The Agent (suppôt)

The agent is Daniel W. Smith's rendering of Klossowski's suppôt — a term retrieved from scholastic philosophy (Latin suppositum, "that which is placed under," linked to substantia and subjectum) and applied to a Nietzschean problem. In *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* the agent "is itself a phantasm, a complex and fragile entity that bestows a psychic and organic unity upon the moving chaos of the impulses, primarily through the grammatical fiction of the 'I', which interprets the impulses in terms of a hierarchy of gregarious needs... and dissimulates itself through a network of concepts (substance, cause, identity, self, world, God) that reduces the combat of the impulses to silence" (Translator's Preface §6). The agent is Klossowski's name for the self as grammatical fiction: not the substantial subject of the metaphysical tradition, nor the Freudian ego, but a fortuitous and provisional cohesion imposed on the impulses by the code of everyday signs.

The colloquial sense of suppôt — a subordinate who carries out a wicked superior's designs (suppôt de Satan, "hellhound") — is deliberately retained: the agent is the henchman of the impulses, executing designs it takes to be its own.

Key Points

  • The agent is itself a phantasm: it is not the ground of the impulses but their product — "a complex and fragile entity that bestows a psychic and organic unity upon the moving chaos of the impulses" (Pref. §6).
  • The "I" is a sign in the code: the self is "the one sign in this code that always corresponds to either the highest or lowest degree of intensity: namely, the self, the I, the subject of all our propositions" (Ch. 3) — "nothing but an always-variable trace of a fluctuation."
  • The agent appropriates an impersonal intensity: "The thought of no one, this intensity in itself... finds a necessity in the agent [suppôt] that appropriates it for itself" (Ch. 3). Thought "in fact belongs to no one."
  • It is constitutively ignorant of the impulses: "it is a condition of existence for the agent to be ignorant of the combat from which its thought is derived: it is not this living unity of the 'subject', but 'the combat of the impulses that wills to maintain itself'" (Ch. 2).
  • The physical agent (le suppôt physique de moi-même): "I am sick in a body that does not belong to me... the physical agent of my self seems to reject any thoughts I have that no longer ensure its own cohesion" (Ch. 2).
  • The agent of meaning: in the analysis of how a tonality becomes thought, Klossowski asks "What is the agent [agent] of meaning?" — and answers that it is the intensity itself, which becomes a sign by turning back on itself (Ch. 3).

Details

Why "agent" and not "subject"

Klossowski needs a term that is neither the substantial subjectum (which presupposes the unity it is meant to explain) nor the Freudian moi/ego (which is rendered "self" elsewhere, "ego" only where Freud is explicitly in view). The suppôt is "placed under" the impulses as their provisional support, but it has no independent reality: "the cohesion of the body is that of the self; the body produces this self, and hence its own cohesion" (Ch. 2). The agent is an effect that mistakes itself for a cause — "we interpret [the soul] as the cause of all these phenomena ('self-consciousness' is a fiction!)" (Ch. 2, quoting Nietzsche).

The agent and the intellect as repulsion (Ch. 10)

The agent's coherence is maintained by the intellect, which Klossowski (following Nietzsche) treats as itself an impulse — specifically a repulsion: "the intellect is nothing but the obverse of all other impulses... it is, as a repulsion, the thought of this same impulse." There is "a total discordance between the agent's own coherence as maintained by the intellect, and the coherence of the impulse with the agent." When an impulse establishes a coherence with the agent that is "more constraining" than the intellect's, the agent "rejects this tutor" — and the phantasm results. This is the mechanism by which the agent can be unmade and remade by impulsive intensity (euphoria/depression), and ultimately by which "Nietzsche" can cease to be Nietzsche at Turin (see vicious-circle-selective-doctrine).

Resistance and the agent

The agent exists only as a node of resistance: "Nietzsche, following this process to its source, thus discovers that of which thought is only a shadow: the strength to resist" (Ch. 10). The only organizations that subsist are those that can "conserve and defend themselves against a great quantity of actions exerted against them." The agent's identity is therefore not a substance but a degree of resistance — which is why it admits of degrees (the "more vast but more brief" lucidity of the convalescent self, Ch. 2) and can be dissolved.

The agent and the Eternal Return

The agent is what the Eternal Return dissolves. Because the "I" is only a sign corresponding to a degree of intensity, the high tonality empties it: "the designation of the self, to which everything had heretofore led, was itself emptied" (Ch. 3). To re-will oneself "as a fortuitous moment is to renounce being oneself once and for all" — the agent passes through "the series of all the other selves." The death of God is the death of the agent's guarantor.

Connections

  • is a fiction produced by semiotic-of-impulses — the agent is the "I"-sign in the code of everyday signs
  • is itself a phantasm — "a complex and fragile entity"
  • is maintained by the intellect as repulsion — and unmade when an impulse out-constrains it
  • is dissolved by eternal-recurrence — the high tonality empties the self-sign; "every name in history is I"
  • is the bearer of gregarious needs — the agent interprets the impulses "in terms of a hierarchy of gregarious needs"
  • contrasts with the Cartesian/Husserlian subject and the Freudian ego — the agent presupposes no prior unity; it is an effect mistaking itself for a cause
  • is a precursor of poststructuralist critiques of the subject (Deleuze, Foucault) — the self as a fold/effect of forces rather than a substance

Open Questions

  • Is the suppôt eliminativist (there is no self, only impulses + a fiction) or functionalist (the self is a real-but-derivative organizing function)? Klossowski's "the agent is itself a phantasm" leans eliminativist, but the agent does real work (resistance, the maintenance of cohesion).
  • How does the agent relate to Deleuze's later "larval subjects" and Foucault's subject-effects? The lineage is plausible (the book is dedicated to Deleuze) but needs the downstream sources.

Sources

  • klossowski-1969-nietzsche-vicious-circle — Translator's Preface §6 (the suppôt/agent definition and scholastic genealogy); Ch. 2 (the physical agent; the agent's constitutive ignorance; the self as product of the body); Ch. 3 (the I as a sign in the code; the agent appropriating impersonal intensity; the agent of meaning; the emptying of the self-sign); Ch. 10 (the intellect as repulsion; resistance as the agent's principle)