copyright © 2011 Semiotext(e). Reprinted with permission of Semiotext(e).
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3350-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3351-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author. | Moore, Ian Alexander, translator.
Title: After God / Peter Sloterdijk ; translated by Ian Alexander Moore.
Other titles: Nach Gott. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | First published in German as Nach Gott: Glaubens- und Unglaubensversuche, Suhrkamp Verlag 2017. | Summary: “After God is dedicated to the theological enlightenment of theology. It ranges from the period when gods reigned to reveries about the godlike power of artificial intelligence”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019034770 (print) | LCCN 2019034771 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533503 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533510 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509533534 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Death of God theology. | Philosophical theology.
Classification: LCC BT83.5 .S5613 2020 (print) | LCC BT83.5 (ebook) | DDC 210--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034770
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034771
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Translator’s Note
I would like to thank Ben Acree, Myron Jackson, Oliver Berghof, and especially Manuela Tecusan for their helpful comments on the translation.
1 TWILIGHT OF THE GODS “Every world of gods is followed by a twilight of the gods”*
Rest now, rest, you god!
Richard Wagner, Die Götterdämmerung
I
The intelligentsia of our culturally forgetful days still remembers, partially, that the Greeks of the classical era used the term “mortals” to refer to human beings. Human beings bore this name because they were conceived of as earthly counterparts of the gods, who were called immortals. Immortality was in fact the only eminent feature of the Greek gods. Their behavior hardly differed from that of humans, with their all-too-humanness.
A century ago, amid the convulsions of World War I, Paul Valéry extended the attribute of mortality to high cultures. We should now know, he assured us, that even the great collective constructs (nous autres, civilisations), those integrated by language, law, and the division of labor, are mortal. We should regard it as a happy accident if this immense statement has left behind a trace here and there, in the memory of a culture that bears the old European stamp. “We civilizations” are indeed mortal and, after everything that had happened, we should have taken note of this. No longer should mortality be predicated only of Socrates and his ilk. The term leaves the domain of syllogistic exercises and inundates a continent that does not grasp its Great War. Mortality acquires this new valence not only from the fact that, within four years, more than nine million men were sent to their deaths. What is decisive is that the countless fallen soldiers and civilian casualties seemed to result from the internal tensions of the cultural events themselves. What are cultural nations, and what do civilizations amount to, if they allow such an excess of casualties and self-sacrifices, indeed not only allow it but provoke it from their ownmost [eigensten] impulses? What does this mass consumption of life say about the spirit of the industrial age? What could this unparalleled recklessness toward individual existence possibly mean? When applied to civilizations, the word “mortality” also hints at the possibility of suicide.
The shock to which Valéry’s note bore witness reached deeper than his contemporaries could have known. For once, our insight that civilizations could fall was not relegated to distant worlds such as Nineveh, Babylon, or Carthage. It now applied to great civilizations close at hand: France, England, Russia … These were names that, until yesterday, still resonated with us. They were spoken of as though they were metaphysical universals in the form of peoples. They stood for the supertemporal stability that used to be attributed to clans and to their associations into peoples. Since time immemorial, clans were ruled by the law of ancestry. They embodied the duration that flows through the generations, no matter how much individuals come and go. Valéry: “And now we see that the abyss of history is big enough for all.”1
The twilight of civilization begins at the moment when the inhabitants of the great cultural enclosures suspect that even the most established human systems of the present have not been built for all eternity. They are subject to a fragility that also goes by the name “historicity.” Historicity means for civilizations what mortality means for individuals. In the philosophy of the twentieth century, this idea was applied to individuals under the description of “being toward death.” When related to cultures, it is called historical consciousness.
As a rule, members of the historically affected nations have ignored the idea that their historians are at the same time their thanatologists. Ex officio, thanatologists make the better theologians. Relying on a local point of departure, they leap ahead and assume God’s standpoint at the end of the world and at the end of life. As a rule, historians don’t realize that they are indirectly practicing the perspective of the end when they recall early beginnings.
From a divine perspective, history means nothing but the process of converting what has not yet been into what has been. Only when all being
