Peter Sloterdijk 
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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über den Autor

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.