The Return of Rage

Abstract

"Emotions are popular again.1 However, while there have been discussions of emotions ranging from humiliation, guilt, and anxiety to love or sympathy, rage has received only marginal attention. This is rather surprising, given that rage is one of the most apparent psychopolitical driving forces in conflicts on the personal, national and international stages. It might be argued that the vengeful part of the affective life of political actors has been neglected because it is, by definition, anti-deliberative and anti-egalitarian. If X is furious about Y, she does not care for equal treatment or reasoning directed toward mutual understanding. Rage thus undermines the normative pillars of contemporary political theory. For the present purpose I would like to pursue the question, if it is possible to construct a viable theoretical paradigm that draws on the psychopolitical category of rage and related concepts such as indignation, wrath, and anger.2 Plato already argued that only a political system that could successfully balance the accumulating, receptive, erotic, on the one hand, and the giving, explosive and what he calls “thymotic” dimensions of communal life, on the other hand, would provide for a just society. Recently, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who became known to a wider audience through his Critique of Cynical Reason3 and his 1999 quarrel with Habermas concerning the ethics of human engineering, attempted to rehabilitate rage as a central political category. In his treatise Zorn und Zeit (‘Rage and Time’, an allusion to Heidegger’s Being and Time), Sloterdijk proposes to reread the history of civilization as well as contemporary political developments as attempts to balance the vengeful and the caring dimensions of social interaction. This paper discusses Sloterdijk’s proposal to introduce rage as a central psychopolitical category and at the same time pursues the systematic question whether this proposal can be extended into a political theory that is empirically plausible and normatively convincing. The guiding hypothesis is that a politics of caring for the worst-off without vengeful contours is empty, while rage without a vision of a better society is blind."