On Hannah Arendt, the film

Arendt’s Radical Good and the Banality of Evil from Babette Babich on Vimeo.

Babette Babich, "Arendt’s Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt "

Video recorded late Spring, Fordham University, NYC. Lecture originally presented at the World Congress of Philosophy, Athens 5 August 2013

And we find ourselves at the end, just after the rocky-horror like force of the “pleural shock,” quoting Thomas Mann, 

I know death .. I can tell you it’s almost nothing … We come out of the dark and go into the dark….   

Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 529. Simon Critchley took this to title one of his books. 

Mann’s reflection on life and death is also made by Nietzsche who speaks of the human being as a rope suspended over an abyss, between animal and Übermensch (Nietzsche, ZI, Prologue §4).  — Elsewhere I emphasize that it has already been noted that it it is important to note that the term corresponds to Lucian’s hyperanthropos. 

Hence Zarathustra’s Lucianic Übermensch refers to the Afterworld and to the human who is dispossessed not only in this world, as Sloterdjk rightly read Heidegger as saying, but is similarly ill at ease and not at home in the world to come, Nietzsche also calls the human being, using two dashes or Gedankenstriche as punctuation “— a hiatus between two nothingness [zwei Nichtsen] —“ (KSA 12, 473)

Thus we might undertake to read philosophy in a sense that engages what “Philosophy demands as life,” conceived as Sloterdijk conceives it via Thales, “’as what is difficult’, to know thyself.” (CCR, 536) 
Now Sloterdijk is able to see not only the popular joke with Thales and the Milesian maid (but we have already noted such proclivities as par for the philosophical course) but and indeed that for Thales both theoretical and practical regards can coexist.
Rather than being dissonant as today’s renaissance of re-reading of Anaximander seem to insist, this goes hand in glove with readings of Empedocles that would strip his Katharmoi of any cathartic or purifying force.   
All in service of the preludes of science they say. 

But ‘know thyself” works dialectically in an extraordinary way to make such sundering readings redundant: “for Thales, knowledge of the heavens and self-investigation could proceed directly parallel to each other.” (537) 

Sloterdijk ends here in a fashion both Heideggerian and kynical, precisely in Diogenes’ spirit.  For Sloterdijk in its self-incurred tutelage or blinding,

practical reason could not see that the highest concept of behaviour is not “doing” but “letting things be,” and that it achieves its utmost not by reconstructing the structures of our doing but by penetrating the relations between doing and desisting.  Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity; every act of disposing over something remains dependent on the stable massiveness of what is not at our disposal; every change is borne also by the reliable perseverance of what is unchanged; and everything that is calculated rests on the indispensable base of what is predictable. (540) 

    
This is the problem of lying even for moral reasons. For Kant as for Sloterdijk, “those who can let things be are not pursued from behind by projects that have taken on a life of their own.” (531) 

And in that sense “the great thinking of antiquity is rooted in the experience of enthusiastic tranquility when, on the summit of having-thought, the thinker steps aside and lets himself be permeated by the self-revelation of the truth.” (Ibid.) And Sloterdijk quotes Heidegger to say this, as the logos that “lets itself ‘be given to think’ what is thinkable by being itself.” (Ibid.) At the end, it becomes earnest for Sloterdijk, with his allusion to the golden, Goethian “present” that we have earlier already referred to, here not heavy or deadly earnest, rather of a “courage” born of the experience of a well-spent life, the courage of Kant’s daring in his Sapere aude, a courage that 

“can suddenly make itself felt as a euphoric clarity or a seriousness that is wonderfully tranquil within itself. It awakens the present within us. In the present, awareness  climbs all at once to the heights of being. Cool and bright, every moment enters its space: you are no difference from its brightness, its coolness, its jubilation.”  (547)   

This feeling which Nietzsche for his part called “the happiness of a god, full of power and love, full of laughter and full of tears,” is also a benediction.

Postmodernism and the Nouvelle Cynic

I have  suggested that the cynicism of which Sloterdijk writes could also be called as both Lyotard and Eco spoke of it, “postmodern” — “Discontent in our culture appears today as a universal, diffuse cynicism.” (88)  

Lyotard

And Sloterdijk calls on Benjamin, where he always could also invoke Adorno or Horkheimer, but even Adorno knew that Benjamin would be a safer bet, just as today we could also invoke Foucault, more popularly, or more esoterically even today, the late Jean Baudrillard: thus for Benjamin, here for Sloterdijk, critics

have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. (Ibid.) 

And in the two decades that have come and gone between the time of this reflection, even before the world changed and references to the GDR cease to make any sense, and the shock of invoking Marx becomes something else again, Sloterdijk asks in a Nietzschean voice, 

Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent. (Ibid.) 

And he answers with his own directness, letting the reader know that we do not have to do with an ordinary critical text, or indeed, any kind of merely academic context.
When I am hit up for cash in a New York sidewalk I pay up, but at the same time, I know that I am using the best expedient to assure my imperturbability. 

The same goes for an email asking me to add my voice to stopping the logger’s saw, to preventing the death of polar bears, wolves, seals, coyotes, and sometimes just horses and kittens.  I always hit a key to respond and I do so although I know that in a world where industry has for nearly 60 years taken each and every new formulation (not merely every new invention) of hand-soap, hand-cream, sun-lotion, dish-washing liquid, etc. and rammed it down the throats of captive animals not until they sicken but until they die and not until some die but until enough of them, at least half have died (and it is nearly always a complete achievement by the time one gets that far), that in a civilization that takes it for granted that animals should be bled to death and hence merely stunned before being literally de-assembled, skinned, sometimes alive, legs removed, beheaded, cut in half and in pieces, etc., in a civilization that poisons prairie dogs so that cows grazing (corporately owned cattle on public lands meant for public use) should not, grazing as they are without supervision (today’s cowboys drive pick-up trucks and not ponies, and do not stay with their herd but round them up mechanically as needs be to take them to the feed lots and then to slaughter), so that as these animals scrabble for food on a range no one has planted for them, these cows do not break their legs by accident or in the stress of being herded together before going off to their deaths.  

Thus the prairie dogs have to die and the black footed ferret likewise and so too anything that eats the poison meant for them or anything that eats prairie dogs, this will include coyotes and pumas, foxes, hawks and eagles, even the cowboy’s dog dies.  

And I have not begun talking about Obama's use of wildlife and parks funding in order to fund the high tech slaughter of America's wolves, shot by morons.

Our civilization shrugs, wolves are 'dangerous.' 

And if we take to the ocean, the shrug intensifies:  so what about the fish, so what about the dolphins, the turtles, the whales, so what about the sharks? So what about squid (harvested at a massive rate, starving whales in the process, just because we can take it all and so we do.

Nor does it end there, America continues its longest war(s). It is hard to think of anyone who is not a European who is not disappointed in Obama, first generation, now into the Obama second term, just after the phantasm of the inauguration but already graced immediately following his election with headlines wondering, warning, that and of course, he will -- because he cannot but -- "blow" his mandate, again. 

---

And part of the reason for this predictably ambidextrous answer can be seen in Sloterdijk’s choice of George Schulz’s cynical oil painting, Industrial Farmers, a painting that for some would combine Grant Wood and Georg Grosz.

 Georg Schulz, Industrial Farmers, 1920 (Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal)

What is of interest in the painting is its cavalier depiction of perversity, of cupidity in the case of the father and exploitative intimacy in the case of the mother and the piglet on her lap (and what one knows of its destiny -- the stainless steel mesh on the mother’s hand seems to show the threat that awaits the thus poised suckling pig). And the famer’s progeny, head tilted to show a literal mindlessness, torturing a frog. In the small window on the opposite side of the twisted flystrip handing from the ceiling, a figure with a strangely convex hollow core sporting what seems to be star in the lower part of the round barrel of his coat stands next to a mechanical harvesting truck in a field harvested clean.

The vision of the farmer exemplifies what Heidegger will later, infamously and inexcusably and precisely accurately name “industrial agriculture.” 

 And for Sloterdijk,

A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlightenment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion for centuries.  
The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phases of our history began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mastery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. (CCR, 95)
 

We can also call this as we increasingly do, globalization and the imperative of “urban imperialism” or sustainable development.   

But what is in a name?

What Sloterdijk says of censorship one can also read in Horkheimer but also Marcuse and at greater length in an another author Sloterdijk does not name at all: Jacques Ellul who wrote insightfully, if rarely cited on this complex and all-too-present topic, on propaganda.

See among his other books, Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Knopf, 1965).

These are not cricitisms and Sloterdijk to be sure can answer any criticism raised against him.  His books are designed to do this. 

Add to this the sheer size of Sloterdijk’s intellectual output and it is plain that this abundance, too, shields against critique. 

So, is there anything unshielded? 

No, and yes. 

Dämmerung: The Twilight of False Consciousness

Once again, we recall the year: 1981.  The echoes resound. We hear Nietzsche and Heidegger to be sure, also Adorno and Benjamin but above all perhaps we hear Marcuse.  We hear little Lyotard in Sloterdijk, though we might have done and the term postmodernism could be substituted for cynicism, Umberto Eco certainly did do just that.  

 Umberto Eco

But that is to make it too easy. We think we know what it is to be modern (Bruno Latour rightly disputes this as does indeed Foucault).  We do not know the cynics and yet all of us use the word, all of us are, indeed, cynics already and in advance.

So we speak of Diogenes in his barrel (and the well-educated translator gives us Diogenes in the tub, to catch the reference both to Athenian pottery and to Swift, references we now see as needful clarification):

In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured.       

        Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 3-4

The reference to the picture book is one small part Nietzsche, almost no part Kittler and an important concession to the culture of self-advertisement. 
To read the Critique of Cynical Reason is to read a book that uses its illustrations to make at least half its case. Like Horst Bredekamp but also like Theweleit, Sloterdijk offers a kind of web-page text, avant la lettre. An early exercise, some might say, of media archaeology.

Our definition comes early in the text: “Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness.” (2) This is a picture-book definition of cynicism, complete with emphasis.  Have your yellow highlighter ready.  And so we read, all sober scholarship, for Sloterdijk is sufficiently down with Nietzsche and critical theory to know all about the object contractions: “The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective validity… logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false?” (Ibid.) How indeed?

“In laughter, all; theory is anticipated.” (42)

Hence I have certain sympathy with the spirit of Sloterdijk’s bemused recommendation that one imagine what a society composed solely of Levinas scholars might look or feel like (Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark, 29), which does not mean that Sloterdijk has an excessive sympathy for animals or for nature — and it has rightly been observed that he is not quite up to the task of thinking about women even where, perhaps especially where he speaks of the body, masturbation, pornography.

Like most of us, Sloterdijk too has his blind spots just because he is limited, qua male, to his own perspective and only women have to learn, this is the singular philosophic advantage of oppressed consciousness, to take the viewpoint of others. 

What makes Sloterdijk elusive here is both his insistence on maleness or virility, a Falstaff-style modus that is hard to refuse because it simply insists upon itself — like a man sitting in a New York Subway car with his legs spread as wide as possible in order to take up two or three or four seats, he’s a man, you see, and he needs those seats.  

But there is also far more than this at work: Sloterdijk seems to know this too, or at least you can content yourself with supposing that he does.  Here he borrows a leaf from Nietzsche (his translator misses the allusion but it’s not a direct one anyway), where Nietzsche talks about his stupidities “down deep” (relevant after Sloterdijk’s Critique of Transparency in psychoanalysis, contra Freud’s self-serving insistence on patenting the technique solely and only in his own name by naming himself the discoverer of the unconscious despite antecedents), Sloterdijk goes in for Mesmerism, but and of course the unconscious is already in Kant, and this is the point of the allusion to the “dear little self,” and why, for Kant, subjective intentions fail to suffice as proof of conformity moral law as they offer no assurance that some other self-interest may have been in play). Natural Illusion (Rousseau’s nostalgia that some convert to the green nostalgia for the underdeveloped or natural world), we read, in his Critique of the Illusions of Privacy of “artful stupefaction” or I would say, as stupefaction is far too kind: it is “stupidification” [Verdummung].  Thus Sloterdijk writes that such deliberate or “artful” stupidification “manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism and egoism.” (CCR, 59) 

Reprise: Sloterdijk and Adorno

The previous post entails, then, that Sloterdijk must be taken as rather more nuanced than the “Heidegger? Can’t be a good philosopher. Wasn’t a good man”* school of philosophical valuation. 

*This is Gilbert Ryle’s apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher’s ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1 (1991): 1-23, here, p. 4. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega” in Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 243-264. 

Indeed, Sloterdijk’s reflections, at least in his Critique of Cynical Reason, appear to continue, even when it comes to Heidegger, the contextual hermeneutic and historical spirit of Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s surprisingly straightforward highlighting of Hegel’s polemical and thus Aristotelian approach to the history of philosophy.

Note by contrast that Jaspers in his essay on Anaximander highlights the achievement that it is to conceive a cosmological conception of theory without tacking it against an opponent: “And he effected all these innovations of human consciousness quietly, without polemics against anyone.” Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Laotzu, Nagarjuna (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 3.

If it has to be noted that the Ryle-Blackburn approach continues apace in the ongoing fisticuffs that characterize the so-called analytic-continental divide, Sloterdijk’s thinking in his Critique of Cynical Reason ironizes our extraordinary ignorance of the history of philosophy, a history that is not only the story of Plato and not only the story of Aristotle but also the story of the cynics, about whom today, and increasingly so, we barely know anything at all. Indeed, although some will argue that this is changing, it may  be countered that the seeming change is only by contrast with an otherwise fairly continuous oblivion.

The analytic-continental divide (and everyone disputes the idea that there is any such thing as either analytic philosophy, per se, or continental philosophy. per se, which has nothing to do with issue or the stakes at hand) refers to a conceptual display of aggression that seems only to have escalated with the triumph of analytic philosophy in terms of jobs and the professional of philosophy as a trade. To discuss this we need the psychoanalytic exigence of a Lacan or in his incarnation as a one-time Lacanian theorist of Žižek or else Badiou, though not, perhaps for reasons that have a great deal to do with Comte, Irigaray or else Kristeva. I discuss this in political terms with reference to academia itself (and not many scholars do) in Babich, “On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy” in C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003), pp. 63-103 but see also Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science” in: Alan Schrift and Keith Ansell-Pearson, eds., The New Century Volume Three: History of Continental Philosophy [Link is to Michael Kelly's review] (Chesham, UK: Acumen Press, 2010), pp. 263-286 as well as Babich, “Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and Waterbears: Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science,” International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 25 (2011). 

Thus it will do to review the cynic Diogenes once again as it may tell us how Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger and we should be able in the process to manage a pitstop on the woman question, by which I mean to say that we may be able to ask where in Sloterdijk’s text one might place or find women? 

I note already that it will not do to say in the context of the current review that there were no women cynics — there were, which is among other things, the most disconcerting aspect of the doctrine, as women do indeed tend to profit and to suffer, but these are the same things, most from convention. Thus Hipparchia of Maroneia had to put up with rather more of the course of a lifetime than Kierkegaard’s child-bride intended, Regina, but the difference between Hipparchia and Regina was one of practical askesis, which at least for some readers would make Regina the feminist hero. Kierkegaard did not simply break with Regina but presented impossible terms which, as Kierkegaard ironically presented these to her, would have had her living in a cupboard, another kind of nordic dollhouse. 

The same difference makes Hipparchia a cynic philosopher, or kynic philosopher, just to use Sloterdijk’s distinction.  It is in meaning and doing as you say that distinguishes the cynic from the kynic, male or female. And it is for the same reason that, like the Cathar Perfecti, the ancients held cynic philosophy in high regard as beyond reproach (and Diogenes’ manifestation as sober-minded  rather than as foil for mockery in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead would attest to this as well). 

As we saw at the start, Sloterdijk not only knows a lot about the cynics he also knows a good deal about many others, some of whom have gone to the heights of fashionable discourse and some for whom fortune has gone quite the other way.   
But with Sloterdijk — as was also the case with Marcuse and especially Adorno — there is something more at work than merely the matter of having done one’s homework.  Indeed the great majority of scholars who work on the cynics can be (or least have traditionally been) all too conventional.  And if this covers over, as in the case of classics traditionally, a certain prurient fascination with topics that are traditionally regarded as taboo — and this is neither a great revelation for us today and nothing like a rarity after the enormous success of Foucault’s History of Sexuality — it is still the case that such motivations, as Nietzsche would uncover them, make a difference, and sometimes even all the difference. 
Thus we have noted that Sloterdijk shocks us and he shocks us, often enough, in the most conventionally sexist of ways. Hence it seemingly does not occur to Sloterdijk to wonder about the woman who might be reading the text or the desires that she might (or might not) have for her own part.  Women are present in Sloterdijk’s text but only as objects of fairly conventional, if rather Groszian desire.

Thus even as restrained a scholar as Andreas Huyssen — and one as friendly to Sloterdijk, Huyssen writes, after all, the introduction to the English edition of The Critique of Cynical Reason — is moved (no matter how mildly he is moved), to observe that Sloterdijk 

clearly has the rational, reified, male subject in mind. The question of women’s subjectivity and its relationship to the cynicism-kynicism constellation is never really explored and the presentation of Phyllis and Xanthippe as female kynics is (just to put it mildly) disappointing. What are women to do while Diogenes “pisses against the idealist wind,” and how do they participate in or counteract the cynicism of domination?*

*Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 169.  See more generally, Derek Krueger,  “The Bawdy and Society The Shamelessness of Diogenes in Roman Imperial Culture,” in R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics.

Yet where Huyssen suggests that Sloterdijk might well have strengthened his own case “by focusing more thoroughly on the problem of gender and by asking himself to what extent his critique of male identity pathology might be indebted to feminist perspectives”(ibid.), Huyssen raises an important ideological point, intriguingly one that Sloterdijk seems not quite to wish to avail himself of. The reason may simply be that Sloterdijk’s sexism is fairly good-natured or ordinary.  The question of how his views on women may come across to others is not his concern.  And this too is fairly common among male academics.
 

We have noted that Sloterdijk begins by characterizing Nietzsche as a cynic, and one can do this, provided one ignores Nietzsche’s other self-characterizing tropes and Sloterdijk — as it can be supposed — has no problem with such a device.  After all, Sloterdijk borrows Foucault’s thunder, without naming him, as he also sets him along with Marx as a “modified approach to ‘saying the truth.’” (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxix) Along the way, Sloterdijk does not spare himself his own cyncism (somewhat, somewhat).

Sloterdijk reflects on Musil’s description of the existential frustration that can be an encounter with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (provided one is affected at all, and as we recall Nietzsche was fairly persuaded that there were scarcely any such).

See for a extended discussion in the context of Jacobi, Fichte, and Kleist, Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Special Issue on Nietzsche. 84-2. (Spring 2010): 231-256.

And Sloterdijk goes on to add a reflection on the dullness of the professors (referring to the 1981 Kant Congress in Mainz he had already conceded a certain underwhelming aura but and to be fair, who has not been to a conference and taken stock of the sort of “luminaries” presented by one’s peers or higher-ups --- or one’s younger-ups, noting the accelerated professionalization of the student) esteemed as the “very best” and who has not experienced something of the same feeling? Here Sloterdijk intends to go beyond not merely Kant but Adorno, which already tells us that he knows what he is doing, but to offer “a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).” (CCR, xxxi)
Sloterdijk’s inspiration is without doubt the impotence of the Frankfurt School, by which we should not think of Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcuse but just and only the Frankfurt School-as-it-has-been-standing without advance or perturbation under the aegis of Habermas (and those who stand in his place today). Even in 1981.  Perhaps most of all in 1981 where one might have expected something more (and the Frankfurt School was given every possible break to fulfill this expectation, of that there is no doubt).

But it is with Adorno (not Habermas) that Sloterdijk’s sympathies are free to find expression, out the open.  “Critical Theory,” so we read, categorically rejects “the masculine world.” (xxxiv) Exceeding Lacan, it “is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers.” (Ibid.)
 

And Sloterdijk is not done: “The masochistic element has outdone the creative element,” (xxxv) adds the condemnation of the “sensitive,” expressed as “paralyzing resentment” nourished upon “an archaic rage against ‘masculinity,’ that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific ‘positivists’.” (Ibid.) And we are then hardly surprised to read that it “took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings.” (Ibid.) Oh, can we add deconstruction too?  Why ever not? 

“With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his father’s name, W.” (Ibid.)

Of course we get to hear about Adorno’s sex life but not in detail just the gossip.  The year is 1981 and we have already been there and done that.  Adorno we are told is reduced, done to ground by nakedness, not just nakedness, naked breasts. (xxxvii) And Sloterdijk recalls these words in the body of the text (nothing like self-reference):

Does the reader remember the episode in the lecture hall described in the Preface? The disturbance of the lecture and the female student’s naked breasts?  Now their baring was no run-of-the-mill erotic-cheeky argument with female skin. They were, almost in the ancient sense, cynically bared bodies, bodies as arguments, bodies as weapons. (109)

Fascinating: so that is where the women were and are.

The author has spent some time for her own part in German university lecture halls, both as student and visiting professor, and recalls wondering how the female students in the room were able to take notes especially as they were (and this was 1984, decades after Sloterdijk’s “cynical” moment of encounter with Adorno) assiduously knitting. 

NB: See however for what might be accounted a kind of cynicism of the sort that might not appeal Sloterdijk and likely not at all to the majority of feminists, who have also and to be sure their problems with Simone de Beauvoir and any woman who practices a kind of truth telling against the conventionality that argues that women choose traditional roles in a kind of magically liberating way, see per contra, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1987) and Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: A Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston 1978: Beacon Press).

And yet, it is hard to protest too much, for that would be to pretend that one knows nothing of American style academic feminism. Even more that, it would be to ignore the circumstances of today’s media connectedness, male and female. Thus I too have students like these today, male and female, although in place of knitting they use computers or just text, using the like Thumbelina-sized zither that is their cell-phones.   

Kynic or cynic?

Sloterdijk who moves between analyzing the claims of objectivity and analysis and claiming the same for himself concludes his introduction: “A mixture of cynicism, sexism, ‘matter-of-factness,” and psychologism constitutes the mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and philosophy.” (xxxviii) 

The self-styledly masculine Sloterdijk quotes his grandmother (no mamma’s boy he) (or maybe not: he’s not writing Dutch after all, this we know) “a teacher’s daughter, from an idealistic home,” who “often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation.”  (Ibid.)  
Sloterdijk seems to know that these were for his grandmother “magical books which we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must admire from the outside like something from someone very great.” (Ibid.)   That would be anyone who knows the true disenchanted magic of such books at all, that is, again, as Nietzsche once spoke of it “those who really know how to use such valuable books, probably those who themselves write or could write such books, as Nietzsche once put it speaking “in usum delphinorum.”*

*Nietzsche, GS §102. See for a discussion in the context of philology and today’s scholarship, Babich, “Nietzsche’s Philology and Nietzsche’s Science: On The ‘Problem of Science’ and ‘fröhliche Wissenschaft’ in: Pascale Hummel, ed., Metaphilology: Histories and Languages of Philology (Paris: Philologicum, 2009), pp. 155-201.  Here it is worth noting that Swift, noted in a previous post, expressly characterized his own Tale of Tub in a similar fashion as for the "use" of the dauphin.

These special readers, very like Sloterdijk’s good grandmother, correspond to the majority of today’s scholars.  It is a necessary corollary to add that this kind of ranking (grandmothers and dauphins), whereby we take ourselves to know whose references are impotent, de-virilized, and whose not, extends fairly broadly.  Thus we continue to read commentaries by those who inform us that there is no evidence, no “proof”  that Nietzsche ever read Kant’s first critique (though fond as many are of the third critique, one sometimes makes an exception for this one critique out of a possible three). It does not occur to these commentators that there is, apart from their own convictions, to use Nietzsche’s word for prejudice, no proof, not a shred of “evidence” (of the kind they themselves would identify as such) that they themselves have read the text they speak of (and with today’s search engine the need to have read anything at all is an optimism of a kinder, perhaps more rigorous, but certainly foregone era). 

What does one mean when one speaks of those books one can have read? 
What is reading? 
Proof, a metaphor borrowed from a certain tradition of geometrical demonstration or construction and further from the security of a test against injury, is similarly in need of question.

Sloterdijk’s initial discussion of what fascinates philosophers who remain captivated by Marxist-Hegelian-Freudian language with a certain resentment of Adorno and Marcuse but an odd fondness for Lühmann, Marquard, and Habermas (note the pigeon-holing here), of unhappy false conciousness — the comparison to Marcuse requires that one pay attention to repressive desublimation precisely in its desublimation as indulgent liberation, and think of the more or less happily unabated consumption of porn and the trafficking in prostitutes which makes a weary appearance either in the tabloids with politicians (as if that were the essence of scandal, and indeed in order to distract from what might otherwise occupy our concern) or else with the trade in children for sex, whereby one engages in the dissociative moralization that allows one to condemn men who flock to Thailand (or to Hamburg or San Francisco) for child prostitutes while at the same time celebrating the prowess (mostly monetary of course and this is why we praise them) of men who date younger women or presidents who marry supermodels, of the kind that another generation called starlets in order to emphasize precisely what counts as charm: and that is their youth. But as a date for the evening, one person’s 17 or 16 year old starlet (13 years old, if one is Roman Polanski) is another person’s “child.” 

Think of the scandal of the by-now nearly forgotten New York governor Eliot Spitzer whose fall from grace had mostly to do with the legal embarrassment less of procurement than transporting across state lines (this is still with a rakish charm called “white slavery” but it is all about sex for money and this is the desublimation that comes with power (it matters indeed that Spitzer’s replacement after his fall from grace, his lieutenant governor and associates would accede to the same proximity to libertarian indulgence assured by political power with an instantaneity that so far from outraging simply bored the press.