In this empty field,10 which seems to await signs and miracles since long ago, the first outbreakers from the antique social cosmos inscribed their hyper-bolic gestures. Like no other space the desert indeed invites one to act out psychotheological imagery. There, men who at some time in their childhood have absorbed the lectures [97] concerning the captivity of the resistant bodies by the will, move about through the driest areas of Palestine for decades with real fifty-pound iron chains around the hips. They lock themselves for many years into huge graves to prepare themselves for ascension through Christ— and if this is postponed, this is only because of the lethargy of the flesh, in which the nights pass in hard battles with sensual simulacra and the midday hours in the struggle against demons of heat. Famously the life of St. Anthony filled the image arsenals of European nightmare culture up to modernity with inexhaustible impulses. The emergence of gruesome images became possible because the deserted space framed the specter of associating and projecting souls like therapeutic brackets; above the delirious holy patients, the neutral attention of God floats as a saving ear. In this regard, the desert experiment had to lead to a spontaneous discovery of what the nineteenth century calls the unconscious; whoever was there knows more about the area out of which temptations [Versuchungen] and symptoms emerge.
If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”11 How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism.
(...)
But then the question of where the monks are going would have to be reformulated so radically that it would no longer be about monks at all. The question would instead be: how does human acosmicity manifest itself under modern conditions? How do the forces oriented toward resettlement organize themselves in post-metaphysical times? How do modern subjects conduct themselves with their element-changing tendencies, if anachoretic, monastic or psychotheological “paths” no longer stand open? What, in general, will become of the escapist, path-forging impulses of the polyvalent animal?
It bears repeating that an adequate response to these questions would amount to a cultural history of modernity. For the moment, it should suffice to indicate that the unexampled development of western music can only be understood on the basis of the necessity of producing a convincing culture-wide substitute for the lost desert and for the barred monastic refuge. European art music between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries touches, with its combination of ascesis and metaphysical tension, on the secrets of dyadic extremism formerly accessible only to hermits and mystics—it too had its athletes and its lonely protagonists, it too was oriented toward an external public, which already consisted more of spectators than of listeners. In the last hundred years, music has established itself as a universal transitional thirdness with which the world-age seeks to address its need for world-flight without recourse to the desert. The artificial sonic attack on the exterior world-noises has in this century reached an intensity unprecedented in the entire history of the species. But unlike the desert, which helped free the interior, the mass-medial musicalization of all spaces [115] floods the last breaches of free interiority: the oblivion of being out of every loudspeaker;
low-level worldlessness in every household at every time of day. Ever since headphones have existed, the principle of world-shutoff in the modern use of music has taken effect purely at the level of apparatuses. Here a drug-theoretical account of all forms of “light” ambience in modernity suggests itself.
There is hardly any phenomenon of contemporary culture in which no traces of quasi-musical world-distancing techniques can be found. The new wave of cocooning, the mass-emigration of modern subjects into the unreachable interior of solitudes, trips and symbioses, would be quite impossible without immersion in the tonal menu of sound-systems. World-distance is the lowest common denominator of a poly-escapist society.
The age of metaphysical homelessness (to recall Lukács’ formula for modernity) generalizes the habitus of flight. With its progressive constitution the world flees from itself in itself; from each point of the fleeing world, further flights are prepared. The accelerated world of money and of absolu-tized communication parodies the metaphysical relation to impermanence; it possesses neither an idea of the pleroma of metaphysics nor a conception of positive emptiness. The acosmic needs of people in a monkless time must seek other outlets—routes that, for all their differentiation, have in common that they run perpendicular to the abundance principle of the secular bourgeoisie. The word bourgeoisie here stands for the type of human that seeks wealth not in the expansion of inner space, but in stuffing oneself with content that ensures seamless self-filling. Flightiness, expanded to an element, makes a compromise between the fluid and the dead. In it move people who recognize themselves neither in the monk nor in the worldling. In a conversation with Boris Groys, the Russian avant-garde artist Ilya Kabakow issued the following statement:
The willingness to feel out of place is highly developed in me. It was always an especially comforting experience for me to not be anywhere. Whenever I go on a journey, even the foretaste of driving away already makes me happy. This obviously is an infantile trauma expressing the lack of the wish to come to the world. The world in which I was born and the form into which I was born leave me deeply unsatisfied. I don’t like my appearance and I don’t identify myself with it. I still remember when I saw my profile for the first time in the mirror; I literally moaned in pain: I couldn’t believe that that’s me. This is the desire to run away from my body, from my things, from my home. . .
I don’t have a home, I always feel that I am in a state of transit. Of such people one often says: they are well nowhere.
Instead of a commentary, I confront this statement with a temporally distant echo that responds to the artist from a nearness, and with a temporally near counterpart that distances itself from it milky-way-wide. In the Manichaean cosmogony that Theodore bar Koni quoted in the seventh century, it is said:
The shining Jesus approached the naïve Adam and awoke him from deathly sleep thereby to redeem him from the many spectres . . . so it was also with Adam, for the friend found him as he was sunken in deep sleep. He woke him, gave him movement, made him lively and drove the false spirit out of him. . . Thereafter Adam examined himself and recognized who he was. And he showed to him the fathers of the heights and how his soul was thrown into everything, devoured by those who devour, swallowed by those who swallow. . .
He erected him and let him eat from the tree of life. Thereafter Adam came to see and wept and cried with a loud voice like a roaring lion. He shook his hair, hit his chest and spoke: “Woe! Woe to him who built my body and to him who bound my soul.”
The distant echo resonates in the closing stanzas of Goethe’s poem “To the Moon”:
Blessed is he who walks apart,
Though no hate he bears,
Holds a friend within his heart;
And with him he shares
All that steals, by men unguessed,
Or by men unknown,
Through the maze of his own breast
In the night alone.
Out of the World
Peter Sloterdijk
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