Peter Sloterdijk: Critique Of Cynical Reason (1983/1988)

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise—polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work—appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960’s. Sloterdijk’s finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.

With Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility “well off and miserable at the same time,” able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the cynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic—the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler’s ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.

Originally published as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols, 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
Translated by Michael Eldred
Foreword by Andreas Huyssen
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Volume 40 of Theory and History of Literature
ISBN 0816615861, 9780816615865
600 pages

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Luc Boltanski: On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009/2011)

The relationship between sociology and social critique has haunted the discipline since its origins. Does critique divert sociology from its scientific project? Or is critique the ultimate goal of sociology, without which the latter would be a futile activity disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people? This issue has underpinned two divergent theoretical orientations that can be found in the discipline today: the critical sociology that was developed in its most elaborate form by Pierre Bourdieu, and the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and his associates.

In critical sociology, description in terms of power relations underscores the potency of mechanisms of oppression, the way the oppressed passively endure them, going so far in their alienation as to adopt the values that enslave them. Pragmatic sociology, by contrast, describes the actions of human beings who rebel but who are endowed with reason. It stresses their ability, in certain historical conditions, to rise up against their domination and construct new interpretations of reality in the service of critical activity.

In this major new book Boltanski develops a framework that makes it possible to reconcile these seemingly antagonistic approaches – the one determinist and assigning the leading role to the enlightening science of the sociologist, the other concerned to stick as closely as possible to what people say and do. This labour of unification leads him to rework central notions such as practice, institution, critique and, finally, ‘social reality,’ all with the aim of contributing to a contemporary renewal of practices of emancipation.

First published in French as De la critique, Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2009
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Polity, 2011
ISBN 0745649645, 9780745649641
Length 200 pages

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Georgios Papadopoulos: Notes towards a Critique of Money (2011)

The analysis in Notes towards a Critique of Money highlights the functions of money both in the organization of the capitalist symbolic order and in the constitution of subjectivity in the market.

Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Baudrillardian structuralism, the book creates a universe where price and sign are entangled, giving rise to the dominant organizing form of capitalism. The fantasmatic management of desire enforces this structural principle on the subjective level and encourages the libidinal investment in the dominant representations of social reality as they are produced by the combined principles of signification and economic valuation. Here, money signifies the particular content that hegemonizes the universal ideological construction of capitalism providing a particular and accessible meaning to economic value, which colours the very universality of the system of prices and accounts for its efficiency.

Being conscious of the limitations of the theoretical analysis, the book employs along with rational arguments a series of artworks that are used both to illustrate the argument and to challenge the unconscious links between the market and the subject, as it is mediated by money and ideology. Notes towards a Critique of Money does not only aspire to raise a theoretical challenge against capital and to open up possibilities of emancipation, but to point towards a new aesthetic of political analysis.

Contributing artists: Société Realiste, Yuko Kamei, Nikos Arvanitis, Zachary Formwalt, Jean-Baptiste Maitre, Valentin Ruhry, Kay Walkowiak, Shogo Matsushiro, Axel Loytved, Post Tenebras Luxe / Donatella Bernardi, Hervé Graumann, Hadrien Dussoix, Wolfgang Fütterer, No Wonder.

Afterword by Yannis Stavrakakis
Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789072076649
142 pages

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