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CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3PP 357–380

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INTEREST AND EXCESS OF MODERN MAN’S RADICAL MEDIOCRITY: RESCALING SLOTERDIJK’S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

HENK OOSTERLING

ABSTRACT In my contribution, I adopt Sloterdijk’s analysis of globalization as the megalomaneous or “hyperpolitical” installing of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). I rephrase his threefold (energetical, informational, and epistemological) “explicitation” of man’s radical immersion in his own media as “radical mediocrity” and argue that this has become our first nature. But then, what is the political potential of Sloterdijk’s

HENK OOSTERLING (1952) IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF

PHILOSOPHY OF DIFFERENCE, INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY, AND

AESTHETICS AT THE ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM.

HE IS ALSO DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE 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 INTERKULTURALITÄT IM

DENKEN HEINZ KIMMERLES (VERLAG BAUTZ 2005). SEE:

HTTP://WWW.HENKOOSTERLING.NL.

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merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Bataillan principle of excess rather than lack and scarcity? Should we not differentiate between miserabilist and affirmative critique? This distinction is all but self-evident, because every new mediological explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. It depends on the critical difference between mediocrity and inter-esse, between plain comfortable life and self-reflective radical mediocrity. In the final analysis, the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reflective in-between. Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires a downscaling of Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitical understanding of being-in in terms of micropolitical art practices. I will concentrate on one possible answer to the critical questions that must be asked: wherein lies the possibility of resistance in Sloterdijk’s recent analyses of capitalism?

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

Upon taking the stage at the Tate Gallery in December 2005, Peter Sloterdijk began his lecture on the relation between art and politics, dealing with surrealism and

terror, with the following statement:

I like very much the pronunciation of the word “enormous.” It gives me a feeling for what I really am, that means, a person working on monstrosity. No more, no less. Philosophy demands that all of us produce a new and convincing interpretation of that strange state of mind we call megalomania. In every generation megalomania has to be reinterpreted by its carriers. It’s not a choice, megalomania is choosing you and you have to cope with that as well as you can. The stress has to be put not on the word “mania” but on the fact that it is a kind of suffering. The real term should be “megalopathia,” to be patient of big questions. As soon as you can accept this existential condition you will feel a little bit better, but you are not healed of 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 judgement of taste by literally examining the palatal, alveolar, and labial qualities of the English word “enormous,” caressing the elongated, rounded sound represented in writing by “or.” Wasn’t it Gaston Bachelard who – in his phenomenology of the spherical – made the observation that “the value of perfection attributed to the sphere is entirely verbal”

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(Bachelard 1994: 235)? In shifting to the content level, Sloterdijk introduces the focus of his judgement of taste: monstrosity. Both “enormous” and “monstrosity” are variations on one of the crucial ideas that haunt and inspire his spherological discourse: das Ungeheuer. Although in earlier interviews he preferred the synonym “das ganz Große,” at the Tate it was once again “monstrosity.” Adopting this concept from Martin Heidegger, who borrowed it from Greek tragedy,2 Sloterdijk no longer relates the monstrous to mythical gods or a Christian God. It is a secularized version of Heidegger’s In-Sein: “to inhabit the monstrous” (dem Ungeheuren einwohnen) (SI: 643).3 For Sloterdijk, authentic philosophy cannot be but “a hermeneutics of the monstrous” (NG: 166; ST: 291).4 Conventional thinking “means only the organized form of resistance against any reflection on the monstrous” (ST: 290).

In order to get a grip on Sloterdijk’s “enormous” diagnosis of our time one has to take at least three giant steps. First, given the fact that the tensions between the local and the global and accompanying technology are articulations of the monstrous, one has to familiarize oneself with his analysis of contemporary globalization. This process consists of three stages. After a metaphysical globalization that begins with the pre-Socratic “global” mapping of the universe, a terrestrial globalization starts in 1492 with the “nautical ecstasies” of European powers which led to the discovery of the different continents. The last sentence of Sphären I – “Where are we when we are in the monstrous?” (SI: 644) – resonates in the preface of part II: globalization is understood as the geometrization of the unmeasurable, i.e. as “geometry in the monstrous” (SII: 47): “Thinking the sphere means to be realized as a local function of the monstrous” (SII: 25). In writing its genealogy, Sloterdijk implicitly rejects the unique character of current digital globalization. It is just another explication (Explikation) of a millennia-long process.

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

Megalomania suits Sloterdijk’s state of mind. Mania, however, contains too much madness. Sloterdijk therefore corrects himself by replacing megalomania with megalopathia not as much emphasizing the aspect of suffering as the aspect of patience and endurance: to

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be patient of big questions.6 One specific Heideggerian overtone, prominently present in his earlier works – especially Eurotaoism

(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 much more than a work of art; it is grand politics, but much more than grand politics; it is technology, but much more than technology . . .” (NG: 367).

The next step demands a tailoring of his concept of the enormous to relational proportions by downscaling these to an individual level. In the concluding sentences of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (2005) Sloterdijk proposes Aristotle’s concept megalopsychia. This sensibility – “an existential condition” – has to become the second nature of citizens of posthistorical foam city. It sensitizes them to their current mode of existence: generosity and abundance. According to Nietzsche, Sloterdijk’s other main inspiration,7 every second nature over time becomes first. Modern generosity – and, for that matter, modern tolerance – needs an update. Different concepts are proposed by Sloterdijk to actualize this notion. The most frequently used is creativity. In the very last sentences of the Sphären-plus project, Sloterdijk wonders why megalopsychia would not be adequate, “just because [our contemporaries] nowadays say creativity instead of magnanimity.” “Creative people . . . are those who prevent the whole from falling back into pernicious routine” (WIK: 415). I”ll come back to these harmful routines. For the time being I restrict myself to registering that Sloterdijk puts his shirt on an aesthetic category: not autonomy but creativity.

One more step is needed. After having read 2,988 pages, one starts to wonder what exactly the political relevance of Sloterdijk’s trilogy-plus is. What does his “introduction to a general science of revolution” (SV: 64) mean? How are revolution and resistance articulated within an aesthetic strategy? What kind of politics is left when the outcome of spherological diagnosis is the principle of abundance (Überfluss)? In the land of plenty, grilled chickens fly around to be grabbed at will. Mere distribution of scarce resources is no longer needed.

I will start with the exploration of Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy in the strict sense: in his writing. After having analyzed its rhetorical aspects I contextualize his claim of abundance in political economy, anthropology, media theory, and ontology. Then I return to aesthetics and politics. I specify in my own terms his media-theoretical underpinning of anthropology. In order to rephrase his critique of the indifference and mediocrity of the masses (Sloterdijk [VM] [2000]) in mediological terms, I need to make a distinction between the reactive and affirmative conditions of being-in-media. The first condition reproduces lack and is qualified by me as “radical mediocrity”; the latter is open, reflective, and labeled as “inter-esse.”8 Hyperpolitical megalopsychia becomes micropolitical

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inter-esse. In having rescaled and miniaturized megalopsychia to these “mediological” proportions, Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy is better understood as the micropolitics of public space, i.e. art as public space.

1. ART AND POLITICS: GETTING BEYOND GRAND NARRATIVESSloterdijk’s spherological project is monstrous indeed! More ad-equate a qualification cannot be found for his trilogy-plus Sphären-project. The number of pages is enormous, the use of neologisms excessive, the conceptual avalanche overwhelming, the historically embedded, methodological legitimization overpowering. The explicitly pseudo-Hegelian overtones that give Sloterdijk’s text coherence and consistency are triggered by his desire to outdo Oswald Spengler’s failed “morphology of world history” (SI: 78). For him, writing a history of “the sphere as a form” means constructing a genealogy of the sphere insofar as it informed and formatted collective consciousness and culture from the beginnings of Western civilization. Instead of reproducing a historical approach based on negativity (Hegel) and resentment (Spengler), Sloterdijk adopts an affirmative approach (Nietzsche). He turned his back on reactive nihilism and its implied cynicism earlier in Critique of Cynical Reason (1987; first published in German: 1983). This shift from cynicism to “kynicism” rehabilitated the hero of antiphilosophy and cosmopolitism Diogenes of Synope, the philosopher in drag, who was presented by Nietzsche as the madman with his lantern wandering around asking the townsmen in the market whether they know the whereabouts of God. He has not been seen lately. Do they already know he is dead?

The death of God, first proclaimed by Hegel (1952: 523, 546), opened a new space in human consciousness: the sublime. Burke problematized this affective tension, Kant transcendentalized it and in a postmodern turn it was “rephrased” by Jean-François Lyotard as the ambiguous rationale of the avant-garde art that methodically shocks the bourgeoisie out of its tastes. Lyotard’s sublime still resonates in Sloterdijk’s notion of monstrosity when he merges aesthetics with politics (Oosterling 1999).9 At the end of Sphären III our current immune sphere – the Greenhouse or “Crystal Palace” – is described in terms of an artistic superinstallation in which public space has gained a museum-like quality. This mega installation can be described as a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, “if this had not been occupied by aesthetic ideology” (SIII: 811).

Benjamin’s analysis of Nazism as the political Gesamtkunstwerk par excellence10 problematized the relation between art and politics indeed. Therefore Sloterdijk’s ”delimiting the concept of art in order to identify the system of society with the system of art” must surpass “all previous interpretations of the concept of the total work of art . . .” (SIII: 813). Is “globalization” perhaps an option? Or McLuhan’s “global village”? For Sloterdijk these are not suitable candidates.11

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This “sphere of all spheres” only exists politico-economically as “an inclusive concept of markets” (WIK: 231), the coherence of which is guaranteed by joint ventures.

Isn’t 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 would rather reproach the grand narratives for “not being big enough” (WIK: 14). Understanding how Sloterdijk overtrumps the modern grand narratives demands an understanding of his use of aesthetics at different 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 claim the truth for his own grand narrative on spheres? Why, for instance, has he chosen the sphere as an all-encompassing image? Is the form, i.e. the figure of the sphere – form and figure are synonyms (ST: 177) – not chosen arbitrarily and externally as an analytic tool in his hermeneutics of the monstrous? It is instructive to consult his philosophical sources of inspiration: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze.

a. fiction and metaphorsTruth, Nietzsche states in Posthumous Writings, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations that, poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and adorned, after steady use occur to a people as founded, canonical and obligatory: truths are illusions . . .” (1980: 880, 881). Objectivity is at best the convergence of as many perspectives as possible. Likewise our collective consciousness is “filled” or formatted by the spherical. Objectivity’s fiction, over time, gains a truth value. This canonized fiction cannot be unmasked without using the very same fiction in the process of unveiling. Sloterdijk investigates this aporetic quality in his writing.

Heidegger’s phenomenological notion of truth (aletheia) – i.e. simultaneous disclosure and unconcealment of Being – is beyond the configuration of the objective and subjective. We are always already attuned to truth, always already in the mood. For Heidegger, Dasein is not a subject but a project. To Foucault, truth was initially a product of discursive formations, but it was eventually downscaled to a truth game, a collective practice in which knowledge, power, and subjectivity converge. That truth is an expression of a will to power is acknowledged by both Foucault and Deleuze. When Nietzsche’s view is linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of philosophy, Sloterdijk’s shift to creativity becomes self-evident: “Philosophy is the art of forming, 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). Reflecting on the inconceivable monstrous, in short, demands the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize a projected truth. This creation of truth is neither a subjective projection nor pure description of a given reality. It is a revealing of what has been concealed for a certain period in order to forge different political alliances and configure yet unseen epistemological coherencies. Truth is a projective practice.

So Sloterdijk’s aesthetic intervention first and foremost takes place at the level of his writing. He strategically applies stylistic figures and uses rhetorical devices against the aforementioned philosophical background. Is the sphere, for instance, a metaphor? Given the Deleuzean inspiration Sloterdijk felt while writing the third volume of Sphären especially12 we can compare his use of the sphere with Deleuze and Guattari’s 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 still presuppose the very metaphysics that is under attack. And again it was Nietzsche, the thinker on the stage, who taught Sloterdijk that “For the true poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, but a representative image which really hovers in front of him in the place of an idea” (Nietzsche 2000: 19). Sloterdijk’s conceptual avalanche covers this “necessary illusion” (ST: 188).

In a staged retrospective conversation at the end of part III – a conversation on this oxymoron between a historian, a theologian, and a literary critic, all waiting for the philosopher to join in – the literary critic counters the others’ critique by stressing “the working of the text”: “you neglect the information that is stored in the rhetorical construction” (SIII: 87). The author, the literary critic goes on, has used a superlativist and supremacist form of classical philosophical reason. But this does not really solve the aporetic tension. It only shows that this is the breeding ground for truth.13

b. critique of hyperbolic reason: hypocritical thinkingBeing a hermeneutic thinker, Sloterdijk’s truth-finding means moving toward an as yet undisclosed truth. What, then, is exactly the specific rhetorical device that is applied in order to overtrump the grand narratives? In the introduction to Sphären I it appears to be the hyperbole. A “hyperbolic phenomenology”14 resonates in Sloterdijk’s spherology. Political overtones can be heard: “by exaggerating the given divisions of society, [philosophy] makes us aware of the exclusions and offers them up for a retuning once more . . . Through philosophical hyperbole the chance arises to revise definite options and to decide against exclusion” (SI: 13). “Exaggerating” helps us to revalue the apparently given that is the result of the canonization of exclusive, dichotomous thinking.

A decisive analysis of the relation between hyperbole and truth is not given in Sphären. For this, we have to turn to Nicht Gerettet, published during the finalization of the trilogy. In this philosophical

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physiognomy of Heidegger, Sloterdijk dissects Adorno’s and Heidegger’s de(con)struction of metaphysics.15 The relation between aesthetics and epistemology is rephrased in terms of hyperbole and truth. Citing the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Sloterdijk points out that a hyperbole becomes a stylistic virtue once the topic has surpassed a natural measure (naturalem modum excessit, in Quintilian’s words). The topic is the monstrous, an excessive world. It is better for reason to speak hyperbolically than to remain modestly in the background in the search for truth. Quintilian’s words are paraphrased: “the justification of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness [Angemessenheit an das Maßlose]” (NG: 256).

Sloterdijk wants to break the nihilistic spell of negativity – and, as we shall see: lack and scarcity – by constructing a literary machine as a hyperbolic system that deconstructs the internalized hyperboles of metaphysics that are taken for granted. When his interlocutor in Die Sonne und der Tod proposes the word “excess” (Übersteigerung), Sloterdijk reacts approvingly: “I like the expression, because it reduces transcendence to exaggeration” (ST: 31). Metaphysics turns out to be canonized rhetoric. That is why metaphysics can only be criticized inter-hyperbolically. The genitive “of” in “critique of hyperbolic reason” has to be understood as both objective and subjective: in the final instance, in criticizing another hyperbole it exposes itself as such. Surpassing Critical Theory, Sloterdijk undermines his own critique. In a technical sense he has become hypocritical. We are all “collaborators.” No one has an alibi (NG: 367).

c. essay: exemplary singularityThe reference to Quintilian for understanding hyperbole as an adequate rhetorical device for evoking and projecting truth, bears witness to Sloterdijk’s proximity to the French philosophy of difference.16 Although he is hardly mentioned in Sphären, it was Lyotard who, in referring to another Roman first-century rhetorician – Longinus – prepared an understanding of the sublime for postmodern discourse. Both Quintilian and Longinus shifted the emphasis from the audience – where it lay in Aristoteles’ Poetics – to the rhetorician; from reception to production. In criticizing the modern avatar of this production unit – the genius – Lyotard’s attention shifts to the work of art in its “working of the text.” Not only does Lyotard subsequently connect the sublime to the Heideggerian event; he – as Foucault had done before him with reference to Montaigne – comes to the conclusion that the essay is the most adequate genre for postmodernity (Lyotard 1986).17 For him, it is the genre that best expresses micronarratives. For Sloterdijk, however, the essay is a hypergenre. It hyperbolically establishes a singular truth.

The essay is radically democratic: it seeks its own rules. In Kantian terms, it reflects on the exemplary position of the singular. In writing on singularity one is condemned to polyvocity (Sloterdijk 1993b: 62). That is why for Lyotard the essay is a micropolitical

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tactic. Given its hyperbolic quality and Sloterdijk’s characterization of politics after modernity as hyperpolitics, the essay is a hyperpolitical genre. Hyperpolitics intervenes in a world that is understood “as logic of functions, relations, liquefactions, . . . as a mode of thinking on groundless complexity” (Sloterdijk 1993a: 76).

Rhetorical exaggeration eventually evokes in its audience the substantial topic of the spherology. As the outcome of a “revaluation of all values” (WIK: 349), abundance turns out to be the projected truth of Sloterdijk’s spherology. Taking expression to be the in-discernible unity of form and matter, style and content, Sloterdijk aims at mobilizing the truth by evoking the content of his thesis – excess and abundance – in his grandiose attempt at a tale bigger than any Grand Narrative.

3. POLITICAL ECONOMY: EXPENDITURE OR DISSIPATION?Now we understand how he is writing, the question remains as to what the writing is about. In order to convey the idea that reality is ruled by abundance, Sloterdijk has to reach beyond modern and postmodern discourse. In spite of the empirical evidence of our abundant wealth, even within postmodern discourse, abundance is not so easily accepted as a basic trait of human behavior and thought. On the contrary, economic and political practices still thrive on the opposite idea: scarcity. It is scarcity that legitimizes the economists’ contention that the efficient distribution of scarce resources to everyone serves the common good. But the discourse of scarcity and lack has become so excessive that victim culture is flourishing. “Victimism” is a trend that is enhanced within the current compensation culture as the vibrant nucleus of a global risk society. Herein freedom is facilitated by security and insurance. Abundance is everywhere, but it is ideologically neglected and even denied by a culture that makes money out of fearful anticipation and translates complaints into claims. Political culture – both the Left and the Right – sustains and enhances this attitude. The former still interprets the world in terms of oppression and exploitation; the latter laments the loss of values in terms of decadence.

a. affluent society and miserabilismThe scarcity option is declined by Sloterdijk as “miserabilistic.” The laments of “miserophiles,” their “bel canto miserabilism” (SIII: 690) thrives on an anthropology of lack. Its advocates are by no means negligible: The respected Pierre Bourdieu is downgraded to an agent of the “miserabilistic Internationale” whose interests are looked after by “poverty lawyers.” Benjamin too is dismissed as “misère conservative” (SIII: 781). Our main problem in “the affluent society” is our self-image, our self-definition, and our self-esteem. Revaluating the 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 Sloterdijk’s proposal to appreciate abundance over scarcity utopian?

A genealogy of scarcity proves him to be right. Although he does not mention this book, Foucault’s The Order of Things can be taken as a guideline. His archeology of human sciences reveals that the concept “scarcity” came to the fore in eighteenth-century discourse (Foucault 1970: 256). The systematic introduction of scarcity was shaped between the classical and modern episteme by economists like Say, Ricardo, and Smith. Deconstructing scarcity and advocating abundance can therefore be understood hyperpolitically as a critique of economic discourse.

In the course of modernity substantial arguments for abundance over scarcity have been made by others as well. In France this affirm-ative approach is part of a deep-seated tradition. In the 1920s the debate was set in motion by Marcel Mauss. During his anthropological research on North-American tribes he became acquainted with the potlatch: a periodic ritual in which the powerful dissipate their wealth. By outdoing their rivals they not only reestablished their power, but they also renewed the economic cycle for another year. Mauss’s anthropological research was philosophically adapted by Georges Bataille, who passed the word to a generation of thinkers of differences, among whom were Kristeva, Lyotard, and Deleuze, but more particularly Foucault and Derrida (see Derrida 1978).

Expenditure of wealth, however, is different from dissipation: “the mediocre dissipation [durchschnittliche Verschwendung] of today cannot be compared with the generous refutation of lack as such” (ST: 334). Dissipation still functions within a discourse of scarcity that favors recycling and asceticism as the main solutions to our problems. Within this perspective, dissipation has a pejorative quality. It is still burdened by exactly those guilty and shameful feelings Schama describes in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987). Bataille, however, develops an affirmative view on expenditure (dépense). Once we shift our gaze to the process level, the instant gratification of overflowing enjoyment appears to be an affirmative feature of dissipation. Spending time excessively not only annihilates the surplus of economic transactions – even the most necessary goods are destroyed, ecstacizing the participants of the ritual to the point of self-loss or even annihilation. A Bataillan analysis of soccer hooliganism is instructive.

All our addictions bear witness to the paradoxical fact that dissipation is collectively productive. The astonishing, though power-invested, statement of the American president in his State of the Union address in 2005 – “America is addicted to oil” – is only one further miserabilistic confession that apparently fits the logic of both scarcity and autonomy, but in the final instance explains how expenditure drives the global economy. Surrounded by abundance,

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globally connected, leading comfortable lives, we realize that a paradigmatic ethico-economic shift is needed in order to share our wealth. The “we,” this will be evident, are the wealthy inhabitants of the five-storey-high Greenhouse (WIK: 333–48), the Crystal Palace as a mega installation that has been slowly, but firmly, erected during the complex triple globalization.

Sloterdijk counters the uncomfortable aspect of our affluent society, triggered by guilt and resentment, by advocating “sources of alternative dissipation” (WIK: 362). Experience-based knowledge being transformed into free-floating information, and facts into data, Sloterdijk foresees a future where “all that is solid melts into air” as Marx wrote of modernization. Matter dissolves into immaterial flows. This is an inescapable conclusion of a genealogy of global-ization: after the second globalization, territory is no longer a safe harbor for human communities. The earth deterritorializes and reter-ritorializes in the air. Current extraterritorial globalization, driven by an urge to move forward (Auftrieb), forces us to levitate our existence. Enlightenment as an overall explicitation cuts through the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter. In becoming less heavy, lighter, both consciousness and body are enlightened. Air conditioning takes on a very literal meaning. Coal and oil will be replaced by solar energy.

b. revaluation of all values: a formal-ontological primacy of excessAlthough Bataille is not referred to in Sphären, statements like the following do suggest that a modified Bataillan perspective is adopted: “Isn’t 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 are exaggerations. Walking upright is already a hyperbole . . .” (ST: 32). Disproportionate excess (Unverhältnismäßige) is the bottom line of human life.

Given the pseudo-Hegelian overtones in Sloterdijk’s texts, it is perhaps instructive to understand the excess in formal-ontological terms. In Hegel’s Science of Logic the extreme or the measureless (das Maßlose) is a transitional concept at the very end of the logic of Being where, after the negation of quality by quantity, both are sublated in measure. Once measure loses its qualitative guarantee and becomes sheer quantity, it becomes a knotted, highly complex network of measure relations. Its dialectical dynamics finally dissolve into excess as an upbeat to absolute indifference. In the first movement in the logic of Essence (Wesen) that follows the logic of Being, this absolute indifference, in trying to understand itself, has to acknowledge that it is sheer appearance. In following dialectical negation and sublation, the overcoming of absolute indifference leads to the realization of the human condition – world spirit in its

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historical articulation – in terms of the reflective concepts of identity, difference, contradiction, and finally ground.

Once dialectics loses its universal authority, excess – as a “false infinity” of the logic of Being – is affirmed.18 The hyperbole is a rhetorical device that is applied to reconfigure the excess coherently. The hyperbolic text sensitizes its readers not to become indifferent to the truth. Sloterdijk’s hermeneutics of the monstrous, aiming at a revaluation of all values, does not ignore indifference. He affirms this as the nihilistic excess of values in a “kynical” way in order to overcome the postmodern dissolution of truth. Playing on Bloch’s “Principle of Hope” Sloterdijk hyperbolically proposes the principle 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, a condition discursively evoked by exaggeration: “The justification of the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness” (NG: 256). But why does this revaluation of values suddenly pop up? Although the sublation of excess into indifference is understood in terms of nihilism, this nihilism does not imply, as is often proposed, the absence of values. It is rather the result of a radical evaluation of any sovereignty that was once beyond evaluation: in the final instance, of God. It is the excess of values that can no longer be coped with in a consistent and coherent way. This leads to a chaotic metastasis of values, as is for instance nowadays illustrated by the rules and regulations that govern public space. Metastasis also sheds light on the debacle of multicultural society and the logic of the risk society. The subject has to become indifferent in order to cope with the excess of meaning and means.

4. RELATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY: LACK AND TOO MUCH“We always already inhabit the dimension of excess” (ST: 337). Following Hegel, excess is, in formal ontological terms, a pre-supposition for reflecting identity. Sloterdijk redefines this formal-ontological transfer in his anthropology. In Die Verachtung der Massen “eroded individualism” has made indifference “the one and only principle of the masses” (VM: 88). “Identity and indifference have to be understood as synonyms” (VM: 86) once all ontological differences – gods, saints, sages, and the talented – are negated. Modern man’s contemptuousness (Verachtung) is pacified in the “differential indifference” that forms “the formal secret of the masses 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 the implications for an affirmative anthropology? Though Hegel was the first to proclaim the death of God in his grandiose effort to secularize Christian negativity, it was Nietzsche who radically drew

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its consequences: Man has to acknowledge being as first and foremost an affirmative will to life that legitimates itself via a will to truth as a will to power. Excess is an affirmation of these vital forces: “The element of human beings is the too much [das Zuviel]” (SIII: 709).

This is, however, not man’s “essence.” Surplus is at best man’s fifth element, his “quint-essence.” Given this quintessential excess we need to revalue our present human condition, not by feeling guilty, but by acknowledging and practicing generosity and creativity. Hence Sloterdijk’s hyperbolic proposal of “a theory of a constitutive luxury.” Most people have no problem acknowledging that modern life has gradually become more comfortable. Over the last two centuries an apparently infinite range of possibilities for applying scientific research to daily circumstances has raised the level of comfort exponentially. For wealthy cosmopolitans the struggle for life has been reduced to a minimum. Once we cross the 10 percent poverty threshold, we enter the five floors of the Greenhouse (WIK: 334, 335), populated by people who no longer sweat. They are stressed and fearful, but properly insured.

This comfortable situation has consequences for anthropology. Is man as an animal rationale – mind governing body, in spite of evident shortcomings – still an option? For Nietzsche man was a “nicht-festgestellte Tier,” an animal not fully realized. Nietzsche’s definition, when incorporated into Scheler’s view on human behavior as “openness to the world,” enabled Arnold Gehlen to qualify human beings as “Mangelwesen” (SIII: 699, literally a “being of lack”): in spite of all the luxury that surrounds him, man is a being whose element is a constitutive lack of the necessary means of subsistence. This, however, triggers institutional compensation: family, school, gang, army, church, nation, in the final instance – culture. These normalizing, disciplinary institutions form immune systems, wherein lack is transformed into a productive force, as happened with asceticism based on resentment. Ascetics, enjoying excessive discipline, transform the reactive element of lack affirmatively into a value in itself.

Gehlen regards the lack of means (Mittellosigkeit) as an essential trait. In Sphären III. Schäume (Foams) all intellectual and rhetorical forces are mobilized to free Nietzsche from Gehlen’s “miserabilist” grip. Although every newborn lacks the means to survive and therefore has to be protected and guided, the abundance of sensorial stimuli is unlimited. The senses, being a-specific, are overflowing with stimuli. Sloterdijk reverses Gehlen’s thesis by focusing on relations that are enabled by media and mediations. These even constitute relations as an openness, a creative force that channels excessive abundance: “what we existential reflex” (SIII: 760), wealth being “the ability to participate in a call the open is the dimension of wealth in its explicitation . . .” (SIII: 756). Given the anthropological premise of plenty, during their lifetime individuals are embedded

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

Immune systems decline over time. They engender their own aporias and become auto-immune. In an article20 on urban culture Sloterdijk explores an alternative lifestyle of expenditure. One of his critical remarks concerns the redefinition of freedom caused by the primacy of mobility and the abundance of cheap energy. Automobility is qualified as a Heideggerian “existential.” In Eurotaoism total mobilization is positioned as our “first” nature. In this “kinetic anthropology” the car is “the technical double of the principally active transcendental subject” (ET: 42). But automobility has produced its own auto-immune disease: Total mobilization suffocates urban life and comes to a standstill in a thousand-mile-long traffic-jam. It is evident that an immune system will dissolve once man does not acknowledge and foster its auto-immune tendencies. But more than these aporias, Sloterdijk emphasizes another, more relevant anthropological implication. In line with Deleuzean thought, immune systems “reveal” the foundation of man’s being as relationality.

In opening up to the world the child is always already beyond “itself.” It is embedded in a bi-unity of mother–child, an extra-uterine symbiosis that overrules lack. In order to accentuate relationality over lack at the very end of Sphären I. Blasen (Bubbles), Lacan’s theory of desire is countered by Kristeva’s primacy of the mother–daughter relation (SI: 542). This symbiosis is an “ecstatic immanence” (SI: 641).21 The shift from a male-dominated, monomaniacal perspective to a female-oriented, open, one was already made in Eurotaoismus. There, Heidegger’s implicit negation of life – “being-toward-death” – is overruled by Hannah Arendt’s “natality”: A coming-into-world (zur-Welt-kommen) (ET: 205) that includes both bi-unity and creativity.

Within Sloterdijk’s general science of revolution, natality is the second radical. The first revolutionary radical was civil society as part of modern nation-state building within the second, territorial globalization. The third radical – Sloterdijk writes this in 1994 – is “a conversion of souls” prepared by philosophy (SV: 61, 62). This at least echoes the idea that in order to change the world, collective consciousness – Hegel’s World Spirit – has to convert itself. In Sphären the perspective has slightly changed. Modifying Latour’s question as to whether we have ever really been modern, Sloterdijk wonders whether we have ever been revolutionary (SIII: 87). The revolutionary impact is no longer presented as a reversal, but as a radical unfolding, a making explicit, emphasizing the “making.” The result of this explicitation is a comfortable life for the inhabitants of the Greenhouse, which is fully dependent upon technological, juridical, and insurance-based mediations.

5. ENLIGHTENMENT AS MEDIOLOGICAL EXPLICITATION“I see myself as a human being who functions amid technical media as 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 a theory of constitutive luxury, we cannot neglect Sloterdijk’s media theory, based on McLuhan’s thesis that media are extensions of our senses, organs, and limbs. Media theory underpins his anthropology. This “mediology” miniaturizes and literally ex-plains, i.e. extends megalopsychia – generosity and creativity – in man’s use of his media. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to res cogitans. Mediologically, both are reinvested in a relational condition. Sloterdijk’s grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects of mediatization need a rescaling, because I think there is a blind spot in Sloterdijk’s media theory. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must be invested in micropolitical art practices. In order to expose this blind spot, a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reflectively affirms abundance. I will characterize this, emphasizing the interest of the in-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijk’s work, as “inter-esse.” Preliminary to this distinction is a further differentiation of the notion of Enlightenment.

a. Triple Enlightenment: “silent takeover” of the mind”Mediological enlightenment” (WIK: 261) not only enlightens the mind; it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in the world. I call this Triple Enlightenment. Next to the conventional Enlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) – emancipation from our “selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit” (self-inflicted immaturity) – enlightenment explicitates itself through scientific knowledge, the explicitation of which in its turn is technology. Ever-accelerating means of transportation literally “enlighten” our bodies (2) as do means 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. In this way speed of transportation and transparency of communication enlighten body and sight. The three aspects of enlightenment are fully dependent upon each other. The last two have always been part of Enlightenment, but only in retrospect can we acknowledge their 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. Enlightenment has this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). Gradually, however, these mediations are internalized. Modern man’s life becomes more comfortable. Once the immunity of the system is restored or a new immune system installed, this comfort becomes part of normalization and subjectivation. Speeded up in capsular nodes (cars, trains, planes), communicating via interfaces (computers, cellphones, GPS), extending their potentialities, human beings feel less heavy, i.e. freer.

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Modern life has undergone a “silent takeover”: Technology has converted – explicitated – modern man’s soul without his realizing it. As a result of this triple enlightenment, man and machine, mind and matter 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 means of subsistence. As a result, our moral categories are transformed. Do modern subjects still nurture the idea that they have an instrumental relation to “their” media? They can abandon them when they have no more use-value. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionless immersion in a media environment. Enforcing your own rules – being auto-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 first natureIf relational anthropology is in need of “an ontology of prosthetic realities” (NG: 361), mediatization explains how our souls are converted: by being-in-media. Being-in-the-world is now being-in-media, a medium being more than just an instrumental, kinetic connection between separate beings. The identity of the relata is constituted in and by the relation. Intention is articulated by its extensions, inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. Medical technology replaces and transforms vital functions of both body and mind. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life; they actually constitute sociability. The proposed transformation of Aristotelian megalopsychia has to take into account the constitutive workings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG: 361).

How does second nature become first (SIII: 809)? After the initial “illness” that always accompanies the introduction of a new medium, end-users consume the comfort, the abundance of “their” media. But once this mediological abundance constitutes the end-user’s milieu or immune system, the “incorporated” media will become as invisible as they are indispensable. Proximity without distance roots both body and soul in media. In retrospect this mediological relationality always has been an inextricable quality of man’s condition. Every medium becomes the message, i.e. man’s milieu. The medium becomes an experience in itself. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainment and even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). It is no longer a means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobility and interactivity feels like being crippled, blinded, or deafened. It is as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properly functioning eye or ear.

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

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was initially second nature. In medial performance, memory of this “first” nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggered by the second. “In comfort one does not ask where it comes from when it has become a habit” (SIII: 403). Unreflective being-in-media takes its users beyond history. It is at this crucial point that a medium becomes “a harmful routine.” Once the abundance of new mediological conditions is internalized, needs that were previously nonexistent are ontologized. They become primary needs. Autonomy has 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 an affirmative mediological condition. As a result of forgetfulness the former prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only the second, which advocates openness, enhances the reflectivity which Sloterdijk’s museological attitude presupposes (SIII: 810). In part I of Sphären, for “living in each other in ecstatic immanence” it suffices to be “a male or female modern mass-media being” (SI: 640). But when he notices that “the mediocre, medial, and vulgar effaced the horizon” (SI: 642), it is evident that for Dasein to be “a passion in the face of the monstrous” (NG: 223) reflectivity has to be part of our “medio-crity.” This is acknowledged at the end of part III: “Actually reflectivity and ‘being spoilt’ (Verwöhnung) are inextricably linked.” Once “imaginations concerning lack have become second nature, it is hard to see how they can perform this change of perspectives on their own” (SIII: 809).

c. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esseThe lightness of being-in-media does not “naturally” make the experience of abundance reflective. As long as the in-betweenness of radical mediocrity does not reflect on itself, comfortable life can easily turn into an experience of lack. For Sloterdijk, mediocre people are part of the They (das Man), Heidegger’s qualification of inauthentic existence (SI: 643). Notwithstanding the collective productivity of addictions, the current level of addiction to all kinds of media – even oil – bears witness to the fact that autonomy is no longer adequate as a category with which to understand ourselves in terms other than indifference. Autonomy being sheer illusion – a Nietzschean fiction – for Sloterdijk, authenticity obviously is still an option. What is needed is a reflective attitude as an “existential” in which mediocrity is experienced in its affluent generosity. As Hegel argues: reflectivity sublates indifference.

Ontologically, radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between. In foam city we, glued foam bubbles, share the in-between.24 An affirmative 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-than–the-others” (VM: 87), with reference to Heidegger’s They, an authentic human condition is at hand. Heidegger makes a distinction between an inauthentic condition of the interesting as shallow entertainment and a being-in-between (Zwischen-sein) as “Inter-esse”: “Interest, inter-esse, means to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it. But today’s 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 Heidegger’s distinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interests as “interesse”: “These interests constitute, in the words of the most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between . . .” (Arendt 1958: 182). This ontology of the in-between – this “esse” of the “inter” – needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. In the final analysis, the “psychological” surplus of generosity and the substance of creativity – Aristotle’s megalopsychia – consist of this self-reflective in-between. Unreflected inter-esse asks for “the combination of ‘de-interesting and re-interesting’ in a nondual type of morality” (SIII: 411).

6. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE GESAMTKUNSTWERKFrom the imperative that we have to become lighter (i.e. enlightened), Sloterdijk draws political consequences. Strategies that favor heaviness over lightness in terms of resignation (Gelassenheit) and recycling, and ideologies that still define human relations in terms of oppression are declared “miserabilistic.” Scapegoats are the Green parties and “the Old Left.” But is it enough to affirm the antigravitational flows and criticize “gravitational conservatism”? Does Sloterdijk’s “jovial” perspective suffice to “convert” radical mediocrity? What kind of politics does he propose? Is resistance still an option?

There was an implicit acknowledgement of resistance in Critique of Cynical Reason – albeit romantic – but in Die Sonne und der Tod it is no longer defined as resistance to oppression and injustice in the political sense (ST: 262, 284, 287). After criticizing Lacan, resistance to the effort of the analyst to unlock the fixated reality principle of his patient is no option either. Perhaps the deconstructionist’s résistance or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognized in “the refusal to follow the rules of one’s own game” (ST: 285). Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. Within his general science of revolution, this is understood as explicitation. Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.

Inhabiting the Greenhouse – a thermotope (SIII: 396) – means we 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 with a thermic aesthetics” (SIII: 405). His affinity with the avant-garde not only explains Sloterdijk’s aversion to the mediocre They; it also sheds light on the political premise of his exaggerative reasoning: revising definite options and deciding against exclusion. The approving remarks on Joseph Beuys’s artistic practice give us a clue.26 Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuys’s concept of the “social sculpture” (Sozial Plastik) (SIII: 661, 811). Every generous citizen has to become an artist, as Joseph Beuys once proposed (SIII: 811). Like Foucault, Sloterdijk favors creativity over autonomy. If aestheticization is needed for enduring monstrosity, is Foucault’s proposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can we recognize Sloterdijk’s exaggerative reasoning in Foucault’s attempt to connect truth games with spirituality beyond religious interpretations as “the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject” (Foucault 2004: 17)?

In our comfortable Greenhouse the great divide between life and art, art and nonart, high and low culture is superseded. The super-installation – as an “inclusive concept of artificiality [Künstlichkeit]” (SIII: 813) that “‘integrates’ all subcultures” – demands an aesthetic attitude: “one transfers the form of the museum to the system as a whole and moves around in it as a visitor” (SIII: 818). Cruising public space demands museological sensibility. But how is this stimulated? Does society become a Gesamtkunstwerk? Sloterdijk has already excluded this option. The Crystal Palace is beyond a total work of art, because the risk has to be avoided that “a culture that organizes a total middle” becomes “totalitarian” (VM: 95). Reflecting the inter is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. Bazon Brock qualified this as “an inclination [Hang] towards the total work of art” (see Szeemann et al. 1983).

A genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk – starting with German idealism via Wagner and Wiener Werkstätte, Arts & Crafts, Merzbau, Bauhaus, and Surrealism27 – shows that it never realized itself to a full extent without becoming totalitarian. However, in its constant failure to totalize art as life, it fully explored the space in between disciplines, media, and in between the artist and his audience. The inter is the “cement” of a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is articulated in interdisciplinary, multimedia, and interactive art practices. To borrow Adorno’s phrase, the totalization (das ganz Große) is the false. The truth is in its failure. In failing it shows us its truth: the inter.

Sloterdijk favors art practices that relate precisely by resisting their own rules. That explains his emphasis on surrealism in his Tate lecture. More than any other art “style,” surrealism – and especially Dalì – is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive. In the past fifteen years these elements have been conceptualized in art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a, 2003b, 2004a).28 Concepts such as “relational architecture”

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(Raphael Lozano-Hemmer) have been invented to express the binding force of installations in public space. More than dropping an art object in open space, intermedial art practices reflect upon and intend to transform 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 condition based on generosity “are far reaching in the moral domain” (SIII: 807) because freedom and a sense of justice can no longer be understood “without the phantasm of equality of all with regard to luxury in material terms” (SIII: 820). Ex negative, this phantasm focuses Sloterdijk’s politico-aesthetic strategy. “We are entering an era of new games of enlightenment” (VM: 63). Their target is aesthetic reflectivity. In a Deleuzean turn, this means that being rooted in media (i.e. radical mediocrity) has to be enlightened to the point of becoming an enlightened rhizomatic inter. No roots, just routes. This “conversion” has far-reaching anthropological implications. Against the background of the intended megalopsychia, creativity no longer resides in, but in-between individuals. Creativity is first and foremost relational. Cooperation, participation, and interaction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to the fore 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 from

Hölderlin’s work. He transformed it into das Unheimliche (uncanny). See Heidegger (1982: 150).

3. Alongside the three volumes of Sphären – I. Blasen, II. Globen, III. Schäume [SI,SII,SIII] – he published Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung [WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and its aesthetico-political implications more specifically. Since there are no published translations available yet, all quotes are my translations.

4. See Sloterdijk [NG] (2001: 164–6); Sloterdijk and Heinrichs [ST] (2001: 291).

5. In his Tate lecture Sloterdijk himself translates the German “Explikation” as “explicitation”: to unfold in the sense of explicitly making things.

6. In Im selben Boot. Versuch über Hyperpolitik, Sloterdijk makes a distinction between megalomania and megalopathia. Aristotle transformed Alexandre the Great’s megalomania into megalopathia as a lived experience that engenders big questions. The polis has become part of global space. For two millennia megalopathia has been philosophy’s raison d’être. See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). See also SII: 303, n. 130. He refines this concept in later interviews by defining late modern philosophy as megalo-depressive, as

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an inter-pathology or inter-mania. See the Alliez article in this volume, p.000. It is this “inter” that I will explore in this article.

7. Nietzsche first 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, Nietzsche’s Materialism (1989) is fully focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pages of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijk’s verbal avalanche is spiced with Nietzschean phrases updated by references to French neo-Nietzschean thinkers.

8. The word “Inter-esse” is German for “interest.” However, it also means “to be interested in.” In a philosophical context this connotation is used in a literal sense: being (esse) in between (inter).

9. Lyotard is mentioned only once in Sphären together with Badiou and other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for their “political infinitism” (SII: 410). I come back to this point in the last 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 Hardt’s Empire, their name for the Crystal Palace. Their proposal is rejected by Sloterdijk as too totalitarian a project for “revolutionary” ends (SIII: 825).

12. See the interview with Éric Alliez, this volume p.000.13. 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 Günther 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 and exaggerated/hyperbolic (übertriebene) reason” (NG: 235).

16. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusively to Michel Foucault, with just an incidental remark on Derrida. But in Sphären Foucault is sidelined by Kristeva, and even more by Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then definitely Sloterdijk’s most favored traveling companions.

17. In this text Lyotard deals with different kinds of literary genres.

18. Here a parallel can be drawn with Fatal Strategies (1983) by Jean Baudrillard, published in the same year as Critique of Cynical Reason. The latter criticizes dialectical thinking too and replaces sublation with excess. At the very beginning of this text, the end of dialectics is proclaimed and the advent of an era envisaged, the dynamics of which will no longer be ruled by dialectical sublation. It is the logic of excess that rules.

19. For me the enigmatic expression “eine totale Mitte” is a synonym for “radical mediocrity” that will be explored in the next paragraph.

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

21. It is, however, surprising that he does not mention Kristeva’s nondiscursive “semiotikè” in order to stress the importance of the acoustic-tactile embedding of desire that subverts its discursive articulation.

22. See the writings of the present director of the McLuhan Institute: Derrick de Kerckhove (1997: 4–6).

23. Sloterdijk understands spherology as a “delightenment” (Abklärung), i.e. a dis-enlightenment of our burdened existence. The delight of wine tasting – in which context the term Abklärung means “clarification” – is implied in this spherological “decanting” (SV: 122–3).

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 as utero-tope [Uterotop] (SIII: 392); thermo-topically in the guise of Beuys’s work of art The honeypump (SIII: 404) that reminds us of 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).

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Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: The Beacon Press.

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

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

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

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1977. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking Press.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” In Writing and Difference, pp. 251–77. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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