No More Learning

STREHLE: But the media could also function as a way of letting off steam.
SLOTERDIJK: If emotions weren’t rational to some extent we wouldn’t have them at all. That also makes sense in terms of evolu- tionary biology: if nature equipped us with some impulse or other it must involve a fitness benefit. It follows that pride and rage belong to the human make-up just as eroticism does. Evolution wouldn’t have produced people capable of rage if that emotion were only senseless ballast. In fact, it is an important derivative of stress, and stress is the biological interpretation of acute danger, which means it is vital for survival. Normally a living being reacts to real present danger by fleeing or attacking. Both reactions require a high degree of energy, and that’s exactly what the stress reaction provides. The early heroic poems describe great stress like a divine gift – or like inspired enthusiasm that seems to flow into the soul from outside.
STREHLE: And things get dangerous when that rage is collected and frozen into resentment?
SLOTERDIJK: Quite right. When people’s need for validation is rejected they start feeling enraged. If they are prevented from expressing the rage, it is stored up. Since the nineteenth century that has been called resentment. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche started a new chapter in the study of the human soul with their investigations into the denigrated, insulted and revengeful person. They were thymotic psychologists, like their successor, Alfred Adler. On a diversion via Kojève and Lacan, he left deep, hidden traces in French psycho- analysis. We can still get drunk on the ambiguity of the word désir.
198 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
Oddly enough, it describes two completely different things: first, erotic desire in terms of the Freudian libido, and, second, the desire for recognition described by Hegel.
STREHLE: At the end of your book you suggest psychological systems for healing injuries. Which direction should they take?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern civilization has already achieved a certain amount in this field. The possibility of a meritocracy con- trolled by money, as facilitated by the market economy, has done much to detoxify social relationships. When someone achieves something, others realize it as long as the achievements can be shown visibly. The Greeks created four theatrical arenas of ambition where gifted people could distinguish themselves: the agora as the stage for political debate, and the theatre, the stadium and the academy for debating scientific opinions. Willing and able people flourished in these arenas. Today, these forums are all fully functioning again. We can’t imagine any more how badly the old aristocratic society was psycho-dynamically screwed up. For centuries, social existence mainly consisted of absurd fights about privilege. People fought with family trees, rival illusions of nobility took the field against each other, and arguments about precedence were fought out in a space completely empty of achievement – hollow dreams of potency without a beginning or an end. The Europeans lost more than a thousand years with that kind of nonsense – we have to state that clearly once and for all.
STREHLE: In your book you go a step further and propose a sort of code of behaviour for world society.
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful. I would never go that far. I say that a behaviour code for the world must first be ground in the mills of the present debate between cultures. Incidentally, this culture clash would still be taking place even if Huntington hadn’t predicted it. 1 It’s in the nature of things. Friction exists between the West and the Far East as well as the Middle East. The game rules for coexistence of 8–10 billion human beings are being discovered in the process. Of course, this only works if the unavoidable conflicts between the great players don’t get too destructive. Then again, it is also not enough if a few omniscient experts in international law and some fervent Protestants meet in Washington to dictate the necessary measures and wait for the others to join in. Rage remains a basic force but it won’t continue collecting in the forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it developed into communism and
1 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 199
fascism. It has largely retreated into individual ambitions, and vents on the broadest front in mass culture. That’s why we always have to understand the function of mass culture for letting off steam and as a form of popular therapy.
STREHLE: Are you talking about computer games, for instance?
SLOTERDIJK: They are important too. Every individualist and collective form of mass culture can function to contain rage and let off steam. The only thing that doesn’t play a role any more is what some intellectuals still dream about: a new communism, a new World Bank of rage. The requisite possibilities of collection are lacking for this. A second wave of communism is less likely than a giant meteorite hitting the earth’s surface in the next thousand years.
STREHLE: When you mention conflict on the Asian–Western border, are you thinking of North Korea’s atom bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: No, North Korea is a very different problem. The country is a singular phenomenon and perhaps simply a brief episode in history. I’m convinced the Chinese will put an end to that irritating situation sooner or later. If the North Koreans really go crazy the Chinese will invade. We don’t have to lift a finger. The Western world’s hysterical reaction to the Korean threat seems rather absurd to me. The USA is too far away and beyond reach of any existing North Korean long-range missiles. Eastern Europe might be reachable – but for what?
STREHLE: Isn’t that more of a mythological horror image – a madman with a bomb?
SLOTERDIJK: A great deal of our politics still plays out in the cinema and in thrillers. Frankenstein appeared on the scene nearly 200 years ago, and since then the role is there to be filled in the mass imagination. No mass culture without horror. Real figures can also act in these scripts because the amusement system all around us has largely erased the difference between real and fictitious horror. We are constantly going back and forth through the revolving door from the horror genre to real terror. We could also say Washington and Hollywood have become too similar to each other. We must hope that one day people will be better able to distinguish again between real threats and fictitious ones.
STREHLE: Are Iran’s nuclear development plans a real threat? After the Iraq debacle, international sabre rattling won’t work in that case any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Iran is evidently not letting itself be intimidated. STREHLE: Do you see this as a danger?
SLOTERDIJK: Nuclear weapons are our invention. It is in the
nature of things that others imitate us in the most risky aspects
200 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
of our civilization. It is part of the risks of our ‘way of life’ that an Iranian driver comes driving down our lane towards us in the wrong direction. As we know, drivers going in the wrong direction are always convinced everybody else is driving in the wrong lane. This view is very widespread in the Middle East at the moment: the West is driving on the wrong side and they are on the right side.
STREHLE: It’s a matter of perception.
SLOTERDIJK: More than that – it’s a war about perception. To put it cautiously: the probability that something good will come out of an Iranian atom bomb isn’t very great. But the probability of it causing much harm isn’t that great either. So far all the nuclear powers have taken responsibility for their own weapons very seri- ously. Our experience up to now shows that anybody with nuclear weapons becomes part of the deterrent system. The only ones who have really used the bomb are the Americans. That’s why they tend to believe more than anyone else that other countries could repeat their lack of control and actually use the transcendent weapon. The mad enemy – that is, the actor who gets away with everything – is the personification of one’s own question.
STREHLE: And do you see the much-talked-about use of nuclear weapons by terrorists as an illusion?
SLOTERDIJK: The really annoying thing about terror is that it distracts us from much more important problems.
STREHLE: From questions of social development? From the destruction of the ecological system?
SLOTERDIJK: Naturally, in Europe the question of social development is taking a new form again. Inequalities have grown dramatically. In the Middle East, however, the question of social development is posed as a demographic question and therefore as the risk of civil war. Enormous psycho-political explosive material has collected there, and it is mostly religiously coded. In addition, in the coming fifty years humankind must make the transition to an economy based on post-fossil energy. Environmental problems are becoming more acute every year. There is a whole slew of such top- list priorities.
STREHLE: You conclude your book with a moral appeal: we should learn to see ourselves with others’ eyes.
SLOTERDIJK: That isn’t a moral appeal; it’s a totally normal intellectual attitude. Seeing yourself from the outside is a modus vivendi that requires a degree of asceticism. Asceticism means, purely and simply, exercising to achieve fitness. That’s what gives the expression a relation to morality. It is an obvious lesson: we have to keep fit for everything to come. We are facing a period
Thus Spoke Sloterdijk 201
of tremendous friction. We can’t simply wish away the coming conflicts. Marx once said that the point is not to make the real con- tradictions disappear, but to create a form within which they can move.
24
FATHERS SHOULD BE KEPT OUT OF BROTHELS AND PUBS
Interview with Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang*2
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Mr Sloterdijk, what has put you in a rage this year?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m not sure – I’m not easily provoked. What I remember is the student protests in France against the introduction of the new contract for first-time employment. It was designed to give more scope to employers so as to overcome their reluctance to hire new employees. Absurdly, the workers affected saw this as an attack on their presumed basic right to employment for life from the first working day onwards. Their opposition was completely illusory, as if they wanted to demand top jobs for all.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But isn’t idealism typical for a student movement?
SLOTERDIJK: We should distinguish between illusionism and idealism. The attitude of younger people has changed. I come from a generation that grew up under totally different conditions. At the time of my school-leaving examination in 1966 nobody dreamed of making compromises with the world of permanent employment. Our motto was, ‘You’ll never get my labour power. ’
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But that only applied to left-wing activ- ists, not to the people they wanted to champion, the workers.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s true that a bohemian student scene evolved
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Jan Feddersen and Susanne Lang appeared under the title ‘Väter weg von Puff und Kneipe’, in the daily taz newspaper (23 December 2006). Available at: <http://www. taz. de/1/ archiv/? dig=2006/12/23/a0209>.
At the time of the interview Jan Feddersen was a journalist and editor at the Berlin taz, and Susanne Lang was an editor at the taz.
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 203
in the early 1970s, during the period of so-called full employment. This bohemian group from the 1968 movement produced a political surplus that created fantastic opportunities. We’re still living from that today. The recent protests in France, however, showed that young people have become almost overwhelmingly petit bourgeois.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Because the young want to work rather than revolutionize?
SLOTERDIJK: Because they let the logic of the consumer world define their wishes. In life stories in the past, youth played the role of a psychosocial moratorium where people in a state of indecision, or even confusion, were tolerated and protected. There was always the assumption that they would make the best use of this in their careers later on. Nowadays eighteen-year-olds take to the streets and demand the right to a permanent job for life!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In France young people in the banlieus took to the streets as well, and set fire to cars. Are they the real angry ones in our society?
SLOTERDIJK: No. Both protests are primarily mimetic move- ments that mimic a kind of rage the actors themselves don’t always feel. France has a rich popular tradition of outrage.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We’re pretty good at that in Germany too, aren’t we?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but it has less of an impact here. The atmosphere in France is more rigid, and that leads to a dialectic of stagnation and explosion. Things are more fluid in Germany, which is why today, unlike in the 1980s, protest doesn’t have a broad basis any longer.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Are you referring particularly to the time when the Green Party was very vocal?
SLOTERDIJK: Anyone who wants to understand the Greens should realize that post-1945 Germany has achieved something extraordinary in the production of loser attitudes. In Germany, thymotic culture, which is based on self-affirmation and pride, was reduced to a stump. What remained of self-affirmative behaviour had to be expressed in terms of moralism. The Greens led the way in this – some of them were veritable Jacobins.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: This means the Greens as a party acted as a good rage bank, as you explain in your new essay, Rage and Time. Are they still playing that role?
SLOTERDIJK: The function of the political party as an institu- tion, not just the Green Party, has fundamentally changed today. From a historical perspective, parties were never just organs for expressing interests, but were collection points for emotions as well. They had the task of organizing collection of hopes, illusions,
204 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
wishes and rage. They used various combinations to address differ- ent segments of the public at different times. People who looked for national symbols to give them satisfaction took up position on the right wing. Others who identified with symbols of material progress, of developing justice and of the welfare state, assembled on the left wing. Finally, the liberals provided a meeting ground for people who pinned their hopes mostly on the advance of different kinds of freedom in the modern state. Interestingly, the middle-class parties acted as collection points for militant satisfaction.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: What does that involve?
SLOTERDIJK: The middle class is the class that turns its own satisfaction into defiance. How do we explain that? Modern society popularizes the possibility of comparison. That’s why there is asymmetrical growth between the reasons for being satisfied and the reasons for being dissatisfied. As soon as the means of satisfac- tion become more widespread, the means of comparison grow as well. We all compare ourselves with each other, with the result that we see people all around us who are ahead of us, and that seems unfair. This is how countless people who are objectively winners in terms of modernization and progress subjectively see themselves as protestors.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: That explains why we live in a German world. Do luxury and satisfaction lead to fear of social decline?
SLOTERDIJK: This question neatly points up the paradox of that wasted freedom. Dissatisfaction with luxury indicates that people don’t have an organ for calculating probabilities. We are oriented to facts on the one hand, and to hopes and expectations on the other, but we don’t have an internal mechanism for dealing with probability. This is why we can’t evaluate the unimaginable improbability of our own lifestyle. The only people who can do that are people who come from outside or who move between a culture of poverty and a culture of wealth.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In terms of political parties, does this mean that today they are advocates of the improbable?
SLOTERDIJK: I see them as service providers in the market of political illusions. Their pact with improbability is fateful and obsessive. Of course, the people who get elected are the ones who correspond most closely to the voters’ expectations. But expecta- tions of that kind all tend towards increasing improbability. The general product that each party must offer today, without excep- tion, is the plausible illusion that the party’s politics will optimize its clientele’s lifestyles.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Yet most politicians have stopped
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 205
pointing to any kind of optimization – they promise the status quo, in a very alarmist way, in fact.
SLOTERDIJK: Guaranteeing the status quo means a great deal in a situation where liberalism has been emptied of meaning. In a sit- uation where most ideologists have long since resorted to threats that things will get worse again, assurances that things will stay the same are nearly gospels. We must realize that in the political arena the forces that threaten have always wrestled with the forces that make promises. At present the threatening forces have the upper hand, which is why the two most suggestive topics for threats, international competition and terrorism, have such powerful connotations here in Germany. People would much rather hear beautiful promises, and by now they are happy when they aren’t threatened too often. And the same people were assertively making demands not long ago!
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In other words, the myth of the general strike has no validity any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Even less so in Germany than in other countries. The left wing was powerful as long as its threats remained cred- ible. At that time, when communism appeared as the real existing alternative, the Western workers’ parties didn’t have to do much to demonstrate to the employers’ side that social peace had its price, even in Germany. Those times are over. Today the left wing is threatened, not threatening. Strategists define the threat as armed advice. Today people on the left are disarmed and confused.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: If the left wing isn’t holding any trump cards, does that mean it’s superfluous?
SLOTERDIJK: In the last third of the twentieth century the whole of politics in the Western world imploded into the centre. At the same time the communist system imploded in Eastern Europe. Resentment has become increasingly diffuse since then. That is the hallmark of the post-communist situation: the left wing has stopped functioning as the collection point for rage.
What is it supposed to canvass with now? I think it must shift its focus away from revenge campaigns and towards civilization campaigns. From fighting to learning.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: We understand immediately what you mean by ‘revenge campaigns’ – but what might left-wing civilization projects look like?
SLOTERDIJK: For instance, one could focus on the differences between religions. Why has Islam become so prominent in the post- communist situation? Because its activists have made an impression as potentially threatening factors. In my book I examined the ques- tion of whether Islam will succeed in becoming the third collection of rage after Catholicism and communism, and my answer is ‘No’.
206 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Why won’t it succeed?
SLOTERDIJK: Its assumptions are too regional. You can’t collect the resentment of jobless German or Polish people in an Islamic context. Of course, you can oppose modernity and you can retreat into Islam and build a stable existence there, but it can’t be constructed into a movement coming from the centre of moderniza- tion. It can’t promise a better modern age. That’s what communism succeeded in doing for a while.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: But to what extent are the differences of religions a project of the left?
SLOTERDIJK: If there is a world war today, it takes the form of a clash of monotheisms. Those antagonisms have to be civilized.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: That doesn’t sound really new. But hardly anyone is able to define exactly how that civilizing process should happen. What do you suggest?
SLOTERDIJK: For example, civilizing by reshaping religion through art. Thomas Mann gave an example of how this could happen in his fictional trilogy Joseph and His Brothers. The book shows how, thanks to contact with a foreign religion, the exclusive and bigoted form of monotheism was transformed into an inclusive religion based on art.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Could the left adopt that?
SLOTERDIJK: Not directly. First of all, this lesson concerns the parties in the conflict that have dogmas and positions, that manage a truth fund. But the post-communist left wing could tag on imme- diately afterward provided they have a sense that conflicts, friction and confrontation can be productive. Today, struggles are still the significant learning situations. We shouldn’t yield to any illusions. Today, even more than in Hegel’s times, humankind is condemned to auto-didacticism as a matter of life and death. War is the main school and anybody who doesn’t fight doesn’t learn either. No neutral teachers are available. The struggle itself must generate the rules, which go beyond the struggle.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Do you mean class struggle?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, good old class struggle was based on a precarious fantasy of victory: the proletariat had to gain complete control over the production process and that would end the antago- nism with capital. The Russian Revolution showed where that led: to genocide against the bourgeoisie perpetrated by the noble hangmen, the professional revolutionaries who appear as advocates of the proletariat. Today, we have moved away from that type of advocacy and prefer the idea of self-organization at grassroots level. Perhaps the model of advocacy or tribuneship could still make sense
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in periods of mass misery. Now we are working with networking constructs and the assumption of self-organized units.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Are you sure this applies to all left-wing tendencies?
SLOTERDIJK: It certainly applies to the alternative rainbow culture. Maybe palaeo-Stalinists and old Maoist Party cadre wouldn’t feel at home in that diverse scene, but who cares? In Empire, Negri tried to combine palaeo-left and new left approaches, without convincing results. He just renamed the masses as the multitude and created a new fetish – the rainbow as the alternative proletariat.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Multitude as the formula for excuses?
SLOTERDIJK: I would look at it differently. First, Negri is only doing what left-wing radicals chronically do. He is continuing the quest for the subject of the revolution. But two ideas are hampering him: first, the subject is not one, but many. He can live with that for the moment. In addition, it turns out that revolution is an obsolete concept because the process of capital and the empire are always more revolutionary than their opponents. On this point, too, Negri acts as if he could live with this knowledge, but in fact it cancels out his position. He has to be content with the appearance of keeping up with the times by updating Marx’s hymn to the revolutionary power of the bourgeois class.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: There is a slight hitch: the bourgeoisie didn’t and doesn’t want to make a revolution.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, they did – because there are two types of revolution, the erotic revolution of the bourgeoisie, which is driven by greed, and the thymotic revolution of the poor, which only func- tions if it continues to be driven by pride. Marx had his reasons for celebrating the revolution of greed very vigorously and simul- taneously claiming it was not enough. For the left-wing revolution is made not in the name of greed, but of pride and its two moral derivatives, rage and outrage. The goal of such a revolution was to provide the denigrated and insulted with dignity as subjects. Those are movements of empowerment, and the leitmotif of the proletar- ian thymos runs through them: dignity through labour! Dignity through struggle! But as soon as the left wing becomes, in turn, a greed party, as is happening everywhere in Germany, it implodes and becomes part of the total centre.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: That would bring us back to student protests and burning cars in the banlieus. In the end is it really about future opportunities, about demands for work?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m not sure. If we rely on the protagonists’ descriptions, in the banlieus it was mostly about a form of rioting
208 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
as fun in the context of a dreadful lack of social prospects. Thanks to copycat contagion, the TV pictures launched a wave of violent games – car burning with the aid of a popular issue of Molotov cocktails, with 1,500 scenes of fires in one night.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Is it about attention-getting for the offended?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but not in the sense of demands for dignity because that would involve a project requiring long-term patience. It was more about immediate gratification for a spectacle of vandal- ism. This is a case where the modern media are guilty of alliances with the worst tendencies. It is always the most disgusting actions that get rewarded with the biggest attention bonuses.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: What should a civilized left wing do to change this system of incentives?
SLOTERDIJK: The only solution would be to integrate the mar- ginalized people into a meaningful process of economic ownership.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: In other words, jobs for all?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but not in the sense of permanent employ- ment for life. We have to make fighters into entrepreneurs – it’s the same energy. The effects of satisfaction come either when positions are available in the world of work or people create positions for themselves on a ladder of ambition.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Do we have to get children off the street?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course, children should be kept off the street and fathers should be kept out of brothels and pubs. This is best done with extensive job creation schemes, and the economy of own- ership is still the best way to create jobs.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: How do you want to tell that to the losers in this society? Support and demand, or something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: In structural terms, we only have three forms of existence: entrepreneur, worker and unemployed. An effective dif- ference only exists among the unemployed: some become passive while the others become fighters. When resentment meets lust for battle, the activists easily slip into the proto-fascist position. Civil war also creates positions. To paraphrase a saying of Thomas Hobbes, not only war has given everything to every man but civil war has, as well. If we want to leave out these variants, the only thing left is the entrepreneurial alternative.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: You are presupposing something: sover- eign subjects responsible for their own actions.
SLOTERDIJK: The main precondition is that we see unemploy- ment neutrally. To begin with it is merely the expression of two highly desirable developments – first, that wage labour isn’t the most important part of life any longer, and, second, that people are
Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs 209
freed from jobs that are better done by machines. In this respect the reduction of work is good news. The left should have cultivated this viewpoint as its civilizing mission. The substitution of machines for men is something absolutely worth affirming, and so is the reduction of labour time by a third within 200 years, that is, by around 1,700 working hours per year. What we should develop is a strong cul- tural and educational concept for the people liberated from work, combined with the formation of free communities in which people can mutually stimulate and enrich each other, including outside the world of work.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: So you don’t believe that monetary wealth leads to social peace?
SLOTERDIJK: It only satisfies those who have it. Capitalism operates on the premise that peace on earth comes when everybody is turned into a consumer. At most that is a dangerous half-truth. Part of the civilizing project is that we don’t see people only as crea- tures at the feeding trough, but also as beings that want dignity.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Is that where religion comes in again?
SLOTERDIJK: In the foreseeable future religions will continue to be part of the problem rather than the solution. If there were a world spirit it would probably be warning us that the civilizing way is the only one still open. In fact, two structural complexes stand facing each other on the great stage and they are totally out of balance internally. One is an over-eroticized West devastated by greed, and the other is an over-thymoticized Middle East devastated by resentment. Unless they are brought into balance again, global self-destruction is on the agenda on both sides.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: You don’t sound really worried. Are you optimistic?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, actually. But contrary to my initial feeling, I have learned to hope at the second attempt. If you have a fair amount of luck you can’t keep on pushing pessimistic positions. In fact, there are also intellectual reasons for moderate optimism.
FEDDERSEN/LANG: What makes you optimistic?
SLOTERDIJK: Some of the thought constructs developed by Herder, Hegel and Whitehead can be reformulated to create resil- ient optimism about processes. In a dense world – and density is the main characteristic of our form of world – the autodidactic tension increases. We can see the side effects of actions catching up with us faster and faster. Where fate was, there will be feedback. Humankind is an infernal conscious-raising group whose members put so much pressure on each other that they will probably be able to work out a halfway liveable code of behaviour in the present century.
210 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
FEDDERSEN/LANG: Is that your version of the opposite of waiting for a new revolutionary leader?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Revolution’ and ‘leader’ are compromised con- cepts. The model process I have in mind has more to do with a new version of Adam Smith’s argument of the invisible hand. Although it seems very naïve, in reality it offers a complex idea in anticipa- tion of cybernetics and chaos theory. If we set chaos theorists and cyberneticists to work on social evolution, after calculating all the obtainable variables they will conclude that, whatever the condi- tions, we can expect something better than the ultimate meltdown. Optimism as minimalism. With this information we can carry on working.
25
THE ATHLETICS OF DYING Interview with René Scheu*1
SCHEU: Mr Sloterdijk, are you afraid of death?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, I am, and the reason is that I came close to it at a very early age. In a certain sense that is where I come from. If I didn’t have any idea of death I would probably act like the French captain La Palisse whom Albert Camus refers to in The Myth of Sisyphus. This officer was renowned for his fearlessness, his thoughtlessness, in fact. The soldiers wrote a song celebrating this: ‘A quarter of an hour before his death / he was still alive. ’ From a philosophical perspective, this highlights an interesting position: there is life over which death does not cast a shadow.
SCHEU: An unconscious life? Philosophers don’t usually appre- ciate that.
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps because modern philosophers are so fixated on existence and its mortality that they find it difficult to imagine life with a purely expansive dynamic. But even if they lack the ability to do so, it doesn’t mean that type of life doesn’t exist – a life without blockages, without reflection, without exaggerated self-absorption and, above all, without the engram of a near-death experience.
SCHEU: Did you have to confront the possibility of death early on?
SLOTERDIJK: You could say I began as a dead person. It was
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and René Scheu appeared under the title ‘Die Athletik der Sterbens’, in Schweizer Monatshefte 6 (2007): 34–9.
At the time of the interview René Scheu was editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine Schweizer Monat.
212 The Athletics of Dying
a complicated birth. My parents were Rhesus-incompatible, and that’s sufficient for starting off as a near-dead person. I developed severe jaundice immediately after I was born, which led people who saw me to comment that blue eyes look particularly good with yellow skin. To be honest, I didn’t see it as an aesthetic privilege. From the first moment of my life I was already reminded of its end. When the beginning evokes the end it makes a starting point that colours everything.
SCHEU: In dark colours?
SLOTERDIJK: It was a dark beginning, but it was followed by brighter intervals that kept getting larger. These clearings have meant most to me as a philosopher. Incidentally, Emil Cioran used a similar trope in one of his darkest books, The Trouble with Being Born, where he says: ‘We do not rush toward death,’ but ‘We flee the catastrophe of birth. ’
SCHEU: You have spoken of the possibility of a life in which death casts no shadow. Isn’t that merely the fantasy of a philoso- pher whose birth was a death agony?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to distinguish between death and dying. In the end, nobody can know death – anybody who knows it is already beyond all knowing. We simply observe its protocol, its attendant circumstances, at most the process of annihilation, from the internal perspective up to the critical boundary. Dying has a claustrophobic dimension that is difficult to overestimate. The Romantics suppressed it by always emphasizing the agoraphiliac dimensions of dying: everything becomes big, beautiful and open, you stand on a field of blooms in May, you have more space than you ever had and you fill it with your soul. The truth is, in the death agony, space becomes narrower; you have no place any more, either in this world or in this time. The feeling of a choking point like that is the most unbearable thing imaginable.
SCHEU: Is a life without relation to death really a life worth living? Or would it be something like the infinite extension of thoughtlessness?
SLOTERDIJK: It would be worth living – I use the conjunctive because I personally feel different about this. Yet I can definitely imagine a life like that. Making appreciation of life dependent on its inner relation to death is an old European quirk. Life also exists with its very own intensity and wakefulness, without morbidity and backlog, and without interest in what is beyond death, even without the need for reunion in the world beyond with loved ones who have died. If we look at our concept of life in relation to the Hindu her- meneutics of death, for example, we become startlingly aware of our dependence on our own history and culture. In the Hindu concept,
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the wish is to be delivered from life and released from the wheel of rebirth. In Western culture, by contrast, dreams of reunion are a major source of thanatological fantasies. By the way, it seems to me that in constructing ideas of the world beyond, the fear of negative encounters has been just as powerful as the positive dimension . . .
SCHEU: We want to live forever but are afraid to meet really nasty people in the hereafter . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Then let’s rather live forever on earth. That would be the conclusion of a thanatological explanation of the will to life. The fear of meeting people we hate in the nether world has roused some people’s hopes that there is absolutely no hereafter. People never give up hoping that heaven may be a labyrinth in which the inhabitants lose their way. That reminds me of a popular joke. St Peter is taking a new arrival around heaven and shows him the different sections: the Jews here, the Muslims there, and the Hindus on the other side. At the end of the tour, he points to a grim- faced group behind a wall and says, ‘Hush, those are the Catholics. They think they’re alone here. ’
SCHEU: We can see something like the birth of real life from the spirit of consciousness of death, not only in Western philosophy but also in our popular fantasies – look at Hollywood. Which cultural influences do you think are responsible for this?
SLOTERDIJK: A strong heroic-athletic pathos developed in Greek culture and extended to all areas of life. Since then life has meant being in good form and our greatest hope is a chance to die at our peak. That is the hidden message of the Iliad. The two strongest warriors on the plain of Troy, Hector and Achilles, depart this life at the right moment. They both escape an existence after their best form.
SCHEU: In Christianity, however, people achieve their triumph not in the perfect timing of death but in God, the guarantor of the triumph over death.
SLOTERDIJK: Our modern consciousness of death is indeed a secular relic of the Catholic memento mori culture. If you will allow me a brief digression into philosophical history about an author who combined both the Greek and Christian legacies . . .
SCHEU: Go ahead . . .
SLOTERDIJK: It is interesting that Martin Heidegger, who was a former acolyte, was at his least Catholic at the time when he spoke most about death. This radical communion with oneself, death not only as one’s own possibility but superlatively enhanced as the ‘most deeply personal possibility’, as the possibility of impossibility, to some extent as the anticipation of the Last Judgement in one’s own soul, was also fascinating for the Protestants of the 1920s. As
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a result they believed – wrongly – that Heidegger was their man. Heidegger’s idea culminated in something extremely un-Christian: the heroic appropriation of one’s own death.