Introduction

Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.

—Nietzsche

This collection of essays opens with a simple albeit hazy intuition, that life and climbing are vitally linked in ways that demand our fresh attention. More specifically, the still-expanding cultural sphere of climbing as a specific postmedieval practice begs the question of its relation not only to historical modernity and its corporeal-kinetic formations but to the nature of life itself.

Climbing and life are intertwined and wrapped in a special way around the human, this strange animal who desires to ascend yet fears heights, one whose species-defining hand not only "sprang forth . . . together with the word" (Heidegger 1992, 80) but did so in a form shaped for/from climbing (see McGinn 2015). As the nature of climbing is inseparable from its evolutionary past and future, so is evolutionary discourse entangled in the climbing principle, from Henry Drummond's counter-Darwinian Ascent of Man (1894) to Richard Dawkins's anticreationist Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). The human pursuit of climbing, from jungle gym to Himalaya, our humble/heroic grasping of it as such, goes hand in hand with climbing's extrahuman horizon—vaster vistas of existence wherein the question of what climbing ultimately is, its universal dimensionality, remains wholly open.

Does life overcome itself by climbing? Or is climbing only a form of desire for that overcoming? Can climbing overcome climbing? How does death—of bodies, places, ways of life—animate the will to climb? What bodies and subjectivities, gestures and technologies, substances and imaginations, desires and economies are produced, performed, and assembled as climbing emerges as a form of social and antisocial life? What are the material and immaterial potentialities of climbing in the present time?

Alpinism's classic notion of ascending a mountain "because it's there" is both a profound and an insufficient index of the autoteleological order of climbing and life, their shared being-for-themselves. Life lives to live, climbing climbs to climb, not only in the depths of presence but because they are not there, because life and climbing lack themselves or their own proper being. As the living are no less the dead, climbing is no less a climb toward climbing. How the question of climbing is tautologically continuous with the question of life is now comically and tragically obvious in the sphere of popular media, where the categories have become indistinguishable, according to the logic of capitalism's self-feeding currents, in such taglines/hashtags/mantras as "climb now work later," "live climb repeat," and "climbing is life."

Our task here is to follow the question of climbing and the problematicity of its concept as a unique opportunity for reflection on the question of life. But not only its concept—climbing's very practices and materialities are themselves problem spaces in which life finds itself both reflected and reflecting. To consider climbing vis-a-vis life affords not only the possibility of new critical perspectives on climbing but the generation of novel orientations within it. As life is a problem in which all life is caught, so climbing proceeds through pursuit of its own difficulties. Climbing and life are agonistic twins, gluttons for their own pleasurable punishments and punishing pleasures. Likewise the contemplation of climbing in connection with life calls not only for critique but for more immersive theorizations, for vexing and failing discursive climbs of climbing. Like life, climbing requires an overcoming-by-intensifying of its own problematic, a seeking out of "the crux." In sum, the very character of climbing's movement calls for progressively recursive and self-problematizing reflections on its own nature and its relation to the greater movement and nature—life—of which it is a part.