Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Politics & Social Sciences

Pierre Klossowski

Philosophy

Continuum International Publishing Group-Athlone

Nietzsche made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche's belief that questions to truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium. The keen student of Nietzsche will welcome the appearance of this profound but extremely taxing study in a good English translation. Klossowski has been one of the few commentators to recognise the centrality of the idea of the drives (Triebe) for Nietzsche and the crucial role they play in the thought of eternal recurrence. The discussion of the significance of Nietzsche's debilitating migraine attacks is exemplary of the way Klossowski deftly interweaves philosophical with biographical considerations.

UNKNO

Roberte Ce Soir and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment. Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French “return to Nietzsche” by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski’s original interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the “demon,” then deepened with provocative readings of Gide’s correspondence; Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody,” in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines―including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy―Klossowski’s critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities.

Such a Deathly Desire (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

History & Criticism

State University of New York Press

Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment. Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowsk's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon" then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines—including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy—Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities. "Pierre Klossowski was one of the most influential (albeit idiosyncratic) literary figures in France during the postwar years, yet his work remains strangely unknown in the English-speaking world. Such a Deathly Desire was one of the essential books of Klossowski's oeuvre, and it includes seminal articles on Gide, Bataille, and Blanchot, as well as his now-classic essay 'Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody.' The appearance of the book in English has long been anticipated, and we owe an immense debt to Russell Ford for providing us with an accessible and accurate translation."— Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University

novel, tr Hawkes/Artarelli, foreword Foucault

The Baphomet

Marsilio Publishers

Product Description The present issue of Umbr(a) aims to provide a space for the elaboration of the often-uninterrogated relation between writing and psychoanalysis. For, inasmuch as psychoanalysis is inextricably linked to the speaking subject, it nevertheless finds its origins and future firmly grounded in writing. Every psychoanalyst whose training is informed by Freud's writing, every psychoanalytic critic who takes writing as his object of study, and anyone in any discipline who reads or writes in the name of psychoanalysis must eventually account for the following -- deceptively simple -- question: If psychoanalysis can rightly be called the talking cure, then why should it have anything at all to say about writing? The answer to this question will dictate not only why psychoanalysis can be brought to bear upon the question of writing -- what, for example, characterizes writing as distinct from speech or even the mark -- but also what psychoanalysis enables one to think about writing, as distinct from any other possible discipline, method, or apparatus. Or, to put it another way, when choosing to bring the concepts, structures, and operations of psychoanalysis to bear upon writing, one must be prepared to account not only for the choice of psychoanalysis -- Why psychoanalysis? -- but also for the admissibility and relevance of the object -- Why writing? Indeed, if there is anything that makes psychoanalysis today uniquely situated to approach the question of writing it is the way in which it inherits -- in a structurally irrevocable way -- the distinction between speech and writing. Writing has been fundamentally, but almost paradoxically, implicated in psychoanalysis from the very outset. Freud became convinced of the existence of the unconscious through direct and repeated experience of its manifestations in the speech and acts of his analysands. However, in order for his singular discovery to be useful and convincing to others who had not had the benefit of direct experience he was compelled to write. This point cannot be emphasized enough: Psychoanalysis, as it exists today, is a direct consequence of the manner in which Freud translated and transmitted his clinical experience through the fundamentally incompatible register of writing. In his case histories, for example, Freud makes it abundantly clear that what he has written is by no means a wholly accurate or linear representation of the course of the analysis in question. What the reader experiences will not be identical to what Freud experienced. Yet Freud nevertheless writes with the expectation of producing the same effect in his reader: a repetition of his inaugural experience of the unconscious. As readers of Freud, we inherit a very specific relation to repetition, and that repetition cannot be unbound from the writing of which it is a consequence. In this sense, Freud's writing has served, and continues to serve, as the base case for a peculiar sort of mathematical induction. Every reader must repeat the discovery of the unconscious and reinvent psychoanalysis, as if for the first time, while being constrained by nothing but the economy of Freud's writing. This is the Freudian wager: that the psychoanalysis we invent by reading what he has written will be, somehow, the same psychoanalysis. About the Author LUCIE CANTIN is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, and co-director of training at Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles (GIFRIC) in Québec. She has published numerous texts on a wide variety of psychoanalytic topics. In English, she has published (with Willy Apollon and Danielle Bergeron) After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (State University of New York Press, 2002). SIGI JÖTTKANDT is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is the co-founder (with Dominiek Hoens) of S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle

Umbr(a): Writing

Catherine Malabou

Alenka Zupančič

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Sigi Jöttkandt

Lucie Cantin

Tracy McNulty

Catherine Millot

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

Pierre Klossowski's debut novel, The Suspended Vocation, fictionalizes and satirizes the great erotic artist, philosopher, and iconoclast's brief, wartime flirtation with the priesthood, portraying the Church as a haven for conspiracy, idolatry, perversion, and even atheism. Written in the form of a disapproving monograph on an anonymous, confessional novel (itself titled The Suspended Vocation), it is the story of the hapless Jérôme, whose lust for holiness leads him astray in a cloistered world full of ideological and physical temptations. Sometimes a knowing critique of "religious fiction," sometimes a wicked self-parody of Klossowski's own lifelong obsessions, and sometimes a sacerdotal spy novel, The Suspended Vocation is one of the strangest and most audacious debuts in twentieth-century literature, and is here made available in English for the very first time.

The Suspended Vocation

Small Press

Das Bad der Diana

Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin

Vicious circle and Nietzsche (1989) ISBN: 4886790291 [Japanese Import]

Philosophy Shobo

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Books by Pierre Klossowski