The only word I can truly summon for this work that would do it any kind of justice is simply this — magisterial.

Sloterdijk has firmly established himself, in my mind at the very least (which really counts for nil), as the preeminent philosopher of our times. As much as I hate brown nosing I can’t see any other way of describing this book, it seriously is that good. His conception of anthropotechnics, usurped from a rather curt usage circulating around the time of the Russian Revolution, is the summation of all prior technical/practical processes and arduous tasks carried out by the ascetics of history. Ascetics broach a far greater range than just religious mystics or hermits, instead including every individual who attempts to bring about the impossible and somehow make it look easy (athletes, musicians, generals and military leaders, actors, writers, teachers, priests and religious authorities - the list is truly endless). They maintain a vertical tension on ‘Mount Improbable’, paradoxically moving both forwards and upwards simultaneously. Ever since the re-secularisation of the subject from the Enlightenment onwards we have faced an easing and slackening of this vertical tension that is causing mankind to become mere cannon fodder, numerically ordained into various programmes (the forced remoulding dreamed of by Trotsky, the Biocosmists, capitalist globalisation etc.) The question is how we can reappropriate the resources of the past, with their edifices on which they stand effectively laid waste to by now, and be able to go forth without succumbing to ecological disaster and a complete disintegration of the symbolic order.

There’s way too much to discuss in a review here, Sloterdijk practically comes out of the gate like a carnivorous, malignant cancer eschewing ever figure there ever was. His intellectual eye is all-encompassing and intensely scrutinising, picking up on subtle sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, commercial, religious etc. trends that have shaped the disarray we have to contend with today. This book begs for multiple re-reads and I am more than happy to oblige, a quick summation is simply impossible. Read it, and then re-read it, my review really doesn’t stand up to the colossal project Sloterdijk has only just begun to explicate in outline. I agree, his anthropotechnics stands at the base of a new discourse that will take decades of research before it even begins to cover any considerable ground. But my god, what a start! ( )