Valetudinary States

In Pierre Klossowski's *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle*, Nietzsche's valetudinary states — his recurrent, incapacitating illness (the migraine/convalescence cycles of roughly 1877–1881, with their alternations of collapse and euphoric lucidity) — are not biographical background but the origin of his semiotic. Two of the book's chapters are titled after them ("The Valetudinary States at the Origin of a Semiotic of Impulses"; "...at the Origin of Four Criteria"). For Klossowski, "the act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking" (Ch. 2): it was by reading his own organism — its afflux and reflux of forces, its rises and falls of intensity — that Nietzsche learned to treat the body as a language of signs and consciousness as the falsifying code that deciphers it. Illness is thus Klossowski's name for the method by which Nietzsche gained access to the impulses beneath the agent.

Key Points

  • Thinking = suffering: "The act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking. From this fact, Nietzsche posited the coincidence of thought with suffering" (Ch. 2).
  • The migraine as internal aggression: the migraines were "not an external aggression; the root of the evil was in himself" — "his own physical self was attacking in order to defend itself against a dissolution" (Ch. 2). What was threatened with dissolution was the brain — the agent.
  • Siding with the body against the person: "He would destroy the person out of a love for the nervous system" (Ch. 2). Illness taught Nietzsche "to conceive of himself in a different manner," submitting intelligence "to exclusively physical criteria."
  • The guiding thread of the body: Nietzsche "followed what he called... the guiding thread of the body... he sought to follow this Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of the impulses" (Ch. 2).
  • Convalescence as a new offensive: each cycle of relapse and recovery "heralded a new inquiry and a new investment in the world of the impulses"; "in each case the body liberated itself a little more from its own agent" (Ch. 2).
  • Health and sickness differ only in degree (after Claude Bernard): "there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state" (Ch. 4, quoting Nietzsche).

Details

Illness as the access to the impulses

The valetudinary cycle is epistemically productive because it loosens the grip of the agent. In convalescence "the self was broken down into a lucidity that was more vast but more brief... the self lay dormant in words, in the fixity of signs; and the forces were awakened all the more in that they still remained silent" (Ch. 2). The weakening of the cerebral self is what lets the impulses become legible — which is why Nietzsche "willed" his suffering as energy and pursued a "therapy of his own derived from his own observations." This is resistance read from the inside: the organism that subsists is the one that can resist, and illness is the experience of resistance failing and reforming.

From illness to the four criteria

The valetudinary states ground Nietzsche's evaluative vocabulary: decadence/vigour and morbid/healthy, which Klossowski shows to be interchangeable with the gregarious/singular schema (Ch. 4). But the criteria are unstable: Nietzsche "continues to hesitate on the question of what constitutes the power and impotence of living," because the same symptoms (ecstasy, intensity) can express either "the over-great fullness of life" or "a state of pathological nourishment of the brain" (the "most dangerous misunderstanding," Ch. 4). This instability is not a flaw Klossowski tries to repair; it is the fault line that runs through Nietzsche's entire effort and that the Eternal Return both intensifies and exploits.

The premonition of the breakdown

Nietzsche foresaw that posterity would read his collapse as confirming "the most dangerous misunderstanding" — confusing the exhausted type with the rich type (Ch. 4). The valetudinary states are therefore also the frame in which Klossowski reads the Turin breakdown: not as the medical terminus of an illness but as the point at which the body finally "liberated itself from its own agent."

Connections

  • is the origin of semiotic-of-impulses — illness taught Nietzsche to read the body as a language of signs
  • loosens the grip of the-agent-suppot — convalescence breaks the self down into "more vast but more brief" lucidity
  • grounds gregarious-vs-singular — the decadence/vigour and morbid/healthy criteria
  • is read through resistance — the organism that subsists is the one that can resist external action (Ch. 10)
  • frames the Turin breakdown — the body finally liberated from its agent
  • contrasts with a "hygiene of the body established by reason" — Nietzsche speaks "on behalf of corporeal states as the authentic data that consciousness must conjure away"

Open Questions

  • Does reading illness as method risk aestheticizing Nietzsche's suffering? Klossowski is aware of the danger (the "dangerous misunderstanding") but courts it.
  • Klossowski brackets the etiological question (hereditary? syphilitic? Jaspers' general paralysis?) as irrelevant to the semiotic reading. Is the bracketing legitimate, or does the clinical fact constrain the interpretation?

Sources

  • klossowski-1969-nietzsche-vicious-circle — Ch. 2 (thinking = suffering; the migraine as internal aggression; siding with the body; the guiding thread; convalescence as new offensive); Ch. 4 (the four criteria; health/sickness as differences in degree; the most dangerous misunderstanding); Ch. 8 (the "invention of the sick"); Ch. 9 (the clinical readings bracketed)