Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason appears, by its title, to submit to a Kantian discipline it simultaneously resists. The borrowed syntagm—Critique of … Reason—signals continuity with the most canonical genre of modern philosophy, yet in Sloterdijk’s hands it functions less as homage than as strategic détournement. The allusion is a gesture, not a pledge: it marks, as Andreas Huyssen insists in his foreword, neither a new Critique of Pure, nor of Practical, nor of Judgment in Kant’s sense, but an anti-Kantian refusal of grand teleologies, a refusal that neither reinstates metaphysical mastery nor abandons philosophical questioning to mere play. The “critique” here names an immanent diagnosis of a historical constitution of subjectivity—enlightened false consciousness—that eludes and neutralizes the very weapons of demystification in which modern critical reason once placed its hope. The Kantian echo is thus neither a parasite upon nor a derivative of the Critiques so much as a deliberately ironic over-coding of them; the title works as a signposted passage from the architectonics of transcendental reason to the physiognomy of late-modern consciousness. “The title’s reference to the Kantian critiques makes sense only as a critical gesture,” Huyssen writes, mapping Sloterdijk’s project onto Foucault’s rereading of Was ist Aufklärung?—What is happening to us, now? What are we, today?—rather than onto Kant’s architectonic system-building.
Sloterdijk’s excursion through fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century conspiratorial ecologies—where czarist, anticzarist, Communist, anarchist, and Western agencies mirrored and interpenetrated one another—identifies a basic structure of modern roles: loyalties and insights diverge until the question “for whom am I really working?” becomes unanswerable, not because agents are uniquely confused, but because institutions are now woven from overlapping strategic binds that pull subjects across incompatible registers. The “reduction of complexity” in paranoid simplifications, from Stalinist purges to conspiracy fantasies like the “Protocols,” becomes in this light a compensatory violence against the irreducibility of multiple agency. Sloterdijk’s point is not moral but diagnostic: the double-bind is the normal grammar of present institutions, with the modern intelligentsia as polyvalent brokers whose very capacity to move across boundaries provokes regimes that dream of “simplifying fronts.”
Sloterdijk’s Kantianism, then, is at most a creative misreading whose real interlocutors stand closer to Hegelian, Nietzschean, and critical-theoretical lineages. The Enlightenment’s self-opposition—its tendency to break on the resistance of the powers it unsettles and to reappear as their strategy—derives from Bacon’s secret now in the open: “knowledge is power.” Not as a trivial maxim but as the core of modern organization: knowledge makes possible a “war of researchers” in which method claims primacy and every corpus of know-how is immediately drawn into strategic circulation. Enlightenment becomes the systematic weaponization of reflection—what Sloterdijk elsewhere names “artillery logic” and “political metallurgy”—where the form of theory matters less than its infusion into competitive apparatuses. Pushed far enough, the critical posture flips into “black empiricism,” a systematic doubt that shadows every optimistic discursivity and cultivates the cold intelligence of the strategist rather than the warm rationality of the moral legislator.
From its opening diagnosis, the book proposes that the prevailing form of subjectivity in late modernity is not naïveté but lucidity turned against itself: “Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness,” a hard-boiled, buffered knowing-better that nonetheless does it anyway, out of compulsion, fatigue, or the convergence of survival instincts with institutional imperatives. This consciousness is not refuted by critique; its falsity has already become reflexive and immunized. Sloterdijk’s bleak aphorism condenses a social character: boards and parliaments staffed by melancholic realists, chic bitterness undergirding competence, the executive mind that sees through and presses on; the paradox is not logical but anthropological—knowing and doing diverge in a durable habitus. This definition sets the book’s argumentative arc: to read the history of Enlightenment and ideology critique as a long series of unmaskings whose success breeds a mood—the twilight of false consciousness—in which demystified subjects incorporate skepticism as their operating system. The effect is not the triumph of reason but the normalization of disenchanted adjustment.
The genre Sloterdijk invents to pursue this is neither Kant’s transcendental deduction nor Marx’s classical ideology critique, but a composite of physiognomy, phenomenology, and cultural history. The book’s architecture—its five “parts” ranging from preliminary reflections and phenomenological “cardinal cynicisms” to a “logical main text” and a sprawling “historical main text” centered on Weimar—confesses its hybrid method: it catalogs types and practices (military, state, sexual, medical, religious, epistemic cynicisms), tracks their logics, and stages their historical crystallizations. The table of contents itself is a map of the method, moving from “Eight Unmaskings” through “The Cabinet of Cynics,” to the Weimar symptom and Dadaistic chaotology. The sequence mirrors Sloterdijk’s thesis that demystification, pursued with modern vigor, splinters ideals and selves until disenchantment congeals into a culture: critique routinized as worldly cleverness.
For Sloterdijk, ideology critique runs aground when it presupposes that exposure of necessary error suffices to induce transformation. The subject of late-modern cynicism is already acquainted with the “models of critique,” and experiences their operations less as emancipatory than as contributions to the “sad complicatedness” of relations; here the modernity of critique shows itself in its own deritualization, and the old confidence in out-arguing the opponent reveals a constitutive blindness—the ritual reification of the other into a pathological case that the critic can name but cannot treat. The upshot is a crisis not only of Enlightenment and enlighteners but of commitment to enlightenment—the dawning sense that interventions moralize from a place no longer inhabited, so that the first reflex to exhortation is a cool “I already know that.”
If Sloterdijk’s critique is in any sense “Kantian,” it is where it refuses to confuse moral exhortation with analysis. His return to sapere aude does not rehearse the moral optimism of classical Enlightenment; it registers instead the historical exhaustion of that optimism and asks what courage could mean in a landscape saturated by reflexive skepticism. The original maxim—have the courage to use your own understanding—relied on an unspoken accommodation between human capacities and a world predisposed to their rational articulation; Sloterdijk reads in it a courageous spontaneity that today, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century and in the presence of global technics, can no longer be presumed. The book’s concluding pages are minimalistic rather than messianic: sapere aude remains, not as a manifesto for mastery, but as a modest resistance to panic, a defense of a future that is more than the reproduction of the worst of the past.
Sloterdijk situates his project through an act of self-disavowal that is also a methodological confession: this is a meditation on Bacon’s “knowledge is power,” the slogan that politicized knowledge and dug philosophy’s grave by binding cognition to armament, management, and social engineering. Against the eros of truth in the ancient sense, modernity offers knowledge as a technology of intervention; both Nietzsche and social democracy converged—via different routes—on the instrumentalization of thinking, one through vitalist disinhibition, the other through schooled access to power. The extension of Kantian criticism after Kant, Sloterdijk notes in a methodological aside, always proceeded by enlarging “experience” beyond physics to the historical, cultural, symbolic, and affective; he takes that enlargement to its limit case, reading ideology critique not as a solvent of error but as a catalyst of cynicism whenever its victories produce the buffered stance of “knowing-and-yet.”
Sloterdijk relocates “reason” from a noumenal judge to a choreography of mouths, eyes, arses, and gestures, from the cabinet of philosophical personae to institutional figures who manage ends as means. The “Cabinet of Cynics” culminates less in a person than in the anonymous “Anyone,” the diffuse subject of modern cynicism whose voice crisscrosses offices, editorial boards, and ministries and whose practiced equipoise between conviction and accommodation defines the cultural superstructure. The Grand Inquisitor, in this series, becomes not a historical curiosity but a prototype of modern instrumentalism: a manipulator of ideals for domination who has learned to treat final ends as means and to supervise consciousness as one more material to be “used politically and economically.” This instrumentalization shows the core Sloterdijkian reversal: consciousness ceases to be the Other of reality and becomes another thing among things—thus available to analysis, design, and deployment.
Because cynicism is as much a style of comportment as a proposition, Sloterdijk devotes significant attention to figures whose physiognomies stage the options available to a post-heroic consciousness. The “cabinet of cynics” arranges a typological sequence from Diogenes (proto-kynic) through Lucian (mocker of pretension) to the modern allegories Mephistopheles and the Grand Inquisitor, and finally to Heidegger’s impersonal Anyone—a gallery deliberately mixing historical and literary types to register what cynicism looks like when it actualizes in character. The point is not biographical fidelity but legibility: Diogenes’ naked truth-telling versus the Grand Inquisitor’s suave instrumentalism; the one living against idealism through a satirical austerity, the other reducing reason to the calculus of means for ends whose moral claims are smuggled in as necessity.
On this basis Sloterdijk proposes his most influential distinction: kynicism versus cynicism. Kynicism (with a kappa) names the cheeky, embodied, plebeian derision of Diogenes—the clownish pantomime that refutes abstraction with the animal body, the performance of truth against power’s solemnities; cynicism (with a “c”) names the modern, instrumental, ends-agnostic rationality that is ruthless about means and evasive about ends. The former “lives against” idealism; the latter manages its collapse into strategy. The split registers not as a mere etymological quibble but as a historical bifurcation: ancient insolence as a critical resource for ends-critique versus modern cleverness as the half-virtue that perfects techniques while abdicating telos.
The cynic “knows what [they] are doing,” understands the nullity toward which their activity tends, and nonetheless continues because the compulsion of circumstances overlaps with self-preservation; the very elasticity of the psyche that makes continued functioning possible marks the new normal of post-ideological realism. In this register, to act “against better knowledge” ceases to be paradox and becomes the quotidian structure of modern superstructures; critique falters not because it has failed to unmask illusions but because its historical successes have been metabolized into a reflexively buffered stance that neutralizes unmasking as such.
The phenomenology of cynicism unfolds, in Sloterdijk’s hands, as an inventory of institutional logics. Military cynicism hardens self-preservation into doctrine; state cynicism converts legitimacy into theater; sexual cynicism codifies desire as technique; medical cynicism pathologizes life under the banner of cure; religious cynicism manages transcendence as organization; the cynicism of knowledge turns truth into leverage, information into maneuver. This systematic catalog, announced explicitly in the book’s “cardinal” and “secondary” lists, is not just mere taxonomy; it stages the ground for a diagnosis of how late-modern subjects inhabit these regimes—not as dupes but as lucid colluders.
Sloterdijk’s “logical main text” radicalizes the claim by construing modern enlightenment as the organization of polemical knowledge: war and espionage provide the master heuristics of a cognition whose default mode is anticipatory suspicion; the social-scientific apparatuses of surveillance and planning extend artillery logic into the management of bodies, populations, and uncertainties. The modern subject is trained, in this view, less to know what is than to forecast moves on an always already adversarial board. Ideology critique, when it becomes a war of consciousness, risks reproducing the very reifications it condemns; it blunts itself against an opponent it has pre-depersonalized as mere bearer of an error structure. Huyssen underscores this point: Sloterdijk’s target is as much the subjective violence of critique—its appetite to annihilate opponents—as the cynicisms critique claims to fight.
The book’s historical center of gravity—its “Weimar Symptom”—asks how a culture enters a crystalline phase in which at once everything is more reflective and more brittle. Sloterdijk refuses both nostalgic moralism and declensionist melodrama; he resists talk of “putrefaction” and “decadence” that imagines the cure as a return to pristine naiveté. What he sees instead is a culture in which norms have become self-reflective, ideals self-ironizing, and private reservations ubiquitous: an era of hollow gestures whose very officialness masks sub-monologues of complicity. This reflectiveness is not to be confused with degeneration; it is the normal mood of a long crisis in which crisis itself is worn thin as a word. In Weimar’s aesthetic disciplines this took an acid, productive form—a language capable of articulating disappointments with aggressive lucidity, dramatizing unhappy consciousness in poses that outdid the world’s coldness by the coldness of art. The war appears there as a metaphysical event in which Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is rewritten as industrialized slaughter; postwar ego is inheritance without testament, and cynicism becomes the almost inevitable stance of living on.
Within that historical montage, for Sloterdijk Dada was not an episode in the genealogy of styles but a technique of reflected negation—a semantics of disorder that refuses to bestow meaning where meaning has become a complicit balm. Dada’s “antisemantics” did not simply mock metaphysics; it set up a procedural discipline of No—montage/demontage, improvisation/revocation—that aimed to break the spell of aestheticization by methodically discrediting the will to meaning as such. The point was not a museum inscription (“Dada, style X”) but an ongoing practice against the “opinionism” of elevated talk. The result was a laboratory of kynical modernity: a counter-affirmation of reality as reality in order to smash whatever pretends to dignify it.
If the Weimar chapters reconstruct a historical apex of reflexive cynicism, the book’s most startlingly contemporary pages are those that meditate on the nuclear condition: the “bomb” as the consummation, almost the apotheosis, of Western subjectivity. Here Sloterdijk’s rhetoric is deliberately scandalous—Zen-like and sardonic at once. The bomb, he writes, is the “only Buddha” Western reason can understand: a perfect, sovereign, purposeless means that exceeds every end, teaches splitting, and renders politics and meditation strangely isomorphic around the principle of relaxation of tensions. This is no call for resignation but an insistence that the only adequate response to overkill structures is the loosening of archaic defensive cramps; the bomb, thus read, forces a question of self-experience rather than strategy, an interior disarmament without which external treaties remain a double game.
Against this background, the book’s much-discussed pairing of kynicism and cynicism takes on programmatic weight. Modern “instrumental reason” acquires a compensatory counter-reason only if kynicism can be revived as an ethics of ends: a satirical poverty of needs, a discipline of cheek that exposes the excess of wants and the absurdity of inflated telē. For Sloterdijk Kynicism’s insolence is a politics of embodied truth-telling whose risk and courage place it outside the managerial languages of legitimacy. The appeal is not to return to Diogenes for color, but to retrieve a mode of critical practice that refuses to cede the question of ends to the Grand Inquisitors of modernity.
Huyssen’s foreword frames the stakes in the context of post-1960s disillusionment. Sloterdijk’s cynic is the social average of the middle-aged professional—integrated, melancholy, reflexively buffered—whose cleverness replaces conviction, whose derision guards against the vulnerability any new ideal would demand. For a generation that lived a “second Enlightenment” only to watch its promises fade into Kulturindustrie simulacra, the old strategies of exposure and correction no longer suffice; indeed, in their war-like subjectivity, they risk reenacting the very exclusions and reifications that crippled them. Sloterdijk’s provocation is to call for an intelligence that is worldly, agile, and existentially committed without reinstalling universal master-narratives.
Yet the book invites, and in places already contains, its own critique. Huyssen points out the gendered blind spot: when Sloterdijk writes “we are the bomb,” he implicitly centers a reified, rational male subject; the figure of the kynic remains curiously solitary and masculinized, and the question of how women’s subjectivity intersects the cynicism–kynicism constellation is left underdeveloped. Without an account of gendered difference, a “politics of subjectivity” risks repeating Enlightenment’s exclusions even as it decries them. This is more than a marginal quibble, it indexes the problem Sloterdijk himself diagnoses: a culture in which the reflexes of domination permeate even those discourses that intend resistance. If kynicism is to be more than a cultivated pose, it must become convivial rather than merely convivial with things; it must discover modes of relation that do not depend upon satirical hostility to conjure truth.
Sloterdijk’s “meditation on the bomb” does not preach quietism; it stages the rhetorical analogies by which a world that cannot disarm itself seeks ersatz reconciliations in Buddhist tropes and relaxation techniques. “We are the bomb” is not a metaphysical claim but a phenomenological index: the subject already lives in the field of devices whose destructive latency is interiorized as a tone of life, and the pseudo-reconciliations that promise a “relaxation of tensions” are themselves elements of the management of dread. This is not to deny movements toward peace; it is to diagnose the form of their rhetoric when inserted into the very mediatic circuits that carry the threat.
To read Critique of Cynical Reason as “simply” a two-volume treatise—premises in the first, a phenomenology of action in the second—would be to miss the way its argument performs what it describes. Sloterdijk writes a text that constantly switches registers—philosophical exposition, historical montage, physiognomic sketch, photo-citation—to enact the very combinatorics of words and images he attributes to public discourse’s cynicisms and their resistances. The inclusion of visual politics (for example, the Heartfield photomontage) is not ornamental, but integral to the claim that modern cynicism operates as much by scenography and montage as by syllogism.
The book’s most famous formula—they know what they are doing, and yet they do it—puts pressure on any simple politics of unmasking. Once falsity is reflexive, critique must learn to address the complicities of its own forms. Sloterdijk’s wager is that kynical practice, precisely because it is a lived insolence rather than a discourse of the bench, can interrupt that reflexivity from below. But the book is too complex to end in idyll: its concluding pages oscillate between apocalypse and minimal hope, between the hard-nosed inventory of “gray cynicisms” and a faint appeal to a spontaneity of life that might re-order things if we “disarm as subjects.” The tone is diagnostic rather than programmatic; the courage to think is preserved precisely at the edge where thinking admits it cannot guarantee outcomes.
To return to the title’s Kantian ruse is therefore to clarify what Sloterdijk refuses. He does not propose a fourth Critique, nor a supplement that would reunify reason’s faculties; he offers a counter-genealogy of reason’s modern fate, in which critique itself, victorious in its unmaskings, becomes the climate in which cynicism thrives. The derivative form of the title is then a calculated misdirection: it lures the reader into expecting a transcendental tribunal, and delivers instead a moral-physiognomic sociology of subjectivity that outflanks the tribunal by showing why, in our time, verdicts are absorbed by the very defendants they target. If Kant instructed courage by presuming a fit between courage and a world that could bend to it, Sloterdijk instructs courage as a fragile insistence against a world whose overkill technics and institutional reflexivity produce subjects for whom irony is anesthesia. “Modern cynicism is the knot,” Sloterdijk writes, “where all the snake-like writhings of an immoral doctrine of cleverness entangle themselves”—a knot tied by victories of enlightenment no longer able to motivate themselves without a satirical undertone.
The logical main text consolidates these insights by re-plotting the entire history of modern “reflection” as the “organization of polemical knowledge.” The decisive step was to hierarchize method over substance—so that knowing-how to fight and deploy information overtook knowing-what—and to generalize suspicion until it became a structure rather than a tactic, with the subject recoded as Untertan (a subjected one), the modern heir of the Cartesian “I am deceived, therefore I am” in a landscape where universal complicity is the background condition. The consequence is a culture where “two cultures” persist, not as the classic science-vs-letters opposition, but as divergent economies of method and ends, and where a “liquefaction of subjects” corresponds to the staged “relaxations” that substitute for a missing peace. The payoff, once again, is diagnostic: critique that ignores the primacy of organization—of how knowledge is arranged, funded, circulated—is critique that misreads its own impotence as a failure of will rather than of form.
Given this reorientation, Sloterdijk’s reading of Marx (via Althusser’s catastrophe) is not a biographical digression but an exemplar of the split internal to critique itself. The point is not to adjudicate a “young” vs. “mature” Marx but to name two modalities that cohabit the corpus: a kynical, emancipatory line that wagers on labor and praxis as routes beyond the system, and an objectivistic, master-cynical line that treats consciousness as function and reorganizes critique as an instrument of governance. Althusser’s tragic literalization of a “break” supplies a cruel allegory for this division; Sloterdijk insists that the break is real, that political economy as critical science has both empowered and neutralized the left’s own hopes by investing them into methodological asceticism whose strategic intelligence often outruns its emancipatory will.
It is in this light that the recurring appeal to Diogenes must be read. Sloterdijk knows perfectly well the risk of romanticizing the body in a culture whose industries long ago appropriated corporeality as commodity and technique. Huyssen underscores this risk while also noting the wager: not a regression to authenticity, but a recalibration of Enlightenment as Selbsterfahrung, an embodied intelligence that laughs, eats, excretes, and refuses—without reinstalling a sovereign subject. The point is not to be “outside” the system; the point is to cultivate profiles of conduct—cheekiness, shamelessness, satirical exposure—that interrupt the seamless conversion of ends into means and re-open spaces where speech and gesture can break arrangements that reason, as administration, commands.
This becomes clearest when “Anyone” enters as a protagonist. In a culture where every grand narrative is already recognized as a “Grosstheorie,” the impersonal voice that says “one knows,” “one must,” “one cannot”—Heidegger’s das Man—takes on a new function: it synthesizes dispersed responsibilities into a tone that absolves everyone by implicating each. Sloterdijk’s cabinet includes Diogenes, Mephistopheles, the Grand Inquisitor, and “Anyone,” not to stage a gallery of curiosities, but to show how the line from plebeian satirist to devil of negation to Christian strategist to impersonal functionary maps the progressive abstraction of domination—an index of how cynicism rules precisely when nobody in particular is responsible.
At this juncture, to return to Kant is to clarify the distance. Sloterdijk’s “critique” offers no architectonic that tells us the conditions for synthetic a priori judgments or the postulates of pure practical reason; it offers, rather, a repertoire of tests by which one can tell whether a given discourse about ends is, in truth, an operation on means; whether a claimed sincerity is in fact a deployment of discretion; whether a call to commitment is not already formatted as a spectacle whose first audience is the caller. The Enlightenment survives here as a discipline of sarcasm, a loyalty that must show itself only in disloyalty to its own heroic self-image. In Sloterdijk’s sentence: the only way for heirs of Enlightenment to remain loyal is to learn how to be heirs of loss.
Such a stance, of course, carries dangers: the slide from lucid sarcasm into masochistic resignation; the substitution of stylistic brilliance for practical institution-building; the reification of kynicism into a lifestyle. Sloterdijk does not deny these; he insists that the old morale of commitment has eroded because modern states demoralize and domesticate enlighteners even as they hire them, and that we too easily convert despair into an ironic chic that flatters our intelligence while avoiding hard reorganizations. But it is precisely here that the most un-Kantian element becomes the most “critical”: critique as metapolemics, a reflexive inventory of the ways critique itself turns into command, entertainment, or anesthesia. The aim is not to purify the will but to diversify tactics that resist becoming integral functions of the systems they address.
If the first volume assembles premises and physiognomies, the second constructs a phenomenology of actions under conditions of generalized cynicism. There the leitmotif “knowledge is power” is not a counsel of despair; it is a caution that every futurism of emancipation must budget for its own incorporation into administrations of means. The alternative Sloterdijk sketches is modest and exacting: a localized, embodied adversarial intelligence that refuses the metaphysics of totality without surrendering the discourse of emancipation; an éclaircissement scaled to practices rather than salvific programs; a repertoire closer to Brecht than to Kant, with Diogenes’s “insolence” deployed not as puerile defiance but as anti-hypocritical hygiene that exposes the contingency of values without abolishing valuation.
Here the historical excursus through Berlin Dada acquires its theoretical weight. Photomontage and cabaret do not merely caricature the powers; they experiment with the material relays through which opinions harden, sensibilities shift, and affects are mobilized. When every camp becomes fluent in irony, the task is no longer to corner hypocrisy but to invent forms that suspend the reflex whereby irony reimburses the status quo. In Weimar this reflex frequently failed; the satire was brilliant and the catastrophe still came. Sloterdijk’s moral is pitiless: brilliance is not immunity. The lesson, however, is not to renounce the satirical but to forge counter-uses that can resist absorption into the same circuits that carry propaganda and entertainment—uses that attach to bodies and habits, not only to slogans.
A final turn returns us to the book’s last horizon: the “good life” as embeddedness in a Whole that reorganizes itself, and Being and Time as a site where concrete acts of creation—poetic, political, technical—are interpretively clarified. Sloterdijk does not rehabilitate metaphysics; he redescribes the conditions under which the “good life” might become articulable in a culture where ends are perpetually consumed by means. The answer cannot be a recommitment to universals; it must be a reconstruction of practices that reconnect ethos to gesture—how one eats, laughs, refuses, collaborates—at scales where institutions can be bent. In this register, even Kant’s sapere aude—dare to know—returns shorn of its universalist optimism and readdressed as a problem of where, when, and with whom knowing becomes leverage rather than decoration.
To call all this a “critique of cynical reason” is therefore deliberately misleading and exact. Misleading, because there is no neutral court of “reason” behind the scene; exact, because the only court that exists is the choreography of reflexive practices that decide, always locally, whether intelligence will serve domination or resistance. Kant’s critiques sought conditions of validity that would bind every rational claimant; Sloterdijk’s critique seeks conditions of non-servility that can be taught, imitated, and transmitted without the comfort of universality. That is why the text oscillates “provocatively between Frankfurt and Paris,” cannibalizing styles without becoming the “blank parody” of postmodernism: it remembers pain, laughs against resignation, and insists that even now the split within cynicism can be bent toward embodied self-assertion. If there is a derivation from Kant, it is the negative derivation of a title that lures us to expect architecture and gives us physiognomy, that invites us to demand foundations and teaches us metapolemics, that promises pure reason and delivers the irreversible experiment of being heirs who can be loyal only by refusing pieties that their loyalty would otherwise betray.
What, then, does Critique of Cynical Reason achieve? It gives a language to a pervasive disposition that standard ideological grids misread. It explains why unmasking fails in a culture where masks are worn knowingly. It retrieves, against the managerial coldness of instrumental reason, a plebeian practice of truth that embarrasses grandeur by laughter and endurance. It insists that any future worthy of the name will not be administratively built but existentially let, as subjects unlearn their armored reflexes and rediscover forms of convivial intelligence. And it does so while refusing both the indulgence of apocalyptic prophecy and the comfort of progress narratives. The result is not a manual of remedies but an anatomy of our malaise: a long, unsystematic, intentionally excessive book that thinks modernity’s most intimate posture in many voices so that one cannot, after reading it, return to cleverness without feeling its cost. In that sense its Kantian masque succeeds precisely where it fails to be Kantian: it prompts the old question—what are we, now?—in a register suited to a culture that knows too much and believes too little, a culture whose hope, if it has one, must subsist in the minimal courage to think without guarantees.
In that sense the book’s unity lies in its consistent refusal of both nostalgic regression and catastrophic absolutism. It neither rehabilitates the old master narratives nor agrees that Enlightenment necessarily culminates in camps and Gulags; it dismantles the teleologies that would make either conclusion necessary and replaces them with a stubborn minimalism of practices that keep open points of leverage. In that sense the book’s unity lies in its consistent refusal of both nostalgic regression and catastrophic absolutism. It neither rehabilitates the old master narratives nor agrees that Enlightenment necessarily culminates in camps and Gulags; it dismantles the teleologies that would make either conclusion necessary and replaces them with a stubborn minimalism of practices that keep open points of leverage. The result is necessarily problematic because it follows the object’s convolution: a reason that has learned too much about itself to be innocent, that has infiltrated offices and logics of command, that can survive in bad faith and still desire something like truth. To describe such a reason is to risk sounding cynical; Sloterdijk accepts the risk, not to crown cynicism, but to expose the point at which knowing too much can begin, again, to become a way of living otherwise.
Simon Gros 
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