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October 11, 2004
I want to return to a previous post and pick up where I had left off. That was chapter two of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which is entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses'. In this chapter Klossowski is interpreting Bk 3 of Nietzsche's The Will to Power text, called 'Principles of a New Evaluation.'
In the previous post we were exploring how Klossowski understood consciousness and unconsciousness and the way they inter-relate.
We had got to a philosophy of bodies flows events with a flickering memory that is maintained by the designations of the everyday codes. Klossowski had argued that these codes intervene in accordance with changing impulses, and they impose their own linkages upon these chaotic bodily impulses.
Consciousness is structured by the codes of everyday life. Klossowski says:
"Even when we are alone, silent, speaking internally to ourselves, it is still the outside that is speaking to us...Even our innermost recesses, even our so-called inner life, is still the residue of signs instituted from the outside under the pretext of signifying us in an 'objective' and 'impartial' manner---a residue that no doubt takes on the configuration of the impulsive movement characteristic of each person, and follows the contours of our ways of reacting to this invasion of signs, which we have not invented ourselves." (p.39)
If that is consciousness, what then is the unconscious?
Klossowski says that we cannot look for it in our dreams, since everything on the other side of the waking state is the same system of signs put to a different use. We cover ourselves with a blanket called understanding, culture, morality that are based on the code of everyday signs.
So what lies beneath this cover in the unintelligible depths of bodily impulses? Klossowski says it is nothingness, or what Nietzsche calls chaos. We are only a succession of discontinuous states in relation to the code of everyday signs, and about which the fixity of language deceives us. Our unity depends on this code even though we live discontinuously. So 'meaning' and 'goal' are mere fictions, as are the 'ego', 'identity', 'duration' and 'willing'. Nietzsche, says Klossowski, denounces the view that consciousness has an aim as an erroneous one. It is a false perspective.
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