Daniel W. Smith

Daniel W. Smith is the translator of Pierre Klossowski's *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* (English edition, Athlone / University of Chicago Press, 1997) and a noted scholar of Deleuze and twentieth-century French philosophy. His Translator's Preface to the Klossowski volume is not a neutral apparatus but a load-bearing interpretive document: it establishes the English renderings of Klossowski's most difficult technical terms and reconstructs their philosophical genealogy, and the wiki's concept pages on Klossowski depend on its decisions.

Key Points

  • Translator of the standard English Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1997), the edition ingested here.
  • The Preface as glossary-and-genealogy: Smith fixes the English equivalents for Klossowski's vocabulary and explains the choices — fond → "depth" (the fond inéchangeable); impulsion → "impulse" (related to Freudian Triebe); âme → "soul" and tonalité → "tonality" (from the theological literature of the mystics); phantasme / simulacre → "phantasm" / "simulacrum"; stéréotype → "stereotype"; and suppôt → "agent", recovering the scholastic suppositum.
  • Deleuze scholarship: Smith is known for his work on and translations of Deleuze; his rendering of Klossowski sits within the broader Anglophone reception of French Nietzscheanism. (This contextual point is from general knowledge and is marked for verification; the source establishes only his role as translator.)

Details

The suppôt → "agent" decision

The most consequential translation choice Smith documents is suppôt → "agent." The English "suppost" survived into the nineteenth century but is now archaic; "agent" captures both the colloquial sense (a subordinate carrying out a superior's designs, as in suppôt de Satan) and the scholastic-philosophical sense (the suppositum / subjectum that integrates heterogeneous elements into a unique whole). Smith flags the three places in Chapter 3 where Klossowski uses the French agent ("the agent of meaning") to keep the two senses distinct. The wiki's the-agent-suppot page follows this decision.

Why the Preface matters for the wiki

Because Klossowski supplies no source references for his Nietzsche citations (all from the posthumous fragments), Smith's apparatus — which locates the citations in the KSA, Will to Power, and Middleton's Selected Letters — is the wiki's traceability anchor for the book's quotations (General Rule 16). The notes also flag where English renderings were altered to accord with Klossowski's French.

Connections

Open Questions

  • The page records Smith's Deleuze scholarship from general knowledge; a dedicated source (one of his Deleuze monographs or essays) would let the wiki treat him as more than the Klossowski translator. Flagged for verification.

Sources