"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 Alain de Botton." 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 is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design and the author of many works including Critique of Cynical Reason .

Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn The Planet of the Practising 1 The Command from the Stone Rilke's Experience 2 Remote View of the Ascetic Planet Nietzsche's Antiquity Project 3 Only Cripples Will Survive Unthan's Lesson 4 Last Hunger Art Kafka's Circus Art 5 Parisian Buddhism Cioran's Exercises Transition: Religions Do Not Exist From Pierre de Coubertin to L. Ron Hubbard 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 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On Conversions and Opportunistic Turns III The Exercises of the Moderns Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 10 Art with Humans In the Arsenals of Anthropotechnics 11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space New Human Beings Between Anaesthesia and Biopolitics 12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