We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins
 it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.
Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern