Living hot, thinking coldly: an interview

with Peter Sloterdijk

Author: Eric Alliez

Date: Nov. 1, 2007

From: Cultural Politics(Vol. 3, Issue 3)

Publisher: Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Dba Berg Publishers

ABSTRACT Subsequent to a dialogue concerning the German philosopher Peter

Sloterdijk's Regeln fur den Menschenpark ("Rules for the Human Park"), the
following interview with Eric Alliez introduces the reader to Sloterdijk's appreciation of
contemporary cultural politics. However, the focal points of the interview are
Sloterdijk's core cultural conception of Nietzschean-inflected thought and his own
Sphere Theory, his ideas on immunization, notions of ecology, "anthropotechnics,"
and the question of Being. As these central themes of Sloterdijk's current work and
the title of this interview indicate, Sloterdijk's belief in "living hot, thinking coldly" is
also considered by Alliez alongside Sloterdijk's contribution to cultural and political
theory.

KEYWORDS: Regeln fur den Menschenpark, Nietzsche, Sphere Theory,

immunization, ecology, anthropotechnics

**********

Eric Alliez: Let's begin with the worst of beginnings: the so-called Sloterdijk Affair. (1)
The worst of beginnings whichever way you look at it. The Affair that bears that
name reduces the philosophical work of Peter Sloterdijk to a single lecture--Regeln
fur den Menschenpark--a lecture which was, in fact, published after the triggering of
the Affair in order to exhibit the implausibility of the reading made of it (Sloterdijk
1999a). For we must immediately note the impossibility--both in terms of content and
form-- of dialogue with the reader Habermas. Dialogue is impossible because
Habermas refuses to engage in it: you no longer belong to the circle of intellectuals
of sound mind--and we could refer back here to the primal scene in Book Gamma of
the Metaphysics in which Aristotle expels the sophist from the philosophical stage ...
But it's impossible, too, if we think of the way the dialogue begun in the early 1980s
by Habermas with Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard developed, because what's lacking is
a common polemical space, a minimal community of thought capable of sustaining
such a dialogue ... Because what's in question is the very definition of philosophy (in
its excess over the regulated circulation of "arguments"), the very definition of politics
(in its excess over the production of "consensus") ... Now, that excess is for
Habermas the exclusive and necessary mark of a lack, of a lapsing from democracy
synonymous with neoconservatism. With the Sloterdijk Affair, it's even argued that a
radical neoconservatism is at issue, reference being made to the most "dubious"
pages of the most "irresponsible" of philosophers: Nietzsche ... Quod erat
demonstrandum.

We must, then, review the general meaning of this Sloterdijk Affair, going back over
the course of it for the non-German reader. Knowing that the reader could have been
thrown somewhat by the summary versions provided by some columnists. I quote,
not entirely at random, a text printed in bold type: "The former German ultra-leftist
has gone over to radical neo-conservatism. But (sic) the hatred of democracy is still
present. Facing him, humanism is not disarmed (sic ) ... ".

Peter Sloterdijk: Starting out from current events would be the worst of things for a
philosopher of a classical orientation. But isn't it the best of beginnings for a
philosopher who involves himself in his times? If we have, as you suggest, to go
back over the Sloterdijk Affair--or, as it has sometimes been called, the Sloterdijk-
Habermas Scandal--let me say briefly why I think that Affair, which I see as a
manifestation of disquiet on the part of the contemporary intelligentsia at the national
and European levels, is an ideal starting point for our discussion. This is because,
with Nietzsche, I've always thought that free thinking is essentially an affair and that
it always will be. An affair in all possible senses of the word: drama, event, project,
offense, negotiation, noise, participation, excitation, emotion, collective confusion,
struggle, scrimmage, mimesis, business, and spectacle. As a consequence, if there
is a Sloterdijk Affair in the German media and in the French newspapers, with
epicenters in Israel and Brazil (bastions of a globalized Habermasianism), and if it's
given rise to a broad and relatively agitated debate on what is at stake--and at risk--
in the new biotechnologies, a debate triggered by my remarks at Elmau and Basle,
then I can't and won't withdraw from my responsibilities, even if, from the standpoint
of my philosophical project overall, I regret the way my actual argument has slipped
from the center to the periphery of the debate. Insofar as this discrepancy, this
polarization on a relatively marginal aspect of my work, isn't a mere error and an
innocent hermeneutic accident, it's worth our taking some time over the
phenomenon.
You've located precisely the origin of the "polemical complex" at work in the said
Affair: I find myself caught, in fact, in an impossible controversy with an adversary
who's omnipresent and absent at the same time. So in the months of September,
October, and November 1999, the German public had the opportunity to participate
in an asymmetric dialogue between a real philosopher, sublime and silent, by the
name of Jurgen Habermas, and a known sophist, Peter Sloterdijk, who, in the patent
absence of his opponent, carried on his little conversation alone with that impossible
Other. Hence that primal scene of academicism mentioned in your question. A scene
in which we were able to observe how true philosophers go about excluding the
sophist from the field of the pursuit of truth, so as to ensure sovereign control of the
terrain for the masters and possessors of true discourse. I'll add that, one primal
scene may conceal another: behind Aristotle's finger looms the menacing shadow of
that reeducation camp "in the country" reserved by Plato in The Laws for the
enraged, unrepentant atheists. Excommunication procedures have certainly changed
today, but they haven't particularly got any milder ... To arrive at the effective
exclusion of the sophist, the true philosopher of our age resorted to a clandestine
stratagem that would doubtless have effected that delicate operation for him if it
could have remained secret, but which was inevitably to produce a lethal effect if the
public became aware of it. Having, then, read and reviled the text of the sophist's
lecture, Regeln fur den Menschenpark, the philosopher of truth was to charge
another sophist, a journalist associated with the confraternity of true discourse, a
contributor to the Hamburg-based weekly, Die Zeit--that is to say, his faithful disciple
Thomas Assheuer--with denouncing the sophist Sloterdijk. The charge sheet was to
be read out loud and clear, the offenses being precisely those the philosopher did
not dare to pronounce publicly. Two weeks later, the scandal ordered by the master
of Stamberg was served up to him--accompanied by the most violent mental storm to
affect Germany since the end of the student protests and ultra-Left turbulence of the
1970s. But at that point the young sophist Assheuer, who no doubt aspired to be
received and recognized among the true philosophers, had to face up to the cruel
truth: Habermas--who hasn't neglected to read Carl Schmitt--never had the foolish
idea of descending into the arena in person. Does one really need to fight a duel to
make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can't the true philosopher have
himself represented by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes
aware of his master's cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause
and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth.

The rest of the story is better known in Germany than in France. The young sophist
was to take his revenge. A few weeks after the Affair exploded, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung of September 16 published extracts, wholly compromising for the
sender, of a letter from J. Habermas to T. Assheuer. It contained a violent critique of
the Elmau lecture. These extracts prove in the most conclusive way what Habermas
had denied in his response to Die Zeit-namely that he had pressed his Hamburg
lieutenant to launch an attack on the "authentically fascist" sophistry of the orator of
Elmau, whom one could no longer, according to the pronouncements of the master
of Stamberg, regard as a person "of sound mind." Alarm and consternation among
Habermas's last friends: the Master of "the inclusion of the other"--the title of one of
his latest books--is unmasked as having practiced a tactic of exclusion of almost
unprecedented brutality in postwar Germany and as having developed an
outlandish- not to say downright insane- reading of a philosophical text. I say
"almost," having in mind a certain precedent, which we must now analyze. Like you, I
have in my sights here that action-packed battle conducted by Habermas and his
people against those French thinkers who've been dubbed, practically and
reductively, "post-structuralists" or "neo-structuralists," and who offered Habermas
the ideal opportunity to go to war on yet one more occasion against his eternal
enemy, Nietzsche, and all those who refuse to treat the philosopher of Sils Maria as
a dead dog. By a pleasing coincidence, the premier German television channel ARD,
in a programme marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Institut
fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt (mythic headquarters of the School of the same
name)--this is September 20--showed the letter desperately concealed by Habermas
and his henchmen on camera--the letter which gave the lie to his official version of
the affair: he had "lied" to the public by brazenly downplaying his role in setting up
the scandal.

We touch here on the political heart of the affair: for Habermas did not lie when he
lied. He simply--one too many times perhaps--defended, by means that seemed
justified to him, given the dictates of militant democracy, what he sees as the space
of consensual truth against what he perceives as the irruption of the word of the
sophist, of a discourse that's polyvalent, essayistic, seductive, harmful, French, and
irresponsible. Having said this, it's clear that we're back once again--as in the early
1980s--at the heart of a struggle for the definition and redefinition of philosophy itself.
Your remarks make that point with all the requisite clarity. Let us nonetheless--
because we have to--define the field of philosophy by seeking to make something
out in the troubled waters of the "admissible" and the "inadmissible." It's the case
that, since my beginnings in philosophy, I've been too steeped in the lessons of
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Adorno, Bloch, Sartre, Foucault, Canetti, and other master-
thinkers for my generation not to be persuaded of this exigency: truth games of the
philosophical type, if they are not to sink into anodyne salon conversation, cannot
and must not be confined within the frames of an epistemological establishment or
within the institutions of a politics of knowledge that's given once and for all, even if
that politics comes with the best of recommendations, and claims the purest moral
and political intentions. If there's a common doctrine toward which the above-
mentioned great teachers and these proud researchers may converge, it would
doubtless be the following: modern philosophy, in its fruitful times, exposes itself to a
metabolism with that which is not philosophy--social struggles, madness, pain, the
arts, politics, accidents, clinical practice, and technologies. For 200 years, everything
that has fired authentic thinking has come from nonphilosophy irrupting into
philosophy--a movement inaugurated by Schopenhauer and the Young Hegelians.
The slogan of those times was to turn ideas back the right way up, to stand them on
their "real" foundations. Hence the well-known schema of "base" and
"superstructures." Thinking, henceforth, would mean engaging in a battle for the
meaning of the "real." But the battle over the "real" is not over, even after the decline
of Marxist theory (which was the logical heart of that battle for a century). It is
present more than ever in our activities and our constructions of the world. To the
point where, for the first time in the history of mentalities, everyone wants to be a
"realist" ... I'm convinced we can't at the present time be said to need one more
definition of philosophy: we have too many of them already, all useful and all
useless. We must, rather, provide evidence that la pensee de la difference, thinking
without epithets, still exists. We must interrupt the arrivistes' danse macabre of
realism. In my view, the real danger for thought today is the rise of a neo-
scholasticism normalizing almost the whole of academic production, which coexists
in a dangerous liaison with omnipresent mediatization, a phenomenon that has
replaced reflection (one would, in the past, have dared to say existential reflection)
and theoretical work with a neoserious attitude and/or an anticonformist conformism.
What is dangerous is this kind of "totalitarianism lite," which has left its mark on the
Zeitgeist throughout the Western world. Consequently, I would be much more
interested not in a definition of philosophy, but in its de-definition, in a de-
scholasticization, a de-conformization, even indeed a de-professionalization of
reflection, provided it were a wise subversion of pseudo-professionalism. As a
philosophical writer who's defined the essay as a definitive form of the provisional, I
have in my sights an essayistic notion of philosophy of the highest possible level.
Isn't philosophy a thing much too fine, much too real to be left to the philosophers
alone? Each one of us mocking philosophy as best he or she can.

I should like to come back now to the formula you put to me, to this language game
that's supposed to sum up my intellectual entelechy between an "ultra-Leftist"
starting point and a finishing point named "radical neoconservatism." Let's put aside
for a moment the ignorant, disparaging aspects of such a construction, and let's
forget the Habermasian stamp upon it. This is an amusing and revealing equation
because it reveals a highly significant phantasm quite commonly found among the
new conformists, whether they present themselves as people of the Left or as
prudent representatives of the liberal Center-Left. In my view, they hallucinate a
trajectory that's dual in character: it is copied phantasmatically from their own
itineraries (what have they become if not conservatives?) and they know those
itineraries fail radically to meet the imperatives of an intelligence freed of the ballast
with which they have burdened themselves. That hallucination isn't, then, without a
certain interest, and even a certain truth, if I may be so bold, because those who
argue this way are admitting, in an indirect and yet quite clear way, that they have, at
a certain point in their mental development, stopped thinking. And how could it be
otherwise, since they have found the truth, have locked themselves away in divine
reunion with it? They haven't moved, in fact, since the post-May 68 period. They
couldn't move because they effectively came home--sure of themselves, sure of their
rights and their property. But did that mean they could totally lose the sense of
movement when others, once of the same ilk, were moving away from them? It was
tempting at that point to conclude that the others' movement led from a possibly
shared and--in spite of its excesses (the ultra-Leftism they have thrown off)--
potentially good starting point to an intrinsically bad end point, an end point not at all
shared, which diabolizes any departure from their stock-in-trade, which is the
regulated production of consensus (the extremes say the same about the Other). He
who distances himself from the axiomatics of an eternal--but rebranded--Left,
anchored in the fundamentum inconcussum of good conscience and its timeless
commitments, is consequently doomed to move closer to the Right of yesteryear
(which is historically their own truth) or, worse still, to team up with the
neoconservatives who, it is (quite wrongly) imagined, would reserve an extremely
warm welcome for the deserters from the ultra-Left.

Everyone has experienced this kind of disorientation: you're in a train in the station
and suddenly there's movement; you don't know if it's the train alongside that's
started up or your own train. To dispel the dizziness and distinguish between the
movements, you have to recover a sense of stability. This has been part of the
cognitive biogram of Homo presapiens and Homo sapiens since we lived in hordes
on the savannah. We're programmed to lend the most extreme attention to the
slightest movement picked out against a stable horizon. We might speak here of the
origin of difference by the irruption of an unexpected presence or development
against a flat horizon. But how are we to orient ourselves in a world where that
horizon has begun to shift? How are we to think in a world where the sun has
stopped revolving around the earth and where things have stopped revolving around
the subject?

Here lies the whole irony of the discourse on the alleged neoconservatism of those
allegedly irresponsible individuals who've chosen to project the immediate data of
the ultra-Leftist consciousness of 1968 into somewhat less ... immediate directions.
Those who haven't moved for a longtime and who nonetheless claim an important
position for themselves at the head of the hierarchy of ideas, are at loggerheads--
and thus in a constant clinch--with those who've espoused the movement of our
times at the level of "existential" experiment and at the level of the concept, to
undertake a renewed analysis of that permanent revolution that expresses itself in an
unparalleled social, technological, artistic, and scientific dynamism. I note in passing
that I fell in love with this French expression "epouser le mouvement" (was it in a text
by Virilio that I stumbled upon it?). A rather sublime expression, which can translate
one of the richest ideas of Heideggerian thought--when it ventures to conceive Being
as movement, as "thrownness" [Geworfenheit] and "consignment" or "dispatch"
[Geschick] and as correspondence to that movement.

We must, therefore, expect frictions between those who espouse "thrownness" and
who, as a consequence, distance themselves from commonplaces (which have, in
any case, lost all usefulness), and those who've settled into their "posts" and remain
comfortably in their places, inducing in themselves the illusion of movement by
watching the trains go by. To cut a long analysis short--I don't want to become
interminable--I shall refer to the little book of dialogues with Carlos Oliveira, a young
Spanish philosopher of a socialist orientation who has chosen for himself a pantheon
of rather singular thinkers--John of the Cross, Marx, Derrida, and the German
Idealists--that has just appeared in a French translation entitled L'essai d'intoxication
volontaire. (2) Toward the end of these dialogues, you'll find a number of passages
concerned with analyzing the moral and conceptual disorientation of the "classicist"
Left ("classical" is too inhabited by the nasty word "class" ...), together with certain
hints for better understanding the driving forces behind this Babylonian confusion of
political languages that's evident nowadays--a confusion which means that quite
often even potential allies no longer recognize each other as such.

In spite of all these risks, L'essai d'intoxication volontaire was very favorably received
in France. Roger-Pol Droit's observations in his article in Le Monde des livres were in
my view very indicative: the inevitably light tone of this recorded conversation didn't
detract from the understanding of the philosophical issues. I mention this fact also
because I had read his L'oubli de L'Inde with a great deal of sympathy and I share
Roger-Pol Droit's revulsion at the incredible ignorance European philosophers
display toward Indian philosophy and, more generally, the thought of Eastern and
non-European civilizations. These are subjects that have been close to my heart
since my return from India in 1980. I've even asked myself at times under what
conditions Raymond Schwab's formula regarding an "Oriental Renaissance" (1984)
could take on new meaning for our times... There remains the (essential) fact--which
other articles published since in France seem to indicate, such as Bruno Latour's
(1999) or your piece in Le Monde des debats (1999)--that my analysis of the
ideological confusion and disarray of the old Left may present some interest on the
other side of the Rhine. Dare I add that I would have been astonished had that not
been the case? ...
A last word on my alleged "radical neoconservatism," the senile malady of the initial
ultra-Leftism. I freely concede that this is a particularly economical summary of the
Affair that bears my name. But why economize on intelligence? This particular
economical individual seems to draw his knowledge of my deep motives from
downright occult sources. Otherwise, how could he declare, on the basis of my
Elmau lecture, over which he can be said to have cast a lofty eye, that "the hatred of
democracy is still there"? Is it so difficult to recognize that the task of the philosopher,
one of his roles in our modern societies, is to produce, for oneself and one's fellow
citizens, an analysis of the weaknesses and flaws in our system of organization of
communal life? Does one show hatred of democracy by thinking not only that it can
cope with the description of its real or potential failings, but that it must also
determine, so far as is possible--the limits never being laid down in advance--the
course of its future development? Does one show scorn for democracy by
conceiving it as a set of arrangements of the "collective intelligence" (Pierre Levy's
fine book comes to mind here) and by believing--rather classically-that it's an
intelligent machinery that prospers only when subjected to permanent criticism? In
short, I'm sure that democracy, when it devises for itself some other course than
mere survival on principle, lives by the good offices of those who aren't disposed to
idealize it (and we know how much those idealists know how to exploit it as though it
were their fiefdom: do they not derive copious benefits from it?). It's only too clear
what a democratic deficit there would be if we allowed the conformists of every
stamp to stifle free thinking to the point of prohibiting the questioning and
problematizing contained in an uncompromising critique. I'll permit myself to refer
here to the article "Du centrisme mou au risque de penser," in which I attempted to
explain the devastating effects of the Kohl era on the culture of debate in our
country--that implosion of the political space, that advent of a boundless conformism
that is the unthought element of the Habermas System.

EA: Since the appearance of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983) (3) and Der
Denker auf der Buhne (1986), (4) which is a commentary on The Birth of Tragedy,
two of your works that are translated into French, it's been possible to see you as the
only German philosopher likely to lay claim to Foucault's assertion that he was
"simply Nietzschean" ... I'd like you, then, to expand on the sense of that reading of
Nietzsche, if possible, on the priority you seem to accord to the young philosopher of
The Birth of Tragedy to the detriment of the thinker of the "will to power"; your (by no
means simple) relationship to Heideggerian interpretation; and, lastly, and above all,
what you mean by "Dionysian materialism": what kind of higher materialism is in play
here and how does this notion specify the general category of vitalism if Nietzsche is,
indeed, in your eyes, the philosopher of life par excellence.
PS: "Simply Nietzschean." That's a phrase that would certainly fire my imagination,
even if I didn't know who'd said it. It's an obvious fact to me that the Nietzsche event
was that earthquake, that cerebral upheaval, which overthrew the entire intellectual
tradition of old Europe. In Ecce Homo, we find very explicit traces of the epochal
consciousness Nietzsche had of the distant effects he bore within him. I'm thinking
particularly of the famous pronunciamento: "One lives before me or after me," (5)
which sounds like the interior monologue of a Messiah busy with the reform of the
calendar made necessary by his appearance. If one were looking for an example
that proved megalomania and sobriety can coincide, this is surely it. For we must
admit that it's a matter of record for us: we do, indeed, live after Nietzsche. Let's hold
to the idea that this coincidence of the megalomaniac and the sober is philosophy
itself. The philosopher is that grandiloquent human being to whom it occurs that the
grandeur of the ideas he formulates exceeds his grandiloquence. In Aristotelian
terms, he's the zoon logon (megalon) echon. It would, of course, be possible to
replace the term "grandeur" with less shocking expressions: substantiality, efficacity,
pertinence, validity, precision, creativity, potency, operativity. But, whatever the
expression chosen, we accept that there are, in any event, thinking beings through
whom something "happens" that affects the state of reality as such. Which amounts
to positing that real thought is a production. Parenthetically, it seems necessary here
to ask the following question: if philosophical megalomania is a reality, wouldn't it be
entirely reasonable to conceive the parallel existence of a specifically philosophical
megalo-depression? Is this to say that the thought of our century will have been, to a
very large extent, merely the drama of the inter-pathology of ideas and thinkers?
Inter-madness [inter-folie]--a concept to revisit. So, "simply Nietzschean"--what can
that mean in the conditions of contemporary thought? Let's begin by noting that the
formula is, first, a chronological statement which says that we're situated in a time
"after" someone. In this, it's entirely in line with the title of Giorgio Colli's famous
book, Dopo Nietzsche. We know the social sciences and contemporary philosophy
have formed the habit of dating themselves within a period after a master-thinker.
The post-Freud period of J.B. Pontalis comes to mind; the post-Saussure of the
structuralists; the post-Foucault of the new genealogists and archivists; the post-
Braudel of the psychohistorians, and, more recently, the post-Luhmann period (at
least in Germany) of the analysts of social systems and subsystems.

But this mere observation that modern thinking is marked by its historicity and that
the proper names of the major authors serve us as markers in the chaotic flow of
discourses doesn't go far enough. We have to go further and delve into the content
and method of a radically contemporary thinking. Hence the following questions:
What is thought (la pensee) if one thinks "after Nietzsche"? And how does one think
if one thinks within the sphere of influence and on the horizon of Nietzschean
thought?
The answer to the first of these questions must indicate why that thought is at the
center of modern civilization. For, after Nietzsche, one thinks (most of the time
without realizing it) the conditions of possibility and the conditions of reality of life.
One tries to understand how life, a life, our lives (and our thinking about these lives)
are possible--and, among the answers given to this question, there's one that relates
to philosophy. (Let us, for the moment, define philosophy as that agency of wisdom
whose task is to manage the question of truth within an advanced civilization.) The
answer consists in the proposition that life, a life, our shared life is possible by virtue
of the fact that human beings are endowed with a sense of truth. This sixth sense
enables them to live a life more or less successfully and be part of a development:
first, because it provides them with the means to adapt to a given environment
(accommodation of the intellect to things) and, second, because it inspires in them
the respect for the rules that make up the religion of the tribe (accommodation of
behavior to the "divine" law). This is also why, after Nietzsche, the theory of truth--the
old royal discipline of philosophy--transforms itself into an element of an expanded
metabiological reflection. (Here again it's tempting to make use of the schema of de-
definition: life and theory are things too important to abandon to the biologists alone.)
In my most recent work, I've set about integrating psychoanalysis, the history of
ideas and images, systems theory, sociology, urbanism, etc. into a metaparadigm I
call General Immunology or, alternatively, Sphere Theory. If one takes the new
definition of life (of a life) given by the immunologists at this century's end, according
to which life, a life, is the success phase of an immune system, one immediately
grasps how these studies lend themselves to a Nietzschean reformulation of the
question of truth. From the standpoint of Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean
philosophical metabiology, "truth" is understood as a function of vital systems that
serves in their orientation in the "world" and their cultural, motivational, and
communicational autoprogramming. At this level we are dealing with a
philosopher/biologist Nietzsche, the author of the famous phrase, "We have need of
lies ... in order to live."(6) In my terminology, one would say that the truths (which I
shall term "first-order") are symbolic immune systems. Lives are condemned to
perform a permanent effort of raising their morpho-immune shields against the
microbiological invasions and semantic lesions (we call these "experiences") to
which they are exposed. Now, I think this way of considering individuals' systems of
opinions has moral implications of considerable scope. It teaches, not a duty of
reserve, but a decision to act with reserve. In postconsensual society, I regard this
kind of ethics as indispensable.

If we turn now to the second question--that of the "how" or the methodical approach
of a properly Nietzschean thinking - we note immediately that there's a second level
in Nietzschean thinking on truth, which is strictly different from the first. Here,
Nietzsche is the philosopher-adventurer: he abandons the terrain defined by concern
with the vital system and immunitary illusionism, whether that of the individual or the
social body. He advances into a region where he discovers (second-order) truths,
the effect of which is indifferent to the vital interests of human beings or, worse,
which is directly opposed to those interests. There is, then, a second face of truth. If
the first were that of a protective mother, the second assumes the features of the
Medusa. Faced with the former, one melts; confronted with the latter, one freezes.
The meta-immune or contra-immune function of the (second-order) truth
consequently triggers an internal crisis in the human beings who have ventured too
far into these forms of knowledge that transcend life or are definitively harmful to life.
One might thus venture that modern philosophy (the philosophy that has killed God,
the ultimate expression of the will to be integrated into an incorruptible space) is the
equivalent at the level of cognitive systems of what doctors call the auto-immune
illnesses. (Sokal and Bricmont can pull out their notebooks here for an augmented
edition of their book! Since I don't dare believe they'd accept the invitation to join my
seminar on the role of scientific metaphor in the development of cutting-edge
theories ... )

Thought reaches its maximum degree of discomfort here, for this challenge is
addressed to the pride of the animal endowed with logos. Knowing we can think
strictly unbearable things, do we for that reason have to give up the adventure of
thought because most of the "hard truths" aren't assimilable as such by human
beings, by all human beings? Shall we deduce from this that life should at all costs
strive to avoid the truths "external" to it? Midi-Minuit is the hour of the meeting with
the other Nietzsche, with the metaphysician of the artistic function of life, who
formulated the battlefield for "inhuman" truths in two sentences. First: We have art in
ordernot to die of [the] truth; and: Let knowledge advance, let life perish! (7)

We shan't take this analysis of the conflict between the thinkable and the bearable
any further here. There's a very useful book by Rudiger Safranski (Wieviel Wahrheit
braucht der Mensch?) that may serve as an introduction to this particular
problematic. I simply point out that this too cursory survey contains all the elements
of an answer to the question why I may have accorded priority to the earliest
Nietzsche. It was, in fact, the young Basle philologist who opened up the battle of the
titans of our age around the essent by showing that the Dionysian isn't in itself
bearable, that it's life itself that's incapable of bearing itself as it is and which, as a
consequence, invents more "pleasing" representations--representations that "please"
us. To use the vocabulary of The Birth of Tragedy, life "transfigures" itself. One might
say it invests the "secondary process." (In this connection: who doesn't see that all
the principles of Viennese psychoanalysis can be found in the text of the young
Nietzsche, including its keyword, primal scene, found there in the plural: Urszenen
des Leidens, which we might render as the "archi-dramas of suffering"?) By way of a
rather bizarre mythological apparatus, not well received by Greek scholars,
Nietzsche outlines a science that is to come--a science that could bear the name of
vitalist constructivism (which was recognized at a certain point in the debate around
Nietzsche's work under the somewhat mediocre label of "active nihilism"). It's mainly
this "hard" Nietzsche that interests me, the philosopher who tried to think without any
regard whatever for the stabilization of his own system of vital illusions. That
particular Nietzsche offers a poignant interpretation of his idea that the philosopher is
the physician of civilization, for, in order to train in that perilous profession, he throws
himself into radical experimentation in vivo on the system of illusions on which his
life--and perhaps human life in general--is founded. This is, ultimately, what I mean
by the term Selbstversuch, self-experiment ... (8) What the simply Nietzschean
thinkers of a generation more feted than our own called "la pensee du dehors."

In my most recently published book, the second volume of Spheres (1998b), which is
on macrospheres or globes (let us not forget that the sphere of all physical spheres
for more than 2,000 years bore, in old Europe, the fine name of "Cosmos" and that
the sphere of all mental or vital spheres was called "God"), I ventured the para-
Nietzschean proposition: The Sphere is dead. I attempted to outline there the
programme of a "vitalist" or "supervitalist" philosophical thinking, that is to say, an
introduction to the specifically modern dilemma, as it expresses itself in this
antithesis: (A) We think to immunize ourselves (and here it is the mental immune
system that thinks--let us say, the individual and collective poetico-hallucinatory
system; the immune cogito). (B) We destroy (ortranscend) our mental immune
system when we think (and it is real, operative, external thought that gains the upper
hand there; it thinks, a masterless thinking). This dual model of thought carries far
beyond the traditional critique of ideologies, into an area beyond the vrai naif and the
faux naif. In my view, the famous parable of paragraph 125 of The Gay Science, in
which the death of God is proclaimed, invokes precisely the need to invent a new
poetics of immunizing space. And this can be done only in an exteriority that will
forever be radically ahead of any construction of an interior. "How shall we console
ourselves ... we who are the murderers of all murderers?" (9) By making love? By
engaging in politics? By building well-heated houses and planning functional
hospitals, which are, indeed, essential? (In the terms of a theory of religion: the
probability of encountering God in the world having become much more remote than
the opposite proposition, it's necessary to replace divine, heavenly, and private
immunity with a technical, earthly, political immunity. I should point out that in my
view this substitution is the hard core of the process of modernization.) All this
bringing us back to the impossible dialogue between Nietzscheans and anti-
Nietzscheans. I propose the following scenario: the former warm themselves in life
and like (or put up with) cold in thought; the latter are cold in life and seek to find
some warmth in thought. The former have broken the sound barrier of human and
humanistic illusionism and no longer (or only indirectly) obey the traditional
exigencies of the Lebenswelt; the latter apply themselves to building the new
cathedrals of communication, and they heat those cathedrals using the pleasant
illusions maintained by the neo-humanist, neo-idealist, or neo-transcendalist schools,
etc. This amounts to saying that we don't live on the same isothermal lines.

EA: Hence this inevitable and necessary tactical or strategic dimension in the
"materialist" use you make of the early Nietzsche ...

PS: Precisely. If only to break with the rather too exclusive attention paid by
research, where this author is concerned, to that doctrine of the "will to power" that
was monstrously twisted by the jackbooted, helmeted readers of the 1930s. Now, the
writings of the young philologist seemed to me haunted by what I've called his
"Dionysian materialism." This provocative expression signaled my intention to read
the Nietzschean corpus as forming part of the subversive tradition of those marginal
thinkers who've managed to keep themselves apart from the idealist closure. In the
1980s, this notion of "materialism"--which I employed with a touch of humor--had, in
spite of everything, retained a last hint of its initial aggressiveness. It seemed always
useable to me as a positional--and oppositional--beacon in relation to an intellectual
environment that displayed hostility to everything that could evoke the vitalism of the
early years of the century. This is to say how delighted I am at the edition of the
works of Tarde you're publishing ... I wasn't unaware, either, that this "materialist"
terminology was going to create definite unease among Heideggerians of a neo-
pietist persuasion. Having proposed an iconoclastic--and "Left-wing"--reading of
Heidegger's work in Critique of Cynical Reason, I didn't at any cost wish to be
confused with that de-virilized, conservative Heideggerianism ... As for Heidegger's
enormous (not, it must be said, a particularly Nietzschean quality) and, in certain
respects, admirable Nietzsche, I must stress I've never accepted his claim to have
"gone beyond" Nietzsche. On the contrary, it was, in my view, in Nietzsche that one
should look for paths leading somewhere, (10) toward an open future for thought.
"Dionysian materialism": the formula expresses the need for a rapprochement
between the post-Marxist and post-Nietzschean currents, a highly implausible
encounter in the academic and public context of the time. It's true that I haven't
explicitly gone back to this formula in the fifteen years since the publication of
Thinker on Stage. And yet it's become virtually second nature to me, and if I didn't
use the expression often, that's because I'd formed the habit of considering all my
problems and all my interventions in the affective light of this concept--without having
any further need to develop its purely theoretical dimensions. I carry the notion on
my head like a miner's lamp; without it I couldn't follow the seam that keeps leading
me on. Now, to come back to the question: there is, for certain, a strong
epistemological linkage between concepts like "Dionysian materialism" and
"vitalism," a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and
life technics (11) have just passed into a new phase of their development. We're
arriving at a point where the most committed idealists are obliged to admit the
productive and "ideoplastic" nature of the process of conceptual labor. More
specifically, where the expression "superior materialism" that you propose and use in
your writings is concerned, I'm very sorry that the work of Gotthard Gunther isn't
known in France. Gunther is the author of an amazing book and more than the title
of it, The Consciousness of Machines. A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (1963),
deserves to be translated. He also wrote an enormous work in several volumes
aimed at defining the principles of a non-Aristotelian logic (1976-80). This is a mass
of "impregnable" ideas, and it has become a source of constant inspiration for the
necessary reform of the philosophical grammar of old Europe. After the shock
induced by Nietzsche, a shock with multiple effects, that reform is continuing, of
course, in the works of contemporary thinkers: Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Luhmann
... But in Gunther's work the concept of a "formless matter" embodies, in my view, all
that's been thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of "things" to "mind." It
tests out a trivalent--or multivalent--logic that's so potent it could rid us of the
impotent, brutal binarism of the mind/thing, subject/object, idea/matter type ...

EA: It's easier now to see how you can be regarded as the most French of the
German philosophers ... Whether it's to deplore your dependence on what's been
called neo-structuralist thought (Manfred Frank) and "la pensee 68" (Ferry and
Renaut), or to include you "affirmatively" in that movement of
biopolitical/biophilosophical thought that has its anchorage points in Deleuze and
Foucault. What thoughts do these French "positionings" of your work inspire in you?
What are your relations with that "darker, nighttime concept of the political that casts
its gaze on the hidden ecology of universal pain," referred to in your Nietzsche book
(1989: 76)? What's the meaning of this appeal to an "expressive ecology of a new
kind," to which you give the name Psychonautics?

PS: It seems to me that in transposing the opposition I've just outlined between
thinking in the cold and the warming function of ideas to the level of the "geopolitics
of ideas," one sees immediately "why I'm so French." Actually, it isn't my fault if the
French thought of this century has produced a set of exceptional authors who
embody the cold tendency of contemporary thought in entirely impressive forms. I
confine myself merely to naming Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Deleuze. This is the
crystal sky above discourse, above the order of discourse of the human sciences at
this close of the twentieth century. And it's no accident if reading Nietzsche was a
turning point for most of them. As for me, it was the great stroke of luck of my
intellectual life that I encountered these French Nietzscheans at a point when it was
inconceivable to read Nietzsche in Germany. More precisely, it was the encounter
with Foucault in Les mots et les choses that catapulted me into a space of reflection
that went beyond my original philosophical training, steeped as it was in young-
Hegelian and Marxist thinking, particularly in its Adornian version. I was immediately
dazzled by the aura of serenity and rigor that emanated from Foucault's work, yet I
felt an indescribable sense of nausea reading it. I realize today that my distress was
a reflex, or rather an alarm signal indicating to me that I'd been pulled irreversibly
into a decisively non-Hegelian, non-Kantian mode of thought. I was taking my first
steps in a mental space where the logic of reconciliation through a final synthesis no
longer operated. For anyone raised in the Hegelian faith, in the Principle of Hope, in
the comfort of teleological thought and the necessity of the categorical imperative, in
the "happy-endism" of the philosophy of history, in the as-if-messianism of Benjamin
and Adorno, and in the certainty that the great refuser is morally superior to the
"collaborators" with the data of experience (which was, in fact, the spiritual source of
the Frankfurt School in its first incarnation), reading Foucault was a bit like having
your heart torn out by an Aztec priest with a tip of obsidian. If I had to characterize
the Foucault of that period of my intellectual history, I'd say that he seemed to me
like someone who no longer philosophized with a hammer, but with a blade of
obsidian. For obsidian has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. (12)

As a result of the shock of that treatment and the flashbacks that made me relive the
experience, riffling back through it with curiosity--I'm thinking here of my trip to India--
I moved right away from the archipelago of dialectics, of phenomenology, of
Frankfurt politico/neo-Messianic thought and entered a quite other space that I now
recognize as being identical to the field of conceptual creation opened up by
Nietzsche. It may perhaps be useful to remind the reader that, if this kind of thought
coexists necessarily with a practice of writing, that practice has nothing whatever to
do with the caricaturally simplistic ideas of those who doggedly persist in believing
that philosophy is first and foremost a matter of content, the "rest" being a mere
rhetorical dressing-up of that same content. I think, quite to the contrary, that
resolutely modern philosophy invests the extinction of the metaphysical distinction
between form and content as one of its constitutive aspects. This is why it's highly
probable that a philosophy [une pensee] that doesn't exist in its writing won't count
as a philosophy [une pensee]. To anyone wishing to test out this proposition, I can
recommend the Wittgensteinian corpus, since that master of "analytic" thinking, who
never knew the pleasure of the text as flow of sentences (he was incapable of
chatting), only ever produced logical crystals, in the sense that the heights of "clarity"
he achieved are above all heights of formulation. With this paradoxical effect: the fact
that Wittgenstein is the only philosopher-writer of our century to have managed to
gain recognition by the "hardest" academicism is down to academicians not having
realized they were dealing with a writer, with an artist of the concept who might be
hailed as the inventor of minimal art in philosophy.
For my part, and insofar as an author can speak of his intentions, if I had to
characterize my philosophical work, I'd say it's positioned--and moves--in an
oscillation between the incredibly soft and the absolutely hard. The reader of
Spheres I (1998a) finds herself grappling with an author-psychonaut undertaking a
descent into the symbiotic hell, into the womb of the Great Mother. That reading may
reveal itself to be of a pitiless gentleness. By contrast, in volumes II and III, one
traverses passages of cosmic coldness: it's the visit to the world of human beings by
a cosmonautical, extraterrestrial intelligence. This visitor from Outside describes the
mental machinations of traditional and modern societies with a perfectly cold eye, for
he isn't afraid to take the metaphysical constructions of "security," in which human
beings have installed themselves, for what they are. Between the very gentle and the
very hard is played out what I've termed "the hidden ecology of universal pain." I like
to think that in a hundred years' time there'll be an author capable of writing the book
we might be said to need today on a general ecology of suffering, technologies, and
illusions.

So far as Deleuze's work is concerned, which isn't far removed from a similar project,
I realize that at the time I quite simply missed the encounter with it. It's only in recent
times that I've begun to read him in a more coherent way. Although friends pointed
out to me almost twenty years ago a certain kinship between his approach and my
intentions, I wasn't able to achieve the resonance for myself. It's different today. I
began reading A Thousand Plateaux and Critique et clinique, as well as Spinoza,
philosophie pratique, with tremendous pleasure, and sometimes feeling I learned
more in an hour's reading than in a year of ordinary research. Which is to say how
much the encounter is useful to me for a better understanding of what I'm looking for
philosophically without ever being sure of having found it ... The trace of Deleuze will
be perceptible in the third volume of the Spheres project, which is called Schaume
[Foams]. You'll see how I try to combine the biophilosophical propositions of the
French writers with my ideas on general morpho-immunology (or spherology). The
theme of the "hidden ecology of universal pain" will be further developed as a result.

EA: Do you want to say something more about the pretext-lecture of Elmau?

PS: A last word, then ... on what was at stake there in philosophical terms: from the
standpoint I've termed anthropotechnical. An expression, I may remark in passing,
that whipped up a storm among the German square-heads (the expression belongs
to a broader field of concepts in which its antonym "theotechnic" also figures, but one
should also add hippotechnic, caninotechnic, felinotechnic, rhodotechnic,
narcotechnic, etc. to reestablish the complete lexicon of an analysis of the
hominization-domestication-biopower complex). Most readers--in Germany, France,
and elsewhere--didn't feel it necessary to point out that my lecture makes practically
no reference to what the media coverage of the Sloterdijk Affair put at the center of
the debate. Yes, that lecture--for we are talking about a lecture here--doesn't speak
about biotechnology, genetics, bioethics, etc., and, if it ventures on to that terrain, it
does so allusively, in the manner of a marginal note (no wonder, then, that some
commentators can claim to be "unsatisfied"!). What interested me was the clearing
Heidegger speaks of. My reflections were on that superphenomenal "phenomenon"
that projects us into the openness where everything shows itself: the place from
which the world is only world. Who's afraid of the clearing? As I conceive it, it's the
gap of an opening or a distance between human intelligence and the "environment"--
it's the site of the human ekstasis that brings it about that we are "in-the-world."

What is the clearing precisely? How was it carved out in the forest of being--and by
what techniques? This is the question we have to pose, at fresh cost to ourselves, to
find a way to a philosophical and historical anthropology that measures up to our
contemporary knowledge. (I've just published a short text in Germany on the natural
history of the "principle of distance" as a relation of human beings to nature in a
recent number of the magazine Geo ([September 1998]). Which may shock
Heideggerians by my desire to work for the birth of a philosophical anthropology of a
new type: these remarks are, in fact, an integral part of a reflection on the
foundations of a biocultural discourse of the clearing. The theory of neoteny (l3) has
to do with this reflection in the Elmau lecture.) So I've attempted to render
Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose benevolence is anything but
ironic. For Nietzsche and Plato have invited themselves to the "symposium" to
comment on the ideas of Heidegger, to put forward their opinions on the drama
played out in the clearing. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How human
beings produce themselves. And suddenly everyone wants to be invited, everyone--
dramatically--wants to be part of the debate, to take part in it.

When I reread the mountain of articles prompted by the lecture, I noticed that the
typical sentence was of the negative order of the "acknowledgement of fact": what I
was saying wasn't new; my remarks were so lacking in originality that it wasn't at all
clear why anyone should waste their time on my text. The dynamics of these
statements seem to me entirely clear: our opinions will remain exactly the same both
before and after the reading of a philosophical text. We want a knowledge that's
independent--independent of any thought, and even more so of any disturbing
thought. We shall turn, then, to the experts, for the expert is precisely the person
who no longer needs to think: he has already thought. The whole secret of his
profession consists in having us share in his postreflexive serenity. As guardian of
collective nonthought, his profession is a very liberal one. Hence this concert of
experts affirming in unison: Sloterdijk has perhaps sparked a debate, but to conduct
that debate properly we must begin by excluding this provocateur who has said
nothing new--except perhaps ... but no, and leave us in peace!

One of the most interesting versions of this cliche was provided by Henri Atlan on the
occasion of an interview he gave to Le Monde des debats (Atlan 1999). Strange for a
declared Spinozist ... Disinclined to waste his precious time with the anacoluthons of
my prose (it must be remembered that the expert is a salaried individual), his media
grammatology was apparently to be satisfied with an antithesis as crude as it was
symptomatic: where the problems posed by the biotechnologies were concerned,
one could speak either as a philosopher (and if that's the case, you can't say much
that's particularly relevant, given that it's easier to quote Plato than to produce a
clone) or as a technical medical man (in which case one will have complete mastery
of discourse since, by definition, the expert has mastery of knowledge: in this case,
what it costs to clone a human being). In short, Monsieur Atlan finds it difficult to
admit there might exist a discourse, that is to say, in principle a movement of
thought, which proposes, philosophically and rigorously, to question technology as a
form of production of self-evident facts, the order of experts as controllers of
knowledge, and the claim of certain experts (the most eminent) to control both their
discipline and its "philosophical premisses" ...

The fact remains that Henri Atlan's contribution is precious on at least one point--
and, in my view, not the least important. It is so in as much as it emphasizes with all
the requisite vigor that German edginess about these topics--the product of a
criminal, abject euthanasian "eugenics" that is part of our history--is one thing, and
the challenge of the biotechnologies and biopolitics of the future is another. Whether
many people like it or not, it is this radical difference that provides us with food for
thought.

Translated by Chris Turner

REFERENCES

Atlan, Henri. 1999. "La biologie de demain n'est pas l'eugenisme nazi." Le Monde
des debats, November.
Bergson, Henri. 1996. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness. Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing Co.

Gunther, Gotthard. 1963. Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. BadenBaden/Krefeld:

Agis-Verlag.

Latour, Bruno. 1999. "Un nouveau Nietzsche." Le Monde des debats, November.

Levy, Pierre. 1994. L'intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace.

Paris: La Decouverte.

Nietzsche, F 1979. Ecce Homo. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

--1873[1980]. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Trans. with an introduction
by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc.

--1959. Die frohliche Wissenschaft. Munich: Goldmann. Schwab, R. 1984. The

Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880.
Trans. G. Patterson-Black and V. Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1983. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.

--1986. Der Denker auf der Buhne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.

--1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. London: Verso.

--1989. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism. Trans. Jamie Owen Daniel.

Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. 1996. Selbstversuch: Selbstversuch. Ein
Gesprach mit Carlos Oliveira. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.

--1998a. Spharen 1. Blasen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.

--1998b. Spharen 11. Globen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.

--1998c. "Das Phanomen Adam." Geo, vol. 9: 43-6.

--1999a. Regeln fur den Menschenpark. Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heidegger's Brief

uber den Humanismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.

--1999b. "Du centrisme mou au risque de penser." Le Monde des debats, November.

NOTES

(1.) This interview was conducted by Eric Alliez by e-mail and completed in January
2000. It was first published in Multitudes 1 (2000). Alliez is here making an allusion
to Bergson's Les Donnees immediates de la conscience, translated into English as
Time and Free Will (1996).

(2.) Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1999. German: Selbstversuch (1996).

(3.) Translated by Michael Eldred and published in 1988 as Critique of Cynical

Reason.

(4.) Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel and published in 1989 as Thinker on Stage,
subtitled "Nietzsche's Materialism."

(5.) This is a paraphrase. The passage referred to in Ecce Homo reads in translation
as follows: "The unmasking of Christian morality is an event without equal, a real
catastrophe. He who exposes it is a force majeure, a destiny--he breaks the history
of mankind into two parts. One lives before him, one lives after him" (1979: 133).

(6.) The Will to Power, section 853.

(7.) "Fiat veritas, pereat vita." This is quoted in section IV of the "Foreword" to
Nietzsche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873).

(8.) Selbstversuch (1996) is the original title of L'essai d'intoxication volontaire.

(9.) "Wie trosten wir uns, die Morder aller Morder?" (Nietzsche 1959: 167).

(10.) An allusion to Chemins qui menent nulle part, the title of the French translation
of Heidegger's Holzwege.

(11.) These two terms in English in original.

(12.) An allusion to Pascal's "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point."

(13.) A zoological term referring to the capacity of certain species to procreate in a

state of biological immaturity. In his book, Das Problem der Menschwerdung (Jena,
1926), the anthropologist Ludwig Bolk developed the hypothesis that human
morphology reflects foetal states that have become permanent. This theory was
integrated into the work of the last of the masters of German sociology and historical
anthropology, Dieter Claessens (see Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte, Frankfurt
a.M., 1980). In France, Dany-Robert Dufour has led the way in stressing the
importance of the concept of neoteny (see Lettre sur la nature humaine a l'usage des
survivants, Calmann-Levy, 1999). [Information communicated by P Sloterdijk.]

PETER SLOTERDIJK IS A GERMAN PHILOSOPHER, BEST KNOWN IN THE

ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD FOR CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON (1987). HE
IS PRESIDENT OF THE STATE ACADEMY OF DESIGN, PART OF THE CENTER
FOR ART AND MEDIA IN KARLSRUHE.

ERIC ALLIEZ (1957) IS SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT MIDDLESEX

UNIVERSITY IN LONDON. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF
MULTITUDES AND EDITOR OF THE COLLECTED WORKS OF GABRIEL TARDE.
HIS MAJOR PUBLICATIONS ARE: CAPITAL TIMES, VOL. 1 (UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA PRESS, 1996); THE SIGNATURE OF THE WORLD. WHAT IS
DELEUZE AND GUATTARFS PHILOSOPHY? (CONTINUUM, 2004); DE
L'IMPOSSIBILITE DE LA PHENOMENOLOGIE. SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE
FRANCAISE CONTEMPORAINE (VRIN, 1995); (WITH J.-C. BONNE) LA PENSEE-
MATISSE (LE PASSAGE, 2005) (WITH JEAN-CLET MARTIN): L'CEIL-CERVEAU.
NOUVELLES HISTOIRES DE LA PEINTURE MODERNE (VRIN, 2007). SEE ALSO:
HTTP://WWW.MDX.AC.UK/ WWW/CRMEP/STAFF/ERICALLIEZ.HTM.

Alliez, Eric

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Dba Berg

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