You Must Change Your Life

In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth - the myth of the return of religion. For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative 'You must change your life'.

In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler.

It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being.

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

Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn 1

The Planet of the Practising

1 The Command from the Stone 19
Rilkes Experience

2 Remote View of the Ascetic Planet 29
Nietzsches Antiquity Project

3 Only Cripples Will Survive 40
Unthans Lesson

4 Last Hunger Art 61
Kafkas Artistes

5 Parisian Buddhism 73
Ciorans 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