Peter Sloterdijk and "The Awful Children of the Neuzeit".
In the original text, the book published in 2014 is called "Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit", which you may translate with "The Terrible Children of the Modern Era" or, as I did, with "The Awful Children of the Neuzeit".
In the following interview, Sloterdijk explains what the book is mainly about.
Sloterdijk knows that the awful children of the neuzeit do not have much time left for the correction of their wrong development. It is a bottomless dead end.
For Sloterdijk, "the suspension of corruption" is the "serious case of learning. Whoever is a learner does not merely accumulate information. This one understands that real learning has something of a conversion. - If there were a counterpart in cultural theory to that which embodies the holy of holies in the Catholic altar structure, it could be nothing other than that most dilapidated term of the present day: 'learning'. In the coming century, it should be guarded like a numinous presence in a revelatory tent. On rare days, it might be allowed to be unveiled for a few moments. Is not the suspicion well-founded that learning is the unknown God of whom it was said at the time, in a note of seer-like darkness, that only such a one could still save us?" (Peter Sloterdijk, ibid, 2014, pp. 28-29 [related to the original text]).
The awful (perhaps the word "terrible" is more appropriate after all) children of the neuzeit should finally learn!
*
Table of the book's content (translated from German into English by me):
Preliminary remarks: Of heritage, sin, and modernity.
Chapter 1: The permanent flood. On a bon mot of Madame de Pompadour.
Chapter 2: Dasein in the hiatus or: The modern triangle of questions. De Maistre - Chernyshevsky - Nietzsche.
Chapter 3: This disturbing surplus of reality. Anticipatory remarks on the process of civilization after the rupture.
Chapter 4: History lesson. Seven episodes from the history of the druft into the bottomless: 1793 to 1944/1971. - Paris, January 22, 1793, about eight o'clock in the evening. - Paris, December 2, 1804. - Zurich, February 5, 1916. - Jekaterienburg, the night of July 16-17, 1918. - Moscow, March 13, 1938. - Posen, October 4, 1943. - Bretton Woods, July 22, 1944 / Washington, August 15, 1971.
Chapter 5: The over-id: of the stuff of which successions are made. 1) In the copy store of evolution. 2) The patriarchal mind and the transmission chain. 3) Monsters-procreations in the hiatus: chimeras and philosopher disciples. 4) The bastard of God: the Jesus caesura.
Chapter 6: The great release. 1) Ecce homo novus. 2) Irregular births. 3) The children of the abyss. From mysticism as antigenealogical revolt 4) The glorious bastards march up. 5) Creative discrimination: legal and illegal. A tryptych. 6) Not a word more about descent. Voiture - de Sade - Jefferson - Emerson - Stirner - Marx - Deleuze/Guttari.
Outlook: In the Delta.
Year of publication: 2014.
Kultur
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Is it possible to develop without a conservative element? No. That is why I think that the real message in this book is this:
TURN BACK: BECAUSE YOUR WAY IS A BOTTOMLESS DEAD END !
Already the genetic processes in every life are conservative. So someone who rejects the conservative can only be against life.
No living being can live without origin, without descent, without lineage, and for the living beings which reproduce sexually, it is also true that they cannot live without parents. Who denies all this, wants to cheat, wants the world power, is megalomaniac and persuades the mass of the people that they can become machines (keyword: transhumanism).
Also, for the people, as they are culturally constituted since the Neolithic Revolution, without tradition a culture is not possible at all.
The antigenealogical experiment of modernity (however we want to define "modernity") is an experiment doomed to failure from its very beginning.
Donnasue Rodent
Gender : Posts : 7 Join date : 2022-09-15 Location : United States
No living being can live without origin, without descent, without lineage, and for the living beings which reproduce sexually, it is also true that they cannot live without parents. Who denies all this, wants to cheat, wants the world power, is megalomaniac and persuades the mass of the people that they can become machines (keyword: transhumanism).
you're creating political strawmen to knock down biological facts. democracy is an example of how individualistic societies are vastly superior to feudal models.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37111 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Donnasue is the one who creates political strawmen to destroy biological facts.
Not coincidentally, Donnasue - projecting the own faults and problems onto others - reminds me of many ILP members and especially of one very specific ILP member.
Back to the topic, which I hope will not be subject to another destruction attempt by an unqualified like Donnasue.
Peter Sloterdijk (ibid, pp. 392-396 [in the Originaltext]), translated by me:
"The attack on hereditary differences is paid for with the unleashing of permanent competition between new, ostensibly equal-opportunity candidates for the better places, which inevitably produces countless losers. This may explain the socio-psychologically paradoxical effect why modern societies have to struggle with the chronic darkening of their basic mood in the face of historically unprecedented high prosperity, massive redistribution and exploding life expectancy.
In the Europe of the transitional centuries between the Middle Ages and modernity, a psychopolitical process is taking place which, in analogy to the transformations of the same period in the economic field, could be characterized as an initial accumulation of dissident, subversive, revolting subjectivity - perhaps as a founding phase of subjectivity without epithets.
In this period, the phenomenon of terrible children becomes chronic and obsessive. Now the offspring of the hiatus shoot up everywhere - partly filiation-capable, partly filiation-unwilling descendants of more or less problematic parents, driven by the impossibility, which becomes clear to them, of entering 'social life' as loyal copies of their producers.
Kafka's letter to his father (Brief an den Vater, written in November 1919, published in 1952), exemplary in its detail, its memory-strong bitterness, and its resigned conciliation, therefore represents much more than the local testimony of an accidental transgression between parent and child. It is the monument of a risk of alienation that chronically wanders through the families of modern times, Jewish, Christian, and secular. In both its polemical and pacifying tendencies, it reveals that it is not infrequently the soul work of children pressing for clarification that bridges the hiatus between generations with accommodating gestures. It was probably not so much the 'work of mourning' that was important in bridging the genealogical intervals among the moderns, but the work of being able to forgive. Wasn't the 20th century thereby the psychoanalytic age, because it introduced a new regime in the treatment of awful children of hardly less awful parents by the invention of 'psychotherapy'? Wasn't Sigmund Freud the most successful interpreter and exploiter of the designated awfulness so far, by bringing it into the soliloquy of bourgeois culture under the term 'Neurose' ('neurosis')? And didn't Freud - with whatever right - place the greater part of the terrible with the children, when he endowed them, after the abandonment of the 'seduction theory', with a passably monstrous drive life?
The process, as disturbing as it is fascinating, is fueled by a single motive, widespread across all social strata and existentially inescapable for those affected: at every moment and everywhere, in the world age of awakening aspirations, it is a matter of the progressive delegitimization of the 'existing' through the objections of the disenfranchised and illegitimate, presented openly or acting in secret - whether they are the bearers of a stigma of origin, the victims of a status disadvantage, or the subjects of an inherited disenfranchisement. Wherever one opens the book of rebellious and bastard modernity, one regularly encounters criminals of lost or never proven honor.
It was practically throughout hereditary positional disadvantages that provoke in their holders the direct comparison with the better-off and dissolved the reflex of non-agreement with the situation and its preconditions in the system of norms of 'society'.
What is called egalitarianism in today's discourses can be easily recognized in its more concrete beginnings, in retrospect, as the offensive of the bastards and other bearers of hereditary disadvantages against the existing system of legally entrenched discriminations. Anyone listening in on the word 'equality' will notice choruses of resentment and bitterness.
From the age of the religious wars, the bastard scheme spills over into the political sphere ....
As the most momentous movement in this field eriwes the foundation of the United States of America which owed the consolidation of its independence, declared in 1776, to a persistently fought battle for decolonization, sealed by the Peace of Paris in 1783. The bastard constitution of the U.S., evidenced from the beginning and never denied later, may be one of the reasons why there is a heightened, occasionally eccentric sensitivity to problems of post-coloniality in other cultures in this country to this day, namely in its multi-culturally agitated, multi-aspirationally confused academia. It includes a tendency to misinterpret the most absurd metastases of post-colonial activisms as precursors of emancipations."
Kultur
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"And you shall call no one father on earth ...." – Jesus Christ –
Peter Sloterdijk (ibid, pp. 288 and 291 [in the original text]), translated by me:
"With the appearance of the fatherless Jesus of Nazareth, the most terrible child in the history of the world, a new form of personalization is connected in psychohistorical view, which starts from the direct indwelling of the patro-poietically generated father in the inspired son. The Christian pattern of medial personhood aims at the Real Presence of the Over-Father in the Over-Son. Whatever the Son says and does, according to his own conviction the Father says and does presently actual through him. John summarizes the facts in the formula, whereafter the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (cf. John, 1:14).“
"The whole of Paul's writing can be read as if he ceaselessly circled around the phrase that was unpronounceable for him, "Where generation was, imitative discipleship shall become." We no longer beget, we baptize and call forth. We do not reproduce, we teach and convert. We no longer believe in a future that lies in our own children, we are preparing for an entirely different world that will be opened up to us by the imminent end of the current aeon."
Last edited by Kultur on Sun Sep 18, 2022 11:46 pm; edited 1 time in total
Kultur
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„The main theorem of civilization dynamics is: In the world process after the hiatus, more energies are constantly released than can be bound under forms of civilization capable of being handed down.“ (Peter Sloterdijk (ibid, pp. 85 [in the original text], translated by me).
Kultur
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„The chronic surplus of mobilizations of activities and the progressive triggering of action-moving event streams, which are reflected in objective relics, drive the world relationship and reality experience of the moderns into constantly growing asymmetry.“ (Peter Sloterdijk (ibid, pp. 85 [in the original text], translated by me).
Kultur
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I am inclined to believe from reading your posts that you rely heavily on Ignatius of Loyola, the Spanish Catholic priest and theologian, who found the The Jesuits, as your thoughts and opinions run in tandem with Peter Sloterdijk.
"Sloterdijk is not a Jesuit himself by any means but his own anthropology and arguably, his late philosophy are impossible without the Jesuits - a point Sloterdijk deems to hint at in a variety of contexts. His attempt to name the Jesuits as a part of his genealogy of anthropotechnology helps to bring in the insights from media theory that distinguish Sloterdijk from both his rivals in Critical Theory and his colleagues in German media studies (e.g. Friedrich Kittler). By way of the Jesuits, Sloterdijk is able to find an autoplastic anthropology, one that locates a certain creative energy in human beings on human beings that eschews the trappings of Habermas's conservative anthropolgy and the technological determinism of Kittlerian media theory.
Sloterdijk’s assumption that the genius of St. Ignatius was to have intuited that the spiritual life is a practicing life, one that aims to train human beings otherwise, replacing old habits with new habits derived from imaginative exercises."
“The SS had been organized by Himmler according to the principles of the Jesuit Order. The rules of service and spiritual exercises prescribed by Ignatius de Loyola constituted a model which Himmler strove carefully to copy. Absolute obedience was the supreme rule; every order had to be executed without comment. Edmond Paris – The Vatican Against Europe (p 252-253)
I am pretty sure that I do not "rely heavily on Ignatius of Loyola". Not always but often and almost always according to certain points, my "thoughts and opinions run in tandem with Peter Sloterdijk".
Sloterdijk's "late philosophy", as you said, is very well conceivable without Ignatius of Loyola. Of course, it is so that an author of so many books is not only compared with just many other authors, but not seldom also equated or paralleled. Sloterdijk's concept of practice says at first not more, but also not less than that one should rather speak of training instead of religion. That this has similarities with what Ignatius of Loyola said may be, but in my opinion it is not yet an indication and certainly not a proof that Sloterdijk is a follower of Ignatius of Loyola (as interesting as your theses may be).
Sloterdijk has worked on many philosophers, scientists, artists, technicians, etc., that does not exclude the theologians (theorists related), which almost puts you in the field of religion. Also, theologians were not seldom represented in discussions on television; however, this is also not an indication of anything, but resulted both from the topic itself and from the selection on the part of the television stations.
Perhaps you can be more specific in your statement. I have read 32 Sloterdijk books and claim that among them are certainly his most important ones.
I also know him from television programs. I haven't actually missed any of that as far as his person is concerned. He also has a winter, a spring, a summer and a fall (autumn).
Anyway, Freyja, without strong convincing indications, it will be very difficult to confirm your thesis. But feel free to provide such indications.
Das Buch über „die schrecklichen Kinder“ ist Peter Sloterdijks bestes Buch. Trotz der in diesem Buch enthaltenen vier Fehler habe ich es in meiner Liste der „Top 100 der Bücher ab 1800“ an die dritte Stelle gesetzt, wie oben schon erwähnt. Wirklich: „dieses Buch hat es in sich“ (Martin Meyer). Seine große Bedeutung liegt nicht nur in der Tatsache, daß in ihm viel Geschichtsphilosophie enthalten ist, was bei allen anderen Werken Sloterdijks auch der Fall ist, sondern in der Aktualität des Themas, was bei fast allen anderen Werken Sloterdijks zwar auch, aber nicht mit derselben Konsequenz der Fall ist. Vielleicht hat diese Tatsache auch mit der globalen Finanzkrise von 2008, die zu einer globalen Staatenkrise - in Verbindung mit Kriegen natürlich - weitergetrieben wurde, zu tun, was nämlich im Falle der hysterischen Reaktion auf Sloterdijks philosophische Reaktion auf eben diese globale Finanzkrise zu einer zweiten unnötigen „Debatte“ von 2009 bis 2010 und möglicherweise deshalb anschließend zu einer Bedenk-, Vorbereitungs- und Bearbeitungzeit für das Buch über „die schrecklichen Kinder“ führte, bevor dieses großartige Werk 2014 veröffentlicht wurde. Wer angesichts solcher Dramatiken ein aktuelles Thema auch im Zusammenhang mit der Zukunft - und sei sie noch so düster und noch so sehr ignoriert - vorlegen will, muß auch das Interesse der Leserschaft angesichts eben dieser Umstände berücksichtigen und entsprechend didaktisch vorgehen und das Lernen in seiner gesamten Bedeutung direkt ansprechen:
„Aufhebung der Korruption wäre das weltliche Gegenstück zur Reue, mit der in christlicher Tradition die Wiederaufrichtung des Menschen nach dem Fall beginnt. Die Aufhebung der Korruption ist der Enstfall des Lernens. Wer ein Lernender ist, häuft nicht bloß Informationen an. Er versteht, daß wirkliches Lernen etwas von einer Bekehrung hat. – Gäbe es in der Kulturtheorie ein Pendant zu dem, was im katholischen Altaraufbau das Allerheiligste verkörpert, es könnte nichts anderes sein als dieser am weitesten heruntergekommene Begriff der Gegenwart: »Lernen«. Im kommenden Jahrhundert sollte man ihn wie eine numinose Präsenz in einem Offenbarungszelt hüten. An seltenen Tagen dürfte man ihn für einige Momente enthüllen. Ist nicht der Verdacht begründet, das Lernen sei der unbekannte Gott, von dem es seinerzeit in einer Anmerkung von seherischer Dunkelheit hieß, nur noch ein solcher könne uns retten?“
So scheint der Titel meiner Rezension zu passen: „Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit sollen endlich lernen!“ Da ich mich immer schon für das Lernen interessiert habe und seit mittlerweile sehr langer Zeit als Lehrer arbeite, ist mir ein zum Lernen aufrufendes Buch besonders sympathisch.
Das Lernen und alles damit Zusammenhängende, also die gesamte Bildung, der Betrieb an Universitäten und Schulen und darum ein beträchtlicher Teil unserer Kultur haben so sehr nachgelassen wie noch nie zuvor in unserer Geschichte. Schlimmer noch: Es ist Absicht dahinter. Die Bildungsmisere ist strategisch geplant. Hinter ihr steckt der Nihilismus bzw. der „Hiatus“, um es auf Sloterdijkisch zu sagen. Die Bildungsanstalten sind stets sein erstes Opfer, weil (a) Kinder und Jugendliche leichter zu beeinfussen sind als Erwachsene und (b) außerhalb der Familie Kinder und Jugendliche effektiver in Richtung Nihlismus bzw. Hiatus, Antigenealogismus, Umwertung aller überlieferten Werte u.s.w. zu beeinflussen sind als innerhalb der Familie, denn die Familie soll ja zerstört werden - sie ist einer der wichtigsten unter den überlieferten Werten - und wir wissen, daß sie schon seit langem zerstört wird.
Translation:
The book about "the awful children" is Peter Sloterdijk's best book. Despite the four errors contained in this book, I have placed it third in my list of the "Top 100 Books from 1800 onwards", as already mentioned above Really: "this book has it all" (Martin Meyer). Its great importance lies not only in the fact that it contains a lot of philosophy of history, which is also the case with all of Sloterdijk's other works, but in the topicality of the subject, which is also the case with almost all of Sloterdijk's other works, but not with the same consistency. Perhaps this fact also has to do with the global financial crisis of 2008 which was pushed on to become a global crisis of states - in connection with wars, of course - which namely, in the case of the hysterical reaction to Sloterdijk's philosophical response to precisely this global financial crisis, led to a second unnecessary "debate" from 2009 to 2010 and possibly therefore subsequently to a period of reflection, preparation and editing for the book on "the awful children" before this great work was published in 2014. In the face of such dramas, anyone who wants to present a topical subject even in the context of the future - however bleak and however much ignored - must also take into account the interest of the readership in the face of these very circumstances and proceed accordingly in a didactic manner, directly addressing learning in all its significance:
"Repeal of corruption would be the secular counterpart of repentance, with which, in the Christian tradition, man's reconstruction after the fall begins. The abolition of corruption is the final fall of learning. He who is a learner does not merely accumulate information. He understands that real learning has something of a conversion. - If there were a counterpart in cultural theory to that which embodies the holy of holies in the Catholic altar structure, it could be nothing other than that most dilapidated term of the present day: "learning". In the coming century, it should be guarded like a numinous presence in a revelatory tent. On rare days it might be unveiled for a few moments. Is not the suspicion well-founded that learning is the unknown God, of whom it was said in a note of seer-like darkness at the time that only such a one could still save us?"
So the title of my review seems to fit: "The awful children of modern times should finally learn!" Since I have always been interested in learning and have been working as a teacher for a very long time by now a book calling for learning is particularly appealing to me.
Learning and everything connected with it, i.e. the whole of education, the operation of universities and schools, and therefore a considerable part of our culture, have declined as never before in our history. Worse still, there is intention behind it. The educational malaise is strategically planned. Behind it is nihilism or "hiatus", to put it in Sloterdijkian terms. Educational institutions are always its first victims because (a) children and young people are easier to influence than adults and (b) outside the family children and young people can be influenced more effectively in the direction of nihilism or hiatus, antigenealogism, re-evaluation of all traditional values, etc. than within the family, because the family is to be destroyed - it is one of the most important of the traditional values - and we know that it has been destroyed for a long time.
Kultur
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Christian Hein: Peter Sloterdijk. Der Briefkurier der POST-Moderne.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Translation: Christian Hein: Peter Sloterdijk. The Letter Courier of POST-Modernism.
For comparison, the original photo:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Kultur
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In Sloterdijk's book "Du mußt dein Leben ändern" ("You must change your life"), published in 2009, it says on pages 521 and 522 (translated by me):
"Vaccination with the monstrous: Nietzsche as immunologist. - Nietzsche is associated with the little-understood main logical event of the 19th and 20th centuries: the transformation of metaphysics into general immunology - an event that modern philosophy as well as theology and conventional sociology have failed to reproduce to this day. (Only Luhmann's systems theory, due to its metabiological approach, has integrated the immunological imperative into its foundations. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, 1984, p. 504 ff..) By revealing immunity as a system and principle, man is explained to himself anew. He explicates himself as a being that has to secure himself in the monstrous - Heidegger says: in-the-world - even at the price of monstrous alliances. Clarifications of this type should have directly affected the status of "religion" as the most comprehensive (apart from law) immunitarian practice of the symbolic type - but it took a whole century for more recent forms of cultural theory and theology to make use of the new potential for reflection. - The course had already been set in Romanticism."
Kultur
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Christian Hein: Peter Sloterdijk. Der Briefkurier der POST-Moderne.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Translation: Christian Hein: Peter Sloterdijk. The Letter Courier of POST-Modernism.
For comparison, the original photo:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
I would like to buy Christian Hein's book, but the price ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) is too high, because I don't know (yet) whether the book is worth that money.
Satyr Daemon
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