After God. Peter Sloterdijk

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After God

      Peter Sloterdijk

      Translated by Ian Alexander Moore

      polity

Copyright page

      First published in German as Nach Gott: Glaubens- und Unglaubensversuche, © Suhrkamp Verlag 2017. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

      This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

      Chapter 5, ‘God’s Bastard: The Jesus-Caesura’ from Modernity’s Enfants Terribles, by Peter Sloterdijk. English translation copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.

      Chapter 4, ‘Closer to Me Than I Am Myself’, from Bubbles (Spheres I), by Peter Sloterdijk. English translation copyright © 2011 Semiotext(e). Reprinted with permission of Semiotext(e).

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3350-3

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3351-0 (pb)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947- author. | Moore, Ian Alexander, translator.

      Title: After God / Peter Sloterdijk ; translated by Ian Alexander Moore.

      Other titles: Nach Gott. English

      Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | First published in German as Nach Gott: Glaubens- und Unglaubensversuche, Suhrkamp Verlag 2017. | Summary: “After God is dedicated to the theological enlightenment of theology. It ranges from the period when gods reigned to reveries about the godlike power of artificial intelligence”-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019034770 (print) | LCCN 2019034771 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533503 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533510 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509533534 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Death of God theology. | Philosophical theology.

      Classification: LCC BT83.5 .S5613 2020 (print) | LCC BT83.5 (ebook) | DDC 210--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034770

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034771

      Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Times by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk

      Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited

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      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Translator’s Note

      I would like to thank Ben Acree, Myron Jackson, Oliver Berghof, and especially Manuela Tecusan for their helpful comments on the translation.

1 TWILIGHT OF THE GODS “Every world of gods is followed by a twilight of the gods”*

      Rest now, rest, you god!

      Richard Wagner, Die Götterdämmerung

I

      The intelligentsia of our culturally forgetful days still remembers, partially, that the Greeks of the classical era used the term “mortals” to refer to human beings. Human beings bore this name because they were conceived of as earthly counterparts of the gods, who were called immortals. Immortality was in fact the only eminent feature of the Greek gods. Their behavior hardly differed from that of humans, with their all-too-humanness.

A century ago, amid the convulsions of World War I, Paul Valéry extended the attribute of mortality to high cultures. We should now know, he assured us, that even the great collective constructs (nous autres, civilisations), those integrated by language, law, and the division of labor, are mortal. We should regard it as a happy accident if this immense statement has left behind a trace here and there, in the memory of a culture that bears the old European stamp. “We civilizations” are indeed mortal and, after everything that had happened, we should have taken note of this. No longer should mortality be predicated only of Socrates and his ilk. The term leaves the domain of syllogistic exercises and inundates a continent that does not grasp its Great War. Mortality acquires this new valence not only from the fact that, within four years, more than nine million men were sent to their deaths. What is decisive is that the countless fallen soldiers and civilian casualties seemed to result from the internal tensions of the cultural events themselves. What are cultural nations, and what do civilizations amount to, if they allow such an excess of casualties and self-sacrifices, indeed not only allow it but provoke it from their ownmost [eigensten] impulses? What does this mass consumption of life say about the spirit