El paso del caballo

In his book on acrobatic anthropology “You must change your life”, Sloterdijk cites a Rilke verse about the Apollo’s archaic torso: Du mußt dein Leben ändern, but adjoining in a enigmatic way the exclamation mark. This final mark is sealing the imperative mode, a “absolute verticality” that in this graphic sign is referring to a top-down hierarchy. Sloterdijk adopts the verticality as a cipher of value, and so the necessity to use transcendence as the only way of change. My brief paper deals just with this stake.