Tags: C

Summary: In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kantís 'Critique of Pure Reason', another philosophical treatise - polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work - appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijkís 'Critique of Cynical Reason' stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960ís. Sloterdijkís finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity. With Adorno and Horkeimerís 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness - a sensibility 'well off and miserable at the same time', able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the kynicism of antiquity - the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism.