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Critique of Cynical Reason

By Peter Sloterdijk (1983 DE, 1988 EN)

Foreword by Andreas Huyssen

I

The book was popular and praised for its crituque of the Enlightenment and despised as a capitalist message. Both are discussions that Sloterdijk proposed to avoid.

The success of Critique of Cynical Reason is mainly rooted in the fact that old explanations & enemies (left vs right, progress vs. reaction - dichotomies) do not seem to suffice anymore. It can be seen as a theoretic approach of a central aspect of postmodern culture. An intervention in the current state to open up discourse. Sloterdijk is, despite the name of the book, anti-Kantian in that he rejects all master narratives of reason.

Critique of Cynical Reason shoul be read as a contemporary investigation and theorization of cynicism - which is often rooted in political disappointment in the promisses of the 60's. It proposes kynicism as a counterstrategy. The growth of cynicism during the 70's sparked the revival of ideologial conservatism of the 80's.

One could question wether Sloterdijks premisse - that a diffuse cynicism is the predominant mindset - is that widespreak, but more directed at a selective group of intellectuals.

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered,

His notion of cynicism is an enlightened false conscious that has rejection of ideological critique reflexively build in. It's a state of unhappy sensibility. Sloterdijk critiques the subjective side of ideology critique, which often rests on reificaton or depersonalization. He follows a Marxists tradition: critique of reification.

Sloterdijk focusses on cynical reason on a "subjective, existential level" to avoid abstract language games without subjects. A new interpretation is given to postmodernity, on that is concrete and about the here and now, this precise moment in history. (Aufklarung as explained by Foucault)

he asks how a historical memory can hep resist "the spread of cynical amnesia" And how to avoid the feeling of history at a stand still SLoterdijk proposes an enlightenment that is enlightened about istself: he rejects both fundamentalism of conservatives and the universality of the Enlightenment. He is troubled with both the absolute truth (Critical Theory) and the dissolution of truth (poststructuralism).

He proposes to turn the disillusionment with enlightened modernity away from melancholy and cynicism and to make lost illusions productive for an enlightened thought on [another] level. He wants to achieve this goal by reclaiming a tradition of rationality from which the modern scientific enlightenment [...] has cut itself loose: the tradition of kynicism.

Definitions & clarifications

Reflexifely buffered

reflexively: without concious thought. Buffered: damped

false consciousness

noun (especially in Marxist theory) a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation.

Reïficatie/Reification

Het begrip reïficatie slaat op het toekennen van menselijke eigenschappen aan dingen en op het versluieren van de betrekkingen tussen de mensen achter de beweging van de dingen. Het is een verzelfstandigen van sociale verhoudingen, een tot-ding-maken. Verdinglijken.

Reïficatie is een soort van ‘illusie’ uit de beelden die onze hersenen maken. Het heeft een vormgelijkenis met optische illusies.

Reïficatie betekent dus het veranderen, in het onderbewustzijn, van verhoudingen tussen mensen in verhoudingen tussen dingen.

Poststructuralism

Emerging in French intellectual life in the late 1960s and early 1970s, poststructuralism departed from the claims to objectivity and comprehensiveness made by structuralism and emphasized instead plurality and deferral of meaning, rejecting the fixed binary oppositions of structuralism and the validity of authorial authority.

critical theory

a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.