You Must Change Your Life (eBook)

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.

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Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject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

"Breathtaking.... A superb and wide-ranging analysis of those moderns who have refused to be pampered or to dwell in capitalist decadence."
--The Guardian

"Make(s) it possible to begin to come to grips with Sloterdijk as a stirring and eclectic thinker, who addresses himself boldly to the most important problems of our age."
--New Republic

"A tour de force that engages the history of philosophy, religion, and thought, both Western and Eastern, in ways that make you think deeply about the evolution of the human being these past few thousand years."
--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Sloterdijk is both seriously learned and brilliantly creative, and he has a talent for wit. He deserves shelf-space alongside Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault."
--New Humanist

"Sloterdijk has constructed in this beautiful text a supreme heterotopology - a place from which to think and see differently."
--Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University

"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 other life-changing philosophy."
--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