Infinite Mobilization by Peter Sloterdijk

“Therefore it is not surprising that the history of the subject has been a history of stances since the very beginning. From the Stoics to existentialism, from the glowing desert saints to the cool young city dwellers, the subject always steps in front of us as a self-composed center of effort, as the active principle of an exerted stance against the sluggish, shapeless, and depressing outside world. Whether the subject holds itself up as an ascetic self by abstaining from all seductive, disruptive, and frightening influences; whether it stands up to the hopeless and untenable world by holding on to the belief in God or godliness; whether it constitutes itself as an autonomous self, sustained by philosophizing reason, which is, in turn, appointed as the self-guardian of its laws; whether it tries to maintain itself as a conqueror of life fatigue in order to make itself heroically and self-extravagantly a gift to the world; whether it knows itself, gloomily resigned to self-acceptance, to be held out into nothingness; whether it rides the waves on the surfboard of its desire in anti-oedipal exhilaration; whether it angrily sticks to the style of its terribly splintered way of writing before sovereignty, and watches from the corners of its eyes as it eludes itself: the subject is always there to give itself a firm foothold in a stance through efforts that resemble a self-birth. Through its inevitably monstrous position, the subject is ‘spontaneously’ condemned to the effort to stabilize its hold by means of its own promises in a world taken over by revocation.”

or

“History is the effort to rework the disadvantage of being born into an advantage of self-realization.”

-Peter Sloterdijk, 1989