The Transfiguration of Existence and Sovereign Life: Sloterdijk and Nietzsche on Posthuman and Superhuman Futures

Abstract

This essay provides a close reading of Sloterdijk's book Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism (1989, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN). Sloterdijk's book is itself a discussion of Nietzsche's book The Birth of Tragedy, and the account offered here is a critical appreciation of both texts, focusing on the question of individual and collective existence. The essay looks at the question of the future of the human, raising the question of the superhuman alongside that of the posthuman. In doing so, it brings in other texts from Sloterdijk—especially “Rules for the human zoo”—and offers an account of Nietzsche's work on these themes as a whole. The essay criticises some aspects of Sloterdijk's appropriation, but more positively makes the case for retrieving the uniqueness of Nietzsche's answers. Human existence cannot be corrected, but it can be transfigured.