ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the hypothesis that the “labour of the self on itself” – as Michel Foucault named the practices which Peter Sloterdijk also refers to as ascesis, metanoia and anthropotechnics – is not only a matter of individual, existential, philosophical or psychological concerns. The questions raised by the care of the self are also in many ways political and are therefore inseparable from the political history of the West. The chapter explores these issues in the wake of Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics – a task which is certainly not without challenges, as one would hardly find in his corpus anything like a systematic theory of politics and askesis. To examine the connection between asceticism and political agonism in its inaugural (Greek) form, the chapter considers Jean-Pierre Vernant’s seminal study on The Origins of Greek Thought.
