An attempt to
understand
Heidegger’s talks on death .
Sloterdijk- Infinite Mobilization
That is why a real critical theory, should it exist one day, will be identical to authentic mysticism.
As a living difference between worldlessness and worldliness, the unique existence will become aware of its
After Modernity 153
being-in-the-world. The spirit of cosmopolitanism will come to see itself as an enlightened a-cosmism. Only the mystical path will then still be open. As a critique of the path, it leads to where we are.
Notes
Premises
1 [The original German title of this book is Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989). ]
2 In the following, especially pp. 66ff.
3 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).
4 [Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 192. ]
Chapter 1 The Modern Age as Mobilization
1 [The original German edition was published in 1989. ]
2 Unless we accept the identification of the world with the adversary par excellence – as Ernst Bloch did in his old age when he at last put his gnostic cards on the table: see Experimentum Mundi: Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), Chapter 45, “Aufklärung und Teufelsglaube, die Fortdauer des
Widersacherischen. ”
3 It was Marx who first saw through the moral mystification of the
kinetic. He found not so much that Kant’s “moral law” falls into the interiority of a sense of duty, but that it is conscience that allows itself to be mobilized as a duty to revolution. The categorical imperative is therefore less an ethical sentence than a kinetic sentence: it says less about what you should do than what you have to overthrow in order to be able to do it, namely all circumstances that inhibit human kinetic.
4 [Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 29. ]
5 Traditionally, spirit has a precarious relationship with movement – except that we say of it that it blows where it wants to (which is probably to be understood as a compliment to the inspired and also
Notes to pp. 9–25 155
meant to explain that there is nothing we can do in the event of a lull). If we want to understand this relationship in positive terms, it could be provisionally characterized by five criteria: contextuality (spirit is aware of the goings-on outside itself), self-perception (it intuits itself), self-limitation (it realizes when it is enough), reversibility (it has “play,” it can do what it can, back and forth), and spontaneity (it is capable not only of carrying on as before, but also of starting afresh, even surprising itself if necessary). These criteria only jointly guarantee the effect of the spiritual – separated from each other, they guarantee only intelligent stupidities (e. g. our life as it is).
6 [Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 144. ]
7 The posthumously published small work by Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt – Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve, 1987), is an example of a free handling of another evil man of the twentieth century, namely Carl Schmitt, the thinker of world war.
8 One may note that these sentences are not formulated in the spirit of utopia, but in the spirit of system function theory, which is known to serve “conservative” interests, but here only the bare minimum of preservation, self-preservation as a non-suicide.
9 In Jacques Derrida’s original formulation – il n’ya pas de hors-texte – the same sounds somewhat more appetizing; one hears the suspending (in our terms: de-mobilizing) function of the thesis. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
10 [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 6. ]
11 In this context, we must draw attention to the little-known work by Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), which raises the question of the encroaching of an evolutionary wisdom in the sense of a “withdrawal of untenable positions” without concession to the romantic demonization of technology.
12 [Paul Valéry, “The European,” in History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews, The Collected Works, Vol. 10 (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1962), p. 323. ]
13 [Horace, Satires and Epistles, trans. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 99. ]
14 The French Indian connoisseur Raymond Schwab was, among other things, the first to draw a parallel between the adventures of Indology and the philological sensations of Renaissance Hellenism. Cf. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-King and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
15 Otto Petras, Post Christum: Streifzüge durch die geistige Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag, 1935), p. 11. In our final essay (pp. 129ff. ), compare the remarks about Paul as the initiator of the Holy Mobilization on Christian world history. Both references, which refer to Petras as well as to Paul, are based on suggestions with which Jacob Taubes conveyed to the author a concept of the span of Jewish
156 Notes to pp. 29–35
historical theology. See Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans.
David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 16 [Novalis, Philosophical Writings, p. 111. ]
Chapter 2 The Other Change: On the Philosophical Situation of Alternative Movements
1 [Robert Musil, The Enthusiasts, trans. Andrea Simon (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), p. 34. ]
2 There is only one significant attempt to take the term “panic” philosophically seriously, the one that Hermann Broch made in his Massenwahntheorie: Beiträge zur einer Psychologie der Politik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). This attempt was born from the impression of fascism. Broch diagnoses that the real fears that affected large parts of the Central European population, especially the German population, after the First World War triggered pre-panicked condi- tions. In these, full-panicked energies already announce their eruption. Full panic means negative ecstasy; in it, a metaphysical despair is experi- enced: constriction of the self in world loss, doomsday plight, deadly isolation. Human activity is capable of the worst under the influence of “panicked” conditions – especially when the panicked energy channels itself forward into delusional programs of a breakthrough. The only counterpower that can absorb these energies, according to Broch, is the rational ecstasy in which the individual is restrained to the insight: I am the world. For Broch, it is a criterion of authentic religion that it overcomes the existential primal in rational ecstasies, while it is typical of demonic revival movements that they seduce one with destructive intoxications. Only from rational ecstasies can people make life covenants in the face of death: at first a religious, then immediately also a politically moral social contract with all contemporaries.
These speculations can be continued today in a birth-psychoanalytic way. A political perinatalism is necessary. The moment of coming into the world is at the same time a moment of fear of death for human children; it contains a lifelong, effective reservoir of panic. As social crisis pressures rise, humanity’s fear of annihilation can discharge into collective negative ecstasies: suicide programs from a panicked fear of death. In a culture of coming into the world that balances political, therapeutic, and religious motives in the right ratio, the panic of world loss would be transformed into the ecstasy of coming into the world. Where this work is consciously undertaken, there can be talk of panicked culture – it must be called as such, because one has to start with the initial explosive affect situation and not with uplifting goals.
3 In just a few years, this way of thinking has been officially adopted. At the Aspen Institute’s Berlin seminar on “prospects for the twenty-first century,” President Richard von Weizsäcker said, referring to the New York stock market crash in October 1987, that it was “one of those small disasters that we so desperately need in order to understand how we can avert major disasters. ” Quoted in Die Presse, October 29, 1987, p. 2.
Notes to pp. 35–56 157
4 [A rewriting of the phrase by Karl Kraus: “Let chaos be welcome; for order has failed. ” Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 285–6, 1909, p. 16. ]
5 A monument of this erroneousness is Martin Heidegger’s 1930 essay The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002). In it, the crisis of reason-that-makes-right punctures the classical district of truth, insofar as the latter had been understood as correctness, adequation, and (im)partibility. Behind it, a realm of events of (un)truth opens up, which occur as being-historical uncon- cealment instances with a sovereign lack of criteria.
6 All these negations are historically valid: previously not so. It remains to be seen whether the perception of these deficiencies can create an equivalent for that which was previously missing.
7 [Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Manche freilich . . . ,” trans. Scott Horton, Harper’s Magazine (November 10, 2007). The following verse extracts are also from this source. ]
8 [Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 53. ]
9 The fusion of the cannibal titan Kronos with Chronos, the running time, had already occurred in ancient times.
10 [E. M. Cioran, The New Gods, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 35–6. ]
11 This lack of differentiation from what is being critiqued is something that the neo-Marxist critique has thoroughly in common with classical mobilization Marxism.
12 On this, Charles Baudelaire is the crown witness of aesthetic modernism: “At every minute we are crushed by the idea and the sensation of time. And there are only two means of escaping this nightmare, – to forget it: Pleasure and Work. Pleasure consumes us. Work fortifies us. Let us choose. [. . . ] One can forget time only by using it. ” My Heart Laid Bare and Other Texts, trans. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2017), p. 55.
13 This expression, which seemingly names something self-evident, does not belong to the vocabulary of philosophy – a treacherous fact. As a neologism, it is an art word from the second half of this century. We find it first with Hans Saner in the book Geburt und Phantasie: Von der natürlichen Dissidenz des Kindes (Basel: Lenos, 1979). However, it is prepared by Hannah Arendt’s meditations on human “natality” in her main work The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
14 The emphasis here is that both must succeed in order to maintain nature–poiesis continuity. Because the two gestures are separated from each other in the prevailing gender-ontological system, the sexual designs of man and woman are each equipped with mutilated ontological features: “man” comes into the world but brings nothing into the world; “woman” brings something into the world but does not come into the world. This scandal runs deeper than the gender segregation that the Platonic androgyny myth speaks of; the scandalous thing about it is thus also not solved by eroticism or sexual union, but only by a poietic addition: through women learning to come into the world and men learning to bring into the world.
158 Notes to pp. 59–75
Chapter 3 Eurotaoism?
1 [Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 25. ]
2 From this point of view, there is a common denominator for Marx’s theory of revolution and Nietzsche’s doctrine of creative forgetting. Both doctrines want to disperse the decay of life at the hands of the past with the means of active nihilism and both rely on self-intensi- fication in order to do so: Marx through a project that once again gives living work priority over the dead, Nietzsche by unleashing a “leonine” will to oneself with the prospect of a child-like second innocence.
3 [Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 48. ]
4 [Ende, Neverending Story, p. 48. ]
5 [Ende, Neverending Story, pp. 48–9. ]
6 [Motto from “Selections from the Papers to the Devil” to Jean Paul
Friedrich Richter, The Invisible Lodge, trans. Charles T. Brooks (New
York: Henry Holt, 1883). ]
7 [See note 3. ]
8 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, pp. 35–7. ]
9 [Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley
and Richard A. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 82. ]
10 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 25. ]
11 [Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx:
Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 95. ]
12 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 24. ]
13 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 80. ]
14 Nietzsche’s tragedy is probably to be understood from the paradoxes of
his self-birth style: because it does not lead into a common world, but into one’s own and alternative worlds, it simulates a coming into the world in order not to be born. In this way, a paradoxical and monstrous move enters the birth movement. It does lead “out,” but it does not lead to anyone; it does bring something “forth,” but it withdraws it in the same gesture. In Zarathustra’s “Night Song,” Nietzsche has provided the formulas for this: “But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. . . . A hunger grows out of my beauty; I wish to harm those for whom I shine, I wish to rob those on whom I have bestowed. . . . Withdrawing my hand when a hand already reaches for it; hesitating like the waterfall that hesitates even while plunging. ” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro, eds. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 81–2. The paradoxical phantasms of a birth into verticality, of a standing there “the way one is born,” belong to this paradox of overspending without contributing. Through these paradoxical gestures and as soon as it begins with its own bringing forth, the subject becomes a mother who does not place real children into the world but monsters of self-reliance, motherless self-standers,
Notes to pp. 76–91 159
works, doctrines, law tables, erected things of any kind, that which has
been thrown out and thrown down.
15 [The two definitive English translations of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit are
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010) and Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1962). ]
16 [“Enframing” is a standard translation for Heidegger’s concept of “Gestell,” which he defines as the essence of modern technology. “Gestell” can also be thought of as rack, structure, frame, or skeleton. “Enframing” is the way that being reveals itself to humans by challenging us to see all things as a standing reserve waiting to be used up. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Martin Lovitt (New York: Grandland Publishing Inc. , 1977). ]
17 [An allusion to Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 117: “Thoughts that come on the feet of doves steer the world. ”]
18 Lloyd deMause presents a bold attempt in this direction – certainly away from the ontological problem – in Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Roots, 1982), Chapter 7: “The Fetal Origins of History. ”
19 Hans Saner rightly pointed out the traces of an awareness that being exists “birthingly” in Heidegger’s Being and Time. But it was only Thomas H. Macho who has recently shown a latent natality thinking in Heidegger by way of an ingenious interpretation: “Being-there means: having been placed into nothingness.
An attempt to understand Heidegger’s talks on death . . . ” (Lecture for the Philosophical Society Graz, 1987).
20 In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Hans Blumenberg reveals (among other things) the extent to which this will to not having been extends – the position of an unconsciousness at birth is affirmed with phenomeno- logical authority: “Every human finds out that they were born by being told, since they were not there to experience it. ” Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 91.
21 [Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (London: Wildwood House, 1991), p. 11. ]
Chapter 4 The Fundamental and the Urgent – or: The Tao of Politics
1 [English: “It’s hard not to write satire. ” See: Juvenal, The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 4. ]
2 [Johannes Rau (1931–2006) was a politician in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). ]
3 [Klaus Staeck (b. 1931) is a German lawyer and publisher. He is best known for his graphic work, which includes satirical political posters. Paul Lorenzen (1915–94) was a German philosopher and mathema- tician. He was one of the founders of the Erlangen School and co-inventor of game semantics. ]
4 The ontological motives are not discussed here; they have been
160 Notes to pp. 100–31
interpreted in the previous chapter as self-birthing efforts of a subjec-
tivity that builds its own worlds.
5 [This refers to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, which eliminated a class of nuclear
weapons and restricted the deployment of missiles. ]
6 [Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, p. 193. ]
7 [Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Hyperion and Other Poems, trans.
Michael Hamburger (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2002), p. 245. ]
Chapter 5 Paris Aphorisms on Rationality
Originally written for a Franco-German philosophy colloquium in
February 1986 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
1 [Jean Maurel, Victor Hugo, philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1985), p. 10: “Philosophers, one more effort if you want to be
Parisians! ”]
2 [Bertolt Brecht. In “Philosophizing Brecht: An (In)conclusion,” trans.
Norman Roessler, in Norman Roessler and Anthony Squiers (eds. ),
Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social
Theory and Performance (Leiden: Konilke Brill NV, 2019), pp. 180–1. ]
3 [See René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), p. 15: “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. ” The author uses the original French for the title of
this section. ]
4 [See chapter 2, pp. 44–5]
5 [A line from René Char’s poem “Les Dentelles de Montmirail” (1960). ]
Chapter 6 After Modernity
1 [Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 20. ]
2 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder, 3rd edn (Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann Verlag,1986), pp. 202f. Keyword “Repristination. ”
3 Cf. Günther Anders, Endzeit und Zeitende: Gedankern über die atomare
Situation (Munich: Beck, 1979).
4 With Paul, both still coincide with one another.
5 To this we can add a speculation about the “end of history”: if the
content of the Christian world history were indeed the universal dissemination of a message, it would end in the moment where the assumption of a significant time-frame for the spread of this message was no longer necessary. Thus, history in the traditional sense would be determined by the slowness of the message. From a certain speed of message-transmission on, the effect of history disintegrates. Apostolic historicism gets replaced by a planetary information technology. History is the time of media installations – post-history, the era of the program. If historical politics becomes installation politics, then post-historical politics turns to program politics.
6 At the same time, this means that there is nothing more ironic and
Notes to pp. 133–51 161
melancholy than the conflict between religion and state in the so-called
“socialist” countries.
7 [Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, p. 228. ]
8 See, for example, Lloyd deMause, Reagan’s America. (New York:
Creative Roots Inc. Publishers, 1984).
9 Cf. Falk Wagner, Geld oder Gott? Zur Geldbestimmtheit der kulturellen
und religiösen Lebenswelt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985).
10 [Franz Kafka. The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and
Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, Mass. : Exact Change, 1991), p. 22. ]
11 Kah Kyung Cho brilliantly explores these questions in a book that the author regrets not having known prior to his own attempts: Bewußtsein und Natursein: Phänomenologischer West-Ost-Diwan (Freiburg/Munich:
K. Alber, 1987).
12 [See chapter 3, n. 16. ]
13 [E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), p. 204. ]
14 [See Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),
p. 249. ]
15 [Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, p. 230. ]
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After Modernity 153
being-in-the-world. The spirit of cosmopolitanism will come to see itself as an enlightened a-cosmism. Only the mystical path will then still be open. As a critique of the path, it leads to where we are.
Notes
Premises
1 [The original German title of this book is Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989). ]
2 In the following, especially pp. 66ff.
3 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).
4 [Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 192. ]
Chapter 1 The Modern Age as Mobilization
1 [The original German edition was published in 1989. ]
2 Unless we accept the identification of the world with the adversary par excellence – as Ernst Bloch did in his old age when he at last put his gnostic cards on the table: see Experimentum Mundi: Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), Chapter 45, “Aufklärung und Teufelsglaube, die Fortdauer des
Widersacherischen. ”
3 It was Marx who first saw through the moral mystification of the
kinetic. He found not so much that Kant’s “moral law” falls into the interiority of a sense of duty, but that it is conscience that allows itself to be mobilized as a duty to revolution. The categorical imperative is therefore less an ethical sentence than a kinetic sentence: it says less about what you should do than what you have to overthrow in order to be able to do it, namely all circumstances that inhibit human kinetic.
4 [Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 29. ]
5 Traditionally, spirit has a precarious relationship with movement – except that we say of it that it blows where it wants to (which is probably to be understood as a compliment to the inspired and also
Notes to pp. 9–25 155
meant to explain that there is nothing we can do in the event of a lull). If we want to understand this relationship in positive terms, it could be provisionally characterized by five criteria: contextuality (spirit is aware of the goings-on outside itself), self-perception (it intuits itself), self-limitation (it realizes when it is enough), reversibility (it has “play,” it can do what it can, back and forth), and spontaneity (it is capable not only of carrying on as before, but also of starting afresh, even surprising itself if necessary). These criteria only jointly guarantee the effect of the spiritual – separated from each other, they guarantee only intelligent stupidities (e. g. our life as it is).
6 [Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 144. ]
7 The posthumously published small work by Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt – Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve, 1987), is an example of a free handling of another evil man of the twentieth century, namely Carl Schmitt, the thinker of world war.
8 One may note that these sentences are not formulated in the spirit of utopia, but in the spirit of system function theory, which is known to serve “conservative” interests, but here only the bare minimum of preservation, self-preservation as a non-suicide.
9 In Jacques Derrida’s original formulation – il n’ya pas de hors-texte – the same sounds somewhat more appetizing; one hears the suspending (in our terms: de-mobilizing) function of the thesis. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
10 [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 6. ]
11 In this context, we must draw attention to the little-known work by Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), which raises the question of the encroaching of an evolutionary wisdom in the sense of a “withdrawal of untenable positions” without concession to the romantic demonization of technology.
12 [Paul Valéry, “The European,” in History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews, The Collected Works, Vol. 10 (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1962), p. 323. ]
13 [Horace, Satires and Epistles, trans. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 99. ]
14 The French Indian connoisseur Raymond Schwab was, among other things, the first to draw a parallel between the adventures of Indology and the philological sensations of Renaissance Hellenism. Cf. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-King and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
15 Otto Petras, Post Christum: Streifzüge durch die geistige Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag, 1935), p. 11. In our final essay (pp. 129ff. ), compare the remarks about Paul as the initiator of the Holy Mobilization on Christian world history. Both references, which refer to Petras as well as to Paul, are based on suggestions with which Jacob Taubes conveyed to the author a concept of the span of Jewish
156 Notes to pp. 29–35
historical theology. See Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans.
David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 16 [Novalis, Philosophical Writings, p. 111. ]
Chapter 2 The Other Change: On the Philosophical Situation of Alternative Movements
1 [Robert Musil, The Enthusiasts, trans. Andrea Simon (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), p. 34. ]
2 There is only one significant attempt to take the term “panic” philosophically seriously, the one that Hermann Broch made in his Massenwahntheorie: Beiträge zur einer Psychologie der Politik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). This attempt was born from the impression of fascism. Broch diagnoses that the real fears that affected large parts of the Central European population, especially the German population, after the First World War triggered pre-panicked condi- tions. In these, full-panicked energies already announce their eruption. Full panic means negative ecstasy; in it, a metaphysical despair is experi- enced: constriction of the self in world loss, doomsday plight, deadly isolation. Human activity is capable of the worst under the influence of “panicked” conditions – especially when the panicked energy channels itself forward into delusional programs of a breakthrough. The only counterpower that can absorb these energies, according to Broch, is the rational ecstasy in which the individual is restrained to the insight: I am the world. For Broch, it is a criterion of authentic religion that it overcomes the existential primal in rational ecstasies, while it is typical of demonic revival movements that they seduce one with destructive intoxications. Only from rational ecstasies can people make life covenants in the face of death: at first a religious, then immediately also a politically moral social contract with all contemporaries.
These speculations can be continued today in a birth-psychoanalytic way. A political perinatalism is necessary. The moment of coming into the world is at the same time a moment of fear of death for human children; it contains a lifelong, effective reservoir of panic. As social crisis pressures rise, humanity’s fear of annihilation can discharge into collective negative ecstasies: suicide programs from a panicked fear of death. In a culture of coming into the world that balances political, therapeutic, and religious motives in the right ratio, the panic of world loss would be transformed into the ecstasy of coming into the world. Where this work is consciously undertaken, there can be talk of panicked culture – it must be called as such, because one has to start with the initial explosive affect situation and not with uplifting goals.
3 In just a few years, this way of thinking has been officially adopted. At the Aspen Institute’s Berlin seminar on “prospects for the twenty-first century,” President Richard von Weizsäcker said, referring to the New York stock market crash in October 1987, that it was “one of those small disasters that we so desperately need in order to understand how we can avert major disasters. ” Quoted in Die Presse, October 29, 1987, p. 2.
Notes to pp. 35–56 157
4 [A rewriting of the phrase by Karl Kraus: “Let chaos be welcome; for order has failed. ” Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 285–6, 1909, p. 16. ]
5 A monument of this erroneousness is Martin Heidegger’s 1930 essay The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002). In it, the crisis of reason-that-makes-right punctures the classical district of truth, insofar as the latter had been understood as correctness, adequation, and (im)partibility. Behind it, a realm of events of (un)truth opens up, which occur as being-historical uncon- cealment instances with a sovereign lack of criteria.
6 All these negations are historically valid: previously not so. It remains to be seen whether the perception of these deficiencies can create an equivalent for that which was previously missing.
7 [Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Manche freilich . . . ,” trans. Scott Horton, Harper’s Magazine (November 10, 2007). The following verse extracts are also from this source. ]
8 [Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 53. ]
9 The fusion of the cannibal titan Kronos with Chronos, the running time, had already occurred in ancient times.
10 [E. M. Cioran, The New Gods, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 35–6. ]
11 This lack of differentiation from what is being critiqued is something that the neo-Marxist critique has thoroughly in common with classical mobilization Marxism.
12 On this, Charles Baudelaire is the crown witness of aesthetic modernism: “At every minute we are crushed by the idea and the sensation of time. And there are only two means of escaping this nightmare, – to forget it: Pleasure and Work. Pleasure consumes us. Work fortifies us. Let us choose. [. . . ] One can forget time only by using it. ” My Heart Laid Bare and Other Texts, trans. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2017), p. 55.
13 This expression, which seemingly names something self-evident, does not belong to the vocabulary of philosophy – a treacherous fact. As a neologism, it is an art word from the second half of this century. We find it first with Hans Saner in the book Geburt und Phantasie: Von der natürlichen Dissidenz des Kindes (Basel: Lenos, 1979). However, it is prepared by Hannah Arendt’s meditations on human “natality” in her main work The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
14 The emphasis here is that both must succeed in order to maintain nature–poiesis continuity. Because the two gestures are separated from each other in the prevailing gender-ontological system, the sexual designs of man and woman are each equipped with mutilated ontological features: “man” comes into the world but brings nothing into the world; “woman” brings something into the world but does not come into the world. This scandal runs deeper than the gender segregation that the Platonic androgyny myth speaks of; the scandalous thing about it is thus also not solved by eroticism or sexual union, but only by a poietic addition: through women learning to come into the world and men learning to bring into the world.
158 Notes to pp. 59–75
Chapter 3 Eurotaoism?
1 [Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 25. ]
2 From this point of view, there is a common denominator for Marx’s theory of revolution and Nietzsche’s doctrine of creative forgetting. Both doctrines want to disperse the decay of life at the hands of the past with the means of active nihilism and both rely on self-intensi- fication in order to do so: Marx through a project that once again gives living work priority over the dead, Nietzsche by unleashing a “leonine” will to oneself with the prospect of a child-like second innocence.
3 [Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 48. ]
4 [Ende, Neverending Story, p. 48. ]
5 [Ende, Neverending Story, pp. 48–9. ]
6 [Motto from “Selections from the Papers to the Devil” to Jean Paul
Friedrich Richter, The Invisible Lodge, trans. Charles T. Brooks (New
York: Henry Holt, 1883). ]
7 [See note 3. ]
8 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, pp. 35–7. ]
9 [Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley
and Richard A. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 82. ]
10 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 25. ]
11 [Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx:
Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 95. ]
12 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 24. ]
13 [Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 80. ]
14 Nietzsche’s tragedy is probably to be understood from the paradoxes of
his self-birth style: because it does not lead into a common world, but into one’s own and alternative worlds, it simulates a coming into the world in order not to be born. In this way, a paradoxical and monstrous move enters the birth movement. It does lead “out,” but it does not lead to anyone; it does bring something “forth,” but it withdraws it in the same gesture. In Zarathustra’s “Night Song,” Nietzsche has provided the formulas for this: “But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. . . . A hunger grows out of my beauty; I wish to harm those for whom I shine, I wish to rob those on whom I have bestowed. . . . Withdrawing my hand when a hand already reaches for it; hesitating like the waterfall that hesitates even while plunging. ” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro, eds. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 81–2. The paradoxical phantasms of a birth into verticality, of a standing there “the way one is born,” belong to this paradox of overspending without contributing. Through these paradoxical gestures and as soon as it begins with its own bringing forth, the subject becomes a mother who does not place real children into the world but monsters of self-reliance, motherless self-standers,
Notes to pp. 76–91 159
works, doctrines, law tables, erected things of any kind, that which has
been thrown out and thrown down.
15 [The two definitive English translations of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit are
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010) and Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1962). ]
16 [“Enframing” is a standard translation for Heidegger’s concept of “Gestell,” which he defines as the essence of modern technology. “Gestell” can also be thought of as rack, structure, frame, or skeleton. “Enframing” is the way that being reveals itself to humans by challenging us to see all things as a standing reserve waiting to be used up. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Martin Lovitt (New York: Grandland Publishing Inc. , 1977). ]
17 [An allusion to Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 117: “Thoughts that come on the feet of doves steer the world. ”]
18 Lloyd deMause presents a bold attempt in this direction – certainly away from the ontological problem – in Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Roots, 1982), Chapter 7: “The Fetal Origins of History. ”
19 Hans Saner rightly pointed out the traces of an awareness that being exists “birthingly” in Heidegger’s Being and Time. But it was only Thomas H. Macho who has recently shown a latent natality thinking in Heidegger by way of an ingenious interpretation: “Being-there means: having been placed into nothingness.
An attempt to understand Heidegger’s talks on death . . . ” (Lecture for the Philosophical Society Graz, 1987).
20 In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Hans Blumenberg reveals (among other things) the extent to which this will to not having been extends – the position of an unconsciousness at birth is affirmed with phenomeno- logical authority: “Every human finds out that they were born by being told, since they were not there to experience it. ” Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 91.
21 [Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (London: Wildwood House, 1991), p. 11. ]
Chapter 4 The Fundamental and the Urgent – or: The Tao of Politics
1 [English: “It’s hard not to write satire. ” See: Juvenal, The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 4. ]
2 [Johannes Rau (1931–2006) was a politician in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). ]
3 [Klaus Staeck (b. 1931) is a German lawyer and publisher. He is best known for his graphic work, which includes satirical political posters. Paul Lorenzen (1915–94) was a German philosopher and mathema- tician. He was one of the founders of the Erlangen School and co-inventor of game semantics. ]
4 The ontological motives are not discussed here; they have been
160 Notes to pp. 100–31
interpreted in the previous chapter as self-birthing efforts of a subjec-
tivity that builds its own worlds.
5 [This refers to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, which eliminated a class of nuclear
weapons and restricted the deployment of missiles. ]
6 [Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, p. 193. ]
7 [Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Hyperion and Other Poems, trans.
Michael Hamburger (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2002), p. 245. ]
Chapter 5 Paris Aphorisms on Rationality
Originally written for a Franco-German philosophy colloquium in
February 1986 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
1 [Jean Maurel, Victor Hugo, philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1985), p. 10: “Philosophers, one more effort if you want to be
Parisians! ”]
2 [Bertolt Brecht. In “Philosophizing Brecht: An (In)conclusion,” trans.
Norman Roessler, in Norman Roessler and Anthony Squiers (eds. ),
Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social
Theory and Performance (Leiden: Konilke Brill NV, 2019), pp. 180–1. ]
3 [See René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), p. 15: “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. ” The author uses the original French for the title of
this section. ]
4 [See chapter 2, pp. 44–5]
5 [A line from René Char’s poem “Les Dentelles de Montmirail” (1960). ]
Chapter 6 After Modernity
1 [Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 20. ]
2 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder, 3rd edn (Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann Verlag,1986), pp. 202f. Keyword “Repristination. ”
3 Cf. Günther Anders, Endzeit und Zeitende: Gedankern über die atomare
Situation (Munich: Beck, 1979).
4 With Paul, both still coincide with one another.
5 To this we can add a speculation about the “end of history”: if the
content of the Christian world history were indeed the universal dissemination of a message, it would end in the moment where the assumption of a significant time-frame for the spread of this message was no longer necessary. Thus, history in the traditional sense would be determined by the slowness of the message. From a certain speed of message-transmission on, the effect of history disintegrates. Apostolic historicism gets replaced by a planetary information technology. History is the time of media installations – post-history, the era of the program. If historical politics becomes installation politics, then post-historical politics turns to program politics.
6 At the same time, this means that there is nothing more ironic and
Notes to pp. 133–51 161
melancholy than the conflict between religion and state in the so-called
“socialist” countries.
7 [Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, p. 228. ]
8 See, for example, Lloyd deMause, Reagan’s America. (New York:
Creative Roots Inc. Publishers, 1984).
9 Cf. Falk Wagner, Geld oder Gott? Zur Geldbestimmtheit der kulturellen
und religiösen Lebenswelt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985).
10 [Franz Kafka. The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and
Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, Mass. : Exact Change, 1991), p. 22. ]
11 Kah Kyung Cho brilliantly explores these questions in a book that the author regrets not having known prior to his own attempts: Bewußtsein und Natursein: Phänomenologischer West-Ost-Diwan (Freiburg/Munich:
K. Alber, 1987).
12 [See chapter 3, n. 16. ]
13 [E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), p. 204. ]
14 [See Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),
p. 249. ]
15 [Bloch, Experimentum Mundi, p. 230. ]
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