Peter Sloterdijk. Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation
Duane H. Davis
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
16 Mar. 2011, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22870
Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario Wenning (Columbia UP,
2010). See excerpt: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14522-0/rage-and-time/excerpt
Peter Sloterdijk is a clever man. His fame and infamy hinge on his keen ability to
provoke controversy and serve up a feast of grilled sacred cows — most recently in his
critiques of the welfare state and genetics. His 2006 work, Zorn und Zeit, now appears in
English translation as Rage and Time. This book will delight and infuriate readers; and it
will certainly entertain. It is perfect for an audience who can’t quite fathom Žižek’s
jokes.
There is a legion (or lesion?) of intellectual critics who were once radical thinkers — or
considered themselves to be, at any rate — but eventually each one lost faith in the
ability to change the world: Jean Baudrillard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Sloterdijk do not
agree with one another in their provocative socio-political critiques. Unfortunately, all
too frequently, they do not bother to agree with themselves in their mass-production of
glossy-covered pap. These popular essayists are less concerned with wisdom than
provocation and persuasion — and the only love visible in their works is self-love. Of
course, not all books need to be rigorous or philosophical.
Please do not misunderstand: if you have never read one of these sorts of books, you
must! Each one provides a picture of our hellish world complete with a free hand
basket. One is more likely to find them in popular bookstores than academic ones. Here,
Sloterdijk argues that our age is doomed because of our inability to understand and
address our rage. He turns our attention back to Plato’s account of thymos (all too
briefly) as an integral part of our soul and of our society. Contemporary society, by
contrast, has either relegated our spirit and its rage to political incorrectness or else
appealed to rage in unfortunate and often destructive ways. Along the way, Sloterdijk
offers glosses on Marxism, capitalism, psychoanalysis, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
He frames each of these movements in terms of what he terms their “thymotic”
aspects. His accounts are irreverent, often interesting, playful, perhaps dangerously
misleading, and worst of all obstructive of real critique.
The book is divided into a long introduction, four chapters, and a tiny conclusion. The
introduction begins with the historical observation that rage has figured into our
literature from the beginning. “Europe’s first word” is the rage of Achilles. Sloterdijk
describes our heroes as “guardians of rage” (11). Our ancient heroes and our gods rage,
and the depth of our literature and presumably our culture are found in the
understanding of rage. Rage is not an accidental affect, but bespeaks our existential
situation — hence the playful allusion to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Sloterdijk’s title,
Zorn und Zeit. He implies that we must re-think our modern conceptions of society, self,
and justice in thymotic terms. Thus, psychoanalysis is correct to disclose the depth of
the soul beneath consciousness, but wrong in its reduction of thymos to eros. Thymos,
Sloterdijk asserts, is fundamental rather than a by-product of erotic energy. Society, and
not only the self, needs to be rethought in thymotic terms. Sloterdijk insists that political
states are “thymotic unities” best analyzed in terms of tensions of spirit, resulting in
rage. The introduction continues in a historical manner, addressing the ways Nietzsche,
capitalism, Marxism, and religions have dealt with rage. Sloterdijk calls for a return to
Platonic attention to thymos (though not to his idealism) in order to refocus on the
thymotic aspects of our lives and overcome the destructive aspects of modernity and
postmodernity. This sets the stage for Sloterdijk’s analysis in the subsequent chapters.
Chapter One, Rage Transactions, asks us to acknowledge that we see today a disturbing
hostility in all aspects of our society. Domestic politics leads us to hostile impasses, while
international politics are fraught with menacing acts of terror and revenge. Sloterdijk
interestingly frames these phenomena in terms of structures of rage. Revenge is the
project of rage. Revolution is described as a rage bank, where rage is stored up as
capital. Marxist readers will be infuriated by the deliberate use of capitalist metaphors
throughout the book to describe topics like alienation, revolution, class consciousness,
etc. Sloterdijk offers an amazingly tendentious gloss — even for him — of Lenin and
Mao as “the most successful entrepreneurs of rage” (64), who propagated pure
negativity designed to produce revolution, “a day of mass rage.” “With [Lenin] begins
the century of the big business of rage” (68). Presumably revolutionaries of all types are
to be understood as making transactions in a rage bank. Sloterdijk continues this
direction of analysis in chapter three.
Chapter Two, The Wrathful God, turns our attention to religion as an instrument of rage.
Religion is depicted as a “metaphysical rage bank.” As ever, Sloterdijk provokes readers
of all types with his irreverent accounts of all three major Western religions as well as
current tensions related to religious dogma. For example, he likens the way Duchamp
shook up the art world to Osama bin Laden’s political actions (75). God is depicted as
the “king of rage,” while religions create narratives of their plights that draw interest in
their rage banks. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have been persecuted, and therefore
deserve to rage, just as their God has raged, against their persecutors. The irreverent
rhetoric is delicious, and no doubt infuriating to believers. Sloterdijk considers various
aspects of religious dogma in light of his account of rage banks. For example, his cleverly
titled section “In Praise of Purgatory” describes the sublimation of expressions of rage in
economic and physiological metaphors.
Chapter Three, The Rage Revolution, continues the attack upon Marxism and deepens
the framing of the history of Marxist revolutionaries as irresponsible propagators of
negativity. Sloterdijk quips that in the 1960s and 1970s youth in Europe and the United
States identified themselves as Maoists, for example, solely out of ignorance and
naiveté — “coquettish admirers” (175). He lashes out at any and all advocates of
Marxist thought in the past century. Most often these broadsides are clever, if
unsupported. For example, Sloterdijk asserts that Jean-Paul Sartre was “a master in the
sublime art of not being willing to learn” (175). This name-calling and provocation is
somehow alluring while being distracting and vacuous. After having finished the third
chapter of the book, the reader will most likely react in the same manner as to a
marathon series of re-runs on late night television: eyes glazed, transfixed, and inert,
one turns to the next chapter.
Chapter Four, The Dispersion of Rage in the Era of the Center, begins by framing our
current situation as a transition from the twentieth-century failure of top-down theory
to the twenty-first-century failure to generate a bottom-up reaction. Thus, Sloterdijk
tars the Marxian theorists of the previous century and the current post-Marxist
collectivists with the same brush: the fruit of their labor is a generation of disgust. They
have spawned a cultural malaise that produces a “molecular civil war” (211).
Presumably the molecularization typical of the malaise of our age is manifest in that
“nowhere do we find an articulation of a vision that would provide perspectives for an
accumulation capable of action” (184). That last passage, incidentally, might serve as an
apt description of Sloterdijk’s book. At times, one almost wonders whether Sloterdijk is
pining for some authentic kind of solidarity. It is clear that everything is all wrong, but
remarkably unclear as to what would make it all right — or even the least bit better.
While it may be unclear quite what he means by “molecular civil war,” it is all too clear
that he blames all collectivists as irresponsible pot-stirrers and troublemakers — as if
capitalism were a bastion of responsibility in its own calls to arms. It seems that ragetraders like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh are fine examples of
irresponsible provocation to violence; i.e., the suicide attack on the tax building in Texas
or the attempted assassination and mass murder in Tucson. There really is a market for
rage, and there really are consequences to the incendiary invective of these tycoons of
the rage-slaves.
Sloterdijk seriously underestimates both the promise and the peril of various decentered political movements. If one thing has emerged in recent geo-political
discourse, it is the recognition that a variety of people have been disenfranchised by
traditional accounts of who has standing in the discussion. This is nothing to glibly
dismiss! Worse, his glosses of Marxists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims are tied together
only to assert that they didn’t manage their investments well in the rage banks. He
condemns all of these movements reductively, cavalierly, and cynically as bringing about
their own demise: “the self-destruction of the superfluous.” The chapter strings
together a series of caustic assertions about a variety of unrelated topics from Ponzi
schemes to Albanian and Romanian post-communist rip-offs. But one is left to wonder
what does matter — or if, by his account, anything could matter anymore.
Of course, Sloterdijk misses no chance to indict. So he includes an account of four
reasons why no solution could emerge to the abuses of capitalism from within, either:
1. “In the present, no movements and parties are visible that could once again take
on the function of a world bank for the utopian-prophetic use of thymotic
impulses”;
2. “contemporary conditions . . . defeat most various variations of fundamentalist
thinking”;
3. “the change of [rage’s] collection media and its organizing myths”; and
4. “the conversion of money-directed civilization to the primacy of eroticism.”
So: no one is stepping up to lead, the leveling of our age prevents anything with an edge
to be taken seriously, the ideological structures are inescapably self-perpetuating, and
we have reduced the value of our goods to a love of goods. This all is intended to show
that contemporary “neo-con” society is powerless to provide a way out of our situation.
However, having taken a token jab at the right, Sloterdijk returns to place the blame
squarely on the left for creating the situation, as he has done throughout his works.
Retrospectively, this spreading disgust makes clear the extent to which the
traditional left — especially its Bolshevist wing but also its more liberal forms —
can be blamed for anthropological and political negligence since it had always
assumed that its members of the so-called masses indiscriminately affirmed a
neutral and ambivalence-free human community in large social associations.
(211)
Sloterdijk’s claim here is nothing more than the sophomoric taunt that Marxism is
utopian and that it ignores the danger of the proximity of other people. It is remarkable
that we have worked through over two hundred pages to get to this point. At least there
were pretty witticisms along the way.
Sloterdijk concludes this chapter by turning his attention to the threat of political Islam
to be a “potential successor to communism” (220). He states that its alluring mission, its
“grandiose worldview,” and its demographic field of recruitment make Islam as effective
at fomenting discontent as Marxism (220-21). Clearly Sloterdijk reduces the significance
of political Islam to the same structures he has tendentiously imposed upon all other
movements only to dismiss them. Yet he goes further — dangerously further — in his
rebuke of political Islam. He states that the analogy with communism has its limits.
The coming adherents of the Islamic goal of expansion do not at all resemble a
class of workers and employees who unite to seize governmental power in order
to put an end to their misery. Rather, they embody an agitated subproletariat or,
even worse, a desperate movement of economically superfluous and socially
useless people for whom there are too few acceptable positions available in
their own system, even if they should get to power through coup d’état or
elections. (223)
Obviously, Sloterdijk reduces all aspects of Islamic culture to a univocal economic
agency — one which he goes on to say manifests “an antimodern disposition and
dissynchronicity with the modern world.” Apparently the crux of the matter is that he
thinks Islam will lack market appeal . . .
And at the end of the chapter, in the final paragraph, Sloterdijk comes to the not so
surprising conclusion that “only global capitalism” can serve as the arbiter of its own
excesses. “It alone could grow to become its own enemy during the next round of the
game, an enemy that excites itself to the point where it has to take itself seriously as a
contender who is deciding who is to be and who is not to be” (226). There is at least a
little dialectical twist here. But the fact the Sloterdijk reduces the value of all of the
other movements he disparages to the values assigned by global capitalism does not
establish the familiar hegemony — the hegemony discussed by the very Marxian and
post-Marxian critics he dismissed as superfluous. That Capitalism may consume itself
and hence (re)produce itself is an interesting, though hardly original, point. That it is the
only story to tell of our age is another matter entirely.
The conclusion, Beyond Resentment, is advisedly short, since Sloterdijk has so very little
to conclude. There will be regional collections of rage rather than a monolithic
collective. Each of the attempts to forge a grand collective has failed. Yet this failure
could be instrumental in the emergence of a new transvaluation of rage. Sloterdijk
makes the analogy of contemporary revenge and retributive unhealthy expressions of
rage to Nietzschean ressentiment. Sloterdijk muses that this revenge could make for
more interesting expressions of rage that overcome the current unhealthy ones. We
might begin to respect one another, he seems to say, if we reinterpret our capacity to
rage, though as one well suspected from the outset he has absolutely no vision of what
this will entail or how to go about it. He ends with whimsy and platitude. This rethinking
of rage will allow for us to “stay in balance,” to learn to “see oneself always through the
eyes of others,” to establish “a culture of rationally built second-order observations,”
and allow us to establish “a new set of interculturally binding disciplines” that could
create world culture for the first time (229).
One does not need to consult the original German to see that Mario Wenning’s
translation is inadequate in places. Sloterdijk’s pithy prose comes through at times, but
it is a clunky imitation in many others. Indeed there are some real howlers. For example,
when Sloterdijk means to play on Heidegger’s dictum that thinking is thanking, to turn
our attention to rage and to imply that Heidegger was a bit of a flâneur in the ways that
he called our attention back to the Greeks, Wenning renders this very interesting
sentence: “Heidegger, who we imagine to be a thoughtful tourist on the planes [sic] of
Troy, would probably say: fighting is also thanking” (11-12). I know that I have never
been able to get a good flight into Troy! One wonders what the airport code might be. . .
In an interview after his famous Critique of Cynical Reason appeared, Sloterdijk
reportedly shrugged-off criticism of the work and said he did not think it should be
taken all that seriously. But he literally banks on the opposite reaction. The danger of his
work, and that of the others like him, is that their ironic treatises take the place in the
public mind of the work of genuine critique. Pandering obstructs pondering. Rage and
Time continues Sloterdijk’s meta-cynical exploitation.