"posthyperbolics from insight could be a stage of maturity; posthyperbolics from weakness is a phase of the economy"

The online library only functions as a facsimile of the real thing in moments of shortcomings, lapses, gaps. The (metaphorical) Critique-of-Cynical-Reason-epub not being in the (metaphorical) card-catalogue; the much lesser-known work has snuck onto the shelves, and why not.

Though in ostensible opposition with the movement of deconstruction, Sloterdijk appears not unconnected with the tradition, exemplified in a certain sympathetic-antagonistic reading of certain texts. The book contains competent, if not exceptional, essays on the Heideggerian oeuvre with reference to the Sloterdijkian Spheres project, however the most significant insight derives from the perception of "incommensurable euphoria" at the core of post-war critical theory. Intended as a critique of Crtitical-Theory-Gnosticism-Hyperbolics, this recognition (perhaps unintentionally) lays open the movement underlying such [already almost unreadable] projects as Minima Moralia, opening the criticism of certain Adorno-flavored hyperbolics in a new sympathetic mode often already (inappropriately) in wide practice in Nietzsche, and which, at present, may be the most fruitful avenue for their interpretation as living text.

On critical theroy/ gnosticism/ hyperbole:

If one lifts ones eyes from these findings in order to survey the older Critical Theory, then it becomes immediately evident how sharply the dualism between the euphoric and the dysphoric mode is marked in it. Yet to its distinctive features belongs the fact that one may only speak about the dysphoric mode, while the euphoric mode presents a secret that is to be stringently guarded. [...] The Critical Theorist [...] comes into the world with the mission to gauge it for is better possibilities. Because he cannot dare to confess himself to be the privileged memory of happiness and to this extent to be truth incarnate, the critical messiah must choose, [...] the form of indirect communication and help the world to experience itself as untruth incarnate.



Gnosticism [...] First Dramaturgies that incessantly interpret a single fundamental event - the passing of the soul which has been constituted above and outside this world, through the world, and the soul's fate in the stretch of errancy allotted to it. [...] The appeal to gnosticism, rather, arises from the incommensurable experiences of happiness, in comparison with which most profane situations seem unreal, insipid, and unacceptably crude.



There is nothing to be done with intense happiness - it is only accepted as a background of the world against which almost all figures from empirical life appear to be wayward.

The polemic against gnosticism-critical-theory, however, appears to thrust too far forward in what Sloterdijk obviously perceives to be the advantage of having trapped an enemy in a fatal bind:

Critical Theory—like every disappointed idealism—indemnifies itself against the existing through escalation. The antithesis, that the whole is the false, attains its sharpness only from surpassing the already sufficiently exaggerated thesis.
[...]
Perhaps the supposedly critical theory had to be realized as Aesthetic Theory because to its author it was at least indirectly clear that only works of art still endure as spaces for exaggeration, while everything that is merely discourse, theory, and complaint aspires to the cultural center, where what is wagered is taken back and what is acutely intensified is eroded. Indeed, perhaps culture is another word for the taming of hyperboles—

This is the response to "reification/Second Nature" (i.e. the critical-theory description of 'posthyperbolics') with the Nietzschean bend, "but that's how things really are in reality." Perhaps correct, though the argument is not as strong as we would hope. Sloterdijk, aware of this, posits a differentiation between the two, "Posthyperbolics from insight could be a stage of maturity; posthyperbolics from weakness is a phase of the economy." Frankly impossible, however, to say which is which (and that which we might think to belong to one category will perhaps eventually reveal itself to be the trace of the other...)

Though we cannot deny the critique of hyperbole "hits home," the dialogue conspicuously neglects the category of understatement, which, perhaps is equally, if not more, the domain of truth. And it is also possible to conceive the reality of a "gaze of truth" from which even Adorno's "exaggerations" are understatement. From the perspective of our Deconstructivist betters, perhaps they already are. On the other hand, one occasionally wonders why Sloterdijk's project has special elevated place for the work of reactionaries, Cioran, Houllebecq, and perhaps would have the affinity to accumulate a certain popularity among the few of them who can read.

On Revolution Today:

In order to speak of the evidence of the whole, we no longer choose images of the petrified, the congealed, the impervious. [...] We are dealing with chaotic, accelerated structures, with nets and foam, with turbulences and indeterminate drifts, [...] These constructs are too intangible for one to lash out against them, and too complex to be guided by such a primitive movement as a ‘revolution’—a kinetic metaphor, of which one eventually notes how much it remains bound to the era of simple ontologies of solid bodies.

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