Gymnastics and the Philosophy of Anti-Planetary Practice
Keywords:
Planetarity, Friedrich Nietzsche, spirit of gravity, biological autonomy, postureAbstract
This is a paper about gymnastics and a primordial form of geological knowledge. It pursues an interpretation of gymnastics, broadly defined, as a philosophy that interrogates what the Earth is. The goal is to reconstruct the epistemic implications of gymnastic practice in order to understand the evolution of animal motility as a prototypical form of geological knowledge. Since gravity is a global medium through which planets act on their creatures, vectors that are diametrically opposed to Earth’s exertion of gravity contain an epistemic quality. Vertical movements test what the Earth is by opposing it, forming what might accurately be called a negative geology in contrast to the positive knowledge created by the Earth sciences. By reconstructing the imaginative geography at the root of the gymnast’s anti-planetary practice, a whole range of other human and animal behaviors are brought into the fold of a single struggle against the Earth which comprises an ongoing process of discovery.
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