This article was downloaded by:[University of Alberta] On: 10 October 2007 Access Details: [subscription number 769428540] Publisher:

Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Textual Practice
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713721880

The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle: Pierre Klossowski reading Nietzsche's sick body through Sade's perversion
Joanne Faulkner a a La Trobe University,

Online Publication Date: 01 March 2007 To cite this Article: Faulkner, Joanne (2007) 'The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle: Pierre Klossowski reading Nietzsche's sick body through Sade's perversion ', Textual Practice, 21:1, 43 - 69 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09502360601156922 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360601156922

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Textual Practice 21(1), 2007, 43 69

Joanne Faulkner
Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle: Pierre Klossowski reading Nietzsches sick body through Sades perversion1

In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle,2 Pierre Klossowskis principal concern is Nietzsches experience in writing. This experience is elaborated with reference to a tension in Nietzsches work between the extant, didactic level, and the tussle of forces through which text is formed. Klossowski thus elucidates a corporeal undercurrent of Nietzsches philosophy that both resists and produces the text, by means of an analysis of the enigmatic thought of eternal recurrence. Klossowski holds that the eternal recurrence referenced sparsely and gnomically by Nietzsche in his published writings was in fact his most important discovery, expressing the phantasm about which all his other thought turns. Klossowski thus also indicates the mechanism by which Nietzsche was able to recruit readers to his critical project: because the thought of eternal recurrence produces the textual conditions under which the reader might share Nietzsches experience. In this respect, text is conceived as the medium for a contagion between its author and reader: that is, Nietzsches bodily experience is transmitted to the reader through his writings. This paper argues that Klossowskis focus upon the role of the simulacrum of eternal return as what simulates the ipseity of the philosophers body brings out the pivotal role played by the notion of a bodily remainder in producing a feeling of intimacy between Nietzsches text and its reader: or an identication gured in terms of corporeal experience. That Nietzsche attracts a variety of readers, with such diverse investments in his text, is a fact often noted by commentators. Moreover, as open to interpretation as Nietzsches writing may be, many Nietzscheans also hold that his texts select good readers from bad, and thus appeal to its own imagery of the hyperborean, or higher philosopher, dwelling beyond the everyday concerns of common people.3 Through his focus upon the vicious circle of return, Klossowski theorizes the readers relation to Nietzsches philosophy in terms of a bodily contagion represented by
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360601156922

Textual Practice

Nietzsches valetudinary states that selects and separates the reader from the remainder of society. This corporeal excess of Nietzsches text amounts to a species of esotericism, admitting to the community thus generated by the text only those readers capable of sharing with Nietzsche the experience that grounds his writing. However, insofar as Klossowski contends that the text selects, his account of Nietzsches esotericism diverges signicantly from the more traditional appeal to those-in-theknow, and higher men. Rather than the lofty hyperborean, Klossowski characterizes Nietzsches good reader as perverse, wont to follow the vagaries of desire, and as a co-conspirator against culture. The meaning of having been selected by Nietzsche thus takes on a different, more precarious hue in Klossowskis terms. I will elucidate the meaning of this conspiracy [complot] by drawing upon its conceptual relationship to the Marquis de Sades secret society of perverts, as elaborated by Klossowski in his essay The PhilosopherVillain.4 By reading his work on Nietzsche and Sade together, we are better able to appreciate the revolutionary tenor of Klossowskis interpretation of Nietzsche, which addresses issues of social cohesion and the potential for critique as well as simple questions of how to read Nietzsches philosophy. By elucidating the difference between the gregarious level of discourse and a mute core that resonates beneath its extant meaning, Klossowski emphasizes a revolutionary potentiality within Nietzsches philosophy. He thus pregures concerns taken up later by Deleuze, Foucault, and Agamben: that is, the bodily potentiality that both undermines and gives rise to discourse.5 A neglected progenitor of these philosophers in relation to other gures such as Bataille or Blanchot, Klossowski also positions the body as a destabilizing force in relation to a repressive socius, or community. His engagements with Nietzsche and Sade through the simulacra of eternal return and sodomy thus address the question of how a community that cultivates singularity or uniqueness might be possible. Before turning to the socially transgressive promise of eternal recurrence, however, I will examine the relation in terms of which Klossowski frames his study of Nietzsche, between the body and language: a relation that generates the requisite tension for transgression to take the form of a community.

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

On the Continuity and Disjunction Between the Body and Language

To a signicant degree, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle responds to and enlarges a problematic set up by Nietzsche throughout his oeuvre: the relation of the body to language. For Nietzsche this is a troubled relation: as language both emerges from and obstructs, or falsies, the body. Language is a product of the body, and can even be interpreted with reference to the

44

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

order of drives that comprise the speakers body because, according to Nietzsche, the philosophers body provides the real germ of life from which the whole plant [the philosophy] has grown.6 Thus Nietzsche is able to claim to be a physician to culture, diagnosing the disease from which Western philosophy and religion understood as misunderstandings of the body7 stem. However, precisely in this respect, language opposes and disempowers the body, separating the subject from the immediacy of bodily impulses and impressions. The body fabricates (produces) language, and in turn, language fabricates (lies about) the body. Reading back from language to the body therefore requires the philological arts: an ability to interpret beyond the face value of every sign, and sometimes even to infer from what is avowed its opposite.8 If language is a mode of corporeal encryption, then the process of deciphering seeks precisely a kernel of meaning unintelligible in terms of the convention of signs of which it is composed. In this respect, the body is understood as the ground that meaning must leave behind or obscure, and a return to the body must involve a departure from sense. As Klossowski writes, [t]o restore these corporealizing forces (impulses) to thought amounts to an expropriation of the agent, of the self.9 The nature of this mute core of meaning can be claried, to an extent, by comparing two systems, or terms, that do not quite coincide: for instance, in translation. Especially as concerns the literary or poetic work, no matter how faithful the translation, a loss of depth, or affect, must always be incurred. As Leslie Hill writes, the problem of translation is the question of the relation of language to its outside.10 For a language indicates, but cannot encapsulate, the material conditions of its production: its history of use and cultural milieu, inected by every linguistic exchange between individual speaking subjects.11 For Klossowski, the exchange of signs both between and within particular languages conceals and disavows the specicity of each body, and so begets an oppressive sameness. He invokes Nietzsches disparagement of consciousness to articulate this loss: [T]he historical and human world has not managed to silence the affects: in order for this newly autonomous consciousness to triumph completely over the initial Desire (represented by the idleness of the Master), it was necessary for art to disappear [. . .], and for the affects to be swallowed up entirely in the fabrication of exchangeable products.12 The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deciphered by consciousness. Consciousness itself constitutes the code of signs that inverts, falsies and lters what is expressed through the body.13

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

45

Textual Practice

As with Nietzsche, Klossowski understands consciousness as a thin tissue that mediates a bodys relation to its outside, and especially to other subjects. Moreover, it is a part of the body that is alienated from itself: the self, or person, that is generic and exchangeable. The code of everyday signs [le code des signes quotidiens] to which Klossowski refers in the passage quoted above indicates an economy of words exchangeable, and so equivalent, units of imaginary value through which consciousness understands itself. All phenomena, if they are to be registered by consciousness, must be converted to its currency (the code of everyday signs) and this also includes interoception: that is, the bodys perception of its own interiority. Thus, for Klossowski words constitute a closed system that refers only to itself rather than to a material outside. Consciousness economy does not accord to that of the body, which deals in incommensurable quantities: or rather, differences in quality, which cannot be exchanged or denitively reconciled. Insofar as thought is conned to an ordinary language, then, it is able to create nothing new. Its surplus value arises from an accumulation of energy that presses on between words: the silence that subtends (and escapes) the statement. Conscious thought has separated itself from the body, but continues to draw upon its secret reserve: from the unarticulated ground upon which the statement derives its meaning. In this respect, Klossowski like Nietzsche understands the self to be coextensive with language and consciousness; situated contrary to the impulsive, volatile body. Whereas the body is not self-present, does not coincide with itself, but is instead a multiplicity of disparate forces, the self is a facade of sameness manufac tured by the body for instrumental purposes. As Klossowski puts this, the body produces the self as an illusion of its own cohesion; and then comes to threaten this self with disintegration.14 The problematic that Klossowski thereby sets up in relation to Nietzsches work is the question of how creativity (encoded as corporeal) is possible within language, and correlatively, how a discourse faithful to the body might be generated. Klossowski looks to Nietzsches writings in search of a praxis capable of bringing to language a corporeal logic, such that the incommensurable becomes accessible at least to those rendered open to it by Nietzsches text. Nietzsches point of access to a corporealizing thought15 or thought that returns to the body was by way of what Klossowski calls his valetudinary states: that is, the very sickness that imperiled his self. [Nietzsche] followed what he called, in several places, the guiding thread of the body. By examining the alternations in his own valetudinary states, he sought to follow this Ariadnes thread through the labyrinth of the impulses.16

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

46

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Of essence to Nietzsches project of recovering the body to language, according to Klossowski, is an experimentation that takes as its empirical data the modulations within his own body. And in order to gain access to this material, Nietzsche had to reinterpret his sickness or valetudinary states as an address to consciousness: hence Klossowskis appellation for these violent bodily uctuations, as a semiotic of impulses.17 Nietzsches experiments upon his body the observations that he made during the times of his worst incapacity served an insubordination of the body to the brain. His sickness became a conspiracy against his self the stable identity Nietzsche in order to enable a greater lucidity with regard to the physiological conditioning underlying all human action, including language and culture. Nietzsches sick body, according to Klossowski, presented him with a perspective on language, writing, and thinking, unavailable to the healthy (meaning gregarious) man. By means of his sickness, Nietzsche was able to observe the body at war with itself. The cycles of migraine, vomiting of phlegm, dyspepsia, and blindness, which both interrupted and fuelled his work, Nietzsche experienced as assaults of the body upon the brain. Under such conditions, the illusion of bodily coherence could not hold. Broken down into its component parts, Nietzsches sick and unruly body could not furnish him the minimum conditions for social agency. Against gregariousness, and against his own self, Nietzsche sided with his body: If the body is presently in pain, if the brain is sending nothing but distress signals, it is because a language is trying to make itself heard at the price of reason. A suspicion, a hatred, a rage against his own conscious and reasonable person was born. This person fashioned by a particular epoch, in a familial milieu he increasingly abhorred is not what he wanted to conserve. He would destroy the person out of a love for the nervous system he knew he had been gifted with, and in which he took a certain pride. By studying the reactions of his nervous system, he would come to conceive of himself in a different manner than he had previously known and indeed, in a manner that will perhaps never again be known.18 Accordingly, Nietzsches attentions to his bodily symptoms engender a lucidity with which the opacity of the impulses can be ameliorated. The central concern of this concept of lucidity is an awareness of the reality of the body as heterogeneous, that the self is a ction, and that there is a fundamental rupture between this body and self.19 For this reason, Klossowski aligns lucidity with Nietzsches delirium, wherein Nietzsche identied with the internal diversity of his physiological states in preference to the cultural and familial milieu represented by his person. In his delirium, according

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

47

Textual Practice

to Klossowski, Nietzsches consciousness scratched at the tain of the mirror that had separated his self from his body, and thereby he was opened to the danger of madness. For once it scratches the tain, consciousness itself, in its very transparency, merges with the ux and reux of the impulses.20 This is precisely the point at which the attractions of Nietzsches madness emerge for Klossowski: where his delirium coincides with lucidity, and there is a departure from the code of everyday signs that limits human experience. In keeping with Nietzsches own account of subjectivity, Klossowski situates the self at the extremity of chaos:21 as a surface delegated by chaos, or becoming, which interprets itself as origin, such that chaos is then rendered at its service. The protective barrier between the self and the chaotic depth that subtends subjectivity, however, is permeable, especially when subjected to stress. According to Klossowski, Nietzsches philosophical strategy of siding with his body, rather than his self, involved expropriating the self, in order to restore thought to the body.22 And as the agent thinks only as a product of this code of everyday signs,23 it is understood that whatever is left for thought in the wake of the expropriation of agency would involve a different economy to everyday language or a semiotic of impulses. Having posed the question of how Nietzsche could corporealize thought expressing his bodily singularity by transgressing the generic code of signs Klossowski proposes the thought of eternal recurrence as the mechanism of this expropriation. For Klossowski eternal return is the gure through which Nietzsche is able to dissociate himself from the ction of his person; and it is also a means by which he is able to transmit to the reader an intensity, or soul tonality, that approximates wordless communication. In the section that follows, I will map the relation, sketched by Klossowski in Vicious Circle, between this project of expropriating the self and the possibility of corporeal communication, or community, between the reader and the text. Of central importance to Klossowskis thesis is eternal return, perhaps the most excessive (and thus corporeal) gure left to us by Nietzsche. I will then, in a third section, be in a position to elucidate Klossowskis vision of a community founded upon the production, rather than the repression, of bodies and desires, in the light of a comparison between Nietzsches conspiracy against culture and Sades secret society of perverts.

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

Exquisite Delirium: the Thought of Eternal Return

Eternal recurrence is elucidated only twice within Nietzsches published writings, and even then it appears more as a poetic device than a

48

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

philosophical argument.24 In which case, why has this thought exerted such a powerful inuence upon twentieth century interpretations of Nietzsches philosophy?25 Perhaps this is because of the seeming incongruity of the thought of eternal return with the remainder of Nietzsches work, such that it either holds the readers attention, or else is passed over relatively unacknowledged. Eternal recurrence with its reference to demons and cosmology stands out in its impenetrability, as a blot on the landscape of a philosophy that is otherwise characterized by its this worldliness. Moreover, the thought of eternal return evokes an uncanny resonance that can potentially unsettle the reader Nietzsches references to it are all the more powerful for their brevity, more effective at shocking the reader out of her comfort zone. Initially, however, eternal return is understood merely as a thought experiment. The reader is asked to imagine that he is addressed by a demon (or spirit of gravity), who challenges him to relive every moment, great and small, innumerable times more.26 The test resides in ones affective response to this possibility: Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.27 This passage is generally considered in existential terms, as an afrmation of immanence: a revaluation of life in response to the realization that our predominant Wissenschaft no longer supports an afterlife, and a challenge to take responsibility for the meaning of the earth.28 Klossowski interprets this revolutionary thought at an even more personal level, as representing the apotheosis of Nietzsches philosophy and life: that highest point wherein he achieved lucidity, understood as an opening to a transformative and divine delirium. Within a mode of thinking for which the self functions chiey to reproduce social norms, lucidity is misconceived as opposed to delirium: expressing, rather, an apex of individuated selfhood and thus safeguarding against civil disobedience. By coupling lucidity and delirium, Klossowski renders eternal recurrence as signifying the destruction of the self. In order to comprehend what this coalescence between lucidity and delirium entails, it would serve well at this point to introduce the specic vocabulary with which Klossowski elaborates the various qualitative differences of experience, or perspective; and through which he sketches the possibility of conscious thoughts return to the body: impulse, phantasm, and simulacrum. First, Klossowski designates as impulsive the most unintelligible aspect of human being: the incommunicable abyss from which all meaning arises. The impulse refers to the bodily chaos that Nietzsche

49

Textual Practice

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

designates as Trieb: instinct, force, will, or drive. The impulse remains inaccessible to consciousness; unrepresentable within the terms that orient identication. This is primarily because an impulse is not exchangeable, differentiating itself from all other drives, and in this respect approximating pure difference. It can be understood as a monad of the internally incoherent play of forces that Nietzsche understood as underpinning the self, and relations of difference between these monads organize what is only contingently a coherent entity. It is the impulses these basic units of life that interpret, each hierarchical organization of impulses yielding its own perspective. Differences in perspective between agents are then, at least in principle, traceable back to the most dominant impulse: perspectival difference is essentially corporeal difference. Insofar as ones hierarchy of impulses is able to accord to the species conguration in general (that is, the code of everyday signs) one is considered moral, subordinate, and productive. To the extent that one senses the call of an impulse that surpasses the economy of signs, however, one is set apart from species being: Once the body is recognized as the product of the impulses (subjected, organized, hierarchized), its cohesion with the self becomes fortuitous. The impulses can be put to use by a new body, and are presupposed in the search for new conditions.29 This excess that would open out to new trajectories of being represents societys monstrous counter-part: its immoral, insubordinate, and proigate shadow. Such singularity is a possible mode for all, as all bodies are products of the interplay of impulses and yet not all will apply to its call, which requires a degree of sacrice and social abandonment.30 In this respect, impulses both subtend and oppose gregariousness. What Klossowski and Nietzsche both call species life is fundamentally impulsive, yet the species opposes impulsional singularity by virtue of its need for exchange. As Nietzsche elucidated in his essay on truth and metaphor, the survival of the collective necessitates the metaphysical reduction of one thing to another, and thus the occultation of idiosyncrasy and difference.31 For Klossowski the impulses constitute the soul tonality that accumulates beneath, or in opposition to, culture. The impulse corporeality is forgotten by culture, and will only resurface through an anamnesis (remembrance, or unforgetting) consisting in a delirious mode of being, such as that exhibited by Nietzsche immediately prior to the onset in 1889 of what would become total brain inertia. According to his doctrine of will to power, impulses are in fact all that there is for Nietzsche, whether prior to or after interpretation. Klossowski reafrms

50

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

this sentiment in Nietzsche when he writes [n]othing exists apart from impulses that are essentially generative of phantasms.32 This brings us to the phantasm, which, Klossowski writes, is produced at the limit-point where this impulse is turned into a thought (of this impulse) as a repulsion against the adulterous coherence of agency.33 The phantasm is a reaction against the person to whom it is understood to belong: an attempt to enact a state of difference from the species (or the herd in Nietzsches parlance), and from the species aspect of oneself (i.e., the individual, installed by virtue of the code of everyday signs). More specically, however, a phantasm represents the impulses attempt to objectivate itself: that is, to appropriate itself as an object of interpretation, thus becoming self-reexive. Like the impulse, Klossowskis concept of the phantasm is in itself still relatively incoherent, and manifests as an obsessional image to which the agent must continually return in the attempt to expunge, or satisfy, the impulse. The phantasm never nds its adequate expression, and is experienced as a constraint that drives one to return continually to certain behaviors; or an engine for obsessional productions, such as philosophy or art. The concept of the phantasm can be further elucidated with reference to the simulacrum of eternal return. As was noted earlier, Klossowski interpreted the thought of eternal recurrence as the apotheosis that nally transported Nietzsche to the perilous heights of disintegration. This gure of apotheosis must be read also in relation to the apparent incommunicability of the idea of return: for, as many of Nietzsches friends attested, his attempts to relate recurrence to them was marked by an urgency that would have been absent were he engaging merely in a didactic repetition of the ancient doctrine of return. According to Klossowski, the essential kernel of the thought that Nietzsche attempted to communicate was precisely this affective intensity that had so perplexed his friends, and was perhaps transmitted more eloquently by means of the silences in which it was couched than the abridged explications offered by Nietzsche. Klossowski thus characterizes the eternal return as a vehicle for the expression of the high tonality [hohe Stimmung] of Nietzsches soul, or his highest feeling [hochste Gefuhl]. Eternal recurrence is the simulacrum that gures the phantasm, which both motivates and provides the limit for Nietzsches philosophy. Understood as a simulacrum, eternal return is not the product of a phantasm, but its skilful reproduction, by which humanity can produce itself, through forces that are thereby exorcized and dominated by the impulse.34 If the phantasm is a production of the impulses, importantly it is not communicable in itself. For that, the simulacrum is needed: in this case, the gure of recurrence. Klossowski ambiguously opposes the phantasm to the simulacrum. On the one hand, the simulacrum is the externalization (or expression)

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

51

Textual Practice

of the phantasm, and is thus in this sense albeit at another remove the bodys own creation. The simulacrum most frequently takes the form of myth or parody, and is characterized by a use of language that is not strictly translatable, or exchangeable. Klossowski holds that such mythmaking is crucial to corporealized thinking, and the inability to invent simulacra is [. . .] a symptom of degeneration.35 We might understand poetry as exhibiting the form of the simulacrum, because it opens the reader to an experience that cannot be rendered by the precis. If one cannot attain the experience directly from the text, as it is written or from a fragment of words, images, or sounds that expresses a similar density or intensity then this experience is simply unavailable. The inability to experience what the poem, piece of music, or artwork shows suggests a weakness of the impulses to which it appeals. Eternal recurrence, as a simulacrum, appeals to impulses that want to be freed of their bondage to the self. Nietzsches attempts in his notes to elucidate (or test) recurrence scientically are unconvincing for the same reason that others attempts to do so are merely ridiculous: the intensity that corresponds to return can only be hailed by the simulacrum, which does not yield to reality testing. The simulacrum is productive of truth; it does not conform to a standard of truth that would be determined externally and universally. On the other hand, the simulacrum also tends towards stereotypy to the extent that it is circumscribed by the code of everyday signs. In this sense, the simulacrum is an ossication of the impulses, liable to empty itself of meaning as soon as a cultural shift takes place. Simulacra can lose their vibrant intensity, becoming mere relics, or windows to the past; husks of some prior life form rather than living architectures of the body. Importantly, however, for Klossowski the simulacrum substitutes itself as a sign for the phantasm, and in this manner protects it from the leveling effects of the code of everyday signs. In this regard the simulacrum enacts a fraudulent exchange, substituting itself for the phantasm, and thus undermining the laws of the sign economy: If the phantasm is what makes each of us a singular case in order to defend it against the institutional signication given to it by the gregarious group the singular case cannot avoid resorting to the simulacrum as something that is equivalent to its phantasm as much as for a fraudulent exchange between the singular case and the gregarious generality. But if this exchange is fraudulent, it is because it is willed as such by both the generality and the singular case. 36 As was the case for the impulse and the phantasm, the phantasm and simulacrum abide together in a close relation:

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

52

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

From the mood (impulse and repulsion) to the idea, from the idea to its declarative formulation, the conversion of the mute phantasm into speech is brought about. For the phantasm never tells us why it is willed by our impulses. We interpret it under the constraint of our environment, which is so well installed in us by its own signs that, by means of these signs, we never have done with declaring to ourselves what the impulse can indeed will: this is the phantasm. But under its own constraint we simulate what it means for our declaration: this is the simulacrum.37 The simulacrum attempts to render the phantasm accessible to a select audience by simulating its movement, or tonality. The simulacrum chaperones the phantasm on its rendezvous with the code of signs, ensuring that a space is kept open for bodily creativity. The simulacrum simulates the phantasm, thus rendering its communication possible but only by distorting its essential nature: that is, by means of an esoteric movement of revealing concealment.38 In this vein, eternal recurrence can be understood as an esoteric and selective form, appealing to the body of the reader upon whom it acts, and stimulating within him the quality, or tonality, for which return is the touchstone. Return purports to open Nietzsches bodily impulsions to the reader, engendering within her the same quality, and thus destabilizing distinctions between Nietzsche and his reader. Yet it must be remembered that, as a simulacrum, the gure of recurrence can only simulate and distort Nietzsches high tonality. The fullness of Nietzsches experience his body is only a lure for the reader, returns principle effect being a perilous destabilization of the self. For, the experience to which the thought of return refers is precisely that lucidity which lays bare the myth of a unity, or self, as subject to that experience. The dangerous truth of return that Nietzsche attempts to share with his friends and readers should also open them to such dissolution, and this is the basis upon which the thought selects: it measures the extent to which the reader is able to withstand, and even afrm, a relinquishment of unity; to open herself to the instability of becoming. Such a renunciation of identity opposes the codication imposed upon the body by gregarious being,39 representing instead an afrmation of discontinuity that characterizes the sovereign individual.40 In this way, recurrence is not only an agent of the communication of the incommunicable, but as a thought that pregures the bearers disintegration, it is also the agent of contagion, threatening madness along with enlightenment. By means of the excessive thought of return, something of the body the ineffable, high tonality resonates and is transmitted; and this is what renders it a corporealized thought, restoring thought to the

53

Textual Practice

body. And yet, as a simulacrum, recurrence also cloisters or encrypts the impulse, protecting it from the abrasive action of common thought. It keeps in reserve its truly corporeal aspect, and then only simulates those qualities that are read as impulsive. But in so doing something of the body is indeed communicated, or transmitted although this can perhaps be understood as a gestural communication41 rather than an exchange of vapors or uids. The simulation that codies Nietzsches highest feeling gives rise to a mimicry on behalf of his reader: a mimicry that reproduces in her the experience of return. By posing to his readers the question of recurrence, Nietzsche bids them to access for themselves the possibility of self-annihilation. The gure of return thus reproduces itself in the reader as a kind death drive, or the curious vicious circle enacting, in the form of parody, the alienation through which the self is precariously constituted. Most signicantly for understanding how Nietzsches text enlists the reader at the level of her corporeality: as a simulacrum, recurrence can only simulate Nietzsches high tonality by transforming it into a mythic form thus also potentially ushering into being a culture equal to the impulsional power that it designates. In this light, Nietzsche may have envisioned the gure of recurrence as the centerpiece of a new counter-culture, and as the engine for a new set of values. But such a revolution in culture and value would occur at the micro-level of his readers body, and the community to which it would give rise would be constituted solely of those who shared with him the experience of return. The reader may assume that a renegade impulse, existing prior to his reading of return, singles him out amongst Nietzsches readers as the one for whom the signal is codied. However, if we are to take seriously Klossowskis characterization of eternal recurrence as a simulacrum, then it must also be understood to have a productive relation to the reality that it purports merely to represent: the simulacrum brings the impulse into a relation with a community of others, but always in the guise of something else. The interpretation produces the impulse, but not in itself: rather, the simulacrum of return reproduces itself through the readers attempt to enact an authentic (dissolute) experience of return. Nietzsches conspiracy against culture and against language is a bodily contagion transmitted to the reader, paradoxically, by means of writing. In the nal section of this paper I will explore Klossowskis notion of the complot or conspiracy that guided his reading of Nietzsche, in relation to his interpretation of the Marquis de Sade. Klossowskis account of Nietzsche cannot properly be separated from his work on Sade, not only because he studied these two great thinkers concurrently, but also because he posed questions to Sade through his writing on Nietzsche, and vice versa, thus staging a call and response exchange

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

54

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

between these texts. In this next section, then, I will address the liaison dangereuse between Nietzsche and Sade as mediated by Klossowski with a view to drawing out the notion of a community of singular types generated by their texts.

The Conspiracy of Philosopher-Villains: Nietzsche-Klossowski-Sade

Nietzsche and Sade may be unlikely bedfellows, given Sades lasciviousness, and Nietzsches famously impoverished sex life. Yet Klossowski brings them together productively if not within the same text, at least within the same movement of his own thought on the relation between language and the body, culture and what it refuses, the political and its ambiguously situated moment of critique. Nietzsche and Sade each embody for Klossowski cultures tipping point: or, an extremity at which the decadence of the cultural elite becomes self-reexive and critical. Nietzsche, as the heir to an overripe accumulation of knowledge (or cultural memory), and the morally corrupt and sexually excessive Sade, each assume the burden of representing to culture its inconsistencies and internal points of rupture. And they do so, according to Klossowski, by means of a corporeal semantics fashioned from the limits of their own experience, represented by Nietzsche as the simulacrum of eternal return, and within Sades writings, as sodomy. Klossowski theorises these simulacra as units of exchange between sovereign individuals, which form the basis for a secret society deeply embedded within existing society, or a conspiracy [complot] against culture. The question Klossowski thus poses, through his readings of Nietzsche and Sade, concerns how their works might found a counter-culture. Moreover, his readings of their works ask after the machinery of their particular variety of esotericism, conceived as a bodily contagion of sickness and perversity, rather than as the skeleton key to a pristine and delicate locked box. Following this line of questioning, we might also ask after Klossowskis relation to this secret society of criminals and invalids: as disciple, learned associate, or perhaps even founder of this cult. He provides us with a rst clue to his relationship to these gures in the preface to a later edition of Sade My Neighbor, to which he had added The Philosopher-Villain as a belated rst chapter. He begins selfreexively, by putting his own authority into question, quoting a character from another of his works, Roberte Ce Soir: ROBERTE: Who gave Antoine that book he was reading last night? Was it you, or did Victor already pass it on to him? The title alone is enough to make one vomit: Sade My Neighbor!42

55

Textual Practice

His commentary on Sade is depicted here as contagious, dealing in the works of a perverse atheist, and thus itself capable of inducing sickness and disgust in its reader. Signicantly, this gesture of self-effacement echoes the introductory section of Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised, where Sade disowns the moral issued by the work crudely, that crime pays arguing rather circuitously instead that even the most hardened and debauched reader will be touched by Justines torments, and would thereby be turned to the path of righteousness.43 Perhaps by dissociating himself from the opinions of the characters about whom he writes and, in a later work, denying his authorship of Justine entirely44 Sade radicalises the contagious effect of his writing. For while enacting an ironic distance between oneself as author and the morality of the text is a standard technique of an esotericism, its more lasting rhetorical effect is to implicate the reader within his bad philosophy. Thus Sades esotericism represents not simply an effort to protect himself against political persecution,45 but also an instrument by which he contaminates the reader with his desire, polluting their imagination and good conscience. By dissimulating his position as author of the text, Sade hands over to the reader responsibility for Justine, the book as well as the woman. It is then the reader who must either assume or refuse the burden of guilt respecting the crimes perpetrated against her. Sade thus infects the reader with the responsibility for Justine by denying such responsibility himself; and as with Nietzsche, the vehicle for this contagion of guilt or ressentiment is reason.46 Reading Justine, one is struck by the cruelty of which reason is capable, as it is with the use of reason that the libertine philosopher-villains of the text practice their perverse pleasures at her expense.47 But if, pace Enlightenment thought, reason leads only to virtue, then what are we to make of the arguments that issue from Sades philosophers, who use reason only in order to justify their own cruelty and vice? For Klossowski, reason (the code of everyday signs) can be understood precisely as an agent of contagion promoting weakness of the organism and the philosopher-villain dramatises this aspect of reason for him. Reason is supposed to be exercised with indifference to motives and passions: the philosophical-hero is typically austere, even selfeffacing, with regard to truth. The characters that Sade depicts in Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom,48 on the other hand, use reason cynically to further the pursuit of their desires: they are philosopher-villains, who gratuitously abuse the notion of truth. Sade thereby puts into question the possibility of arriving at the right and good course of action through the use of reason alone: being utterly indifferent to ones desires, passions, and values, reason cannot lead the way to the correct desire, passion, or value. The use of reason is thus always already tainted, our objectives

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

56

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

always already determined by the values that we pretend to efface in the appeal to it. We forget the value of our values, so accustomed are we to the belief that they are only inferred from our reasoning, that they have come to be confused with reason and in this way merely customary values are enshrined as inherently reasonable. Sades innovation is to put into the mouths of philosophers whom all reasonable men would judge as perverts and degenerates, reasonable assertions that prove the exception. Whilst by common standards their desires are aberrant and criminal, with the voice of reason they take on the appearance of normalcy, even decency. This demonstrates the arbitrariness of reasons application, and makes fools and liars of the righteous and murderous men of his day: the revolutionaries of French republicanism who represented the terror as following the dictates of reason. Yet more importantly, it also gives Sade cause for hope that the values of his day could, in time, be superseded, through the various turns and inversions of reason itself. Sades arguments would transmit to the reader his perverse passions or those of the characters whom he disowns. The distinction between the philosopher and the villain the one who dedicates himself only to reason, and he who subjects reason to his passions would thereby break down. In a further respect, however, Sade sought belonging through his writing, which was also an expression of vengeance against those who demonstrated punitively that he did not belong.49 According to Klossowski, Sade attempted to develop an alternative generality of writing as a system of shared, values and signs based upon his perverse body and desires, or singularity. The most potent signier of his type is sodomy, which becomes for him the basis of a new discourse, and a new community. However, the creation of a new type would also necessarily destabilize the old type: the present community, or as Klossowski nominates it, our species being. [S]odomy is formulated by a specic gesture of countergenerality, the most signicant in Sades eyes that which strikes precisely at the law of the propagation of the species and thus bears witness to the death of the species in the individual. It evinces an attitude not only of refusal but of aggression; in being a simulacrum of the act of generation, it is a mockery of it.50 Sade mocks what he takes to be a central tenet of conventional morality, procreation, by setting up an alternative moral conversation that takes sodomy as its paradigm. In the act of sodomy, not only is the seed spent in vain, but it also mixes with excrement. Thus, Sades system offends and ridicules the values of conventional men. However, Klossowski is

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

57

Textual Practice

careful to show that Sades transgression only functions as such by asserting itself with reference to the order that it seeks to undermine. He writes:
Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

In outrage what is outraged is maintained to serve as a support for transgression.51 Transgression presupposes the existing order, the apparent maintenance of norms under which energy accumulates thereby making transgression necessary.52 Counter-generality thus takes the meaning of its signiers parasitically from the normative structure of culture, but exploits and explodes them. That is to say, Sade does not perform a Kinseyan (or even Freudian) disarmament of sodomys offensive signication, by positing it as merely one sexual practice among others. Rather, sodomy retains for him the full force of its biblical signicance, as an offence against God and human dignity. However, Klossowski notes, as an undercurrent to culture, the transgressive symbol accumulates its force to the extent that it is repressed, or kept in store. This is why Sade peoples his writings with priests, judges, and aristocrats as well as thieves and vagabonds, thus signifying that corruption is already inherent to the system that morality apparently protects; that what the moral order rejects lies only barely beneath the surface of its highest echelons.53 In this way, Sade presents himself to the Enlightenment philosopher as embodying the corruption of society and what amounts to the same thing the death of the human species, or type. In The Philosopher-Villain, however, Klossowski presents the case that Sades writing is intended not only to offend that, rather, it is also an appeal to tastes that accord to his own. From the loneliness of his imprisonment, Sade developed a perverse community, comprising his imaginary interlocutors in Philosophy in the Bedroom, as well as the books (largely imaginary) readers. Together, they would reproduce their values, using a language that rivals conventional usage, or the code of everyday signs. Under the banner of integral atheism, Klossowski indicates a selfdestructive possibility within reason whereby the principle of identity itself disappears along with the absolute guarantor of this principle; the property of having a responsible ego is therewith morally and physically abolished.54 In other words, if God were really dead, then the consistent atheist would also need to relinquish the notion that things are selfidentical, as this notion is inconsistent without a Creation mythology to underpin identity. This critique from the perspective of integral atheism foreshadows the forfeit of identity that we nd in Klossowskis reading of Nietzsche. And like Nietzsche, for Sade this alienation of the self

58

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

takes place not only at the level of religion, psychology, or morality, but also bodily. He continues:
Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

The rst consequence will be the universal prostitution of beings. And this is but the counterpart of integral monstrosity, which rests on the insubordination of the life functions in the absence of any normative authority of the species.55 Klossowskis interpretations of Sade and Nietzsche thus attest to a symmetry of purpose. While both symbolize to him the sovereign individual whose uniqueness challenges the code of everyday signs, or conventional morality; each also attempts at once to signify and encrypt his difference, so as to be understood only by those with the sensual capacity to share in the singular experience their writing attempts to reveal. Central to this attempt to communicate a singularity is the concept of the simulacrum, which playfully and treacherously creates truth, or value. For, as Klossowski indicates in relation to sodomy, the simulacrum mocks the real, or whatever is understood to be natural and right. The simulacrum represents a gnawing hollowness sewn into the normative fabric of society at its very beginning: the simulacrum makes the real possible, because it is that against which the real is opposed, and against which irruption the real bolters itself. By reguring what is conventionally considered the most marginalised, abject sexual behavior as central, Sade can be understood to dismantle or even revalue the values of his day. Moreover, the secret communities embodying such a revaluation of values live among us as societys most important elements, including custodians of the law. Like most revolutions, the community that takes universal prostitution as its goal is strangely consistent with the purveying system of values: it is the rot society refuses to recognise as rigorously consequent of its organising principles. Similarly, recurrence is the signier of Nietzsches own integral atheism, wherein the notion of an afterlife is excluded, and life itself is parodied as a vicious circle, to be endlessly repeated. With the death of God, the world of selves and of things is also suspended. The simulacrum of recurrence is, for Klossowski, a point of revolution that both articulates and dismantles identity. Through the experience of return the subject renegotiates its own reexivity by means of an anamnesiac lucidity that recognizes the incongruity between the body and conscious thought, and dwells in the dissonances between moments: thus privileging becoming (chaos) over being (identity). Above all, however, what both simulacra recreate is the phantasm: the obsession according to which signs are congured, and the internal constraint that determines the sovereign individuals manner of insubordinate enjoyment.

59

Textual Practice

The phantasm, thus maintained by the simulacrum, is the kernel of an irritation ( jouissance, or pleasure in unpleasure) that both motivates and destabilizes the subject. In this respect, we may think of the phantasm as the corporeal remainder that resists representation only thus to form the basis of representation: as the unconscious connection between the self and its world. It is precisely in this sense that Klossowski can hold that Nietzsches body communicates itself to the receptive other the one whose own bodily impulsions accord to Nietzsches high tonality. The impulse thus communicated is not withheld deep at the core Nietzsches body, as if its essential atom. Rather, the bodily remainder forms the tissue that renders inter-subjective relations possible: a mood inhabiting language as a surface that can only be communicated by way of mimicry. That muteness, or soul tonality, indicated in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, is the very stuff of a non-verbal (gestural) communication, without which language loses its texture and materiality. This unexchangeable depth that would ordinarily evade, or subsist beneath, the economy of signs, is precisely what the simulacrum allows the reader to access. Such access takes the form of a feeling of sympathy with Nietzsches philosophy and his values, but a sympathy that perhaps unbeknownst to the reader tears her apart as it binds her to Nietzsche. In this manner, selection by Nietzsches text does not so much accord one the security of the hyperborean, in seclusion from the mundane affairs that despoil lesser men, as rendering the position of stable subject impossible for the reader. The price of sharing Nietzsches experience is the animation of a destructive impulse that strives to undo the self, whilst also forming the basis for a counter-community of invalids, criminals, and perverts. In stark contrast to other esoteric interpretations or readings that attribute a selective function to Nietzsches philosophy Klossowski holds that the connection between the text and the reader is ambiguous in the extreme, as there must be a continuous commerce between them. The reader is chosen not by virtue of his integrity as an individual, but precisely to the extent that he is able to lose himself, and thereby to obscure and put at risk his integrity. The experience of having a position of privilege respecting Nietzsches text thus betrays the goal of being addressed by it: for, according to Klossowski, such an address already implies an attenuation of the position, to the point that it is barely viable.

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

Conclusion

For Klossowski, the relationship between Nietzsche and his reader consists in a kind of cross-contamination at the level of corporeality, conceived as what resists encapsulation by language. Hence his designation for the

60

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

community of sovereign individuals selected by the text as a society of criminals and sodomites, all engaging in a mode of communal perversion. The community engendered by the textual encounter with Nietzsche or Sade is therefore marked by a contagion of sickness and perversity. These contaminants, by denition, threaten the bodys integrity, so that Klossowskis invocation of them in this context suggests the violation of the readers body by the texts she reads. Such violation, however, is nothing personal. Indeed, the corporealization of thought suggested by Klossowski consists in a manner of depersonalization: the expropriation of ones person. While sodomy is invoked by Klossowski as the simulacrum of sex, destroying rather than reproducing the species, the gure of recurrence symbolizes both a point of identication and a vertiginous sense of the disintegration of identity. Both simulacra distort and dissimulate the notion of an original source of meaning or value, and both serve to demonstrate the self-destructiveness intrinsic to society, and the already social self. Yet upon examination, the concept of the simulacrum also demonstrates that the contagious sensuality indicated by Klossowski is inseparable from (albeit also opposed to) what is understood as merely textual especially the texts one chooses, or by which one is chosen. What the encounter with Nietzsches texts accesses is not something exclusive to Nietzsche: the material exchanged through that encounter is more akin to a pulsation or mood (or, more contentiously, an algorithm) than bodily matter. The corporeal element thus communicated does not belong to Nietzsche who, as Klossowskis work shows us, is but a ction. Hence the conspiracy suggested by Klossowskis readings of Nietzsche and Sade: a conspiracy that he insists takes place at the level of the person.56 This conspiracy against the species element within oneself is also a conspiracy in the more traditional sense: among equals who nd one another, on this occasion in the eld of text. Because the mute intensity is transmitted textually, Klossowski is able to reverse the temporal order, thus becoming the founding member of this posthumous secret society of perverts and invalids. By means of the connection he draws between eternal recurrence and sodomy, Klossowski ushers Nietzsche ` and Sade through a corps-a-corps that, given the opportunity, each might have refused. In keeping with the self-destructive movement of the simulacrum at work in their texts, however, it is perhaps only proper that this liaison remain unauthorized by its participants; and that Klossowski, like Sades philosopher-villains, should take his pleasure from them according to the dictates of his own singularity. Moreover, the curious corporeality invoked by Klossowski suggests that such singularity is accessed only in relation to the texts of another. In this way, Klossowskis own conspiracy against his person is mediated by Nietzsche and Sade: as a self-touching that explodes the self by dispersing it within their writings. La Trobe University

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

61

Textual Practice

Notes

1 I would like to acknowledge The Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University, Melbourne, for supporting the development of this article. 2 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago, Illinois: Chicago University Press, 1997). 3 See, for instance, Stanley Rosens essay, Nietzsches Revolution, The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). Like other esoteric readers of Nietzsche, such as Laurence Lampert, Rosen appears to be amused that feminists and those from the political left often nd Nietzsche as appealing as those to the right of the political spectrum. According to these commentators, this phenomenon represents a mistaken identication, or a constitutive inability on the part of many readers to appreciate the actual meaning of Nietzsches philosophy, and that they belong to the common many who must misinterpret Nietzsche, rather than the rare few who might understand the meaning of his writing for philosophy and culture. 4 Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 5 Each of these philosophers respond to a theoretical tendency to overlook materiality in favor of structures imposed upon it, and through which bodies acquire their meaning, such as language or kinship relations. This tenor in Deleuze can be seen in his work with Felix Guattari onward, and especially in the concepts of desiring-production and the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus; whereas Foucault appeals to a body both subtending and resisting inscription in volume one The History of Sexuality. Giorgio Agambens concept of potentiality, as the element of non-being implicit within all existence or what must become opaque to form the background of articulation also resembles Klossowskis notion of mute singularity. See in particular Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999). I would like to thank an anonymous Textual Practice reviewer for pointing out this connection to Agamben and the critique of structuralism. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 6, p. 13, square parentheses added. 7 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Preface 2, pp. 34 5. 8 See also Eric Blondels seminal text on the relation of the body, language (metaphor) and culture in Nietzsches philosophy, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1991). Blondel argues that this relation is circular, the common thread between terms being interpretation. For instance, he writes: Metaphor would then be an imaginary, and not a speculative, synthesis, making it possible to have a body thinking, that is both a body that thinks and an interpretative thinking that thinks about the body. (Blondel,

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

62

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

Nietzsche, p. 239, emphasis in original) And: To interpret is to have a body, and to be a perspective. (ibid., p. 242) 9 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 31. 10 Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 154 11 Klossowskis extensive work in translating the texts of others (including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Wittgenstein) most probabaly inuenced the direction of his philosophy, especially with respect to his account of the relation between the body and language. Leslie Hill takes this further with her playful suggestion that Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux is a translation but a translation that responds to and inverts Heideggers interpretation of eternal return as properly metaphysical. See Hill (2001, p. 154. This confrontation between Klossowski and Heidegger, over the place of the thought of eternal return, marks the cleavage between French and German scholarship on Nietzsche: while the latter interprets Nietzsches philosophy as a coherent, metaphysical system, the former understands it precisely as a challenge to coherence and to metaphysics, and to system. At least in part, this difference perhaps is attributable to variations in perspective and a way of life that supports each of the languages concerned. 12 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 13, emphases in original. 13 Ibid., p. 26, emphasis in original. 14 Ibid., p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 30. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., pp. 1554 18 Ibid., pp. 245, emphases in original. 19 Klossowski provides three denitions for this term in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Lucidity refers rst to the physiological consciousness of oneself and of others (p. 53); second, to the new consciousness of the more or less subtle conditioning that underlies every mode of behaving, thinking, feeling, and willing (p. 53, emphases in original); and third, to the thought of a total discordance between the hidden reality and the one that is claimed or admitted (p. 54, emphasis in original). 20 Ibid., p. 27. 21 Ibid., p. 33. 22 Ibid., p. 31. 23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 Nietzsches notes contain much more sustained and worked through elaborations of eternal return, in which the idea is tested against scientic theories of the day i.e., mechanism (especially thermodynamics). Both Deleuze and Klossowski discuss the scientic applications of eternal recurrence in terms of his critique of science and metaphysics. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1983).

63

Textual Practice

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

25 Heidegger, Deleuze, and Klossowski each award eternal recurrence a central position within Nietzsches work, notwithstanding differences (both radical and subtle) between their accounts of why it is important. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vols One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1991), p. 228; and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1983), pp. 39 73. Within the analytic tradition of interpreting Nietzsche, on the other hand, eternal recurrence plays a negligible part precisely because of such ambiguity about its meaning. Arthur Dantos account famously attempts to decipher the meaning of eternal return with reference to Nietzsches scientic elaborations of the idea (in his notes), and so he is easily able to demonstrate the spuriousness of the thought scientically, if not existentially. See Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 2059. 26 See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 341, pp. 2734; and The Vision and the Riddle, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 17680. 27 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 341, pp. 2734. The passage reads in full: The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your live will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. If this thought gained possession of you, it would change, you as you are or perhaps crush you. 28 This interpretation of return is summarized by Bernd Magnus, Nietzsches Existential Imperative (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978). He writes: Recurrence [. . .] is a visual and conceptual representation of a particular attitude toward life. The attitude toward life Nietzsche wishes to portray is the opposite of decadence, decline of life, world-weariness. The attitude he wishes to portray is the attitude of afrmation, of overfullness; the attitude which expresses ascending life, life as celebration, life in celebration. (p. 142) 29 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 33, emphasis in original.

64

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

30 I would like to thank Daniel Smith for providing me with his unpublished notes on Klossowskis vocabulary in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. He writes, [A]t bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls obstinate singularity of the human soul, which is by nature non-communicable; they constitute what he calls the unexchangeable depth (le fond inechangeable) or the unintelligible depth (le fond unintelligible) of the human soul. It is the constellation of impulses that makes each individual a singular case, an idiosyncrasy. And here, for Klossowski, the singular is opposed not so much to the universal, but to the gregarious, the species, what Nietzsche calls the herd, which reduces its singularity to a common denominator, and expresses only what can be communicated. (Smith, forthcoming in Diacritics) 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense, Essays on Metaphor, ed. W. Shibble (Wisconsin: The Language Press, 1972). See especially where he writes: Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain is it that the idea leaf has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf, perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form. (Ibid., p. 5) A nerve-stimulus, rst transformed into a percept! First metaphor! The percept again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one. (Ibid., p. 4) 32 33 34 35 36 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 133, emphases in original. Ibid., p. 260, emphases in original. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 133, emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 261, emphases in original. Allen S. Weiss brings out this double genesis of the simulacrum when he writes: language is both the simulacrum of the common external resistance and the simulacrum of our singular phantasms (Weiss, A Logic of the Simulacrum or Anti-Roberte, eds Paul Foss, Paul Taylor, Allen S. Weiss, Phantasm and Simulacra: The Drawings of Pierre Klossowski, Special Issue of Art & Text 18 [ July 1985], p. 118), meaning that the simulacrum is produced at the limit of two constraints: generality (the code of everyday signs), and the creativity of the sovereign individual. Weiss also writes in this text: the supposed depth of our interior lives is but a series of ctions, the residue of signs deposited from the exterior (Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche

65

Textual Practice

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

et le Cercle Vicieux. [Mesnil-sur-lEstree: Mercure de France, 1969], p. 58). Or else it is sheer chaos. Either expression is falsied by the internalisation of the code of everyday signs, or else a true expression of individuality is achieved and expressed as a perverse singular sign (Hence the famous Nietzschean opposition of the gregarious mentality of the herd to the creativity of the sovereign individual.) In either case, expression suffers a constraint: for the gregarious mentality, this is the constraint of collective censorship which is internalised as superego, ego ideal, and all forms of stereotyped and idealised sublimation; for the perverse, sovereign mentality, this is the obsessional constraint of the phantasm, made manifest as monomania (the polarisation of expression around certain signs or passions). (Ibid., p. 116) 37 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 260, emphasis in original. 38 As Daniel Smith points out in the preface to his translation of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, the word simulacrum comes from the Latin simulare (to copy, represent, feign), and during the late Roman empire referred to the statues of the gods that lined the entrance to a city (p. x). These Roman statues reproduced a realism in excess of the original to which they were understood to refer: not only because what they represented was mythical and so did not actually exist but also because of the technique by means of which they achieved the representation. So that they would appear more realistic, these colossal gures were constructed larger at their highest point and smaller at the point closest to the viewer, so as to counteract the diminishing effects of distance upon the viewers perspective. In this manner, whereas from an objective point of view the statues might seem completely out of proportion, from the point of view of those entering the city, they would have appeared perfectly natural. In short, ironically, the simulacrum distorts, or feigns, in order to produce the reality that it undercuts. 39 As Allen S. Weiss puts this, Eternal Return is not a dialectical process of instilling memory, but rather the very sign of forgetting, of a unique experience, of the loss of language (Weiss, A Logic of the Simulacrum, p. 120, emphasis in original). 40 The notion of the sovereign individual was coined in relation to the libertinage movement of thought that culminated in Sade. Chiey, the sovereign individual is not subject to the limits and superstitions of religion and morality that regulate society. The sovereign individual takes his law from Nature rather than society. This concept was resurrected by surrealist interpretations of Sade, and resonates easily with Nietzsches free-spirit. 41 With the use of the phrase gestural communication I have in mind MerleauPontys account of inter-subjectivity in terms of the postural schema. According to this account, one is able to learn through mimicry only because of a perceived continuity between ones own body and the body of the other. This works in reverse also, so that one anticipates in ones own movements the gestures of another. For instance, a mother will part her own lips when spooning food into her childs mouth, and one will rub ones own cheek

66

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

42 43

44 45

46 47

upon seeing dirt on the cheek of the interlocutor. In this way, subjectivity extends not only to the whole of the individuals body, but also traverses the bodies of others with whom one has formed a social relation. Once transposed to Nietzsches philosophy, the idea of gestural communication describes a structural replication, rather than the transmission of actual material. Thus, bodily forces would rearrange themselves to conform to the conguration of the others body: indeed, Nietzsches appeal to type designates a quality determined structurally, through the relations between forces, and not according to some quality essential to the body. Pierre Klossowski, Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Two Novels. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1989) p. 69, quoted in Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, p. 4. D. A. F. de Sade, Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791), The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1965), pp. 4578. D. A. F. de Sade, Note Concerning My Detention, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1965), pp. 1534. Michel Delon states well Sades invidious position in relation to the established political interests of his day, being identied by the Jacobins as a feudal lord, and by monarchists as implicated in the revolution. For instance, Dulaure characterised Sade in a revolutionary pamphlet as an enemy of the revolution, ultimately embodying the limit of aristocratic danger (Michel Delon, Sade Oeuvres, Vol. I [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990] p. xix); while Sade the writer was read by the counter-revolutionaries as the incarnation of the terror in writing (ibid., p. xxiv, my translation). But further, Delon argues that Sade utilises this double position for his own ends: Sade plays ceaselessly on this double status of aristocrat and thinker, of the lord full of his hereditary rights, and philosopher supporting a new liberty (ibid., p. xvii, my translation). In a separate article, Delon argues that Sade mitigates against the notion of the political position representing a gure in whom each side projects their worst fears and in this way revealing the limits of ideology. There are obvious similarities in this respect between Sade and Nietzsche, who remains a gure of controversy in relation to German fascism. See Michel Delon, Sade comme revelateur ideologique, Romanistische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte 5 [1] (1981). Thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for directing me to Delon. See especially his master-slave narrative in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). See Thomas DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 15691791 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992). According to DiPiero, Sades libertines differ from earlier forms, in that rather than simply ridiculing and paying no head to reason, they use reason as a weapon against their victims, to aid a desire which consummation entails not

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

67

Textual Practice

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

necessarily sexual release, but the annihilation of all personal and political ties that constitute the victim as the libertines other and which, consequently, block libertines from attaining full subjectivity (ibid., p. 343). Thus, the philosopher-villain takes moral, spiritual, and social, and not only physical, possession of their victim, through the use of reason. I would like to thank an anonymous Textual Practice reviewer for making DiPieros work on Sade known to me. 48 D. A. F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1965). 49 With respect to the individuals belongingness to the generality of language, Klossowski writes: The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his act of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sades time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition; in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the eld of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals. This normative structure is expressed physiologically by a subordination of the life functions, a subordination that ensures the preservation and propagation of the race. To this need to reproduce and perpetuate oneself which is in force in each individual there corresponds the need to reproduce and perpetuate oneself by language. Whence the reciprocity of persuasion, which makes possible the exchange of individual singularities in the circuit of generality. This reciprocity is brought about only in conformity with the principle of identity or of noncontradiction, which makes logically structured language one with the general principle of understanding, that is universal reason. (Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, p. 14, my emphasis) According to Klossowski, language is the means by which individuals come together, expressing a general will, or Mitsein (meaning compassion, but also being with), through the norms and values reproduced and reconstituted therein. The individual comprehends himself only by means of this general medium, and there is no singular subject that exists apart from a relation to language. Ibid., p. 24, emphases in original. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Thomas DiPiero, commenting upon the rhetorical efcacy of Justine, argues that Sade writes subversively by means of a style that parodies narrative conventions of his day for instance, the educational treatise but in particular, the convention of vraisemblance, or similitude. He writes: Sades critics frequently gave plot synopses and summaries of the offensive scenes in their reviews, which suggests that it was not the acts that should

50 51 52 53

68

Joanne Faulkner The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle

Downloaded By: [University of Alberta] At: 20:21 10 October 2007

be censored, but the specic narrative style used to describe them. That narrative style evokes contemporary standards of vraisemblance, and [. . .] much of Justines rhetorical power derives from the contradiction between its naturalistic, rst-person narrative style, and the preposterous experiences its principal narrator undergoes. Sades unfettered and luxuriant use of language and narrative and the response they generated consequently provide us with a working denition of pornography in the late eighteenth century. Pornography is the representation of that which should not be represented; it either contradicts the expressed moral and political positions of the dominant social group which is not the same thing as contradicting the actual or lived positions of that group or it articulates the site of intense social and political conict within a social structure. Pornography is, thus, always invraisemblable to the extent that it never portrays things as the discursively dominant class expressly states they should be. (DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions, pp. 3345) This deployment of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude, clearly resonates with Klossowskis understanding of the simulacrum as what simulates, or parodies, the real. 54 Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, p. 19. 55 Ibid. 56 [T]here is a Nietzschean conspiracy which is not that of a class but that of an isolated individual (like Sade), who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole. (Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. xv).

69