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September 24, 2004
In his chapter two of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses', Klossowski operates with an individualist conception of the person. History, culture and society have dropped into the background and appear to be forgotten.
It is a similar world to the one Bataille inhabited in his On Nietzsche, but the interpretation of Nietzsche is far more rigorously thought through. This world is one in which there is a conflict between historical culture, the impulses of the individual body and the intensities of inner experience.
The focus of this chapter is on the struggle within the individual between bodily impulses and consciousness. Klossowski says:
"The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deciphered by consciousness. Consciousness itself constitutes this code of signs that inverts, falsifies and filters what is expressed through the body. Consciousnesss is itself nothing other than a deciphering of the messages transmitted by the impulses."
The implication here is that everything is internal to the individual including language. Language does not appear to be social. Nor does the body. We appear to be talking about a biological organism. Language--a code of signs-- is within consciousness.
However, Klossowsk denies that Nietzsche operates with a purely physiological conception of life. But I see no argument for this so far.
Klossowski then goes on to conceptualize the body as a product of a flux of conflicting forces:
"The body is a product of chance; it is nothing but the locus where a group of individuated impluses confront each other so as to produce this interval that constitutes a human life, impluses whose sole ambition is to de-individuate themselves. What is born from chance association of impluses is not only the individual they constitute at the whim of circumstance, but also the eminently deceptive principle of a cerebral activity that progressively disengages itself from sleep."
So far we still have a physiological conception of human live, albeit one that does away with an internal teleology of growth as realizing an end. But what is retained is dialectical conception of the conflict of impluses (or desires.)
Hegel is retained. Aristotle is dumped. What this gives us is the body as a product of the conflicting impluses.
Klossowski says that Nietzsche is no longer concerned:
"...with the body as a property of the self, but with the body as as the locus of impluses, the locus of their confrontation. Since it is a product of the impulses, the body becomes fortuitous; it is neither irreversible nor reversible, because its only history is that of impulses. These impulses come and go, and the circular movement they describe is made manifest as much as in moods as in thought, as much in the tonalities of the soul as in corporeal depressions---which are moral only insofar as the declarations and judgements of the self re-create in language a property that is in itself inconsistent and hence empty."
The tonalites of the soul--note how that theological category is just slipped in unannounced.
The prejudice against ethics is also evident. Ethics is reduced to empty morality of language. What is missing is an ethics of a healthy organism being better than an unhealthy one. Is this what we get?
Ward Boult, Star LA, 2004
Are we working towards a Dionysian semiotic in which bodily impulses break through conventional forms of thought; a semiotic in which obsessional impulses generate phantasms and simulacra. These phantasms and simulacra reinscribe received ideas and produce new modes of seeing and living.
Does that mean a world of dom and slave in a dungeon: a new mode of seeing and living where we hear the naked slave react to the Mistress's whip or cane or riding crop or neck-lock or whatever suits the fancy of the sexy Mistress at that moment?
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