Radiotexte 16

Semiotexte

Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault. In a torrent of haikus, which can now be seen as classically Baudrillardian, he swirls Foucault's concepts of repression, sexuality, production, consumption, and history around in an intense, and often comical, reversal of forces. Exceeding the boundaries of literary or philosophical critique, Baudrillard writes from beyond the horizon of political thought and in a space of phantasmic speculation, finally "using" Foucault's terminologies and public significance to launch his own form of occult, philosophical clarity. In the second half of the book, Baurillard meets his match in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer, who teases Baudrillard with his own ideas, in turn making commentaries on subjects as diverse as panic, ecstasy, and May '68.

Forget Foucault

Literature & Fiction

BAUDRILLARD, Jean

History & Criticism

Peter Sloterdijk's essay on Friedrich Nietzsche and the benefits and dangers of narcissistic jubilation. 
For Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Nietzsche represents nothing short of a “catastrophe in the history of language”―a new evangelist for a linguistics of narcissistic jubilation. Nietzsche offered a philosophical declaration of independence from humility, a meeting-point of sobriety and megalomania that for Sloterdijk has come to define the very project of philosophy.
Yet for all the significance of this language-event named Nietzsche, Nietzsche's contributions have too often been elided and the contradictions at the root of his philosophy too often edited out. As Sloterdijk observes, “Never has an author so insisted on distinction and yet attracted such vulgarity.” Nietzsche Apostle, drawn from a speech Sloterdijk gave in 2000 on the hundredth anniversary of Nietzsche's death, looks at the ways in which Nietzsche has been branded over the years through selective compilation, and at the ways in which Nietzsche turned himself into a brand―a brand announced by his proclaimed “fifth Gospel,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For Sloterdijk, the focus should not be on the figure of Zarathustra or on the “will to power” often used as a kind of philosophical shorthand to sum up Nietzsche's work, but on Zarathustra's act of “speaking” itself. Nietzsche Apostle offers a brief history of self-praise and self-affirmation, an examination of the evolution of boasting (both by God and by man), and a very original approach to Nietzsche, philosophy's first designer brand of individualism.

Nietzsche Apostle (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)

Humor & Entertainment

SLOTERDIJK, Peter

Humor

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