Those who study the situation of the peasant popula- tions in the nineteenth century, or even more, that of the growing industrial proletariat and the development of
pauperism
in the age of bourgeois rule (and in addition, the situation of women, servants, minorities, etc.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
According to Flavius
11
Josephus's account {The Jewish War), Jesus was nothing more than one of
numerous messianic critics of the authorities and religious guerrillas who had proclaimed their resistance to Roman domination. From the Roman conquest of Palestine until the collapse of the Bar Kokhba uprising in 135 A. D. , messianism must have been truly epidemic on Jewish soil. The charismatic rebel, Simeon bar Kozibe (Bar Kokhba, son of the stars), like Jesus, had claimed that he was a descendant of David.
With Jesus and the consolidation of the Christ religion, the David tradition was continued in new dimensions. While the Jewish people were being beaten and driven from their homeland and were entering the bitter second half of their history--in which Ahasver might be their model figure rather than David- Christianity continued the Jewish resistance against the Roman Empire on an- other level. At first, Christianity became a significant school of resistance, cour- age, and embodied faith. If it had been then what it is today in Europe, it would not have lasted fifty years. During the period of the Roman emperors, Christians formed the nucleus of inner resistance. To be a Christian once meant not allowing oneself to be impressed by earthly power, and especially not by the arrogant, vio- lent, and amoral Roman god- emperors, whose religious-political maneuvers were all too transparent. Early Christianity may have been helped in this by hav- ing inherited from the Jews that historicizing kynicism that knew how to say to all bearers of power and fame and imperial pretension: We have already seen a dozen of your sort perish: hyenas and almighty time, which obeys only our God, have been gnawing for a long time on the bones of earlier despots. The same fate awaits you. The Jewish view of history thus contains political dynamite: It dis- covers the transitoriness of others' empires. The primary "theoretical" kynical- cynical consciousness (cynical too because in alliance with the more powerful principle, i. e. , here, historical truth and "God") is the historical consciousness: that so many powerful and grandiose empires have decayed into dust and ashes.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 233
In Jewish consciousness, historical knowledge becomes the narration of the downfall of others and of its own miraculous survival. From the Jews, the early Christians inherited a knowledge of what it was like in the hearts of the oppres- sors, a knowledge of the hubris of naked power. In the tenth Psalm, Jewish con- sciousness puts itself in the interior of evil power and eavesdrops on its haughty conversation with itself:
2 Because the wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor, let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire . . .
6 He hath said in his heart, "I shall not be moved, for I shall never be
in adversity. "
The Jewish kynic follows the invulnerability fantasies of military despots into their innermost marrow. There, he then speaks his denial. He will not be among those who praise the powerful rulers. Since that time, despots have to live with this torment. There will always be a group that takes no part in deifying the powerful. This is how the psychopolitical dynamics of the "Jewish question" func- tion. Jewish-kynical consciousness feels on its own beaten and burned skin the violent nature (Gewaltwesen) of glory and splendor. The back that has counted the lashes will, it is true, bow down
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
because that is the smarter thing to do, but there will be an irony in its bowing that drives those hungry for greatness into a rage.
In the tension between hegemonic powers and the oppressed, two positions thus initially present themselves: here, the "splendid" power with its pompous fa- cade; there, the immediate experience slaves have of the violent core of power and of the facade of pomp. A midpoint between the two is established through the political-legal achievements of the hegemonic power, from which it draws its legitimation. At this midpoint--the achievement of law and state--the conscious- ness of the master and the slave can meet. To the extent hegemonic power legiti- mates itself through a good exercise of power, it overcomes its initially violent character and can find its way back into a relative innocence, namely, to exercise the art of the possible in a world of necessities. Where hegemonic power really legitimates itself, it subjects itself to a higher and more universal interest, to the support and continuance of life. For this reason, peace, justice, and protection of the weak are the holy words of politics. Where a hegemonic power can justifia- bly say of itself that it has furthered peace, brought forth justice, and made the protection of the most fragile life its noblest cause, there it begins to overcome its own core of violence and to earn a higher legitimacy. But here more than any- where else, the words must be measured against reality. As a rule, the language
of power changes the meaning of expressions: It calls the postponement of war peace; it says "creation of order" when it suppresses unrest;
12
it boasts about its
234 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social-mindedness when it has handed out alms that are mere window dressing; and it says "justice" when it administers laws. The dubious justice of power is reflected in Anatole France's great sarcastic remark: "The law, in its elevated equality, forbids beggars and millionaires alike to sleep under bridges. "
The political original sin, the bloody, violent, and extortionary beginnings of
domination, can only be overcome through legitimation in the sense just de-
scribed and purified through broad assent. If this fails, the violent core of
hegemonic powers resurfaces; unveiled. This occurs continually in legalized
form through the exercise of the punitive force that intervenes whenever the law
of hegemonic powers is broken. Punishment is thus the Achilles' heel of the legal-
13
ity of violence.
at the same time something of their essence and his or her own; their core of vio- lence and his or her attitude toward it. Just as cowards have to hide themselves in the mass of hesitaters, the subver- sive consciousness of slaves keeps itself alive by learning the language of slaves (of acknowledgment, of the illusion of legality and of glorification) so well that the ironic tone is not immediately perceived. The Roman Petronius, if tradition portrays him accurately, is supposed to have been a genius at servile irony. In his encounter with the arrogance of a Nero, he carried the art of scathingly ironic flattery to an extreme. He knew how to serve his poisoned veneration to his maj- esty in such sweet compliments that power could not restrain itself from swallow- ing them. Of course, for the ironic, self-aware patrician in the age of the em- perors, there remained in the end no other way out than to consciously die. This savoir mourir, which knowingly calculates its own death as the possible final price for freedom, links the disempowered but proud Roman patriciate with Christianity, which over the centuries had grown into the greatest provocation to the caesars. With it emerged a consciousness of existential sovereignty that, even more than Stoic ethics, neutralized the question whether one stood at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom of society. Under its sign, slaves could become more fearless of death than the masters. The power of embodiment in early Christianity was so strong that in the end, it won the greatest power structure in the ancient world over to its side. It had its roots in the consciousness of freedom that emerges when the naive veneration of power ceases. To never again be forced to respect a mere worldly, external, violent power--this became the kynical core in the Christian attitude toward hegemonic power. Friedrich Schlegel was one of the first modern thinkers to again achieve a clear picture of the kynical-cynical quality of radically embodied Christianity. In his Athenaeumsfragmente of 1798 he noted: "If the essence of cynicism consists in . . . having an absolute con- tempt . . . for all political splendor . . . , then Christianism is probably noth-
14
ing other than universal cynicism. "
The truth of this thesis is shown in the way the splendid Roman state met and
reflected the kynical-Christian challenge. At first, the Roman state had no alterna-
Anyone who observes hegemonic powers as they punish learns
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 235
tive than to suffocate with brutal force the self-aware light that irritated it, as demonstrated by the waves of persecution of Christians over the centuries. When these were unsuccessful, and the power of embodiment in the new faith grew with repression, there occurred, after three centuries of friction, a turn in world his- tory: Imperial power submitted to Christian kynicism in order to tame it. This is the significance of the Constantinian turning point. With it, the Christianization of power began--and herewith, viewed structurally, the refraction of the kynical impulse into cynicism. Since Constantine, the history of nation-states in Europe is essentially the history of Christianized state-cynicism that, after this epoch- making change of positions did not cease to dominate and afflict political reflec- tion in the form of a schizoid masters' ideology. This, by the way, is (initally! ) not a theme that would require a psychology of the unconscious. The divisions discussed here run through consciousnesses on the surface. That power cannot become pious appears to those ruling, not in nocturnal bad dreams but rather in their daily calculations. There is no unconscious conflict between the ideals of faith here and the morality of power there, but, from the beginning, a limited faith. With this, the cynicism of hegemonic power counterposes itself to the kyni- cal impulse of oppositional power. The former already begins as doublethink.
Christian doublethink reached its first peak in the Augustinian philosophy of history that, despairingly realistic and confronted with the decayed monster of the Christianized Roman Empire, saw no other way out than to make a comprehen- sive program out of the splitting of reality (and implicitly of morality). Thus arises the fatally realistic doctrine of the two realms (de duabus civitatibus), the divine realm (civitasf! ] dei) and the temporal realm (civitas terrena), which are conspicuously embodied in the Catholic church and the Roman Empire. The tem- poral organization of the church, as an appendage of the divine spheres, reaches down to earth. With this, dualisms are described from which there has been no definitive break either in the history of European nation-states or in philosophical thought concerning the state. Even in the twentieth century, state and church stand in a conflict-laden relationship--as accomplices and contracting parties. The thousand-year-old wrangle between state and church provides the picture book of pugilism illustrating all positions, holds, throws, hugs, and scissors that are possible between two wrestlers whom fate has wound inseparably together. Not even on the surface can the Christianized state organize itself as a unified en- tity (aside from Byzantinian Christianity). According to its inner and outer struc- ture, it has long since been condemned to being two-faced and to splitting truth. Thus a double system of law (church law, state law), a double culture (spiritual, worldly) and even a double politics (church politics, state politics) develop. In these doublings is hidden something of the secret of the rhythm of Western Euro- pean history, which produced the bloodiest, most disruptive, most conflict- laden, but at the same time, the most creative and "fastest" history that has ever taken place in such a relatively short time on such a small continent. The kynical-
236 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
cynical logic of conflict is one of the forces or "laws" that drive the tumultuous process of the history of European states, classes, and cultures to its unequaled brilliance. Almost from the beginning, everything is "doubled" here-a mighty potential for antitheses ripe for execution, for embodied powers of reflection, and for armed convictions.
Here, we do not want to get into historiography. A few catchwords may illus- trate the tensions just described as they developed. As is well known, the bishopric of Rome, with its provincial dependencies, was the only parastate struc- ture that survived the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Around 500 AD. , Christianity conquered the new Northern European group of powers when Regimus of Reims succeeded in christening the Frankish Merovingian chief, Chlodwig (Clovis). For this reason, even today, the French church proudly calls itselffille ainee de I'eglise (the eldest daughter of the church). That Chlodwig him- self was incidentally also one of the wiliest and most bestial and power- hungry figures of early European history -- surely of the same stuff as a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane, only with lesser means --may be taken as a hint of what could be expected from Christianized monarchical powers. To live with a schism in one's head became the fundamental problem of Christian domination. Moreover, as a last consequence, the doctrine of Christianity had to split itself, namely, into a doctrine for "half and "whole" Christians, for split and intact Christians. This tendency, of course, had already begun in the times of persecution, when Chris- tian communities started to polarize into religious elites--saints, martyrs, priests --and "ordinary" Christians.
The schizoid development of Christianity can be explained essentially through three great movements: first through the transformation of religion from a way of life for communities to the metaphysical dress rehearsal of ruling powers, that is, through the structuring of religious politics; second, through the establishment of spiritual governments in the form of papal, episcopal, and monastical (abbies, priories) landed dominions; and third, through the forced and superficial Chris- tianization of the broad population. The kynical core of Christianity also presents itself in a threefold way, when, still under the sign of Christian domination, it resists mere domination and tries to live against the splits: first, in the great orders of Western monasticism, which, since Benedict of Nursia, carried on the synthe- sis of prayer and labor, and later
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
too in the contemplative and ascetic movements of the high Middle Ages: second, in the heretics who unrelentingly filed suit for the embodiment of the Christian commandment to love and frequently became martyrs in the "Christian" persecution of Christians; third, in the attempts of some Christian monarchs to bridge the tensions between the worldly "office" and Chris- tian doctrine through a princely humanitarianism (we will leave aside the question of the extent to which this could succeed). Charlemagne cynically and brutally pursued his Frankish-imperialist politics in the name of Christianity, for which reason he is rightly called the Father of the Occident. The Ottonians and Salians
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 237
eveloped the business of political rule by means of churchmen so thoroughly that under them the bishoprics became the supporting struts of German imperial poli- tics (cf. the imperial program of the high Middle Ages, the Christian and German- ically transformed idea of empire and emperor, and the political duels between the monarchy and the papacy). The eight great European crusades can probably be understood only against this background. What happened between 1096 and 1270 under the concept of croisade constituted an attempt of the Christianized feudal dominions to act out the masters' cynicism of their own consciousness, which had become unbearable. After centuries of Christianization, the religious commandments had created a matrix of internalizations in the ruling military-aristocratic strata that then inten- sified the contradiction between the Christian commandment to love and the feu- dal ethics of war to the point of bursting. The unbearable pressure of the contradiction --which had become internalized--explains the violence with which, for centuries, Europeans could pour their energies into the pathological idea of the crusade. The Crusades-- proclaimed to be holy wars --were sociopsy- chological explosions of a proto-Fascist quality. They channeled the energies that had been blocked in the conflict between two mutually negating ethics in the in- dividual and collective soul. In the holy war, the opposition of a religion of love and an ethics of heroism that could not be lived out turned into a call that could be lived out: God wills it. In this fiction, enormous tensions were discharged --to the astonishment of a posterity that can discover neither military nor economic nor religious reason in the unspeakable torments and shows of bravado in the Cru- sades. The idea of the crusade offers (besides the persecution of witches, anti- Semitism and fascism) one of the strongest examples of how an officially proclaimed, collective mania saved countless individuals, in whom the conflict between religious love and militarism churned, from going privately mad. Since 1096, the holy war functions in Western civilizations as a safety valve. Under the pressure of their own inner contradictions and madnesses, people have since then sought external, diabolical enemies and have waged the holiest of wars against them. The psychogram of Christian civilizations carries this--proto-Fascist--risk within it: In times of crisis, when the unlivability of opposed ethical program- mings comes to be felt more acutely, a moment regularly arrives when the pres- sure explodes. That the persecution of the Jews in the Rhineland began simultane- ously with the Crusades underlines the interconnections between the various cultural-pathological phenomena. Jews, heretics, witches, Antichrists, and Reds are all victims of a primarily inner formation of fronts that emerge during highly schizoid periods of pressure, when the irrationality of the whole society seeks an outlet for contradictory ethics.
In addition to channeling Christian masters' cynicism into the Crusades, the Middle Ages showed a second way out of the tension: A semisecularized courtly sphere was set up in which the ethos of the aristocracy and the military could be 238 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
indulged in with a free conscience. The early Arthurian legend was nourished by the momentum released by this discovery; chivalrous romances like the chansons de geste pretty clearly gave the heroic ethos priority over the Christian ethos. Here, chivalry removed itself a couple of steps from the "chains" of the Christian commandment to be loving and peaceful by indulging in an autonomous, worldly celebration of skill in the use of weapons, courtly festivity, and a refined erotics, not caring what the priests had to say about it: the culture of tournaments, feasts, hunting, gluttonous banquets, chivalrous love. Aristocratic hedonism played a significant role into the nineteenth century by protecting the worldly joy in living from the masochistic aura of Christian monasteries. He who slew the most oppo- nents and conquered the most beautiful woman was considered the grandest fel- low. Even Nietzsche, in his anti-Christian song of praise for the "blond beast" and powerful figures, had in mind such secularized, rowdy aristocrats, later condottieri-the type of men who act, take what they desire, and can be "splen- didly" ruthless. The courtly neoheroism, however, achieved only an illusory emancipation from Christian ethics. In a more sublime way, Arthur's knights were also, of course, Christian knights; this is obvious in the case of Percival. With the myth of the knight in search of the Holy Grail, the Christianization of the military is extended into metaphorical and allegorical spheres and ultimately stripped of reality in a pure mysticism of chivalry that absorbs combat into spiritual dimensions. During the late Burgundian period, chivalrous culture resembled a literature living itself out.
In the symbolic haze of Christianized ideologies of the empire, the knight and the state during the late Middle Ages, which hovered over the incessant feudal, city, church, and state wars of Europe, Machiavelli's ideas must have had the cleansing effect of a storm. Machiavelli's Prince has always been read, especially in bourgeois times, as the greatest
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
testament of the cynical technique of power. As an insurpassable declaratory oath of political unscrupulousness, it was in- dicted on moral grounds. What religion fundamentally and unconditionally condemns --murder--is here openly recommended as political means. Of course, over the centuries, many have employed this means. This is not what is innovative in Machiavelli's doctrine. But that someone now comes forth and advocates it openly-that creates a new moral standard that can be sensibly treated only under the concept of cynicism. Masters' consciousness arms itself for a new round and in doing so checks the supplies. Someone was almost bound to come along and express the new standard unmistakably, cheekily, unrestrainedly, clearly, etc. The act of expressing, even to the present day, is considered more scandalous than what is expressed.
Machiavelli's political "amoralism" presupposes the unending tradition of war and the feudal and political chaos of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centu- ries. As a historian, Machiavelli saw that the last remnants of legitimation had been torn from the splendid gown of the Christian state, since no ruler was any
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 239
longer in a position to fulfill, even illusorily, the most primitive tasks of state -- securing peace, upholding the law, protecting life--in the never-ending confusion of warring minor powers. Here, the thought of a central power presses to the fore since it would be in a position to end the chaos of individual powers and to again make civil and state life possible. The ideal prince of such an imaginary, still nonexistent central power would, without regard for the constraints and intrica- cies of Christian morality, have to learn to exercise power radically as an effective force of law, peace, and protection within a homogenized state territory. Politi- cally, Machiavelli, with his cynicism, saw decidedly more clearly than the authorities of the land, empire, and town in the late Middle Ages who simply went on running things with a brutality cloaked in Christianity. The Florentine's prince theory posits for the statesman a duty to unconditional hegemonic power whereby the disposal over every means is automatically implied. Such a cynical technology of power can be valid only in situations in which the state, the political vessel for survival, has been smashed and the central power, if it still exists at all, has fallen into the role of a whipped dog with which a pack of brutal, greedy, and chaotically quarreling minor powers play their game. In such a situation, Machiavelli's cyni- cism can speak the truth. For a minute in world history, this is how a cheeky, sovereign spirit sounds who expresses precisely the right point in amoral tones and can speak for more general vital interests. To be sure, this cynical conscious- ness of power is already so reflexively convoluted and precariously unrestrained that this voice cannot be readily understood, neither from above nor below, nei- ther by those who wield power nor by the general population. A residue of uneasi- ness remains when a princely sovereignty is described here that does something "good" for itself and for the nation's people as a whole by risking, beyond good and evil, the most infamous crimes against individuals.
One might think that the politics of the absolutist states and territories in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe fulfilled Machiavelli's ideas with a grain of salt. The absolutist state indeed set itself above the quarreling minor powers, above regional sovereigns, and especially above the religious parties that were bloodily entangled in one another. (The "politicians" were initially those who tried to maneuver tactfully and to remain relatively neutral vis-a-vis the war- ring religious camps. ) But scarcely established as new, relatively stable hegemonic powers, the absolutist states began to present themselves in a cloud of self-adulation. They too did their utmost to veil their core of violence in a gran- diose rhetoric of legality and God's grace. However, no amount of boastful claims on God's grace can make critical subjects completely forget that in reality it is also a domination by the grace of murder and manslaughter as well as oppression. No modern state has completely succeeded in masking its core of violence, as the Uto- pia of legality dreams of doing. The first great resistance against the modern (ab- solutist) state was borne, sensibly enough, by the former free high nobility and the landed aristocracy that feared the court's sovereignty-that is, a group of peo-
240 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Lorenzo Leonbuono, Allegoria della Fortuna. This allegorical politology shows Tyrannis (power) surrounded by Envy, Ignorance, Suspicion, Ungratefulness, Dissimulation.
pie who, because they were themselves all too arrogant, clearly perceived the ar- rogance of the central power. That could almost be written up as an unintended, "popular" success of Machiavelli, who revealed the trade secrets for all modern central powers. The cynical amoralism of hegemonic powers can no longer be dismissed. Since then, states have lived in a cynical twilight of semilegitimation and semipresumption. A relative excess of violence, oppression, and usurpation accompanies even those states most concerned about legitimacy and the rule of law. Under even the most solemnly sworn achievement of peace by a state, its military undergarments can be seen (modern people say, as did the ancients, "Si vispacempara bellum" [If you want peace, arm for war]). Even in the best legal system, raw facts like class privileges, misuse of power, caprice, and inequalities pierce through time and again. Behind the juridical fictions of the free exchange of goods, free labor contract, and unregulated prices, inequalities in power and extortion come to light on all sides. Under the most sublime and free forms of aesthetic communication, the voices of social suffering and cultural
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
barbarities
? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 241
still cry out. (In this respect, Walter Benjamin's statement holds: There is no evi- dence of culture that is not simultaneously evidence of barbarism. )
Since the eighteenth century, the political atmosphere in Central Europe has been rife with "open secrets. " Partly discreetly, in a private or secret setting, partly in the form of an open publicistic aggression, the secrets of power are now given away. Power is once again supposed to answer to morality. The origin of absolutism and its political wisdom, which was based on the prince's capability to suppress minor war and religious massacre, has here long since sunk into the dim past. Convinced that it would handle power in a morally unobjectionable way, if it only had power, the political- moral critique of the eighteenth century resisted absolute "despotism. " A new social class, the bourgeoisie, now made it- self, under the name of the people, a candidate for the assumption of power ("commoners," the "Third Estate," etc. ). The French Revolution, in its regicidal phase, carried a government of the "people" to the summit of the political system. However, what had made the revolution in the name of the "people" established itself in the following era as the bourgeois aristocracy, as an aristocracy of finance, culture, and entrepreneurship; moreover, through marriage, it was inter- woven a hundredfold with the older hereditary nobility. It could not be long be- fore this new stratum of masters, which called itself the people and cited the sov- ereignty of the people as its legitimating principle, experienced the contradictions of ruling for itself. For those who use the people for legitimation call forth the people and invite them to take an active interest in the machinations that are em- ployed in their name and against them.
The contradictory nature of the Christianized state now repeats itself, on a higher historical level, in the contradictions of the bourgeois state, which bases itself on the sovereignty of the people and makes the authorities dependent on universal elections (or makes it appear so). For, just as little as the Christian "state" in the Middle Ages realized the Christian ethics of love, reconciliation, and free fraternity could the modern "bourgeois" states convincingly represent their maxims ("freedom, equality, fraternity, solidarity") or even the vital in- terests of the broad masses.
Those who study the situation of the peasant popula- tions in the nineteenth century, or even more, that of the growing industrial proletariat and the development of pauperism in the age of bourgeois rule (and in addition, the situation of women, servants, minorities, etc. ) -- those who do this must notice that a garbled and truncated concept of the people underlies the legitimating appeal to the people.
At this point, socialist movements become possible and necessary. They de- mand that whatever happens in the name of the people should also happen through and for the people. Those who base their authority on the people must also "serve the people," to start with by not involving them in those murderous "people's wars" that were typical of that age when bourgeois or feudal-bourgeois classes
242 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ruled "in the name of the people"; and ending by allotting them a just proportion of the wealth they produce through their own labor.
In the secular conflict of the socialist movements with, let us say, the "bour-
15
geois" nation-state,
political consciousness were perpetrated that to a large extent govern the twen- tieth century. Both are late, complex forms of cynical consciousness. The first is what we call fascism. It goes so far as to confess in a relatively unabashed way its allegiance to a politics of pure violence. In a cynical manner, it simply dis- penses with the effort of legitimation by openly proclaiming brutality and "holy egoism" to be political necessities and historical-biological laws. Hitler's contem- poraries found him to be a "great orator," because, among other reasons, he began to articulate with a clear tone of naked realism that which had displeased the Ger- man temperament for a long time and that which it had wanted to do away with in accordance with its narcissistic and brutal ideas of order, namely, the hopeless Weimar parliamentarianism, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, etc. , and in par- ticular the "guilty" ones and the troublemakers-- socialists, Communists, trade unionists, anarchists, modern artists, gypsies, homosexuals, but above all the Jews, who had to bear the brunt of it all for being the intimate enemy and univer- sal projection figure. Why precisely them? What is the meaning of this uniquely malicious animosity? Through the mass murder of the Jews, the Fascists sought to smash the mirror that the Jewish people, by their mere existence, held up to Fascist arrogance. For the Fascist, the heroically arrogant Nobody, must have felt that no one saw through him more than did the Jews, who by virtue of their
tradition of suffering, almost as if by nature stand in ironic juxtaposition to every superior power. The central figures of German Fascism must have sensed that their arrogant thousand-year Reich would never be able to believe in itself as long as there remained in a corner of their own consciousness the memory that this pretention to power was a mere
pose. It was the Jews who reminded the Fascists of this. Anti-Semitism betrayed the kink in the Fascists' will to power.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This power could never become so great that it would overcome the kynical-Jewish denial of it. "The impudent Jew" became the catchword for beating, stabbing, and murder- ing (Schlag-, Stick-, und Mordwort) under fascism. Out of its legacy of resigned resistance, covered over by apparent accommodation, modern Judaism radiated such an intense negation of the arrogance of power into the center of Fascist con- sciousness that the German Fascists, bent on their own grandiosity, built extermi- nation camps in order to eliminate what stood in the way of their presumptuous- ness. Did not these people live with the melancholy knowledge that all messiahs, since time immemorial, had been false? How could the German messiah out of the Austrian night-asylum, who let himself be celebrated as the returned Bar-
barossa from Kyffhauserberge, believe in his own mission as long as he himself looked over his shoulder with the eyes of the "evil Jew," who "undermines every-
two new turnings and polemical-reflexive convolutions of
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 243
thing"? No will to power can endure the irony of the will to survive this power
16
too.
To be sure, it is inadmissible simply to characterize the Fascist state of the
twentieth century as the typical representative of the modern, "bourgeois" state based on the sovereignty of the people. Nevertheless, fascism develops one of the latent possibilities of the "bourgeois" people's state. Its rampant antisocialism makes it clear that there is in fascism a political phenomenon of disinhibition, namely, a master-cynical defensive reaction against the impudent socialist de- mand to let the people have what they were promised, what is due to them. Fas- cism, it is true, also wants "everything for the people," but first it swindles through its false concept of the people: the people as monolith, as a homogeneous
17
mass that obeys a single will ("One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer").
With this,
liberal ideology is given a good, swift lesson. Individual freedoms, individual will? Individual opinion (Eigensinn)? Nonsense! And this nonsense is all the more annoying the further "down" it appears. Fascism realizes the tendency of the "bourgeois" state to push through, with the "necessary force," the particular "in- terests of the whole" rather than individual interests. In doing this it distinguishes itself through its unrestrained brutality. For this reason, it could occur to some substantial non-Fascist interest groups with political influence (in the economy and parliament) to support the Fascists when they seized state power and to think of them perhaps as the new broom with which disruptive "individual" interests (down below) could be thoroughly swept away. Were there really people who were cynical enough to believe that they could buy off Hitler and his cynical party of brutality? (One of them -- Thy ssen--in fact wrote memoirs under the title / Paid
nHitler. ) The Fascist state, with its stifling confusion of capital and folk ideology,
idealisms and brutalities deserves a unique philosophical predicate: the cynicism of cynicism.
The second complicated convolution of modern political consciousness oc- curred in recent Russian history. There seems to be a tendency for the militance and radicalness of socialist movements to develop proportionally to the level of oppression in a country. The more powerful a workers' movement was able to become in Europe, especially in Germany --corresponding to the real growth of the proletariat in the process of industrialization --the more established ("bour- geois") it presented itself in its average political behavior, the more it trusted in a gradual victory over its opponents, the forces of the late-feudal and bourgeois state. Conversely, the more powerful and unconquerable a despotic-feudal state power really was, the more fanatically it was confronted by the "socialist" opposi- tion. One might try to express it in the following way: The riper a country was for the insertion of socialist elements into its social order (high development of the productive forces, high degree of employment of wage labor, high degree of organization of "proletarian" interests, etc. ), the more calmly the leaders of the workers' movements waited for their chance. The strength and weakness of the
244 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social democratic principle was always its pragmatic patience. Conversely, the
19
less ripe
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unrelentingly and successfully radical socialism knew how to place itself at the head of subversive movements.
If there is a law governing the logic of struggle that says that in long conflicts opponents assimilate each other, then this law has been substantiated in the conflict between the Russian Communists and the czarist despots. What was played out between 1917 and the XXth Party Congress must be understood as the cynical and ironical testament of czarism. Lenin became the testamentary execu- tor of a despotism whose representatives had possibly been extinguished, but not its procedures and inner structures. Stalin raised the traditional despotism to the technological level of the twentieth century, in a way that would have made any Romanov blanch. If, under the czars, the Russian state was already a much too tightly fitting shirt for its society, under the Communist party it became a real straitjacket. If under czarism a tiny group of the privileged had held an enormous empire terroristically under control through their apparatus of power, after 1917, it was a tiny group of professional revolutionaries who, riding the wave of disgust with the war and the hatred the peasants and proletariat had for "those at the top," overthrew Goliath.
But was Leon Trotsky not, as a Jew, the inheritor of an ancient tradition of resistance and self-assertion against arrogant power? Trotsky had to let himself be banished and murdered by his colleague, who had become the Goliath. Is not in Stalin's murder of Trotsky the same cynical reply of presumptuous hegemonic power at work as in Fascist genocide? In both cases it is a matter of the revenge of presumptuous force on those whom it knows will never respect it, but rather for all time will cry out to the bugaboo: Legitimate yourself or you will be over- powered! In Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution was hidden something of the knowledge that political force must justify itself every time it is used in order to differentiate itself from criminality. Power must prove that it is a force for peace, law, and protection within its territory in order to make possible a new abundance of autonomous life. The idea of a permanent revolution is not an appeal for con- tinual chaos but stands rather as a code for the Jewish consciousness that every mere arrogance of state will be humbled--even if that means by being reminded of its crimes for as long as it exists. If Russian resistance even today expresses itself in the language of Christian and human rights, it does so because the process of . ^//-liberation in Russia came to a halt at that point where it had arrived be- tween February and the Red October of 1917: the demand for human rights as the universal formula of bourgeois freedoms. A country that wants to leap over the "liberal phase" will, when it jumps from despotism to socialism, land back in despotism again. The Russian people let themselves be made into the tools of a future that never wanted to arrive and that, after all that has happened, can no longer come in the way it was promised. It has sacrificed its rights to life and its
a society was for socialism (thought of as postcapitalism), the more
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 245
demands of reason for the present --in an act of orthodox masochism and scared confessional torment--on the altars of consumption of distant generations. It has exhausted its vital energies in the race to catch up to the madness of consumption and Western weapons technology.
As far as the real socialist apparatus of state is concerned, most observers as- sure us that ideologically it has been in the meantime totally drained. Everyone feels the gulf between the phraseology of the Leninist tradition and everyday ex- periences, particularly those who are forced to speak this phraseology because of their position. The world falls into two separate dimensions. One reckons everywhere with a split reality. Reality begins where the state and its terminology end. The conventional concept of "lie" does not adequately describe the situation in the East with its floating, schizoid diffusions of reality. For everyone knows that the relation between the "words" and the "things" is disrupted, but without control through public discussion, the disruption establishes itself as a new nor- mality. People therefore no longer define themselves in terms of socialist values and ideals; rather their definitions proceed from the lack of any alternative or es- cape from what is really given, that is, from a "socialism" that one endures like an evil, together with its radiantly true, but unfortunately only rhetorical, side. If cynicism--according to the prototype of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor-- can turn into tragedy, then it does so here, where the word "socialism," which every- where else in the world delineates a hope for people to become the masters of their own lives, has frozen into a symbol of futility. This represents a cynical speech disturbance of epochal proportions. Even from the outside it is obvious that the politics of the socialist powers no longer holds any hope of socialism whatsoever. In Marxist-Leninist terminology, the East exemplifies naked hegemonic politics, and one hesitates to laugh or hiss only because one cannot know what would hap- pen when the emperor notices that he has been walking naked across the street for a long time now. The other also has long been this way, but what will happen when it becomes known? Why has the greatest military power in the world been built up in order to protect a Active otherness?
If we try to imagine what a Machiavelli at the end of the twentieth century would say after a careful study of the political situation, it would probably be a cynical piece of advice to the super powers to declare with unscrupulous openness the bankruptcy of the systems on both sides, first, to motivate each to aid the other, second, to move their politically tired subjects to a great offensive of inven- tive self-help, and third, because the bankruptcy has probably in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fact come about. As a good positivist, Machiavelli would observe that a majority of the so-called political problems around the year 2000 are "illusory problems," stemming from the antagonism between two power blocs that confront each other because one of them tried to organize a social system that bypasses capitalism without having ever really known it; the other is a brittle, old, "overripe" capitalism that cannot go beyond itself because the house named "socialism" into which it could move
246 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
is already occupied. Accordingly, the competition between East and West is- Machiavelli would recite this with his well-known dry malice--neither a produc- tive competition between powers in the usual sense nor a classic hegemonic rivalry, but rather an aborted conflict of a complicated type. "Socialism" has be- come the chief hindrance to capitalism's transition to it; at the same time, the capitalism of the West, "nailed down" in this way, is its own chief hindrance to an open joining with systems in the East. Thus, while the East systematically lives beyond its means by pretending to be socialism, the West systematically does not live up to its potential because it has to formulate its ideas of the future defen- sively; namely, under no circumstances does it want this socialism--which is un- derstandable because no system can take what it has long since surpassed as its goal. For capitalism, a disguised and crippled state capitalism of the Eastern type cannot be an idea for the future.
If we want to resolve the conflict, we first must have a precise understanding of this uniquely paradoxical type of conflict. On this point Machiavelli would con- cur with the views of his colleague Marx, who provided the initial steps for a
20
Universal (historical-political) Polemic.
lows us to differentiate between conflicts based on rivalry between similar sys- tems and conflicts based on evolutionarily dissimilar systems, differing from each other in the degree of their development. In the latter case, the conflict is between the less developed and the more developed system whereby the latter necessarily grows out of the former. Ideally, the conflict between capitalism and socialism is of the latter kind. Seen logically, it can only be a conflict of overcoming in which the old resists the new, even though the latter undeniably emerges out of the former. The new becomes necessary when the old has become a fetter. This is precisely what Marx assures us of concerning the essence of fully developed capitalism: Once it has first become completely developed, it becomes itself a bar- rier to the human productivity that it had previously impelled. This barrier must thus be lifted: socialism. Socialism, on all levels, releases human productivity from its restrictive capitalist conditions, i. e. , above all from capitalist property relations. If we now observe what presents itself today as the conflict between capitalism and socialism, it can be seen at once that this is in no way the conflict between the old and the new studied by Marx but is instead a conflict based on the rivalry between two empires. Thus nothing new under the sun? What is new arises through the turning of this rivalry about its own sociological and historical axis. The Marxist attempt to guide history through socioeconomic insight has led to a complete distortion of historical perspectives on the future as a whole. The claims to control the history of the system, instead of letting it take its (known) course, has brought it drastically out of step. For indeed the future of capitalism is not an eternally new capitalism, but rather something grows out of it and out of its achievements that comes after it, overcomes it, inherits it, and will make it into prehistory. In a word, it makes possible its own ascent into a postcapital- This Marxian Universal Polemic al-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 247
ism, and if we call this socialism, then what this means should now be clearly enough defined from all points of view: after-capitalism, grown out of an overripe capitalism.
Now one must not dream that one could "force" the development simply be- cause one has recognized these interconnections. What gave Lenin the right to believe or want to believe that Russia offered a case for the application of this Marxist theory of development and revolution will remain a puzzle. The puzzle lies not in Lenin's authentic revolutionary motivations but in the way in which he forced the application of a Western political-economic theory on a semi-Asiatic, scarcely industrialized, agrarian empire. I believe there can be no other answer: Here was an absolute will to revolution in search of a halfway suitable theory, and when it became evident that the theory was not really appropriate due to the lack of the real preconditions for its application, a compulsion to falsify, reinter- pret, and distort arose out of the determination to apply it. In Lenin's hands, Marxism became a theory of legitimation for an attempt to violently force reality to a point at which, later, the preconditions for the application of Marxian theory would be given, namely, in late-capitalist relations that would thus be ripe for revolution. How? Through forced industrialization. To the present day, the So- viet Union is in search of the causes of the Second Revolution of 1917. It would like, in a sense, to provide "after the fact" the necessity for a socialist revolution and, if all signs do not deceive us, it is on the best road for doing just that. For it is there, as in scarcely any other country, that, in Marx's formulation, the rela- tions of production
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
have become a fetter to the productive forces. If this incon- gruity provides the general formula for a revolutionary tension, then it is given here in an exemplarily crass form.
What in the current world situation is a conflict within the system presents it- self in an absurd way as a conflict between two systems. At the same time, this externalized conflict between the systems has become the main fetter to the libera-
21
tion of human productivity.
two mystified mystifiers. By means of a paranoid politics of armament, two real illusory opponents force themselves to maintain an imaginary system difference solidified through self-mystification. In this way, a socialism that does not want to be capitalism and a capitalism that does not want to be socialism paralyze each other. Moreover, the conflict confronts a socialism that practices more exploita- tion than capitalism (in order to hinder the latter) with a capitalism that is more
22
socialist than socialism (in order to hinder the latter).
Universal Polemic, Machiavelli would conclude that the developmental conflict has been neutralized by an externalized, distorted hegemonic conflict. Two giants of production expend enormous amounts of their socially produced wealth to so- lidify militarily a demarcation of systems that is basically untenable.
Thus, as was said, at the end of the twentieth century, Machiavelli would prob- ably recommend a general declaration that the systems are bankrupt. This decla-
The so-called system conflict takes place between
In the spirit of the Marxian
248 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ration must precede so-called disarmament. For what causes the systems to arm is the idea that they are fundamentally opposed and that they each want something quite different that must be defended at all costs. Relaxation of tension through disarmament--that is yet again one of those fatally dangerous mystifications that see everything in inverted order. Relaxation of tension can only happen as an un- cramping from within, that is, as insight into the fact that the only thing we have to lose is the unbearable, armed illusion of a difference between systems.
Perhaps Machiavelli would again write a small pamphlet on the art of govern- ing, this time not under the title The Prince but under the heading On the Weak State. Posterity would doubtless again agree that this brochure is a scandal. Machiavelli perhaps would not have entirely stripped off his Florentine human- ism and thus would write his treatise in the form of a dialogue between two partners --David and Goliath. A passage from it might read as follows:
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one. And you also maintain that it's true? Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent. Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now.
11
Josephus's account {The Jewish War), Jesus was nothing more than one of
numerous messianic critics of the authorities and religious guerrillas who had proclaimed their resistance to Roman domination. From the Roman conquest of Palestine until the collapse of the Bar Kokhba uprising in 135 A. D. , messianism must have been truly epidemic on Jewish soil. The charismatic rebel, Simeon bar Kozibe (Bar Kokhba, son of the stars), like Jesus, had claimed that he was a descendant of David.
With Jesus and the consolidation of the Christ religion, the David tradition was continued in new dimensions. While the Jewish people were being beaten and driven from their homeland and were entering the bitter second half of their history--in which Ahasver might be their model figure rather than David- Christianity continued the Jewish resistance against the Roman Empire on an- other level. At first, Christianity became a significant school of resistance, cour- age, and embodied faith. If it had been then what it is today in Europe, it would not have lasted fifty years. During the period of the Roman emperors, Christians formed the nucleus of inner resistance. To be a Christian once meant not allowing oneself to be impressed by earthly power, and especially not by the arrogant, vio- lent, and amoral Roman god- emperors, whose religious-political maneuvers were all too transparent. Early Christianity may have been helped in this by hav- ing inherited from the Jews that historicizing kynicism that knew how to say to all bearers of power and fame and imperial pretension: We have already seen a dozen of your sort perish: hyenas and almighty time, which obeys only our God, have been gnawing for a long time on the bones of earlier despots. The same fate awaits you. The Jewish view of history thus contains political dynamite: It dis- covers the transitoriness of others' empires. The primary "theoretical" kynical- cynical consciousness (cynical too because in alliance with the more powerful principle, i. e. , here, historical truth and "God") is the historical consciousness: that so many powerful and grandiose empires have decayed into dust and ashes.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 233
In Jewish consciousness, historical knowledge becomes the narration of the downfall of others and of its own miraculous survival. From the Jews, the early Christians inherited a knowledge of what it was like in the hearts of the oppres- sors, a knowledge of the hubris of naked power. In the tenth Psalm, Jewish con- sciousness puts itself in the interior of evil power and eavesdrops on its haughty conversation with itself:
2 Because the wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor, let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire . . .
6 He hath said in his heart, "I shall not be moved, for I shall never be
in adversity. "
The Jewish kynic follows the invulnerability fantasies of military despots into their innermost marrow. There, he then speaks his denial. He will not be among those who praise the powerful rulers. Since that time, despots have to live with this torment. There will always be a group that takes no part in deifying the powerful. This is how the psychopolitical dynamics of the "Jewish question" func- tion. Jewish-kynical consciousness feels on its own beaten and burned skin the violent nature (Gewaltwesen) of glory and splendor. The back that has counted the lashes will, it is true, bow down
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
because that is the smarter thing to do, but there will be an irony in its bowing that drives those hungry for greatness into a rage.
In the tension between hegemonic powers and the oppressed, two positions thus initially present themselves: here, the "splendid" power with its pompous fa- cade; there, the immediate experience slaves have of the violent core of power and of the facade of pomp. A midpoint between the two is established through the political-legal achievements of the hegemonic power, from which it draws its legitimation. At this midpoint--the achievement of law and state--the conscious- ness of the master and the slave can meet. To the extent hegemonic power legiti- mates itself through a good exercise of power, it overcomes its initially violent character and can find its way back into a relative innocence, namely, to exercise the art of the possible in a world of necessities. Where hegemonic power really legitimates itself, it subjects itself to a higher and more universal interest, to the support and continuance of life. For this reason, peace, justice, and protection of the weak are the holy words of politics. Where a hegemonic power can justifia- bly say of itself that it has furthered peace, brought forth justice, and made the protection of the most fragile life its noblest cause, there it begins to overcome its own core of violence and to earn a higher legitimacy. But here more than any- where else, the words must be measured against reality. As a rule, the language
of power changes the meaning of expressions: It calls the postponement of war peace; it says "creation of order" when it suppresses unrest;
12
it boasts about its
234 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social-mindedness when it has handed out alms that are mere window dressing; and it says "justice" when it administers laws. The dubious justice of power is reflected in Anatole France's great sarcastic remark: "The law, in its elevated equality, forbids beggars and millionaires alike to sleep under bridges. "
The political original sin, the bloody, violent, and extortionary beginnings of
domination, can only be overcome through legitimation in the sense just de-
scribed and purified through broad assent. If this fails, the violent core of
hegemonic powers resurfaces; unveiled. This occurs continually in legalized
form through the exercise of the punitive force that intervenes whenever the law
of hegemonic powers is broken. Punishment is thus the Achilles' heel of the legal-
13
ity of violence.
at the same time something of their essence and his or her own; their core of vio- lence and his or her attitude toward it. Just as cowards have to hide themselves in the mass of hesitaters, the subver- sive consciousness of slaves keeps itself alive by learning the language of slaves (of acknowledgment, of the illusion of legality and of glorification) so well that the ironic tone is not immediately perceived. The Roman Petronius, if tradition portrays him accurately, is supposed to have been a genius at servile irony. In his encounter with the arrogance of a Nero, he carried the art of scathingly ironic flattery to an extreme. He knew how to serve his poisoned veneration to his maj- esty in such sweet compliments that power could not restrain itself from swallow- ing them. Of course, for the ironic, self-aware patrician in the age of the em- perors, there remained in the end no other way out than to consciously die. This savoir mourir, which knowingly calculates its own death as the possible final price for freedom, links the disempowered but proud Roman patriciate with Christianity, which over the centuries had grown into the greatest provocation to the caesars. With it emerged a consciousness of existential sovereignty that, even more than Stoic ethics, neutralized the question whether one stood at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom of society. Under its sign, slaves could become more fearless of death than the masters. The power of embodiment in early Christianity was so strong that in the end, it won the greatest power structure in the ancient world over to its side. It had its roots in the consciousness of freedom that emerges when the naive veneration of power ceases. To never again be forced to respect a mere worldly, external, violent power--this became the kynical core in the Christian attitude toward hegemonic power. Friedrich Schlegel was one of the first modern thinkers to again achieve a clear picture of the kynical-cynical quality of radically embodied Christianity. In his Athenaeumsfragmente of 1798 he noted: "If the essence of cynicism consists in . . . having an absolute con- tempt . . . for all political splendor . . . , then Christianism is probably noth-
14
ing other than universal cynicism. "
The truth of this thesis is shown in the way the splendid Roman state met and
reflected the kynical-Christian challenge. At first, the Roman state had no alterna-
Anyone who observes hegemonic powers as they punish learns
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 235
tive than to suffocate with brutal force the self-aware light that irritated it, as demonstrated by the waves of persecution of Christians over the centuries. When these were unsuccessful, and the power of embodiment in the new faith grew with repression, there occurred, after three centuries of friction, a turn in world his- tory: Imperial power submitted to Christian kynicism in order to tame it. This is the significance of the Constantinian turning point. With it, the Christianization of power began--and herewith, viewed structurally, the refraction of the kynical impulse into cynicism. Since Constantine, the history of nation-states in Europe is essentially the history of Christianized state-cynicism that, after this epoch- making change of positions did not cease to dominate and afflict political reflec- tion in the form of a schizoid masters' ideology. This, by the way, is (initally! ) not a theme that would require a psychology of the unconscious. The divisions discussed here run through consciousnesses on the surface. That power cannot become pious appears to those ruling, not in nocturnal bad dreams but rather in their daily calculations. There is no unconscious conflict between the ideals of faith here and the morality of power there, but, from the beginning, a limited faith. With this, the cynicism of hegemonic power counterposes itself to the kyni- cal impulse of oppositional power. The former already begins as doublethink.
Christian doublethink reached its first peak in the Augustinian philosophy of history that, despairingly realistic and confronted with the decayed monster of the Christianized Roman Empire, saw no other way out than to make a comprehen- sive program out of the splitting of reality (and implicitly of morality). Thus arises the fatally realistic doctrine of the two realms (de duabus civitatibus), the divine realm (civitasf! ] dei) and the temporal realm (civitas terrena), which are conspicuously embodied in the Catholic church and the Roman Empire. The tem- poral organization of the church, as an appendage of the divine spheres, reaches down to earth. With this, dualisms are described from which there has been no definitive break either in the history of European nation-states or in philosophical thought concerning the state. Even in the twentieth century, state and church stand in a conflict-laden relationship--as accomplices and contracting parties. The thousand-year-old wrangle between state and church provides the picture book of pugilism illustrating all positions, holds, throws, hugs, and scissors that are possible between two wrestlers whom fate has wound inseparably together. Not even on the surface can the Christianized state organize itself as a unified en- tity (aside from Byzantinian Christianity). According to its inner and outer struc- ture, it has long since been condemned to being two-faced and to splitting truth. Thus a double system of law (church law, state law), a double culture (spiritual, worldly) and even a double politics (church politics, state politics) develop. In these doublings is hidden something of the secret of the rhythm of Western Euro- pean history, which produced the bloodiest, most disruptive, most conflict- laden, but at the same time, the most creative and "fastest" history that has ever taken place in such a relatively short time on such a small continent. The kynical-
236 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
cynical logic of conflict is one of the forces or "laws" that drive the tumultuous process of the history of European states, classes, and cultures to its unequaled brilliance. Almost from the beginning, everything is "doubled" here-a mighty potential for antitheses ripe for execution, for embodied powers of reflection, and for armed convictions.
Here, we do not want to get into historiography. A few catchwords may illus- trate the tensions just described as they developed. As is well known, the bishopric of Rome, with its provincial dependencies, was the only parastate struc- ture that survived the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Around 500 AD. , Christianity conquered the new Northern European group of powers when Regimus of Reims succeeded in christening the Frankish Merovingian chief, Chlodwig (Clovis). For this reason, even today, the French church proudly calls itselffille ainee de I'eglise (the eldest daughter of the church). That Chlodwig him- self was incidentally also one of the wiliest and most bestial and power- hungry figures of early European history -- surely of the same stuff as a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane, only with lesser means --may be taken as a hint of what could be expected from Christianized monarchical powers. To live with a schism in one's head became the fundamental problem of Christian domination. Moreover, as a last consequence, the doctrine of Christianity had to split itself, namely, into a doctrine for "half and "whole" Christians, for split and intact Christians. This tendency, of course, had already begun in the times of persecution, when Chris- tian communities started to polarize into religious elites--saints, martyrs, priests --and "ordinary" Christians.
The schizoid development of Christianity can be explained essentially through three great movements: first through the transformation of religion from a way of life for communities to the metaphysical dress rehearsal of ruling powers, that is, through the structuring of religious politics; second, through the establishment of spiritual governments in the form of papal, episcopal, and monastical (abbies, priories) landed dominions; and third, through the forced and superficial Chris- tianization of the broad population. The kynical core of Christianity also presents itself in a threefold way, when, still under the sign of Christian domination, it resists mere domination and tries to live against the splits: first, in the great orders of Western monasticism, which, since Benedict of Nursia, carried on the synthe- sis of prayer and labor, and later
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
too in the contemplative and ascetic movements of the high Middle Ages: second, in the heretics who unrelentingly filed suit for the embodiment of the Christian commandment to love and frequently became martyrs in the "Christian" persecution of Christians; third, in the attempts of some Christian monarchs to bridge the tensions between the worldly "office" and Chris- tian doctrine through a princely humanitarianism (we will leave aside the question of the extent to which this could succeed). Charlemagne cynically and brutally pursued his Frankish-imperialist politics in the name of Christianity, for which reason he is rightly called the Father of the Occident. The Ottonians and Salians
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 237
eveloped the business of political rule by means of churchmen so thoroughly that under them the bishoprics became the supporting struts of German imperial poli- tics (cf. the imperial program of the high Middle Ages, the Christian and German- ically transformed idea of empire and emperor, and the political duels between the monarchy and the papacy). The eight great European crusades can probably be understood only against this background. What happened between 1096 and 1270 under the concept of croisade constituted an attempt of the Christianized feudal dominions to act out the masters' cynicism of their own consciousness, which had become unbearable. After centuries of Christianization, the religious commandments had created a matrix of internalizations in the ruling military-aristocratic strata that then inten- sified the contradiction between the Christian commandment to love and the feu- dal ethics of war to the point of bursting. The unbearable pressure of the contradiction --which had become internalized--explains the violence with which, for centuries, Europeans could pour their energies into the pathological idea of the crusade. The Crusades-- proclaimed to be holy wars --were sociopsy- chological explosions of a proto-Fascist quality. They channeled the energies that had been blocked in the conflict between two mutually negating ethics in the in- dividual and collective soul. In the holy war, the opposition of a religion of love and an ethics of heroism that could not be lived out turned into a call that could be lived out: God wills it. In this fiction, enormous tensions were discharged --to the astonishment of a posterity that can discover neither military nor economic nor religious reason in the unspeakable torments and shows of bravado in the Cru- sades. The idea of the crusade offers (besides the persecution of witches, anti- Semitism and fascism) one of the strongest examples of how an officially proclaimed, collective mania saved countless individuals, in whom the conflict between religious love and militarism churned, from going privately mad. Since 1096, the holy war functions in Western civilizations as a safety valve. Under the pressure of their own inner contradictions and madnesses, people have since then sought external, diabolical enemies and have waged the holiest of wars against them. The psychogram of Christian civilizations carries this--proto-Fascist--risk within it: In times of crisis, when the unlivability of opposed ethical program- mings comes to be felt more acutely, a moment regularly arrives when the pres- sure explodes. That the persecution of the Jews in the Rhineland began simultane- ously with the Crusades underlines the interconnections between the various cultural-pathological phenomena. Jews, heretics, witches, Antichrists, and Reds are all victims of a primarily inner formation of fronts that emerge during highly schizoid periods of pressure, when the irrationality of the whole society seeks an outlet for contradictory ethics.
In addition to channeling Christian masters' cynicism into the Crusades, the Middle Ages showed a second way out of the tension: A semisecularized courtly sphere was set up in which the ethos of the aristocracy and the military could be 238 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
indulged in with a free conscience. The early Arthurian legend was nourished by the momentum released by this discovery; chivalrous romances like the chansons de geste pretty clearly gave the heroic ethos priority over the Christian ethos. Here, chivalry removed itself a couple of steps from the "chains" of the Christian commandment to be loving and peaceful by indulging in an autonomous, worldly celebration of skill in the use of weapons, courtly festivity, and a refined erotics, not caring what the priests had to say about it: the culture of tournaments, feasts, hunting, gluttonous banquets, chivalrous love. Aristocratic hedonism played a significant role into the nineteenth century by protecting the worldly joy in living from the masochistic aura of Christian monasteries. He who slew the most oppo- nents and conquered the most beautiful woman was considered the grandest fel- low. Even Nietzsche, in his anti-Christian song of praise for the "blond beast" and powerful figures, had in mind such secularized, rowdy aristocrats, later condottieri-the type of men who act, take what they desire, and can be "splen- didly" ruthless. The courtly neoheroism, however, achieved only an illusory emancipation from Christian ethics. In a more sublime way, Arthur's knights were also, of course, Christian knights; this is obvious in the case of Percival. With the myth of the knight in search of the Holy Grail, the Christianization of the military is extended into metaphorical and allegorical spheres and ultimately stripped of reality in a pure mysticism of chivalry that absorbs combat into spiritual dimensions. During the late Burgundian period, chivalrous culture resembled a literature living itself out.
In the symbolic haze of Christianized ideologies of the empire, the knight and the state during the late Middle Ages, which hovered over the incessant feudal, city, church, and state wars of Europe, Machiavelli's ideas must have had the cleansing effect of a storm. Machiavelli's Prince has always been read, especially in bourgeois times, as the greatest
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
testament of the cynical technique of power. As an insurpassable declaratory oath of political unscrupulousness, it was in- dicted on moral grounds. What religion fundamentally and unconditionally condemns --murder--is here openly recommended as political means. Of course, over the centuries, many have employed this means. This is not what is innovative in Machiavelli's doctrine. But that someone now comes forth and advocates it openly-that creates a new moral standard that can be sensibly treated only under the concept of cynicism. Masters' consciousness arms itself for a new round and in doing so checks the supplies. Someone was almost bound to come along and express the new standard unmistakably, cheekily, unrestrainedly, clearly, etc. The act of expressing, even to the present day, is considered more scandalous than what is expressed.
Machiavelli's political "amoralism" presupposes the unending tradition of war and the feudal and political chaos of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centu- ries. As a historian, Machiavelli saw that the last remnants of legitimation had been torn from the splendid gown of the Christian state, since no ruler was any
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 239
longer in a position to fulfill, even illusorily, the most primitive tasks of state -- securing peace, upholding the law, protecting life--in the never-ending confusion of warring minor powers. Here, the thought of a central power presses to the fore since it would be in a position to end the chaos of individual powers and to again make civil and state life possible. The ideal prince of such an imaginary, still nonexistent central power would, without regard for the constraints and intrica- cies of Christian morality, have to learn to exercise power radically as an effective force of law, peace, and protection within a homogenized state territory. Politi- cally, Machiavelli, with his cynicism, saw decidedly more clearly than the authorities of the land, empire, and town in the late Middle Ages who simply went on running things with a brutality cloaked in Christianity. The Florentine's prince theory posits for the statesman a duty to unconditional hegemonic power whereby the disposal over every means is automatically implied. Such a cynical technology of power can be valid only in situations in which the state, the political vessel for survival, has been smashed and the central power, if it still exists at all, has fallen into the role of a whipped dog with which a pack of brutal, greedy, and chaotically quarreling minor powers play their game. In such a situation, Machiavelli's cyni- cism can speak the truth. For a minute in world history, this is how a cheeky, sovereign spirit sounds who expresses precisely the right point in amoral tones and can speak for more general vital interests. To be sure, this cynical conscious- ness of power is already so reflexively convoluted and precariously unrestrained that this voice cannot be readily understood, neither from above nor below, nei- ther by those who wield power nor by the general population. A residue of uneasi- ness remains when a princely sovereignty is described here that does something "good" for itself and for the nation's people as a whole by risking, beyond good and evil, the most infamous crimes against individuals.
One might think that the politics of the absolutist states and territories in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe fulfilled Machiavelli's ideas with a grain of salt. The absolutist state indeed set itself above the quarreling minor powers, above regional sovereigns, and especially above the religious parties that were bloodily entangled in one another. (The "politicians" were initially those who tried to maneuver tactfully and to remain relatively neutral vis-a-vis the war- ring religious camps. ) But scarcely established as new, relatively stable hegemonic powers, the absolutist states began to present themselves in a cloud of self-adulation. They too did their utmost to veil their core of violence in a gran- diose rhetoric of legality and God's grace. However, no amount of boastful claims on God's grace can make critical subjects completely forget that in reality it is also a domination by the grace of murder and manslaughter as well as oppression. No modern state has completely succeeded in masking its core of violence, as the Uto- pia of legality dreams of doing. The first great resistance against the modern (ab- solutist) state was borne, sensibly enough, by the former free high nobility and the landed aristocracy that feared the court's sovereignty-that is, a group of peo-
240 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Lorenzo Leonbuono, Allegoria della Fortuna. This allegorical politology shows Tyrannis (power) surrounded by Envy, Ignorance, Suspicion, Ungratefulness, Dissimulation.
pie who, because they were themselves all too arrogant, clearly perceived the ar- rogance of the central power. That could almost be written up as an unintended, "popular" success of Machiavelli, who revealed the trade secrets for all modern central powers. The cynical amoralism of hegemonic powers can no longer be dismissed. Since then, states have lived in a cynical twilight of semilegitimation and semipresumption. A relative excess of violence, oppression, and usurpation accompanies even those states most concerned about legitimacy and the rule of law. Under even the most solemnly sworn achievement of peace by a state, its military undergarments can be seen (modern people say, as did the ancients, "Si vispacempara bellum" [If you want peace, arm for war]). Even in the best legal system, raw facts like class privileges, misuse of power, caprice, and inequalities pierce through time and again. Behind the juridical fictions of the free exchange of goods, free labor contract, and unregulated prices, inequalities in power and extortion come to light on all sides. Under the most sublime and free forms of aesthetic communication, the voices of social suffering and cultural
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
barbarities
? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 241
still cry out. (In this respect, Walter Benjamin's statement holds: There is no evi- dence of culture that is not simultaneously evidence of barbarism. )
Since the eighteenth century, the political atmosphere in Central Europe has been rife with "open secrets. " Partly discreetly, in a private or secret setting, partly in the form of an open publicistic aggression, the secrets of power are now given away. Power is once again supposed to answer to morality. The origin of absolutism and its political wisdom, which was based on the prince's capability to suppress minor war and religious massacre, has here long since sunk into the dim past. Convinced that it would handle power in a morally unobjectionable way, if it only had power, the political- moral critique of the eighteenth century resisted absolute "despotism. " A new social class, the bourgeoisie, now made it- self, under the name of the people, a candidate for the assumption of power ("commoners," the "Third Estate," etc. ). The French Revolution, in its regicidal phase, carried a government of the "people" to the summit of the political system. However, what had made the revolution in the name of the "people" established itself in the following era as the bourgeois aristocracy, as an aristocracy of finance, culture, and entrepreneurship; moreover, through marriage, it was inter- woven a hundredfold with the older hereditary nobility. It could not be long be- fore this new stratum of masters, which called itself the people and cited the sov- ereignty of the people as its legitimating principle, experienced the contradictions of ruling for itself. For those who use the people for legitimation call forth the people and invite them to take an active interest in the machinations that are em- ployed in their name and against them.
The contradictory nature of the Christianized state now repeats itself, on a higher historical level, in the contradictions of the bourgeois state, which bases itself on the sovereignty of the people and makes the authorities dependent on universal elections (or makes it appear so). For, just as little as the Christian "state" in the Middle Ages realized the Christian ethics of love, reconciliation, and free fraternity could the modern "bourgeois" states convincingly represent their maxims ("freedom, equality, fraternity, solidarity") or even the vital in- terests of the broad masses.
Those who study the situation of the peasant popula- tions in the nineteenth century, or even more, that of the growing industrial proletariat and the development of pauperism in the age of bourgeois rule (and in addition, the situation of women, servants, minorities, etc. ) -- those who do this must notice that a garbled and truncated concept of the people underlies the legitimating appeal to the people.
At this point, socialist movements become possible and necessary. They de- mand that whatever happens in the name of the people should also happen through and for the people. Those who base their authority on the people must also "serve the people," to start with by not involving them in those murderous "people's wars" that were typical of that age when bourgeois or feudal-bourgeois classes
242 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ruled "in the name of the people"; and ending by allotting them a just proportion of the wealth they produce through their own labor.
In the secular conflict of the socialist movements with, let us say, the "bour-
15
geois" nation-state,
political consciousness were perpetrated that to a large extent govern the twen- tieth century. Both are late, complex forms of cynical consciousness. The first is what we call fascism. It goes so far as to confess in a relatively unabashed way its allegiance to a politics of pure violence. In a cynical manner, it simply dis- penses with the effort of legitimation by openly proclaiming brutality and "holy egoism" to be political necessities and historical-biological laws. Hitler's contem- poraries found him to be a "great orator," because, among other reasons, he began to articulate with a clear tone of naked realism that which had displeased the Ger- man temperament for a long time and that which it had wanted to do away with in accordance with its narcissistic and brutal ideas of order, namely, the hopeless Weimar parliamentarianism, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, etc. , and in par- ticular the "guilty" ones and the troublemakers-- socialists, Communists, trade unionists, anarchists, modern artists, gypsies, homosexuals, but above all the Jews, who had to bear the brunt of it all for being the intimate enemy and univer- sal projection figure. Why precisely them? What is the meaning of this uniquely malicious animosity? Through the mass murder of the Jews, the Fascists sought to smash the mirror that the Jewish people, by their mere existence, held up to Fascist arrogance. For the Fascist, the heroically arrogant Nobody, must have felt that no one saw through him more than did the Jews, who by virtue of their
tradition of suffering, almost as if by nature stand in ironic juxtaposition to every superior power. The central figures of German Fascism must have sensed that their arrogant thousand-year Reich would never be able to believe in itself as long as there remained in a corner of their own consciousness the memory that this pretention to power was a mere
pose. It was the Jews who reminded the Fascists of this. Anti-Semitism betrayed the kink in the Fascists' will to power.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This power could never become so great that it would overcome the kynical-Jewish denial of it. "The impudent Jew" became the catchword for beating, stabbing, and murder- ing (Schlag-, Stick-, und Mordwort) under fascism. Out of its legacy of resigned resistance, covered over by apparent accommodation, modern Judaism radiated such an intense negation of the arrogance of power into the center of Fascist con- sciousness that the German Fascists, bent on their own grandiosity, built extermi- nation camps in order to eliminate what stood in the way of their presumptuous- ness. Did not these people live with the melancholy knowledge that all messiahs, since time immemorial, had been false? How could the German messiah out of the Austrian night-asylum, who let himself be celebrated as the returned Bar-
barossa from Kyffhauserberge, believe in his own mission as long as he himself looked over his shoulder with the eyes of the "evil Jew," who "undermines every-
two new turnings and polemical-reflexive convolutions of
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 243
thing"? No will to power can endure the irony of the will to survive this power
16
too.
To be sure, it is inadmissible simply to characterize the Fascist state of the
twentieth century as the typical representative of the modern, "bourgeois" state based on the sovereignty of the people. Nevertheless, fascism develops one of the latent possibilities of the "bourgeois" people's state. Its rampant antisocialism makes it clear that there is in fascism a political phenomenon of disinhibition, namely, a master-cynical defensive reaction against the impudent socialist de- mand to let the people have what they were promised, what is due to them. Fas- cism, it is true, also wants "everything for the people," but first it swindles through its false concept of the people: the people as monolith, as a homogeneous
17
mass that obeys a single will ("One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer").
With this,
liberal ideology is given a good, swift lesson. Individual freedoms, individual will? Individual opinion (Eigensinn)? Nonsense! And this nonsense is all the more annoying the further "down" it appears. Fascism realizes the tendency of the "bourgeois" state to push through, with the "necessary force," the particular "in- terests of the whole" rather than individual interests. In doing this it distinguishes itself through its unrestrained brutality. For this reason, it could occur to some substantial non-Fascist interest groups with political influence (in the economy and parliament) to support the Fascists when they seized state power and to think of them perhaps as the new broom with which disruptive "individual" interests (down below) could be thoroughly swept away. Were there really people who were cynical enough to believe that they could buy off Hitler and his cynical party of brutality? (One of them -- Thy ssen--in fact wrote memoirs under the title / Paid
nHitler. ) The Fascist state, with its stifling confusion of capital and folk ideology,
idealisms and brutalities deserves a unique philosophical predicate: the cynicism of cynicism.
The second complicated convolution of modern political consciousness oc- curred in recent Russian history. There seems to be a tendency for the militance and radicalness of socialist movements to develop proportionally to the level of oppression in a country. The more powerful a workers' movement was able to become in Europe, especially in Germany --corresponding to the real growth of the proletariat in the process of industrialization --the more established ("bour- geois") it presented itself in its average political behavior, the more it trusted in a gradual victory over its opponents, the forces of the late-feudal and bourgeois state. Conversely, the more powerful and unconquerable a despotic-feudal state power really was, the more fanatically it was confronted by the "socialist" opposi- tion. One might try to express it in the following way: The riper a country was for the insertion of socialist elements into its social order (high development of the productive forces, high degree of employment of wage labor, high degree of organization of "proletarian" interests, etc. ), the more calmly the leaders of the workers' movements waited for their chance. The strength and weakness of the
244 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social democratic principle was always its pragmatic patience. Conversely, the
19
less ripe
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unrelentingly and successfully radical socialism knew how to place itself at the head of subversive movements.
If there is a law governing the logic of struggle that says that in long conflicts opponents assimilate each other, then this law has been substantiated in the conflict between the Russian Communists and the czarist despots. What was played out between 1917 and the XXth Party Congress must be understood as the cynical and ironical testament of czarism. Lenin became the testamentary execu- tor of a despotism whose representatives had possibly been extinguished, but not its procedures and inner structures. Stalin raised the traditional despotism to the technological level of the twentieth century, in a way that would have made any Romanov blanch. If, under the czars, the Russian state was already a much too tightly fitting shirt for its society, under the Communist party it became a real straitjacket. If under czarism a tiny group of the privileged had held an enormous empire terroristically under control through their apparatus of power, after 1917, it was a tiny group of professional revolutionaries who, riding the wave of disgust with the war and the hatred the peasants and proletariat had for "those at the top," overthrew Goliath.
But was Leon Trotsky not, as a Jew, the inheritor of an ancient tradition of resistance and self-assertion against arrogant power? Trotsky had to let himself be banished and murdered by his colleague, who had become the Goliath. Is not in Stalin's murder of Trotsky the same cynical reply of presumptuous hegemonic power at work as in Fascist genocide? In both cases it is a matter of the revenge of presumptuous force on those whom it knows will never respect it, but rather for all time will cry out to the bugaboo: Legitimate yourself or you will be over- powered! In Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution was hidden something of the knowledge that political force must justify itself every time it is used in order to differentiate itself from criminality. Power must prove that it is a force for peace, law, and protection within its territory in order to make possible a new abundance of autonomous life. The idea of a permanent revolution is not an appeal for con- tinual chaos but stands rather as a code for the Jewish consciousness that every mere arrogance of state will be humbled--even if that means by being reminded of its crimes for as long as it exists. If Russian resistance even today expresses itself in the language of Christian and human rights, it does so because the process of . ^//-liberation in Russia came to a halt at that point where it had arrived be- tween February and the Red October of 1917: the demand for human rights as the universal formula of bourgeois freedoms. A country that wants to leap over the "liberal phase" will, when it jumps from despotism to socialism, land back in despotism again. The Russian people let themselves be made into the tools of a future that never wanted to arrive and that, after all that has happened, can no longer come in the way it was promised. It has sacrificed its rights to life and its
a society was for socialism (thought of as postcapitalism), the more
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 245
demands of reason for the present --in an act of orthodox masochism and scared confessional torment--on the altars of consumption of distant generations. It has exhausted its vital energies in the race to catch up to the madness of consumption and Western weapons technology.
As far as the real socialist apparatus of state is concerned, most observers as- sure us that ideologically it has been in the meantime totally drained. Everyone feels the gulf between the phraseology of the Leninist tradition and everyday ex- periences, particularly those who are forced to speak this phraseology because of their position. The world falls into two separate dimensions. One reckons everywhere with a split reality. Reality begins where the state and its terminology end. The conventional concept of "lie" does not adequately describe the situation in the East with its floating, schizoid diffusions of reality. For everyone knows that the relation between the "words" and the "things" is disrupted, but without control through public discussion, the disruption establishes itself as a new nor- mality. People therefore no longer define themselves in terms of socialist values and ideals; rather their definitions proceed from the lack of any alternative or es- cape from what is really given, that is, from a "socialism" that one endures like an evil, together with its radiantly true, but unfortunately only rhetorical, side. If cynicism--according to the prototype of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor-- can turn into tragedy, then it does so here, where the word "socialism," which every- where else in the world delineates a hope for people to become the masters of their own lives, has frozen into a symbol of futility. This represents a cynical speech disturbance of epochal proportions. Even from the outside it is obvious that the politics of the socialist powers no longer holds any hope of socialism whatsoever. In Marxist-Leninist terminology, the East exemplifies naked hegemonic politics, and one hesitates to laugh or hiss only because one cannot know what would hap- pen when the emperor notices that he has been walking naked across the street for a long time now. The other also has long been this way, but what will happen when it becomes known? Why has the greatest military power in the world been built up in order to protect a Active otherness?
If we try to imagine what a Machiavelli at the end of the twentieth century would say after a careful study of the political situation, it would probably be a cynical piece of advice to the super powers to declare with unscrupulous openness the bankruptcy of the systems on both sides, first, to motivate each to aid the other, second, to move their politically tired subjects to a great offensive of inven- tive self-help, and third, because the bankruptcy has probably in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fact come about. As a good positivist, Machiavelli would observe that a majority of the so-called political problems around the year 2000 are "illusory problems," stemming from the antagonism between two power blocs that confront each other because one of them tried to organize a social system that bypasses capitalism without having ever really known it; the other is a brittle, old, "overripe" capitalism that cannot go beyond itself because the house named "socialism" into which it could move
246 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
is already occupied. Accordingly, the competition between East and West is- Machiavelli would recite this with his well-known dry malice--neither a produc- tive competition between powers in the usual sense nor a classic hegemonic rivalry, but rather an aborted conflict of a complicated type. "Socialism" has be- come the chief hindrance to capitalism's transition to it; at the same time, the capitalism of the West, "nailed down" in this way, is its own chief hindrance to an open joining with systems in the East. Thus, while the East systematically lives beyond its means by pretending to be socialism, the West systematically does not live up to its potential because it has to formulate its ideas of the future defen- sively; namely, under no circumstances does it want this socialism--which is un- derstandable because no system can take what it has long since surpassed as its goal. For capitalism, a disguised and crippled state capitalism of the Eastern type cannot be an idea for the future.
If we want to resolve the conflict, we first must have a precise understanding of this uniquely paradoxical type of conflict. On this point Machiavelli would con- cur with the views of his colleague Marx, who provided the initial steps for a
20
Universal (historical-political) Polemic.
lows us to differentiate between conflicts based on rivalry between similar sys- tems and conflicts based on evolutionarily dissimilar systems, differing from each other in the degree of their development. In the latter case, the conflict is between the less developed and the more developed system whereby the latter necessarily grows out of the former. Ideally, the conflict between capitalism and socialism is of the latter kind. Seen logically, it can only be a conflict of overcoming in which the old resists the new, even though the latter undeniably emerges out of the former. The new becomes necessary when the old has become a fetter. This is precisely what Marx assures us of concerning the essence of fully developed capitalism: Once it has first become completely developed, it becomes itself a bar- rier to the human productivity that it had previously impelled. This barrier must thus be lifted: socialism. Socialism, on all levels, releases human productivity from its restrictive capitalist conditions, i. e. , above all from capitalist property relations. If we now observe what presents itself today as the conflict between capitalism and socialism, it can be seen at once that this is in no way the conflict between the old and the new studied by Marx but is instead a conflict based on the rivalry between two empires. Thus nothing new under the sun? What is new arises through the turning of this rivalry about its own sociological and historical axis. The Marxist attempt to guide history through socioeconomic insight has led to a complete distortion of historical perspectives on the future as a whole. The claims to control the history of the system, instead of letting it take its (known) course, has brought it drastically out of step. For indeed the future of capitalism is not an eternally new capitalism, but rather something grows out of it and out of its achievements that comes after it, overcomes it, inherits it, and will make it into prehistory. In a word, it makes possible its own ascent into a postcapital- This Marxian Universal Polemic al-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 247
ism, and if we call this socialism, then what this means should now be clearly enough defined from all points of view: after-capitalism, grown out of an overripe capitalism.
Now one must not dream that one could "force" the development simply be- cause one has recognized these interconnections. What gave Lenin the right to believe or want to believe that Russia offered a case for the application of this Marxist theory of development and revolution will remain a puzzle. The puzzle lies not in Lenin's authentic revolutionary motivations but in the way in which he forced the application of a Western political-economic theory on a semi-Asiatic, scarcely industrialized, agrarian empire. I believe there can be no other answer: Here was an absolute will to revolution in search of a halfway suitable theory, and when it became evident that the theory was not really appropriate due to the lack of the real preconditions for its application, a compulsion to falsify, reinter- pret, and distort arose out of the determination to apply it. In Lenin's hands, Marxism became a theory of legitimation for an attempt to violently force reality to a point at which, later, the preconditions for the application of Marxian theory would be given, namely, in late-capitalist relations that would thus be ripe for revolution. How? Through forced industrialization. To the present day, the So- viet Union is in search of the causes of the Second Revolution of 1917. It would like, in a sense, to provide "after the fact" the necessity for a socialist revolution and, if all signs do not deceive us, it is on the best road for doing just that. For it is there, as in scarcely any other country, that, in Marx's formulation, the rela- tions of production
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
have become a fetter to the productive forces. If this incon- gruity provides the general formula for a revolutionary tension, then it is given here in an exemplarily crass form.
What in the current world situation is a conflict within the system presents it- self in an absurd way as a conflict between two systems. At the same time, this externalized conflict between the systems has become the main fetter to the libera-
21
tion of human productivity.
two mystified mystifiers. By means of a paranoid politics of armament, two real illusory opponents force themselves to maintain an imaginary system difference solidified through self-mystification. In this way, a socialism that does not want to be capitalism and a capitalism that does not want to be socialism paralyze each other. Moreover, the conflict confronts a socialism that practices more exploita- tion than capitalism (in order to hinder the latter) with a capitalism that is more
22
socialist than socialism (in order to hinder the latter).
Universal Polemic, Machiavelli would conclude that the developmental conflict has been neutralized by an externalized, distorted hegemonic conflict. Two giants of production expend enormous amounts of their socially produced wealth to so- lidify militarily a demarcation of systems that is basically untenable.
Thus, as was said, at the end of the twentieth century, Machiavelli would prob- ably recommend a general declaration that the systems are bankrupt. This decla-
The so-called system conflict takes place between
In the spirit of the Marxian
248 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ration must precede so-called disarmament. For what causes the systems to arm is the idea that they are fundamentally opposed and that they each want something quite different that must be defended at all costs. Relaxation of tension through disarmament--that is yet again one of those fatally dangerous mystifications that see everything in inverted order. Relaxation of tension can only happen as an un- cramping from within, that is, as insight into the fact that the only thing we have to lose is the unbearable, armed illusion of a difference between systems.
Perhaps Machiavelli would again write a small pamphlet on the art of govern- ing, this time not under the title The Prince but under the heading On the Weak State. Posterity would doubtless again agree that this brochure is a scandal. Machiavelli perhaps would not have entirely stripped off his Florentine human- ism and thus would write his treatise in the form of a dialogue between two partners --David and Goliath. A passage from it might read as follows:
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one. And you also maintain that it's true? Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent. Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now.
