Sloterdijk Peter: Gnev i vreme

Peter Sloterdijk: Anger and Time

Psychopolitical research

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk can write a book of 700 pages, and if the reader overcomes that mountain of paper and letters cheerfully and with joy, at the end, he would even feel a little sorry that this incomparable reading-philosophical experience will (after all) end. Sloterdijk also writes books that are much smaller in volume, but the effect is similar to mastering his giant works: once we get hold of them, we never let them go (until someone rips them out of our hands). Anger and time is one of those, relatively speaking, smaller books by Sloterdijk.

On the one hand, it is a book about politics, that is, as the subtitle reads, "psychopolitical research". But with this original German philosopher, neither psychology nor politics are what we expect them to be, but rather, they are linguistic structures that are constantly being transformed. One of the first European words is, Sloterdijk begins his dizzying text - anger. He reminds us, namely, that the Iliad opens precisely with an invitation to sing the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus. This anger, however, carries a psychological as well as a political charge, because, first of all, Achilles is not just any man, and then, no matter how much anger is characteristic of an individual, in this case it produces serious political consequences. How, then, asks Sloterdijk, to deal with anger? Today we turn to the therapist, and in the old days we turned to the gods. Back then there were heroes who knew how to turn anger into virtue, so anger became a political force, while today there are no heroes, and anger tends to be resolved on a psychological level. Constantly drawing parallels between the ancient and modern world, Sloterdijk necessarily introduces time, which appears as a quantity that through its three forms - past (genealogies), present (action) and future (possibilities) - inhabits our perspectives. Or, in Sloterdijk's words: "When the expenditure of anger takes on more developed forms, the seeds of anger are consciously sown, and the fruits of anger are carefully harvested. Through the culture of hatred, anger takes the form of a project. Whenever vengeful intentions ripen, dark energies become stable [...], and the life of the subject of anger is bubbling in the chalice of situations." Acting in anger is, to that extent, a version of the passage of time that thickens in a special way. Anger brings us back to an animalistic conception of time that has the quality of an ever-flowing present.