With it, that which lives follows an unquestioned permission to be and to become. That establishes its opposition to the predominant mentality of care and self- inhibition (Selbsthemmung).
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Self-inhibition is the symptom that perhaps best characterizes the rest of the "critical" intelligentsia in the tired column of enlightenment. It knows it is in a two-front situation: On the one side, it is at pains to resist the cynicism of "late capitalism," which has coagulated into a system; on the other side, it is anxious about the radicalness of the emigrants and escapists who seek other ways and who break off cooperation. In such an in-between position, the temptation to defend
10
its "identity" through forced moralism is great.
renders oneself more than ever to the overserious and depressive mood. The scen- ery of the critical intelligentsia is therefore populated by aggressive and depres- sive moralists, problematists, "problemoholics," and soft rigorists whose predominant existential stimulus is No. From this group there is not much hope for the correction of the vitally false course.
From Walter Benjamin comes the aphorism: "To be happy means to be able
11
to look into oneself without being frightened.
