Ascetic worlds notes on politics and technologies of the self after Peter Sloterdijk

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).