November 8, 2004
In earlier posts on the second chapter of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses', I've mentioned how out of sorts I am with his interpretation of Nietzsche. I've drawn attention to his biographical approach, the dualism of bodily impulses versus the everyday coded consciousness, and the wilful ignoring of the process of evaulation.
Let's face it, I'm not a sympathetic reader of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I am much more at home with Heidegger's interpretation, and I find reading the rest of the book an intellectual chore which I keep on putting off.
Here is a sympathetic reader----Joanne Faulkner from La Trobe University Melbourne. Her interpretation of Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche makes much more sense of Klossowski's than I have done, or could do. Joanne's reading emphases the relationship between language and its fabrication of the body, highlights the importance of Nietzsche as a philosopher of the body, and the way that Nietzsche places his life at risk for the sake of his experimentation with his writings, and the significance of Nietzsche's sick body for the doctrine of eternal recurrence.
Towards the end of chapter 2 Klossowski writes:
"We cannot renounce language, nor our intentions, nor our willing; but we could evaluate this willing and these intentions in a different manner than we have hitherto evaluated them---namely, as subject to the 'law' of the vicious Circle.
Joanne allows us to make sense of passages such as these with her insight that "the body invents language in order to deceive us about itself." I never saw this.
I understood that language and bodily impulse were in opposition and I had understood that willing and intention were linguistic fictions of the everyday codes of language that shaped consciousness. I thought that it was language deceiving us because it did not, nor could, grasp the chaotic warring bodily impulses.
Nor did I give much attention to the significance of Nietzsche's sick body for his philosophy. I understood that his need to maintain cheerfulness in the midst of sickness, wounds that needed to heal, convalesence and his thinking of growing strong through a revaluation of values and the sounding out of idols. I had interpreted this along the lines of Nietzsche working in the tradition of the classical Greek's medical conception of philosophy as a healing of what makes us sick.
But I couldn't really connect with Klossowski's insights into the way that Nietzsche's experience of his sick body linked to his understanding of his organic metaphysics. Joanne highlights this aspect of Kossowski's interpretation: through his sickness Nietzsche observes his body at war with itself and break down into its component parts. As his body broke down so did Nietzsche's consciousness and personality (sense of self) shaped by culture and society. Nietzsche sides with his body.
Joanne also highlights Klossowski's understanding of the way that Nietzsche connected his sickness and philosophy: sickness leads to a convalesence where the body husbands its energies and creates conditions for change and growth. Presumably this leads to will to power.
The limitations of Klossowski's approach remain--the literary institution's indifference to the philosophical tradition. So Nietzsche's engagement with a Darwinian and physicalist metaphysics is ignored. Yet Nietzsche engaged with these traditions as well as the experience of his sick body.
Still, with Joanne's text to converse with I can start reading chapter 3 of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
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Perhaps I should tell Jo that she is being discussed here:))