September 23, 2004
I managed to read a part of chapter two of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle whilst on the road. I had a spare moment in a motel room in Port Lincoln. Alas I had no internet access, nor could I find an internt cafe open, so no blogging.
Entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses' the chapter begins with a series of Nietzsche's letters about his migraines, physical suffering, his monastic existence and his attempted cures. The man suffered terribly. He really did understand a therapeutic philosophy concerned with living well inside out.
Klossowsk uses the material to argue against a particular concepion of self: one identified with consciousness that uses the body as an instrument. On this model the body supports the culturally shaped person. Klossowski writes:
"The more he [Nietzsche] listened to his body, the more he came to distrust the person the body supports ... 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 familar milieu he increasingly abhored--is not what he wanted to conserve. He would destroy the person ... and come to conceive of himself in a different manner than he had preciously known." (pp.24-25).
Nietzsche sides with his body. His self is his body. It is a suffering body full of pain.
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