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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Michel Serres, Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1990/1995)

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick–a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.

Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events– including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science’s ascendancy over the humanities–that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician’s fondness for “shortcuts” in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age–a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind’s frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control.

In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his “philosophy of prepositions”–an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions.

Originally published in French as Eclaircissements by Editions Francois Bourin 1990
Translated by Roxanne Lapidus
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 1995
Studies in Literature and Science series
ISBN 0472065483, 9780472065486
204 pages

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Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth (1997/2007)

“In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatschrifte asked its audience to reply to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Immanuel Kant, following Moses Mendelssohn, took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his ‘age of reason.’ Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault released a response to Kant’s initial essay, positioning the philosopher as the initiator of the discourse, and critique, of modernity—a credit traditionally accredited to Nietzsche. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between these two philosophers, Foucault and Kant, as the framework around which these different lectures and unpublished essays are assembled. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three volume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s examination of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” is the most “American” moment of Foucault’s thinking. It is in America that he realized the necessity of tying down his own reflection to that of the Frankfurt School. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, The Politics of Truth contains transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by John Rajchman
Translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2007
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350393, 9781584350392
195 pages

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