The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine

The longest and most politically charged chapter of Pierre Klossowski's *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* reads the Eternal Return not only as a lived experience but as a selective doctrine — "a means of training and selection" (Nietzsche's Fundamental Innovations fragment). The Vicious Circle, disclosed, is supposed to function as a test that sorts humanity: those who can affirm it and those who cannot. Klossowski calls the practical-political form of this the conspiracy (complot) of the Vicious Circle — Nietzsche's thought conceived not as commentary but as a premeditated action, a counter-selection mounted against the gregarious "conspiracy" of Darwinism and institutional science/morality. This is the chapter where Nietzsche's most discomfiting notebook material appears (the "Masters of the Earth," "training and selection," the eugenic fragments), and Klossowski's central interpretive move is to insist that Master and slave are states resulting from a test — adherence to or rejection of the sign of the vicious circle — "which already renders impossible any confusion with the regimes that some have tried to attribute to these projects."

Key Points

The Eternal Return as training and selection: "In place of 'metaphysics' and religion, the doctrine of the Eternal Return (this as a means of training and selection)" (Ch. 5, First Fragment).
The three alternatives: either the Return selects through itself (no will required); or it was revealed so a conscious, voluntary selection might intervene; and if the latter, either selection depends on the public disclosure of the Return (requiring a scientific demonstration) or it proceeds in secret — "in the name of this secret by certain experimenters (the Masters of the Earth)" (Ch. 6).
The secret as invented simulacrum: in the secret-selection case, "the secret of the Vicious Circle can also be regarded as an invented simulacrum in accordance with one of Nietzsche's phantasms" (Ch. 6).
Master and slave are test-states: "The Master and the slave are states which, respectively, are the result of a test. And this test always remains the adherence to the sign of the vicious circle, or its rejection" (Ch. 6). The épreuve (test) is the silent key that re-routes the political vocabulary.
The Versucher (experimenter/tempter): "Every creator is at once someone who tempts others and who experiments on (tempts) himself" (Ch. 6) — the experimenter is "an elaboration of the figure of the 'Master', the 'Master' being the fruit of experience."
The overman is a state, not an individual: "the postulate of the 'overman', which is not an individual but a state"; it "presupposes [the dwarfing of man] as its base" (Ch. 6).
The conspiracy succeeded "without him": industrial "planetary management" realized one aspect of the project as its exact inverse — "not the 'superhuman' but the 'super-gregarious' — the Master of the Earth" (Ch. 6).

Details

The internal vs. external conspiracy

Klossowski frames the doctrine as a counter-conspiracy. The external conspiracy is "the conspiracy of the science and morality of institutions": Darwinian natural selection, which Nietzsche rejects as "a falsification of the real selection" because it "conspires with gregariousness by presenting mediocre beings as strong" (Ch. 6). Against it Nietzsche projects "the conspiracy of the Vicious Circle... an experimental action — a kind of counter-selection that follows from... the lived experience of a singular and privileged case." The conspiracy is thus the political face of the singular case's revolt against gregariousness.

Power is insignificance; the two reality principles

The metaphysical premise (developed in Ch. 5) is that power is insignificance: cosmic energy has "neither goal nor meaning," and "what is insignificant in itself exercises the greatest violence." Sovereign formations must therefore mask the absence of goal/meaning in their power by assigning themselves a meaning — which is why the will to power (the interpreter of power) introduces goal and meaning where energy has none. Klossowski separates the two reality principles that consciousness confuses — the reality principle of science and that of (gregarious) morality — both of which the Return suspends.

The test as the anti-fascist guard (a silent key)

The interpretive weight of the chapter rests on the épreuve (test/trial). By making "Master" and "slave" states that result from a test rather than hereditary or racial categories, Klossowski blocks the reading of "training and selection" as a breeding program. The same word does heavy work elsewhere: the Lou adventure was "a test"; the Wagner relation "the strongest test of my character" (Ch. 9). The test is positionally load-bearing and under-defined — and the reading lives or dies on whether it can carry the weight. Klossowski asserts more than he argues here: the chapter quotes the eugenic fragments (prenuptial examinations, forbidding the "degenerate" to reproduce) and then re-routes them through the test, conceding that the projects could be "undertaken by the worst kind of gregarious cretinism."

Training vs. taming

Klossowski preserves Nietzsche's distinction between Zucht (disciplinary training: "a means of storing up the tremendous forces of mankind") and Zähmung (taming/domestication). "There is no worse confusion than the confusion of (disciplinary) training with taming." The selective doctrine is training (intensification of forces), not taming (weakening) — though Klossowski notes the two are perpetually confused in practice.

What the Concept Does

It converts the lived Eternal Return into a politics without making it a program: the doctrine selects by being the kind of thought most cannot bear, not by a policy.
It diagnoses modernity: industrial "planetary management" is read as the unintended, inverted fulfilment of the conspiracy — gregariousness raised to the "sole agent of existence."
It re-routes Nietzsche's eugenic vocabulary through the test, attempting (with acknowledged strain) to separate the selective doctrine from the political regimes that claimed Nietzsche.

What It Rejects

Darwinian natural selection — as a gregarious falsification favouring the mediocre "who compromise the value of life."
The fascist/eugenic appropriation — "this already renders impossible any confusion with the regimes that some have tried to attribute to these projects"; Master/slave are test-states, not breeding-categories.
Economic optimism — "increasing expenditure of everybody" as collective welfare; for Nietzsche it is "a collective loss."
Nietzsche's "aristocratism" as nostalgia — it appeals to no past hierarchy and no retrograde economy; it is "complicit with every phase" of planetary levelling.

Stakes

If the selective doctrine is read as Klossowski reads it — through the test and the lived Circle — then Nietzsche's most politically toxic material becomes an existential selection (who can affirm the abolition of meaning) rather than a biological one (who should reproduce). The payoff is a reading that neither suppresses the eugenic fragments nor endorses them. The risk, which Klossowski half-acknowledges, is that the test cannot fully bear this weight: the chapter's proximity to the material it disavows is uncomfortable, and the move depends on privileging the "meaningless intensity" pole of will-to-power as the authentic one — itself an interpretive bet. (confidence: medium — the anti-fascist guard is the source's own, but it is asserted more than argued, and the page should not present it as settled.)

Problem-Space

The chapter inherits the problem: can a thought that abolishes the principle of identity and the value of meaning have any practical-political consequence other than nihilism? Nietzsche's answer is the selective doctrine — the Circle selects by being unbearable to the gregarious. The problem recurs across the corpus under different names (the Heideggerian Vollendung/nihilism, the question of whether the death of God is catastrophe or liberation), and the test is Klossowski's distinctive operator within it.

Connections

is the political version of eternal-recurrence — the Return as "training and selection," the conspiracy of the Vicious Circle
turns on the test (épreuve) — Master/slave as test-states, the silent key of the anti-fascist guard
deploys the simulacrum — "the secret of the Vicious Circle can be regarded as an invented simulacrum"
is the revolt of the singular case against gregariousness
rests on the insignificance of power — power as meaningless violence that the will must interpret
culminates in the Turin breakdown — "the perspective of the Crucified was the perspective of the conspiracy"
contrasts with Heidegger's reading of the Return as Vollendung der Metaphysik (heidegger-1961-nietzsche-ii) — for Klossowski the Return is selective-experimental, not metaphysical culmination

Open Questions

Can the test (épreuve) actually separate the selective doctrine from its fascist appropriations, or does the chapter's proximity to the eugenic fragments undercut the guard?
Is the "conspiracy succeeded without him" diagnosis of industrial modernity a genuine analysis or a retrospective projection? Klossowski writes in 1969, at the height of the "planetary management" thesis.
How does the selective doctrine relate to Deleuze's selective reading of the Return ("only difference returns")? Both are "selective," but Deleuze's selection is ethical-ontological and Klossowski's is the test of the lived Circle — needs the Deleuze source.

Sources

klossowski-1969-nietzsche-vicious-circle — Ch. 5 (power as insignificance; the Fundamental Innovations fragment; the Return as training and selection); Ch. 6 ("The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine": the three alternatives; Master/slave as test-states; the Versucher; training vs. taming; the Masters of the Earth; the conspiracy vs. Darwinism; the overman as state; the "super-gregarious" diagnosis of industrial modernity)