Foams by Peter SLoerdijk

“Tell me what you are immersed in, and I will tell you what you are.”
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”The everyday sojourn in latency becomes increasingly restless. Two forms of sleepers appear: sleepers in the implicit, who continue to search for security through ignorance, and sleepers in the explicit, who know what is planned at the front and wait to be called into action. Atmoterrorist explication tears the consciousness of a single cultural population (whether one calls them a people or a population has long ceased to matter) so far apart that they de facto no longer inhabit the same world, only forming a single society in terms of citizenship. It turns one side into employees of explication, and thus—at constantly changing sections of the front—agents of a structural, albeit only rarely current terror against the background conditions of nature and culture, while the others—transformed into inner aborigines, regionalists and voluntary curators of their own untimeliness—reside in fact-free reservations with the advantage of being allowed to cling to world pictures and symbolic immune conditions from the age of latency.”
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”In popular culture, unfortunately, optimism is misunderstood as an affective disposition, as if a ‘sunny temperament’ were enough in order to view everything in the most favorable light like a philosopher of the old school. As a mood, optimism actually produces kitsch, facile shortenings of the path to the reconciled image. One is never more remote from insight than when gazing at the fake symbols of peace. Philosophical optimism is a harsh discipline; it is humanly improbably, because it defends the best in virtually impossible situations. It seeks no less than to present the perfection of God and the world in full knowledge of the real circumstances.”

-Peter Sloterdijk, 2004