Acrobats and Ascetics

Abstract

In his 2009 work You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk proposes an anthropology of the acrobat. ‘Whoever looks for humans will find ascetics,’ Sloterdijk declares programmatically at one point, ‘and whoever observes ascetics will discover acrobats.’ This essay shows that the topological shift Sloterdijk traces in You Must Change Your Life from asceticism to acrobatics indicates a shift from a religious to a decidedly creaturely experience of verticality. The acrobat, for Sloterdijk, figures the nonchalance with which humans conquer the downward force of gravity. But in developing this vertical metaphor of the human-as-acrobat, Sloterdijk ignores what the author wants to call the topology of affect – the sense in which humans respond emotionally to their topological orientation. To demonstrate Sloterdijk’s insensitivity to the emotional implications of the vertical orientation of humans, the author re-examines two of the main sources of his acrobat metaphor: the tightrope walker scene in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Franz Kafka’s 1924 short story about an eccentric trapeze artist, ‘First Sorrow’. When we re-examine these texts in light of their treatment of verticality, we notice that they are actually both about the physical, metaphysical and emotional experience of falling.