Peter Sloterdijk

I'll give you a couple, two examples.

One is Sloterdijk's reading that like post-historical struggles are kind of struggles over boredom and kind of anime, ultimately.

kind of dovetails with the Adorno-Horkheimer thesis of culture, industry, and consumer capitalism squashing revolutionary class consciousness.

So therefore, revolts are sort of aesthetic.

It has been taken as inspiration, as accusation, as spiritual injunction, as aesthetic cliché.

But in two thousand and nine, a German philosopher named Peter Sloterdijk did something none of those borrowers had done.

He took the line as a philosophical problem.

He made it the title of a vast and dense and wildly ambitious book, and he asked what it would mean, really mean, not as metaphor, not as poetry, but as a description of what human beings fundamentally are.

Not the story of a statue, though the statue set everything in motion.

The story of an idea, one of the strangest and most quietly radical ideas in contemporary philosophy about what we are, how we are made, and why the question of change is so much older, so much deeper, and so much more intimate than we usually allow ourselves to think.

Peter Sloterdijk was born in nineteen forty-seven in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the rubble and possibility of the post-war years.

His mother was German, his father Dutch, and the household seems to have been one in which ideas were taken seriously but not reverently, where thinking was a practice rather than a performance.

In our own age, that danger is sharpened by algorithmic outreach, billionaire control of public platforms, both social and public, ideological echo chambers, and the daily temptation to become spectators of suffering rather than neighbors to those who suffer.

To a certain extent, Peter Sloterdijk's account of rational cynicism as enlightened false consciousness also helps us understand the public mood in some quarters.

Nothing will change.

We often know what is wrong and yet continue as though knowledge itself weren't enough.

My theory of Nietzscheanism, there's many different great theories of Nietzscheanism.

Let's take one that I work with, which is the Sloterdijk thesis, which is kind of like the lose, let's call it the loser community theory.

which is a pop Nietzscheanism that he associates with Nazism as a kind of vulgar reading of Nietzsche in which the kind of transvaluation of values is absorbed by those whose lives have not turned out well, to use a quote from World of Power, But they presume that they are like either more than they are or they feel chided by the world that has left them behind.

And they are eager to find and eager to establish a system of rank order that they don't see as legitimate before them.

And this is why you get like a fascist community where the fascist community can be a negative community, non-normative, experimental, cut off from establishment, where they reintroduce a type of rank, right? That they want to project outward, right? And now here's the interesting thing that Sloterdijk comes back with.

And this is the vicious circle kind of thesis coming back again, now at the level of politics.

Which is it seems to be that the only antidote to that is to find more sophisticated readers of Nietzsche who might correct the losers.