Schwierigkeiten mit der kritischen Geographie

This paper takes Foucault's and Sloterdijk's reception of the Greek cynics as an intellectual resource to critically examine critical geography's moralizing high ground. I analyse how, in 1983, Foucault and Sloterdijk paint the cynical impulse as a political practice of provocative truth-telling against the moral high-grounds of the dogmatic left of the 1970s: For Foucault and Sloterdijk, the cynics are anti-dogmatic, anti-theoretical and anti-scholastic. I will argue, however, that the cynical impulse is itself in danger of speaking from the moral high ground of anti-critique, a disposition that needs the anti-dote of skepticism.