By way of introduction: Therapeutics vs. politics in the work of Sloterdijk

• 1. In this preliminary study we propose the development of some central issues in Sloterdijk's thought, taking the question of power and its political elaboration as our central theme. In his seminal Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk establishes a crucial polemical distinction that takes on a programmatic value: “Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter”. Stigmatizing “the psychological naïveté of the old concept of politics”

• and stating that, “the depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the modern”, Sloterdijk gradually develops a theory of therapeutics that can be described as the most determining feature of his work.

• 2. For Sloterdijk, therapeutics literally encompasses the domain of politics or, to put it another way, Sloterdijk seeks to counter the universality of politics with a “generalized therapeutic concern” that “queries the individual as to his capacity to endure his innate cosmopolitanism”. For Sloterdijk, therapeutic theory is from the outset located in a cosmopolitical context, and the apparent strangeness of the expression “innate cosmopolitanism” merely anticipates the later development of his “theory of the spheres” and his remarks on immunitarian processes.

• 3. So initially – in other words primarily in Critique of Cynical Reason and Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism – we see the development of a theory that interprets politics in the general context of a radical critique of metaphysics and subjectivity. For example, where revolutionary politics traditionally raizes partiality to the value of truth in order to constitute itself as a subject of unilateralized action, Sloterdijk advocates “deneuroticizing politics”: