Cont Philos Rev (2011) 44:253–257 DOI 10.1007/s11007-011-9178-5

Peter Sloterdijk: Rage and time: A psychopolitical investigation. Mario Wenning (trans.) Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, 256 pp, cloth, US$34.50, ISBN 978-0-231-14522-0 Jeffrey Bernstein

Published online: 30 April 2011  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Within the context of the return to sweeping conceptual histories—whether of the epochal (Antonio Negri, Phillip Bobbitt) or encyclopedic (Jonathan Israel) variety— Peter Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time (in German, Zorn und Zeit) occupies a unique position. As a Nietzschean, Sloterdijk is committed to genealogical practice as a way of allowing history its ‘relevance for life.’ But, unlike Foucault, his approach is not archival. The reader is thus treated to something approaching a ‘Nietzschean big history.’ If this seems paradoxical, it is nonetheless in keeping with Sloterdijk’s essayistic and provocative style—one familiar to English-speaking readers from his two mid-1980s texts Critique of Cynical Reason and Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (both published by Minnesota Press). Crucial to Sloterdijk’s approach is the ability to survey from a distance in order to cast a glance at both the prior and ensuing conceptual horizons. A somewhat idiosyncratic figure within the German University system (he is President and Philosophy Professor at the state Academy of Design at the University of Karlsruhe and co-host of the German philosophy television show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett), Sloterdijk is less tied to academic written conventions than many others; as such, he is well-placed to make substantial usage of what Adorno referred to as ‘the essay as form’. The title of Sloterdijk’s text cannot but recall Heidegger’s Being and Time. To a certain extent, this is accurate: For Sloterdijk, rage—understood here as a form of thymos—is that fundamental affective disposition of human being which makes its first appearance in archaic Greece (in Homer’s Iliad). It becomes philosophically thematized in Plato and Aristotle, but eventually undergoes obfuscation due to the historical priority accorded to eros. The ‘eroticization’ of humanity (along with its concomitant economic structure) produces a history where rage is misunderstood and mishandled. If Nietzsche has taught us anything at all, Sloterdijk contends, it is that we have magisterially failed at the project of regulating rage in order to keep it J. Bernstein (&) College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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from descending into barbarism: ‘‘If the goal of the political experiment of modernity consisted in translating the thymotic energies of the masses into political forms and in mobilizing these energies for standard ‘progress,’ we have to acknowledge a catastrophic failure’’ (25). Where this project actually is Nietzschean (over and against the mere referencing of him) is in the genealogical account of rage. First, it is not simply that rage initially appears on the world stage in Greece. One finds ‘‘an authentic creation of a treasury of rage’’ in the Book of Psalms (86). This move to think Athens and Jerusalem together parallels Nietzsche’s own genealogical accounts. Second, Sloterdijk succeeds in providing an astute social history of the production, circulation, consumption, expulsion, and withholding of rage. This constellation is significant insofar as it most appropriately applies to ‘‘an economic life… based on erotic impulses, that is, desire, greed, and impulsive consumption’’ (28). Given that this economic constellation is mistakenly applied to thymos, the discipline of psychoanalysis immediately becomes suspect. For Sloterdijk, psychoanalysis is fully and completely focused on eros (even in the ambiguous forms of narcissism and the death drive). Rather than enslave oneself to an aberrant economic formation and its subsidiary disciplines, Sloterdijk asks the question concerning what an economic life ‘‘based on thymotic impulses such as the desire for recognition and self-respect’’ would look like (29). From here, Sloterdijk develops a historically oriented socio-economic distinction between eros and thymos based strictly along Nietzschean lines: If an erotic economy is concerned with debt payment and exchange (as is Capitalism), a thymotic economy would be one based on noble and magnanimous giving (30). If an erotic economy is tied to the temporal index of the past (in the form of resentment-based guilt production and debt payment) a thymotic economy is indexed to the as-yet-unforeseeable future: ‘‘In a transcapitalist economy, the progressive, creative, giving, and excessive gestures need to become constitutive’’(30). Differently stated, we need a life-affirming political economy rather than a life-denying economical politics. Insofar as Sloterdijk seeks to present not simply a psychology, but a ‘pyschopolitics’ of rage, he outlines three ‘macropolitical tasks’ of the future for which Rage And Time is to be merely preparatory: (1) ‘‘extending the welfare state to the suprahistorical level’’; (2) ‘‘the integration of nonhuman actors, forms of life, ecosystems, and ‘things’ in general into the domain of civilization’’; and (3) ‘‘the neutralization of potential genocides in the countries of the Near and Middle East and elsewhere, countries that are populated by angry young men’’ (42). At this point, one might wish to ask: What country doesn’t have ‘‘angry young men’’? Sloterdijk remains silent. One might also wish to ask how Sloterdijk’s recent criticism of European social-economic welfare policies could be in keeping with his aforementioned desire for a supranational welfare state. Again, silence. While one, by no means, has to agree with Sloterdijk’s criticism of such a system, it clearly emanates from his Nietzschean stance (as opposed to a harboring of neoconservative or libertarian tendencies). If erotic economics is fuelled by (and fuels) guilt, shame, and resentment by virtue of its being focused on the repayment of debt, then current welfare practices could be opposed on Nietzschean grounds. Put differently (returning to the discussions pertinent to Rage and Time) any

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practice which increases the potential for future outbreaks of rage can be understood as problematic. What, then, is rage such that it holds decisive sway over humanity? Again, the reference to Nietzsche is utterly clear: Rage is a modality of energetic force— what Nietzsche calls ‘‘will to power.’’ It is not the only modality of such force, but it is the one—in being systematically misdiagnosed—which carries the most toxic potential. Sloterdijk’s six principles for a theory of ‘thymotic unities’ illustrates this Nietzschean heritage: (1) political groups are ensembles which stand in relations of thymotic tension, (2) political actions are initiated by means of a decrease in such tension, (3) political fields are constituted by the spontaneous collectivizing of affective forces, (4) political opinions circulate by means of symbolic operations which express thymotic emotions of collectives, (5) rhetoric has a significant application to this thymotic arrangement, and (6) power struggles are struggles between thymotically charged individuals and/or collectives’’ (20). In the end, Sloterdijk defines ‘‘the art of the political’’ as ‘‘the process of compensating losers’’ (20). This is ultimately what Sloterdijk means when he holds that the current task of humanity is not to thymotically negate political contradictions, but rather to bring about ‘‘civilizational learning’’ with respect to the undeniably and inevitably thymotic character of humanity (229). The schema that Sloterdijk adopts for his historical account is threefold: (1) rage and eternity (i.e., the period characterized by religious conflict as a result of the concern over divine punishment [occurring roughly until the end of the middle ages]), (2) rage and time (the period characterized by the replacement of the ‘wrathful God’ by man, and the onset of revolutionary mobilization of the masses in history [occurring roughly from the 18th Century until the present]), and (3) the time of civilizational learning (the temporal period occurring after history proper— i.e., after the legacy of battles fought ostensibly over an erotic economics but really as an expression of rage). It is clear that the first two stages of history are characterized by the dysfunctional occlusion of thymotic energies as a result of erotic economic practices, institutions and legitimating discourses. The book’s structure outlines this dysfunctional occlusion in detail. Chapter 1 (‘‘Rage Transactions’’) attunes the reader to the historical issue of thymotic impulses by asking the question: ‘‘How was it at all possible, after the disappearance of the West-East divide in 1991, for us to come to believe that we had been thrown into a universe in which individuals and collectives could let go of their capacity to have revengeful feelings’’ (47)? Sloterdijk here begins a compelling quasi-phenomenological description of rage in order to illustrate its perennial quality for humans; interestingly enough, he accomplishes this, in part, through a discussion of the enraged individual’s (lack of) relation to time: ‘‘For the raging person… time does not exist. The uproar in the here and now neutralizes the retrospective and prospective ecstasies of time so that they both disappear in the momentary energy flow. The life of the subject of fury is the sparkles in the chalice of the situation’’ (60). The enraged individual (or, for that matter, community) is impervious to time (one might even say, psychoanalytically, that s/he ‘destroys’ time). This gives the appearance of rage as somehow impervious to ‘normal temporality.’ However, in its misappropriation by erotic structures, rage gets

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reintroduced within time as an aberration. From this ensues rage transactions— where one ‘gives as good as one gets’—in order to eradicate the other person’s thymotic impulses altogether. Hence, the view of rage as aberration simply produces more wastefully destructive rage. Chapter 2 (‘‘The Wrathful God’’) discusses the attempt by theology to enter the political realm. God’s infinite wrath (in all three Abrahamic traditions) amounted to a series of legitimating discourses designed to manage rage (as it were) sub specie aeternitatis. Hence, Sloterdijk’s discussion of Christianity in this chapter: ‘‘the Christianization of the wrath of God leads to a transcendent bank for the purpose of depositing deferred human thymotic impulses and deferred projects of rage whose global design lies beyond the conceptual horizon of the employees of these banks’’(99). It should be clear, here, that Sloterdijk is referring to the ascetic ideal operative in the institutional-theological structure of the Church (and not every and all manifestation of Christianity). It is, in other words, a matter of detecting the ground for the justification of political action in this historical period. That divine wrath ultimately gives way to more worldly forms of political power is a result of the subsequent inability to ‘hear God’s wrath’ in the same way. Hence, a new ‘investing system’ develops. Chapter 3 (‘‘The Rage Revolution: On The Communist World Bank Of Rage’’) addresses the transformation of eternal rage (as a justification) into temporal rage by the creation of revolutionary masses. This occurs, predictably for Sloterdijk, by means of an erotic economic maneuver: In transforming entitlements of the few into egalitarian necessities for all, the model of debt and exchange is employed. The rage in the initially dispossessed causes rage in the formerly well-off; similarly, those who are now well-off set their own rules and provide their own justifications for why they need to remain above everyone else. Consequently an entirely new generation of enraged individuals and communities is produced. The consequences of this for the French Revolution are less than satisfactory insofar as they produce Napoleon. In Lenin’s time, such an economics ultimately gives way to Stalin. It is ultimately Mao, who marks the decisive advance in controlling and mobilizing the dysfunctional economics of rage: ‘‘As the leader of the national bank of revolutionary affect, Mao was convinced after the creation of the People’s Republic that he would be able to regulate infinite credit if he could succeed in amalgamating rage, despair, and revolutionary pride’’ (172). In short, permanent revolution. Chapter 4 (‘‘The Dispersion Of Rage In The Era Of The Center’’) brings the discussion into the period of post-communism. The dream of unregulated capitalism mesmerizes both Europe and the United States—consumptive dreams of peace, security and unlimited prosperity are the new opiates of the people: ‘‘Greed is the affect that refers to the ontological assumption that it is possible to sustain a permanent asymmetry between giving and taking’’ (200). The excesses of communism give way to the excesses of capitalism, and the localized movements resisting the new world order are not forceful enough to capture the hearts and minds of the masses. Sloterdijk invokes a litany of names to illustrate this—Davos, Porto Alegre, the Paris banlieues, political Islamism—but in all the cases the problem is the same: ‘‘In the absence of a successful collection point of rage with a perspective on what needs to be done, we are thus at the same time missing the

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theoretical standpoint from which consultations concerning truly global matters could be carried out’’ (204). One imagines that this, for Sloterdijk, would be the definition of an inoperative community. In his conclusion (‘‘Beyond Resentment’’), Sloterdijk lets forth a clarion call: ‘‘under conditions of globalization no politics of balancing suffering on the large scale is possible that is built on holding past injustices against someone’’ (228). A difficult thought, to be sure; yet one which would signal the mutation from an erotic to a thymotic economy. Accordingly, we are today at a crossroads concerning this issue. I find Sloterdijk’s treatment of psychoanalysis (in his Introduction) problematic. One might suggest that his text carry the alternative title Thymos and Civilization— A Response to Herbert Marcuse. Yet I wonder just how accurate Sloterdijk’s account is. It is certainly the case that a great deal of psychoanalysis is focused on eros. However, Sloterdijk gives extremely short shrift to those moments in psychoanalytic thought not simply reducible to the erotic impulses—one thinks here of Freud’s ‘death drive’, Klein’s ‘infantile destructive aggression’, Kohut’s ‘narcissistic rage’, and Winnicott’s ‘hatred’. Moreover, that psychoanalysis also has resources for balancing thymotic impulses is evident from Bion’s ‘containercontained’ function of thinking and Segal’s conception of ‘symbol-formation’, as well as Winnicott’s ‘holding environment’. While it is true that these conceptions are all (in some sense) linked to eros, it is not at all clear that they stricto sensu operate according to Sloterdijk’s conception of erotic economy. Finally, the question needs to be raised as to whether thymos and eros are as separate as Sloterdijk suggests. After all, psychoanalysis whatever else it is, is a discipline and discourse dealing with conflict and war. As such, it is inevitably a discipline seeking to address thymotic instincts. More needs to be said about this issue so that Sloterdijk’s profoundly interesting analysis of thymos does not risk becoming (in Kantian terms) an empty concept without an object; for, as Sloterdijk would have to agree, human history decisively shows that thymos is in no way empty insofar as it is not wanting for objects.

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