Table of Contents

Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn 1

The Planet of the Practising

1 The Command from the Stone 19
Rilke’s Experience

2 Remote View of the Ascetic Planet 29
Nietzsche’s Antiquity Project

3 Only Cripples Will Survive 40
Unthan’s Lesson

4 Last Hunger Art 61
Kafka’s Artistes

5 Parisian Buddhism 73
Cioran’s Exercises

Transition: Religions Do Not Exist 83
From Pierre de Coubertin to L. Ron Hubbard

I The Conquest of the Improbable: For an Acrobatic Ethics

Programme 109

1 Height Psychology 111
The doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of ‘Over’

2 ‘Culture Is a Monastic Rule’ 131
Twilight of the Life Forms, Disciplines

3 Sleepless in Ephesus 160
On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory

4 Habitus and Inertia 175
On the Base Camps of the Practising Life

5 Cur Homo Artista 190
On the Ease of the Impossible

II Exaggeration Procedures

Backdrop: Retreats into Unusualness 211

6 First Eccentricity 217
On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloguies

7 The Complete and the Incomplete 243
How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories

8 Master Games 271
Trainers as Guarantors of the Art of Exaggeration

9 Change of Trainer and Revolution 298
On Conversations and Opportunistic Turns

III The Exercises of the Modern

Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 315

10 Art with Humans 331
In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics

11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space 369
New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics

12 Exercises and Misexercises 404
The Critique of Repetition

Retrospective
From the Re-Embedding of the Subject to the Relapse into Total Care

Outlook: The Absolute Imperative 442

Notes 453

Index 487

About the Author

Peter Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design and the author of many works including Critique of Cynical Reason.

Reviews

"A challenging, powerful, and at times frustrating read,Sloterdijk ranges widely across literatures and topics, inspiringand provoking in equal measure. He is fortunate to have WielandHoban as his excellent translator. A very good antidote to thechicken-soup banalities of Alain de Botton." Stuart Elden, Durham University "Challenging the pious and self-righteous alarm of those whohave declared war on the return to religion, Sloterdijk - in histypically original irreverence - argues that we cannot see today'sreligiosity as any sort of return. What is really at stake is theformation of the self through practices. Charting a path beyondliberal critiques of religion and post-secular pseudo-returns tospirit, Sloterdijk provides a genuinely twenty-first centuryapproach to the problem of life-formation. This book opens up newways of thinking about life after humanism without lapsing into thesimple affirmations of the post-human." Claire Colebrook, Penn State University "Peter Sloterdijk has assembled in this book the most amazingseries of practices invented in history to hold humans soulssuspended to a virtual hook slightly above their head. The resultis a totally original analysis of religion by the most importantphilosopher or rather educator of today." Bruno Latour, Ecole des mines, Paris