CULTURAL POLITICS

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 357-380

HENK OOSTERLING (1952) IS

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF
PHILOSOPHY OF DIFFERENCE,
INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY AND
AESTHETICS AT THE ERASMUS
UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM,
HE IS ALSO DIRECTOR OF THE
CENTRE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND
ART. CHAIRMAN OF THE DUTCH
AESTHETICS FEDERATION, AND
SECRETARY OF THE DUTCHFLEMISH ASSOCIATION FOR
INTERCULTURAL PHILOSOPHY.
HE HAS PUBLISHED EXTENSIVELY
ON FRENCH PHILOSOPHY.
HIS BOOKS INCLUDE: DOOH
SCH//W BEWOGEN. NAAR EEN
HYPERKRITIEK VAN DE XENOEOBE
BEDE (KOK AGORA, 1996), BADICALE
MIDDELMATIGHEID (BOOM, 2000),
MiD INTERKULTURAUTAT IM
DENKEN HEINZ KIMMERLES
(VERLAG BAUTZ 2005). SEE:
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INTEREST AND
EXCESS OF MODERN
MAN'S RADICAL
MEDIOCRITY:
RESCALING
SLOTERDIIK'S
GRANDIOSE
AESTHETIC
STRATEGY
HENK OOSTERLING
ABSTRACT In my contribution,
I adopt Sloterdijk's analysis of
globalization as the megalomaneous or
"hyperpolitical" installing oi a total work
of art (Gesamtkunstwerk). I rephrase his
threefold {energetical, informational, and
epistemological) "explicitation" of man's
radical immersion in his own media as
"radical mediocrity" and argue that this
has become our first nature. But then, what
is the political potential of Sloterdijk's

HENK OOSTERLING

merger of aesthetics with politics as based on the Bataillan principle

of excess rather than iacl^ and scarcity? Should we not differentiate
between miserabiiist and affirmative critique? This distinction is
ail but self-evident, because every new mediological explicitation
eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. It depends on
the critical difference between mediocrity and inter-esse, between
plain comfortable life and self-reflective radical mediocrity. In the
final analysis, the "psychological" surplus of generosity and the
substance of creativity consist precisely of this self-reflective inbetween. Therefore, any feasible critical reflection requires a
downscaling of Sloterdijk's hyperpolitical understanding of being-in
in terms of micropoiitical art practices. I will concentrate on one
possible answer to the critical questions that must be asked: wherein
lies the possibility of resistance in Sloterdijk's recent analyses of
capitalism?
KEYWORDS: philosophy, art, media critique, ecology, micropolitics,
globalization

Upon taking the stage at the Tate Gallery in December

2005, Peter Sloterdijk began his lecture on the relation
between art and politics, dealing with surrealism and
terror, with the following statement:

>

I like very much the pronunciation ofthe word "enormous." It

gives me a feeling for what 1 really am, that means, a person
working on monstrosity. No more, no less. Philosophy demands
that all of us produce a new and convincing interpretation
of that strange state of mind we call megalomania. In every
generation megalomania has to be reinterpreted by its carriers.
It's not a choice, megalomania is choosing you and you have
to cope with that as well as you can. The stress has to be put
not on the word "mania" but on the fact that it is a kind of
suffering. The real term should be "megalopathia," to be patient
of big questions. As soon as you can accept this existential
condition you will feel a little bit better, but you are not healed
of course.^
en

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There is no cure, only a taste for the enormity of our problems.

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0. WORKING ON MONSTROSITY

We can imagine Sloterdijk almost physically performing a judgement

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o f t a s t e by literallyexaminingthe palatal, alveolar, and labial qualities

ofthe English word "enormous," caressing the elongated, rounded

sound represented in writing by "or." Wasn't it Gaston Bachelard who
- in his phenomenology of the spherical - made the observation that
"the value of perfection attributed to the sphere is entirely verbal"

RESCALING SLOTERDIJK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

(Bachelard 1994: 235)? In sliifting to the content ievel, Sioterdijk

introduces the focus of his judgement of taste: monstrosity. Both
"enormous" and "monstrosity" are variations on one of ti^e crucial
ideas that iiaunt and inspire his spheroiogical discourse: das
Ungeheuer. Aithough in earlier interviews he preferred the synonym
"das gam GroSe," at the Tate it was once again "monstrosity."
Adopting this concept from iVlartin Heidegger, who borrowed it from
Greek tragedy.^ Sioterdijk no longer reiates the monstrous to mythicai
gods or a Christian God. It is a secuiarized version of Heidegger's
inSein: "to inhabit the monstrous" (dem Ungeheuren einwohnen)
(Si: 643).^ For Sloterdijk, authentic philosophy cannot be but "a
hermeneutics of the monstrous" (NG: 166; ST: 291).'' Conventional
thinking "means oniy the organized form of resistance against any
refiection on the monstrous" (ST: 290).
in order to get a grip on Sloterdijk's "enormous" diagnosis of our
time one has to take at least three giant steps. First, given the fact
that the tensions between the locai and the giobai and accompanying
technology are articuiations of the monstrous, one has to familiarize
oneself with his analysis of contemporary globaiization. This process
consists of three stages. After a metaphysicai giobalization that
begins with the pre-Socratic "giobai" mapping of the universe, a
terrestrial giobaiization starts in 1492 with the "nautical ecstasies"
of European powers which ied to the discovery of the different
continents. The iast sentence of Spharen i - "Where are we when
we are in the monstrous?" (Si: 644) - resonates in the preface
of part il: giobaiization is understood as the geometrization of
the unmeasurable. i.e. as "geometry in the monstrous" (Sii: 47):
"Thinking the sphere means to be reaiized as a iocai function of
the monstrous" (Sii: 25). In writing its genealogy. Sloterdijk impiicitiy
rejects the unique character of current digitai globalization, it is just
another explication (Expiikation) of a miiiennia-iong process.
Rather than labeling this expiication as a progressive development,
Sioterdijk qualifies it - with Giiies Deleuze's notion of "pii." or fold,
in mind (Deleuze 1993) - as "explicitation."^' "Worid history" is a
discursive invention ofthe second phase. In the third phase man is
beyond history (WiK: 247). The monstrous becomes a quaiification
of a posthistorical world, i.e. a totality that allows neither full understanding nor total comprehension, it is the enigmatic name for a
network of immune systems, of cocoons, and capsules: after the
bioiogicai motherwomb and the poiiticai nation state, man has erected
an ecological Greenhouse with a foam-like texture, consisting of
cocoon-iike bubbies, glued together. To enhance Sloterdijk's imagery:
the mother-child cocoon has been blown up to giobai proportions,
expioded. and reconditioned as airy foam.
Megaiomania suits Sioterdijk's state of mind. Mania, however.
contains too much madness. Sioterdijk therefore corrects himseif by
replacing megaloman/a with megalopath/a not as much emphasizing
the aspect of suffering as the aspect of patience and endurance: to

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HENK OOSTERUNG

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be patient of big questions.^ One specific Heideggerian overtone,

prominently present in his eariier works - especially Eurotaoism
(Sioterdijk [ET] [1989]) - but expelied from his iast project, resonates:
monstrosity demands to be endured (Gelassenheit). It is too vast
for man. It is beyond aii discourses: "It is a work of art. but much
more than a work of art: it is grand politics, but much more than
grand poiitics; it is technoiogy, but much more than technology..."
(NG: 367).
The next step demands a tailoring of his concept ofthe enormous
to relational proportions by downscaling these to an individuai level.
In the concluding sentences of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals
(2005) Sloterdijk proposes Aristotle's concept megalopsychia. This
sensibility - "an existentiai condition" - has to become the second
nature of citizens of posthistorical foam city, it sensitizes them
to their current mode of existence: generosity and abundance.
According to Nietzsche, Sloterdijk's other main inspiration,'' every
second nature over time becomes first. Modern generosity - and,
for that matter, modern tolerance - needs an update. Different
concepts are proposed by Sloterdijk to actualize this notion. The
most frequently used is creativity. In the very last sentences of the
Sp^aren-plus project, Sloterdijk wonders why megalopsychia would
not be adequate, "just because [our contemporaries] nowadays say
creativity instead of magnanimity." "Creative peopie ... are those
who prevent the whole from falling back into pernicious routine"
(WiK: 415). I'll come back to these harmful routines. For the time
being 1 restrict myself to registering that Sloterdijk puts his shirt on
an aesthetic category: not autonomy but creativity.
One more step is needed. After having read 2,988 pages, one
starts to wonder what exactly the poiiticai relevance of Sloterdijk's
triiogy-plus is. What does his "introduction to a general science
of revolution" (SV: 64) mean? How are revolution and resistance
articulated within an aesthetic strategy? What kind of politics is
left when the outcome of spheroiogical diagnosis is the principle
of abundance {0berfiuss)7 In the land of plenty, grilled chickens fly
around to be grabbed at will. Mere distribution of scarce resources
is no longer needed.
I wiil start with the exploration of Sloterdijk's politico*aesthetic
strategy in the strict sense: in his writing. After having analyzed its
rhetorical aspects I contextualize his claim of abundance in political
economy, anthropology, media theory, and ontology. Then I return
to aesthetics and politics. I specify in my own terms his mediatheoretical underpinning of anthropology. In order to rephrase his
critique of the indifference and mediocrity of the masses (Sloterdijk
[VM] [2000]) in medioiogical terms. I need to make a distinction
between the reactive and affirmative conditions of being-in-media.
The first condition reproduces lack and is quaiified by me as
"radical mediocrity"; the latter is open, reflective, and iabeied as
"Inter-esse."^ Hyperpoiitical megalopsychia becomes micropolitical

RESCALING SLOTERDIIK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

inter esse. In having rescaied and miniaturized megalopsychia to

these "mediological" proportions, Sioterdijk's politico-aesthetic
strategy is better understood as the micropolitics of public space,
i.e. art as public space.

1. ART AND POLITICS: GETTING BEYOND GRAND

NARRATIVES
Sioterdijk's spherological project is monstrous indeed! More adequate a quaiification cannot be found for his trilogy-plus Spharenproject. The number of pages is enormous, the use of neologisms
excessive, the conceptual avalanche overwhelming, the historically
embedded, methodoiogical iegitimization overpowering. The expiicitiy
pseudo-Hegelian overtones that give Sloterdijk's text coherence and
consistency are triggered by his desire to outdo Oswaid Spengier's
faiied "morphoiogy of worid history" (SI: 78). For him. writing a history
of "the sphere as a form" means constructing a genealogy of the
sphere insofar as it informed and formatted coiiective consciousness
and culture from the beginnings of Western civiiizatlon. Instead of
reproducing a historical approach based on negativity (Hegel) and
resentment (Spengier). Sioterdijk adopts an affirmative approach
(Nietzsche). He turned his back on reactive nihilism and its impiied
cynicism earlier in Critique of Cynicai Reason (1987; first published in
German: 1983). This shift from cynicism to "kynicism" rehabilitated
the hero of antiphiiosophy and cosmopolitism Diogenes of Synope.
the philosopher in drag, who was presented by Nietzsche as the
madman with his lantern wandering around asking the townsmen
in the market whether they know the whereabouts of God. He has
not been seen lately. Do they already know he is dead?
The death of God. first proclaimed by Hegel (1952: 523. 546),
opened a new space in human consciousness: the sublime. Burke
probiematized this affective tension. Kanttranscendentaiized it and
in a postmodern turn it was "rephrased" by Jean-Franpois Lyotard
as the ambiguous rationale of the avant-garde art that methodicaiiy
shocks the bourgeoisie out of Its tastes. Lyotard's sublime still
resonates in Sioterdijk's notion of monstrosity when he merges
aesthetics with poiitics (Oosterling 1999).^ At the end of Spharen
/// our current immune sphere - the Greenhouse or "Crystal Palace"
- is described in terms of an artistic superinstaiiation in which public
space has gained a museum-like quality. This mega installation can
be described as a total workof art, or Gesamtkunstwerk. "if this had
not been occupied by aesthetic ideology" (Slli: 811).
Benjamin's analysis of Nazism as the poiiticai Gesamtkunstwerk
par excellence^" probiematized the relation between art and poiitics
indeed. Therefore Sioterdijk's "delimiting the concept of art in order
to identify the system of society with the system of art" must surpass
"all previous interpretations of the concept of the total work of art..."
(Sill: 813). Is "giobaiization" perhaps an option? Or McLuhan's
"global village"? For Sioterdijk these are not suitable candidates."

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HENK OOSTERLING

This "sphere of all spheres" only exists politico-economicaiiy as "an

inclusive concept of markets" (WIK: 231), the coherence of which
is guaranteed by joint ventures.
Isn't this reason enough for Sloterdijk to draw the same conclusion
as Lyotard did. i.e. that the grand narratives have come to an end?
On the contrary. Sloterdijk makes an unexpected move: he would
rather reproach the grand narratives for "not being big enough" (WIK:
14). Understanding how Sioterdijk overtrumps the modern grand
narratives demands an understanding of his use of aesthetics at
different levels of his writing.

2. RHETORIC: FICTION, METAPHOR. HYPERBOLE. ESSAY

So how does Sioterdijk get beyond the grand narratives of modern
enlightenment, i.e. of state-building, emancipation, and giobaiization?
If these narratives are no longer viable, how can Sloterdijk stiii claim
the truth for his own grand narrative on spheres? Why, for instance,
has he chosen the sphere as an all-encompassing image? is the
form, i.e. the figure ofthe sphere - form and figure are synonyms
(ST: 177) - not chosen arbitrarily and externally as an analytic tooi
in his hermeneutics ofthe monstrous? It is instructive to consult his
philosophical sources of inspiration: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault,
and Deleuze.

a. fiction and metaphors

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Truth, Nietzsche states in Posthumous Writings, is "a mobile army

of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum
of human relations that, poetically and rhetorically intensified,
transferred, and adorned, after steady use occur to a people as
founded, canonical and obligatory: truths are illusions..." (1980:
880, 881). Objectivity is at best the convergence of as many
perspectives as possible. Likewise our collective consciousness is
"filled" or formatted by the spherical. Objectivity's fiction, overtime,
gains a truth value. This canonized fiction cannot be unmasked
without using the very same fiction in the process of unveiling.
Sloterdijk investigates this aporetic quality in his writing.
Heidegger's phenomenoiogicai notion of truth (a/ethe;a) - i.e.
simultaneous disclosure and unconcealment of Being - is beyond
the configuration of the objective and subjective. We are always
already attuned to truth, always already in the mood. For Heidegger,
Dasein is not a subject but a project. To Foucauit. truth was initially
a product of discursive formations, but it was eventually downscaied
to a truth game, a coiiective practice in which knowledge, power, and
subjectivity converge. That truth is an expression of a will to power is
acknowledged by both Foucault and Deleuze. When Nietzsche's view
is linked to Deieuze and Guattari's definition of phiiosophy. Sloterdijk's
shift to creativity becomes self-evident: "Phiiosophy is the art of
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts" and "With its concepts,
philosophy brings forth events" (Deieuze and Guattari 1994: resp. 2.

RESCAUNG SLOTERDIJK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

199; see aiso WIK: 14). Reflecting on the inconceivable monstrous.

in short, demands the creation of new concepts in order to mobilize a
projected truth. This creation of truth is neither a subjective projection
nor pure description of a given reality, it is a revealing of what has
been concealed for a certain period in order to forge different political
alliances and configure yet unseen epistemological coherencies.
Truth is a projective practice.
So Sloterdijk's aesthetic intervention first and foremost takes
place at the ievel of his writing. He strategically applies stylistic
figures and uses rhetorical devices against the aforementioned
philosophical background. Is the sphere, for instance, a metaphor?
Given the Deleuzean inspiration Sloterdijk felt white writing the
third volume of Spharen especially^^ we can compare his use of the
sphere with Deleuze and Guattari's use ofthe notion ofthe machine.
Machine is not a metaphor (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 36).
Given the representational quality of the metaphor, this would still
presuppose the very metaphysics that is under attack. And again
it was Nietzsche, the thinker on the stage, who taught Sloterdijk
that "For the true poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, but a
representative image which really hovers in front of him in the piace
of an idea" (Nietzsche 2000:19). Sioterdijk's conceptual avalanche
covers this "necessary illusion" (ST: 188).
In a staged retrospective conversation at the end of part III - a
conversation on this oxymoron between a historian, a theologian, and
a literary critic, ail waiting for the philosopher to join i n - t h e literary
critic counters the others' critique by stressing "the working ofthe
text": "you neglect the information that is stored in the rhetorical
construction" (Sill: 87). The author, the literary critic goes on, has
used a superiativistand supremacist form of classical phiiosophicai
reason. But this does not really solve the aporetic tension, it only
shows that this is the breeding ground for truth.^^

b. critique of hyperbolic reason: hypocritical thinking

Being a hermeneutic thinker, Sioterdijk's truth-finding means moving
toward an as yet undisclosed truth. What, then, is exactly the specific
rhetorical device that is applied in order to overtrump the grand
narratives? In the introduction to Spharen i it appears to be the
hyperbole. A "hyperbolic phenomenology"^'^ resonates in Sloterdijk's
spheroiogy. Poiiticai overtones can be heard: "by exaggerating the
given divisions of society, [phiiosophy] makes us aware of the
exclusions and offers them up for a retuning once more... Through
philosophical hyperbole the chance arises to revise definite options
and to decide against exclusion" (SI: 13). "Exaggerating" helps us
to revalue the apparently given that is the result of the canonization
of exclusive, dichotomous thinking.
A decisive analysis of the relation between hyperbole and truth
is not given in Spharen. For this, we have to turn to Nicht Gerettet.
published during the finalization of the trilogy. In this phiiosophicai

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physiognomy of Heidegger, Sloterdijk dissects Adorno's and

Heidegger's de(con)struction of metaphysics.^^ The relation between
aesthetics and epistemoiogy is rephrased in terms of hyperbole and
truth. Citing the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, Sloterdijk points out that
a hyperbole becomes a stylistic virtue once the topic has surpassed
a natural measure (naturalem modum excessit. in Quintilian's words).
The topic is the monstrous, an excessive worid. it is better for reason
to speak hyperbolically than to remain modestly in the background
in the search for truth. Quintiiian's words are paraphrased: "the
Justification ofthe hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness
[Angemessenheit an das MaSlose]" {NG: 256).
Sloterdijk wants to break the nihilistic speli of negativity-and. as
we shai! see: lack and scarcity - by constructing a literary machine
as a hyperbolic system that deconstructs the internalized hyperboles
of metaphysics that are taken for granted. When his interiocutor in
Die Sonne und der Tod proposes the word "excess" (Obersteigerung),
Sloterdijk reacts approvingiy: "I like the expression, because it
reduces transcendence to exaggeration" (ST: 31). Metaphysics turns
out to be canonized rhetoric. That is why metaphysics can oniy be
criticized inter-hyperbolically.Thegenitive "of" in "critique of hypert)olic
reason" has to be understood as both objective and subjective: in
the final instance, in criticizing another hyperbole it exposes itself
as such. Surpassing Critical Theory, Sloterdijk undermines his own
critique. In a technical sense he has become hypocritical. We are
all "collaborators." No one has an alibi (NG: 367).

c. essay: exemplary singularity

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The reference to Quintilian for understanding hyperbole as an

adequate rhetorical device for evoking and projecting truth, bears
witness to Sloterdijk's proximity to the French philosophy of
difference.^^ Although he is hardly mentioned in Spharen, it was
Lyotard who, in referring to another Roman first-century rhetorician Longinus - prepared an understanding ofthe sublime for postmodern
discourse. Both Quintilian and Longinus shifted the emphasis from
the audience - where it lay in Aristoteles' Poetics - to the rhetorician;
from reception to production. In criticizing the modern avatar of
this production unit - the genius - Lyotard's attention shifts to
the work of art in its "working of the text." Not oniy does Lyotard
subsequentiy connect the sublime to the Heideggerian event; he - as
Foucault had done before him with reference to Montaigne - comes
to the conclusion that the essay is the most adequate genre for
postmodernity (Lyotard 1986).^'' For him, it is the genre that best
expresses micronarratives. For Sloterdijk, however, the essay is a
hypergenre. It hyperbolicaily establishes a singuiar truth.
The essay is radicaily democratic: it seeks its own rules. In
Kantian terms, it reflects on the exemplary position ofthe singular.
In writing on singularity one is condemned to polyvocity (Sloterdijk
i 9 9 3 b : 62). That is why for Lyotard the essay Is a micropolitical

HESCALING SLOTEHDIJK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

tactic. Given its hyperbolic quaiity and Sloterdijk's characterization of

politics after modernity as hyperpolitics, the essay is a hyperpolitical
genre. Hyperpolitics intervenes in a world that is understood "as
logic of functions, relations, liquefactions,... as a mode of thinking
on groundless complexity" (Sloterdijk 1993a: 76).
Rhetorical exaggeration eventually evokes in its audience the
substantial topic ofthe spherology. As the outcome of a "revaluation
of all values" (WIK: 349), abundance turns out to be the projected
truth of Sloterdijk's spherology. Taking expression to be the indiscernible unity of form and matter, style and content, Sloterdijk
aims at mobilizing the truth by evoking the content of his thesis
- excess and abundance - in his grandiose attempt at a tale bigger
than any Grand Narrative.

3. POLITICAL ECONOMY: EXPENDITURE OR

DISSIPATION?
Now we understand how he is writing, the question remains as to
what the writing is about. In order to convey the idea that reality is
ruled by abundance, Sloterdijk has to reach beyond modern and
postmodern discourse. In spite of the empirical evidence of our
abundant wealth, even within postmodern discourse, abundance
is not so easily accepted as a basic trait of human behavior and
thought. On the contrary, economic and political practices still
thrive on the opposite idea: scarcity. It is scarcity that legitimizes
the economists' contention that the efficient distnbution of scarce
resources to everyone serves the common good. But the discourse
of scarcity and lack has become so excessive that victim culture is
flourishing. "Victimism" is a trend that is enhanced within the current
compensation culture as the vibrant nucleus of a global risk society.
Herein freedom is facilitated by security and insurance. Abundance
is everywhere, but it is ideologically neglected and even denied by a
culture that makes money out of fearful anticipation and translates
complaints into claims. Political culture - both the Left and the Right
- sustains and enhances this attitude. The former still interprets the
world in terms of oppression and exploitation; the latter laments the
loss of values in terms of decadence.

a. affluent society and miserabilism

The scarcity option is declined by Sloterdijk as "miserabilistic." The
laments of "miserophiles." their "bel canto miserabilism" (Sill: 690)
thrives on an anthropology of lack. Its advocates are by no means
negligible: The respected Pierre Bourdieu is downgraded to an agent
of the "miserabilistic Internationale" whose interests are looked
after by "poverty lawyers." Benjamin too is dismissed as "misere
conservative" (Sill: 781). Our main problem in "the affluent society"
is our self-image, our self-definition, and our self-esteem. Revaluating
the surplus requires "a theory of constitutive luxury" (Sill: 676),
questioning the apparent primacy of scarcity. Is it an ontological.

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ideological, or discursive illusion? Is it an integral part of our being,

of our political economy, or just paradigmatic for a certain period?
Even worse, is Sloterdijk's proposal to appreciate abundance over
scarcity Utopian?
A genealogy of scarcity proves him to be right. Although he does
not mention this book, Foucault's The Order of Things can be taken
as a guideline. His archeology of human sciences reveals that the
concept "scarcity" came to the fore in eighteenth^entury discourse
(Foucault 1970: 256). The systematic introduction of scarcity was
shaped between the classical and modern episteme by economists
like Say, Ricardo, and Smith. Deconstructing scarcity and advocating
abundance can therefore be understood hyperpolitlcally as a critique
of economic discourse.
In the course of modernity substantial arguments for abundance
over scarcity have been made by others as well. In France this affirmative approach is part of a deep-seated tradition. In the 1920s the
debate was set in motion by Marcel Mauss. During his anthropological
research on North-American tribes he became acquainted with
the potlatch: a periodic ritual in which the powerful dissipate their
wealth. By outdoing their rivals they not only reestablished their
power, but they also renewed the economic cycle for another year.
Mauss's anthropological research was philosophically adapted by
Georges Bataille, who passed the word to a generation of thinkers
of differences, among whom were Kristeva, Lyotard, and Deleuze, but
more particularly Foucault and Derrida (see Derrida 1978).
Expenditure of wealth, however, is different from dissipation:
"the mediocre dissipation [durchschnittliche Verschwendung] of
today cannot be compared with the generous refutation of lack as
such" (ST: 334). Dissipation still functions within a discourse of
scarcity that favors recycling and asceticism as the main solutions
to our problems. Within this perspective, dissipation has a pejorative
quality. It is still burdened by exactly those guilty and shameful
feelings Schama describes in The Embarrassment of R/ches (1987).
Bataille, however, develops an affirmative view on expenditure
(depense). Once we shift our gaze to the process level, the instant
gratification of overflowing enjoyment appears to be an affirmative
feature of dissipation. Spending time excessively not only annihilates
the surplus of economic transactions - even the most necessary
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goods are destroyed, ecstacizing the participants of the ritual to the

point of selMoss or even annihilation. A Bataillan analysis of soccer
hooliganism is instructive.
All our addictions bear witness to the paradoxical fact that
dissipation is collectively productive. The astonishing, though powerinvested, statement ofthe American president in his State o f t h e
Union address in 2005 - "America is addicted to oil" - is only one
further miserabilistic confession that apparently fits the logic of
both scarcity and autonomy, but in the final instance explains how
expenditure drives the global economy. Surrounded by abundance,

RESCALING SLOTERDIJK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

globally connected, leading comfortable lives, we realize that a

paradigmatic ethico-economic shift is needed in order to share our
wealth. The "we," this will be evident, are the wealthy inhabitants of
the five-storey-high Greenhouse (WIK: 333-48), the Crystal Palace
as a mega installation that has been slowly, but firmly, erected during
the complex triple globalization.
Sioterdijk counters the uncomfortable aspect of our affluent
society, triggered by guilt and resentment, by advocating "sources
of alternative dissipation" (WIK: 362). Experience-based knowledge
being transformed into free-floating information, and facts into data,
Sloterdijk foresees a future where "all that is solid melts into air"
as Marx wrote of modernization. Matter dissolves into immaterial
flows. This is an inescapable conclusion of a genealogy of globalization: after the second globalization, territory is no longer a safe
harbor for human communities. The earth deterritorializes and reterritorializes In the air. Current extraterritorial globalization, driven by
an urge to move forward (Auftneb), forces us to levitate our existence.
Enlightenment as an overall explicitation cuts through the Cartesian
dichotomy of mind and matter. In becoming less heavy, lighter, both
consciousness and body are enlightened. Air conditioning takes
on a very literal meaning. Coal and oil will be replaced by solar
energy.

b. revaluation of all values: a formal-ontological primacy

of excess
Although Bataille is not referred to in Spharen. statements like the
following do suggest that a modified Bataillan perspective is adopted:
"Isn't it more true to say that life fundamentally is an overreaction,
an excess, an orgy. Man is an overreactive animal par excellence.
Making art means overreacting, thinking means overreacting,
marrying means overreacting. Ail decisive human activities are
exaggerations. Walking upright is already a hyperbole..." (ST: 32).
Disproportionate excess {UnverhaltnismaSige) is the bottom line of
human life.
Given the pseudo-Hegelian overtones in Sloterdijk's texts, it is
perhaps instructive to understand the excess in formal-ontological
terms. In Hegel's Science of Logic the extreme or the measureless
(das MaSlose) Is a transitional concept at the very end of the logic
of Being where, after the negation of quality by quantity, both are
sublated in measure. Once measure loses its qualitative guarantee
and becomes sheer quantity, it becomes a knotted, highly complex
network of measure relations. Its dialectical dynamics finally dissolve
into excess as an upbeat to absolute indifference. In the first
movement in the logic of Essence (Wesen) that follows the logic of
Being, this absolute indifference, in trying to understand itself, has
to acknowledge that it is sheer appearance. In following dialectical
negation and sublation, the overcoming of absolute indifference
leads to the realization of the human condition - world spirit in its

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historical articulation - in terms ofthe reflective concepts of identity,

difference, contradiction, and finally ground.
Once dialectics loses its universal authority, excess - as a "false
infinity" of the logic of Being - is affirmed.^^ The hyperbole is a
rhetorical device that is applied to reconfigure the excess coherently.
The hyperbolic text sensitizes its readers not to become indifferent
to the truth. Sloterdijk's hermeneutics of the monstrous, aiming
at a revaluation of all values, does not ignore indifference. He
affirms this as the nihilistic excess of values in a "kynical" way in
order to overcome the postmodern dissolution of truth. Playing on
Bloch's "Principle of Hope" Sloterdijk hyperbolicaily proposes the
principle of abundance as the still-concealed truth of modernity.
Man can acknowledge this condition through his worldliness and
by communicating its monstrosity hyperbolicaily.
In a revaluation of all values, excess becomes abundance, a
condition discursively evoked by exaggeration: "The justification of
the hyperbole is its appropriateness to excessiveness" (NG: 256).
But why does this revaluation of values suddenly pop up? Although
the sublation of excess into indifference is understood in terms
of nihilism, this nihilism does not imply, as is often proposed, the
absence of values. It is rather the result of a radical evaluation of any
sovereignty that was once beyond evaluation: in the final instance,
of God. It is the excess of values that can no longer be coped with
in a consistent and coherent way. This leads to a chaotic metastasis
of values, as is for instance nowadays illustrated by the rules and
regulations that govern public space. Metastasis also sheds light
on the debacle of multicultural society and the logic of the risk
society. The subject has to become indifferent in order to cope with
the excess of meaning and means.

4. RELATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY: LACK AND TOO MUCH

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"We always already inhabit the dimension of excess" (ST: 337).

Following Hegel, excess is, in formal ontological terms, a presupposition for reflecting identity. Sloterdijk redefines this formalontological transfer in his anthropology. In Die Verachtung der
Massen "eroded individualism" has made indifference "the one and
only principle ofthe masses" (VM: 88). "Identity and indifference
have to be understood as synonyms" (VM: 86) once all ontological
differences - gods, saints, sages, and the talented - are negated.
Modern man's contemptuousness (Verachtung) is pacified in the
"differential indifference" that forms "the formal secret of the
masses and of a culture that organizes a total middle" (VM: 87).^^
The latter can even become "totalitarian" (VM: 95).
If hyperbole as a rhetorical device evokes truth, and if expenditure is the hidden "rationale" of economic life, what then are the
implications for an affirmative anthropology? Though Hegel was
the first to proclaim the death of God In his grandiose effort to
secularize Christian negativity, it was Nietzsche who radically drew

RESCALING SLOTERDIIK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

its consequences: Man has to acknowledge being as first and

foremost an affirmative will to life that legitimates itself via a will
to truth as a will to power. Excess is an affirmation of these vital
forces: "The element of human beings is the too much [dasZuviel]"
(SMI: 709).
This is. however, not man's "essence." Surplus is at best man's
fifth element, his "quint-essence." Given this quintessential excess
we need to revalue our present human condition, not by feeling guilty,
but by acknowledging and practicing generosity and creativity. Hence
Sloterdijk's hyperbolic proposal of "a theory of a constitutive luxury."
Most people have no problem acknowledging that modern life has
gradually become more comfortable. Over the last two centuries
an apparently infinite range of possibilities for applying scientific
research to daily circumstances has raised the level of comfort
exponentially. For wealthy cosmopolitans the struggle for life has
been reduced to a minimum. Once we cross the 10 percent poverty
threshold, we enter the five floors of the Greenhouse (WIK: 334,
335), populated by people who no longer sweat. They are stressed
and fearful, but properly insured.
This comfortable situation has consequences for anthropology.
Is man as an animal rationale - mind governing body, in spite of
evident shortcomings - still an option? For Nietzsche man was a
"nicht-festgestellte Tier," an animal not fully realized. Nietzsche's
definition, when incorporated into Scheler's view on human behavior
as "openness to the world," enabled Arnold Gehlen to qualify human
beings as "Mangelwesen" (Sill: 699, literally a "being of lack"): in
spite of all the luxury that surrounds him, man is a being whose
element is a constitutive lack of the necessary means of subsistence.
This, however, triggers institutional compensation: family, school,
gang, army, church, nation, in the final instance - culture. These
normalizing, disciplinary institutions form immune systems, wherein
lack is transformed into a productive force, as happened with
asceticism based on resentment. Ascetics, enjoying excessive
discipline, transform the reactive element of lack affirmatively into
a value in itself.
Gehlen regards the lack of means (Mittellosigkeit) as an essential
trait. In Spharen III. Schaume (Foams) all intellectual and rhetorical
forces are mobilized to free Nietzsche from Gehlen's "miserabilist"
grip. Although every newborn lacks the means to survive and
therefore has to be protected and guided, the abundance of sensorial
stimuli is unlimited. The senses, being a-specific, are overflowing
with stimuli. Sloterdijk reverses Gehlen's thesis by focusing on
relations that are enabled by media and mediations. These even
constitute relations as an openness, a creative force that channels
excessive abundance: "what we call the open is the dimension
of wealth in its existential reflex" (Sill: 760), wealth being "the
ability to participate in an explicitation..." (SHI: 756). Given the
anthropological premiseof plenty, during their lifetime individuals are

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embedded in ever-changing immune systems to prevent them from

collapsing under a constitutive abundance, called addiction.
Immune systems decline over time. They engender their own
aporias and become auto-immune. In an article^" on urban culture
Sloterdijk explores an alternative lifestyle of expenditure. One of his
critical remarks concerns the redefinition of freedom caused by the
primacy of mobility and the abundance of cheap energy. Automobility
is qualified as a Heideggerian "existential." In Eurotaoism total
mobilization is positioned as our "first" nature. In this "kinetic
anthropology" the car is "the technical double ofthe principally active
transcendental subject" (ET: 42). But automobility has produced its
own auto-immune disease: Total mobilization suffocates urban life
and comes to a standstill in a thousand-mile-long traffic-jam. It is
evident that an immune system will dissolve once man does not
acknowledge and foster its auto-immune tendencies. But more
than these aporias, Sloterdijk emphasizes another, more relevant
anthropological implication. In line with Deleuzean thought, immune
systems "reveal" the foundation of man's being as relationality.
In opening up to the world the child is always already beyond
"itself." It is embedded in a bi-unity of mother-child, an extra-uterine
symbiosis that overrules lack. In orderto accentuate relationality over
lack at the very end of Spharen /. Blasen (Bubbles), Lacan's theory
of desire is countered by Kristeva's primacy of the mother-daughter
relation (SI: 542). This symbiosis is an "ecstatic immanence" (SI:
641).^^ The shift from a male-dominated, monomaniacal perspective
to a female-oriented, open, one was already made in Eurotaoismus.
There, Heidegger's implicit negation of life - "being-toward-death"
- is overruled by Hannah Arendt's "natality": A coming-into-world{zurWelt-kommen) (ET: 205) that includes both bi-unity and creativity.

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Within Sloterdijk's general science of revolution, natality is the

second radical. The first revolutionary radical was civil society as
part of modern nation-state building within the second, territorial
globalization. The third radical - Sloterdijk writes this in 1994 - is
"a conversion of souls" prepared by philosophy (SV: 6 1 , 62). This
at least echoes the idea that in order to change the world, collective
consciousness - Hegel's World Spirit - has to convert itself. In
Spharen the perspective has slightly changed. Modifying Latour's
question as to whether we have ever really been modern, Sloterdijk
wonders whether we have ever been revolutionary (SMI: 87). The
revolutionary impact is no longer presented as a reversal, but as a
radical unfolding, a making explicit, emphasizing the "making." The
result of this explicitation is a comfortable life for the inhabitants
of the Greenhouse, which is fully dependent upon technological,
juridical, and insurance-based mediations.

5. ENLIGHTENMENT AS MEDIOLOGICAL EXPLICITATION

"I see myself as a human being who functions amid technical media
as a medium in the second degree, if this is a plausible proposition"

RESCAUNG SLOTERDIIK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

(ST: 15). If we want to understand the radical implications of a

theory of constitutive luxury, we cannot neglect Sloterdijk's media
theory, based on McLuhan's thesis that media are extensions of our
senses, organs, and limbs. Media theory underpins his anthropology.
This "mediology" miniaturizes and literally ex-plains, i.e. extends
megalopsychia - generosity and creativity - in man's use of his
media. Cartesian res extensa is drawn beyond its opposition to res
cogitans. Mediologically, both are reinvested in a relational condition.
Sloterdijk's grandiose estimations of the revolutionary effects of
mediatization need a rescaling, because I think there is a blind spot
in Sloterdijk's media theory. His hyperpolitical aesthetics must be
invested in micropoiitical art practices. In order to expose this blind
spot, a systematic distinction is needed between a being-in-media
driven by lack (radical mediocrity) and one that reflectively affirms
abundance, t will characterize this, emphasizing the interest ofthe
in-between and referring to the Heideggerian undertow in Sloterdijk's
work, as "inter-esse." Preliminary to this distinction is a further
differentiation of the notion of Enlightenment.

a. Triple Enlightenment: "silent takeover" of the mind

"Mediological enlightenment" (WIK: 261) not only enlightens the
mind; it also makes bodies less heavy and connects minds and
bodies via interfaces in a more transparent way to and in the
world. I call this Triple Enlightenment. Next to the conventional
Enlightenment of our collective consciousness (1) - emancipation
from our "selbstverschuldete Unmundigkeit" (self-inflicted immaturity)
- enlightenment explicitates itself through scientific knowledge, the
explicitation of which in its turn is technology. Ever-accelerating
means of transportation literally "enlighten" our bodies (2) as do
means of telecommunication (3). Territorial distances are annihilated
- a supernova right in front of our noses; intercontinental chatter
- new virtual ones created - atomic universes; virtual public space. In
this way speed of transportation and transparency of communication
enlighten body and sight. The three aspects of enlightenment are
fully dependent upon each other. The last two have always been
part of Enlightenment, but only in retrospect can we acknowledge
their constitutive value.
But the steam engine, combustion engine, jet engine, television,
pacemaker, computer, and Internet - to mention only the most obvious
- have initially ruptured existing immune systems. Enlightenment
has this psychotraumatic price (NG: 341). Gradually, however,
these mediations are internalized. Modern man's life becomes
more comfortable. Once the immunity of the system is restored
or a new immune system installed, this comfort becomes part of
normalization and subjectivation. Speeded up in capsular nodes
(cars, trains, planes), communicating via interfaces (computers,
cellphones. GPS), extending their potentialities, human beings feel
less heavy, i.e. freer.

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Modern life has undergone a "silent takeover": Technology has

converted - explicitated - modern man's soul without his realizing It.
As a result of this triple enlightenment, man and machine, mind and
matter have integrated. Machine is no longer a metaphor. Man has
becomes "psycho-technological" and "techno-psychological"being.^^
Media are incorporated to the point of becoming indispensable means
of subsistence. As a result, our moral categories are transformed. Do
modern subjects still nurture the idea that they have an instrumental
relation to "their" media? They can abandon them when they have no
more use-value. Nowadays freedom is synonymous with frictionless
immersion in a media environment. Enforcing your own rules - being
auto-nomos - is transformed into a will to access and exposure.
Heteronomy is no problem. The "lightness of being" is no longer
unbearable.^^

b. Dasein is design: radical mediocrity as first nature

If relational anthropology is in need of "an ontology of prosthetic
realities" (NG: 361), mediatization explains how our souls are
converted: by being-in-media. Being-in-the-world is now being-inmedia. a medium being more than just an instrumental, kinetic
connection between separate beings. The identity of the relata
is constituted in and by the relation. Intention is articulated by
its extensions, inner life by its prosthetic explicitation. Medical
technology replaces and transforms vital functions of both body
and mind. Cars and cellphones do not simply facilitate social life;
they actually constitute sociability. The proposed transformation of
Aristotelian megalopsychia has to take into account the constitutive
workings of mediological extensions or prostheses (NG; 361).

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How does second nature become first (SMI: 809)? After the initial
"illness" that always accompanies the introduction ofa new medium,
end-users consume the comfort, the abundance of "their" media. But
once this mediological abundance constitutes the end-user's milieu
or immune system, the "incorporated" media wili become as invisible
as they are Indispensable. Proximity without distance roots both body
and soul in media. In retrospect this mediological relationality always
has been an inextricable quality of man's condition. Every medium
becomes the message, i.e. man's milieu. The medium becomes an
experience in itself. It produces yet unknown forms of entertainment
and even lifestyles (see Pine II and Gilmore 1999). It Is no longer
a means to an end. That is why the idea of quitting automobility
and interactivity feels like being crippled, blinded, or deafened. It
Is as if we are invited to cut off a healthy leg and pierce a properly
functioning eye or ear.
Nowadays Dasein seems reduced to a rooted or "radical" mediocrity (see Oosterling 2004b, 2005a). The mediocrity of the masses
expressing contemptuousness, so severely criticized by Sloterdijk,
is an indication of a constitutive lack. Given their indifference,
individuals nowadays no longer realize that their "first" nature

RESCALING SLOTERDIIK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

was initially second nature. In medial performance, memory of

this "first" nature is absorbed in the actual awareness triggered
by the second, "In comfort one does not ask where it comes from
when It has become a habit" {Sill: 403). Unreflective being-in-media
takes its users beyond history. It is at this crucial point that a
medium becomes "a harmful routine." Once the abundance of new
medioiogical conditions is internalized, needs that were previously
nonexistent are ontologized. They become primary needs. Autonomy
has become automobility, freedom frictionless access, Dasein design.
As a result the unprecedented possibilities - or better, vJrtualities
- of an internalized extension reproduce lack on another level.
Every new medioiogical explicitation eventually reproduces scarcity through forgetfulness. In order to add a normative component to
being-in-media, I make a distinction between a miserabilist and an
affirmative medioiogical condition. As a result of forgetfulness the
former prolongs the illusion of autonomy based on lack. Only the
second, which advocates openness, enhances the reflectivity which
Sloterdijk's museological attitude presupposes (Sill: 810). In part I of
Spharen, for "living in each other in ecstatic immanence" it suffices
to be "a male or female modern mass-media being" (SI: 640). But
when he notices that "the mediocre, medial, and vulgar effaced the
honzon" (SI: 642), it is evident that for Dasein to be "a passion in
the face of the monstrous" (NG: 223) reflectivity has to be part of
our "medio-crity." This is acknowledged at the end of part III: "Actually
reflectivity and 'being spoilt' (Verwdhnung) are inextncably linked."
Once "imaginations concerning lack have become second nature,
it is hard to see how they can perform this change of perspectives
on their own" (Sill: 809).

c. Ontology of the in-between: abundance as inter-esse

The lightness of being-in-media does not "naturally" make the
experience of abundance reflective. As long as the in-betweenness
of radical mediocrity does not reflect on itself, comfortable life
can easily turn into an experience of lack. For Sloterdijk, mediocre
people are part of the They (das Man), Heidegger's qualification
of Inauthentic existence (SI: 643). Notwithstanding the collective
productivity of addictions, the current level of addiction to all kinds
of media - even oil - bears witness to the fact that autonomy is no
longer adequate as a category with which to understand ourselves
in terms other than indifference. Autonomy being sheer illusion - a
Nietzschean fiction - for Sloterdijk, authenticity obviously is still an
option. What is needed is a reflective attitude as an "existential" in
which mediocrity is experienced in its affluent generosity. As Hegel
argues: reflectivity sublates indifference.
Ontologically, radical mediocrity is a condition of being-in-between.
In foam city we, glued foam bubbles, share the in-between.^'' An
affirmative approach acknowledges that Homo sapiens is an "interesse" (Zw/schenwesen). Although Sloterdijk criticizes "our efforts

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to make ourselves interesting," which means to "make-oneselfbetterthan-the-others" (VM: 87), with reference to Heidegger's
They, an authentic human condition is at hand. Heidegger makes a
distinction between an inauthentic condition of the Interesting as
shallow entertainment and a being-in-between (Zw/sc/ien-se/n) as
"Inter-esse": "Interest, inter-esse, means to be among and in the
midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with
it. But today's interest accepts as valid only what is interesting."^^
"Inter-esse" is the "cement" (Kit) of relationality or Being-with
(Mit-sein). In f^e Human Condition Hannah Arendt took Heidegger's
distinction one step further by rephrasing subject-oriented interests
as " interesse": "These interests constitute, in the words ofthe most
literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between
people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most
action and speech is concerned with this in-between..." (Arendt
1958; 182). This ontology of the in-between - this "esse" of the
"inter" - needs to be explicitated within radical mediocrity. In the
final analysis, the "psychological" surplus of generosity and the
substance of creativity - Aristotle's megalopsychia - consist of
this self-reflective in-between. Unreflected inter-esse asks for "the
combination of 'de-interesting and re-interesting' in a nondual type
of morality" (Sill: 411).

6. MICROPOLITICAL ART: INTERMEDIALITY AS THE

INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK

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From the imperative that we have to become lighter (i.e. enlightened),

Sloterdijk draws political consequences. Strategies that favor
heaviness over lightness in terms of resignation (Ge/assenhe/t)
and recycling, and ideologies that still define human relations in
terms of oppression are declared "miserabilistic." Scapegoats are
the Green parties and "the Old Left." But is it enough to affirm the
antigravitational flows and criticize "gravitational conservatism"?
Does Sloterdijk's "jovial" perspective suffice to "convert" radical
mediocrity? What kind of politics does he propose? Is resistance
still an option?
There was an implicit acknowledgement of resistance in Critique
of Cynical Reason - albeit romantic - but in Die Sonne und der Tod it
is no longer defined as resistance to oppression and injustice in the
political sense (ST: 262,284,287). After criticizing Lacan, resistance
to the effort ofthe analyst to unlock the fixated reality principle of his
patient is no option either. Perhaps the deco n struct! on ist's res/stance

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or restance as a principally nonanalyzable rest can be recognized

in "the refusal to follow the rules of one's own game" (ST: 285).
Sloterdijk favors an avant-garde-inspired notion of resistance. Within
his general science of revolution, this is understood as explicitation.
Avant-garde practices connect art and politics.
Inhabiting the Greenhouse - a thermotope (SHI: 396) - means
we are still haunted by scarcity. "In the absence of a convincing

RESCALING SLOTERDIJK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

thermic socialism, for the time being we have to be content with

a thermic aesthetics" (Sill: 405). His affinity with the avant-garde
not only explains Sloterdijk's aversion to the mediocre They; It also
sheds light on the political premise of his exaggerative reasoning:
revising definite options and deciding against exclusion. The
approving remarks on Joseph Beuys's artistic practice give us a
clue.^*^ Sloterdijk explicitly refers to Beuys's concept ofthe "social
sculpture" {Sozial Plastik) (Sill: 6 6 1 , 811). Every generous citizen
has to become an artist, as Joseph Beuys once proposed (SMI:
811). Like Foucault, Sloterdijk favors creativity over autonomy. If
aestheticization is needed for enduring monstrosity, is Foucault's
proposal of an aesthetics of existence then an option? Can we
recognize Sloterdijk's exaggerative reasoning in Foucault's attempt to
connect truth games with spirituality beyond religious interpretations
as "the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the
subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth
can transfigure and save the subject" (Foucault 2004: 17)?
In our comfortable Greenhouse the great divide between life and
art, art and nonart, high and low culture is superseded. The superinstallation - a s an "inclusiveconcept of artificiality [Kunst/fchkeit]"
(Sill: 813) that "'integrates' all subcultures" - demands an aesthetic
attitude: "one transfers the form ofthe museum to the system as a
whole and moves around in it as a visitor" (SIM: 818). Cruising public
space demands museological sensibility. But how is this stimulated?
Does society become a Gesamtkunstwerk? Sloterdijk has already
excluded this option. The Crystal Palace is beyond a total work of art,
because the risk has to be avoided that "a culture that organizes a
total middle" becomes "totalitarian" (VM: 95). Reflecting the inter
is better served by the desire that installs a total work of art. Bazon
Brock qualified this as "an inclination [Hang] towards the total work
of art" (see Szeemann et al. 1983).
A genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk - starting with German
idealism via Wagner and Wiener Werkstatte, Arts & Crafts, Merzbau,
Bauhaus, and Surrealism^' - shows that it never realized itself to
a full extent without becoming totalitarian. However, in its constant
failure to totalize art as life, it fully explored the space in between
disciplines, media, and in between the artist and his audience. The
inter is the "cement" of a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is articulated in
interdisciplinary, multimedia, and interactive art practices. To borrow
Adorno's phrase, the totalization (das ganz GroSe) is the false. The
truth is in its failure. In failing it shows us its truth: the inter.
Sloterdijk favors art practices that relate precisely by resisting
their own rules. That explains his emphasis on surrealism in his
Tate lecture. More than any other art "style," surrealism - and
especially Dafi - is interdisciplinary, multimedial, and interactive.
In the past fifteen years these elements have been conceptualized
in art-theoretical debates as intermediality (see Oosterling 2003a,
2003b, 2004a).^*^ Concepts such as "relational architecture" (Rafael

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Lozano-Hemmer) have been invented to express the binding force

of instaliations in pubiic space. More than dropping an art object
in open space, intermedial art practices refiect upon and intend to
transform the way people relate to each other via art. it is no longer
art in pubiic space, but art as public space.
The consequences for the acceptance of a medioiogicai condition
based on generosity "are far reaching in the morai domain" (SIM:
807) because freedom and a sense of justice can no longer be
understood "without the phantasm of equality of ail with regard to
luxury in materiai terms" (Sill: 820). x negat;Ve, this phantasm
focuses Sioterdijl<'s poiitico-aesthetic strategy. "We are entering
an era of new games of enlightenment" (VM: 63). Their target is
aesthetic reflectivity, in a Deleuzean turn, this means that being
rooted in media (i.e. radicai mediocrity) has to be eniightened to
the point of becoming an eniightened rhizomatic inter. No roots,
just routes. This "conversion" has far-reaching anthropoiogicai
implications. Against the background ofthe intended megalopsychia,
creativity no ionger resides in, but in-between individuais. Creativity
is first and foremost reiatlonal. Cooperation, participation, and
interaction no longer presuppose individuals. These come to the
fore in creativity.

NOTES

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1. See: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/spheres_
of_action/.
2. It is this concept of the "demon" that iHeidegger takes from
Holderiin's work. He transformed it into das Unheimliche (uncanny).
See Heidegger (1982: 150).
3. Alongside the three voiumes of Spharen - /. Biasen, II. Globen.
III. Schaume [SI,SII,Slli] - he pubiished Im Weltinnenraum des
Kapitals. Fur eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung
[WIK] in order to clarify the phenomenon of globalization and its
aesthetico-poiitical impiications more specifically. Since there
are no pubiished translations avaiiabie yet, ali quotes are my
translations.
4. See Sioterdijk [NG] (2001:164-6); Sloterdijk and Heinrichs [ST]
(2001: 291).
5. In his Tate lecture Sioterdijk himseif transiates the German
"Explikation" as "explicitation'^to unfold in the sense of expiicitiy
making things.
6. in Im selben Boot. Versuch uber Hyperpolitik. Sloterdijk makes
a distinction between megalomania and megalopathia. Aristotle
transformed Aiexandre the Great's megalomania into megalopathia
as a lived experience that engenders big questions. The poiis has
become part of giobal space. For two millennia megalopathia has
been phiiosophy's raison d'etre. See Sloterdijk (1993a: 29). See
also Sli: 303, n. 130. He refines this concept In later interviews
by defining late modern phiiosophy as megalo-depressive, as

RESCAUNG SLOTERDIIK'S GRANDIOSE AESTHETIC STRATEGY

7.

8.

9.

10.
11.

12.
13.
14.
15.

16.

17.
18.

19.

an inter-pathoiogy or inter-mania. See the Aliiez article in this

voiume, pp. 307-26. It is this "inter" that I will explore in this
article.
Nietzsche first came to the fore in Critique of Cynical Reason in
which he has the highest reference index, foiiowed by Diogenes,
Marx, Freud, and Hitler. Thinker on Stage, Nietzsche's Materialism
(1989) is fuiiy focused on Nietzsche. And up to the last pages
of Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals Sloterdijk's verbal avalanche
is spiced with Nietzschean phrases updated by references to
French neo-Nietzschean thinkers.
The word "Inter-esse" is German for "interest." However, it also
means "to be interested in." In a phiiosophicai context this
connotation is used in a iiterai sense: being (esse) in between
(inter).
Lyotard is mentioned oniy once in SpAiaren together with Badiou
and other thinkers of difference. They are criticized for their
"poiitical infinitism" (Sil: 410). I come back to this point in the
iast paragraph ofthis section.
See the conciuding remarks of Waiter Benjamin, The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).
Neither is Negri and Hardt's Empire, their name for the Crystal
Palace. Their proposal is rejected by Sioterdijk as too totalitarian
a project for "revolutionary" ends (Sill: 825).
See the interview with Eric Ailiez, this volume, pp. 307-26.
Stoterdijk by the way does not join the debate. The three are
waiting in vain at the end ofthe book.
He refers for this method to Gunther Anders (1980). See aiso
NG: 362.
The essay "What is solidarity with metaphysics in the moment
of its downfail?" has as its subtitie "A notice on critical and
exaggerated/hyperboiic (uberfrf'ebene) reason" (NG: 235).
In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) he refers exclusiveiy to
Michel Foucauit, with just an incidentai remark on Derrida. But
in Spharen Foucault is sideiined by Kristeva, and even more
by Deleuze and Guattari, who are by then definiteiy Sloterdijk's
most favored traveiing companions.
In this text Lyotard deais with different kinds of iiterary
genres.
Here a paraliei can be drawn with Fatal Strategies (1983) by
Jean Baudriliard, published in the same year as Critique of
Cynical Reason. The latter criticizes diaiectical thinking too and
replaces sublation with excess. At the very beginning of this
text, the end of dialectics is proclaimed and the advent of an
era envisaged, the dynamics of which will no longer be ruled by
dialectical subiation. it is the iogic of excess that ruies.
For me the enigmatic expression "eine totaie Mitte" is a
synonym for "radicai mediocrity" that will be explored in the
next paragraph.

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20. See www.petersloterdijk.net/german/topoi/stadtenergetik.

html.
2 1 . it is, however, surprising that he does not mention Kristeva's
nondjscursive "semiotike" in order to stress the importance
of the acoustic-tactile embedding of desire that subverts its
discursive articulation.
22. See the writings of the present director of the McLuhan Institute:
Derrick de Kerckhove (1997: 4 ^ ) .
23. Sioterdijk understands spheroiogy as a "delightenment"
(Abkiarung), i.e. a dis-eniightenment of our burdened existence.
The delight of wine tasting- in which context the term Abkiarung
means "clarification" - is implied in this spherological
"decanting" (SV: 122-3).
24. This is the topic of another "trans-Heideggerian" Nancy (2002).
See Oosteriing (2005a).
25. In Heideggerian terms, the ephemerai interest as an indifferent
attitude needs to be transformed to existential inter-esse. See
(1978: 347). See aiso Being and Time, o.c, p. 124.
26. Utero-topicaiiy as a "community art" analogous to the group as
utero-tope [L/terotop] (Sill: 392);thermo-toplcallyin theguiseof
Beuys's work of art The honeypump (Slli: 404) that reminds us
of a "sweet life": as an example for the "era ofthe uplifting"
that can be seen as "a critique of 'heavy' reason" (SMI: 733).
27. His lecture at the Tate focuses mainly on surrealism.
28. The outcome of this research can be found at www2.eur.nl/fw/
cfk (accessed 1 2 / 5 / 0 6 ) .

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