Abstract
In 1983, two philosophers, Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, engaged with ancient Cynicism and the outspokenness and laughter of Diogenes as a critical practice. Foucault and Sloterdijk did so to position themselves ‘after’ critique: ‘after’ a period of and ‘beyond’ a certain style of dogmatism and theoretical deadlocks that troubled left thinking in the early 1980s (and continue to do so today). I show how Foucault and Sloterdijk, while differing in their critical politics, both read Diogenes’ politics of truth as radical subversive otherness. While Diogenes performed this antagonizing critique from a subaltern position, his politics nevertheless risked ending up in a self-righteous intransigence to know the truth. As an alternative, I turn to another politics of laughter in Hellenistic philosophy, that of the Thracian Maid, and its sceptical impulse that is situated ‘before’, ‘beyond’ and ‘after’ critique in the space of what Hans Blumenberg calls Nachdenklichkeit (pensiveness).
1983 or: Diogenes Twice
In 1983, in October and November, the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered six lectures in Berkeley on parrhêsía (hereafter: parrhesia), on ‘truth-telling’ or ‘speaking freely’ or ‘fearless speech’ (cf. Foucault, 2001). Shortly after, in his final lectures at the Collège de France – delivered in February and March 1984, only a few months before his death – Foucault dealt again with parrhesia, as he had in Berkeley. In these final lectures, Foucault retrieves in the figure of Diogenes, the Cynic 1 of ancient Greece, and his ascetic practice of parrhesia, the courage to speak the truth as an engaged, militant attitude. In the destitution and shamefulness of Diogenes’ life, form of life and truth are intricately intertwined in the commitment to live differently, even outrageously. Louisa Shea summarizes Foucault’s position thus: ‘Critique [. . .] must reengage with the tradition of blunt speech and ascetic self-fashioning’ (Shea, 2010: 132). In his lecture of 29 February 1984 Foucault mentions in passing ‘someone called Sloterdijk’ and his book which ‘bears the solemn title Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason) [. . .]. It is a book in two volumes about which I know nothing’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 179). It seems that Foucault and Sloterdijk were on the same track.
Indeed, in 1983, Suhrkamp had published the best-selling two volumes of Kritik der zynischen Vernunft by Peter Sloterdijk, until then a little known author. His book caused quite a stir in left-wing circles (cf. Heinrichs, 2009; Huyssen, 1987; Kallscheuer, 1987). Sloterdijk captured a zeitgeist in Germany of the early 1980s that expressed a certain weariness and fatigue in the wake of many years of dogmatic debate within the Marxist left of the 1970s: ‘after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, [. . .] [the] critical attitude turns nostalgically inwards’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxv). Sloterdijk confronts Critical Theory, 2 still influential in this historical constellation in the critical social sciences, with an ironic counterpoint: he dissects the contradictions of a social milieu that, weaned on readings of Adorno, has reserved for itself a moral sphere of social criticism, while at the same time ‘playing the game’. The revolutionaries of 1968 began to settle down in the institutions of the state, which they had so heavily criticized as repressive. As an antidote to the cynicism of this ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5), Sloterdijk recommends the Cynicism of Diogenes.
In this paper, I turn to Foucault’s and Sloterdijk’s readings of Diogenes to show how both, Foucault and Sloterdijk, position themselves ‘after’ critique: ‘after’ a period of and ‘beyond’ a certain style of left dogmatism. Both Foucault and Sloterdijk paint Diogenes’ politics of truth as radical subversive otherness, which is constitutive of a particular form of critique, which they formulated in juxtaposition of an intellectual deadlock about the function and practice of critique in the early 1980s. At stake in this debate was the value of critique as a legacy of 18th-century Enlightenment. French poststructuralists, such as Derrida, Lyotard and to some extent Foucault, affirmed a critique of the universalist pretensions of Enlightenment thinking, which they claimed was untenable and simply obfuscated its partial and exclusionary positions. On the other side of the debate stood Jürgen Habermas, heir of the Frankfurt School, who charged the ‘post-moderns’ with ‘neo-conservativism’. They had, he asserted, abandoned the ambition for transformative change. Habermas, in turn, hoped to rescue critique’s emancipatory credentials (Habermas, 1985).
This theoretical deadlock, Foucault and Sloterdijk feared, had incapacitated critique as an emancipatory practice. For Sloterdijk, the resulting impotence of critique had resulted in left cynicism. Foucault, in turn, was eager to abandon what he called the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment to rescue a positive function for critique (Foucault, 1984: 42). On a theoretical plane, this conundrum of critique – what its fundamental basis and values might be – continues to haunt left thinking, where the debate about the ‘proper’ conduct of critique is still ongoing: some voice a certain fatigue towards ‘critique’ (or ‘theory’) and the need for a ‘post-critique’ (Anker and Felski, 2017), while others insist on the ‘endurance’ of critique (Fassin, 2017; Harcourt, 2020). For Foucault and Sloterdijk, Diogenes’ Cynicism offers a potential way out of this deadlock through an ethical practice from which to formulate another politics (Foucault) or gain another subjectivity (Sloterdijk). This essay therefore raises the question of how their readings of Diogenes can inform today’s debate about the theory and practice of critique.
For both Foucault and Sloterdijk, Diogenes embodies critique as an ethical practice that works on the self to govern oneself and others with ‘a minimum of domination’ (Shea, 2010: 142). For Sloterdijk, Diogenes the Cynic is the prototype of the ‘anti-theoretician, anti-dogmatist, anti-scholar [. . .] [who] teaches instead to undertake the risk of existence consciously and serenely’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 160). Diogenes offers ammunition to attack an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5) that Sloterdijk thinks characterizes a post-modern cynical attitude. Diogenes’ life is the scandal that, as a permanent provocation, breaks with the customary forms of life and scholastic forms of critique. For Foucault, Cynicism is a formation of the subject through certain practices of the self in which truth-telling is staged as the idea of an unconcealed life that reveals the truth. The Cynic leaves behind the dogmatics of critique and performs the authenticity of an existence, not only as a new ethics or aesthetics of existence, but another politics.
Yet, I also contend that Diogenes’ outspokenness and laughter as antagonizing critique contains within it the danger of a self-righteous intransigence. For the Cynic’s laughter, as a fundamental practice of parrhesia, is premised on the conviction that the truth-teller – the parrhesiast – knows the truth. Hans Blumenberg, contra Foucault and Sloterdijk, insists that the Cynics have professionalized laughter as antagonistic critique, and from that position they ‘disparage the theoreticians [or critics] of all the other denominations’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 35). 3 Blumenberg turns to another critical laughter, reported by Plato: the Thracian maid laughs about Thales, the astronomer, who, while walking, fell into the well, because he was glancing into the sky instead of looking in front of his feet. For Blumenberg, the maid’s laughter represents a phenomenological turn and exposes a sceptical proviso, which makes Cavarero (1995) contrast the Cynics’ antagonistic laughter with the liberating cheerfulness of the Thracian woman. What is at stake in these two forms of laughter are different registers of critique – the more self-immune of Diogenes and a more sceptical one of the Thracian maid.
Sloterdijk’s Diogenes
Sloterdijk turns to Diogenes’ Cynicism to find an anti-dote to (post-) modern cynicism, which, he fears, has incapacitated traditional Enlightenment critique by absorbing and at the same time neutralizing it. Sloterdijk develops his ideas of Cynicism and Diogenes in critical conversation with the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s Negative Dialektik [Negative Dialectics] (Adorno, 2003 [1970]) had influenced a generation of left scholars and activists in Germany, while his aestheticism had increasingly disenchanted the radical students of 1968. And so, in Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Sloterdijk commences his thoughts on Diogenes with an anecdote about Adorno. On 22 April 1969, three young women stormed the podium of Lecture Hall VI at Frankfurt University where the matador of Critical Theory was about to start his lecture. Encircling him, the women opened their coats and exposed their naked breasts as a protest. Holding up his briefcase as a shield in front of his face, Adorno fled the lecture hall, highly distraught and bitterly disappointed at his reception by the students. Sloterdijk writes: ‘Here, on one side, stood the naked flesh, exercising “critique”; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxvii).
The scene throws up the following question: Do we find here an anti-theoretical act of Cynicism? Yes and no, finds Sloterdijk, because without Adorno, the master thinker of Critical Theory, ‘scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant. [. . .] Right and wrong, truth and falsity were inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxvii). In this case, the ‘naked’ truth manifests an ‘anti-theoretical action’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 107); its critique is directed at ‘a kind of philological gardening’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxvi) by Critical Theory; it expresses a plea for a ‘praxis of social change’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 107), which Adorno seemed no longer willing to deliver. In this act of provocation the ‘naked’ truth becomes ‘an element of aggression, an unwelcome exposure’ intended to tear through the veil of convention – namely, in this case, the way Critical Theory is practised (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxviii). Sloterdijk concludes: Adorno, ‘in a tragic but understandable way, had slipped into the position of the idealistic Socrates, and the women into the position of the unruly Diogenes’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 107f.).
Sloterdijk laments: ‘Critique [. . .] is experiencing gloomy days’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxvi). Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as a form of critique remains, he maintains, imprisoned in an ‘a priori pain’, or ‘Weltschmerz’, a presumptive sense of dismay, of being personally concerned (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxiii). Critique is stylized as a ‘mirror of the evil in the world’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxiv), yet remains stuck in its archaic ‘No’ to this world: ‘Where enlightenment appears as a “melancholy science” [Adorno], it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxvii). This is precisely where, for Sloterdijk, the difference between the Cynical and the cynical stance lies: Post-modern cynicism makes its appearance where cheekiness, satire and the scholasticism of critique serve the powerful and find a comfortable niche within the institutions (Sloterdijk, 1987: 174). Its cynicism is shaped by an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5) that acts against one’s better judgement. The cynic can thus continue to do his work, because the ‘falseness [of his action] is already reflexively buffered’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5). In this ‘stagnation of Critical Theory’, Sloterdijk claims, ‘the masochistic element [. . .] has outdone the creative element’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxv).
Sloterdijk confronts this cynical ossification with the Cynic’s impulse, a ‘thinking at the threshold of pain’ (Heinrichs, 2009: 53, 56). The Cynic envisioned by Sloterdijk as a role model is Diogenes, ‘a dog that bites when he feels like it. [. . .] His weapon is not so much analysis as laughter’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 156, 160). For Sloterdijk, Diogenes embodies the feisty antitype to the cerebral Adorno and his suffering-centred theory. Diogenes is here the prototype of the anti-theoretician and anti-dogmatist who, free of the constraints of following schools of thought, ‘undertakes the risk of existence consciously and serenely’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 160). In the Cynic’s impulse we find an incredible exhilaration, a ‘joyful science’ (Sloterdijk paraphrases Nietzsche here) 4 and an existential reduction, a ‘regression to the level of an animal’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 165) through which Diogenes has, says Sloterdijk, acquired an ‘unerring, sovereign spirit’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 160).
The Cynic goes in search of ‘an existential truth that is situated before the political’ (Heinrichs, 2009: 36; emphasis in the original). Cheekiness and withdrawal belong together. According to Sloterdijk (1987: 160f.), this spirit reveals itself in the famous anecdote of the encounter between Alexander of Macedonia and the sunbathing Diogenes. Alexander, wishing to demonstrate his generosity, granted the philosopher any wish. The latter simply replies, ‘Stop blocking my sun!’ Diogenes, the shameless political animal, is ‘the first one who is uninhibited enough to say the truth to the prince’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 161). Precisely because Diogenes has minimized his needs, he can ‘[outline] the platform of an existential antipolitics’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 167) which is based on an existential, crisis-compatible presence of mind: ‘Politics is that activity in which one has to be ready for anything’, concludes Sloterdijk (1987: 169).
Diogenes’ tactic of ‘restraint’ or ‘abstinence’ (Enthaltsamkeit) informs Sloterdijk’s own impulse to counter the ‘activist fury of “praxis”’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 939) and its inherent self-perpetuation: ‘[T]hose who exercise the praxis of abstention do not get caught in the self-continuation of unleashed activisms’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 541). For Sloterdijk (1987: 540), ‘in a nonpraxis, a refraining from acting, a letting happen and nonintervention, higher qualities of insight can come to expression than in any deed, no matter how well thought through’. Here, Sloterdijk takes up Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit (‘serenity’) – or ‘enthusiastic tranquillity’ – as a state of letting oneself be permeated (Sich-durchdringen-Lassen) by ‘the “self-revelation” of truth’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 541). Sloterdijk argues here for a disarming of the subject (Sloterdijk, 1987: 374ff.), an ethic of allowing and letting go, for advocating the ‘act of desisting’ (Heinrichs, 2009: 76), of non-intervention and the non-obstruction of the world’s rhythms – a thought that Sloterdijk explores more deeply in Eurotaoismus (Sloterdijk, 1989a). Ancient Cynicism is thereby joined by a Taoist stance of ‘not (or no longer) acting’ (Nicht(mehr)handeln), which presupposes an objectively harmonious order of the world, ‘for which everything that counts for us as a good life is of no importance’ (Meyer, 1987: 211).
Sloterdijk therefore does not abandon negative critique; rather, negation comes in the form of the passive virtues of letting-be, which vent an air of dropping-out (Habermas, 1985 [1983]: 124). But Sloterdijk’s gestus of the Cynic, warns Habermas, evades the discourse over society ‘through the strategy of refusing argumentation’ (Habermas, 1985 [1983]: 123f.). Sens (1987: 255) concurs with this position: ‘The Cynic as critic makes only brief appearances [. . .] the Cynic is adverse to investing mind and patience in the argumentative discourse.’ The Cynic’s laughter thus inaugurates an antagonizing critique. Habermas feels uneasy with this stance: ‘the Cynic does not mind violating the integrity of his opponent’ (Habermas, 1985 [1983]: 124). And although Žižek (1989: 25ff.) approves of Sloterdijk’s ridiculing of society by means of irony and sarcasm, he fears that ‘[c]ynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this [C]ynical subversion’ (Žižek, 1989: 26).
Foucault’s Diogenes
Diogenes comes into play in Foucault’s late work as an exemplar figure of a parrhesiast. The parrhesiast, according to Foucault, ‘is someone who tells the truth’ (Foucault 2009 [1982/3]: 52). The parrhesiast has the courage to tell the truth, even at high political risk, and by telling the truth ‘distinguishes himself from any untruthfulness and flattery’ (Foucault 2009 [1982/3]: 52). Cynicism is, for Foucault, the ‘most rudimentary as well as the most radical form’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 309) of parrhesia, in which truth is revealed in the otherness of the true life: the Cynic’s truth of otherness shows itself as a form of philosophical life in ‘scandalous, unbearable, ugly, dependent, and humiliated poverty’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 259), which is intimately connected to a form of truth-telling as ‘overt, universal, aggressive militancy’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 285). Truth is thereby un-concealed in the Cynic’s body: ‘He has suffered, endured, and deprived himself so that the truth takes shape in his own life, as it were, in his own existence, his own body’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 173).
In his last lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault talks about the Cynics largely in a philological, not political register. As one reader of the posthumously published lectures comments: ‘Foucault, facing imminent death, takes all the time in the world; he has almost unlimited patience for his objects, his interpretation is fondly pedantic and exhaustive to the point of redundancy’ (Assheuer, 2010: 55). In the last lecture he would ever give, on 28 March 1984, Foucault ends with the cryptic words: ‘There you are. Listen, I had things to say to you about the general framework of these analyses. But, well, it is too late. So, thank you.’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 338). While he insists that ancient asceticism ‘always aspired to lead both the true life and the life of truth at the same time’, and that ancient Cynicism for him ‘affirmed the possibility of leading this true life of truth’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 338), Foucault had spoken little about how the Cynic’s impulse could be practised today. In his lectures on 29 February and 7 March Foucault mentions several books that linked ancient Cynicism and modern cynicism (including Sloterdijk’s Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) and André Glucksmann’s (1981) Cynicism et passion). He quickly presents Sloterdijk’s work as ‘a reflection on the possible meanings and values of Cynicism in the present’, but then returns ‘humbly and modestly, to the history of Cynicism in Antiquity’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 192f.). 5
At least at first sight. In his philological detour to different texts that report on the Cynics and their practices of truth-telling in ancient Greece, Foucault emphasizes the point that Cynicism makes of life, of existence, of the bios, ‘an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 172). And Foucault positions the truth-telling of the Cynic as an ‘antidote to power’ (Saar, 2007: 335); one that comes through ethical self-formation. This truth-telling is courageous, it is a scandal, and it is intimately tied to the body of the critic: ‘Truth literally takes place in the Cynic’s body’ (Shea, 2010: 180). Foucault affirms here a space of resistance within relations of power: contrary to interpretations that identify a shift in the ‘late’ Foucault (Saar, 2003: 278ff.), Frédéric Gros, who has edited and annotated the lectures and also consulted Foucault’s extensive notes from that period, insists: ‘Foucault does not present the practices of the self as a conceptual novelty, but as the organizing principle of his entire work and the common theme of his first writings’ (Gros, 2005 [1981/2]: 515; see also: Legg, 2019; Saar, 2007: 236; Shea, 2010: 173f.). And his final lectures on Diogenes serve him to show how ethical self-formation finds in the Cynic’s parrhesiastic practice ‘a direct identification of truth and alterity’ (Di Gesu, 2022: 179), i.e. the Cynic is the role model for the militant critical vanguard, who is living differently (Shea, 2010: 188f.).
Foucault thus depicts Cynicism as a formation of the subject with specific practices of the self. What is central for Foucault is that the Cynics practised the idea of an unconcealed life, taking it to the extreme and staging their openness in the form of a shameless life. It is the naked life as a ‘dog’, as a beggar, as an animal, and even as a slave, and yet this life is, at the same time, the sovereign life: It is, he writes, a ‘naked, begging, and bestial life, or a life of shamelessness, destitution, and animality’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 270f.). The Cynic thus becomes a true yet unrecognized king, a king of derision, ridicule and poverty ‘who hides his sovereignty in destitution’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 278). The Cynic’s life, which breaks with all customary forms of living, is a scandal: ‘The Cynic strives for the “true life” so as to get others to see that they are mistaken and have lost the way’ (Gros, 2012 [1983/4]: 354). It is an admonition manifested in an aggressive, militant, brutal way, not in the subtle irony of a Socrates. Foucault, after discussing at length both Socrates’ and Diogenes’ truth-telling practices, finally opts for Diogenes as the avantgarde of a militant critic. ‘It is as if, confronted with the aporias of an ethics of existence or of a morality obligatory for everyone, Foucault ended up thinking that basically there could be no legitimate ethics other than one of provocation and political scandal’, concludes Gros (2005 [1981/2]: 532).
Foucault and Sloterdijk differ in their exposition of Cynicism, and so do their politics. While Sloterdijk’s ‘meditative Cynic [. . .] seeks to dissolve tensions within himself’ (Shea, 2010: 1985) through the gestus of dropping-out and letting-go, Foucault’s Cynic is in a ‘battle in the world against the world’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 340), and leads a struggle ‘directed at humanity in general [. . .] against the vices of the world and the evils of men’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 364f.). The Cynic, Foucault insists, ‘is a functionary of ethical universality’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 301), who pursues an inner-worldly activism. For the care of the self, which the Cynics practised in their exercises of self-examination, of poverty and renunciation, at the same time implicated the care of the other: ‘The care of others thus coincides with the care of the self’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 313). Cynicism turns life into a drama, not as an exercise to be performed alone, in solitary asceticism. Cynicism performs life as a spectacle, which confronts the other; the care of the self thus turns into a care for the world, as a social praxis of provocation in which the ‘true’ life as a caesura, as another life, calls simultaneously for the beginning of ‘another’ world (Gros, 2012 [1983/4]: 355). Catherine Malabou therefore interprets Foucault thus: ‘the Cynic form of parrhesia is a prefiguration of anarchism, not an ethics, but another politics’ (Malabou, 2022: 161, emphasis in original).
‘1983’, or: Dialogue among Absentees
‘1983’ evokes the simultaneity of Foucault’s and Sloterdijk’s appropriation of Cynicism. But temporal simultaneity does not incur theoretical congruence. Central to both Foucault and Sloterdijk is the idea to conceive the ‘true’ life of the Cynic as another life, a life of otherness – of thinking, speaking and living differently, even outrageously (Shea, 2010: 188), which transcends societal boundaries (on Foucault: Gros, 2012 [1983/4]: 356). But where Sloterdijk emphasizes satire and the carnivalesque, Foucault insists on parrhesia as inter-subjective truth-telling (Shea, 2010: 189). Even more so, it is worthwhile to pose the question: What would Foucault have taken from Sloterdijk if he had got round to reading him in 1984? And what would Sloterdijk, who had written on Foucault’s The Order of Things previously (Sloterdijk, 1972), have made of Foucault’s lectures, which he could not have known when writing Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, as they had not yet been delivered? Unfortunately, there was no longer time for an exchange between Foucault and Sloterdijk on their interpretations of Cynicism. Foucault died on 25 June 1984, just a few months after his final lecture. Sloterdijk did, however, draw on the ‘late’ Foucault in his subsequent work.
Sloterdijk reads the late Foucault through the lens of ethics, not that of (another) politics. In his book You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk writes that the ‘late’ Foucault had ‘completed the breakthrough to a conception of philosophy as exercise’ (Sloterdijk, 2013: 148ff.). Sloterdijk’s concept of ‘Übung’ (exercise) developed in You Must Change Your Life is also a central element in Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetic of existence’ (Menke, 2003: 284ff.). In this respect, Foucault attributes techniques of practice (apprentissage) by a self on itself (e.g. abstinences, examinations of consciousness) to a number of the ancient philosophical schools: Pythagoreans, Socratics and Cynics (Foucault, 1982: 246). Sloterdijk reads Foucault’s expedition into the history of asceticism or, rather, ‘techniques of the self’, as a philological exercise, with Foucault being on the path to a ‘General Disciplinics’ (Sloterdijk, 2013: 152). Sloterdijk, however, only mentions the Stoic authors discussed by Foucault in his earlier lectures at the Collège in 1981/2 (Foucault, 2005 [1981/2]), and fails to engage with Foucault’s last lectures on Cynicism (Sloterdijk, 2013: 152).
On the other hand, Foucault’s critique of Arnold Gehlen, Klaus Heinrich and Paul Tillich and the fundamental distinction they make between ancient Cynicism and modern cynicism also applies to Sloterdijk. Foucault notes: ‘it seems to me that these authors systematically contrast a Cynicism with a rather positive value, ancient Cynicism, and a cynicism with a rather negative value, modern cynicism’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 180). In this interpretation, modern cynicism is ‘always presented as a sort of individualism, of self-assertion, [. . .] of existence at any rate in its extreme singularity, whether this is in opposition or in reaction to the break-up of the social structures of Antiquity, or faced with the absurdity of the modern world’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 180). There is, he finds, a danger of ‘missing [. . . ] [the] fundamental dimensions, that is to say, the problem, which is at the core of Cynicism, of establishing a relationship between forms of existence and manifestations of truth’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 180). This criticism would also apply to Sloterdijk’s version of Cynicism. And Foucault adds: ‘It seems to me that it is the form of existence as living scandal of the truth that is at the heart of Cynicism’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 180). Thus, for Foucault, quite unlike Sloterdijk, Cynicism cannot be a matter of dropping out, of an ‘existential anti-politics’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 167; my emphasis), but needs to be one of militant engagement in the world for another politics.
Foucault (2012 [1983/4]: 192) follows here the interpretation of Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, to whom Sloterdijk also makes prominent reference in his Kritik (Sloterdijk, 1987: xxxix). Yet, Niehues-Pröbsting resists the normative comparison of Cynicism and cynicism that Sloterdijk proposes: ‘Sloterdijk explodes [. . .] the historical continuum of the concept by constructing Cynicism and cynicism as opposites’ (Niehues-Pröbsting, 1988: 8). In his conceptual history of Cynicism, Niehues-Pröbsting teases out the Janus-headed nature of Diogenes as the prototype of the Cynic, who as myth has from the outset ‘passed into reception’ (Niehues-Pröbsting, 1988: 18f.). In other words, Niehues-Pröbsting notes that Diogenes is being invoked as a mythological figure, not a historical one. In these mythological narratives, two different figures who go under the name of ‘Diogenes’ make their appearance. On the one hand, Diogenes is a joker, jester and mocker. This is how Sloterdijk’s Diogenes enters the stage. On the other hand, Diogenes appears as a sage and philosopher. This is the role played by Foucault’s Diogenes, who frames him as a militant truth-teller (parrhesiast).
Foucault’s analysis explores the way techniques of the self and the asceticism of the Cynics give the subject the capacity for disobedience, for critical-political engagement. By contrast, Sloterdijk’s Cynic is someone who drops out of society with the air of a critic of contemporary culture. As Bernhard Lang put it, ‘in Foucault, [Diogenes] is the philosopher who confronts the political power mongers epitomised by Alexander; in Sloterdijk, Diogenes represents the free individual who, just as he flouts the rules of bourgeois society, also refuses to follow the Scholastic constraints of the established philosophical movements’ (Lang, 2010: 175f.). In the case of Foucault, we find the (indirect) articulation of a political-critical engagement by the philosopher as an outsider of politics: ‘Foucault reserves the role of the Cynic to a small and select group of individuals [. . .] the rigorous ethos of the avant-garde social critic’ (Shea, 2010: 185). What emerges from Sloterdijk is, by contrast, more of a culture-critical and elitist ressentiment à la Nietzsche, a figure who eschews scholastic constraints and fashions a fluid subjectivity through meditation, while at the same time casting as Nietzschean ‘thinker on stage’ (Sloterdijk, 1989b).
Scepticism and the Politics of Laughter
Besides his shamelessness, Diogenes is famous for his laughter – a laughter which is not without its politics. The Cynic laughs from a subaltern position, and yet displays an aura of his own ‘unmockability’ (Kuin, 2019: 266). Foucault and Sloterdijk engage Diogenes’ politics of laughter differently: Sloterdijk emphasizes the carnivalesque, the satirical and the witting humour in Diogenes’ utterances and gestures, whereas ‘[Foucault]] privileges the bluntness of Cynic speech over its wit, and militancy over laughter’ (Shea, 2010: 189). Sloterdijk turns to Diogenes’ laughter ‘in search of lost cheekiness’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 101ff.): Diogenes’ shamelessness for Sloterdijk is one of happy refusal. Andreas Huyssen puts it thus: ‘The mythic model for the kind of somatic anarchism he advocates is the Greek [C]ynic Diogenes [. . .] who challenged state and community through loud satirical laughter and who lived an animalist philosophy of survival and happy refusal’ (Huyssen, 1987: xvii). Foucault’s militant Diogenes hardly laughs. Foucault rather emphasizes the hard labour that the ascetic practices of destitution require. Shamelessness and scandal are couched in disgrace and dishonour, where precisely the ‘Cynic asserts his sovereignty’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 262), although Foucault also mentions that the Cynic operates in a ‘mode of connection [that] is one of confrontation, and derision, of mockery and the assertion of a necessary exteriority’ (Foucault, 2009 [1982/3]: 286, my emphasis).
Diogenes’ laughter is a knowing laughter, whose truth has been worked out in the hard labour of asceticism (Foucault) or meditative practice (Sloterdijk). This gestus of openly giving voice to another truth (unintelligible to the other) runs the risk, however, of succumbing into a knowing, even triumphant stance. Take Foucault’s narration of the encounter between Diogenes and Alexander the Great in his Berkeley lectures (Foucault, 2001: 124ff.). After Diogenes has refuted all of Alexander’s claims to being a king, the conversation ends in exhaustion: ‘[Alexander] is brought to a point where Diogenes tells him that the only way to be a real king is to adopt the same type of ethos as the Cynic philosopher. And at this point in the exchange there is nothing more for Alexander to say’ (Foucault, 2001: 132; my emphasis). Diogenes has won the battle. And this attitude applies to both the ancient Cynic and the modern cynic – even in the latter’s resignation: ‘Cynicism [becomes] a synonym for resignation in the face of a recognised threat. [. . .] The primary response is [. . .] the expression of an unspoken, knowing indifference’ (Heinrich, 1966: 148, 155; my emphasis). The cynical disposition was always a latent aspect of Cynicism: ‘The cynic always needs to be the “winner”’ notes Fetscher (1975: 338). The danger in the Cynic’s gestus of parrhesia lies in the potential insistence on always being right: ‘Diogenes’ laughter [. . .] is exclusive, premeditated, and self-immune’ (Kuin, 2019: 266).
Hellenistic philosophy knows a different subaltern laughter, though, namely the laughter of the Thracian maid. That laughter from a subaltern (woman, slave) has been mostly considered as anti-parrhesiastic, however. It is the story of a Thracian maid (presumably a slave) who laughs at the philosopher Thales – and in so doing calls into question the latter’s truth regime. Plato lets Socrates tell the story of Thales, the astronomer, who ‘while engrossed in examining the firmament above, fell into a well. On seeing this, a Thracian servant maid of good humour and good looks bursts into laughter at him’ (as related in Blumenberg, 1987: 13f.). For Plato, the maid operates only as a metaphor for the Sophists, whom he can contrast with Socrates, seen as the true philosopher. The ridiculousness of the philosopher in the life-world (Lebenswelt) is put into question by Plato ‘by comparing it with the greater ridiculousness of herself, the one who is laughing at the philosopher’ (Niehues-Pröbsting, 2015: 33).
In Plato’s reading, according to Niehues-Pröbsting, the maid is the fool, not the philosopher. Similarly, in his lectures on metaphysics (WS 1935/36), Heidegger reads Thales’ falling into the well as a metaphor for the inscrutable nature of philosophical thinking. Thales is the true sage, and the maid is laughable herself, as she laughs out of ignorance (Heidegger, 1962: 2ff.). All others have become the laughing ones out of ignorance, except the philosopher, who knows (and therefore does not laugh). Hans Blumenberg comments: ‘In Heidegger, the philosopher’s plunge has, to take the metaphor further, become the criterion for his being on the right path’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 149), whereas the Thracian woman has made herself laughable, for: ‘She believes in a fall where there can only have been a dive’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 151) – a deep dive down to the profundity of the truth. Heidegger, Blumenberg holds, is celebrating ‘the unapproachability, from the standpoint of the life-world, of the one who has dived down into the horrors of the underground’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 151) to un-conceal the concealed truth. Heidegger’s Thales withdraws from discussion, disengages from agreement and consensus.
Not-knowing is the problem of the others, but not of Heidegger’s Thales, nor that of Diogenes, the Cynic. In both cases there is an assertion of a deeper insight that remains inaccessible to the maidservants (or even to Alexander, the king) who are caught up in the busyness of everyday life and its social norms, which both Thales and Diogenes reject. The clumsiness of Thales and the destitute shamelessness of Diogenes are ‘distancing techniques’ (Sloterdijk, 2012: 80). Truth is becoming accessible not through a phenomenological enmeshing in everyday life but through another life that is distancing itself from the busyness and common sense of everyday life. Blumenberg has a problem with Heidegger on this point: ‘It is no longer just a matter of a minor or major correction, but rather of the exception, the election, the state of grace from the standpoint of which one cannot be taught or initiated [. . .]. The one who comprehends is recognised by being the person nobody else comprehends’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 158).
What this truth concept excludes is the question of not-knowing, of doubt and thus of scepticism, itself an influential trope in Hellenistic philosophy. Foucault did not engage with ancient Scepticism in his lectures, as Gros notes: ‘As for scepticism, it is not even mentioned’ (Gros, 2005 [1981/2]: 521f.). Even more so, Foucault insists that the question of ‘how [. . .] the alleged parrhesiastes can be certain that what he believes is, in fact, the truth [. . .] is a particular modern one which, I believe, is foreign to the Greeks’ (Foucault, 2001: 15). And Foucault seems to side with ‘the Greeks’ on this point (even though he does not spell his position out explicitly). Foucault’s stance is informed by an anti-Cartesian position, but the laughter of the Thracian maid, though sceptical, is not necessarily the same as Descartes’. What, then, is actually amusing this Thracian maid and informing her scepticism?
The maid might perhaps be laughing at the unworldliness or practical ineptitude of the philosopher: ‘Apparently disconnected from the world, Thales falls and the maid, representing the life-world, laughs’ (Schües, 2008: 16). The anecdote, in Socrates’ rendering, has the maid saying that Thales ‘is so eager to know things in the sky that he cannot see what is there in front of his nose and at his very feet’ (Blumenberg, 1987: 14). Perhaps the maid is not at all stupid: she could be laughing at a grand delusion underpinning philosophy, namely the notion that only by distancing oneself from the life-world – by being unworldly – can theoretical proximity to truth grow (Cavarero, 1995: 53ff.; Schües, 2008: 20). And the maid might also smile about Diogenes’ mockery and jokes, as these jokes are spoken in a militant attitude and from a distancing position. As Adriana Cavarero puts it: ‘A quick smile can often be seen on the faces of women as they observe the self-absorption of brainy intellectual men’ (Cavarero, 1995: 50). The maid laughs ‘because self-importance prevents [the critics] from laughing at themselves’ (Hawkins, 2015: 157). While the Thracian maid is following the Cynic’s impulse of calling into question the unworldliness of the philosophical form of life ‘in a tone of liberating laughter’ (Cavarero, 1995: 56), her liberating cheerfulness is different from the triumphant laughter of Diogenes: ‘Her laughter resonates within her confinement to the sphere of “necessities”’, writes Cavarero (1995: 53).
It is exactly this liberating cheerfulness of the Thracian maid that is central to Blumenberg’s notion of scepticism. The laughter of the sceptic is a ‘laughing with’, not a ‘laughing at’, and links cheerfulness with a phenomenological disposition. The maid laughs at a perceived incongruity, but she can only sense this incongruity, because Thales stumbles over his feet and into the well in the maid’s presence: ‘The maidservants do not laugh at the phenomenologist’, writes Blumenberg (1987: 159), because they share the attention to the necessities of the life-world. The Thracian maid’s cheerfulness comes from a shared attention to the object of the well as a stumbling block and practises a spatial gaze ‘at eye level, [. . .] not vertically from above, but horizontally over the shoulders’ (Köhne, 1999: 413, 416). This ‘horizontal’ laughter does not monopolize parrhesia to a few privileged intellectuals but invites a collective parrhesia that is hesitant rather than militant.
After Critique
In this paper, I have discussed what is at stake in Foucault’s and Sloterdijk’s turn to the outspokenness and laughter of the ancient Cynic Diogenes as a register of critique. This form of critique promised to overcome the theoretical deadlock of the early 1980s, when a post-Enlightenment critique had ‘blackmailed’ the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment (Foucault) and succumbed to ‘post-modern’ cynicism (Sloterdijk). While Foucault and Sloterdijk differed in their critical politics, both read Diogenes’ politics of truth as radical subversive otherness. Diogenes’ Cynicism offers a distancing practice of the self that enables truth-telling – in the form of provocation, satire, laughter, and frank speech, which is constitutive of a form of critique positioned ‘after’ a period of and ‘beyond’ a certain style of left dogmatism. For Sloterdijk, Diogenes breaks with the customary forms of life, and scholastic forms of critique to expose the ‘enlightened false consciousness’ of cynicism. For Foucault, Diogenes performs the authenticity of an existence, not only as a new ethics or aesthetics of existence, but another politics. As Foucault puts it: ‘There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life (de l’autre monde et de la vie autre)’ (Foucault, 2012 [1983/4]: 340).
Around the corner looms the spectre of cynicism as ‘Cynicism turned self-righteous’ (Shea, 2011: 196). Diogenes’ outspokenness and laughter performs an antagonizing critique, which, even though operating from a subaltern position of shamelessness, destitution and otherness, nevertheless manifests an ‘unlimited sovereignty’ (Gros, 2012 [1983/4]: 354) and an ‘unerring, sovereign spirit’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 160). But this unerring spirit, acquired through the hard work of asceticism, seems self-immune to the criticism of others, an attitude which contains within it the danger of a self-righteous intransigence to know the truth. An alternative, more sceptical register of critique comes to light in another subaltern laughter in Hellenistic philosophy, that of the Thracian maid. The maid’s laughter exposed a sceptical impulse that is situated ‘before, ‘beyond’ and ‘after’ critique. This scepticism operates in the phenomenological spirit of a descent into ‘the textures of the ordinary’ (Das, 2020). The Thracian maid’s scepticism thereby does not call into question the world in itself or the necessity to change it for the better. Rather, the maid’s cheerfulness laughs at any premature determinations for its interpretation, which are taken from a distancing position of the ‘know-it-all’ critic rather than through a phenomenological gaze.
It would be wrong to interpret the phenomenological scepticism of the Thracian maid as anti-intellectualism or populist ‘common sense’ posited against a presumed ‘expert rule’, which is troubling today’s political conjuncture. Rather the opposite. The maid’s laughter, while turning her cheerfulness against a self-righteous form of distanced critique, is simply an expression of doubt towards any unquestionable truth, whoever might pretend to be in its possession. Also, populist claims to ‘common sense’ are self-righteous in this sense. The maid’s cheerfulness disrupts any such form of self-righteousness through a phenomenological interruption: ‘The sceptic ego is above all hesitation’ writes Marquard (1973: 152). This hesitation slows down the very practice of judgement and enables collective parrhesia, which invites a space of what Blumenberg calls Nachdenklichkeit, i.e. a state of ‘pensiveness’ or thoughtful reflection: ‘Pensiveness means it does not all stay as self-evident as it was. That’s all’ (Blumenberg, 1981: 61). Pensiveness produces a moment of what Joseph Vogl calls procrastination: ‘Procrastination calls for revision. [. . .] that means a critique which interrupts its own generalising tendency’ (Vogl, 1988: 109, 115). Parrhesia thus understood is not primarily about speaking out an unquestionable truth, but about suspending judgement temporarily to make space for Nachdenklichkeit before, beyond and after critique.
Foucault might not have been much moved by the Thracian maid’s ‘horizontal’ laughter, nor by my reading of it as a potentially collective parrhesia. Foucault envisioned the Cynic impulse to stand for ‘the arduous work of a few public intellectuals who have the courage to risk all’ (Shea, 2010: 190). For Foucault, the Cynic’s truth-telling is militant, and so is his mocking-laughter, without which truth-telling has no power. ‘The Cynic performs in the midst of everyday life’ (Bosman, 2006: 99), but he holds ordinary life in contempt, which leaves little room for the liberating cheerfulness of the Thracian maid, who keeps invested in the ‘sphere of necessities’ (Cavarero) of ordinary life. Sloterdijk, perhaps, sees Diogenes’ laughter in closer proximity to the Thracian maid’s mockery than Foucault: Diogenes’ and the Thracian maid’s laughter, according to Sloterdijk, ridicule theory’s (and critique’s) ‘inability to be small’ and its ‘absence of spirit from the most obvious’ (Bosman, 2006). It is in this sense that Sloterdijk acknowledges that the maid’s laughter ‘inaugurates [. . .] the history of the “sublation” (Aufhebung) of philosophy [. . .] through a stubborn insistence on the seriousness of life against the frivolous word garlands of abstraction’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 535).
