It is almost as if our
sympathy
goes less to those for whom another commits himself or herself than to the commitment itself in its rarity and fragile naivete.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays.
Thus, enlightenment tries first to light the lamps and then to clear the obstacles out of the way that prevent the light's diffusion.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge. They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti- Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
E. Schalk, Political Juggling Act (literally, egg dance). Caricature of Bismarck as Minister for Conflict. Frankfurter Latern, 1863.
schizoid melancholy, the main thread of recent German history already begins to unravel--the demoralization of bourgeois enlightenment by an intelligent hegemonic power.
Otto von Bismarck was the second great cynical force in German modernity, a figure of repression highly capable of thinking. As creator of the "delayed na- tion" (1871), he was at the same time the one who tried to turn back the domestic political clock of this nation by half a century. He undertook the denial of evolu- tion on a grand scale. He strove to maintain standards for the political denial of rights that no longer corresponded to the balance in sources of power in his time. He repressed not only the political will of the old Fourth Estate, which had long since begun to articulate itself (social democracy), but also that of the Third Es- tate, of bourgeois liberalism. Bismarck hated liberalism (Freisinn, sense of free- dom) possibly even more than the "red hordes" of social democracy. Even in po-
? 82 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
litical Catholicism (the center party), he sensed the claim to a political ego that provoked his cynicism. The place where these political egos wanted to speak their mind, the Prussian parliament (later the Reichsparlament), he called realistically and contemptuously a "gossip shop," for the real decisions were always made solely by him and the crown. Here, the main thread of German masters' cynicism becomes a strong rope. "Reason and argue as much as you want, but obey! " Here the road begins that leads from the "gossip shop" of Bismarck's time to the demoralized and chaotic parliamentarism of the Weimar period.
It remains to be considered whether in Social-Democratic periods the diffusion of identity of enlightenment must proceed more strongly than ever. As soon as "enlightened" governments are established, the schizoid tension within the subject of power is intensified; the subject must split off its own knowledge of enlighten- ment and get involved in the melancholy realism of governing --it must learn the art of the second-worst evil. No merely moral consciousness and no loyalty to principles will be able to cope with the intricate realisms of the exercise of power. Not without intention, I explained in the Preface that the critique of cynical reason is a meditation on the statement "Knowledge is power. " It was a slogan of the old social democracy; the critique as a whole thus leads to a meditative grounding and dissolution of the core of social democracy: pragmatic political reason. As pragmatics, it respects the given order against which, as reason, it continues to revolt. Only under the sign of a critique of cynicism can the worn-out counterpo- sition of theory and praxis be superseded; only it can leave the schoolboy dialectic of "ideal" and "reality" behind. Under the sign of a critique of cynical reason, en- lightenment can gain a new lease on life and remain true to its most intimate pro-
ject: the transformation of being through consciousness.
To continue enlightenment means to be prepared for the fact that everything that in consciousness is mere morality will lose out against the unavoidable amoralism of the real. Is this not what social democracy is learning today in that,
2 almostagainstitswill,itisbecomingcaughtupintheGreatDialectic? Thispain
of learning is one of the three main factors in the self-denial of present-day en-
3lightenment.
Enlightenment experiences its main refractive break (Brechnung) in the politi-
cal cynicism of the hegemonic powers. For knowledge is power, and power, when forced to fight, leads to the splitting of knowledge into livable and nonliva- ble knowledge. This appears only superficially as an opposition between "real- ism" and "idealism. " In truth, a schizoid and an antischizoid realism oppose each other here. The first appears respectable, the second cheeky. The first assumes responsibility for what one cannot be responsible for; the second
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
irresponsibly champions the cause for what one can be responsible for. The first, so it says, wants to secure survival; the second wants to save the dignity of life from the en- croachments of the realism of power.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 83
Breaks in Enlightenment
Besides the main fracture of enlightenment through the hegemonic powers' poli- tics of antireflection, which consciously tries to preserve the naivete of others, we observe further breaks and unevennesses in the development of enlightenment that maneuvers it to the edge of self-denial.
The Breaking through Time
Enlightenment is a process in time, a form of evolution. It uses up life-time in the case of individuals, process-time in the case of institutions. Nothing hap- pens overnight with it, although jumps and abrupt awakenings are not foreign to it. Its rhythm is difficult to predict, and it varies infinitely according to inner and outer conditions and resistances. Analogous to the image of the flame, its energy is most intense at the center and dies down at the periphery. Starting from the pioneers and masters of reflective intelligence in philosophy and the arts, its im- pulse is refracted initially in the milieu of the intelligentsia with its inertia, then in the world of social labor and politics, further in the countless private spheres split off from the universal, and is finally reflected back by pure misery that can no longer be enlightened.
Biographically, enlightenment knows many stages and steps that earlier were strikingly represented in the esoteric movements. In the old Freemasonry, an in- itiation process was staged that was intended to represent the sequence of matura- tion, reflection, practice, and illumination. This indispensable biographical sys- tem of stages of enlightenment as initiation is corrupted in modern pedagogy; the system of stages lives on only superficially in the graduated order of the educa- tional system and in the sequence of school years and semesters. The curricula in modern schools are parodies of the idea of development. In the old Humboldt- ian university, with its "authoritarian" relation between teachers and learners and its student freedoms, a trace of that biographical consolidation and an opportunity for personal initiation into knowledge still lived on. In the modern educational system, the idea of embodied knowledge in those who teach as well as in those who study is lost. The professors are really not "confessors" but coaches in courses for the acquisition of a knowledge removed from life. The universities and schools practice a schizoid role playing in which an unmotivated, prospect- less but intelligent youth learns to keep up with the general standards of enlight- ened meaninglessness.
In the temporal refraction of enlightenment, we distinguish a biographical and a sociological dimension. Each new generation requires its own time to process in its own rhythm what has already been achieved. But since schizoid culture works toward a depersonalization of enlightenment, an enlightenment without embodied enlighteners, a great big groan issues from modern schools. Its "ap-
84 ? AFTER THE UNMASK1NGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
? Georg Scholz, Industrial Farmers, 1920. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. ) paratus of enlightenment" confronts youth from the position of an opponent. If there were no teachers who desperately made every effort for enlightenment in spite of instruction and who invested their vital energies in the pedagogic process in spite of conditions, scarcely any pupils would still experience what school should be about. The more systematically education is planned, the more it is a matter of accident or luck whether education as initiation into conscious living still takes place at all.
With the sociological breaking of enlightenment in time, it is the "province"- in the concrete as well as metaphorical sense --that resists the impulse of enlight- enment with its inertia. Province means accommodation to repressions and hard- ships that actually no longer exist. Only in the idle motion of habituation and self-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT U 85
repression do they remain effective--unnecessarily. In the age of advanced
jj? ntenment one really feels for the first time how deadly substanceless misery
and how wretched outmoded unhappiness are. The province has taken part in
modernization without participating in liberalization; it has gone along and yet
remained behind. Today this picture is, of course, changing. A relative inversion
in the tendencies of urban and rural consciousness can be distinguished; certain
signs make it clear that a stifling retardation is not the same as an insightful not-
wanting-to-go-further. A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlight-
enment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-
technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion
for centuries. The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phase of our history began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mas- tery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. In the culture of tech- nology, urban imperialisms are realized. Increasingly, voices of considerable theoretical weight--from Toynbee to Wittfogel --have elaborated on a premoni- tion of how the future of urban and industrial civilizations could be called the new 4 province.
The Breaking by the Party
Those who inquire after the political subject of enlightenment become lost in a maze. The split in motivations for enlightenment between liberalism and social- ism, the latter of which in turn branches into authoritarian-Communist, Social Democratic, and anarchist currents, goes back to basic principles. Each party has loudly claimed for itself a special relation, indeed, an intimate identity with en- lightenment and science. Liberalism bears in its very name not only economic freedom but also civil freedom and freedom of thought; social democracy has presented itself for ages now as the party for the rational guidance of social de- velopments; and communism steals the show by presenting itself as the current in which partiality {Parteilichkeit) and insight into truth have become one. Whom should we believe? For those who are still free enough to pose the question, there 's probably no alternative than to resort to one's own reflection, whereby poten- tially a new enlightenment party, that of "one's own opinion," could arise. Those free enough to do this are possibly also free enough to agree with the antiparty impulse of anarchism that attacks all parties as surrogates of the state and accuses them of being mechanisms of stupefaction and apparatuses for recruiting the fatu- ous electorate. The wonderful-sounding dialectical phrase about "truth and par- tiality" thus remains a pipe dream --until one can discover an impartial party that serves universal life interest by intervening in the blind mechanisms of self- destruction.
86 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The Breaking by Sectors
Especially the advanced thrusts of enlightenment that question the fictions of a clear self-consciousness, of nature, and identity are unhesitatingly opposed even today by great social powers that operate with these fictions. This can easily be demonstrated in the case of depth-psychological enlightenment, which became involved in a battle on two fronts with other fractions of enlightenment; the latter performed a thorough job of counterenlightenment on it. On one side, the psy- chology of the unconscious was unrelentingly "disproved" and accused of being mythology by scientism and natural-scientific medicine; on the other side, it was denounced by official Marxism as a symptom of bourgeois irrationalist decadence.
Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter. As soon as proclivities for a party coagulate in identities, so that individuals do not merely support a party but become a party, psychological reflection must inevitably have a decomposing effect on such arti- ficial naivete. It thereby slips into the role of an unwelcome enlightenment. Con- versely, psychological enlightenment puts itself in a bad light when it starts to be- come a Weltanschauung, a school of opinion, an ideology, or even a sect. One sees this in the many pitiful squabbles and dogmatisms of a new psychological orthodoxy as well as in the ossifications and demarcations of a psychologizing subculture. It becomes really scandalous when psychologists --for example, C. G. Jung--through a combination of ambition and naivete have tried to win favor with political currents such as fascism. Instead of providing a psychology of authority and an illumination of political masochism, the leaders of schools of psychology have been inclined to taste the sweetness of authority and to use masochistic mechanisms to their own advantages.
The Break in Intelligence
I just indicated that the alliance of enlightenment with the process of natural- scientific, technical civilization is no longer unambiguous. The philosophy of en- lightenment still hesitates to annul the coerced alliance and to seek a new relation to the sciences. The modern equation of reason and science is too powerful for philosophy - if it does not want to destroy itself--to simply push aside the advan- tages of the sciences. Nevertheless, the signs of the times indicate a twilight of the scientific idols. Since the time of European romanticism, so-called irration- alist currents have repeatedly resisted the process of modern rationalism. The present also is experiencing such a wave of antirationalism in which the motifs of "another kind of reason" combine with each other--motifs of a logic of feelings and mysticism, of meditation and critical self-reflection, of myth and a magical worldview. It would probably be wasted time to try to sort out the grain from the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 87
chaff- Time will tell which impulses survive the fad phase. As soon as American syncretism comes and goes here and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the first titillation of anything goes has worn 0ff perhaps the charms of clarity too will again be valued. In the long run, murky mixtures are unpleasant; where "anything goes," nothing matters anymore, but we have to grit our teeth and bear it.
Beyond the mechanics of pendulum swings between fascination and boredom, enlightenment still has the task of assigning an appropriate place in our culture to the sciences. A prerequisite for this would be the clarification of the relation- ship between types of intelligence--particularly of various opposing kinds of cleverness such as science and wisdom, learnedness and presence of mind.
The distancing of the types of intelligence from each other that in modern rea- son are only illusorily brought together in the unity of rationality, has long been obvious. What Georg Lukacs, for example, attacked as "irrationalism" in modern bourgeois thinking--the "destruction of reason"-contains in its basic impulse a fully justified separation of "another" kind of intelligence from the hegemony of rationalism and natural science. The only bad thing here is that irrationalism from Bergson to Klages took itself much too seriously. It fell over itself with its preten- sions to respectability and struck up the solemn tone of a priest where a great phil- osophical buffoonery would have been just the right thing. In pronounced irra- tionalist literature one often finds a mixture of theorizing melancholy and self-pretension. Still, Bergson did, at least, write about laughter.
The bourgeois compulsion for respectability spoiled the satirical, poetical, and ironic possibilities of irrationalism. Those who see the "Other" should also tell it otherwise. But those who present what they have "grasped" beyond the limits of a narrower rationality, claiming nothing less than validity of the most respecta- ble insights, degrade both the irrational and the rational. Thus, Gottfried Benn struck at the heart of oracle-irrationalism when he said that in Germany thinkers who cannot master their world-pictures linguistically are usually called vi- sionaries.
Respectable conservatism has known much of this for a long time. Under its frequently demagogic wailing about the evils of progress, it has preserved the in- sight that the modern kind of knowledge has little to do with that state of human maturity that is called wisdom by all great teachers. Wisdom is not dependent on the level of the technical mastery of the world; conversely, the latter presupposes the former when the process of science and technology moves toward an insane state of affairs-as we are observing today. With the aid of Buddhist, Taoist, and original Christian, Indian, and American Indian intelligence, no production lines
and no satellites can be built. However, in the modern type of knowledge, that
awareness of life dries up from which the old teachings of wisdom take their inspi- ration, in order to speak of life and death, love and hate, antagonism and unity, individuality and cosmos, manliness and womanliness. One of the most important motifs in the literature of wisdom is a warning against false cleverness, against
88 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
"head" knowledge and learnedness, against thinking in terms of power and arro- gant intellectuality.
Breaking Down Half-Open Doors
In spite of all inhibitions, breaks, and self-doubt in the course of its development, enlightenment has unleashed an enormous potential for reflection. This is un- mistakable even in the present phase of demoralization. The penetration of science, psychology, and schooling into large areas of social life has brought strong means of reflection, especially into the heads of the intelligentsia and state employees. The diffusion of power in the modern state has led to an extraordinary dissemination of the knowledge of power, which simultaneously intensifies the cynicism of the knowledge of power, as sketched earlier, that is, the self-denial of morality and the splitting off of insights that cannot be lived out into a diffuse collective mentality. Here we flesh out our initial thesis: Discontent in our culture appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.
With the diffusion of cynicism to a collective mentality of intelligence in the gravitational field of the state and the knowledge of power, the erstwhile moral foundations of ideology critique collapse. Critics, as Walter Benjamin notes in his aphorism of 1928 (see the Preface), have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. The existence of such models of critique is perceived today as a contribution to the sad complicatedness of relations in the world rather than as an impulse for an existential self-reflection. Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent.
There is, to be concise, not only a crisis of enlightenment, not only a crisis of the enlighteners, but even a crisis in the praxis of enlightenment, in commit- ment to enlightenment. Today, the word "committed" is said with a mixture of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
acknowledgment and indulgence, as if it were a fragile sediment from a younger psychological layer that has to be handled with the utmost care.
It is almost as if our sympathy goes less to those for whom another commits himself or herself than to the commitment itself in its rarity and fragile naivete. Who does not known this from his or her feelings toward the so-called alternative movements? Something similar can be seen in France, where the younger generation of intel- ligentsia, apres Sartre, is experiencing the dissolution of the old foundations of political moralism that constituted leftist identity. Commitment? "Takes place in the ivory tower. The committed sit there actively" (Ludwig Marcuse).
In that the moral foundation of enlightenment is decomposing because the modern state simultaneously demoralizes the enlightened and makes public ser-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 89
vants of them, the perspectives of what was earlier called commitment are becom- ing blurred. When someone tries to "agitate" me in an enlightened direction, my first reaction is a cynical one: The person concerned should get his or her own shit together. That is the nature of things. Admittedly, one should not injure good will without reason; but good will could easily be a little more clever and save me the embarrassment of saying; "I already know that. " For I do not like being asked, "Then why don't you do something? "
Things have been this way now for a long time: The "committed" enlightener breaks down doors that, admittedly, are not completely open, but they also no longer have to be broken down. It can go so far that one knows more about moral conditions as a cynic than as a committed person. Since Erich Kastner, the tone of satire in modern enlightenment is reflectively tinged and hits its mark with a melancholy, coquettish spin, if it still wants to hit the mark at all. Today's jokers are anything but committed, and they can profit from the inflated price of laughter insofar as buffoonery suits the spirit of the times better than does good old nasty satire. The last defenders of ideology critique are inspired buffoons, such as Otto, in whom one finds little sociology but a good deal of mental alertness.
Besides "commitment," and entwined with it, we find in our memory another
recent sediment--the experience of the student movement, scarcely settled, with
its ups and downs of courage and depression. This most recent sediment in the
history of political vitality forms an additional veil over the old feeling that some-
thing ought to be done about this world. The dissolution of the student movement
must interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into real-
ism, of revolt into a clever melancholy, from a grand political denial into a
thousand-faceted, small, subpolitical affirmation, from a radicalism in politics
into a middle course of intelligent survival. I do not really believe in the end of
enlightenment merely because the spectacle has come to an end. When so many
disappointed enlighteners whine today, they are just spitting out all their rage and
sadness, which would hinder them from continuing to propagate enlightenment,
into the spittoon of the public sphere. Only courageous people feel when they are
discouraged; only enlighteners notice when it is getting dark; only moralists can
become demoralized. In a word: We are still here. Leonard Cohen has written
alyrical line that could be the battle song of an enlightenment that has become muted: "Well, never mind: We are ugly, but we have the music" (Chelsea Hotel No. 2).
A German enlightenment intelligentsia does not find itself for the first time in such a twilight state, where the doors are ajar, the secrets aired, the masks half lowered-and where, in spite of this, dissatisfaction still will not be dispelled. In the introduction to Part V, I want to describe the "Weimar symptom" as the tem- porally closest historical mirror in which we can look at ourselves. In the Weimar Republic, the progressive intelligentsia had already reached a stage of reflection m which ideology critique as social game became possible and in which everyone
90 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
could lift the masks from everyone else's face. From this stage of development comes that experience of "total suspicion of ideology," which was discussed so much after the Second World War and which was spoken about so much because one would have really liked to have avoided the serious game of this critique.
If one slips into the umpire's black suit for a moment, one finds a clearly struc- tured playing field with well-known players, established tactics, and typical fouls. Each side has developed certain, almost rigged, moves of critique; the religious criticize the areligious and vice versa, whereby each side has in its repertoire a metacritique of the ideology critique used by the opposing side; the moves in the dialogue between Marxists and liberals are to a large extent fixed, likewise those between Marxists and anarchists as well as those between anarchists and liberals. In this dialogue, the approximate penalty for the anarchists' fouls and the cus- tomary depression of the liberals and the Marxists after the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
length of the sentence is announced are known. One knows pretty well what natural scientists and representatives of the humanities will accuse each other of. Even the ideology cri- tique used by militarists and pacifists on each other threatens to stagnate, at least as far as creative moves are concerned. For ideology critique, the Sartrean film title, The Game Is Over, itself almost half a century old, thus seems apposite.
Marxist Elegy: Althusser and the "Break" in Marx
But enlightenment is and remains unsatisfied. The second major factor in its self- denial is its disappointment with Marxism. A large part of the present-day cynical twilight has its origin in the experiences of what became of "orthodox" Marxist movements, in Leninism, Stalinism, with the Vietcong, in Cuba, and in the Khmer Rouge. In Marxism we experience the collapse of what promised to be- come "the rational Other. " It was the development of Marxism that drove a wedge between enlightenment and the principle of being left-wing, and that wedge can never be taken out. The degeneration of Marxism into the legitimating ideology of hidden nationalist and open hegemonic and despotic systems has ruined the much-celebrated principle of hope and spoiled any pleasure in history, which is in any case difficult. The Left too is learning that one can no longer speak of com- munism as if none existed and as if one could ingenuously begin anew.
I have hinted at the peculiar double structure of Marxian knowledge in the fourth unmasking: It is a composite of emancipative and reifying theory. Reifica- tion (Verdinglichung) is a feature of any knowledge that strives to dominate things (Dinge). In this sense, Marxian knowledge was a knowledge of domination from the start. Long before Marxism was in power anywhere, theoretically or practi- cally, it already behaved tactically in a perfectly realist-political style, as a hegemonic power even before it seized power. Marxism always dictated much too precisely the "correct line. " It has always hot-temperedly annihilated every practical alternative. It has always said to the consciousness of the masses: I am
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 91
your master and liberator, you shall have no other liberator before me! Every lib- erty you take upon yourself from elsewhere is a petit-bourgeois deviation. In rela- tion to other tendencies of enlightenment, Marxism also assumed the position that corresponds to that of a "reflecting surface. " The intellectual student cadre of Marxism behaved like the censorship departments of bourgeois ministries for the interior and for the police, which studied everything produced by non-Marxist enlighteners and censored that which gave even a hint of promoting noncon- formism.
Louis Althusser, earlier the theoretical head of the French Communist Party, created a disturbance more than a decade ago when he claimed to have found a "scientific, theoretical break" in Marx's work, a transition from a humanist ideol- ogy to an antihumanist structural science, which occurred between the early works and the works of maturity. This break, which Althusser, one of the best Marx experts of the present, had theoretically tracked down, seems to have been reincarnated in his own personality. In a way, he became sick because of what he saw. This break became his scientific, political, and existential locus. Because Althusser understood Marx sympathetically, the break in Marx's theory and exis- tence impressed itself with an almost symbiotic depth on his theory and his life. One may venture to say that Althusser was wrecked by this conflict. For years, the contradiction between his philosophical competence and his loyalty to the Communist Party put a strain on his theoretical work as well as on his very exis- tence. Married to a sociologist with "Bolshevist convictions," the conflict between orthodoxy and insight, between loyalty and freedom, pursued him even into his private life. Althusser recognized that, in a certain regard, Marx was no longer Marx and that a break, an ambiguity runs through his work that again and again makes its theoretical and practical validity problematic. In his loyalty to the truth and to the Communist Party, Althusser could no longer remain Althusser. Thus, the world-famous Marxist philosopher, in a "psychotic" attack of mental confu- sion, as they say, murdered his wife on 16 November 1980, perhaps in one of those desperate states in which one no longer knows where the other begins and the ego ends, where the boundaries betwen self-assertion and blind destruction dissolve.
Who is the murderer? Is it Althusser, the philosopher, who killed himself through his wife, the "dogmatist," in order to end the state of divided being that kept the philosopher from really living. Is it the murder of liberation by a prisoner who, as inner self-defense, killed what killed him? Is it a murder committed on Althusser, the famous man, who could destroy his own false identity, his own raise fame, his false signification only by plunging into the cynical sphere of criminality? As is known in psychology, there are suicides who are basically mur- derers of someone else; but there are also murderers who are basically suicides MI that they annihilate themselves in the other.
I will attempt to interpret the Althusserian "break" differently from the way in
92 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
which he himself interpreted it; in doing so I will pay attention to his example and the language of his act. I want to erect a monument to the philosopher by reconstructing his interpretation of Marx --the real break in Marx's theory. It is a monument for a murderer who, with confused violence, made visible a break that cannot be made to disappear by any
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
act of will to mediate it, by any loyalty, or by any fear of separation.
In the Marxian oeuvre there is a rupture, not between an "ideological" and a "scientific" phase but between two modalities of reflection--a kynical-offensive, humanistic, emancipative reflection and an objectivistic, master-cynical reflec- tion, which derides the striving for freedom of others in the style of a functionalist ideology critique. On the one hand, Marx is something of a rebel, on the other, something of a monarch; his left half resembles Danton, his right half is reminis- cent of Bismarck. Like Hegel, who bore a similar double temperament of revolu- tionary and statesman within himself, Marx is one of the greatest dialectical thinkers because in him a fruitful inner polemic between at least two sparring thinker-souls was at work. Althusser's theoretical and existential tragedy starts from his partisanship for the "right" Marx, whom he discovered in his writings after the so-called coupure epistemologique. It is that "realist- political" Marx to whom Althusser attributes an absolutely "scientific" Realtheorie of capital, pu- rified of all humanist sentimentalities; this is the sense of his "structural reading. "
The work of the young Marx is rooted in his impressions of the Hegelian Logic, with which he went into battle against Hegelian idealism itself. Labor and praxis are the key concepts with which one finds one's way out of the casing of the system in a Hegelian way. They hold the hope of a new type of scientific ap- proach, an empiricism that does not fall back behind the summits of philosophical reflection. With these concepts of labor and praxis, which combine in the lofty concept of politics, the left-Hegelian generation went beyond its master. From this spirit grew a powerful, pugnacious social critique that understood itself as "real humanism," as a turning to the "real human being. "
The genius of the young Marx is shown in his not remaining content with a turning from the Hegelian "system" to a post-Hegelian humanist "critique. " His sharpest polemic, therefore, was directed initially against his greatest temptation, which he shared with his generation of intelligentsia, namely, to persist in mere "critical critique. " He sensed, and rationalized this perception, that a powerful critical theory must conquer the world of objects and reality itself in order to con- ceptualize them not only positively but also critically. This impulse was the rea- son, among other things, for his turning to political economy, which he took up in its naive, bourgeois form in order to surpass it with a reflected theory. The in- sipid phrase "learning process" fails to capture the drama of this creative reflec- tion. Marx's thinking traveled the path from the Hegelian system to the critique of political economy, from a contemplative conception of theory to an under- standing of theory as world-mover, from the sphere of ideas to the discovery of
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT Q 93
labor, from abstract to concrete anthropology, from the illusion of nature to the history of the self-creation of humanity. As theory of social emancipation, Marxian knowledge could secure recognition only if, at the same time, it named a mass ego that would recognize the possibility of its freedom in the mirror of this theory. Here, Marx made himself into the historical-logical teacher and pa- tron of the proletariat, which he identified as the predestined pupil of his theory. Through the proletariat, he wanted to become the great liberator by intervening in the course of European history as the teacher of the workers' movement.
Marx, however, stepped over dead bodies at least twice in a way that raises doubts as to his claim to teach and his realism. In Max Stirner and Bakunin I see the most intimate opponents of Marx because they were the theorists whom he could not simply surpass but whom, in order to exclude them, he had to practi- cally annihilate with his critique. For both represented clear logical and objective alternatives to Marx's solutions, Stirner with his question whether and how one can break through "private" alienation, and Bakunin with his question whether and how a way can be found to a future "alienation-free society. " Marx criticized both outright with a practically eviscerative hatred. The famous posthumous Ger- man Ideology, in large part directed against Stirner, contains the most intensive, detailed dispute Marx and Engels ever carried out with a thinker; and the annihila- tion of Bakunin was for Marx a preoccupation that stretched over many years. In Marx's hatred for both, in his scorn and his infinite contempt, an energy was at work that in no way can be explained by temperament and a feeling of competi- tiveness. Both showed him the systematic limits of his own approach -- experiences that he could neither integrate nor simply disregard. Here, elemen- tary and undeniable considerations came into play for which there was no place in Marx's plan and for which no place was to be made. Indeed, moreover, in Stirner, as in other representatives of critical critique and of the "Holy Family," Marx recognized something that was also present in himself, but whose right to exist he had to deny in order to become this Marx. With his right side, with his "realistic," statesmanlike, realist-political, and grand-theoretical side he sup- pressed the left, rebellious, vital, merely "criticistic" side, which, in the others, confronted him as a "position as such. " In his critical annihilation of Stirner and Bakunin, he stepped over his own corpse, so to speak, over the concrete, existen- tial, and in the last instance, "feminine" part of his intelligence. With this part he had revolted, critically and realistically- concretely, against Hegel; now he comes forward as master thinker against this side in its one-sidedness.
Stirner, like Marx, belongs to the "young Germany" generation that, in the cli- ate of Hegelian philosophy, with its subversive training in reflection, had devel- oped an extraordinary sense for everything that "takes place in the head"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
(Feuer- ? ach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Karl Griin, Heinrich Heine, among others).
Hegel's logic had conquered a space that is neither only being nor only con-
m94 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
sciousness but contains "something of both"; this is expressed in the figure of thought "mediated immediacy. " The magic word of the new logic is "mediation" (Vermittlung). We may translate it as "medium. " Between being and conscious- ness is something in the middle that is both and in which the illusory antithesis of spirit and matter disappears; Marx transposed this vision to his theory of capital.
Let us say it concretely: In people's heads, historically formed programs of thinking and perception are at work that "mediate" everything that moves from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. The human cognitive apparatus is, in a way, an inner relay, a switching station, a transformer in which perceptual sche- mata, forms of judgment, and logical structures are programmed. Concrete con- sciousness is never immediate but is mediated by the "inner structure. " Reflection can assume basically three attitudes to this transmitted inner struc- ture: It can try to escape the inner structure by "deprogramming itself; it can move within the inner structure as alertly as possible; and it can surrender itself as reflection by accepting the thesis that the structure is everything.
We now have to treat these three attitudes. Stirner's idea is simply to throw all alien programming out of one's head. After this total self-purification of the head, a naked, so to speak empty, reflected egoism should remain. If society really has trained "kinks" into my head, then my emancipation, thought through quickly, must presumably consist in my dismantling this alien programming. What is one's own in ego consciousness tries thus to rid itself with a snap of the fingers of what is alien. Stirner aims for a liberation from alienation in one's own interior. What is alien makes itself at home in me; I thus win "myself back by expelling what is alien. For several hundred pages one can read how Marx and Engels got worked up about this basically simple thought. They criticized this neoegotistical position in a devastating way --not morally but epistemologically: as a new self-delusion. They showed that the Stirner egos, those "individuals" who have based their position on nothing and view themselves as their only prop- erty, leap into a new naivete that betrays itself not least of all in its petit- bourgeois, boasting standpoint of "I am the be-all and end-all. " The theoretical anarchism of the nineteenth century reached its first culmination in Stirner. Stirner effected an "existentialist" reduction to pure ego, but in doing this he very naively presupposed the ego as something that simply "exists. " Once I have thrown out of "me" what is alien (society), Stirner believes, then a beautiful ego of my own remains that revels in the "possession" of itself. In radiant naivete, Stirner speaks of the "property" that individuals have in themselves. But one can
only possess what exists in reality. Here, valid reflective experience and confused naivete stand next to each other, separated by a hairbreadth. Existentialist reflec- tion on one's "own" consciousness is as realistic as the transition to the idea of self-property is false. Self-reflection leaves nothing objective that one could possess.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 95
Marx and Engels dismantle this construction down to its atomic components. On wings of contempt, they prepare for themselves a feast of satirical reflection that, as alertly as possible, moves within the inner structure of consciousness. In the destruction of the Stirnerian illusion, however, they destroy more than the op- ponent; they destroy themselves in him. The way they do it, line for line, with intensive logic, meticulous philology, and a cruel pleasure in destruction-- that is more than critique; it is the exorcism of a danger, the elimination of "another possibility. " In fact, Marxism could never shake off the anarchist and existen- tialist shadow that fell on Stirner. Only with Sartre and Marcuse did this shadow again gain a more intensive life in Marxist-inspired thinking.
Marx does not belong to that sort of naive-genius that, like Schelling, "de- velops its thought in public. " The German Ideology remained a private text. It was not published until 1932. Since then, Marx philologists have passed it around like a holy text. In the student movement, it was taken into battle as an antisubjectivis-
5tic weapon-by the "strict" Marxists against the spontaneists and the academic
flower children. In fact, however, there was a good reason for Marx and Engels's discretion regarding their most intensive work in ideology critique. The German Ideology lets the cat out of the bag. One can learn from it that, on the question of subjectivity, Marx and Stirner went off in symmetrically false directions. Both know that human consciousness, as one initially finds it, is "alienated" and must be "appropriated" through patient reflection. Both think in the dialectic of the authentic and the alien; however, both fail to find the middle ground and plunge into exclusive alternative positions. Stirner chose the right, Marx the left path. Stirner believes he can overcome the expropriation of oneself (Enteignung) through an individualist act of purification. In his "adulthood," individuals learn how to expel their
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
inner alien programming so that they have it and do not have it at the same time and thus "keep" it as its free masters and possessors. By surren- dering thoughts and things as their own, they are no longer under their power. In Stirner's thinking, realistic self-reflection and ideological ego-cult flow without clear boundaries into one another. What can be a productive experience of inner distancing from conditioning has become in Stirnerism dogmatically ossified to a new "short-circuited thinking. "
Marx's investigation of class consciousnesses is at its starting point equally realistic. Class consciousnesses, worldviews, and ideologies can indeed be un- derstood as "programming"; they are mediations, formed and forming schemata ? f consciousness, results in a world-historical process of the self-formation of all intellect. This way of seeing opens a path to a fruitful analysis of patterns in con- sciousness that can become free of the curse of naive idealism. With their "in the last instance" dogmatic materialism, however, Marx and Engels deviate from this approach again. They dissolve subjectivity in the historical process. This comes
ut in the harshness and contempt with which Marx treats his "existential" oppo-
ents. In this brutality, the other, master form of reflection begins to stir. Where
96 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The trial against the "Industry Party" in Moscow.
Stirner brought his rebellious, protesting ego out into the public arena, Marxism produced revolutionaries who, with the feeling of supreme slyness and an artful sense for reality, use themselves as means in the historical process. In the clinch with Stirner's false individual, the idea of the false Nobody arises in Marx's theory- those revolutionaries who themselves will become only grim instruments of the fetish: revolution. That is the break Althusser has discerned in the Marxian oeuvre after The German Ideology. Early on, at the latest since the polemic against Stirner, there begins a tendency in Marx's thinking to chain oneself, al- most like Jesuits of the revolution, to the process of historical development, in the belief of being able not only to recognize the development but also to direct it. Marx's theory sets its hope on domination by conceiving of the subject of the theory as a function of development. Through self-reification it believes it can achieve a mastery of history. By making itself into an instrument of a purported future, it believes it can make the future into its own tool.
This schizoid logic of master's cynicism has no historical parallel. Only an ex- tremely highly developed consciousness can deceive itself in such a way. The only thinker whose self-reflection reached similar heights of artful self-denial was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose historical influence is well known.
The philosophically significant pinnacle of this artful self-reification was reached by those courgeous old Communists who, in the Moscow Show Trials, in the face of certain death, falsely confessed to having conspired against "the revolution," a confession that was not merely extorted but possessed an aspect of freedom insofar as the accused, with their confessions, wanted to save the revolu- tion from greater damage than had already been done to it by accusation and exe-
? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 97
cution. The subtlety of this doubling of murder by the judiciary with suicide can- not be grasped with conventional conceptions of "tragedy. " They are murders in which it is clear only in the biological sense who is in fact killing whom. They are murders and suicides within a schizophrenic structure, where the ego that kills can no longer be clearly distinguished from the ego that is killed. Only one thing is certain: In the end the corpses of intelligent human beings are lying on the ground, strangled, shot, beaten. The case of Althusser is probably, among other things, a supplement to the psychopathology of Marxism. It takes place on an in- telligence level of murderous violence on which the revolution devours its cleverest children, not to mention the millions who lost their lives without know- ing exactly what they had to do with this revolution, except perhaps that what was killing them could not be quite the truth.
The young Marx expressed the logical root of these inversions in 1843 in a fully alert sentence that was written before that time of callousness, although it already betrayed a cynical tendency: " . . . communism has seen other socialist doctrines rise up against it not by accident but because it itself is only a particular, one-sided realization of the socialist principle. " (Letters from the Deutsch- Franzosischen Jahrbuchern, Marx to Ruge, September 1843). The word "one- sided" shows the elevated irony of Marxism at play. Those who say "one-sided" know that there are, and must be, at least two sides. Those who then decide for one side deceive themselves and others. Only a knowledge that is consumed by an enormous will to power can want to present conscious one-sidedness as the truth. In doing so, it profoundly denies its own pathos for genuine cognition. Thus, communism is that knowledge of power that tells it all before it has taken over the reins. This, and only this, constitutes, on a philosophical level, its affinity to fascism.
The Feeling toward Life in Twilight
The self-denial of enlightenment is a result of the most recent history, which has
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge. They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti- Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
E. Schalk, Political Juggling Act (literally, egg dance). Caricature of Bismarck as Minister for Conflict. Frankfurter Latern, 1863.
schizoid melancholy, the main thread of recent German history already begins to unravel--the demoralization of bourgeois enlightenment by an intelligent hegemonic power.
Otto von Bismarck was the second great cynical force in German modernity, a figure of repression highly capable of thinking. As creator of the "delayed na- tion" (1871), he was at the same time the one who tried to turn back the domestic political clock of this nation by half a century. He undertook the denial of evolu- tion on a grand scale. He strove to maintain standards for the political denial of rights that no longer corresponded to the balance in sources of power in his time. He repressed not only the political will of the old Fourth Estate, which had long since begun to articulate itself (social democracy), but also that of the Third Es- tate, of bourgeois liberalism. Bismarck hated liberalism (Freisinn, sense of free- dom) possibly even more than the "red hordes" of social democracy. Even in po-
? 82 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
litical Catholicism (the center party), he sensed the claim to a political ego that provoked his cynicism. The place where these political egos wanted to speak their mind, the Prussian parliament (later the Reichsparlament), he called realistically and contemptuously a "gossip shop," for the real decisions were always made solely by him and the crown. Here, the main thread of German masters' cynicism becomes a strong rope. "Reason and argue as much as you want, but obey! " Here the road begins that leads from the "gossip shop" of Bismarck's time to the demoralized and chaotic parliamentarism of the Weimar period.
It remains to be considered whether in Social-Democratic periods the diffusion of identity of enlightenment must proceed more strongly than ever. As soon as "enlightened" governments are established, the schizoid tension within the subject of power is intensified; the subject must split off its own knowledge of enlighten- ment and get involved in the melancholy realism of governing --it must learn the art of the second-worst evil. No merely moral consciousness and no loyalty to principles will be able to cope with the intricate realisms of the exercise of power. Not without intention, I explained in the Preface that the critique of cynical reason is a meditation on the statement "Knowledge is power. " It was a slogan of the old social democracy; the critique as a whole thus leads to a meditative grounding and dissolution of the core of social democracy: pragmatic political reason. As pragmatics, it respects the given order against which, as reason, it continues to revolt. Only under the sign of a critique of cynicism can the worn-out counterpo- sition of theory and praxis be superseded; only it can leave the schoolboy dialectic of "ideal" and "reality" behind. Under the sign of a critique of cynical reason, en- lightenment can gain a new lease on life and remain true to its most intimate pro-
ject: the transformation of being through consciousness.
To continue enlightenment means to be prepared for the fact that everything that in consciousness is mere morality will lose out against the unavoidable amoralism of the real. Is this not what social democracy is learning today in that,
2 almostagainstitswill,itisbecomingcaughtupintheGreatDialectic? Thispain
of learning is one of the three main factors in the self-denial of present-day en-
3lightenment.
Enlightenment experiences its main refractive break (Brechnung) in the politi-
cal cynicism of the hegemonic powers. For knowledge is power, and power, when forced to fight, leads to the splitting of knowledge into livable and nonliva- ble knowledge. This appears only superficially as an opposition between "real- ism" and "idealism. " In truth, a schizoid and an antischizoid realism oppose each other here. The first appears respectable, the second cheeky. The first assumes responsibility for what one cannot be responsible for; the second
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
irresponsibly champions the cause for what one can be responsible for. The first, so it says, wants to secure survival; the second wants to save the dignity of life from the en- croachments of the realism of power.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 83
Breaks in Enlightenment
Besides the main fracture of enlightenment through the hegemonic powers' poli- tics of antireflection, which consciously tries to preserve the naivete of others, we observe further breaks and unevennesses in the development of enlightenment that maneuvers it to the edge of self-denial.
The Breaking through Time
Enlightenment is a process in time, a form of evolution. It uses up life-time in the case of individuals, process-time in the case of institutions. Nothing hap- pens overnight with it, although jumps and abrupt awakenings are not foreign to it. Its rhythm is difficult to predict, and it varies infinitely according to inner and outer conditions and resistances. Analogous to the image of the flame, its energy is most intense at the center and dies down at the periphery. Starting from the pioneers and masters of reflective intelligence in philosophy and the arts, its im- pulse is refracted initially in the milieu of the intelligentsia with its inertia, then in the world of social labor and politics, further in the countless private spheres split off from the universal, and is finally reflected back by pure misery that can no longer be enlightened.
Biographically, enlightenment knows many stages and steps that earlier were strikingly represented in the esoteric movements. In the old Freemasonry, an in- itiation process was staged that was intended to represent the sequence of matura- tion, reflection, practice, and illumination. This indispensable biographical sys- tem of stages of enlightenment as initiation is corrupted in modern pedagogy; the system of stages lives on only superficially in the graduated order of the educa- tional system and in the sequence of school years and semesters. The curricula in modern schools are parodies of the idea of development. In the old Humboldt- ian university, with its "authoritarian" relation between teachers and learners and its student freedoms, a trace of that biographical consolidation and an opportunity for personal initiation into knowledge still lived on. In the modern educational system, the idea of embodied knowledge in those who teach as well as in those who study is lost. The professors are really not "confessors" but coaches in courses for the acquisition of a knowledge removed from life. The universities and schools practice a schizoid role playing in which an unmotivated, prospect- less but intelligent youth learns to keep up with the general standards of enlight- ened meaninglessness.
In the temporal refraction of enlightenment, we distinguish a biographical and a sociological dimension. Each new generation requires its own time to process in its own rhythm what has already been achieved. But since schizoid culture works toward a depersonalization of enlightenment, an enlightenment without embodied enlighteners, a great big groan issues from modern schools. Its "ap-
84 ? AFTER THE UNMASK1NGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
? Georg Scholz, Industrial Farmers, 1920. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. ) paratus of enlightenment" confronts youth from the position of an opponent. If there were no teachers who desperately made every effort for enlightenment in spite of instruction and who invested their vital energies in the pedagogic process in spite of conditions, scarcely any pupils would still experience what school should be about. The more systematically education is planned, the more it is a matter of accident or luck whether education as initiation into conscious living still takes place at all.
With the sociological breaking of enlightenment in time, it is the "province"- in the concrete as well as metaphorical sense --that resists the impulse of enlight- enment with its inertia. Province means accommodation to repressions and hard- ships that actually no longer exist. Only in the idle motion of habituation and self-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT U 85
repression do they remain effective--unnecessarily. In the age of advanced
jj? ntenment one really feels for the first time how deadly substanceless misery
and how wretched outmoded unhappiness are. The province has taken part in
modernization without participating in liberalization; it has gone along and yet
remained behind. Today this picture is, of course, changing. A relative inversion
in the tendencies of urban and rural consciousness can be distinguished; certain
signs make it clear that a stifling retardation is not the same as an insightful not-
wanting-to-go-further. A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlight-
enment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-
technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion
for centuries. The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phase of our history began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mas- tery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. In the culture of tech- nology, urban imperialisms are realized. Increasingly, voices of considerable theoretical weight--from Toynbee to Wittfogel --have elaborated on a premoni- tion of how the future of urban and industrial civilizations could be called the new 4 province.
The Breaking by the Party
Those who inquire after the political subject of enlightenment become lost in a maze. The split in motivations for enlightenment between liberalism and social- ism, the latter of which in turn branches into authoritarian-Communist, Social Democratic, and anarchist currents, goes back to basic principles. Each party has loudly claimed for itself a special relation, indeed, an intimate identity with en- lightenment and science. Liberalism bears in its very name not only economic freedom but also civil freedom and freedom of thought; social democracy has presented itself for ages now as the party for the rational guidance of social de- velopments; and communism steals the show by presenting itself as the current in which partiality {Parteilichkeit) and insight into truth have become one. Whom should we believe? For those who are still free enough to pose the question, there 's probably no alternative than to resort to one's own reflection, whereby poten- tially a new enlightenment party, that of "one's own opinion," could arise. Those free enough to do this are possibly also free enough to agree with the antiparty impulse of anarchism that attacks all parties as surrogates of the state and accuses them of being mechanisms of stupefaction and apparatuses for recruiting the fatu- ous electorate. The wonderful-sounding dialectical phrase about "truth and par- tiality" thus remains a pipe dream --until one can discover an impartial party that serves universal life interest by intervening in the blind mechanisms of self- destruction.
86 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The Breaking by Sectors
Especially the advanced thrusts of enlightenment that question the fictions of a clear self-consciousness, of nature, and identity are unhesitatingly opposed even today by great social powers that operate with these fictions. This can easily be demonstrated in the case of depth-psychological enlightenment, which became involved in a battle on two fronts with other fractions of enlightenment; the latter performed a thorough job of counterenlightenment on it. On one side, the psy- chology of the unconscious was unrelentingly "disproved" and accused of being mythology by scientism and natural-scientific medicine; on the other side, it was denounced by official Marxism as a symptom of bourgeois irrationalist decadence.
Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter. As soon as proclivities for a party coagulate in identities, so that individuals do not merely support a party but become a party, psychological reflection must inevitably have a decomposing effect on such arti- ficial naivete. It thereby slips into the role of an unwelcome enlightenment. Con- versely, psychological enlightenment puts itself in a bad light when it starts to be- come a Weltanschauung, a school of opinion, an ideology, or even a sect. One sees this in the many pitiful squabbles and dogmatisms of a new psychological orthodoxy as well as in the ossifications and demarcations of a psychologizing subculture. It becomes really scandalous when psychologists --for example, C. G. Jung--through a combination of ambition and naivete have tried to win favor with political currents such as fascism. Instead of providing a psychology of authority and an illumination of political masochism, the leaders of schools of psychology have been inclined to taste the sweetness of authority and to use masochistic mechanisms to their own advantages.
The Break in Intelligence
I just indicated that the alliance of enlightenment with the process of natural- scientific, technical civilization is no longer unambiguous. The philosophy of en- lightenment still hesitates to annul the coerced alliance and to seek a new relation to the sciences. The modern equation of reason and science is too powerful for philosophy - if it does not want to destroy itself--to simply push aside the advan- tages of the sciences. Nevertheless, the signs of the times indicate a twilight of the scientific idols. Since the time of European romanticism, so-called irration- alist currents have repeatedly resisted the process of modern rationalism. The present also is experiencing such a wave of antirationalism in which the motifs of "another kind of reason" combine with each other--motifs of a logic of feelings and mysticism, of meditation and critical self-reflection, of myth and a magical worldview. It would probably be wasted time to try to sort out the grain from the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 87
chaff- Time will tell which impulses survive the fad phase. As soon as American syncretism comes and goes here and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the first titillation of anything goes has worn 0ff perhaps the charms of clarity too will again be valued. In the long run, murky mixtures are unpleasant; where "anything goes," nothing matters anymore, but we have to grit our teeth and bear it.
Beyond the mechanics of pendulum swings between fascination and boredom, enlightenment still has the task of assigning an appropriate place in our culture to the sciences. A prerequisite for this would be the clarification of the relation- ship between types of intelligence--particularly of various opposing kinds of cleverness such as science and wisdom, learnedness and presence of mind.
The distancing of the types of intelligence from each other that in modern rea- son are only illusorily brought together in the unity of rationality, has long been obvious. What Georg Lukacs, for example, attacked as "irrationalism" in modern bourgeois thinking--the "destruction of reason"-contains in its basic impulse a fully justified separation of "another" kind of intelligence from the hegemony of rationalism and natural science. The only bad thing here is that irrationalism from Bergson to Klages took itself much too seriously. It fell over itself with its preten- sions to respectability and struck up the solemn tone of a priest where a great phil- osophical buffoonery would have been just the right thing. In pronounced irra- tionalist literature one often finds a mixture of theorizing melancholy and self-pretension. Still, Bergson did, at least, write about laughter.
The bourgeois compulsion for respectability spoiled the satirical, poetical, and ironic possibilities of irrationalism. Those who see the "Other" should also tell it otherwise. But those who present what they have "grasped" beyond the limits of a narrower rationality, claiming nothing less than validity of the most respecta- ble insights, degrade both the irrational and the rational. Thus, Gottfried Benn struck at the heart of oracle-irrationalism when he said that in Germany thinkers who cannot master their world-pictures linguistically are usually called vi- sionaries.
Respectable conservatism has known much of this for a long time. Under its frequently demagogic wailing about the evils of progress, it has preserved the in- sight that the modern kind of knowledge has little to do with that state of human maturity that is called wisdom by all great teachers. Wisdom is not dependent on the level of the technical mastery of the world; conversely, the latter presupposes the former when the process of science and technology moves toward an insane state of affairs-as we are observing today. With the aid of Buddhist, Taoist, and original Christian, Indian, and American Indian intelligence, no production lines
and no satellites can be built. However, in the modern type of knowledge, that
awareness of life dries up from which the old teachings of wisdom take their inspi- ration, in order to speak of life and death, love and hate, antagonism and unity, individuality and cosmos, manliness and womanliness. One of the most important motifs in the literature of wisdom is a warning against false cleverness, against
88 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
"head" knowledge and learnedness, against thinking in terms of power and arro- gant intellectuality.
Breaking Down Half-Open Doors
In spite of all inhibitions, breaks, and self-doubt in the course of its development, enlightenment has unleashed an enormous potential for reflection. This is un- mistakable even in the present phase of demoralization. The penetration of science, psychology, and schooling into large areas of social life has brought strong means of reflection, especially into the heads of the intelligentsia and state employees. The diffusion of power in the modern state has led to an extraordinary dissemination of the knowledge of power, which simultaneously intensifies the cynicism of the knowledge of power, as sketched earlier, that is, the self-denial of morality and the splitting off of insights that cannot be lived out into a diffuse collective mentality. Here we flesh out our initial thesis: Discontent in our culture appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.
With the diffusion of cynicism to a collective mentality of intelligence in the gravitational field of the state and the knowledge of power, the erstwhile moral foundations of ideology critique collapse. Critics, as Walter Benjamin notes in his aphorism of 1928 (see the Preface), have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. The existence of such models of critique is perceived today as a contribution to the sad complicatedness of relations in the world rather than as an impulse for an existential self-reflection. Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent.
There is, to be concise, not only a crisis of enlightenment, not only a crisis of the enlighteners, but even a crisis in the praxis of enlightenment, in commit- ment to enlightenment. Today, the word "committed" is said with a mixture of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
acknowledgment and indulgence, as if it were a fragile sediment from a younger psychological layer that has to be handled with the utmost care.
It is almost as if our sympathy goes less to those for whom another commits himself or herself than to the commitment itself in its rarity and fragile naivete. Who does not known this from his or her feelings toward the so-called alternative movements? Something similar can be seen in France, where the younger generation of intel- ligentsia, apres Sartre, is experiencing the dissolution of the old foundations of political moralism that constituted leftist identity. Commitment? "Takes place in the ivory tower. The committed sit there actively" (Ludwig Marcuse).
In that the moral foundation of enlightenment is decomposing because the modern state simultaneously demoralizes the enlightened and makes public ser-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 89
vants of them, the perspectives of what was earlier called commitment are becom- ing blurred. When someone tries to "agitate" me in an enlightened direction, my first reaction is a cynical one: The person concerned should get his or her own shit together. That is the nature of things. Admittedly, one should not injure good will without reason; but good will could easily be a little more clever and save me the embarrassment of saying; "I already know that. " For I do not like being asked, "Then why don't you do something? "
Things have been this way now for a long time: The "committed" enlightener breaks down doors that, admittedly, are not completely open, but they also no longer have to be broken down. It can go so far that one knows more about moral conditions as a cynic than as a committed person. Since Erich Kastner, the tone of satire in modern enlightenment is reflectively tinged and hits its mark with a melancholy, coquettish spin, if it still wants to hit the mark at all. Today's jokers are anything but committed, and they can profit from the inflated price of laughter insofar as buffoonery suits the spirit of the times better than does good old nasty satire. The last defenders of ideology critique are inspired buffoons, such as Otto, in whom one finds little sociology but a good deal of mental alertness.
Besides "commitment," and entwined with it, we find in our memory another
recent sediment--the experience of the student movement, scarcely settled, with
its ups and downs of courage and depression. This most recent sediment in the
history of political vitality forms an additional veil over the old feeling that some-
thing ought to be done about this world. The dissolution of the student movement
must interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into real-
ism, of revolt into a clever melancholy, from a grand political denial into a
thousand-faceted, small, subpolitical affirmation, from a radicalism in politics
into a middle course of intelligent survival. I do not really believe in the end of
enlightenment merely because the spectacle has come to an end. When so many
disappointed enlighteners whine today, they are just spitting out all their rage and
sadness, which would hinder them from continuing to propagate enlightenment,
into the spittoon of the public sphere. Only courageous people feel when they are
discouraged; only enlighteners notice when it is getting dark; only moralists can
become demoralized. In a word: We are still here. Leonard Cohen has written
alyrical line that could be the battle song of an enlightenment that has become muted: "Well, never mind: We are ugly, but we have the music" (Chelsea Hotel No. 2).
A German enlightenment intelligentsia does not find itself for the first time in such a twilight state, where the doors are ajar, the secrets aired, the masks half lowered-and where, in spite of this, dissatisfaction still will not be dispelled. In the introduction to Part V, I want to describe the "Weimar symptom" as the tem- porally closest historical mirror in which we can look at ourselves. In the Weimar Republic, the progressive intelligentsia had already reached a stage of reflection m which ideology critique as social game became possible and in which everyone
90 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
could lift the masks from everyone else's face. From this stage of development comes that experience of "total suspicion of ideology," which was discussed so much after the Second World War and which was spoken about so much because one would have really liked to have avoided the serious game of this critique.
If one slips into the umpire's black suit for a moment, one finds a clearly struc- tured playing field with well-known players, established tactics, and typical fouls. Each side has developed certain, almost rigged, moves of critique; the religious criticize the areligious and vice versa, whereby each side has in its repertoire a metacritique of the ideology critique used by the opposing side; the moves in the dialogue between Marxists and liberals are to a large extent fixed, likewise those between Marxists and anarchists as well as those between anarchists and liberals. In this dialogue, the approximate penalty for the anarchists' fouls and the cus- tomary depression of the liberals and the Marxists after the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
length of the sentence is announced are known. One knows pretty well what natural scientists and representatives of the humanities will accuse each other of. Even the ideology cri- tique used by militarists and pacifists on each other threatens to stagnate, at least as far as creative moves are concerned. For ideology critique, the Sartrean film title, The Game Is Over, itself almost half a century old, thus seems apposite.
Marxist Elegy: Althusser and the "Break" in Marx
But enlightenment is and remains unsatisfied. The second major factor in its self- denial is its disappointment with Marxism. A large part of the present-day cynical twilight has its origin in the experiences of what became of "orthodox" Marxist movements, in Leninism, Stalinism, with the Vietcong, in Cuba, and in the Khmer Rouge. In Marxism we experience the collapse of what promised to be- come "the rational Other. " It was the development of Marxism that drove a wedge between enlightenment and the principle of being left-wing, and that wedge can never be taken out. The degeneration of Marxism into the legitimating ideology of hidden nationalist and open hegemonic and despotic systems has ruined the much-celebrated principle of hope and spoiled any pleasure in history, which is in any case difficult. The Left too is learning that one can no longer speak of com- munism as if none existed and as if one could ingenuously begin anew.
I have hinted at the peculiar double structure of Marxian knowledge in the fourth unmasking: It is a composite of emancipative and reifying theory. Reifica- tion (Verdinglichung) is a feature of any knowledge that strives to dominate things (Dinge). In this sense, Marxian knowledge was a knowledge of domination from the start. Long before Marxism was in power anywhere, theoretically or practi- cally, it already behaved tactically in a perfectly realist-political style, as a hegemonic power even before it seized power. Marxism always dictated much too precisely the "correct line. " It has always hot-temperedly annihilated every practical alternative. It has always said to the consciousness of the masses: I am
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 91
your master and liberator, you shall have no other liberator before me! Every lib- erty you take upon yourself from elsewhere is a petit-bourgeois deviation. In rela- tion to other tendencies of enlightenment, Marxism also assumed the position that corresponds to that of a "reflecting surface. " The intellectual student cadre of Marxism behaved like the censorship departments of bourgeois ministries for the interior and for the police, which studied everything produced by non-Marxist enlighteners and censored that which gave even a hint of promoting noncon- formism.
Louis Althusser, earlier the theoretical head of the French Communist Party, created a disturbance more than a decade ago when he claimed to have found a "scientific, theoretical break" in Marx's work, a transition from a humanist ideol- ogy to an antihumanist structural science, which occurred between the early works and the works of maturity. This break, which Althusser, one of the best Marx experts of the present, had theoretically tracked down, seems to have been reincarnated in his own personality. In a way, he became sick because of what he saw. This break became his scientific, political, and existential locus. Because Althusser understood Marx sympathetically, the break in Marx's theory and exis- tence impressed itself with an almost symbiotic depth on his theory and his life. One may venture to say that Althusser was wrecked by this conflict. For years, the contradiction between his philosophical competence and his loyalty to the Communist Party put a strain on his theoretical work as well as on his very exis- tence. Married to a sociologist with "Bolshevist convictions," the conflict between orthodoxy and insight, between loyalty and freedom, pursued him even into his private life. Althusser recognized that, in a certain regard, Marx was no longer Marx and that a break, an ambiguity runs through his work that again and again makes its theoretical and practical validity problematic. In his loyalty to the truth and to the Communist Party, Althusser could no longer remain Althusser. Thus, the world-famous Marxist philosopher, in a "psychotic" attack of mental confu- sion, as they say, murdered his wife on 16 November 1980, perhaps in one of those desperate states in which one no longer knows where the other begins and the ego ends, where the boundaries betwen self-assertion and blind destruction dissolve.
Who is the murderer? Is it Althusser, the philosopher, who killed himself through his wife, the "dogmatist," in order to end the state of divided being that kept the philosopher from really living. Is it the murder of liberation by a prisoner who, as inner self-defense, killed what killed him? Is it a murder committed on Althusser, the famous man, who could destroy his own false identity, his own raise fame, his false signification only by plunging into the cynical sphere of criminality? As is known in psychology, there are suicides who are basically mur- derers of someone else; but there are also murderers who are basically suicides MI that they annihilate themselves in the other.
I will attempt to interpret the Althusserian "break" differently from the way in
92 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
which he himself interpreted it; in doing so I will pay attention to his example and the language of his act. I want to erect a monument to the philosopher by reconstructing his interpretation of Marx --the real break in Marx's theory. It is a monument for a murderer who, with confused violence, made visible a break that cannot be made to disappear by any
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
act of will to mediate it, by any loyalty, or by any fear of separation.
In the Marxian oeuvre there is a rupture, not between an "ideological" and a "scientific" phase but between two modalities of reflection--a kynical-offensive, humanistic, emancipative reflection and an objectivistic, master-cynical reflec- tion, which derides the striving for freedom of others in the style of a functionalist ideology critique. On the one hand, Marx is something of a rebel, on the other, something of a monarch; his left half resembles Danton, his right half is reminis- cent of Bismarck. Like Hegel, who bore a similar double temperament of revolu- tionary and statesman within himself, Marx is one of the greatest dialectical thinkers because in him a fruitful inner polemic between at least two sparring thinker-souls was at work. Althusser's theoretical and existential tragedy starts from his partisanship for the "right" Marx, whom he discovered in his writings after the so-called coupure epistemologique. It is that "realist- political" Marx to whom Althusser attributes an absolutely "scientific" Realtheorie of capital, pu- rified of all humanist sentimentalities; this is the sense of his "structural reading. "
The work of the young Marx is rooted in his impressions of the Hegelian Logic, with which he went into battle against Hegelian idealism itself. Labor and praxis are the key concepts with which one finds one's way out of the casing of the system in a Hegelian way. They hold the hope of a new type of scientific ap- proach, an empiricism that does not fall back behind the summits of philosophical reflection. With these concepts of labor and praxis, which combine in the lofty concept of politics, the left-Hegelian generation went beyond its master. From this spirit grew a powerful, pugnacious social critique that understood itself as "real humanism," as a turning to the "real human being. "
The genius of the young Marx is shown in his not remaining content with a turning from the Hegelian "system" to a post-Hegelian humanist "critique. " His sharpest polemic, therefore, was directed initially against his greatest temptation, which he shared with his generation of intelligentsia, namely, to persist in mere "critical critique. " He sensed, and rationalized this perception, that a powerful critical theory must conquer the world of objects and reality itself in order to con- ceptualize them not only positively but also critically. This impulse was the rea- son, among other things, for his turning to political economy, which he took up in its naive, bourgeois form in order to surpass it with a reflected theory. The in- sipid phrase "learning process" fails to capture the drama of this creative reflec- tion. Marx's thinking traveled the path from the Hegelian system to the critique of political economy, from a contemplative conception of theory to an under- standing of theory as world-mover, from the sphere of ideas to the discovery of
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT Q 93
labor, from abstract to concrete anthropology, from the illusion of nature to the history of the self-creation of humanity. As theory of social emancipation, Marxian knowledge could secure recognition only if, at the same time, it named a mass ego that would recognize the possibility of its freedom in the mirror of this theory. Here, Marx made himself into the historical-logical teacher and pa- tron of the proletariat, which he identified as the predestined pupil of his theory. Through the proletariat, he wanted to become the great liberator by intervening in the course of European history as the teacher of the workers' movement.
Marx, however, stepped over dead bodies at least twice in a way that raises doubts as to his claim to teach and his realism. In Max Stirner and Bakunin I see the most intimate opponents of Marx because they were the theorists whom he could not simply surpass but whom, in order to exclude them, he had to practi- cally annihilate with his critique. For both represented clear logical and objective alternatives to Marx's solutions, Stirner with his question whether and how one can break through "private" alienation, and Bakunin with his question whether and how a way can be found to a future "alienation-free society. " Marx criticized both outright with a practically eviscerative hatred. The famous posthumous Ger- man Ideology, in large part directed against Stirner, contains the most intensive, detailed dispute Marx and Engels ever carried out with a thinker; and the annihila- tion of Bakunin was for Marx a preoccupation that stretched over many years. In Marx's hatred for both, in his scorn and his infinite contempt, an energy was at work that in no way can be explained by temperament and a feeling of competi- tiveness. Both showed him the systematic limits of his own approach -- experiences that he could neither integrate nor simply disregard. Here, elemen- tary and undeniable considerations came into play for which there was no place in Marx's plan and for which no place was to be made. Indeed, moreover, in Stirner, as in other representatives of critical critique and of the "Holy Family," Marx recognized something that was also present in himself, but whose right to exist he had to deny in order to become this Marx. With his right side, with his "realistic," statesmanlike, realist-political, and grand-theoretical side he sup- pressed the left, rebellious, vital, merely "criticistic" side, which, in the others, confronted him as a "position as such. " In his critical annihilation of Stirner and Bakunin, he stepped over his own corpse, so to speak, over the concrete, existen- tial, and in the last instance, "feminine" part of his intelligence. With this part he had revolted, critically and realistically- concretely, against Hegel; now he comes forward as master thinker against this side in its one-sidedness.
Stirner, like Marx, belongs to the "young Germany" generation that, in the cli- ate of Hegelian philosophy, with its subversive training in reflection, had devel- oped an extraordinary sense for everything that "takes place in the head"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
(Feuer- ? ach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, Karl Griin, Heinrich Heine, among others).
Hegel's logic had conquered a space that is neither only being nor only con-
m94 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
sciousness but contains "something of both"; this is expressed in the figure of thought "mediated immediacy. " The magic word of the new logic is "mediation" (Vermittlung). We may translate it as "medium. " Between being and conscious- ness is something in the middle that is both and in which the illusory antithesis of spirit and matter disappears; Marx transposed this vision to his theory of capital.
Let us say it concretely: In people's heads, historically formed programs of thinking and perception are at work that "mediate" everything that moves from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. The human cognitive apparatus is, in a way, an inner relay, a switching station, a transformer in which perceptual sche- mata, forms of judgment, and logical structures are programmed. Concrete con- sciousness is never immediate but is mediated by the "inner structure. " Reflection can assume basically three attitudes to this transmitted inner struc- ture: It can try to escape the inner structure by "deprogramming itself; it can move within the inner structure as alertly as possible; and it can surrender itself as reflection by accepting the thesis that the structure is everything.
We now have to treat these three attitudes. Stirner's idea is simply to throw all alien programming out of one's head. After this total self-purification of the head, a naked, so to speak empty, reflected egoism should remain. If society really has trained "kinks" into my head, then my emancipation, thought through quickly, must presumably consist in my dismantling this alien programming. What is one's own in ego consciousness tries thus to rid itself with a snap of the fingers of what is alien. Stirner aims for a liberation from alienation in one's own interior. What is alien makes itself at home in me; I thus win "myself back by expelling what is alien. For several hundred pages one can read how Marx and Engels got worked up about this basically simple thought. They criticized this neoegotistical position in a devastating way --not morally but epistemologically: as a new self-delusion. They showed that the Stirner egos, those "individuals" who have based their position on nothing and view themselves as their only prop- erty, leap into a new naivete that betrays itself not least of all in its petit- bourgeois, boasting standpoint of "I am the be-all and end-all. " The theoretical anarchism of the nineteenth century reached its first culmination in Stirner. Stirner effected an "existentialist" reduction to pure ego, but in doing this he very naively presupposed the ego as something that simply "exists. " Once I have thrown out of "me" what is alien (society), Stirner believes, then a beautiful ego of my own remains that revels in the "possession" of itself. In radiant naivete, Stirner speaks of the "property" that individuals have in themselves. But one can
only possess what exists in reality. Here, valid reflective experience and confused naivete stand next to each other, separated by a hairbreadth. Existentialist reflec- tion on one's "own" consciousness is as realistic as the transition to the idea of self-property is false. Self-reflection leaves nothing objective that one could possess.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 95
Marx and Engels dismantle this construction down to its atomic components. On wings of contempt, they prepare for themselves a feast of satirical reflection that, as alertly as possible, moves within the inner structure of consciousness. In the destruction of the Stirnerian illusion, however, they destroy more than the op- ponent; they destroy themselves in him. The way they do it, line for line, with intensive logic, meticulous philology, and a cruel pleasure in destruction-- that is more than critique; it is the exorcism of a danger, the elimination of "another possibility. " In fact, Marxism could never shake off the anarchist and existen- tialist shadow that fell on Stirner. Only with Sartre and Marcuse did this shadow again gain a more intensive life in Marxist-inspired thinking.
Marx does not belong to that sort of naive-genius that, like Schelling, "de- velops its thought in public. " The German Ideology remained a private text. It was not published until 1932. Since then, Marx philologists have passed it around like a holy text. In the student movement, it was taken into battle as an antisubjectivis-
5tic weapon-by the "strict" Marxists against the spontaneists and the academic
flower children. In fact, however, there was a good reason for Marx and Engels's discretion regarding their most intensive work in ideology critique. The German Ideology lets the cat out of the bag. One can learn from it that, on the question of subjectivity, Marx and Stirner went off in symmetrically false directions. Both know that human consciousness, as one initially finds it, is "alienated" and must be "appropriated" through patient reflection. Both think in the dialectic of the authentic and the alien; however, both fail to find the middle ground and plunge into exclusive alternative positions. Stirner chose the right, Marx the left path. Stirner believes he can overcome the expropriation of oneself (Enteignung) through an individualist act of purification. In his "adulthood," individuals learn how to expel their
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
inner alien programming so that they have it and do not have it at the same time and thus "keep" it as its free masters and possessors. By surren- dering thoughts and things as their own, they are no longer under their power. In Stirner's thinking, realistic self-reflection and ideological ego-cult flow without clear boundaries into one another. What can be a productive experience of inner distancing from conditioning has become in Stirnerism dogmatically ossified to a new "short-circuited thinking. "
Marx's investigation of class consciousnesses is at its starting point equally realistic. Class consciousnesses, worldviews, and ideologies can indeed be un- derstood as "programming"; they are mediations, formed and forming schemata ? f consciousness, results in a world-historical process of the self-formation of all intellect. This way of seeing opens a path to a fruitful analysis of patterns in con- sciousness that can become free of the curse of naive idealism. With their "in the last instance" dogmatic materialism, however, Marx and Engels deviate from this approach again. They dissolve subjectivity in the historical process. This comes
ut in the harshness and contempt with which Marx treats his "existential" oppo-
ents. In this brutality, the other, master form of reflection begins to stir. Where
96 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The trial against the "Industry Party" in Moscow.
Stirner brought his rebellious, protesting ego out into the public arena, Marxism produced revolutionaries who, with the feeling of supreme slyness and an artful sense for reality, use themselves as means in the historical process. In the clinch with Stirner's false individual, the idea of the false Nobody arises in Marx's theory- those revolutionaries who themselves will become only grim instruments of the fetish: revolution. That is the break Althusser has discerned in the Marxian oeuvre after The German Ideology. Early on, at the latest since the polemic against Stirner, there begins a tendency in Marx's thinking to chain oneself, al- most like Jesuits of the revolution, to the process of historical development, in the belief of being able not only to recognize the development but also to direct it. Marx's theory sets its hope on domination by conceiving of the subject of the theory as a function of development. Through self-reification it believes it can achieve a mastery of history. By making itself into an instrument of a purported future, it believes it can make the future into its own tool.
This schizoid logic of master's cynicism has no historical parallel. Only an ex- tremely highly developed consciousness can deceive itself in such a way. The only thinker whose self-reflection reached similar heights of artful self-denial was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose historical influence is well known.
The philosophically significant pinnacle of this artful self-reification was reached by those courgeous old Communists who, in the Moscow Show Trials, in the face of certain death, falsely confessed to having conspired against "the revolution," a confession that was not merely extorted but possessed an aspect of freedom insofar as the accused, with their confessions, wanted to save the revolu- tion from greater damage than had already been done to it by accusation and exe-
? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 97
cution. The subtlety of this doubling of murder by the judiciary with suicide can- not be grasped with conventional conceptions of "tragedy. " They are murders in which it is clear only in the biological sense who is in fact killing whom. They are murders and suicides within a schizophrenic structure, where the ego that kills can no longer be clearly distinguished from the ego that is killed. Only one thing is certain: In the end the corpses of intelligent human beings are lying on the ground, strangled, shot, beaten. The case of Althusser is probably, among other things, a supplement to the psychopathology of Marxism. It takes place on an in- telligence level of murderous violence on which the revolution devours its cleverest children, not to mention the millions who lost their lives without know- ing exactly what they had to do with this revolution, except perhaps that what was killing them could not be quite the truth.
The young Marx expressed the logical root of these inversions in 1843 in a fully alert sentence that was written before that time of callousness, although it already betrayed a cynical tendency: " . . . communism has seen other socialist doctrines rise up against it not by accident but because it itself is only a particular, one-sided realization of the socialist principle. " (Letters from the Deutsch- Franzosischen Jahrbuchern, Marx to Ruge, September 1843). The word "one- sided" shows the elevated irony of Marxism at play. Those who say "one-sided" know that there are, and must be, at least two sides. Those who then decide for one side deceive themselves and others. Only a knowledge that is consumed by an enormous will to power can want to present conscious one-sidedness as the truth. In doing so, it profoundly denies its own pathos for genuine cognition. Thus, communism is that knowledge of power that tells it all before it has taken over the reins. This, and only this, constitutes, on a philosophical level, its affinity to fascism.
The Feeling toward Life in Twilight
The self-denial of enlightenment is a result of the most recent history, which has
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason.
