follow. The word appears only once more – the reader will have to guess to what purpose.
Like all that I have previously published, these texts are subversive exercises against the absolutism of history and socialization. Instead of orienting ourselves by the progressive norm that so quickly degenerates to a forward crawl, I recommend being attentive to sideways mobility. That is what the recourse to the ancient cynical intervention and the allusion to the utopian sharp wit of the man in the barrel were about, only in a more indirect and ambiguous way. In the meantime, the amusement over the critique of cynicism has dissipated; among those capable of judgment, nothing remains of the misunderstanding that critique would thus be reduced to mere pantomime. The thing that always emerges from the discovery of pantomime – the understanding of gesture, gesticulation, and movement – has crossed over into suggestions for a theory of civilizing movement; a theory in which the life-or-death difference between mobility and mobilization presents itself as criterion of an alternative “ethics.” Thus, the following pages contain a new version of critical theory in its embryonic form – not of “society” but of the Western type of progressive process that is played out by modern societies. In the current world process, which exhibits an accelerated movement towards catastrophe, people – as the perpetrators and victims of mobilization – experience their predominant life form as something that leads the wrong way. In their characteristics as perpetrators, they at the same time learn of their ability to be so completely in agreement with the trend towards the wrong thing that they identify with it. Thus, a critical theory of mobilization is not just a translation of the critique of alienation into a language of kinetics. One has to assume that within the most hazardous accelerations of the present, something is executed that stems from what is our own, what is closest to us – in other words, something self-intended. If this is the case, then a critical theory of society is no longer possible, since there is no actual difference between the critique itself and the object of that critique – unless the critique would first turn its thinking against itself and then also examine what is of one’s own, nearest and self-intended, as well.
This kind of critique has so far only existed in the form of theology. Theologians have enjoyed the prerogative to critique the world as such in the name of an Other that is superior to the world, so that that which is one’s own was also subject to criticism. In this book, I attempt to repeat a critique of this kind in a non-theological way. This presupposes that the critical spirit can break away from the world to distance and transform what is one’s own, nearest and self-intended, too. Such a critique explodes the cynical-melancholy notion of a fallen world, one that nowadays sells itself everywhere as post-modern acceptance. It also eschews masochistic total contemplation, which leads to a metaphysical “drop-out-ism.” Neither escapist nor in agreement, the goal of alternative critique is to advance a critical theory of being-in-the-world. It would become plausible in the moment it successfully indicated a non-theological space for distance from the world – opened up a transcendence for the purpose of methodology, if you will. I am of the opinion that we are at the beginning stages of such a theory. Its center forms an analytics of coming-into-the-world2 where the position of philosophical anthropology that humans are “here” loses its validity – we may no longer carelessly assume that “existence” and “being-in-the-world” can be attributed to humans. The presumption that “human beings” are already “in the world” and “exist” becomes corrected by a Socratic maieutic method that deals with arriving on earth and generating worlds, as well as the risk of failure associated with both efforts. What was previously considered to be existential philosophy becomes transformed into a cosmology of the individual – each birth is a chance for a world to sprout up. Maieutic philosophy speaks of the exertion that actually emerging individuals must generate in order to be there. What is thus brought into discussion follows the movement of the life that comes into the world. In this way, the maieutic method once again speaks a serious language – a dramatic world language about the commonly inevitable.
As we will see, only trace elements of these kinds of reflections have previously been available to us in an explicit way – elements that inhabit the space between Heidegger and Bloch, Cioran and Lao Tzu (a space that is barely still surveyed or even perceived). Nevertheless it must be said – to avoid creating confusion – that the explicit elements of the following will appear obscure without the implicit. The reflections steer towards the thesis that the idea of critique without reserves against the unreasonable demands of the world will remain hollow. The question of whether a critical theory is still possible depends on resolving the problem of whether an enlightened a-cosmism may not be a necessary mode of lucid life.3
It is no wonder that serious tones predominate in this book. Other tones have joined the amoral cabaret that wanted to save itself from tragedy. The Teutonic vein in particular stands out more noticeably, weighing down the carefree cheer of the otherwise preferred Southern tone. Thin vibrations of Chinese elements add themselves to the mix and a fatal music of the spheres is barely perceptible against the death march of hardness, strength, skill. It would also be wrong to deny that, here and there, a Jewish cantor’s world lament can be heard, for whom every man-made wall becomes a Wailing one. The dedication to Jacob Taubes – one of the last great representatives of the Jewish spirit in the German language – who died in March 1987, holds a commitment to the memory of apocalypticism as a Jewish alternative to the optimism of the moderns and the tragicism of neo-heroics. It is in Taubes’ work that I experienced an unforgettable enlightenment about that which Manés Sperber calls the religion of good memory.
A nuance will surely elude a reader who is unfamiliar with the landscape where these texts largely came into being. In them, at least to my perception, some of that ahistorical calm of a Provençal summer has been stored. They assume a refutation of city neuroses through heat and light; you may sense the spirit of that place in the way that thoughts at the end of a given paragraph do not always continue on logically – there are frequent imperceptible interruptions between one sentence and the next. The warmth of the land seeps into these gaps – a land that rests upon itself in a burning euphoria. In such a climate, one’s very physiological functions change. Thinking automatically becomes a measure against the heat even though it cannot entirely help but become a symptom of it as well – cruelly rested, it glints at the reader mischievously, as if offering an invitation to a long siesta; it seems to be joviality itself at play. Sitting at Northern desks, one might not be able to immediately pick up on these conditions because different requirements apply to them. Nevertheless, to understand the matters at hand, one must go to the countryside from time to time. The task of discovering a slower pace applies to philosophy as well.
The more horses you hitch up, the faster it goes – I mean, not tearing the block out of the foundations, which is impossible, but tearing the reins and so travelling empty and joyful.
Franz Kafka4
Notes
1 [The original German title of this book is Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).] 2 In the following, especially pp. 66ff. 3 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). 4 [Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 192.]
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