Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also… — Peter Sloterdijk
Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a “critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
p. 58Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
p. 5
Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity.
p. 540
Since modern thinking no longer entrusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason." The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective.
p. 538

