No More Learning

Joseph de Maistre, Petersburg Dialogues, Or , Conversations on the Temporal Government ofProvidence, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 19.
NOTES TO PP. 339-44
50 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 33.
51 See Richard van Dulmen, Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale der Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995).
52 In ch. 8 of the first book of The Wealth of Nations, he writes that 'the demand for men, like that of any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men. ' Adam Smith, The Wealth o f Nations, ed. Jonathan B. Wight [Petersfield: Harriman House, 2007], p. 53. What Smith views as an effect of the market is in fact a consequence of demographic policy.
53 Gunnar Heinsohn, Rolf Knieper and Otto Steiger, Menschenproduktion: Allgemeine Bevolkerungslehre der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). The authors' thesis did not go uncontested, especially their argument that the documentation of the witch trials shows more denunciation of witches by neighbours and fellow villagers than by state investigators and inquisi- tors. This does not change the truth of the observation that the creation of the witch-hunting climate stems from clericocratically based political meas- ures.
54 TN: 'subject' is used here purely in the sense of subordination to power.
55 The German translation by Johannes Fischart appeared as early as 1591 under the title Yom ausgelassenen wUtigen Teufelsheer (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1973 [reprint]). See Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, Inflation and Witchcraft or The Birth o f Political Economy: The Case of Jean Bodin Reconsidered (Bremen: Institut fur Konjunktur- und
Strukturforschung, 1997).
56 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans.
Montague Summers (New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 66.
57 Heinsohn et aI. , Menschenproduktion, p. 78.
58 For a macro-historical description of Europe's demographic anomaly
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Gunnar Heinsohn, Sohne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen (Munich: Piper, 2008).
59 Michel Foucault, 'Lives of Infamous Men', in James D. Faubion (ed. ), Essential Works ofFoucault, vol. 3: Power (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 157-75:
60 See James L. Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century's End (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
61 Heinsohn et aI. , Menschenproduktion, pp. 70-7.
62 In this context, they point out that Foucault's analysis of the 'microphysics
of power' contains a dating error that, restricted by the methodological bar- riers of discourse analysis, he was no longer able to correct with its own methods. He directed questions at the eighteenth century that had already been answered by the sixteenth; for this reason, almost all of Foucault's statements about modern biopower are impaired in decisive aspects by anachronisms and explanatory gaps.
476
NOTES TO PP. 344-53
63 See Markus Krajewski (ed. ), Projektemacher: Zur Produktion von Wissen in der Vorform des Scheiterns (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004).
64 This failure is described by Herbart in The Application ofPsychology to the Science of Education (1832): 'the less useful an individual is, the less the State will trouble itself about him. Its schools are to provide it with those whom it requires. It chooses the most useful; the rest may look after them- selves. ' Johann Friedrich Herbart, The Application of Psychology to the Science of Education, trans. Beatrice Charlotte Mulliner (New York: Scribner's, 1898), p. 19.
65 It is no coincidence that the greatest metanoetic account to come from medi- eval Europe, La Divina Commedia, states that the poet's initiation into unearthly matters began when he lost his way in a forest at the midpoint of his life (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita).
66 TN: Bildung, from the verb bilden, 'to form' or 'to educate', usually refers to the academic aspect of education, as opposed to Erziehung, which conveys more the sense of upbringing or conditioning. Nonetheless, the word's origin suggests a moulding of character (as evident in the Bildungsroman).
67 Arnold Gehlen often pointed harshly to the tendency towards intellectual hyper-morality, accompanied by a massive moralizing disloyalty to the general interest. Niklas Luhmann speaks more detachedly of such phenom- ena: see Luhmann, 'The Morality of Risk and the Risk of Morality', International Review ofSociology 3 (1987), pp. 87-107.
68 See the pelle di asino aria in Act 4 of Le nozze di Figaro.
69 See Paul Konrad Liessmann, Theorie der Unbildung: Die Irrtumer der Wissensgesellschaft (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006); concerning the implosion of school in postmodernity, see pp. 429f below. TN: there is a play on words concealed by the translation. Entgeisterung, meaning 'dismay' or 'dumb- foundedness', literally indicates a 'de-spiriting', in contrast to the Geist of
Zeitgeist.
70 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7.
71 Docentium et discentium utilia coetus.
72 Comenius, Via Lucis, Der Weg des Lichtes, ed. and trans. Uwe Voigt
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1997), pp. 21£. TN: because the aforementioned English translation is out of print and not accessible online, the author's references to the German edition have been retained and the corresponding passages newly translated.
73 Ibid. , p. 23.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid. , p. 93.
76 Ibid. , p. 95.
77 Schola est officina, in qua novelli animi ad virtutem formantur; from
Comenius, Via Lucis, p. 206.
78 Ibid. , p. 124.
79 Comenius offers a para-Baconian argument on this subject: 'But neither
should the artificial be ignored. For the arts express nature, or even place it under pressure or keep it captive, forcing it to confess its secrets gradually to us. Hence these secrets become ever more well known. In addition, the arts serve to multiply the comforts of life (and in the Age of Illumination, there would surely have to be a wealth rather than a lack of such comforts). ' Der Weg des Lichtes, pp. l10£.
477
86 87
88 89 90
91 92
in Enzyklopadien der Pruhen Neuzeit: Beitrage zu ihrer Erforschung, ed. Franz M. Eybl, Wolfgang Harms, Hans-Henrik Krummacher and Werner Welzig (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 15£.
See the section above on Sophism as a rhetorical version of the art of omnis- cience, pp. 288f.
See Klaus Schaller, Die Maschine als Demonstration des lebendigen Gottes: Johann Amos Comenius im Umgang mit der Technik (Hohenghren: Schneider, 1997).
See Klaus Volker (ed. ), Kunstliche Menschen: Dichtungen aber Golems, Homunculi, Androiden und Liebende Statuen (Munich: Hanser, 1971). See Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), part 2: Kontingenz und Sichtbarkeit, pp. 473-895.
In his youthful satire of 1798 - 'Einfaltige, aber gutgemeinte Biographie einer neuen angenehmen Frau von bloBem Holz, die ich liingst erfunden und geheiratet' - Jean Paul derived the possibility of legal bigamy from this circumstance: 'any man can marry two women at once, if one of them is made purely of wood'. Quoted in Volker, Kunstliche Menschen, p. 140.
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution ofDynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
This is one reason why psychoanalysis could only seem plausible in Western cultures with a historically grown technical awareness, while its reception was virtually impossible in Japan, China or Africa - that is, in cultures without significant ego--id polarizations or indigenous traditions of higher mechanical engineering.
NOTES TO
80 See Nikolai Fedorov, 'Das sein Sinn und seine , in
Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20" Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in collaboration with Anne von der Heiden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 127-232.
81 In her otherwise admirable book The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt failed to grasp the modernity-constituting relationship between flight from the world and flight into the world, and her misinterpretation of the new mode of futurized worldliness led her to the completely absurd conclusion that modern humans suffered from an unprecedented degree of 'worldlessness' .
82 Comenius, Der Weg des Lichtes, p. 125.
83 'Everything flows of its own accord - compulsion is absent from things. '
This shows the after-effects of Quintilian's conclusion that all learning is
based on the will, but this will cannot be forced.
84 Comenius, Der Weg des Lichtes, p. 126.
85 See Wilhelm Schmift-Biggeman, 'Enzyklopadie und Philosophia Perennis',
93 See Gotthard Gunther, Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen: Eine Metaphysik der Kybemetik (Baden-Baden: Agis, 1963). For Gunther, it is still uncertain whether the draining of subjectivity into the second machine should be read as a mere emptying of the inner world or as a deepening of subjectivity via its mirroring in spirit-mimetic machines of increasing complexity. See also Gunther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, ed. and intr. Kurt Klagenfurt (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 2000).
94 One aspect of this has been mentioned by Bourdieu in his observations on habitus transfer.
478
TO PP. 3
95 See and L'Etat lienee (Paris: Grasset,
96 See pp. 295f above.
97 See Grete Wehmeyer, Carl C:z;erny und die Ein:z;eihaft am Klavier oder Die
Kunst der Fingerfertigkeit und die industrielle Arbeitsideologie (Kassel and
Zurich: Barenreiter & Atlantis, 1983), especially pp. 151-80.
98 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History ofthe Image Before the Era o f Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: Chicago University
Press, 1997).
99 Concerning the decline in the awareness of imitation in the visual art of the
twentieth century, see pp. 433£ below.
100 An example of this is a sequence of forty-three movements for musket train-
ing, with the corresponding commands, dating from the early seventeenth century; quoted in Werner Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike: Studien :z;ur Geschichte des Kriegswesens der Niederlande, Deutschlands, Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens, Spaniens und der Schwei:z; vom Jahre 1589 bis :z;um Dreissigjahrigen Kriege (1941) (Osnabruck: Biblio, 1987), pp. 34f.
101 For a presentation of the opposing argument, see Friedrich W. Heubach,
Das bedingte Leben: Theorie der psycho-logischen Gegenstandlichkeit der Dinge. Ein Beitrag :z;ur Psychologie des Alltags (Munich: Fink, 1987), as well as Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
102 See Chiara Frugoni, Books, Banks, Buttons and Other Inventions, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
103 Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994).
104 TN: a reference to a popular German saying whose meaning is equivalent to 'Rome wasn't built in a day. '
105 Blumenberg, Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988) (expanded edition).
106 See Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
107 Concerning evolutionary theory as a general way to make counter-intuitive assumptions about the 'current' of events plausible, see the passage about Nietzsche's combination of artistry and nature theory on pp. 121£ above.
108 This difference strikes me as a suitable replacement for Foucault's power- critical reflections on the autonomizing reversal of being dominated into self-domination. I am convinced that this translation is closer to the author's intentions than the formulation which his own terminological framework permitted. As a whole, the field of exercises and reflexive praxes must be moved away from the naive over-politicizations underlying the common ways of discussing 'biopolitics'. At the same time, this also refutes the feminist criticisms of Foucault's late works, which seize on his mislead- ing choice of terms without noting the emancipatory perspective of his work for both sexes. For example: Lin Foxhall, 'Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality', and Amy Richlin, 'Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women? ', both in David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter (eds. ),
479
Princeton
109 See Jean-Paul Sartre,
111
112
113
114
115
116 117
118
119 120
121
122 123
Ontology (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 377f.
TN: the word used here, Gelassenheit, is related to the verb lassen, meaning 'to let', in the sense both of allowing and of arranging for something to be done (it also combines with numerous prefixes to produce other verbs related in different ways to leaving and letting). This dialectic is reflected in the entire section on 'operating', where the German for 'having oneself operated on' is sich operieren lassen.
Bruno Latour acted on this by abandoning the object of classical sociology, 'society' as an association of subjects, and replacing it with networks of agents. See Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Illustrierte Geschichte der Anasthesie, ed. Ludwig Brandt (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsanstalt, 1997), p. 63.
See Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1: Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), ch. 3: 'Humans in the Magic Circle: On the History of the Fascination with Closeness', pp. 207-62.
The only context in which even this step is exceeded is that of science fiction literature - for example, when human actors have themselves transformed from matter into energy in order to be projected to other locations in the universe via beaming.
Karl Marx, Critique o(Hegel's 'Philosophy ofRighf, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 137. One could then constructively adopt Friedrich August von Hayek's anti- socialist arguments from The Road to Serfdom (1944), and use them for a positive structural diagnosis of the modern welfare and therapy state. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945).
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 207.
Concerning the exemplary fate of Stalin's chief torturer Yagoda in 1938, see Bazon Brock, Lustmarsch durch Theoriegelande: Musealisiert Euch! (Cologne: DuMont, 2008), pp. 141-3.
The subject has been examined from many different angles by Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Vat, Andrei Sinyavsky, Boris Groys and most recently Michail Ryklin, to name only a few outstanding analysts. I added a footnote of my own to this literature with my essay God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), in which I interpret commu- nism as a fourth monotheism, or more precisely as the practical realization of Rousseau's 'religion of man'.
Quoted in Saral Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? (London: Zed, 1999), p. 58.
An echo of the new stage of anthropotechnics could still be discerned in the preference of the DDR elites for cybernetics and its further development in all areas.
NOTES PI', 3
and Classical
(or an Ethics, trans, David Pellauer (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 4. On the same page, he writes: 'Good habits: they are never good, because they are habits. ' 110 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
480
124
See Peter
Geschichte del'
Suhrkamp, 1988).
The third biopolitical emergency, that of National Socialism, combined the populationism of the Modern Age with exterminationism on the contempo- raneous Soviet model to form an operative complex - with weak results in the former category and devastating consequences in the latter. By com- parison, the 'constructive' attempts to cross humans with apes that had already been carried out in Stalin's time (after preludes in the colonial era) were merely episodes, barely different from the attempts to produce bio- logically correct offspring in certain breeding centres run by the S5. The historical evidence indicates that both the USSR and the Nazi state pursued the most large-scale policies of elimination, liquidation of 'unusable ele- ments' and eradication of 'life unworthy of life', but never eugenics in the true sense of the word. The factually indefensible equation of eugenics and extermination policy (conveyed in Germany via the intermediate step of 'racial hygiene') still defines current polemics against the humanistic genetic-therapeutic research conducted today, which stands accused of being a 'liberal eugenics'.
Andrei 5inyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1990).
Two lines from the poem 'TBC' (1929) by the Soviet poet Eduard Bagritsky, dedicated to the memory of Dzerzhinsky. Quoted in Peter Barenboim and Boris Meshcheryakov, Flanders in Moscow and Odessa: Poet Eduard
Bagritskii as the Till Ulenspiegel o f Russian Literature, at http://baruchim. narod. ru/Bagritsky.
html (accessed 29 November 2011). Anyone seeking evidence for the explicit abolition of the commandment against killing in the twentieth century will find the first pieces among the intellectual ana- lysts of the Russian Revolution.
Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, p. 126.
A selection of writings by these authors was edited and published - almost a century after the event - as part of the project 'The Post-Communist Condition', directed by Boris Groys, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and under the patronage of Peter Weibel at the Karlsruhe Centre of Art and Media Technology, under the title Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russ/and zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (see n. 80 above).
Die Neue Menschheit, p. 393.
Ibid. , p. 395.
Ibid. , p. 403.
Concerning Bogdanov's politics of blood, see Margarete Vohringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der fruhen Sowjetunion (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2007), pp. 173-229; also, by the same author, '1m Proletformat - Medien fUr Transformationen und Transfusionen im Russland der 20er Jahre', in Transfusionen: Blutbilder und Biopolitik in der Neuzeit, ed. Anja Lauper (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2005), pp. 199-210.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia included the term 'anthropotechnics' in its third volume as early as 1926; it defines it as an 'applied branch of biology whose aim is to improve the physical and mental characteristics of humans
125
126 127
128 129
130
131 132 133
134
TO
481
135
136 137
138
139 140
141
former Pavel Blonski had
NOTES TO Pl'.
the same methods in zootechnics to in Die Neue
and breed new races As as the public in widely dis- seminated text 'Pedagogy': 'Education [. . . Jshould take its place along with veterinary medicine and phytoculture [plant breeding]. ' Quoted in Alexander Etkind, Eros o f the Impossible, trans. Noah and Maria Rubens
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), p. 265.
Die Neue Menschheit, p. 466. In this argument, Muraviev passes over what he knows about the bodily dimension of Indian practice systems - evidently under the influence of the dominant technicism, which ignores the differ- ence between self-operation and having-oneself-operated-on, relying exclu- sively on external treatments. The one-sidedness of this option is denied through simultaneous insistence on 'psychophysical' methods in the 'rebuilding of the human being'.
Ibid. , p. 468.
Leon Trotsky made the analogous Nietzsche-inspired claim that through communist 'psychophysical self-education', 'the average human type' would 'rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise. ' 'The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training. ' Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, pp. 207 and 206.
Concerning the role of European emigres in the restructuring of the American illusion industry, see Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988).
Aron Zalkind, 'Die Psychologie des Menschen der Zukunft' (1928), in Die Neue Menschheit, p. 612.
In the aforementioned text, Zalkind provides ambivalent examples of this art: on the one hand, he foresees 'colossal progress in transportation and communications technology, an unusual dynamization of life' (p. 645); on the other hand, he ventures the prediction that the socialist human being will be so infused with joie de vivre that the last otherworldly stirrings of 'mysticism' will die out, just as the tails of their primate ancestors disap- peared (p. 647). The upward trend in human development, he argues, no longer stems from competition between humans; it comes firstly from the declaration of outer space as the new 'cruel class enemy', and secondly from the systematic stimulation, through socialist education, of the indispensable discontent of all subsequent generations with the living standard of the previous ones. The motor of history must continue to run at full steam, but egotisms will be replaced by sociophilic forces (pp. 650£).
See Jean Ziegler's essay 'Gier gegen Vernunft', in Tugenden tmd Laster: Gradmesser der Menschlichkeit, ed. ZDF-Nachtstudio (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 252£: 'Where is there hope? Completely new social movements and a powerful civil society [. . . J are coming into being. Opposition fronts are setting out everywhere on the planet. They all have different fighting methods, but their motivation is the same: the moral imperative. [. . . JOver 100,000 people from five continents - representing over 8,000 farmers' syndicates, industrial unions, women's movements and non-government organizations fighting for human rights, the environment,
482
142
143
144
145
146
147
148 149 150 151 152
153 154
155
last for the World Social Forum in no hierarchy, no central committee and no sophisticated imperative programme. As a brotherhood of the night, a living figure of solidarity. We know exactly what we do not
want. '
The existence of the 'mixed economic system' from the New Deal years to the beginning of the Thatcher era is frequently overlooked in ideologically distorted criticism of 'capitalism'. Ironically enough, the 1968 movement, which brought about a shift from Stalinism to Maoism or alternative leftist positions, appeared in the heyday of actually existing Rhine semi-socialism. See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 19-91.
Studying the party programmes of the three Trotskyist candidates in the 2007 French presidential election - Olivier Besancenot, Arlette Arguiller and Gerard Schivardi, who received a total of 2. 2 million votes - yields a paradoxical result: all of them argue for the suspension of the permanent revolution of capital and for the return to the age of social security. Nietzsche, Twilight ofthe Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 190.
Epistolae morales ad Lucilium, 51.
See Emil Szittya's account of a peculiar holy man in Ascona around 1910 who, to visible success, declared that humans must work on rotting alive. In Das Kuriositaten-Kabinett (Constance: Kraus, 1923).
Consequently, Alasdair MacIntyre's 'narrative concept of selfhood' (After Virtue, p. 217), which is meant to establish the possibility of personal iden- tity, cannot fulfil its promise, because only a small part of this identity is based on conscious and narratable changes, while the largest part is based on automatic and non-narratable refusals to change, as well as unconscious and mimetic adaptations.
Matthew 10:37.
Luke 14:33.
Matthew 10:34.
See Julian the Apostate, Oratio 7, 225 D-226 A.
In the passage mentioned, at least. In his earlier lectures on pedagogy, Kant looks deeper by dealing at certain points with pre-logical conditions for being able to take on reason. In Rink's transcript, we read in Article 7: 'Whoever is not cultivated is crude; whoever is not disciplined is savage. Neglect of discipline is a far greater evil than neglect of culture, for one can still compensate for the latter; but savageness cannot be done away with, and an omission in discipline can never be balanced out. ' See Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 12, p. 700 (quoted in Christopher Korn, Bildung und Disziplin, pp. 100f). Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, trans. Mary Campbell Smith (New York: Cosimo, 2010), p. 26.
It encompasses the five spiritual vices - superbia (pride), acedia (sloth) or tristitia (depression), avaritia (greed), invidia (envy) and ira (anger) - as well as the two carnal vices, luxuria (lust) and gula (gluttony).
TN: a reference to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, whose German
NOTES TO Pl'. 402~I2
483
156 157 158
159
160 161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168 169 170 171
172 173
174
175
176 177
title, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, actually translates as 'Unease in Culture'.
Peter Weibel in collaboration with Loys Egg, Lebenssehnsucht und Sucht (Berlin: Merve, 2002), p. 32.
TN: in German, the two words are connected: 'addiction' is Sucht, while 'search' is Suche.
'There will be no favour for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil-doer and his violent dealing. Strength will be right and reverence will cease to be; and the wicked will hurt the worthy man, speaking false words against him, and will swear an oath upon them: Hesiod, Works and Days 1. 190-4.
For a rebuttal of the ideology of the deficient being, see Peter Sloterdijk, Sphiiren III. Schiiume: Plurale Sphiirologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), ch. 3: 'Auftrieb und Verwohnung. Zur Kritik der reinen Laune', pp. 671- 859.
See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, trans. Quintin Hoare (London and New York: Verso, 2006).
Outstanding reflections on this can be found in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Lob des Sports (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007); the lost poetry of early cycling is evoked in Philippe Bordas, Forcenes (Paris: Fayard, 2007).
Stefan Miiller, Das Yolk der Athleten: Untersuchungen zur Ide%gie und Kritik des Sports in der griechisch-romischen Antike (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1995), p. 5.
See Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, pp. 113£. Romans 6:17-18.
See Sloterdijk, Rage and Time.
See pp. 395f above.
See Frank J. Tipler, The Physics o f Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection ofthe Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
See pp. 200-5 above.
Giinther, Die amerikanische Apokalypse, pp. 277f.
See p. 379 above.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 224.
See Sloterdijk, 1m Weltinnenraum des Kapitais, pp. 265f.
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth- Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
This applies to all authors of the various conservative revolutions in the twentieth century. For a recent example of this tendency, see the bellicist tract of the American neoconservative Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Vintage, 2002). ItisinthislanguagethatRortyformulatedthemostintensemanifestoofthe late twentieth century for a renaissance of the idea of world improvement, drawing on the American civil religion of Whitman and Dewey: see the chapter 'A Cultural Left' in Rorty, Achieving Our Country, pp. 73-107. This document no longer had any chance of effect after the rupture in the discursive field, both in the USA and in the rest of the world, in the wake of 11 September 2001; today it reads like a liberal utopia from a bygone age. See pp. 449f below.
The contrast between single-age and multi-age phenomena forms the basis
NOTES TO PP. 4I3-25
484
of
and
PI'.
studies.
178 In this context, the critical distance assumed by Peter Weibel in his texts
with regard to Viennese Actionism and the drug culture of the 1960s and 19705 is of fundamental significance: it cancels the axiomatics of selfish art. The representatives of art history have thus far reacted to the triumphs of maladaptive art mostly with jargon-heavy cluelessness. At the same time, the enormous ceuvre of Bazon Brock is still waiting to be explored: he seems to be the only contemporary artist and art theorist who has concisely for- mulated the necessity of re-civilizing art in an art-immanent fashion.
179 See Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, catalogue for the large-scale installation Palast der Projekte in the Zollverein cokery in Essen, 2001, where a humor- ous summary of utopian modernity was presented in sixty-five separate projects under three headings: 'How can one improve oneself? ', 'How does one improve the world? ' and 'How does one simulate the creation of projects? '
180 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998).
181 Count Harry Kessler notes in his journal (Tagebucher 1918-1937, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli [Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1982], p. 689) the observa- tions of the Corriere della Sera correspondent Caffi: 'Apparently no Bolshevik executioner has lasted more than two years . . . They have been in all the asylums; the sanatoriums on the Crimean coast are full of execution- ers who have gone mad. '
182 See the study by Luuk van Middelaar, Politicide: De moord op de politiek in de Franse filosofie (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1999), in which he accuses Sartre and the majority of French philosophers of contributing to the destruction of the political future.
183 See pp. 348f above.
184 See Stefabo Bacin, Fichte in Schulpforta: Kontext und Dokumente (Stuttgart:
Frommann-Holzboog, 2007).
185 Concerning the socio-idealistic surpluses of the German university system in
the nineteenth century, see Matthias Steinbach, Okonomisten, Philanthropen, Humanitare: Professorensozialismus in der akademischen Provinz (Berlin: Metropol, 2008).
186 Niklas Luhmann, 'Am Anfang war kein Unrecht', in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993).
187 The connections between the theological, psychoanalytical and systemic theories of perversion have not been clarified. That psychoanalytical contri- butions to this object are usually scarcely more than translations of the Christian critique of egotism into different terminology is clear from studies such as those by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Anatomie der menschlichen Perversion (Stuttgart: Psychosozial Verlag, 2002).
188 Because they can ultimately only use 'embedded' experts, these disciplines do not produce any genuine sciences, instead making the transition to the level of a non-seH-serving formation of theories more difficult.
189 Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (London: Penguin, 2006).
190 TN: though it is not particularly significant, there is a certain play on words here, as 'to produce' is herstellen and 'to exhibit' is ausstellen.
485
192
193 194
195 196
197
198
199 200
See Boris An Ende des musealen Hanser
For a definition this term, see Heiner Mlihlmann, The Nature of Culture: A Blueprint for a Theory of Culture Genetics, trans. R. Payne (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1996).
Concerning the phenomenon of secession, see ch. 2, 'Culture Is a Monastic Rule'. JohannWolfgangvonGoethe,'Daemon',inSelectedWorks,trans. Nicholas Boyle (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 1123. See Hermann Schmitz, Goethes Altersdenken im problemgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang (Bonn: Bouvier, 2008 [reprint]), pp. 217£ and 264f.
Ibid.
See Alfred Schafer, 'Die Seele: Gefangnis des Korpers', in Alfred Pongratz et al. (eds. ), Nach Foucault: Diskurs- und machtanalytische Perspektiven der Padagogik (Wiesbaden: Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften, 2004), pp. 97-113. This was academicized as a 'step back' in Husserl's doctrine of epoche, or 'bracketing' of the existential judgement. Concerning the 'shore' and 'shore subjectivity', see pp. 227£ above.
See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts: Eine leibhaftige Grammatik in vier Tei/en, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1964), pp. 15-197: 'Wenn eine Ewigkeit verstummt. Erinnerungen eines Entewigten'. TN: the German word for 'to immortalize', verewigen, literally means 'to eternalize'.
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 236f.
TN: the words of Carl Schmitt.
NOTES TO PI'. 434-'50
486
Abbot, Gilbert 379 acrobatism 61-72,122
and asceticism 61-72,196-7 and the Axial Age effect 192-3 and Christianity 64-5,202-7 and Foucault 156
and habitus theory 185
and height psychology 124, 125 and Jacob's Ladder 126
and Nietzsche 61-3,64,65,123 and the rope metaphor 63-4,65,
115-17,207 addiction 305, 378-9
and search 413
Adler, Alfred 45, 128
Adorno, Theodore and Horkheimer,
Max
Dialectic ofEnlightenment 152
advanced civilization
paradoxes and passions of 273-5 and trainers 275-6
advertising 367-8
Ages of Man myth 412, 414 airport security 102-3
Ajivika movement 231-2 alcohol addiction 305,378 Alexander the Great 52 Alexander III, Tsar of Russia 43 alienation 414-15
ascetic suspension of 415-21 allochrony
in Nietzsche 32 altruism 449-50
Amadis of Gaul 310
Amery, Carl 55
Amish 2
anachoretic psychoanalysis 256-9 anaesthesia 379-81,382
communist 400
Analytic Philosophy 134, 140 anarchy
and crippledom 49-50 'Angel of History' 299 angels 327
and Jacob's Ladder 126, 127
and perfection 260 anthromorphism 317 anthropological proportionality
175-6
anthropology 11-12,13,14
cripple anthropology 40, 57-8
Homo anthropologicus 328-30
and human automata 356-9 anthroposophy 87 anthropotechnics 3-4,10,109-10,
327,329,331-68,452
and the axial age of practice 197-8 and biopolitics 339, 340-4
and Cioran 77, 78
and ethical secessionism 219,226 and the European training camp
334-8
and the executioner 340
Indian 262-70
and life-augmenting commodities
366-8
INDEX
487
and Human
and Nietzsche 34, 35,
and pedagogy as applied mechanics
198-9
and the Russian Revolution 391,
397-400
and Scientology 103, 104 self-shaping through practice
320-3
and social policy 345-6
antiquity
anaesthetic techniques 380
and anthropotechnics 335
and conversions 308
and military discipline 364-5
and modernity 211-14
myths of the human condition 412,
413-14
and Nietzsche 31-9 rebirth of 36-7 schooling in 430
Antonius 256, 386
apes and humanization 65-7 Apollo
and Rilke's 'Torso' poem 22,24-5, 443
apostles 275-7,277 Arendt, Hannah 212
The Human Condition 292
aristocratic cultures 13, 14, 130 Aristotle 101,162,212,445
hexis concept in 183-4 Metaphysics 408
and the Sophists 290
and stabilized improbability 273
Aron, Raymond 178 art
and aesthetic modernity 213 and anthropotechnics 331,333 authority of 443-4
and the craft of the executioner
338-40
and modernity 360-4,425-6,
433-4
and New Human Beings 399
art history 360-4 ascetic cultures 13,14 asceticisms 110
and alienation 415-21
and 398 and art history 360-4
and Cioran 75-82
and crippledom 47-8
and death 201
de-spiritualization of 38,55, 77,
212,335,421-3,437-9
and discipline society 132
and ethical secessionism 220-1
and Foucault 152-3, 154, 156 hunger artists 69-72
language games as 140-2 micro-asceticism 147
monastic 129
moral asceticism 420-1
in Nietzsche 33-8,61-3,64, 196-7 and poverty 416-17
and the Reformation 369-70 religious 61, 68
and repetition 404
and revolutions 387
and sexuality 418-19
see also ethical secessionism;
perfection
ascetological twilight 146-7 Ashoka 386
Asimov, Isaac 99 Athanasius
Life of Anthony 256-7
atheism 5
athletic renaissance 26-8, 29, 131,
186,212
and asceticisms 38-9
and Foucault 155
and the trainer figure 57 see also Olympic movement
athletics
as ascetics 417-18,422
athletes as Ubermenschen 403 athletic cultures 13, 14
Christian athletism 128-9
and Foucault 156, 157
god-athletes in ancient Greece 26-7 philosophy as 194-6
and the trainer 291
Augustine 87,95, 169-70 Confessions 305-8,318
Aurelius Augustinus
and acrobatism 61-72,196-7
On True Religion 169-70
488
Aurobindo, Sri 229 Austria
and Wittgenstein 142-4 automata
anthropology and human automata 356-9
Axial Age 192-4,221
and anthropotechnics 197-8
Babel, Isaac 441
bagatelles, epoch of death and 396-7 Ball, Hugo 47,61, 75
Byzantinisches Christentum 129
Balzac, Honore de 378 baptism 308 barbarianism 12 Barth, Karl 86-7
base camps 176-8, 185-6, 190 schools as 187-8
Bayreuth Festival 51,88,91-2 Beaufret, Jean 161 being-unto-completion 252-3 Belting, Hans
Likeness and Presence 362
Benedict of Nursia 243 Ladder of Humility 253-6
Benedict XVI, Pope 283 Benedictine Rule 211,233, 243,
254-6,257,286
Benjamin, Walter 299
Benn, Gottfried 68
Berger, Klaus 203-4
Bergson, Henri 101 Berlichingen, Gotz von 52, 367 Besant, Annie 381
Bible
thedeathofJesus 202-3
the Fall of Man story 412, 413-14 Jacob's dream story 126
and spiritual secessionism 218
Biesalski, Konrad 49
Binswanger, Ludwig 154, 160, 175,
176
and the base camp problem 178 Dream and Existence 149,150 'Extravagance' 160
biological immune systems 7-10,449 biopolitics 339,340-4
Soviet 379,384,388-401,426 birth control 341-3
Bismarck, Otto von 392
Black Death (1348) 319, 323 Blavatsky, Helena 381
Blumenberg, Hans 58, 109, 357, 371 bodies
the Greek god-athlete 26-7 and Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of
Apollo' 21-2 Bodin, Jean 342
Bogdanov, Alexander 395,400 'Tectology of the Struggle Against
Old Age' 397 Bolk, Louis 57-8
Bora, Katharina von 342 Bourdieu, Pierre 109-10,178-83
Distinction 182
and habitus 179-83, 185-6, 188
and Marxism 178-9 Brahmans 218,240,263,264-5
and Buddhism 282, 283
and hunger 416
master-pupil relationships 278-80
Breart, Michel 89
Brecht, Berthold 401
Brock, Bazon 377
Brod, Max 63
Buddha 101,217-18,222,329,405,
436
and perfection 243,266-7,268,
269
and recessive subjectification 228,
230,231
as a teacher 281-2
Buddhism 77,84,218,231 and endo-rhetoric 235, 236 and illumination 284, 285 masters 277,281-4
and moral asceticism 420 Bukharin, Nikolai 389 Burckhardt, Jacob 325-6, 327
Die Kultur der Renaissance in ltalien 30
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 51,66
calmness 376-7 medical 377-80
camps, culture of 426-8 Camus, Albert 428 capitalism
and social policy 345
INDEX
489
Catholic Church 87, ]01,236 Catholic oriemalism 256-60 conversions 309-11 Counter-Reformation 310
and political theologies 96
see also monasticism
Cellini, Benvenuto 295 Chateaubriand, Fran~ois-Rene de 261 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai
What Is to Be Done? 389
children
and verticality 113-14
China 335,427 Chomsky, Noam 180 Christianity
and acrobatism 64-5
and anthropotechnics 331,332,
333,336-7
apostles 275-7,277
and art history 362-3
and biopolitics 341-3 Christian acrobatism 202-7 Christian ascetics 61 Christian athletism 128-9 Christian Platonism 201
and Cioranian asceticism 79 and conversion 302-11
and crippledom 47-8,51-2 and disciplines 158
and ethical secessionism 217,
222-3
and Foucault 158
foundation of 95
and illumination 284
martyrs 204-7,285 Methodism 226,257,294
in the Middle Ages 211
and moral asceticism 419,420 and Nietzsche 30-1,32-3
on passions and habit 169-70 and perfection 243-4,245-8,
254-60
and political theologies 96 and the production of the New
Human Being 318
and recessive subjectivity 236, 240 as a religion 85-7
and revolutions 387
and the Seven Deadly Sins 169 and sexuality 27
2 8
490
in Wlttg,enstem
see also
Cicero 109, 364
Cioran, Emile M. 73-82
All Gall is Divided 81, 84 and aphorisms 80-1
and Buddhism 77
Cafard 76
and Nietzsche 73-4, 77
and religion 84-5
A Short History o f Decay 76, 79 and suicide 80, 82
and Wittgenstein 143
class
and Bourdieu's habitus concept
181,182,185-6
class society and discipline society
132 divisions 191
cloning 398-9
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 68, 104,
445
Columbus, Christopher 447 Comenius, John Amos 33,315,316,
318,350-1
and automata 356-7 Way of Light 351-6
commodities, life-augmenting 366-8 communicative action theory 178 communism 1,3,214-15
and co-immunity 451-2
production of humans 388-91 computers 99,359
Comte, Auguste 5,87 consciousness
and wakefulness 172 consumer societies 368 continental philosophy 45 conversions 216,298-311
and the Augustinian paradigm 305-8
education as conversion 300-2 Ignatius of Loyola 309,310-11 Paul on the road to Damascus 206,
302-5,308
and repetition 409
and revolutions 392
St Francis of Assisi 309, 310-11 and the science of reversal 298-300
Cosmic Maximalism 397 Pierre de
and Foucault 155
and the Olympic movement 83-4,
87,88-94,95 craftsmanship 292-5,360 crippledom 40-60
and acrobatism 61
cripple existentialism 43-7
and the trainer figure 55-7 Unthan the armless violinist 40-7,
51,61,66
and Wiirtz's Break the Crutches
48-57,66 critical theory
and Bourdieu's concept of habitus 178-83,185-6
and Marxism 178-80
and world improvement 354 Cromwell, Oliver 176 Crowley, Aleister 105
cultural anthropology 14 cultural distinctions 13-14 cultural immunity 9, 10 cultural studies 4
culture
cura and cultura 271-2 hierarchies of 131
and nature 10-11,119
and Wittgenstein
culture as monastic rule 130-1,
132-6,138, 143, 146 secessionist understanding of 130,
136-8,144 cybernetics 99
Cynics 195,409,419
Dadaism 47
Damiens, Robert Fran~ois 339 Darwin, Charles 29,116,117, 119,
128
Daume, Willi 93
Dawkins, Richard 1
Climbing Mount Improbable
117-18,119
Growing Up in the Universe 117
death 200-7
and the egalitarian society 396-7 and the ethical distinction 420-1 of Jesus 201-2,202--4,254,420
and Human of Socrates
420
and the Verticalists 384 see also suicide
Debord, Guy 327 debt servicing 368 declared exercises
in Wittgenstein 144-5 democracy
and spiritual trainers 277
and world improvement 436 demographic policy
and biopolitics 343--4
and the birth of social policy 345-6 depth psychology 124
Derrida, Jacques 290-1
devils, Kantian 411
Dianetics 94,96-103 didactic ascension 200 Diderot, Denis 257,260,355 Dionysius the Areopagite 47 Dionysus 24-5
discipline 335, 338-9
military discipline 360, 364-6
and social policy 345-6
discipline society 132
discourse analysis in Foucault 152--4,
160-1 dispotifs 8
doctor-patient relationships 377-8 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Notes from Underground 74
dreams 149-50
Durkheim, Emile 5, 178 Dzerhinsky, Edmundovich 394-5
east-west contrasts
in thinking and waking 172-3
ecological categorical imperative 448-9
economic cultures 13,14 economic modernization 385,423
post-war 402 economic theory 430-1 education
Comenius' school projects 351-6 as conversion 300-2
and the emendatio mundi 346-8 the erosion of the school 429-32
iNDEX
491
education (cont.