The Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice

In the face of increasing critique of Modernity’s founding principles, concepts like truth, the autonomous and self grounded subject, morals or solvability of conflicts have become sites of contestation and debate. This book ventures to re-think some of those categories being debated in (post)modernity by invoking transpersonal and transrational transpositions. Asking about the continued possibilities for subjectivation, it inquires how an active, experiential practice of self-transformation could concretely be lived. Norbert Koppensteiner sketches the outlines of an art of living for a subjectivity perceived as constantly emergent and in transformation, a subjectivity that dares to embrace conflict as part of its transpersonal relational becoming and that emerges through an ongoing transformation of the self understood as an aesthetic (Apollonian) and energetic (Dionysian) practice. Norbert Koppensteiner is the Program Coordinator at the MA Program for Peace Studies and Research and Publications Coordinator at the UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria.