> Original article for French readers:
> <http://www.lepoint.fr/edito/document.html?did=164024>
A couple excerpts, in my off-the-cuff translation, plus a couple comments of my own:
Interviewer: One could ask oneself if they [i.e. the pro-Constitution elites] aren’t supposedly reasonable adults who infantilize the people. Because if being reasonable means, accepting unemployment and living paycheck to paycheck, better off staying a child!
Sloterdijk: In this case, the French vote expressed a metaphysical “no”. The deeper question of the referendum would have been: are you resigned to a world where adults can no longer resolve all their problems? Or even: do you accept a world where there are a certain number of mouths to feed?
Interviewer: And if that at all signifies that elites no longer make their living as elites? After all, for years they’ve given the impression of doing nothing other than listening to what happens in society. Why listen to them?
Sloterdijk: It is true that direct democracy presupposes elites who have done their homework, in the process of an information campaign over several years. Thus, on the contrary, one has the feeling that the accelerated European project is aimed solely for elites, that is to say, those with the capacity to prove, even without enthusiasm, the beauty of a great project denuded of all grandeur. Europe is the paradox of a grandeur without grandeur: difficult to explain to a population disturbed by daily struggles! The price of the European adventure is the renunciation of heroism. In order to enter into the club of humiliated empires, it’s necessary to abandon the bad manners of imperial pride and grandiloquence. Yes, Europe is a club of mediocrities, there is its grandeur, an ironic grandeur. The alternative which we are confronted with is simple: on the one hand, grandeur and sacrifice, and on the other, well-being and mediocrity.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Seems like one of those stylistic arguments, French insurrection vs. German consolidation. Both are needed, not just one or the other.
We need better theories of Eurocapitalism, though -- what it's doing, where it is investing, how to organize multinational resistance movements against it.
-- DRR