Museum—School of Alienation

Abstract

Peter Sloterdijk’s witty and acerbic text is directed against the museum and in particular the national museum of the nineteenth century, which he sees as essentially xenological—concerned with the study of that which is foreign and alien. Introducing his theme, Sloterdijk imagines a scenario in which “the world looks like a film in which the soundtrack that gives it sense has been turned off, so that nothing remains but an impenetrable and attention-grabbing swarm of facts, which seem to be permeated by a preposterous claim on Being.” It is this swarm that finds its way into the museum, which is where we control and deal with strange facts and objects. This is the collection and neutralization point for the ugly unfamiliar, the unassimilated, the dissimilar, and the dead. The Hegel-inspired museal historicism of the nineteenth century achieves, according to Sloterdijk, a noteworthy symbiosis of observation and violence. Locating the mechanism of the museum in the broader cultural and social context, Sloterdijk concludes his polemic by comparing museums with cemeteries, mortuaries, garbage dumps, mausolea, mental institutions, prisons, and brothels.