In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth - the myth of the return of religion. In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth - the myth of the return of religion. 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298 On Conversations and Opportunistic Turns III The Exercises of the Modern Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 315 10 Art with Humans 331 In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics 11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space 369 New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and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