Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 13:37:26 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: SLOTERDIJK REVISITED


At 02:53 PM 08/09/2000 +0200, you wrote:
>The site is: http://www.egroups.com/group/Sloterdijk

Ok, I've joined it.

>Now, Sloterdijk's thinking has evolved from the dialectical thinking of the 
>Frankfurter Schule and fits today very well with French
(post-)structuralism of 
>Foucault and Deleuze. BTW, what I read between your lines below and in
your other 
>posting is that you try to dichotomize between a critical Adornoesque
position and a 
>non-critical post-modernist stance, and that you are also delighted to
find out that 
>Sloterdijk is not a post-modernist, but a critical thinker. I think
however he is >both, but I assume postmodernism and criticism are flexible
concepts indeed.

You are correct: I am hoping that Sloterdijk is not a postmodernist.

>Hmm, difficult question: as far as I am able to reconstruct Germany was in
the 
>seventies caught and paralyzed between right-wing NATO followers who 'were
the men who 
>still had Nazi blood on their hands', and the extreme left wing RAF, who
took the 
>consequences, as they saw it, from the unended 'liberation', and took and
shot several >hostages.....
>.... The kynical, affirmative and joyful Critique de Cynical Reason then
fell into 
>good butter.

I look forward to gaining a more detailed picture.  But I have a hunch that
I overestimated any analogy between the German and American contexts.  I am
also seriously missing out on something about Sloterdijk's own position.
When I re-read the first few pages of his book, I sense there's something
different there from what I've been describing.

To reinforce another point about cynicism in America: it coexists with a
countervailing tendency we could easily label cynical according to another
of its definitions: a totalitarian pseudo-innocence that reinforces piety
and traditional values.  It is now apparent to me that these complementary
cultural strategies are indispensable to one another.  If one disappeared,
the other would fall immediately.  Furthermore, I would generalize it to
the pardoc of American culture in general: it is simultaneously avant-garde
and extremely backward.  I assume that Americans are so pious because they
recoil in fear at their own viciousness.


---------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project":
  <http://home.thirdage.com/education/ralphdavid>
Regular visitors can see what's new on the site at: 
  <http://home.thirdage.com/education/ralphdavid/whatnew.html>

"Nature has no outline but imagination has."  
                          -- William Blake