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.

List 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.

Summary

In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth - the myth of the return of religion.

Report

''A challenging, powerful, and at times frustrating read, Sloterdijk ranges widely across literatures and topics, inspiring and provoking in equal measure. He is fortunate to have Wieland Hoban as his excellent translator. A very good antidote to the chicken-soup banalities of Alain de Botton.''
Stuart Elden, Durham University
 
''Challenging the pious and self-righteous alarm of those who have declared war on the return to religion, Sloterdijk - in his typically original irreverence - argues that we cannot see today's religiosity as any sort of return. What is really at stake is the formation of the self through practices. Charting a path beyond liberal critiques of religion and post-secular pseudo-returns to spirit, Sloterdijk provides a genuinely twenty-first century approach to the problem of life-formation. This book opens up new ways of thinking about life after humanism without lapsing into the simple affirmations of the post-human.''
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
 
''Peter Sloterdijk has assembled in this book the most amazing series of practices invented in history to hold humans souls suspended to a virtual hook slightly above their head. The result is a totally original analysis of religion by the most important philosopher or rather educator of today.''
Bruno Latour, Ecole des mines, Paris

Product details

• Authors: Peter Sloterdijk, Peter ( Karlsruhe School of Design) Sloterdijk, Peter (Â Karlsruhe School of Design) Sloterdijk
• Publisher: Blackwell Scientific Publishers Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.09.2014
• EAN: 9780745649221
• ISBN: 978-0-7456-4922-1
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 230 mm x 36 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories