Dear Peter Sloterdijk,
Hey, remember that book you wrote back in '87? That was a great one: funny, acerbic, rambling, sharp. I had wished for more like it.
Now, though:
"In an earlier day the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones--though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still."
You should have your fingers and mouth taken from you, so that you can neither write nor speak. You are an unconscionable jackass.
S a/o B
5 comments:
I've got a fire going over here, into which I am tossing any book that uses the revolting combination "productive citizen" (and, a fortiori, "unproductive citizen.") Bring that one over, and let's keep the fire going, and tended.
(I have never met a productive citizen. If I do, he too goes on the fire.)
-->LB
Yes on the whole your request seems to be a reasonable one. I second it.
Maybe after we seize his fingers and mouth we can force him to read the recent New Left Review on "Wageless life":
"You don’t need a job to be a proletarian: wageless life, not wage labour, is the starting point in understanding the free market.”
This is now giving me the "productive" image of Michael Denning defeating Sloterijk in an underground cage match, forcing him to acknowledge the ontological status of pauper, surrounded by guttering flames, fed by a million little pointless books.
Lauren Berlant's analysis puts Sloterdijk to shame (so to speak):
"The Euro-American state is a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that, having grown its own administrative limbs to serve at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed the state. So the state bails out banks and tells the polis to tighten up, claiming that the people are too expensive to be borne through their state, which can no longer afford their appetite for risk. They are told that they should feel shame for having wanted more than they could bear responsibility for and are told that they should take satisfaction in ratcheting down their image of the good life and the pleasures to be had in the process of its production. The affective orchestration of the crisis has required blaming the vulnerable for feeling vulnerable; not due only to a general precarity but also to the political fact that there is no longer an infrastructure for holding the public as a public. The public must become entrepreneurial individuals."
(http://www.variant.org.uk/39_40texts/berlant39_40.html)
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