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CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3PP 357380

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INTEREST ANDEXCESS OF MODERNMANS RADICAL MEDIO CRITY:RESCALINGSLOTERDIJKSGRANDIOSE

AESTHETICSTRATEGYHENK OOSTERLING

ABSTRACT In my contribution,I adopt Sloterdijks analysis ofglobalization as the megalomaneous or

hyperpolitical installing of a total workof art ( Gesamtkunstwerk ). I rephrase histhreefold (energetical, informational, andepistemological) explicitation of mansradical immersion in his own media asradical mediocrity and argue that thishas become our rst nature. But then, whatis the political potential of Sloterdijks

HENK OOSTERLING (1952) IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF

PHILOSOPHY OF DIFFERENCE,INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY, AND

AESTHETICS AT THE ERASMUSUNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM.

HE IS ALSO DIRECTOR OF THECENTRE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART, CHAIRMAN OF THE DUTCH AESTHETICS FEDERATION, AND

SECRETARY OF THE DUTCH-FLEMISH ASSOCIATION FOR

INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY.HE HAS PUBLISHED EXTENSIVELY

ON FRENCH PHILOSOPHY.HIS BOOKS INCLUDE: DOOR

SCHIJN BEWOGEN. NAAR EEN HYPERKRITIEK VAN DE XENOFOBE

REDE (KOK AGORA, 1996), RADICALE MIDDELMATIGHEID(BOOM, 2000),

AND INTERKULTURALITT IM DENKEN HEINZ KIMMERLES(VERLAG BAUTZ 2005). SEE:

HTTP://WWW.HENKOOSTERLING.NL .
http://www.henkoosterling.nl/http://www.henkoosterling.nl/


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merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Bataillan principleof excess rather than lack and scarcity? Should we not differentiatebetween miserabilist and afrmative critique? This distinction isall but self-evident, because every new mediological explicitation

eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. It depends onthe critical difference between mediocrity and inter-esse, betweenplain comfortable life and self-reective radical mediocrity. In thenal analysis, the psychological surplus of generosity and thesubstance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reective in-between. Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires adownscaling of Sloterdijks hyperpolitical understanding of being-inin terms of micropolitical art practices. I will concentrate on onepossible answer to the critical questions that must be asked: wherein

lies the possibility of resistance in Sloterdijks recent analyses ofcapitalism?

KEYWORDS: philosophy, art, media critique, ecology, micropolitics,globalization

Upon taking the stage at the Tate Gallery in December2005, Peter Sloterdijk began his lecture on the relation

between art and politics, dealing with surrealism andterror, with the following statement:

I like very much the pronunciation of the word enormous. Itgives me a feeling for what I really am, that means, a personworking on monstrosity. No more, no less. Philosophy demandsthat all of us produce a new and convincing interpretationof that strange state of mind we call megalomania. In everygeneration megalomania has to be reinterpreted by its carriers.Its not a choice, megalomania is choosing you and you haveto cope with that as well as you can. The stress has to be putnot on the word mania but on the fact that it is a kind ofsuffering. The real term should be megalopathia, to be patientof big questions. As soon as you can accept this existentialcondition you will feel a little bit better, but you are not healedof course.1

There is no cure, only a taste for the enormity of our problems.

0. WORKING ON MONSTROSITYWe can imagine Sloterdijk almost physically performing a judgementof taste by literally examining the palatal, alveolar, and labial qualitiesof the English word enormous, caressing the elongated, roundedsound represented in writing by or. Wasnt it Gaston Bachelard who in his phenomenology of the spherical made the observation thatthe value of perfection attributed to the sphere is entirely verbal


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(Bachelard 1994: 235)? In shifting to the content level, Sloterdijkintroduces the focus of his judgement of taste: monstrosity. Bothenormous and monstrosity are variations on one of the crucialideas that haunt and inspire his spherological discourse: das

Ungeheuer . Although in earlier interviews he preferred the synonymdas ganz Groe , at the Tate it was once again monstrosity.Adopting this concept from Martin Heidegger, who borrowed it fromGreek tragedy,2 Sloterdijk no longer relates the monstrous to mythicalgods or a Christian God. It is a secularized version of HeideggersIn-Sein: to inhabit the monstrous (dem Ungeheuren einwohnen )(SI: 643).3 For Sloterdijk, authentic philosophy cannot be but ahermeneutics of the monstrous (NG: 166; ST: 291). 4 Conventionalthinking means only the organized form of resistance against any

reection on the monstrous (ST: 290).In order to get a grip on Sloterdijks enormous diagnosis of ourtime one has to take at least three giant steps. First, given the factthat the tensions between the local and the global and accompanyingtechnology are articulations of the monstrous, one has to familiarizeoneself with his analysis of contemporary globalization. This processconsists of three stages. After a metaphysical globalization thatbegins with the pre-Socratic global mapping of the universe, aterrestrial globalization starts in 1492 with the nautical ecstasies

of European powers which led to the discovery of the differentcontinents. The last sentence of Sphren I Where are we whenwe are in the monstrous? (SI: 644) resonates in the prefaceof part II: globalization is understood as the geometrization ofthe unmeasurable, i.e. as geometry in the monstrous (SII: 47):Thinking the sphere means to be realized as a local function ofthe monstrous (SII: 25). In writing its genealogy, Sloterdijk implicitlyrejects the unique character of current digital globalization. It is justanother explication (Explikation) of a millennia-long process.

Rather than labeling this explication as a progressive development,Sloterdijk qualies it with Gilles Deleuzes notion of pli, or fold,in mind (Deleuze 1993) as explicitation.5 World history is adiscursive invention of the second phase. In the third phase man isbeyond history (WIK: 247). The monstrous becomes a qualicationof a posthistorical world, i.e. a totality that allows neither full under-standing nor total comprehension. It is the enigmatic name for anetwork of immune systems, of cocoons, and capsules: after thebiological mother womb and the political nation state, man has erectedan ecological Greenhouse with a foam-like texture, consisting ofcocoon-like bubbles, glued together. To enhance Sloterdijks imagery:the mother-child cocoon has been blown up to global proportions,exploded, and reconditioned as airy foam.

Megalomania suits Sloterdijks state of mind. Mania, however,contains too much madness. Sloterdijk therefore corrects himself byreplacing megalomania with megalopathia not as much emphasizingthe aspect of suffering as the aspect of patience and endurance: to


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be patient of big questions. 6 One specic Heideggerian overtone,prominently present in his earlier works especiallyEurotaoism (Sloterdijk [ET] [1989]) but expelled from his last project, resonates:monstrosity demands to be endured ( Gelassenheit ). It is too vast

for man. It is beyond all discourses: It is a work of art, but muchmore than a work of art; it is grand politics, but much more thangrand politics; it is technology, but much more than technology . . .(NG: 367).

The next step demands a tailoring of his concept of the enormousto relational proportions by downscaling these to an individual level.In the concluding sentences of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) Sloterdijk proposes Aristotles concept megalopsychia . Thissensibility an existential condition has to become the second

nature of citizens of posthistorical foam city. It sensitizes themto their current mode of existence: generosity and abundance.According to Nietzsche, Sloterdijks other main inspiration,7 everysecond nature over time becomes rst. Modern generosity and,for that matter, modern tolerance needs an update. Differentconcepts are proposed by Sloterdijk to actualize this notion. Themost frequently used is creativity. In the very last sentences of theSphren-plus project, Sloterdijk wonders whymegalopsychia wouldnot be adequate, just because [our contemporaries] nowadays say

creativity instead of magnanimity. Creative people . . . are thosewho prevent the whole from falling back into pernicious routine(WIK: 415). Ill come back to these harmful routines. For the timebeing I restrict myself to registering that Sloterdijk puts his shirt onan aesthetic category: not autonomy but creativity.

One more step is needed. After having read 2,988 pages, onestarts to wonder what exactly the political relevance of Sloterdijkstrilogy-plus is. What does his introduction to a general scienceof revolution (SV: 64) mean? How are revolution and resistancearticulated within an aesthetic strategy? What kind of politics isleft when the outcome of spherological diagnosis is the principleof abundance (beruss)? In the land of plenty, grilled chickens yaround to be grabbed at will. Mere distribution of scarce resourcesis no longer needed.

I will start with the exploration of Sloterdijks politico-aestheticstrategy in the strict sense: in his writing. After having analyzed itsrhetorical aspects I contextualize his claim of abundance in politicaleconomy, anthropology, media theory, and ontology. Then I returnto aesthetics and politics. I specify in my own terms his media-theoretical underpinning of anthropology. In order to rephrase hiscritique of the indifference and mediocrity of the masses (Sloterdijk[VM] [2000]) in mediological terms, I need to make a distinctionbetween the reactive and afrmative conditions of being-in-media.The first condition reproduces lack and is qualified by me asradical mediocrity; the latter is open, reective, and labeled asinter-esse. 8 Hyperpolitical megalopsychia becomes micropolitical


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inter-esse. In having rescaled and miniaturized megalopsychia tothese mediological proportions, Sloterdijks politico-aestheticstrategy is better understood as the micropolitics of public space,i.e. art as public space.

1. ART AND POLITICS: GETTING BEYOND GRANDNARRATIVESSloterdijks spherological project is monstrous indeed! More ad-equate a qualication cannot be found for his trilogy-plusSphren -project. The number of pages is enormous, the use of neologismsexcessive, the conceptual avalanche overwhelming, the historicallyembedded, methodological legitimization overpowering. The explicitlypseudo-Hegelian overtones that give Sloterdijks text coherence and

consistency are triggered by his desire to outdo Oswald Spenglersfailed morphology of world history (SI: 78). For him, writing a historyof the sphere as a form means constructing a genealogy of thesphere insofar as it informed and formatted collective consciousnessand culture from the beginnings of Western civilization. Instead ofreproducing a historical approach based on negativity (Hegel) andresentment (Spengler), Sloterdijk adopts an afrmative approach(Nietzsche). He turned his back on reactive nihilism and its impliedcynicism earlier inCritique of Cynical Reason(1987; rst published in

German: 1983). This shift from cynicism to kynicism rehabilitatedthe hero of antiphilosophy and cosmopolitism Diogenes of Synope,the philosopher in drag, who was presented by Nietzsche as themadman with his lantern wandering around asking the townsmenin the market whether they know the whereabouts of God. He hasnot been seen lately. Do they already know he is dead?

The death of God, rst proclaimed by Hegel (1952: 523, 546),opened a new space in human consciousness: the sublime. Burkeproblematized this affective tension, Kant transcendentalized it andin a postmodern turn it was rephrased by Jean-Franois Lyotardas the ambiguous rationale of the avant-garde art that methodicallyshocks the bourgeoisie out of its tastes. Lyotards sublime stillresonates in Sloterdijks notion of monstrosity when he mergesaesthetics with politics (Oosterling 1999).9 At the end of SphrenIIIour current immune sphere the Greenhouse or Crystal Palace is described in terms of an artistic superinstallation in which publicspace has gained a museum-like quality. This mega installation canbe described as a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk , if this hadnot been occupied by aesthetic ideology (SIII: 811).

Benjamins analysis of Nazism as the politicalGesamtkunstwerk par excellence 10 problematized the relation between art and politicsindeed. Therefore Sloterdijks delimiting the concept of art in orderto identify the system of society with the system of art must surpassall previous interpretations of the concept of the total work of art . . .(SIII: 813). Is globalization perhaps an option? Or McLuhansglobal village? For Sloterdijk these are not suitable candidates.11


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This sphere of all spheres only exists politico-economically as aninclusive concept of markets (WIK: 231), the coherence of whichis guaranteed by joint ventures.

Isnt this reason enough for Sloterdijk to draw the same conclusion

as Lyotard did, i.e. that the grand narratives have come to an end?On the contrary. Sloterdijk makes an unexpected move: he wouldrather reproach the grand narratives for not being big enough (WIK:14). Understanding how Sloterdijk overtrumps the modern grandnarratives demands an understanding of his use of aesthetics atdifferent levels of his writing.

2. RHETORIC: FICTION, METAPHOR, HYPERBOLE, ESSAYSo how does Sloterdijk get beyond the grand narratives of modern

enlightenment, i.e. of state-building, emancipation, and globalization?If these narratives are no longer viable, how can Sloterdijk still claimthe truth for his own grand narrative on spheres? Why, for instance,has he chosen the sphere as an all-encompassing image? Is theform, i.e. the gure of the sphere form and gure are synonyms(ST: 177) not chosen arbitrarily and externally as an analytic toolin his hermeneutics of the monstrous? It is instructive to consult hisphilosophical sources of inspiration: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault,and Deleuze.

a. ction and metaphorsTruth, Nietzsche states in Posthumous Writings, is a mobile armyof metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sumof human relations that, poetically and rhetorically intensied,transferred, and adorned, after steady use occur to a people asfounded, canonical and obligatory: truths are illusions . . . (1980:880, 881). Objectivity is at best the convergence of as manyperspectives as possible. Likewise our collective consciousness islled or formatted by the spherical. Objectivitys ction, over time,gains a truth value. This canonized ction cannot be unmaskedwithout using the very same ction in the process of unveiling.Sloterdijk investigates this aporetic quality in his writing.

Heideggers phenomenological notion of truth (aletheia ) i.e.simultaneous disclosure and unconcealment of Being is beyondthe conguration of the objective and subjective. We are alwaysalready attuned to truth, always already in the mood. For Heidegger,Dasein is not a subject but a project. To Foucault, truth was initiallya product of discursive formations, but it was eventually downscaledto a truth game, a collective practice in which knowledge, power, andsubjectivity converge. That truth is an expression of a will to power isacknowledged by both Foucault and Deleuze. When Nietzsches viewis linked to Deleuze and Guattaris denition of philosophy, Sloterdijksshift to creativity becomes self-evident: Philosophy is the art offorming, inventing, and fabricating concepts and With its concepts,philosophy brings forth events (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: resp. 2,


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199; see also WIK: 14). Reecting on the inconceivable monstrous,in short, demands the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize aprojected truth. This creation of truth is neither a subjective projectionnor pure description of a given reality. It is a revealing of what has

been concealed for a certain period in order to forge different politicalalliances and congure yet unseen epistemological coherencies.Truth is a projective practice.

So Sloterdijks aesthetic intervention rst and foremost takesplace at the level of his writing. He strategically applies stylisticgures and uses rhetorical devices against the aforementionedphilosophical background. Is the sphere, for instance, a metaphor?Given the Deleuzean inspiration Sloterdijk felt while writing thethird volume ofSphren especially12 we can compare his use of the

sphere with Deleuze and Guattaris use of the notion of the machine.Machine is not a metaphor (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 36).Given the representational quality of the metaphor, this would stillpresuppose the very metaphysics that is under attack. And againit was Nietzsche, the thinker on the stage, who taught Sloterdijkthat For the true poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, but arepresentative image which really hovers in front of him in the placeof an idea (Nietzsche 2000: 19). Sloterdijks conceptual avalanchecovers this necessary illusion (ST: 188).

In a staged retrospective conversation at the end of part III aconversation on this oxymoron between a historian, a theologian, anda literary critic, all waiting for the philosopher to join in the literarycritic counters the others critique by stressing the working of thetext: you neglect the information that is stored in the rhetoricalconstruction (SIII: 87). The author, the literary critic goes on, hasused a superlativist and supremacist form of classical philosophicalreason. But this does not really solve the aporetic tension. It onlyshows that this is the breeding ground for truth. 13

b. critique of hyperbolic reason: hypocritical thinkingBeing a hermeneutic thinker, Sloterdijks truth-nding means movingtoward an as yet undisclosed truth. What, then, is exactly the specicrhetorical device that is applied in order to overtrump the grandnarratives? In the introduction to Sphren I it appears to be thehyperbole. A hyperbolic phenomenology14 resonates in Sloterdijksspherology. Political overtones can be heard: by exaggerating thegiven divisions of society, [philosophy] makes us aware of theexclusions and offers them up for a retuning once more . . . Throughphilosophical hyperbole the chance arises to revise denite optionsand to decide against exclusion (SI: 13). Exaggerating helps usto revalue the apparently given that is the result of the canonizationof exclusive, dichotomous thinking.

A decisive analysis of the relation between hyperbole and truthis not given in Sphren . For this, we have to turn to Nicht Gerettet ,published during the nalization of the trilogy. In this philosophical


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physiognomy of Heidegger, Sloterdijk dissects Adornos andHeideggers de(con)struction of metaphysics.15 The relation betweenaesthetics and epistemology is rephrased in terms of hyperbole andtruth. Citing the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Sloterdijk points out that

a hyperbole becomes a stylistic virtue once the topic has surpasseda natural measure ( naturalem modum excessit , in Quintilians words ).The topic is the monstrous, an excessive world. It is better for reasonto speak hyperbolically than to remain modestly in the backgroundin the search for truth. Quintilians words are paraphrased: the

justication of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness[ Angemessenheit an das Malose ] (NG: 256).

Sloterdijk wants to break the nihilistic spell of negativity and, aswe shall see: lack and scarcity by constructing a literary machine

as a hyperbolic system that deconstructs the internalized hyperbolesof metaphysics that are taken for granted. When his interlocutor inDie Sonne und der Tod proposes the word excess ( bersteigerung ),Sloterdijk reacts approvingly: I like the expression, because itreduces transcendence to exaggeration (ST: 31). Metaphysics turnsout to be canonized rhetoric. That is why metaphysics can only becriticized inter-hyperbolically. The genitive of in critique of hyperbolicreason has to be understood as both objective and subjective: inthe nal instance, in criticizing another hyperbole it exposes itself

as such. Surpassing Critical Theory, Sloterdijk undermines his owncritique. In a technical sense he has become hypocritical. We areall collaborators. No one has an alibi (NG: 367).

c. essay: exemplary singularityThe reference to Quintilian for understanding hyperbole as anadequate rhetorical device for evoking and projecting truth, bearswitness to Sloterdijks proximity to the French philosophy ofdifference.16 Although he is hardly mentioned inSphren , it wasLyotard who, in referring to another Roman rst-century rhetorician Longinus prepared an understanding of the sublime for postmoderndiscourse. Both Quintilian and Longinus shifted the emphasis fromthe audience where it lay in AristotelesPoetics to the rhetorician;from reception to production. In criticizing the modern avatar ofthis production unit the genius Lyotards attention shifts tothe work of art in its working of the text. Not only does Lyotardsubsequently connect the sublime to the Heideggerian event; he asFoucault had done before him with reference to Montaigne comesto the conclusion that the essay is the most adequate genre forpostmodernity (Lyotard 1986).17 For him, it is the genre that bestexpresses micronarratives. For Sloterdijk, however, the essay is ahypergenre. It hyperbolically establishes a singular truth.

The essay is radically democratic: it seeks its own rules. InKantian terms, it reects on the exemplary position of the singular.In writing on singularity one is condemned to polyvocity (Sloterdijk1993b: 62). That is why for Lyotard the essay is a micropolitical


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tactic. Given its hyperbolic quality and Sloterdijks characterization ofpolitics after modernity as hyperpolitics, the essay is a hyperpoliticalgenre. Hyperpolitics intervenes in a world that is understood aslogic of functions, relations, liquefactions, . . . as a mode of thinking

on groundless complexity (Sloterdijk 1993a: 76).Rhetorical exaggeration eventually evokes in its audience thesubstantial topic of the spherology. As the outcome of a revaluationof all values (WIK: 349), abundance turns out to be the projectedtruth of Sloterdijks spherology. Taking expression to be the in-discernible unity of form and matter, style and content, Sloterdijkaims at mobilizing the truth by evoking the content of his thesis excess and abundance in his grandiose attempt at a tale biggerthan any Grand Narrative.

3. POLITICAL ECONOMY: EXPENDITURE ORDISSIPATION?Now we understand how he is writing, the question remains as towhat the writing is about. In order to convey the idea that reality isruled by abundance, Sloterdijk has to reach beyond modern andpostmodern discourse. In spite of the empirical evidence of ourabundant wealth, even within postmodern discourse, abundanceis not so easily accepted as a basic trait of human behavior and

thought. On the contrary, economic and political practices stillthrive on the opposite idea: scarcity. It is scarcity that legitimizesthe economists contention that the efcient distribution of scarceresources to everyone serves the common good. But the discourseof scarcity and lack has become so excessive that victim culture isourishing. Victimism is a trend that is enhanced within the currentcompensation culture as the vibrant nucleus of a global risk society.Herein freedom is facilitated by security and insurance. Abundanceis everywhere, but it is ideologically neglected and even denied by aculture that makes money out of fearful anticipation and translatescomplaints into claims. Political culture both the Left and the Right sustains and enhances this attitude. The former still interprets theworld in terms of oppression and exploitation; the latter laments theloss of values in terms of decadence.

a. afuent society and miserabilismThe scarcity option is declined by Sloterdijk as miserabilistic. Thelaments of miserophiles, their bel canto miserabilism (SIII: 690)thrives on an anthropology of lack. Its advocates are by no meansnegligible: The respected Pierre Bourdieu is downgraded to an agentof the miserabilistic Internationale whose interests are lookedafter by poverty lawyers. Benjamin too is dismissed as misreconservative (SIII: 781). Our main problem in the afuent societyis our self-image, our self-denition, and our self-esteem. Revaluatingthe surplus requires a theory of constitutive luxury (SIII: 676),questioning the apparent primacy of scarcity. Is it an ontological,


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ideological, or discursive illusion? Is it an integral part of our being,of our political economy, or just paradigmatic for a certain period?Even worse, is Sloterdijks proposal to appreciate abundance overscarcity utopian?

A genealogy of scarcity proves him to be right. Although he doesnot mention this book, Foucaults The Order of Things can be takenas a guideline. His archeology of human sciences reveals that theconcept scarcity came to the fore in eighteenth-century discourse(Foucault 1970: 256). The systematic introduction of scarcity wasshaped between the classical and modern episteme by economistslike Say, Ricardo, and Smith. Deconstructing scarcity and advocatingabundance can therefore be understood hyperpolitically as a critiqueof economic discourse.

In the course of modernity substantial arguments for abundanceover scarcity have been made by others as well. In France this afrm-ative approach is part of a deep-seated tradition. In the 1920s thedebate was set in motion by Marcel Mauss. During his anthropologicalresearch on North-American tribes he became acquainted withthe potlatch : a periodic ritual in which the powerful dissipate theirwealth. By outdoing their rivals they not only reestablished theirpower, but they also renewed the economic cycle for another year. Mausss anthropological research was philosophically adapted by

Georges Bataille, who passed the word to a generation of thinkersof differences, among whom were Kristeva, Lyotard, and Deleuze, butmore particularly Foucault and Derrida (see Derrida 1978).

Expenditure of wealth, however, is different from dissipation:the mediocre dissipation [durchschnittliche Verschwendung ] oftoday cannot be compared with the generous refutation of lack assuch (ST: 334). Dissipation still functions within a discourse ofscarcity that favors recycling and asceticism as the main solutionsto our problems. Within this perspective, dissipation has a pejorativequality. It is still burdened by exactly those guilty and shamefulfeelings Schama describes in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987).Bataille, however, develops an afrmative view on expenditure(dpense ). Once we shift our gaze to the process level, the instantgratication of overowing enjoyment appears to be an afrmativefeature of dissipation. Spending time excessively not only annihilatesthe surplus of economic transactions even the most necessarygoods are destroyed, ecstacizing the participants of the ritual to thepoint of self-loss or even annihilation. A Bataillan analysis of soccerhooliganism is instructive.

All our addictions bear witness to the paradoxical fact thatdissipation is collectively productive. The astonishing, though power-invested, statement of the American president in his State of theUnion address in 2005 America is addicted to oil is only onefurther miserabilistic confession that apparently ts the logic ofboth scarcity and autonomy, but in the nal instance explains howexpenditure drives the global economy. Surrounded by abundance,


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globally connected, leading comfortable lives, we realize that aparadigmatic ethico-economic shift is needed in order to share ourwealth. The we, this will be evident, are the wealthy inhabitants ofthe ve-storey-high Greenhouse (WIK: 33348), the Crystal Palace

as a mega installation that has been slowly, but rmly, erected duringthe complex triple globalization.Sloterdijk counters the uncomfortable aspect of our afuent

society, triggered by guilt and resentment, by advocating sourcesof alternative dissipation (WIK: 362). Experience-based knowledgebeing transformed into free-oating information, and facts into data,Sloterdijk foresees a future where all that is solid melts into airas Marx wrote of modernization. Matter dissolves into immaterialows. This is an inescapable conclusion of a genealogy of global-

ization: after the second globalization, territory is no longer a safeharbor for human communities. The earth deterritorializes and reter-ritorializes in the air. Current extraterritorial globalization, driven byan urge to move forward ( Auftrieb), forces us to levitate our existence.Enlightenment as an overall explicitation cuts through the Cartesiandichotomy of mind and matter. In becoming less heavy, lighter, bothconsciousness and body are enlightened. Air conditioning takeson a very literal meaning. Coal and oil will be replaced by solarenergy.

b. revaluation of all values: a formal-ontological primacyof excessAlthough Bataille is not referred to inSphren , statements like thefollowing do suggest that a modied Bataillan perspective is adopted:Isnt it more true to say that life fundamentally is an overreaction,an excess, an orgy. Man is an overreactive animal par excellence .Making art means overreacting, thinking means overreacting,marrying means overreacting. All decisive human activities areexaggerations. Walking upright is already a hyperbole . . . (ST: 32).Disproportionate excess (Unverhltnismige) is the bottom line ofhuman life.

Given the pseudo-Hegelian overtones in Sloterdijks texts, it isperhaps instructive to understand the excess in formal-ontologicalterms. In Hegels Science of Logic the extreme or the measureless(das Malose ) is a transitional concept at the very end of the logicof Being where, after the negation of quality by quantity, both aresublated in measure. Once measure loses its qualitative guaranteeand becomes sheer quantity, it becomes a knotted, highly complexnetwork of measure relations. Its dialectical dynamics nally dissolveinto excess as an upbeat to absolute indifference. In the rstmovement in the logic of Essence (Wesen ) that follows the logic ofBeing, this absolute indifference, in trying to understand itself, hasto acknowledge that it is sheer appearance. In following dialecticalnegation and sublation, the overcoming of absolute indifferenceleads to the realization of the human condition world spirit in its


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historical articulation in terms of the reective concepts of identity,difference, contradiction, and nally ground.

Once dialectics loses its universal authority, excess as a falseinnity of the logic of Being is afrmed.18 The hyperbole is a

rhetorical device that is applied to recongure the excess coherently.The hyperbolic text sensitizes its readers not to become indifferentto the truth. Sloterdijks hermeneutics of the monstrous, aimingat a revaluation of all values, does not ignore indifference. Heafrms this as the nihilistic excess of values in a kynical way inorder to overcome the postmodern dissolution of truth. Playing onBlochs Principle of Hope Sloterdijk hyperbolically proposes theprinciple of abundance as the still-concealed truth of modernity.Man can acknowledge this condition through his worldliness and

by communicating its monstrosity hyperbolically.In a revaluation of all values, excess becomes abundance, acondition discursively evoked by exaggeration: The justication ofthe hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness (NG: 256).But why does this revaluation of values suddenly pop up? Althoughthe sublation of excess into indifference is understood in termsof nihilism, this nihilism does not imply, as is often proposed, theabsence of values. It is rather the result of a radical evaluation of anysovereignty that was once beyond evaluation: in the nal instance,

of God. It is the excess of values that can no longer be coped within a consistent and coherent way. This leads to a chaotic metastasisof values, as is for instance nowadays illustrated by the rules andregulations that govern public space. Metastasis also sheds lighton the debacle of multicultural society and the logic of the risksociety. The subject has to become indifferent in order to cope withthe excess of meaning and means.

4. RELATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY: LACK AND TOO MUCHWe always already inhabit the dimension of excess (ST: 337).Following Hegel, excess is, in formal ontological terms, a pre-supposition for reecting identity. Sloterdijk redenes this formal-ontological transfer in his anthropology. InDie Verachtung derMassen eroded individualism has made indifference the one andonly principle of the masses (VM: 88). Identity and indifferencehave to be understood as synonyms (VM: 86) once all ontologicaldifferences gods, saints, sages, and the talented are negated.Modern mans contemptuousness ( Verachtung ) is pacied in thedifferential indifference that forms the formal secret of themasses and of a culture that organizes a total middle (VM: 87). 19 The latter can even become totalitarian (VM: 95).

If hyperbole as a rhetorical device evokes truth, and if expend-iture is the hidden rationale of economic life, what then are theimplications for an afrmative anthropology? Though Hegel wasthe rst to proclaim the death of God in his grandiose effort tosecularize Christian negativity, it was Nietzsche who radically drew


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its consequences: Man has to acknowledge being as rst andforemost an afrmative will to life that legitimates itself via a willto truth as a will to power. Excess is an afrmation of these vitalforces: The element of human beings is the too much [das Zuviel]

(SIII: 709).This is, however, not mans essence. Surplus is at best mansfth element, his quint-essence. Given this quintessential excesswe need to revalue our present human condition, not by feeling guilty,but by acknowledging and practicing generosity and creativity. HenceSloterdijks hyperbolic proposal of a theory of a constitutive luxury.Most people have no problem acknowledging that modern life hasgradually become more comfortable. Over the last two centuriesan apparently innite range of possibilities for applying scientic

research to daily circumstances has raised the level of comfortexponentially. For wealthy cosmopolitans the struggle for life hasbeen reduced to a minimum. Once we cross the 10 percent povertythreshold, we enter the ve oors of the Greenhouse (WIK: 334,335), populated by people who no longer sweat. They are stressedand fearful, but properly insured.

This comfortable situation has consequences for anthropology.Is man as an animal rationale mind governing body, in spite ofevident shortcomings still an option? For Nietzsche man was a

nicht-festgestellte Tier , an animal not fully realized. Nietzschesdenition, when incorporated into Schelers view on human behavioras openness to the world, enabled Arnold Gehlen to qualify humanbeings as Mangelwesen (SIII: 699, literally a being of lack): inspite of all the luxury that surrounds him, man is a being whoseelement is a constitutive lack of the necessary means of subsistence.This, however, triggers institutional compensation: family, school,gang, army, church, nation, in the nal instance culture. Thesenormalizing, disciplinary institutions form immune systems, whereinlack is transformed into a productive force, as happened withasceticism based on resentment. Ascetics, enjoying excessivediscipline, transform the reactive element of lack afrmatively intoa value in itself.

Gehlen regards the lack of means ( Mittellosigkeit) as an essentialtrait. In Sphren III. Schume (Foams) all intellectual and rhetoricalforces are mobilized to free Nietzsche from Gehlens miserabilistgrip. Although every newborn lacks the means to survive andtherefore has to be protected and guided, the abundance of sensorialstimuli is unlimited. The senses, being a-specic, are overowingwith stimuli. Sloterdijk reverses Gehlens thesis by focusing onrelations that are enabled by media and mediations. These evenconstitute relations as an openness, a creative force that channelsexcessive abundance: what we call the open is the dimensionof wealth in its existential reex (SIII: 760), wealth being theability to participate in an explicitation . . . (SIII: 756). Given theanthropological premise of plenty, during their lifetime individuals are


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embedded in ever-changing immune systems to prevent them fromcollapsing under a constitutive abundance, called addiction.

Immune systems decline over time. They engender their ownaporias and become auto-immune. In an article 20 on urban culture

Sloterdijk explores an alternative lifestyle of expenditure. One of hiscritical remarks concerns the redenition of freedom caused by theprimacy of mobility and the abundance of cheap energy. Automobilityis qualied as a Heideggerian existential. In Eurotaoism totalmobilization is positioned as our rst nature. In this kineticanthropology the car is the technical double of the principally activetranscendental subject (ET: 42). But automobility has produced itsown auto-immune disease: Total mobilization suffocates urban lifeand comes to a standstill in a thousand-mile-long trafc-jam. It is

evident that an immune system will dissolve once man does notacknowledge and foster its auto-immune tendencies. But morethan these aporias, Sloterdijk emphasizes another, more relevantanthropological implication. In line with Deleuzean thought, immunesystems reveal the foundation of mans being as relationality.

In opening up to the world the child is always already beyonditself. It is embedded in a bi-unity of motherchild, an extra-uterinesymbiosis that overrules lack. In order to accentuate relationality overlack at the very end of Sphren I. Blasen (Bubbles), Lacans theory

of desire is countered by Kristevas primacy of the motherdaughterrelation (SI: 542). This symbiosis is an ecstatic immanence (SI:641). 21 The shift from a male-dominated, monomaniacal perspectiveto a female-oriented, open, one was already made in Eurotaoismus . There, Heideggers implicit negation of life being-toward-death is overruled by Hannah Arendts natality: A coming-into-world ( zur-Welt-kommen) (ET: 205) that includes both bi-unity and creativity.

Within Sloterdijks general science of revolution, natality is thesecond radical. The rst revolutionary radical was civil society aspart of modern nation-state building within the second, territorialglobalization. The third radical Sloterdijk writes this in 1994 isa conversion of souls prepared by philosophy (SV: 61, 62). Thisat least echoes the idea that in order to change the world, collectiveconsciousness Hegels World Spirit has to convert itself. InSphren the perspective has slightly changed. Modifying Latoursquestion as to whether we have ever really been modern, Sloterdijkwonders whether we have ever been revolutionary (SIII: 87). Therevolutionary impact is no longer presented as a reversal, but as aradical unfolding, a making explicit, emphasizing the making. Theresult of this explicitation is a comfortable life for the inhabitantsof the Greenhouse, which is fully dependent upon technological,

juridical, and insurance-based mediations.

5. ENLIGHTENMENT AS MEDIOLOGICAL EXPLICITATIONI see myself as a human being who functions amid technical mediaas a medium in the second degree, if this is a plausible proposition


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(ST: 15). If we want to understand the radical implications of atheory of constitutive luxury, we cannot neglect Sloterdijks mediatheory, based on McLuhans thesis that media are extensions of oursenses, organs, and limbs. Media theory underpins his anthropology.

This mediology miniaturizes and literally ex-plains, i.e. extendsmegalopsychia generosity and creativity in mans use of hismedia. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to rescogitans . Mediologically, both are reinvested in a relational condition. Sloterdijks grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects ofmediatization need a rescaling, because I think there is a blind spotin Sloterdijks media theory. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must beinvested in micropolitical art practices. In order to expose this blindspot, a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media

driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reectively afrmsabundance. I will characterize this, emphasizing the interest of thein-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijkswork, as inter-esse. Preliminary to this distinction is a furtherdifferentiation of the notion of Enlightenment.

a. Triple Enlightenment: silent takeover of the mindMediological enlightenment (WIK: 261) not only enlightens themind; it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and

bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in theworld. I call this Triple Enlightenment. Next to the conventionalEnlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) emancipationfrom our selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit (self-inicted immaturity) enlightenment explicitates itself through scientic knowledge, theexplicitation of which in its turn is technology. Ever-acceleratingmeans of transportation literally enlighten our bodies (2) as domeans of telecommunication (3). Territorial distances are annihilated a supernova right in front of our noses; intercontinental chatter new virtual ones created atomic universes; virtual public space. Inthis way speed of transportation and transparency of communicationenlighten body and sight. The three aspects of enlightenment arefully dependent upon each other. The last two have always beenpart of Enlightenment, but only in retrospect can we acknowledgetheir constitutive value.

But the steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, television,pacemaker, computer, and Internet to mention only the most obvious have initially ruptured existing immune systems. Enlightenmenthas this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). Gradually, however,these mediations are internalized. Modern mans life becomesmore comfortable. Once the immunity of the system is restoredor a new immune system installed, this comfort becomes part ofnormalization and subjectivation. Speeded up in capsular nodes(cars, trains, planes), communicating via interfaces (computers,cellphones, GPS), extending their potentialities, human beings feelless heavy, i.e. freer.


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Modern life has undergone a silent takeover: Technology hasconverted explicitated modern mans soul without his realizing it.As a result of this triple enlightenment, man and machine, mind andmatter have integrated. Machine is no longer a metaphor. Man has

become a psycho-technological and techno-psychological being.22

Media are incorporated to the point of becoming indispensable meansof subsistence. As a result, our moral categories are transformed. Domodern subjects still nurture the idea that they have an instrumentalrelation to their media? They can abandon them when they have nomore use-value. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionlessimmersion in a media environment. Enforcing your own rules beingauto-nomos is transformed into a will to access and exposure.Heteronomy is no problem. The lightness of being is no longer

unbearable.23

b. Dasein is design: radical mediocrity as rst natureIf relational anthropology is in need of an ontology of prostheticrealities (NG: 361), mediatization explains how our souls areconverted: by being-in-media. Being-in-the-world is now being-in-media, a medium being more than just an instrumental, kineticconnection between separate beings. The identity of the relatais constituted in and by the relation. Intention is articulated by

its extensions, inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. Medicaltechnology replaces and transforms vital functions of both bodyand mind. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life;they actually constitute sociability. The proposed transformation ofAristotelianmegalopsychia has to take into account the constitutiveworkings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG: 361).

How does second nature become rst (SIII: 809)? After the initialillness that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium,end-users consume the comfort, the abundance of their media. Butonce this mediological abundance constitutes the end-users milieuor immune system, the incorporated media will become as invisibleas they are indispensable. Proximity without distance roots both bodyand soul in media. In retrospect this mediological relationality alwayshas been an inextricable quality of mans condition. Every mediumbecomes the message, i.e. mans milieu. The medium becomes anexperience in itself. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainmentand even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). It is no longera means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobilityand interactivity feels like being crippled, blinded, or deafened. Itis as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properlyfunctioning eye or ear.

NowadaysDasein seems reduced to a rooted or radical medi-ocrity (see Oosterling 2004b, 2005a). The mediocrity of the massesexpressing contemptuousness, so severely criticized by Sloterdijk,is an indication of a constitutive lack. Given their indifference,individuals nowadays no longer realize that their rst nature


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was initially second nature. In medial performance, memory ofthis rst nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggeredby the second. In comfort one does not ask where it comes fromwhen it has become a habit (SIII: 403). Unreective being-in-media

takes its users beyond history. It is at this crucial point that amedium becomes a harmful routine. Once the abundance of newmediological conditions is internalized, needs that were previouslynonexistent are ontologized. They become primary needs. Autonomyhas become automobility, freedom frictionless access, Dasein design.As a result the unprecedented possibilities or better, virtualities of an internalized extension reproduce lack on another level.

Every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarc-ity through forgetfulness. In order to add a normative component to

being-in-media, I make a distinction between a miserabilist and anafrmative mediological condition. As a result of forgetfulness theformer prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only thesecond, which advocates openness, enhances the reectivity whichSloterdijks museological attitude presupposes (SIII: 810). In part I ofSphren , for living in each other in ecstatic immanence it sufcesto be a male or female modern mass-media being (SI: 640). Butwhen he notices that the mediocre, medial, and vulgar effaced thehorizon (SI: 642), it is evident that forDasein to be a passion in

the face of the monstrous (NG: 223) reectivity has to be part ofour medio-crity. This is acknowledged at the end of part III: Actuallyreectivity and being spoilt (Verwhnung ) are inextricably linked.Once imaginations concerning lack have become second nature,it is hard to see how they can perform this change of perspectiveson their own (SIII: 809).

c. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esseThe lightness of being-in-media does not naturally make theexperience of abundance reective. As long as the in-betweennessof radical mediocrity does not reect on itself, comfortable lifecan easily turn into an experience of lack. For Sloterdijk, mediocrepeople are part of the They (das Man ), Heideggers qualicationof inauthentic existence (SI: 643). Notwithstanding the collectiveproductivity of addictions, the current level of addiction to all kindsof media even oil bears witness to the fact that autonomy is nolonger adequate as a category with which to understand ourselvesin terms other than indifference. Autonomy being sheer illusion aNietzschean ction for Sloterdijk, authenticity obviously is still anoption. What is needed is a reective attitude as an existential inwhich mediocrity is experienced in its afuent generosity. As Hegelargues: reectivity sublates indifference.

Ontologically, radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between.In foam city we, glued foam bubbles, share the in-between.24 Anafrmative approach acknowledges that Homo sapiens is an inter-esse ( Zwischenwesen ). Although Sloterdijk criticizes our efforts


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to make ourselves interesting, which means to make-oneself-better-thanthe-others (VM: 87), with reference to HeideggersThey, an authentic human condition is at hand. Heidegger makes adistinction between an inauthentic condition of the interesting as

shallow entertainment and a being-in-between ( Zwischen-sein) asInter-esse: Interest, inter-esse, means to be among and in themidst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay withit. But todays interest accepts as valid only what is interesting. 25 Inter-esse is the cement (Kit) of relationality or Being-with(Mit-sein). In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt took Heideggersdistinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interestsas interesse : These interests constitute, in the words of the mostliteral signicance, something whichinter-est, which lies between

people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Mostaction and speech is concerned with this in-between . . . (Arendt1958: 182). This ontology of the in-between this esse of theinter needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. In thenal analysis, the psychological surplus of generosity and thesubstance of creativity Aristotles megalopsychia consist ofthis self-reective in-between. Unreectedinter-esse asks for thecombination of de-interesting and re-interesting in a nondual typeof morality (SIII: 411).

6. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THEINFRASTRUCTURE OF THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK From the imperative that we have to become lighter (i.e. enlightened),Sloterdijk draws political consequences. Strategies that favorheaviness over lightness in terms of resignation ( Gelassenheit )and recycling, and ideologies that still dene human relations interms of oppression are declared miserabilistic. Scapegoats arethe Green parties and the Old Left. But is it enough to afrm theantigravitational ows and criticize gravitational conservatism?Does Sloterdijks jovial perspective sufce to convert radicalmediocrity? What kind of politics does he propose? Is resistancestill an option?

There was an implicit acknowledgement of resistance inCritiqueof Cynical Reason albeit romantic but in Die Sonne und der Tod itis no longer dened as resistance to oppression and injustice in thepolitical sense (ST: 262, 284, 287). After criticizing Lacan, resistanceto the effort of the analyst to unlock the xated reality principle of hispatient is no option either. Perhaps the deconstructionists rsistance or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognizedin the refusal to follow the rules of ones own game (ST: 285).Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. Withinhis general science of revolution, this is understood as explicitation.Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.

Inhabiting the Greenhouse a thermotope (SIII: 396) meanswe are still haunted by scarcity. In the absence of a convincing


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thermic socialism, for the time being we have to be content witha thermic aesthetics (SIII: 405). His afnity with the avant-gardenot only explains Sloterdijks aversion to the mediocre They; it alsosheds light on the political premise of his exaggerative reasoning:

revising definite options and deciding against exclusion. Theapproving remarks on Joseph Beuyss artistic practice give us aclue.26 Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuyss concept of the socialsculpture (Sozial Plastik) (SIII: 661, 811). Every generous citizenhas to become an artist, as Joseph Beuys once proposed (SIII:811). Like Foucault, Sloterdijk favors creativity over autonomy. Ifaestheticization is needed for enduring monstrosity, is Foucaultsproposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can werecognize Sloterdijks exaggerative reasoning in Foucaults attempt to

connect truth games with spirituality beyond religious interpretationsas the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, thesubject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truthcan transgure and save the subject (Foucault 2004: 17)?

In our comfortable Greenhouse the great divide between life andart, art and nonart, high and low culture is superseded. The super-installation as an inclusive concept of articiality [Knstlichkeit](SIII: 813) that integrates all subcultures demands an aestheticattitude: one transfers the form of the museum to the system as a

whole and moves around in it as a visitor (SIII: 818). Cruising publicspace demands museological sensibility. But how is this stimulated?Does society become a Gesamtkunstwerk ? Sloterdijk has alreadyexcluded this option. The Crystal Palace is beyond a total work of art,because the risk has to be avoided that a culture that organizes atotal middle becomes totalitarian (VM: 95). Reecting theinter is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. BazonBrock qualied this as an inclination [Hang] towards the total workof art (see Szeemann et al. 1983).

A genealogy of theGesamtkunstwerk starting with Germanidealism via Wagner and Wiener Werksttte, Arts & Crafts, Merzbau,Bauhaus, and Surrealism 27 shows that it never realized itself toa full extent without becoming totalitarian. However, in its constantfailure to totalize art as life, it fully explored the space in betweendisciplines, media, and in between the artist and his audience. Theinter is the cement of a Gesamtkunstwerk . This is articulated ininterdisciplinary, multimedia, and interactive art practices. To borrowAdornos phrase, the totalization (das ganz Groe ) is the false. Thetruth is in its failure. In failing it shows us its truth: the inter .

Sloterdijk favors art practices that relate precisely by resistingtheir own rules. That explains his emphasis on surrealism in hisTate lecture. More than any other art style, surrealism andespecially Dal is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive.In the past fteen years these elements have been conceptualizedin art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a,2003b, 2004a). 28 Concepts such as relational architecture (Rafael


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Lozano-Hemmer) have been invented to express the binding forceof installations in public space. More than dropping an art objectin open space, intermedial art practices reect upon and intend totransform the way people relate to each other via art. It is no longer

art in public space, but art as public space.The consequences for the acceptance of a mediological conditionbased on generosity are far reaching in the moral domain (SIII:807) because freedom and a sense of justice can no longer beunderstood without the phantasm of equality of all with regard toluxury in material terms (SIII: 820).Ex negative, this phantasmfocuses Sloterdijks politico-aesthetic strategy. We are enteringan era of new games of enlightenment (VM: 63). Their target isaesthetic reectivity. In a Deleuzean turn, this means that being

rooted in media (i.e. radical mediocrity) has to be enlightened tothe point of becoming an enlightened rhizomatic inter. No roots, just routes. This conversion has far-reaching anthropologicalimplications. Against the background of the intendedmegalopsychia ,creativity no longer resides in, but in-between individuals. Creativityis rst and foremost relational. Cooperation, participation, andinteraction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to thefore in creativity.

NOTES1. See: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_of_action/.

2. It is this concept of the deinon that Heidegger takes fromHlderlins work. He transformed it intodas Unheimliche (uncanny).See Heidegger (1982: 150).

3. Alongside the three volumes of Sphren I. Blasen, II. Globen,III. Schume [SI,SII,SIII] he publishedIm Weltinnenraum desKapitals. Fr eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and itsaesthetico-political implications more specically. Since thereare no published translations available yet, all quotes are mytranslations.

4. See Sloterdijk [NG] (2001: 1646); Sloterdijk and Heinrichs [ST](2001: 291).

5. In his Tate lecture Sloterdijk himself translates the GermanExplikation as explicitation: to unfold in the sense of explicitlymaking things.

6. In Im selben Boot. Versuch ber Hyperpolitik , Sloterdijk makesa distinction between megalomania and megalopathia . Aristotletransformed Alexandre the Greatsmegalomania intomegalopathia as a lived experience that engenders big questions. The polis hasbecome part of global space. For two millenniamegalopathia hasbeen philosophys raison dtre . See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). Seealso SII: 303, n. 130. He renes this concept in later interviewsby dening late modern philosophy as megalo-depressive, as
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_of_action/http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_of_action/http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_of_action/http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_of_action/


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an inter-pathology or inter-mania. See the Alliez article in thisvolume, pp. 30726. It is this inter that I will explore in thisarticle.

7. Nietzsche rst came to the fore in Critique of Cynical Reason in

which he has the highest reference index, followed by Diogenes,Marx, Freud, and Hitler.Thinker on Stage, Nietzsches Materialism (1989) is fully focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pagesof Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijks verbal avalancheis spiced with Nietzschean phrases updated by references toFrench neo-Nietzschean thinkers.

8. The word Inter-esse is German for interest. However, it alsomeans to be interested in. In a philosophical context thisconnotation is used in a literal sense: being (esse) in between

(inter). 9. Lyotard is mentioned only once inSphren together with Badiouand other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for theirpolitical innitism (SII: 410). I come back to this point in thelast paragraph of this section.

10. See the concluding remarks of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).

11. Neither is Negri and Hardts Empire, their name for the CrystalPalace. Their proposal is rejected by Sloterdijk as too totalitarian

a project for revolutionary ends (SIII: 825).12. See the interview with ric Alliez, this volume, pp. 30726.13. Sloterdijk by the way does not join the debate. The three are

waiting in vain at the end of the book.14. He refers for this method to Gnther Anders (1980). See also

NG: 362.15. The essay What is solidarity with metaphysics in the moment

of its downfall? has as its subtitle A notice on critical andexaggerated/hyperbolic (bertriebene ) reason (NG: 235).

16. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusively toMichel Foucault, with just an incidental remark on Derrida. Butin Sphren Foucault is sidelined by Kristeva, and even moreby Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then denitely Sloterdijksmost favored traveling companions.

17. In this text Lyotard deals with different kinds of literarygenres.

18. Here a parallel can be drawn with Fatal Strategies (1983) byJean Baudrillard, published in the same year as Critique ofCynical Reason. The latter criticizes dialectical thinking too andreplaces sublation with excess. At the very beginning of thistext, the end of dialectics is proclaimed and the advent of anera envisaged, the dynamics of which will no longer be ruled bydialectical sublation. It is the logic of excess that rules.

19. For me the enigmatic expression eine totale Mitte is asynonym for radical mediocrity that will be explored in thenext paragraph.


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20. See www.petersloterdijk.net/german/topoi/stadtenergetik.html.

21. It is, however, surprising that he does not mention Kristevasnondiscursive semiotik in order to stress the importance

of the acoustic-tactile embedding of desire that subverts itsdiscursive articulation.22. See the writings of the present director of the McLuhan Institute:

Derrick de Kerckhove (1997: 46).23. Sloterdijk understands spherology as a delightenment

( Abklrung ), i.e. a dis-enlightenment of our burdened existence.The delight of wine tasting in which context the term Abklrung means clarification is implied in this spherologicaldecanting (SV: 1223).

24. This is the topic of another trans-Heideggerian Nancy (2002).See Oosterling (2005a).25. In Heideggerian terms, the ephemeral interest as an indifferent

attitude needs to be transformed to existential inter-esse. See(1978: 347). See also Being and Time, o.c., p. 124.

26. Utero-topically as a community art analogous to the group asutero-tope [Uterotop] (SIII: 392); thermo-topically in the guise ofBeuyss work of artThe honeypump (SIII: 404) that reminds usof a sweet life; as an example for the era of the uplifting

that can be seen as a critique of heavy reason (SIII: 733).27. His lecture at the Tate focuses mainly on surrealism.28. The outcome of this research can be found at www2.eur.nl/fw/

cfk (accessed 12/5/06).

REFERENCESAnders, Gnther. 1980. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen : ber die

Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution . Band 1.Ch. Mnchen: Beck Verlag.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space . Boston: The BeaconPress.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Fatal Strategies . New York: Semiotext(e).Benjamin, Walter. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction. See http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/The-Work-of-Art-in-the-Age-of-Mechanical-Reproduction.html (accessed 12/5/06).

de Kerckhove, Derrick. 1997. The Skin of ulture. Investigating thenew electronic reality . London: Kogan Page.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold. Leibniz and the baroque. London:The Athlone Press.

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