Description: Erik Johnson's website of quotes about Ghana, rhetoric, postcolonial public address, and African public spheres
writing (6175) power (3407) creole (117) cynicism (10) edouard glissant (3) peter sloterdijk (2) pca321 (2) pca4070 (2)
“But what if there is no [oppositional] power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where potential oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation . ‘Basic values’ and excuses merge impercept
— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112–13.
“kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the factors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, and the process of truth gets caught in a previously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition . Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together with their ideologies of domination, let go affectively—precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while the kynics support their ‘cheek