You Must Change Your Life

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.

"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

• Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn 1The Planet of the Practising1 The Command from the Stone 19Rilke’s Experience2 Remote View of the Ascetic Planet 29Nietzsche’s Antiquity Project3 Only Cripples Will Survive 40Unthan’s Lesson4 Last Hunger Art 61Kafka’s Artistes5 Parisian Buddhism 73Cioran’s ExercisesTransition: Religions Do Not Exist 83From Pierre de Coubertin to L. Ron HubbardI The Conquest of the Improbable: For an Acrobatic EthicsProgramme 1091 Height Psychology 111The doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of ‘Over’2 ‘Culture Is a Monastic Rule’ 131Twilight of the Life Forms, Disciplines3 Sleepless in Ephesus 160On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory4 Habitus and Inertia 175On the Base Camps of the Practising Life5 Cur Homo Artista 190On the Ease of the ImpossibleII Exaggeration ProceduresBackdrop: Retreats into Unusualness 2116 First Eccentricity 217On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloguies7 The Complete and the Incomplete 243How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories8 Master Games 271Trainers as Guarantors of the Art of Exaggeration9 Change of Trainer and Revolution 298On Conversations and Opportunistic TurnsIII The Exercises of the ModernProspect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 31510 Art with Humans 331In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space 369New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics12 Exercises and Misexercises 404The Critique of RepetitionRetrospectiveFrom the Re-Embedding of the Subject to the Relapse into Total CareOutlook: The Absolute Imperative 442Notes 453Index 487