Pierre Klossowski

Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) was a French novelist, essayist, translator, and painter whose *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* (1969) is one of the most influential and idiosyncratic readings of Nietzsche in twentieth-century European thought. The older brother of the painter Balthus, born in Paris into an old Polish family, he was in his youth a friend and disciple of Rilke and Gide; in the 1930s he participated in the Bataille circle (the Collège de Sociologie, the journal Acéphale), and his Nietzsche apprenticeship dates to 1934, "in competition with Kierkegaard." He entered a Dominican seminary in 1939, studied scholasticism and theology, underwent a religious crisis during the Occupation, and returned to lay life in 1947 with a study of Sade (Sade My Neighbor). His fiction — The Suspended Vocation, the Laws of Hospitality trilogy (creating the figure of Roberte), The Baphomet (1965, "an allegorical version of the Eternal Return") — and his later turn to painting form a single oeuvre organized around the phantasm and the simulacrum. He "categorically refuses the designation 'philosopher'" ("Je suis un maniaque").

Key Points

  • Brother of Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, the painter); born Paris 1905, of Polish descent; close to Rilke and Gide in youth.
  • The Bataille circle: participant in the Collège de Sociologie with Leiris, Caillois, and Bataille, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship; contributed to Acéphale's 1937 issue on "Nietzsche and the Fascists."
  • Translator: of Benjamin, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Hamann, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Klee, Nietzsche, Suetonius, Virgil — a major conduit of German and Latin texts into French.
  • The 1957 lecture "Nietzsche, polytheism, and parody" was praised by Deleuze for having "renewed the interpretation of Nietzsche"; Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle grew from the 1964 Royaumont paper "Forgetting and anamnesis in the lived experience of the eternal return of the same."
  • Influence: the book shaped Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1975); Foucault called it "the greatest book of philosophy I have read, with Nietzsche himself."
  • Method, not ideology: his books on Nietzsche and Sade are "essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers."

Details

The physiognomic method

Klossowski's distinctive procedure is to read a thinker through the impulses, phantasms, and simulacra that constituted them — not through the propositional content of a doctrine. His idiosyncratic vocabulary (the fond inéchangeable / unexchangeable depth; the tonality of the soul; the agent / suppôt; phantasm/simulacrum/stereotype) is designed for this physiognomic task. His "conventionally classical" prose, "sprinkled with minor grammatical improprieties," is itself an exercise in the "science of stereotypes" — a simulacrum that traces "the outline of [the phantasm's] opaque physiognomy."

Place in French Nietzscheanism

Klossowski is one of the central figures (with Deleuze, Foucault, and Bataille) of the explosion of French interest in Nietzsche around 1970. His contribution to the 1972 Cerisy conference, "Circulus vitiosus," on the "conspiracy" (complot) of the eternal return, was his last text on Nietzsche. His reading is distinguished from Heidegger's (the Return as Vollendung der Metaphysik) and from the academic tradition by its focus on the lived experience of the Return and its semiotic of the impulses.

Connections

Open Questions

  • How tightly do Klossowski's fiction, painting, and Nietzsche-reading form a single project organized by the phantasm/simulacrum? The wiki currently has only the Nietzsche book; the novels (The Baphomet as "allegory of the Eternal Return") would deepen the picture.
  • What precisely did Klossowski transmit to Deleuze, and what did Deleuze transform? (See the simulacrum genealogy flagged on simulacrum.)

Sources