Chartbook 398 Letting our "no ones" live: translating Sloterdijk with DeepSeek

Holding myself together in a lounge at Chengdu’s airport yesterday, whilst a typhoon roared through Hong Kong, I immersed myself in writing a piece about the dollar system. The last Chartbook.

It was a productive exercise. But the whole experience - the thought of a great “vertical” city swept by huge storms, the uncertainty of our departure, the certainty of my one-entry visa ticking towards its expiry date, the filter of living in a Chinese world, compounding the sense of unreality in a cavernous, largely-empty airport - on top of the sudden surge of intellectual focus in writing the piece, adding it all up, left me drained and somewhat shaken.

To recharge batteries on the flight South I returned to Peter Sloterdijk’s Kritik der Zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason) (1983), which has been accompanying me, on and off, all summer. I find his playful German prose and the surprisingly accessible brilliance of his thought, restorative. As others have noted, his diagnosis of the modern condition of critical reason, reason that has already disillusioned itself, that already “knows the truth”, has dramatic contemporary resonance.

Yesterday evening, there was one passage in particular that seized me. It spoke directly to the question of the pressures of subject-hood/selfhood, the imperative of being “somebody” and “holding oneself together”. The pages are 156-158 in the 1983 Suhrkamp edition.

I don’t know whether these pages are included in the English translation of Sloterdijk’s text. I don’t have that to hand because it does not seem to have been digitized. So, I thought I would try my hand at a translation.

Since my friend Cui Zhiyuan and I have been talking about an AI-assisted Sino-English-German translation group, I thought I would try out DeepSeek as a partner in translating Sloterdijk into English. I’m delighted to report that the results were surprisingly quick, competent and intelligent.

DeepSeek is not flawless there were three points in three pages where it went off track. In one case it ascribed to Sloterdijk more linguistic imagination than is actually in the German original and added a rather fascinating rationale of its own.

We went back and forth about these passages and DeepSeek happily self-corrected. I must admit that I am looking forward to our next exchange.

Here are the three screen shots that I fed to the machine. Astonishingly, this is all you have to do. DeepSeek has excellent OCR. Obviously uploading a PDF is easier, but if you are stuck, simply take a screenshot.

What DeepSeek and I made out of it, is the following English rendition. It is not the most elegant English prose, but it is a fairly faithful rendition of the German original. The argument that so grabbed my attention begins in earnest from the second paragraph:

“New blind identifications emerge to confront new destabilizations. Life, which even through upheavals and moments of wakefulness, seeks new stabilities, obeys an inclination toward inertia. Thus, the impression can arise that intellectual history forms a mere carousel of ideologies—not a systematically wrought emergence of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "post-enlightenment," the idiocy of the I’s (Iche, i.e. plural Ich’s) screws itself into ever more refined and contorted positions: into a *conscious unconsciousness*, into defensive identities.

The addiction to "identity" seems the deepest of the unconscious programmings, so profoundly hidden that it long escapes even attentive reflection. Within us, a formal "someone" is quasi-programmed as the bearer of our social identifications. It guarantees everywhere the precedence of the foreign over the self; where "I" appears to exist, others were always already in my place before me, automating me through socialization. Our true self-experience in primordial *nobodiness* remains, in this world, buried under taboo and panic. Yet fundamentally, no life has a name. The self-aware/proud *nobody* within us—who only receives names and identities through "social birth"—remains the living source of freedom. This living nobody remembers, despite the horrors of socialization, the *energetic paradises* beneath personalities. Its foundation is the *present-minded body*, which we should call not *nobody* but *yesbody*, and which can unfold in the course of individuation from unreflective "narcissism" to reflected "self-discovery within the cosmic whole." In it the ultimate enlightenment as a critique of private, egoistic illusion finds its conclusion. While mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of pre-individual emptiness were previously the exclusive domain of meditative minorities, there are now good reasons to hope that in our world—torn apart by clashing identifications—majorities can be found for such enlightenment.

It is often necessary for pure survival interests to be able to become *No-one*. The *Odyssey* illustrates this at its most magnificent and playful moment. Odysseus, the quick-witted Greek hero, calls out at the decisive hour of his voyage—after escaping the cave of the blinded Cyclops: "*No-one* was it who blinded you!" This is how one-eyedness and identity are overcome. With this cry, Odysseus, the master of shrewd self-preservation, reaches the pinnacle of presence of mind. He transcends the sphere of primitive moral causalities, the web of revenge. From then on, he is safe from the "envy of the gods." The gods laugh at the Cyclops when he demands they take revenge. Upon whom? Upon *Nobody*.

It was and remains the **utopia of conscious life**: a world in which everyone may claim the right to be Odysseus and let the *Nobody* live—despite history, despite politics, despite citizenship, despite *somebody-ness*. In the form of his wakeful body, he shall embark on life’s wandering journey, which spares itself nothing. In the moment of danger, the person who is **mentally present** rediscovers the *being-Nobody* within themselves. Between the poles of *Nobody-ness* and *somebody-ness* unfold the adventures and vicissitudes of conscious life. In this conscious life, every fiction of an "I" is ultimately dissolved. This is why **Odysseus—not Hamlet—is the true archetype of modern and perpetual intelligence.**”

The moment where DeepSeek when off on its own track was the moment where Sloterdijk talks about “unreflective "narcissism"“ As you can see in the screenshot, Sloterdijk is simply invoking the familiar “Narzißmus” i.e. narcissim. Instead DeepSeek generated a term it referred to as:

*"Narcitaming"* (Narzähmus): Sloterdijk's neologism = *Narziss* (Narcissus) + *zähmen* (to tame), critiquing narcissism as domesticated self-obsession

Now this is an interesting idea. Perhaps “narcitaming” ought to be a concept. I am no Sloterdijk specialist, I am not 100 percent sure that the LLM is not finding this somewhere in some text that is out of reach. Perhaps other readers know better. But when I google Narzähmus or Narcitaming, I get the famous:

When I pointed this out, DeepSeek was quick to apologize and correct itself. But perhaps it should not have beaten such a hasty retreat. Is this where creativity starts?

In any case, dig out your favorite out of reach text, crank up DeepSeek and have a go.

In the meantime, here is to letting our no ones live.

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