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Prospect: The Re-Secularization of the Withdrawn Subject 315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