Introductory Note to Sloterdijk

Peter Sloterdijk belongs to that rare breed of free-lance scholars, whose very existence poses a provocation to the academic institution. The theses developed in his Critique of Cynical Reason (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983) add substance to the provocation. While his study incorporates philosophy, history, literature, psychology, and political science, none of the customary guidelines for academic discourse are followed. One will find numerous implicit references to the work of scholars who have preceded him, but relatively few instances in which he engages them in explicit dialogue. (Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic ofEnlightenment would be one striking example of this, but there are many others.) Most significantly, he mocks the territorial boundaries of academic disciplines by speaking with the voice, not of a discipline, but of an integral subject. And yet, the traditional notion of the cognitive subject of Enlightenment is rigorously challenged by Sloterdijk. Ultimately he argues against the ego of self-preservation in favor of a dissolution of subjects altogether. In this regard his work also stands as a significant contribution to the international debate on postmodernism. What renders Sloterdijk's diagnosis of our times particularly intriguing is his underlying premise that cynicism and the life-affirming forces opposed to it struggle in concrete historical constellations of institutionalized power; his mediation between that premise and the overriding analysis is at times problematic. Nonetheless, the Critique ofCynical Reason assumes a particular significance in the West German context, which has been marked by a general disinterest if not distrust in theory since the demise of the student movement. Linking his critique of the Enlightenment tradition with the nuclear threat we all face, Sloterdijk attempts a broad-based personal and social theory (with no new values, or so he claims) that would acknowledge the body as the primary locus of cognition and as the primary vehicle for social protest and change. The enlightenment he envisions (and he does speak for an enlightenment of sorts) takes the road not taken by the Occidental tradition of Enlightenment.