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Abstract
Building and expanding on Peter Sloterdijk’s work, in this essay I explore the interrelation between anthropotechnics qua practice of the self and the political sphere, with a view, in particular, to providing a genealogy of some of its recent developments. I first analyse the birth of anthropotechnics within the framework of the axial revolution (Karl Jaspers), as withdrawal and return to a common world bereft of certainty and self-evidence (section 2). Next, I show how the rise of asceticism shaped some of the central problematiques of classical politics and, in particular, political agonism and metaphysics, the latter here understood as a geometrical theory of political order (section 3). Against this background, I discuss how modern anthropotechniques have altered the classical relation between individual askesis and collective security, and how this, in turn, has paved the way for a certain understanding of self-mobilisation to saturate the government of the self in the twenty-first century (section 4).
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For other interpretations emphasising the political dimension of Sloterdijk’s thought, see Van Tuinen; Consoli; Janicka.
2 This is not to say, however, that humans first began to “operate” on themselves in a conscious or systematic fashion starting from this period (roughly, the first millennium bce). As Jaspers also emphasises (36–40), the plasticity of Homo sapiens has been present throughout, and has perhaps even set its history into motion. As we shall see, with the axial breakthrough, anthropotechnics nevertheless took on a very specific ontological, spiritual and cosmic dimension.
3 “[Humans] explicate themselves as beings that must secure themselves in the monstrous – in-the-world, Heidegger says” (Sloterdijk, You Must Change 333).
4 Cf., for example, Sloterdijk, Weltfremdheit 12: “The era of advanced civilisations […] appears to us as the period in which an increasingly litigious process of divorce between man and the world began – an epoch of estrangement and disagreement.”
5 Cf. Sloterdijk, Not Saved 122: “the care for en-housing and the care for self are not to be distinguished in the beginning.” On philosophical ascesis as encounter with the world, see Pierre Hadot’s classical Exercices Spirituelles et Philosophie Antique, and especially the section “Le Moi et le Monde” (323–92).
6 In the sphere of vita contemplativa, this is the “apparent death” which the “I” must undergo in order to convert itself into a subject of theory: its epoche is not only suspension of the belief in the world but also an “exchange of the local ego for the higher self” (Sloterdijk, Art of Philosophy 82).
7 Or, as Sloterdijk puts it, “to conceive finitude and opening simultaneously: that is the matter at hand” (qtd in Duclos 39).
8 See also Sloterdijk, Stress and Freedom 53: “The released subject never maintains the stance of inaccessibility to the real in the long term. As soon as it discovers its freedom, it simultaneously discovers a virtually boundless accessibility within itself to calls from the real.”
9 Cf. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Conundrum” 207: “The zeal for reorganization and transformation of social formations […] made the ‘whole world’ at least potentially subject to cultural-political reconstruction.”
10 Following Sloterdijk (Im selben Boot) I employ this term to refer to politics after the axial breakthrough and before the dawn of modernity.
11 Vernant’s comments on the axial age only appear in the preface to the second edition of The Origins of Greek Thought, which is not included in the English translation. See Vernant, Le Origini 11–22.
12 For a partially overlapping analysis of the political effects of the axial breakthrough, see Arnason et al. 2–3:
The cultural mutations of the Axial Age generated a surplus of meaning, open to conflicting interpretations and capable of creative adaptation to new situations […] The new horizons of meaning could serve to justify or transfigure, but also to question and contest existing institutions […] the complex interplay of patterns and processes is conducive to more autonomous action by a broader spectrum of social actors and forces.
13 Even though he hinted at how a certain form of askesis – entailing the discipline, education and training necessary to achieve sophrosyne, moderation, rejection of hubris and “the virtue of the happy medium” – was crucial to establishing a “political order that sets up an equilibrium between opposing forces, establishing an accord between rival groups” (Vernant, The Origins 85).
14 See n13 above.
15 Cf. Bellah 276:
Transcendental breakthrough occurred when in the wake of second-order weighing of clashing alternatives there followed an almost unbearable tension threatening to break up the fabric of society, and the resolution of the tension was found by creating a transcendental realm and then finding a soteriological bridge between the mundane world and the transcendental.
16 Sloterdijk, Globes 120–21. See also 93 (“the whole, in its geometric euphoria can only last if it manages to keep the eccentric under control”), 103, 120, and Foams 243ff.
17 Plato’s Alcibiades is exemplary in this respect, in as far as it presents possibly the first metaphysical scene in which the interweaving between the cosmic and the ascetic also appears as the ideal ground of political order. This theme, however, also transpires in other dialogues by Plato (cf. Carone).
18 Cf., for example – as a mere indication of where this investigation could set out from – Marx 807: the “development of human energy […] is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom”; Kropotkin 234: “[…] Man would thus be enabled to obtain the full development of all his faculties, intellectual, artistic and moral”; Schultz 1–2: “the economic capabilities of man are predominantly a produced means of production.”
19 This theme is developed by Sloterdijk especially in his early works (Eurotaoismus; Zur Welt Kommen; Im selben Boot). In different ways, yet, it resurfaces in more recent texts too (see, e.g., In the World Interior; Die schrecklichen).
20 In The World Interior of Capital (249), Sloterdijk describes this world as the last sphere, the “crystal palace”: “in the crystallized world system, everything is subject to the compulsion of movement. Wherever one looks in the great comfort structure, one finds each and every inhabitant being urged to constant mobilization.”
21 As exemplified today most notably by geo-engineering projects aimed at remodelling the Earth and its atmosphere on a planetary level, as a remedy to climate change and other environmental disasters. For a critique, see, e.g., Altvater.