Cynicism by Ansgar Allen

Author:Ansgar Allen [Allen, Ansgar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cynic; cynical; ancient Cynicism; Diogenes; mass cynicism; philosophy; politics; parrhesia; fearless speech; post-truth; scepticism; stoicism; nihilism; dog; ascetics; asceticism; holy fool; trickster; misanthrope; malcontent; insurrection; riot; transgression; progressive education; queer theory; paideia; performance art; anekdoty; Kynismus; Kynikos; Zynismus; Sloterdijk; Foucault; Nietzsche; Freud; Antisthenes; Plato; Crates; Hipparchia; Demonax; Menippean Satire; Jesus; John the Baptist; Paul; Epictetus; Lucian; Julian; Rabelais; Bakhtin; Shakespeare; Marson; Rousseau; Diderot; Sade; Pavlensky; Pussy Riot
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Sade’s work extends a recognizably Cynic project to the Enlightenment, subverting Western cultural frameworks by amplifying them, revealing their grotesque nature so that they become available to criticism.

In Sade’s writing, we find the drive to sovereign mastery that underpins Western education and philosophy pushed to its abysmal conclusion: the destruction of Humankind, God, and Nature.59 By implication, if anything is to be retained of ancient Cynicism as a militant philosophy, it must develop beyond the self-defeating, world-denying consequences of a drive to mastery, beyond the mastery (and destruction) of others and their environment. Although ancient Cynic mastery might be contrasted with other forms of sovereign composure that seek to regulate and form the body in the name of a higher calling (this being the formula that governs Western education), and although it might be defended as promoting a strain of mastery that affirms rather than denies experience, as Sade makes clear, mastery can still be destructive (and not in a generative way), even at its most wildly affirmative. This is not to argue that mastery in either form should be simply rejected. As a salutary note, this is the endpoint the libertine reaches in Sade’s writing, where the libertine discovers that his or her last remaining bind is to the quest for mastery itself. Its abandonment leaves the libertine romping without purpose, ceaselessly active—aimlessly so, in ways that seem to anticipate a direction of travel that today’s educator may begin to recognize.60

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