Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) Paperback – May 15, 2012

Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic ProblemThe Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome This is an important book emphasizing the critical importance of rage as an individual and collective motive and a basis for action. Most of the modern theories of international relations and security ignore this factor and therefore misunderstand reality and arrive at doubtful and often counterproductive recommendations. Accordingly this book is recommended for urgent and careful study by international relations and security affairs scholars and practitioners, and by the interested public as a whole. I will refer to it in my book ISRAELI STATECRAFT: CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE, on which I am working.However the book has three main weaknesses. The first one concerns the theoretic frame into which the author tries to force his discourse. He considers rage as a kind of phenomenon which can be put into a Bank and then either kept as a treasure or used as an asset producing more Zorn, and which can even be "borrowed". This is largely incorrect. Rage is not an asset or treasure which can be deposited. Rather, in many and perhaps most cases it dissipates if not translated rather soon into deeds. At least the author should have added a discussion of "remembering rage" to show if and how far it can be kept intact till used.The second weakness is neglect of leaders as capable of producing rage as a way to mobilize support and activate people. True, there is need for some social conditions enabling mobilizing of rage, but this does not reduce the importance of leaders in producing, using or reducing it - as shown by many studies, including on recent mass-killings in Africa (such as by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen).Last, but not least, there is a rupture between most of the book and the conclusions which propose a way to cope with rage, focusing on a kind of dedactic program. This recommendation contradicts all of the text which presents rage as a very serious and deeply rooted factor which surely cannot be contained by such lame measures. Rather, if one adds to the treatment more thorough consideration of the implications for humanity of rage combined with weapons of mass killing, which is a very realistic scenario, then an unavoidable conclusion may well be that only what I call a "Global Leviathan,", that is a strict and partly authoritarian global security regime, can prevent calamities resulting from rage combined with mass killing instruments. It is hard to understand the sudden optimism of the author, unless he consciously or subconsciously "forced" himself to conclude the book in a positive vain - however much contradicting his otherwise very pertinent analysis.The book lacks an index. This is unacceptable in a serious book such as this.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected]

We can excuse Sloterdijk perhaps for this early shallow attempt to explain rage(Zorn) revolution, rebellion,bonfires, jihads outrage. Since there is no economic hardly political basis to anything in his thinking not deeply,not with Heidegger nearby; the book gets skewed into marginalized provocations,like the subject itself;Yes interesting to read; As an academic he needs to plow through the historical ferment of the subject, All quite boring... ancient history, Plato,the thymotic.....closer to an explication on the time-honored Seven Deadly Sins....Sloterdijk's context is the "spheres",the immune systems, rage, resentment is an armour, a breast-plate,perhaps Brunnhilde's for borrow... then we find the spatialized Beings a la Heidegger,the "horizons" of Rage..Wrath Bonfires... summed up with the evangelicisms of Nietzsche. Great conservative rogues,actually Romantics.... company you have the conceptual luxury to pick n'choose the atrocity, the "cleansing" the inhuman abbatoir you wish to focus.His unceasing,unrelenting rage against the Marxist Left, Negri,even swipes at,Eagleton, Chomsky (monotonous)and Agamben"homo sacer",exaggerations..Derrida is left alone, untouched, and his misunderstands his "spectres" elegance, that Marx indeed still remains because the realization was never properly attenuated...perhaps in Scandinavia socialisms there.... is much;but the vast arsenal is saved for the Red citadel, the Communist monsters...well easy targets indeed... really Stalin, MaoI assume Sloterdijk may have known that both were quite uncomfortable with Marx,as currently democracy is of austerity capitalism....both seldom understood the theory. Mao knew nothing of the basic categories explicated in "Das Kapital"; more he nurtured a permanent guerilla war.obeying,nurturing the simplicity of the feudal lifeworlds...like the West's Ponzi schemes, you always need fresh flesh of investments..We never learn that in fact both Stalin and Mao were deeply fearful of the USA, it's why there was a Cultural Revolution,The Red Guards worked for free; Mao needed free labor quickly or perish, and was fearful of the Vietnam War,the Rage there of the USA Marines... and what that may mean for China...So the historic meeting with Niixon was inevitable from both perspectives.Stalin we all know accommodated the Imperial West numerously, as did his heirs....Where's the Rage in accommodation, in compromise. in betrayal...And for all of Sloterdijk contra-Left efforts, there are many hundreds of bourgeois writers who are better at it, more devoted,greater elegant repertoire to furthering the xenophobic cause.In the end Sloterdijk fails to understand the jihad,the current terror networks,Well this is the middle 2005,when the book was written,,so present ISIS developments may have changed his orientation..For him the jihad is all based on a resentment ,jealousy...a'' Reader's Digest'' subjectivity would come to the same conclusion.... here we have....resentment of of what, of having your country occupied...?, of taking advantage of an Iraq Army,Police never made with embezzleed funds....No a larger more complex context is necessary to understand the rage mechanisms...... Yes the jihad were outsiders,(it was not called that on first employment by Carter)----OK there are countless criminals in history,for hire... but this particular post-Cold War jihad was CIA financed,to quell-kick-out the Soviets in Afghanistan. There were many more projects lined up....Well 9/11 happened, and you know the rest of the tale... The larger context was the end of the Cold War, and Reagan's new power of a Un-Soviet globe.... proxy war. So intelligent a man,Sloterdijk you'd think he'd appreciate more the co-extensions of power that sovereigns co-inhabit with themselves in maintaining a healthy base for wealth accumulation,global hegemony and the borderless movements of capital.Rage I'd say first for Herr Sloterdijk is a financed operation, manipulated, channeled, summoned into servitude....resentment can be nurtured like "fossil fuels", a renewable energy source( as he said himself in a latter interview, from 2015...)Rage not always doesn't appear as a spontaneous combustion as a dimension within a Wagnerian opera..or an enigmatic canon from Also Sprach.... Nietzsche is not a good way to deal with this subject.......

I tend to agree with Professor Dror. In this book, Sloterdijk attempts to posit the theory that all the significant acts of rebellion of the past, notably the French Revolution, Communism, and Fascism, were "engineered" attempts to orchestrate a generic moral outrage people feel in the face of perceived injustice; and that these "engineered" attempts were based on "banking" that outrage and channelling it.Unfortunately for him, his own lengthy denunciations of Leninism, Maoism, etc., are themselves seething with rage.He believes that Margaret Thatcher's right-wing ideology was developed for her by someone called "Joseph Keith". He also believes that Thomas Paine published a book entitled "Human Rights" (about which he then digresses at length, having failed to understand that Paine was not talking about "human rights" but about "The "RIghts of Man", which are quite a different thing).These are not merely typographical or translator's errors: they are emblematic of Sloterdijk's superficial, careless pontificating, which ultimately loses itself in an extraordinary coda about "The Count of Monte Cristo", having failed to define the "Rage" embodied in the title of the book.His proposition that only Bakunin understood the inherent value of revolutionary violence for its own sake, without thought for future structures, fails to take account of Bakunin's elaborate "catechism" in which Bakunin set out, in terrifyingly bureaucratic detail, exactly how his post-revolutionary Utopia would be organised.Towards the end of the book we realise that Sloterdijk's purpose is to try to ride the tiger of contemporary rebellion. His attempts, as an outsider and an academic (certainly not as a participant), to understand the street fighting and occupations of recent years, particularly in the Paris suburbs, only leave him bewildered; and his final attempt to suggest that Islamism is in some sense an analogue of Communism (as an attack on the West, whose assumed pre-eminence he never questions) is simply laughable. Anyhow, by this point he has abandoned all attempts to define what exactly he means by "rage"; there is not a single word about (for instance) the West's attacks on the Muslim world (Bush and Blair) and the rage those attacks generated in Muslims and non-Muslims alike.To paraphrase an old Bob Dylan song: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is - do you, Professor Sloterdijk?" Well- none of us knows what it is, but Sloterdijk's rather pathetic attempt to make himself its ideologue only makes him seem to be on the wrong side.

Das Buch habe ich in englischer Version auch meiner Familie im Ausland geschenkt. Dieses Buch hat bei mir vollständig neues Bild über die grundlegenden Ansichten über das Leben an sich, die ich bis dahin hatte, ausgelöst. P. Sloterdijk ist der Philosoph der Moderne. Das Buch ist ein wenig schwierig zu lesen aber es lohnt sich sehr es bis zum Ende zu lesen.