Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life - The Planet of the Practising - The Command From the Above - Rilke's Experience

Sloterdijk, Peter (2013) You Must Change Your Life - The Planet of the Practising - The Command From the Above - Rilke's Experience

1 Introduction to Art and Rilke's Poems
- Starting with art because art is no authoritarian command:

"La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose." (Sloterdijk 2013:19),

Art does not foster reactions against the Lord above

2
Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (New Poems: The Other Part, 1908), the thing is the source of authority (a thing-poem), result from his work with Rodin as a secretary from 1905 to 1906

3 Things that are speaking as a turn towards religion
Thing-Poems eliminate randomness, a reaction to the emptiness of the Linguistic Turn.

4
Not everything is a thing, however. They require a messenger who translates the energy of things into meaning

5
A breakthrough to the concept of an object that states itself - Torso - only a mutilated body

6 The Poem and its interpretation

7
First interpretation of the poem: It deals with perfection

8
Perfection is not in a morphologically complete thing: "The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority." (Sloterdijk 2013:22) Perfection is not expressed by complete forms anymore.

9
Sloterdijk's reflections on the museum: "[E]ven a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us [...]" (Sloterdijk 2013:23)

10 What does "You must change your life!" mean?
Why did the last lines enter our modernity as such famous lines?

11
The recipient completes the Torso, but why does the torso see him?

12
It is a training in religiosity: We need to come to the point of a subject-object-reversal. Suddenly the stone starts seeing me. Suddenly we accept a "surplus of soul" in the stone.

13
"[R]eligiosity is a form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained." (Sloterdijk 2013:25) Rilke described Rodin's work that everywhere in his statues we can find places, and in each place something happens. The second necessity of religion is that something stands for something else and this holds for the stone. It is more than its structure.

14
Why does Being suddenly speak in the imperative form (the command from above)? The stone speaks, it is the torso of religion.

15
All teachings in one workshop are summarized in this torso

16
"It is the authority of a different life in this life." (Sloterdijk 2013:25) The "innermost not-yet" tells me that "my change is the one thing that is necessary" (Sloterdijk 2013:26)

17
In Greece there was always an identity between the sportsman and God. "Hence the athlete's body, which unifies beauty and discipline into a calm readiness for action, offers itself as one of the most understandable and convincing manifestations of authority." (Sloterdijk 2013:26)

18
"the so called ideas had already established themselves in the statue", the eros works in both directions

19
Sport is the "resurrection of the flesh in this life" (Sloterdijk 2013:27). Sport is a de-spirtiualization of asceticism and it comes up in our modernity again.

20
It is the change of the "crippling tradition of Christian 'renunciation of instincts'

21
The imperative has another meaning now, it became a coach

22
"Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect [...] Seize the chance to train with God." (Sloterdijk 2013:28)