Rage and Time

A Psychopolitical Investigation

Peter Sloterdijk, Mario Wenning

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231518369
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Deconstrucción en filosofía

While ancient civilizations worshipped strong, active emotions, modern societies have favored more peaceful attitudes, especially within the democratic process. We have largely forgotten the struggle to make use of thymos, the part of the soul that, following Plato, contains spirit, pride, and indignation. Rather, Christianity and psychoanalysis have promoted mutual understanding to overcome conflict. Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk, the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing how the history of Western civilization can be read as a suppression and return of rage.

By way of reinterpreting the Iliad, Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, and recent Islamic political riots in Paris, Sloterdijk proves the fallacy that rage is an emotion capable of control. Global terrorism and economic frustrations have rendered strong emotions visibly resurgent, and the consequences of violent outbursts will determine international relations for decades to come. To better respond to rage and its complexity, Sloterdijk daringly breaks with entrenched dogma and contructs a new theory for confronting conflict. His approach acknowledges and respects the proper place of rage and channels it into productive political struggle.

RAGE TRANSACTIONS

Rage, oh rage,

is a pleasure that is preserved for the wise.

—DA PONTE AND MOZART,

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, 1786

THERE IS NO PERSON LIVING TODAY WHO HAS NOT REALIZED that the Western world, and through it also indirectly all other areas of the world, is being irritated by a new theme. With a concern that is half true and half put-on, Westerners raise an alarm: “Hatred, revenge, irreconcilable hostility have suddenly appeared again among us! A mixture of foreign forces, unfathomable as the evil will, has infiltrated the civilized spheres.”

Some people, engaged for the sake of morality, make similar observations with a form of realism marked by a tone of reproach. They emphasize that the so-called foreign forces cannot confront us as absolutely foreign. What many people pretend to experience as a terrible surprise is, according to the moralist, only the flipside of the domestic modus vivendi. The end of pretense lies before us. “Citizens, consumers, pedestrians, it is urgent to wake up from lethargy! You do not know that you still have enemies, and you don’t want to know because you have chosen harmlessness!” The new appeals to awakening the conscience aim to enforce the idea that the real has not been tamed, not even in the great bubble of irreality that encloses citizens of affluent society like the womb protects a fetus. If what is real is taken to be what could kill, the enemy presents the purest incarnation of the real. With the renaissance of the possibility of hostility, the return of the old-fashioned real lies before us. From this, one can learn that a controversial topic is put on the agenda only when an irritation is transformed into an institution—an institution with visible protagonists and permanent employees, customer service, and its own budget, with professional conferences, public relations, and continuing reports from the problem area. The constant visitor in the West, the spirit of revenge, can profit from all of this. It can say to itself: I irritate, therefore I am.

Who could deny that, as usual, the alarmists are almost right? The inhabitants of affluent nations sleepwalk mostly within illusions of apolitical pacifism. They spend their days in gold-plated unhappiness. At the same time, their molesters, their virtual hangmen, immerse themselves at the margins of happiness zones in the manuals of explosive chemistry. These manuals have been checked out of the public libraries of the host country. Once one has listened to the alarm for some time, one feels like one is viewing the opening credits of a disturbing documentary where the naïve and its opposite are put into a perfidiously astonishing sequence by directors who know how to create effects: new fathers open up cans of food for their children; working mothers put a pizza in the preheated oven; daughters swarm into the city in order to make use of their awakening femininity; pretty salesgirls step outside during a short break to smoke a cigarette while returning the gaze of those passing by. In the suburbs, petrified foreign students put on belts filled with explosives.

THE MONTAGE OF SUCH SCENES FOLLOWS LOGICS THAT CAN EASILY BE understood. Many authors who see their vocation as educating the public in matters of politics—among them neoconservative editorial writers, political antiromantics, wrathful exegetes of the reality principle, converted Catholics, and disgusted critics of consumerism—want to reintroduce into a population of overly relaxed citizens the basic concepts of the real. For this purpose they quote the most recent examples of bloody terror. They show how hatred enters standard civil contexts. They do not tire of claiming that under the well-kept façades, amok has already for a long time been running. They constantly have to scream: this is not a drill! Because for quite some time the public has become used to the routine translation of real violence into mere images, into entertaining and terrifying, pleading and informative images. The public experiences the development of opposition as a tasteless regression into a dialect extinct for many years.

BUT HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SERIOUSLY PRESENT RAGE AND ITS EFFECTS, its proclamations and explosions as news? What needed to be intentionally forgotten before the desire could emerge to stare at those who effectively practice revenge against their alleged or real enemies as if they were visitors from distant galaxies? How was it at all possible, after the disappearance of the West-East divide in 1991, for us to come to believe that we had been thrown into a universe in which individuals and collectives could let go of their capacity to have revengeful feelings? Is it not the case that resentment is what is distributed the most around the world, even more so than bon sens?

Starting with the mythic era, it has been part of popular wisdom that the human being is that animal unable to cope with too many things. Nietzsche would say that the human being as such has something “German” to it. It is not capable of digesting the poisons of memory and suffers from certain unfriendly impressions. The saying that “sometimes the past does not want to pass” preserves the ordinary version of the sophisticated insight that human existence is initially just the peak of cumulative memory. Memory does not merely mean the spontaneous activity of the internal sense of time. It is not merely the ability to counteract the immediate disappearance of the lived moment by “retention,” that is, an inner, automatic function of holding onto temporal consciousness. It is also connected to a saving function that enables the coming back to virtual topics and scenes. Memory is a result of the generation of networks through which the new introduces itself compulsively, and like an addiction, into older episodes of pain. Neuroses and national sensibilities have in common these movements in the domain of trauma. We know about neurotics that they prefer to, again and again, repeat their accident. Nations include the remembrance of their defeats at cult sites to which their citizens periodically go on pilgrimages. Thus it is necessary to put on stage all kinds of cultures of memory both detached from ourselves and with unconditional mistrust, no matter if the memories are dressed in religious, civil, or political garments. Under the pretense of purifying, emancipating, or merely creating identity, memories inevitably support some secret tendency to repeat and reenact.

Even popular victimology more or less understands the reactions of injured people. Through bad experiences they are dislocated from the happy-forgetful center of society to its slippery margins, from which there is no longer any simple return to normal life. One understands this eccentric dynamic right away: to the victims of injustice and defeat, consolation through forgetting often appears unreachable. If it appears unreachable, it also appears unwanted, even unacceptable. This means that the fury of resentment begins at the moment the person who is hurt decides to let herself fall into humiliation as if it were the product of choice. To exaggerate pain in order to make it bearable, to transcend one’s depressed suffering, to “sport with his misery”—quoting Thomas Mann’s sensitive and humorous coinage about the primal father Jacob¹—to extend the feeling of suffered injustice to the size of a mountain in order to be able to stand on its peak full of bitter triumph: these escalating and twisting movements are as old as injustice, itself seemingly as old as the world. Isn’t “world” the name for the place in which human beings necessarily accumulate unhappy memories of injuries, insults, humiliations, and all kinds of episodes for which one wants revenge? Are not all civilizations, either openly or in secret, always archives of collective trauma? Considerations like these allow us to draw the conclusion that measures taken to extinguish or contain smoldering memories of suffering have to belong to the pragmatic rules of every civilization. How would it be possible for citizens to go to bed peacefully if they had not called a couvre-feu for their internal fires?

Because cultures always also have to provide systems for healing wounds, it is plausible to develop concepts that span the entire spectrum of wounds, visible and invisible. This has been done by modern trauma sciences, which started from the insight that for moral facts it is also useful to apply physiological analogies, if only within certain limits. To use a familiar example, in the case of open bodily wounds, blood comes into contact with air, and as a result of biochemical reactions the process of blood clotting starts. Through it, an admirable process of somatic self-healing comes about, a process that belongs to the animal heritage of the human body. In the case of moral injuries we could say that the soul comes into contact with the cruelty of other agents. In such cases subtle mechanisms for the mental healing of wounds are also available—spontaneous protest, the demand to bring the perpetrator immediately to justice, or, if this is not possible, the intention to take matters into one’s own hands when the time comes. There is also the retreat into oneself, resignation, the reinterpretation of the crime scene, the rejection of the truth of what happened, and, in the end, when only a drastic psychic treatment seems to work, the internalization of the violation as a subconsciously deserved penalty even to the point of the masochistic worship of the aggressor. In addition to this medicine chest for the injured self, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity developed moral exercises to enable the injured psyche to transcend the circle of injuries and revenge as such.² As long as history is an endless pendulum of hit and retaliation, wisdom is required to bring the pendulum to a halt.

It is not only common wisdom and religion that have adopted the moral healing of wounds. Civil society also provides symbolic therapies intended to support the psychic and social reactions to the injuries of individuals and collectives. Since ancient times, conducting trials in front of courts has made certain that the victims of violence and injustice can expect reparation in front of a gathered people. Through such procedures is practiced the always precarious transformation of the desire for revenge into justice. However, just as a festering wound can become both a chronic and general malady, psychic and moral wounds also may not heal, which creates its own corrupt temporality, the infinity of an unanswered complaint. This implies the trial without satisfactory sentence and calls forth the feeling in the prosecutor that the injustice inflicted upon him is rather increased through the trial. What is to be done when the juridical procedure is experienced as an aberration? Can the matter be settled through the sarcastic remark that the world will one day go down because of its official administration—a statement perpetually reinvented as often as citizens experience the indolence of administrative bodies? Isn’t it more plausible to assume that rage itself engages in payback? Isn’t it more plausible to assume that rage, as a self-proclaimed executor, goes so far as to knock on the door of the offended?

RAGE RECOUNTED

THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POSSIBILITY EXISTS IN COUNTLESS exemplary case studies, some more recent and some older. The search for justice has always brought about a second, wild form of the judiciary in which the injured person attempts to be both judge and warden at once. What is noteworthy about these documents, given our present perspective, is that only with the beginning of modernity was the romanticism of self-administered justice invented. Whoever speaks of modern times without acknowledging to what extent it is shaped by a cult of excessive rage suffers from an illusion. This is, even to the present day, the blind spot of cultural history—as if the myth of the “process of civilization” did not aim only to make invisible the release of vulgar manners under conditions of modernity but also to inflate revenge phantasms. While the global dimension of Western civilization aims at the neutralization of heroism, the marginalization of military virtue, and the pedagogical enhancement of peaceful social affects, the mass culture of the age of enlightenment reveals a dramatic recess in which the veneration of vengeful virtues, if we may so call them, reaches new, bizarre extremes.

This phenomenon can be traced back centuries before the French Revolution. The Enlightenment not only releases polemics of knowledge against ignorance but also invents a new quality of the guilty verdict by declaring all old conditions unjust before the demands of the new order; hereby the ecosystem of resignation begins to totter. Since time immemorial, human beings learned in this ecosystem to accept the apparent inevitabilities of misery and injustice. The Enlightenment was thus required to allow revenge to be promoted to an epochal motive, as it dominated private as well as political affairs. Since the past is fundamentally always unjust, the inclination increases, not always but with increased regularity, to extol revenge as just.

OF COURSE, ANTIQUITY ALREADY KNEW GREAT ACTS OF REVENGE. From the furies of Orestes to the hysterics of Medea, ancient theater paid tribute to the dramatic potency of revengeful forces. Mythos knew as well from early on about the danger that begins with humiliation, a danger almost like a natural disaster. Medea’s example shows particularly well the idea that the female psyche passes from pain to insanity with terrific velocity. This is what Seneca wanted to show when he depicts the hysterical heroine as an exemplary deterrent. In modern terminology, one would call attention to the fact that the passive-aggressive character is disposed to enter into states of excess whenever, by way of exception, she decides to become offensive. This is the framing of women on the rage stage, and, often, the privilege of the “great scene” (“großien Szene”) has always belonged to the “angry sex.” The ancients never imagined taking such exempla as anything other than warnings to orient themselves to the middle, away from excesses.

In the Eumenides, one of the key plays of Athenian drama, with which the Atride Trilogy of Aeschylus comes to an end, what is at issue is nothing less than the complete break with the older culture of revenge and fate as well as the introduction of a political concern for justice. This form of political justice should be practiced in the future exclusively in civil courts. What is required for the establishment of such courts is the sensible theological-psychosemantic operation in which the old dignified goddesses of vengeance, the Erinnyen, are renamed as the Eumenides, which means “those who want good” or “those caring for what is beautiful.” The meaning of the name change is unmistakable: “Where vengeance compulsion was, balanced, prudent justice will be.”

Whatever criteria one has in mind when searching the libraries of the Old World, one will come across a large amount of references to the elementary force of rage and the campaigns of vengeful fury. There are traces of a more or less serious game with the romantic fire of rage, though this will become a dominant motive only with the eighteenth century’s emerging culture of civil society. Since then, one great revenger hunts another, accompanied by the sympathy of the audience of the modern imaginary. From the noble robber Karl Moor to the angry veteran John Rambo; Edmond Dantes, the mysterious Count of Monte Christo to Harmonica, the hero of Once Upon a Time in the West, who has committed his life to a private nemesis; Judah ben Hur, who exacted revenge against the spirit of imperial Rome with his victory in an ominous chariot race, to the Bride, alias Black Mamba, the protagonist of Kill Bill, who works through her death list. The time of those who live for the “great scene” has come.³ When Durrenmatt’s old lady comes for a visit, she exactly knows who needs to be liquidated out of the group of friends. Brecht’s dreaming Pirate Jenny even knows a better answer to the question “Who is to die?”: all.

Stories of this kind seem to be natural ballads. By themselves they appear to aspire to a superior form of recitation and epic detail. By making visible the relationship between suffered injustice and just retribution, more recent acts of rage provide an illustration of the causality of fate. We moderns do not like to dispense with this lesson, however much we agree otherwise with the exercise of enlightenment, that is, the suspension of blind fate. The well-constructed story of rage provides the sublime for the people. It provides the audience with a compact formula for moral if/then relationships even if they pay the price of suspending the slow, formal application of the rule of law in order to practice a quicker form of retaliation. Moreover, rage satisfies the popular interest in acts of which the perpetrator can legitimately be proud: such stories focus on the avengers, who by directly paying back for their humiliation release a part of the discontent with judicial civilization. They provide satisfying proof that the modern person does not always have to travel the windy road of resentment and the steep steps of the judiciary process in order to articulate thymotic emotions. In the case of injuries leading to chronic illness, rage is still the best therapy. This feeling constitutes the reason for the pleasure taken in base things.

The dangerous liaisons between the revenge motif and popular narrative do not need to be unfolded in detail at this point. Apparently these linkages are so deep that sometimes the return of modern art to its great epic form is helpful—as in the case of the abovementioned work from the century of narrative film, Once Upon a Time in the West. It has rightly been claimed that this work provided the art of film with the proof that two formally impossible things were in fact possible: that serious opera can be appropriated through film and that the lost form of epic can once again be given a contemporary form.

The affinity between rage and popular narrative forms could be illustrated by drawing on a countless number of more recent documents. One example is particularly illuminating: the picturesque life history of the Indian rebel Phoolan Devi (1968-2001). From the state of Uttar Pradesh, Phoolan, when she was still quite a young woman, was the main actress of a widely watched reality drama that aired across the whole of the Indian sub-continent. After she had been collectively abused and raped by her husband and other male inhabitants of her village (including policemen), she fled and joined a group of bandits with whom she devised a plan to ambush and liquidate those who were guilty of the crimes against her. The corpse of her husband is said to have been put onto a donkey and chased through the village. The simple folk celebrated the rebel as an emancipated heroine and saw her as an avatar of the gruesome-sublime goddess Durga Kali. The photograph that depicts Phoolan Devi’s handover of her weapons to Indian law enforcement officials is one of the archetypical press images of the twentieth century. One can see in the young fighter all the concentrated anger of being given over to her undecided fate. After eleven years of prison, without trial, the “Bandit Queen” was pardoned. Then she was elected into the Indian parliament, where she served as an inspir...