CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3
PP 307–326 DIRECTLY FROM THE
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.
ÉRIC 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 GUATTARI’S
PHILOSOPHY? (CONTINUUM,
2004); DE L’IMPOSSIBILITÉ DE
LA PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE. SUR
LA PHILOSOPHIE FRANÇAISE
CONTEMPORAINE (VRIN, 1995); (WITH
J.-C. BONNE) LA PENSÉE-MATISSE
(LE PASSAGE, 2005) (WITH JEAN-CLET
MARTIN): L’ŒIL-CERVEAU. NOUVELLES
HISTOIRES DE LA PEINTURE MODERNE
(VRIN, 2007).
SEE ALSO: HTTP://WWW.MDX.AC.UK/
WWW/CRMEP/STAFF/ERICALLIEZ.HTM.
REPRINTS AVAILABLE PHOTOCOPYING © BERG 2007
PERMITTED BY LICENSE PRINTED IN THE UK
PUBLISHERS. ONLY
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LIVING HOT,
THINKING COLDLY:
AN INTERVIEW WITH
PETER SLOTERDIJK
ÉRIC ALLIEZ
CULTURAL POLITICS DOI 10.2752/175174307X226870
ABSTRACT Subsequent to a dialogue
concerning the German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk’s Regeln für den Menschenpark
(“Rules for the Human Park”), the following
interview with Éric 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 für den Menschenpark, Nietzsche,
307
Sphere Theory, immunization, ecology, anthropotechnics
 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

Éric 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 für 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

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– 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
CULTURAL POLITICS

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,
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collective confusion, struggle, scrimmage, mimesis, business, and

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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

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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 Jürgen 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 für 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
CULTURAL POLITICS

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
Starnberg 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
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recognized among the true philosophers, had to face up to the cruel

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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

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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 Starnberg, 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 für 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
CULTURAL POLITICS

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
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we’re back once again – as in the early 1980s – at the heart of

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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

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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 pensée de la différence, 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
CULTURAL POLITICS

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
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philosophical writer who’s defined the essay as a definitive form of

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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

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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,
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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
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cognitive biogram of Homo presapiens and Homo sapiens since we

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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

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have stopped revolving around the subject?
Here lies the whole irony of the discourse on the alleged neocon-
servatism 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 long time 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 “épouser
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
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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
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inevitably light tone of this recorded conversation didn’t detract from

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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

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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 débats (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 Lévy’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
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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
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element of the Habermas System.

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

ÉA: Since the appearance of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983)3

and Der Denker auf der Bühne (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

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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 philo-
sopher 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
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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,
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first, a chronological statement which says that we’re situated in

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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

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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 pensée) 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
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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
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philosophical metabiology, “truth” is understood as a function of

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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-

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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
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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 order not to die of [the]
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truth; and: Let knowledge advance, let life perish!7

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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
Rüdiger 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

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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 fêted than our own
called “la pensée 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
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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 (or transcend) our mental
immune system when we think (and it is real, operative, external
thought that gains the upper hand there; it thinks, a masterless
318

thinking). This dual model of thought carries far beyond the traditional
 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

critique of ideologies, into an area beyond the vrai naïf and the faux
naïf. 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

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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.

ÉA: 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 jack-
booted, 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
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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,
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either, that this “materialist” terminology was going to create definite

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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”

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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 technics11 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 Günther isn’t known in France. Günther
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:
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Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Luhmann . . . But in Günther’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 . . .

ÉA: It’s easier now to see how you can be regarded as the most
320

French of the German philosophers . . . Whether it’s to deplore

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

your dependence on what’s been called neo-structuralist thought

(Manfred Frank) and “la pensée 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,”

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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 immedi-
ately “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 Lévi-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
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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
321

knows nothing of.12

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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

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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 pensée] that doesn’t exist in its
writing won’t count as a philosophy [une pensée]. 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
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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
322

the encounter with it. It’s only in recent times that I’ve begun to read
 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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

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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 Schäume [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.

ÉA: 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 philosoph-

ical 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
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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
323

history of the “principle of distance” as a relation of human beings

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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 neoteny13 has
to do with this reflection in the Elmau lecture.) So I’ve attempted
to render Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose

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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 cliché was provided by
Henri Atlan on the occasion of an interview he gave to Le Monde des
débats (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
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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,
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to question technology as a form of production of self-evident facts,

 LIVING HOT, THINKING COLDLY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER SLOTERDIJK

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,

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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

NOTES
1. This interview was conducted by Éric Alliez by e-mail and com-
pleted in January 2000. It was first published in Multitudes 1
(2000). Alliez is here making an allusion to Bergson’s Les
Données immédiates de la conscience, translated into English
as Time and Free Will (1996).
2. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 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 trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder?” (Nietzsche
1959: 167).
CULTURAL POLITICS

10. An allusion to Chemins qui mènent 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 connaît 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
325

Ludwig Bolk developed the hypothesis that human morphology

 ÉRIC ALLIEZ

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 à l’usage des survivants, Calmann-Levy, 1999).

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[Information communicated by P. Sloterdijk.]

REFERENCES
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nazi.” Le Monde des débats, November.
Bergson, Henri. 1996. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate
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Co.
Günther, Gotthard. 1963. Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen. Baden-
Baden/Krefeld: Agis-Verlag.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. “Un nouveau Nietzsche.” Le Monde des débats,
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Lévy, Pierre. 1994. L’Intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie
du cyberespace. Paris: La Découverte.
Nietzsche, F. 1979. Ecce Homo. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin.
—— 1873[1980]. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Trans.
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—— 1959. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Munich: Goldmann.
Schwab, R. 1984. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery
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V. Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1983. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt:
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—— 1986. Der Denker auf der Bühne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
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—— 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred.
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—— 1989. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Trans. Jamie
Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
—— 1996. Selbstversuch: Selbstversuch. Ein Gespräch mit Carlos
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Oliveira. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.

—— 1998a. Sphären I. Blasen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
—— 1998b. Sphären II. Globen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.
—— 1998c. “Das Phänomen Adam.” Geo, vol. 9: 43–6.
—— 1999a. Regeln für den Menschenpark. Ein Antwortschreiben
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—— 1999b. “Du centrisme mou au risque de penser.” Le Monde
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