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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Klossowski and Psychoanalysis?; Plug for my radio archive « Previous | |Next »
December 9, 2004

Hi Gary and Trevor,

I've been occasionally checking the blog, but am very busy at the moment trying to finish off a chapter... there have been a number of things coming up in discussion, though, to which I know I should respond (need to respond), for the benefit of my own research. It's funny that Klossowski keeps coming up because I'm trying to keep away from all that at the moment and concentrate on other things (was it me it began the discussion on Klossowski, or Gary? Perhaps I'm experiencing a return of the repressed here). Anyway, I digress...

It is highly likely that I am over-estimating the influence of psychoanalysis on Klossowski's work. What Trevor said the other day about Klossowski's concern being "to overcome individuality" through the eternal return is perfectly correct. I suppose that what interests me is the relation that Klossowski draws between the eternal return, the dissolution of identity, and what he calls Nietzsche's "valetudinary states." His argument is not that Nietzsche's sickness (acute bouts of migraine, dispepsia, vomitting) gave rise to his philosophy, but rather that a certain attitude toward his sickness—i.e. taking his sick body as an object of study—gave rise to a particular perspective on the formation of the individual, and perhaps a program within Nietzsche's philosophy of destabilizing such individuality.

At different points of the text (perhaps more towards the end, from memory, but there are scattered references before chapter five), Klossowski talks about impulses, phantasms, simulacra, and the code of everyday signs, each of which bears a different relation to the body/ipseity/idiosyncracy, at one end of the scale, and language/community/cohesion at the other. This is where I would impose the unconscious/ conscious schema, but we would need here to be careful not to import too many assumptions from psychoanalysis. I would think more along the lines of Nietzsche's use of these terms (I think this is fairly safe, given that the text deals with Nietzsche's work). For Nietzsche, the conscious lays down the foundations upon which language is built. He writes in The Gay Science:

Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own conscousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a "must" that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed to "know" himself what distressed him, he needed to "know" how he felt, he needed to "know" what he thought. For, to say it once more: Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness (§354, pp. 298 - 9. Emphasis in original)

Consciousness is therefore a mean (i.e. average) way of thinking: of summarising unconscious thoughts into signs, so that they can be understood by any other person, and there is much lost in this process. The problem, as I see it, for both Klossowski and Nietzsche, is how to write in such a way as to provide an access to unconscious thought, or the thinking-body. The eternal return provides that access, according to Klossowski, because it is what he calls a phantasm, which is "produced at the limit-point where [the] impulse [i.e. the most unconscious aspect of the body] is turned into a thought (of this impulse as a repulsion against the adulterous coherence" (Vicious Circle, 260). This is fairly enigmatic, but my understanding is that the phantasm is an impulse once it attempts to objectivate itself, but which resists being appropriated to species being, or common language. The eternal return is a phantasm because it is a near obsessional image that Nietzsche produces in his writing, but which is never quite dealt with, i.e. it never exhausts itself, but conceals, as much as reveals, its meaning. The eternal return thus transmits its meaning only unconsciously, to those in whom it can produce a similar intensity of feeling, or mood, as Nietzsche did in creating it. This intensity is the feeling of dissolution, or the transgression of individuality.

I haven't thought about all this much in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. There is someone who attempts to do this, Louis Armand... this is something that I suppose I should think about.

To change the subject rather abruptly, the philosophy postgraduates at La Trobe University (my home) have been anchoring a philosophy radio program this year. We've just hung up the microphone for 2004, but will resume early next year. However, previous programs are now accessible, in mp3 format, via our website. There are a few programs there that might interest you chaps.

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