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298 On Conversations and Opportunistic Turns III The Exercises of the Modern Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 315 10 Art with Humans 331 In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics 11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space 369 New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and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