Post-humanism is a humanism: a reading of the Sloterdijkian conception of anthropoechnics

Abstract

In 1997 Peter Sloterdijk had the daring initiative of coining again in his book Rules for the Human Park an already
polemical term that within the Russian Revolution in the beginning of the past century appointed the possibility of
the biotechnological manipulation of human beings. By spreading back the concept of “Anthropotechnics” among
the shrewd academic and journalistic Germanic, the not-so-aged post-Weimar nightmares stirred, and the media
along with the intellectual spheres didn’t take too long to spread the scandal. Yet, the extent of the
communicational storm has dispelled, thus it is now possible to elucidate about the sense of this anthropotechnic
and also to comprehend its relation with other phenomena such as
the spheres, the anthropogenesis, the domestication or the actiones in distans, and above all, to examine whether
its theoretical deployment has us think -as the german thinker likes to avouch- beyond the verges of the
humanistic tradition, that is to say, within the framework of posthumanism. Those are, precisely, the objectives of
the following essay.