It is a very hot day in Adelaide and I'm struggling with reading Klossowski chapter on Nietzsche and eternal return in his book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.

I've though about this material off and on. I've decided the best way to approach this is to personalize it, as it is all about the unconscious processes of subjectivity. From what I can gather Klossowski appears to be about the chaotic, fluctuating impulses rising and falling inside me, and about the way these impulses then turn back on themselves, repeat themselves, and imitiate themselves.

Klossowski writes:

"Intensity is subject to a moving chaos without beginning or end." (p.62)

Okay, I can understand this. Whilst flying to Melbourne my subjectivity was full of emotional intensities arising from my experience of living in a destructive personal relationship, which I am seeking to find my out off. These intense feelings --eg., the pain of being emotionally hurt--are repetitious, dividing; and they join up with previous traces of similar emotional states. I have been here many times before.

But my effort is to understand these experiences, to make sense of them, so that I can extract myself from the destructive emotional cycle. That rise and fall that of intense painful impluses has a momentum of its own; one I find so debilitating and exhausting. I can accept the imagery of waves of intense emotion rolling through my subjectivity (or psyche) and a remembering of these emotional states and then a forgetting of them.

Klossowski contrasts this unconscious inside the psyche with an outside--to the sign of self in trhe code of everyday communication--eg., Gary in the everyday work context doing the soft shoe political shuffle with others in Canberra and Melbourne. Kkossowski writes:

"Up to now, in the everyday context, thought was always referred back to the designation 'myself'. But what becomes of my coherence at the degree of intensity where thought ceases to refer back to me in the designation 'myself', and instead invents a sign by which it would designate its own coherence with itself."

The sign is 'wounded, suffering', disconnected from the everyday context , and adrift on a stormy sea of turbulent intense emotion.

Klossowski say it is here that the image of Circle is formed. My thought enter in such strict coherence with this sign of the circle that it takes on the power of all thought. Klossowski says:

"There is nothing here to distinquish the designating intensity from the designated intensity, to re-establish the coherence between the self and world, as constituted by everyday designations. A single circuit brings me back to the code of everyday signs, and then makes me depart, again leaving me at the mercy of the sign, as soon as I try to explain to myself the event it represents." (p. 64)

Well, the only I can understand this is the intense ache of emotional pain that rises up from the unconscious after a fight, and which then overwhelms me.

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