Emptiness and hyperpolitics
01
Dec
The subject that should interest theologians first interests philosophers
and writers like Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending), which won the Man Booker award, wrote: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him” while skeptical Peter Sloterdijk wrote: “In a monotheistically conditioned culture, declaring that God is dead implies shaking all references and announcing a new form of world” (Slotertijk, 1999, p. 59) and implies abandoning the project of planetary unity.
In an opposite line, English literature professor and writer Terry Eagleton wrote “Culture and Death of God”, identifies the Enlightenment substitutes for this death beyond reason and his most finished work: the Modern State, some ways of rationalizing this “death” in addition to the State itself: science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, life force and personal relationships, calling them “forms of displaced divinity”.
As substitutes, Sloterdijk elaborates in “in the same boat: essays on hyperpolitics” (1999): “a literary wave begins that speaks of nothing but the State, life in society, human formation” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 58), says Sloterdijk reflecting Nietzsche that the Theological Code is part: “that which inspires our time with hope and horror; something is dead and can only fall apart faster or slower, but somehow life and civilization advance and crystallize into ununderstood novelties” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 60) and this is not just about the new strain of the coronavirus that scares, but of novelties that advance in polarized and radical discourses.
He recalls that it is not just the speeches of some political adventurer from countries with political upheavals, but: “You can see the political cast parading through the media and we are reminded of the premeditated inappetence of municipal tournaments” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 64) , you know that there are here and there: “convincing megalopaths of the old guard” (idem), but a “global disproportion between the forces in need and the existing weaknesses” (ibid.), or to put it another way, statesmen capable of dealing with contemporary crises .
He calls some of these characters that appear here or there “globality state athletics”, but emphasizes that it has not yet been written highlighting the “required consciences” that it should not have for a “profession: political”, a residence with opacity, a program with which it is difficult to belong, in the Moral aspect of small works, no passion: an absence of relationship, evolution towards self-recruitment based on knowledge and they should be athletes of a “synchronous world” (p. 65).
Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitics sentence is drastic: “the theme of the ‘conservative revolution’, experienced two or three generations ago” (p. 67) in which he predicted a certain kind of new fundamentalist wave, predicted some contemporary politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson they show not only that it was no accident, but that they continue to be on the lookout for a new policy that emerges in the aftermath of the “Krause syndrome” (German politician involved in corruption scandals), showing that it is not the work of chance, it is not just the absence from Geist (spirit) or from the lack of subjectivity and acceptance of planetary cultural diversity, “politics appears as the equivalent of a collective-chronic near-accident on a road covered by fog” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 69). The book was written well before the rise of the conservative wave.
In his final sentence Sloterdijk calls for “hyperpolitics to become the continuation of paleopolitics by other means” (p. 92).
Sloterdijk, P. in the same boat: essay on hyperpolitics. Trans. Claudia Cavalcanti. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1999.
