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.

"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

Contents:
Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn
The Planet of the Practising
PART I. The Conquest of the Improbable: For an Acrobatic Ethics
PROGRAMME
1. HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY: The Doctrine of Upward Propagation and the Meaning of 'Over'
2. 'CULTURE IS A MONASTIC RULE': Twilight of the Life Forms, Disciplinics
3. SLEEPLESS IN EPHESUS: On the Demons of Habit and Their Taming Through First Theory
4. HABITUS AND INERTIA: On the Base Camps of the Practising Life
5. CUR HOMO ARTISTA: On the Ease of the Impossible
PART II. Exaggeration Procedures
BACKDROP: Retreats into Unusualness
6. FIRST ECCENTRICITY: On the Separation of the Practising and Their Soliloquies
7. THE COMPLETE AND THE INCOMPLETE: How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories
8. MASTER GAMES: Trainers as Guarantors of the Art of Exaggeration
9. CHANGE OF TRAINER AND REVOLUTION: On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns
PART III. The Exercises of the Moderns
PROSPECT: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject
10. ART WITH HUMANS: In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics
11. IN THE AUTO-OPERATIVELY CURVED SPACE: New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics
12. EXERCISES AND MISEXERCISES: The Critique of Repetition
RETROSPECTIVE: From the Re-Embedding of the Subject to the Relapse into Total Care
OUTLOOK: The Absolute Imperative