Make Art, Not War: An Other (Hi)Story of thymos

Abstract

This essay critically examines Peter Sloterdijk’s Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch (Rage and Time. A Psychopolitical Investigation) and his attempt to rehabilitate a culture of thymos, i.e. a culture of self-confidence and self-assertion, whose emotional agent Sloterdijk sees in rage. As an alternative to Achilles’ rage in Homer’s Iliad, Sloterdijk’s ancient reference, I will propose Ovid’s Metamorphoses as another literary origin of thymos. Against this background, I aim to defend the legitimacy of thymos, but to give it a different profile than Sloterdijk does, namely that of a creative and culturally productive energy that dismantles the tradition of warlike heroism and is pacifist at its core.