Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk: The collapse of Western civilization

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(TRANSLATION): Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk: The collapse of Western civilization

Culture Magazine

Friday August 19 2011, 18:36 hs.

Politics and Economics



Ideas
Politics and Economics
19/08/11

Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk:
The collapse of Western civilization

Since the economic crisis and the role of religion even if Strauss-Kahn, two of the most widely read philosophers of the day analyzing present and future of the West. "We have accumulated so much debt that the promise of reimbursement in which case the seriousness of our world building can not be sustained," reported.


BY NICOLAS TRUONG



WEATHER. The mortgage crisis and rising unemployment in the U.S. contextualize this image of 2009: tents in Sacramento, California for some homeless.
LONDON, IN FLAMES. Police round on August 8, the third day of destruction of violent youths.
STRAUSS-KAHN. Former IMF managing director was arrested in May for an alleged violation.


West is experiencing a crisis of the future: the new generation no longer believe that they will live better than before. A crisis of meaning, direction and meaning. West knows about where it comes from but it employs know where he goes. Indeed, as said the French poet René Char, "Our inheritance is not preceded by any testament" and each generation is responsible to draw your horizon. Our torments, however, are not unfounded. The common sense of the fragmented. With "each in his own" sense of belonging to a project that transcends individuality evaporated. The collapse of collectivism, both communist and nationalist economic progress led to the rule of "I". The sense of "we" broke up.

The idea of ​​partition, the common good and community seems to blow up. However, many still do not want to trust the idea of ​​community to the communitarianism that beset a planet torn. Among them are Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek, European philosophers who accepted the first time publicly discuss these issues.

All separates appearance. The first is a follower of the individualistic philosophy of Nietzsche, the other a Marxist aide to alternative movements. The first is rather liberal, the second, described as radical. Thanks to the metaphorical force at the service of his daring theory, Peter Sloterdijk (pronounced "Sloterdeik") is dedicated to capturing the time mainly due to a general morphology of the human space, the famous trilogy of "spheres", which presents an analysis of conditions under which man can return the habitable world.

Marx and allying with the Matrix trilogy of science fiction, juggling between Hegel and Hitchcock, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (pronounced "Yiyek") is a notorious figure of the "pop philosophy" so severe with global capitalism as some sections of the radical left, which articulates ceaselessly elitist culture references (opera) and popular (film) to large planetary explosions.

This unprecedented meeting is related to the concurrent publication of two works intended to think the crisis we are experiencing. With Vivre la fin des temps (Flammarion), Zizek discusses the different ways of apprehending the crisis of capitalism. For him, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (ecological disaster, revolution bioenergetics, excessive commercialization and social tensions) are decimating: denial (the idea that poverty or disasters "can not happen to me"), bargaining (" leave me time to see my children received "), depression (" I'm going to die, why worry about something ") and acceptance (" I can not do anything, I'd better prepare. ") He proposes alternatives and collective initiatives to regain the sense of a communist ally stripped of his gregariousness a Christianity freed from his belief in the divinity.

With Tu dois changer ta vie (Libella / Maren Sell), Peter Sloterdijk outlines other solutions, more individual and spiritual. Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's poem dedicated to an ancient torso in the Louvre, is to invent the religious retreat of a new self-care, a new relationship with the world. From the break of the credit to the case that led to the resignation of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, unpublished dialogue to change course. Collective or individual, political or spiritual, the key ideas of two iconoclastic thinkers to avoid the deadlocks of globalization.

For the first time since 1945, the idea of ​​future is in crisis in Europe. And the West will not believe in progress, as evidenced by these new generations that do not imagine that they will live better than their elders. Political disaffection, identity crisis or tension, can we talk to you, a crisis of civilization?

Peter Sloterdijk: What do we mean when we use the term "Western civilization", in which we live from the seventeenth century? In my opinion, speak in a world created based on the idea of ​​a departure from the era of attachment to the past. The primacy of the past broke: Western humanity invented a way of life based on the unprecedented anticipation of the future. This means that we live in a world that is "futuristic" increasingly. I, therefore, that the deeper meaning of our "being in the world" lies in the future, which is the fundamental feature of how we exist.

The primacy of the future dates from the time that the West invented the art of making new promises from the Renaissance, when the credit entered the lives of Europeans. During Antiquity and the Middle Ages the credit did not play hardly any role because he was in the hands of usurers, condemned by the Church. The modern credit, however, opens up a future. For the first time, promises of refunds can be met or maintained. The crisis of civilization lies in this: we enter an era in which the ability of credit opened a sustainable future is increasingly blocked because now make other claims for reimbursement. In other words, the "credit" crisis entered a final. We have accumulated so much debt that the promise of reimbursement in which case the seriousness of our world building can not be sustained. Ask an American, imagine how the payment of the debts accumulated by the federal government. Your answer will surely be: "Nobody knows" and I think that not knowing is the core of our crisis.Nadie on this earth knows how to pay the collective debt. The future of our civilization collides with a wall of debt.

Zlavoj Zizek: subscribe fully to the idea of ​​a crisis of "Futurism" and the logic of credit. But let us call the economic crisis subprime 2008. Everyone knows that it is unable to pay mortgages, but each behaves as if it were able. I call it to that in my psychoanalytic jargon, a fetishistic denial: "I am aware that is impossible, but anyway I will try ..." We know we can not do, but we act in practice as if we could. However, use the term "future" to describe what Peter Sloterdijk calls "credit." The term "future", on the other hand, seems more open. The formula no future is pessimistic but the word "future" is more optimistic. And here I am trying to give new impetus to the communism of Marx who is related indeed a credit unconscionable. To characterize our situation, economic and political, ideological and spiritual, I can not remember a probably apocryphal story. This is an exchange of telegrams between the German and Austrian staffs during the Great War. The Germans had sent a telegram to the Austrian saying, "Here, the situation at the front is serious but not catastrophic" and the Austrians responded: "Here, the situation is serious but not catastrophic." And that is catastrophic, we can not pay debts, but in a way, do not take it seriously. In addition to that wall of debt, our time is coming to a sort of "degree zero". First, the huge environmental crisis requires us not to continue in this politico-economic. Second, capitalism, as in China, and is not naturally associated with parliamentary democracy. Third, the biogenetic revolution requires us to invent another biopolitics. In terms of global social divisions, creating the conditions of exploitation and unprecedented popular uprising. The idea of ​​the collective is also affected by the crisis.

How to give meaning to the "common" in time of rampant individualism?

SZ: Although we reject the naive communitarianism, the homogenization of cultures, just like that multiculturalism has become the ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, we should dialogue of civilizations and unique individuals. At the level of individuals, we need a new logic of discretion, the distance, ignorance even. To the extent that promiscuity has become total, is a vital necessity, a crucial point.

Collectively, it is necessary to invent another way to effectively articulate the ordinary. However, multiculturalism is a false answer to the problem, firstly because it is a kind of racism denied that respects the other's identity but contains in its particularism. It is a kind of neo-colonialism, the reverse of classical colonialism, "respect" communities, but from the standpoint of his position of universality. Moreover, multicultural tolerance is an illusion that depoliticized the public debate, referring to social issues racial issues, economic issues to ethnic considerations. There are also many angels in this position of the postmodern left. Thus Buddhism can serve to legitimize militarism extreme: in the years 1930-1940, the establishment of Zen Buddhism not only supported the rule of Japanese imperialism, but even legitimized it. I deliberately use the term "communism" because my problems are actually the real "common" as the biogenetic and ecology.

PS: We need to find the real problems of our era. The memory of Communism and the great tragic experience of twentieth-century politics reminds us that there is no automatic solution dogmatic and ideological. The Challenge of the century is the coexistence within a "humanity" become a reality, physically. It is not the "universalism" abstract of the Enlightenment, but the real universality of a monstrous collective begins to be a community of real traffic are likely to encounter likely permanent and extended collisions.

We have become like particles in a gas under pressure. The issue is now on social ties within a society too big, and I believe that the alleged religious heritage is important, because they are the first attempts of synthesis and meta-meta-ethnic national. The Buddhist sangha was a spaceship where all the deserters of all ethnicities could take refuge. Similarly, we could describe Christianity, social kind of synthesis that transcends the dynamics of ethnically closed and the divisions of class societies. The dialogue of religions in our own time is none other than reformatting the problem of "communism." The meeting held in Chicago in 1900, the congress of world religions was a way to raise the issue of our present through these fragments, these representatives from all sources, members of the human family who had lost view after the African exodus ... In the era of concentration must be raised and reformat everything you thought so far about the relationship of coexistence of an overflowing humanity. So I use the term "co-immunity." All social associations of history are indeed co-immunity structures. The choice of this concept reminiscent of communist heritage. In my analysis, communism goes back to Rousseau and his idea of ​​"religion of man." This concept is inherent, is a global communitarianism. It is impossible to escape the new world situation. In my book, goddess or divine entity that appears in the last pages, is the crisis: it is the only body that has sufficient authority to compel us to change our lives. Our starting point is overwhelming evidence, we can not continue.

SZ: My idea is not so much looking for a "co-immunity" as to revitalize the idea of ​​true communism. But Rest assured, this is more of Kafka than Stalin, more Erik Satie that of Lenin. Indeed, in his latest story Josephine the Singer, or the people of rats, traces the utopia of an egalitarian society, a world with artists like this singer Josephine, whose singing together, subjugates and knocks the crowds, and is held but without material gain.

A recognition that keeps society ritual, revitalizes community parties, without hierarchy or gregariousness. Ditto for Erik Satie. However, everything seems out of politics to the famous author of the Gymnopédies. Compose declared himself a "music of furnishing" a background music or background. And yet he was a member of the Communist Party. Anyway, off to write propaganda songs, he was to hear a collective kind of intimacy, just the opposite of elevator music. And that is my idea of ​​communism.

To overcome the crisis, you, Sloterdijk, opt for the revival of individual spiritual exercises, while you, Zizek insists collective political mobilization and the reactivation of the emancipatory power of Christianity. Why such differences?

PS: I propose to introduce the study of pragmatism in the alleged religions: the pragmatic nature forces us to look more closely at what the religious do, to meet internal and external practices, which can be described as exercises that form a structure of personality. What I call the main subject of philosophy and psychology is the bearer of the series of exercises that make up personality. And some of the series of exercises that constitute the personality can be described as religious.

But what does this mean? Mental exercises are made to communicate with a partner invisible, are absolutely concrete things that can be described, there is nothing mysterious about that. I believe that until further notice, the term "financial system" is operating a thousand times that the term "religion" refers to the righteousness of the Roman state. We must not forget that the use of the terms "religion" "mercy" or "fidelity" was reserved in Roman times to the epithets that had the Roman legions stationed in the Rhine Valley and elsewhere. The highest privilege of a legion was carrying fedelis pia epithets, because it expressed a particular loyalty to the emperor in Rome. I think the Europeans simply forgot religious meaning. The word literally means "diligence." Cicero gave the correct etymology: reading, legere, religere, that is, carefully consider organizing protocol for communication with higher beings. It is therefore a kind of diligence or in my terminology, a code of training. For that reason I think the "return of religion" would only be effective if it could lead to financial practices intensified. By contrast, our "new religious" are not, most times, more than lazy dreamers. But in the twentieth century, sport was imposed on Western civilization. He did not religion, sport reappeared, having been forgotten for nearly 1,500 years. It was fideism athletics but who came to the fore. Pierre de Coubertin wanted to create a religion of muscle in the early twentieth century. Failed as a founder of a religion, but succeeded as a creator of a new system of exercises.

SZ: consider religion as a set of embodied practices already existed in the Russian avant-garde. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) wrote a very beautiful text on the Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) as someone who systematized some spiritual exercises. My thesis about the return to Christianity is paradoxical: I believe that only through Christianity one can truly be an atheist.

Considering the great twentieth-century atheism, it is actually a completely different logic, that of a "credit" theological. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) one of the founders of quantum physics, received a visit from a friend at his dacha. This, however, refused to pass the gate of his house for a horseshoe was nailed-a superstition to keep out evil spirits. And the friend said to Bohr: "You're a first-rate scientist, how can you believe in such superstitions?" "Do not believe it!" Said Niels Bohr. "But then why let that mule?" Insisted the friend. And Niels Bohr had this excellent response: "Someone told me that it works even if you do not believe." It would be a pretty good picture of our current ideology. I think the death of Christ on the cross is the death of God and that is no longer the Big Other who pulls the strings. The only way to be a believer after the death of Christ is to participate in egalitarian collective ties. Christianity can be understood as a religion accompanying the order of the existing or a religion that says "no" and helps to resist. I think that Christianity and Marxism should fight together the new wave of spirituality and the capitalist gregariousness. I defend a religion without God, without love communism.

The historic moment we are facing seems to be marked by anger. Outrage culminating in the slogan "Out!" Of revolutions Arab or Spanish democratic protests. However, according to Zizek, you Sloterdijk is too harsh on social movements at their discretion from resentment.

PS: We must distinguish the anger of resentment. A range of emotions that belong to the regime of thymos, or the regime of pride. There is a kind of pride primordial, irreducible, which is in the depths of our being. In that range is expressed thymos joviality, benevolent contemplation of all that exists. Here, the field knows no psychological disorder. If we go down the scale of values, is proud of himself.

We got a little more and the humiliation of that pride which leads to anger. If anger can not speak, is doomed to wait to speak later and elsewhere, that leads to resentment, hatred and so destructive that wants to annihilate the object of which came the humiliation. Do not forget that good anger, according to Aristotle, is the feeling that accompanies the desire for justice. A justice who does not know anger is a fickle powerless. Social currents of the nineteenth and twentieth created collection points to the collective anger, something just as important. But too many people and too many of the traditional left organizations slid into resentment. Hence the urgency to think and imagine a new left beyond resentment.

SZ: What satisfies awareness resentment is more detrimental to the other and destroy the obstacle to benefit myself. We Slovenians are like in nature. Know the legend that a farmer is an angel appears and asks, "Do you want to give you a cow? But beware, I'll give you two cows also your neighbor! "And the Slovenian peasant says:" Of course not! "But for me, resentment is never the attitude of the poor. Rather, the poor attitude of love, as Nietzsche analyzed it so well. It is the moral of "slaves."

Only he was wrong a bit from the social point of view: is not the real slave, the slave, as the Figaro of Beaumarchais, wants to replace the master. In capitalism, I think there is a very specific combination between the look and feel Timoto erotic. That is, capitalism is mediated eroticism in relation to poor Timotes, which breeds resentment. I agree with Sloterdijk: basically, the hard part is how to think about giving, beyond the exchange, beyond resentment. Do not really believe in the efficacy of these spiritual exercises proposed Sloterdijk. I'm too pessimistic for that. To these self-disciplinary practices, such as athletes, I want to add social heterotopia. So I wrote the final chapter of Vivre la fin des temps, envision a utopian space where communist, referring to the works that get to see and hear what we might call a collective intimacy. I am also inspired by those utopian science fiction movies, where heroes wandering rejected neurotic types that are true communities. Individual tours can also guide us. Kravtchenko often forgotten that Victor (1905-1966), the Soviet officer who reported early in the horrors of Stalinism J'ai choisi la liberté and was infamously attacked by pro-Soviet intellectuals, wrote a sequel, J'ai choisi the justice, while fighting in Bolivia and organized an agricultural production system more equitable. We must encourage Kravtchenko emerging everywhere from South America to the shores of the Mediterranean.

PS: I think you are a victim of the psycho-political evolution of Eastern Europe. In Russia, for example, each load on his shoulders with a whole century of political and personal catastrophe. Eastern peoples express the tragedy of communism and not out of it. All this forms a bond of desperation weld. I am a pessimist by nature, but life refuted my original pessimism. I am, so to speak, an apprentice optimistic. And so I think we're pretty close to each other because in a sense parallel biographies traveled from radically different starting points, reading the same books.

The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Is it a simple case of morality or a symptom of a malaise most important?

PS: This is a global event that exceeds the police made. Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be innocent. But that history reveals that the huge power that holds an individual can create a kind of religion of the powerful that I would qualify as sexual pantheism. We thought we had finished with the sun kings. But, interestingly, the XXI century multiplied by ten thousand men of power to those who think that all the objects of their desire to be penetrated by irradiation.

SZ: The only interesting case is the DSK circulated rumor that his friends would have approached the family of the alleged victim in Guinea to provide you with an exorbitant amount of money if Diallo Nafissatou withdraw his complaint. If that is true, what a dilemma! What choice, dignity or the money you can save the life of a family, giving you the chance to live in prosperity? That's what I would sum up the true moral perversion of our time.

(C) Le Monde, 2011.