philosophical conversations

Klossowski: a semiotic of impulses#3

In chapter two of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses', Klossowski makes reference to Nietzsche working the Stoic ethical tradition without naming that tradition, or its classical Greek heritage.

Klossowski lists a number of quotations from Nietzsche (pp.33-36) to make his point that beyond the cerebral intellect there lies an intellect that is infinitely more vast than the one that merges with our consciousness.

In the second of these quotes (p.34) Nietzsche says:

"Clear out the inner world! There are still many false beings in it. Sensation and thought are enough for me. The 'will' as a third reality is imaginary. Moreover, all the impluses, desire, repulsion, etc., are not 'unities', but apparent 'simple' states."

We have a reference to a therapy of desire that eases their suffering. This quote from Epicurus expresses this tradition well:

"Empty is the philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of bodies, so too there is no use use in philosophy, unless it too casts out the suffering of the soul."

Philosophy heals suffering caused by false beliefs. It aims to heal the soul in distress.

The Stoics claim (eg., Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus) that the philosophical art of soul-healing, when correctly developed and applied, is necessary to live a flourishing life. Stoic therapy as a self-governance of the soul is based on a radical critique of deeply rooted convention and ordinary belief; the acquisition of virtue through practical reason; seeing the passions as forms of false judgement and belief in that they embody ways of interpreting the world, curing us of the ills caused by the passions, and that the passions should be not just be moderated, but extirpated.

In the last quote that Klossowski lists (p.36), Nietzsche says:

"Our strongest feelings, inasmuch as they are feelings, are only something external, outside us, imagistic: similitudes, that's what they are. And what we habitually call the inner world:alas, for the most part it is poor and deceptive and invented and hollow."

Hence we need philosophical therapy, a self-governance of the soul.

This is only in this way that I can understand what Klossowski is doing in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.

discussions elsewhere

Trevor,
in the light of your remarks in your Spazzing and philosophy post I came across this discussion of Benjamin and Adorno in the comments threads over at The Young Hegelian.

In this discussion about quotes and context someone called Anonymous writes:

"It is tempting to see Adorno's use of constellations as akin to Hegel's remarks on mediation in the Encylopedia logic (sec. 70) in that what both Hegel and Adorno seem to be doing is overcoming the one-sidedness of concepts by placing them in relation to other equally one-sided concepts. The point of this strategy, however, is to aim towards the particular itself (contra Benjamin). "

Anonymous then asks, 'At what point, then, do Hegel and Adorno seem to disagree?' Two differences are then noted:

"(1) For Adorno, Hegel does not "deal with the particular as a particular at all". Instead, "[h]is logic deals only with particularity, which is already conceptual" (ND 326). It is not, therefore, that Hegel sees the universal as above and beyond the particulars which constitute it but that he can't think beyond the "concept" of the particular and, thus, misses what the particular is - something which cannot be wholly conceptualised. Of course, it is ethically and politically important, for Adorno, that we register something which cannot be exhausted by thinking as a corrective to the excesses of enlightenment.

(2) Adorno thinks that, for Hegel, the procedure of determinate negation (by which the Adornian strategy of constructing constellations seems to be a more advanced variant) yields some sort of teleological path towards Truth whereas, for Adorno, it can only suggest or hint at the space for Utopia in the face of the bad. Constellations, therefore, only figure as a means of illuminating the possibility of the good and do not open up some “triumphal march of reason”.

Personally I do not buy the claim that Hegel sees history as the “triumphal march of reason”---that is not how the Phenomenology of Spirit reads-- but we can leave that aside for the moment.

In response the Young Hegelian says that Anonymous characterizes Adorno accurately on particulars and determinate negation. The Young Hegelian then says:

"Personally, I feel Hegel is right. We cannot know, grasp, name or even describe particulars without concepts, without universal terms (thus paras 100-110 of the Phenomenology on ‘sense-certainty’ where Hegel shows consciousness trying to grasp the haeccity of particulars and finding itself having to use the most general universals – ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’, etc.)."

That is my position too. Maybe that is why I'm having such a difficulty with Klossowsk's reading of Nietzsche. Yet I am sympathetic to Adorno's point about concepts not grasping all the richness of particularity. On this issue Anonymous makes a good point:

" One way of looking at the particular, in Adorno, is to identify it with the somatic. I take Adorno to be claiming that Enlightenment’s drive towards universalism, objectivism and instrumentalism damages out ability to respond to or “mimic” the suffering and distress of others. Enlightenment forges concepts into formal and immutable systems – unable to communicate reflexively with the particulars from which they are constructed. An important part of what is lost, or disavowed, in this process is the somatic response to objects (and other people) – which is integral to any understanding of cognition."

I agree. A lot of bodily response to the world we inhabit is not captured by concepts. It is a tacit bodily knowledge --trusting your gut- etc.--that is now generally covered by desire or impulses in Klossowski---but which has its roots in Hegel's Phenomenology. I'm at one with the Young Hegelian on this.

So where does that leave me?

I have to run. Go have a read of the discussion. It is well worth it. I'll come back to Klossowski on Nietzsche in my next post.

As an aside, what I'm trying to do is becoming clearer:undermine the traditional (& French) view that juxtapositions Hegel and Nietzsche as philosophical opposites. I'm trying to find a way to show, that contrary to this traditional view, there is actually considerable overlap between Hegel and Nietzsche.

As an example consider the relationship philosophy and culture. The historicist the idea is that philosophy--contrary to the Cartesian impulse to deny it--emerges out of a culture. At the same time, philosophy reflects on culture. Both Nietzsche and Hegel recognize the need to work out their philosophies within, and in response, to culture.

Heidegger: Building Dwelling#6

Trevor,
good to see you back. No doubt you have been inhabiting your space and taking stock of yourself.

I want to briefly come back to finish the little series on Heidegger on space and dwelling.It is a philosophical pathway out of the metaphysics of Australian materialism; a pathway that leads away from space as point or location to space as place as an indwelling. Place as an indwelling leads to building.

Though Heidegger does not use the word place the idea of space as indwelling can be called place. It is an important pathway as it leads to questioning we construct our buildings to live in. Heidegger takes us to the everyday--that is the significance of his philosophical pathway out of the scientific metaphysics defended by Australian materialists.

I'm picking up from this earlier post. Heidgegger says:

"Even when mortals turn "inward," taking stock of themselves, they do not leave behind their belonging to the fourfold. When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things. Indeed, the loss of rapport with things that occurs in states of depression would be wholly impossible if even such a state were not still what it is as a human state: that is, a staying with things....Man's relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken."

Hence we have the idea of the implaced person. This being 'inplace' or staying with things is dwelling.

What we have is a double movement about the relation between location and space and the relation of man and space. Space is not a point with place a part of space---as Descartes, Locke and Newton had insisted. On the contrary, space is a part of place belonging to its history and is implicit in it. Our relationship to place is to go through and stand in them, which we do by staying with things.

This enables us to make some sense of our experience of walking around the Bluff or the beaches with the dogs on the weekends. We experience our movement through this space of the landscape all around by staying constantly with near and remote things--this particular beach over there, this scrub here.

Thinking about this double movement throws a light falls on the nature of the things that are locations and that we call buildings. This is the significance of this pathway: it leads to us re-looking at architectural form from the perspective of dwelling.

Heidegger says that genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence:

"....genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence. Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell."

Once we have understood the nature of dwelling, then we have to learn how to dwell and how buildings can give form to dwelling.

"Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell....As soon as we try to think of the nature of constructive building in terms of a letting-dwell, we come to know more clearly what that process of making consists in by which building is accomplished....The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."

Heidegger has a conservative---pre-modernist--understanding of this as the example he gives of a building that gives form to dwelling is a 200 year farmhouse in the Black Forest:

"Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the "tree of the dead"-for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum-and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse."

The equivalent for us in Adelaide would be a 120 year old cottage in the city.

Heidegger is often taken to be 9interepreted as) suggesting that we should return to these old nineteenth century architectural forms, and reject the straight lines, right angles, and grids of modernism, if we are to have a genuine building that lets us dwell. He explicitly rejects this interpretation:

"Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build."

I would concur with this going back. My 1890s cottage is a dark cave. Dwelling spaces demand openness, lightness, not the severe and hard boundaries of dark caves. Was middle class suburbia a form of building that let us dwell?

My suggestion over at junk for code is the beach architecture such as this. However, we do need to think about architectural form differently to what modernism has bequeathed to us.

Heidegger concludes the essay by saying that the real dwelling plight is not the inappropriate architectual form--or its lack; rather

"...the real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling."

We have forgotten how to dwell.

Maybe that is not the case with our beach shacks? It is there that we are learning to dwell? We are thinking about dwelling there, but not in the inner city where all the new apartments are being built for people returning to live in the inner city.

start previous.

Spazzing and Philosophy

Gary,

as you know, I’ve been quiet for awhile, with one thing and another. Incidentally, when it is only you who is doing the writing the number of hits goes up. Interesting. Any ideas? But in any case I’ve been reading all your stuff on Klossowski, which has been really good, and I have a few comments.

The identity of the self depends on the history of the constantly modified body, which has a certain functional cohesion. But the identity of the social person called Nietzsche doesn’t just depend on the history of his body. Nietzsche is a certain functional cohesion. This particular functional cohesion, for some unspecified reason, comes to focus on that which is beyond the self, and its efforts are to liberate that which is beyond from functional constraint. Eventually, Nietzsche achieves his aim.

This idea of liberation is the focus of Lars Von Trier’s film The Idiots. Following Nietzsche, Trier’s thesis is that suffering is a prerequisite to final idiocy, ‘spazzing’, as they call it in the film (this is from memory, mind you). Only the woman who has lost everything can truly spaz.

There is also something of this idea in Kafka’s contention that there is no hope for us but there is an infinite amount of hope for the bunglers and the fools who live on at the margins, on the trash heaps, but are not really a part of this mess. For Kafka, there is no hope for any selves.

I don’t know what Klossowski thinks but the need to understand ourselves as agents that concerns you, Gary, is from my perspective an historical curse. I’m with Shakespeare here. Prospero marshals the forces of nature to overcome the social ill but then surrenders his power over those forces. Agency is of no value in itself.

I think Deleuze’s position, as you describe it, is oxymoronic. We cannot go beyond conceptual reason conceptually, certainly not by some kind of conceptual creation. Prospero uses concepts negatively, to assemble the forces of nature in order to bring an end to the rule of the concept.

Here is a difference between Deleuze and Adorno: the former sees philosophy as about creating concepts, the latter sees it as about getting rid of them. From Nietzsche And Philosophy, Deleuze has explicitly tried to practise philosophy non-dialectically, but it is only through dialectics that the concept can be overcome. This doesn’t end in an identity thesis, in dialectics being the new myth, the last and final universal concept, because for Adorno in the end dialectics itself must be overcome.

As Prospero learnt, without dialectics there is no agency. But when agency has achieved its task we must surrender the powers of agency. We have to know when to spaz. It’s not an intellectual achievement – Trier points that out. How must the human suffer to have such need of being a fool! said Nietzsche. Suffering and dialectics go together.

shuffling towards deleuze

I have been struggling with Klossowski. I accept that the identity of the self depends on the history of the constantly modified body, which has a certain functional cohesion. That is better than locating the self in consciousness.

What I have difficulty with is the confrontation between this understanding the body and the social person who is the thinking Nietzsche. What we have here is the body liberating itself step by step from its own agent (the individuated subject that bestows unity on the chaos of the bodily impulses.) It is as if there is a civil war going on within Nietzsche, which leads to Nietzsche re-creating himself as another kind of being.

But I'm not sure.

Do the violent impluses within our biological body break down both our social identity as individuals, and our understanding of ourselves as agents in the world? How can we understand this?

Here are two suggestions:

Hans Bellmer, The Rape of Europe, copper etching 1967.

The body is a chaos of impulses of sexual desire, and it satisfies these desires by tossing away conventions and morality.

The other suggestion is that what Klossowski is doing with his interpretation of Nietzsche in his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be filled out by bringing in Deleuze and Guattari's 1990's text, What is Philosophy.

That text is concerned with lines of flight or openings that allow thinking to escape from those institutional and cultural constraints that seek to define and enclose it. This points to philosophy as a kind of conceptual creation.

That means a line of flight away for the recieved philosophical tradition --the French Hegel for Deleuze and Australian materialism for us in Australia. That has to be done if philosophy is to be "the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts."

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari go on to say that:

"More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts . .... Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator's signature. Nietzsche laid down the task of philosophy when he wrote, "[Philosophy] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, not merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing. Hitherto one has generally trusted one's concepts as if they were a beautiful dowry from some sort of wonderland", but trust must be replaced by distrust, and philosophers must distrust most those concepts they did not create themselves."

What this Nietzschean line of thinking means is that we will nothing through concepts unless we have first created them. Hence the emphasis is on making something.

Let us grant this conception of philosophy. We then come back to the body as chaotic and conflicting impulses or desires:

Hans Bellmer

With Bellmer we have entered a world in which sexual desire is aroused by little girls at play. Since the obsessional sexual desire for young girls is taboo, so we have a chaos of conflicting impulses in the body.

Bellmer's work represents, or gives expression, to these obsessional desires. Presumably Nietzsche does something similar with philosophy. He creates concepts from the impulses of pain and suffering in his body.

Are we getting somewhere?

Klossowski: a semiotic of impulses#2

In his chapter two of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses', Klossowski operates with an individualist conception of the person. History, culture and society have dropped into the background and appear to be forgotten.

It is a similar world to the one Bataille inhabited in his On Nietzsche, but the interpretation of Nietzsche is far more rigorously thought through. This world is one in which there is a conflict between historical culture, the impulses of the individual body and the intensities of inner experience.

The focus of this chapter is on the struggle within the individual between bodily impulses and consciousness. Klossowski says:

"The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deciphered by consciousness. Consciousness itself constitutes this code of signs that inverts, falsifies and filters what is expressed through the body. Consciousnesss is itself nothing other than a deciphering of the messages transmitted by the impulses."

The implication here is that everything is internal to the individual including language. Language does not appear to be social. Nor does the body. We appear to be talking about a biological organism. Language--a code of signs-- is within consciousness.

However, Klossowsk denies that Nietzsche operates with a purely physiological conception of life. But I see no argument for this so far.

Klossowski then goes on to conceptualize the body as a product of a flux of conflicting forces:

"The body is a product of chance; it is nothing but the locus where a group of individuated impluses confront each other so as to produce this interval that constitutes a human life, impluses whose sole ambition is to de-individuate themselves. What is born from chance association of impluses is not only the individual they constitute at the whim of circumstance, but also the eminently deceptive principle of a cerebral activity that progressively disengages itself from sleep."

So far we still have a physiological conception of human live, albeit one that does away with an internal teleology of growth as realizing an end. But what is retained is dialectical conception of the conflict of impluses (or desires.)

Hegel is retained. Aristotle is dumped. What this gives us is the body as a product of the conflicting impluses.

Klossowski says that Nietzsche is no longer concerned:

"...with the body as a property of the self, but with the body as as the locus of impluses, the locus of their confrontation. Since it is a product of the impulses, the body becomes fortuitous; it is neither irreversible nor reversible, because its only history is that of impulses. These impulses come and go, and the circular movement they describe is made manifest as much as in moods as in thought, as much in the tonalities of the soul as in corporeal depressions---which are moral only insofar as the declarations and judgements of the self re-create in language a property that is in itself inconsistent and hence empty."

The tonalites of the soul--note how that theological category is just slipped in unannounced.

The prejudice against ethics is also evident. Ethics is reduced to empty morality of language. What is missing is an ethics of a healthy organism being better than an unhealthy one. Is this what we get?

Ward Boult, Star LA, 2004

Are we working towards a Dionysian semiotic in which bodily impulses break through conventional forms of thought; a semiotic in which obsessional impulses generate phantasms and simulacra. These phantasms and simulacra reinscribe received ideas and produce new modes of seeing and living.

Does that mean a world of dom and slave in a dungeon: a new mode of seeing and living where we hear the naked slave react to the Mistress's whip or cane or riding crop or neck-lock or whatever suits the fancy of the sexy Mistress at that moment?

Klossowski: a semiotic of impulses

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.

Klossowski: Drawings

While I struggle through chapter two Klossowski's Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle--I presume the circle refers to the eternal return---others can look at one of Klossowsk's drawings: an overtly theatrical tableaux vivant.

Pierre Klossowski, Robert and Gulliver (ca. 1978).

I'm sure the drawings and Nietzsche are linked----the meeting of the erotic and the sacred?

Klossowski on Nietzsche: Combat against culture#3

As we have seen in the earlier discussion of the first chapter of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled 'The Combat against Culture' Klossowski has argued that Nietzsche puts Christian culture into question and attacks Hegel's master/slave dialectic at its roots.

So Nietzsche rebelled.

Then I get lost. We have a long paragraph about the reproduction of the world of affects (emotion?) through art produced through a servile consciousness that leads to a guilty culture. Klossowski says:

"Nietzsche will remain in within this perspective of a guilty culture up to the time he puts consciousness and its categories in question----in the name of the world of affects.Until then, there will always be 'carriers of the general guilt' of a culture that mask the antinomies of bourgeois morality."

The emphasis appears to be on the individual's emotions (Nietzsche's) as a way of rebelling. And there the chaper more or less ends ends. It points to the forces within Nietzsche: a typology of forces, or the dyadic forces of Master and Slave, or manic side countered by his depressive side? It does appear to point to a reading centred on Nietzsche's psychic states one structured on Nietzsche's struggle with his own descent into madness.

The chapter reads more like a stand alone essay than a chapter in a book. There is a particular reading being developed here: one that wants to show how strange, unique, and disorienting Nietzsche's thought can be?

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Heidegger: Building Dwelling#5

So how does Heidegger answer the following question: what is the relation between man and space? He says:

"When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space; for when I say "a man," and in saying this word think of a being who exists in a human manner-that is, who dwells-then by the name "man" I already name the stay within the fourfold among things. Even when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind-as the textbooks have it-so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things."

Heidegger offers an alternative way of considering our relationship to space that implies, but does not, expressly state embodiment:

"Spaces, and with them space as such-"space"-are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it."

So we have a staying near things as an encapsulated body; a staying near in the sense of being absorbed in, or residing there. There is somewhere particular: this particular room.

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Klossowski on Nietzsche: Combat against culture#2

As we have seen in the earlier discussion of the first chapter of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled 'The Combat against Culture' Klossowski has argued that Nietzsche had put culture into question.

He now goes on to argue that culture implies slavery in the sense that it is the product of slavery. This both looks back to classical Greek culture and to Hegel's master slave dialectic. Klossowski picks up on Hegel as mediated by Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Kossowski says:

"Culture is the product of the Slave; and 'having produced culture, he is now its conscious Master---this is what Hegel demonstrated. Nietzsche is the incorrigible beneficiary of this culture. But for Nietzschethe salcve who has become the master of culture is nothing other than ---Christian morality."

Klossowski then goes on to say that Nietzsche attacks Hegel's dialectic at its roots:

"In his analysis of the unhappy consciousness Hegel distorts the 'initial Desire (the will to power): the autonomous consciousness (of the Master)despairs of ever having its autonomy recognized by another autonomous being; since it is necessarily constituted by a dependent consciousness ---that of the Slave. In Nietzsche, there is no need for this reciprocity...on the contrary, given his own idiosyncracy--the sovereingty of the incommunicable emotion ---the very idea of a 'consciousness for itself mediated by another consciousness' remains foreign to Nietzsche."

I remain with Hegel on this. Mediation is the pathway out of individualism and the pathway to becoming.French culture makes the shift to becoming but it has a tendency to remain within ensconced individualism.

Personally I think that Klossowski exaggerates the way Nietzsche broke from Hegel's dialectic. He reworks it more than breaks away since the historical account of morality in his The Genealogy of Morals is very dialectical and works within the historical conception of culture mapped out in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Moreover Nietzsche's metaphsyics of a world of forces in The Will to Power is a dialectical process account.

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Heidegger: Building, Dwelling#4

Just after the example of the bridge in Building Dwelling Thinking essay Heidegger remarks:

"Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows a site for the fourfold. By this site are determined the localities and ways by which a space is provided for."

That is a dense passage. What is being referred to is not something pre-existing-- a position-- but arises with the bridge that is regarded as a thing.

Heidegger then adds:

"Things which, as locations, allow a site we now in anticipation call buildings. They are so called because they are made by a process of building construction. Of what sort this making-building-must be, however, we find out only after we have first given thought to the nature of those things which of themselves require building as the process by which they are made."

Heidegger then goes on to ask some useful questions:

"For one thing, what is the relation between location and space? For another, what is the relation between man and space? The bridge is a location. As such a thing, it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted. The space allowed by the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge. These places, however, may be treated as mere positions between which there lies a measurable distance.."

In a space that is represented purely as mere position the bridge appears as a mere something at some position, which can be occupied at any time by something else or replaced by a mere marker. In architectural language it is a site.

I presume that what Heidegger is doing here is arguing against the idea of space in modern mathematical physics which accords primacy to position. That means little by way of the concrete particularity of place. Is Heidegger edging his way back to residing in a place?

What we do have is a shift from a mere spot, position or simple location into a fully fledged location. That fully fledged location is also a gathering of the fourfold to reside in the bridge.

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Klossowski on Nietzsche: combat against culture

Chapter One of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is called 'The Combat against Culture.' It opens with some questions:

"Is the 'philosopher' still possible today....What does a philosophical existence mean for us today? Isn't it always a way of withdrawing? A kind of evasion?...What then does the behaviour of the philosopher amount to? Is he a mere spectator of events, at once lucid and impotent."

Klossowski answers these in relation to Nietzsche. He says that Nietzsche rejected the attitude of the philosopher-teacher:

"He made fun of himself for not being a philosopher---if by that we mean a thinker who thinks and teaches out of a concern for the human condition...What Nietzsche meant to say through his own rejection of the system was that if philosophy merely concerns itself with a transmission of 'problems', it will never get beyond the general interpretation of a particular social state of its own 'culture'".

Many would consider the school of analytic philosophy to be a living example of that.

Niezsche's alternative conception was to combat culture from the perspective of its relation to life and to what is sick and healthy. This leads to an agonistic conception that identifies who is the adversary or enemy to be destroyed. This was the culture of liberal capitalism and it involved deploying the Stoic techniques of self mastery to free onself from the sickness of this culture.

P. Klossowski: Drawings#2

Another drawing by Pierre Klossowski

P.Klossowski, Scene with the young Ogier and the Commander of St. Vit, 1982

Klossowski: drawings

Although Klossowski is known as a writer, translator novelist and essayist, he is also a visual artist who produced a number of erotic drawings.

PP. Klossowski, La Tour de la Meditation, 1972, Coloured pencil on paper .

A number of drawings depict Klossowski's literary characters in enigmatic erotic situations, or clergymen fondling adolescent boys.

Pierre Klossowski , Rocking Chair, 1982

These were much admired by French intellectuals.

Nietzsche, Bataille & Klossowski

Gary,

I have been out of circulation with one thing and another, but I have been keeping an eye on your entries and I noticed that you are looking at Klossowski’s book on Nietzsche at the moment. You say that you are having trouble working out what is going on. I’ve got a few ideas, for what they are worth.

Klossowski uses Nietzsche’s works physiognomically, that is, he reads the person from his literary face. This is the opposite of a psychoanalytic reading.

What Klossowski identifies are Nietzsche’s phantasms. What are these? Phantasms are instinctual obsessions. They lie within our most impenetrable depths and are inaccessible in themselves. They are manifest through their simulations, which are never more than an interpretation or expression of a phantasm. Through Nietzsche’s simulacra, Klossowski identifies two obsessions, which are polar opposites: an obsession with dissolution and an obsession with communication (pedagogy). He concentrates largely on the first of the poles.

If this reflects some sort of a Bataillean theme, it is that Nietzsche’s goal was dissolution – he is an example, an instance of the general concern motivating the school (I’m using this last term loosely). From this perspective, Klossowski’s book is not unlike Bataille’s book on Gilles de Ray. I don’t think it has much in common with Bataille’s On Nietzsche. That has to be seen as the third volume of a trilogy called Summa Atheologica. I don’t think I would be doing it too much of an injustice to call this work a kind of post-religious mysticism. Bataille himself is happy with the idea. But Klossowski’s book is certainly nothing like that.

Nietzsche: Klossowski#3

My struggle with Klossowski's idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche can be put down to the poverty of an education in philosophy within an Anglo-American philosophical culture. That meant reading continental philosophers on one's own. So there are huge gaps. This post at Spurious describes the problem:

"....we are too busy trying to educate ourselves – those of us who made the difficult transition in Continental philosophy after an undergraduate degree where we never heard the names Aquinas or Hegel, Scotus or Schelling, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, Bachelard or Husserl, Heidegger or Adorno, Foucault or Deleuze, Sartre or Arendt and barely studied Plato or Aristotle."

It is a huge transition. I constantly struggle with trying to compensate for the education I feel we lacked. Sometimes it is best to forget that history and just get on with reading.

Back to Klossowski.

In his Introduction to Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle Klossowski says that there are two hitherto points in reading Nietzsche that have been overlooked. Klossowsk says veiled, if not passed over in silence.

The first point is that as:

"...Nietzsche's thought unfolded, it abandoned the strictly realm in order to adopt if not simulate, the preliminary elements of a conspiracy. It therefore made our own era the object of a tacit accusation. It thereby made our era the object a tacit accusation....a Nietzschen conspiracy ...is not that of a class but that of an isolated individual (like Sade), who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole."

Well I've always read Nietzsche that way. I would have hardly called it a conspiracy. It is more like a conservative critique of modernity from the perspective of a conception of philosophers as physicians of culture. With Nietzsche this took the form of a critique of morality.

Klossowski's second point is that:

"...because Nietzsche's thought mediated on a lived experience to the point where it became inverted into a systematic premediation, prey to an interpretative delirium that seemed to diminish the 'responsibility of the individual', there is a tendency to grant it, as it were , 'extenuating circumstances' ...For what do we want to extenuate? The fact that his thought revolved around delirium as its axis."

That is the bit I have all the trouble with. Nietzsche may have collapsed into madness, but his writing and thinking did not revolve around madness. To me it suggests a pushing beyond reason into non-reason. Trevor is more comfortable with this way of reading Nietzsche than I am.

I see it is a literary informed reading that pushes language to its limit or its own "outside." This outside of language is made up of affects and precepts that are not linguistic. So we have the world of delirium (the process of life?) that gestures to a silence when this delirium becomes a clinical state. It is a reading from within aesthetics and concerned with the movement of forces that produce emotion and sensation. It is one that places an emphasis on Dionysian energies

I've always read Nietzsche as working within, and reshaping the classic Stoic ethical tradition. This practical ethical tradition defined pity as a negative emotion, valued self-mastery and virtue, and was concerned to use philosophy to alleviate human suffering. In this tradition philosophy is a way of life.

With Klossowski we are working on the borderline of philosophy and literature. But back to Klossowski's interpretation.

Klossowski goes on to spell out what he means. He says that:

"... lucid thought, delirium and conspiracy form an indissoluble whole in Nietzsche---and indissolubility that would become the criterion for discerning what is of consequence or not. this does not mean that, since it involved delirium, Nietzsche's thought was 'pathological'; rather , because his thought was lucid to the extreme, it took on the appearance of a delirious interpretation--and also required the entire experimental initiative of the modern world."

That is pretty accurate. I'm quite comfortable with Nietzsche's writing having the appearance of a delirious interpretation.

So far so good.

Heidegger: Building Dwelling#3

I'm really struggling with Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche and I have very little idea of what is going on. Al the references are to Nietzsche's collected works in German, so I cannot follow them up and orientate myself withe texts that I know. It is like reading Bataille on Nietzsche: I'm all at sea. without a compass.

So I am going to go back and reconnect with Heidegger's building dwelling essay. Most of the architecture in Adelaide where I live is marked by the poverty of an architectural practice that is dominated by the technology of buiilders and the calculative instrumental thinking of the developers. It is all about dollars, junk buildings and slick marketing. It has little to do with dwelling at all and more to do with pragmatic shelter (engineering and technology) overlaid with an aestheticization of shelter that is identical to fashion and the dictates of consumerism.

Hence my turn to Heidegger. He asks:

"In what way does building belong to dwelling? The answer to this question will clarify for us what building, understood by way of the nature of dwelling, really is. We limit ourselves to building in the sense of constructing things and inquire: what is a built thing? A bridge may serve as an example for our reflections."

This is what he says about the bridge:

"The bridge swings over the stream with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream's bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream's waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky's floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky's weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.

The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants their way to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore."

What then is the significance of this?

next previous start

Nietzsche: Klossowski's reading#2

As I've mentioned I have had difficulties in engaging with the French tradition's reading of Nietzsche. My ambivalence is the way that it has been too centred around Nietzsche's madness.

My gut reaction is that it too centred on a (loose) psychoanalytic approach and on Nietzsche's own psychological struggles and has, as a result, downplayed Nietzsche the philosopher engaging with the philosophical tradition and academic philosophical scholarship. I am far more comfortable with Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as a metaphyscian engaged with the problematics of nihilism.

With that said we can push on. In the Preface to his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle Klossowski makes the following insightful remark:

"Because we are reading Nietzsche's texts directly, because we are listening to him speak, can we perhaps make him speak to 'us? Can we ourselves make use of the whisperings, the breathings, the bursts of anger and laughter .... Nietzsche was interroging the near and distant future, a future that has become our everyday reality---and he predicted that this future would be convulsive, to the point where our own convulsions are caricatures of his thought. We will try to comprehend how and in what sense Nietzsche's interrogation describes what we are now living through."

I'm entirely comfortable with that way of reading Nietzsche's texts. It is a way that these texts should be read since these texts are on reflection on lived experience.

Nietzsche: Klossowski's reading

I've finally got my hands on a copy of Pierre Klossowski's 1969 book on Nietzsche---Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. It has been long regarded as an influential text in the late 20th century French understanding of Nietzsche.

This highly original reading of Nietzsche provides one way to understand the French Nietzsche tradition; a pathway that has its roots in Bataille's On Nietzsche.

I have to admit that I have difficulty in coming to grips with the French Nietzsche tradition: I keep on bouncing out of it. I find it very difficult to connect to my own reading of Nietzsche based on nihilism and the revaluation of all values.

You can find Daniel Smith's translator's preface here; some background on Klossowski here adn a review of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle here.

Heidegger: building dwelling#2

Heidegger's approach to an understanding of dwelling is through language. He says:

"It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."

So what does language say?

"But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things:
1. Building is really dwelling.
2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the buildingthat cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.

If we give thought to this threefold fact, we obtain a clue and note the following: as long as we do not bear in mind that all building is in itself a dwelling, we cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the building of buildings might be in its nature. We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers."

Heidegger: Dwelling, building etc

Many eco-philosphers do not move beyond a concern with eco-rationality and the extension of ethics the non-human world. But if we are to find counter-practices to a technological mode of being then how do we live differently?If dwelling implies building, then what sort of building would allow us to dwelling poetically?

The answer often given in Adelaide is water and energy efficiency. Our houses, apartments and office buildings need to become far more efficient in te way we use energy and water to run them. Most of our buildings are very energy and water inefficient, and the finger is often pointed at architects. Surely it is up to them to design buildings that enable dwelling?

Is energy and water efficient buildings a pathway to dwelling?

One way of exploring this is to turn to Heidegger's late essay Building Dwelling Thinking contained in Poetry, Language, Thought. Heidegger opens the essay with a powerfulpassage:

"We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means."

To reside means to dwell in a place.

ecological rationality

My understanding is that the current environmental cris is not just a crisis of free market capitalism. It is also a crisis of reason, of an instrumental rationality: something is considered rational if the best or most efficient means are to achieve the desired ends.

The desired ends for economic rationality in a liberal capitalist society are those of wealth creation; for political rationality it is power. This results in the destruction of life on earth.

What is blocked by this mode of rationality is the re-situating human beings in ecological terms, as embodied ecological beings dependent on nature, and recasting the non-human world in ethical terms. This is what we would call ecological rationality.

Heidegger: ecopoetics

Kate Rigby (p.12) argues that there are two limitations to Heidegger's conception of an eco-poetics as dwelling. Both flow from his conception of language is the house of being.

The first is that it denies language to the non-human world (like Descartes) thereby claiming signification purely for the human world. This renders the non-human world effectively silent. A silent non-human world is effectively a dead world; a world where the biodiversity has gone.

Rigby's second limitation of Heidegger''s over-evaluation of the poetic world states that there is an obliteration of difference between earth and world since the earth is disclosed in language. is there not something about at the time, season and atmosphere of place that is not sayable, not expressed by poetry?

Both lines of criticism are limitations because they indicate human hubris.

This article interprets the Heidegger of Being and Time as a culturalist. That means the world explored in that text consists of human language, cultural and human existence. Non-human entities, such as ecological beings, are considered as equipment, or use objects for human beings in their practices.

I concur with this interpretation. There is no ecological awareness in Being and Time. You would never know from reading this text that the human world depended upon the ecological processes for its being.

It is this culturalism that is put into question in the late essay, A Question Concerning Technology, which is a critique of modernity from the perspective of the domination of nature. This--ie economics---enframes objects and human beings as standing reserve, resources, or raw material. In that text it is poesis which counters the technological mode of being by bring forth things and allowing them them to be. Poesis is not simple a turn to poetics or to th aesthetic as with Adorno. It also refers to praxis, and to a way of life based on knowing how to dwell.

Dwelling is to create and care for a place of habitation that would allow the river to flow.

romantic poetics

Poetry in a hi-tech world, is where we gather to hear stories about the plight of the earth, needing to live differently and possibly redeeming the past? Is that what poets are for in these dark times?

Can poetics counter the technological domination of the earth with an ethos of care?

It is an enticing possibility. Poetry can help us to counter the assumption that the rest of nature exists solely for human benefit and help us render our technologies and practices more compatible with life.

However, concern that our life support systems are increasingly under stress has never really figured all that much in literary criticism or cultural studies. They have forgotten about the earth. They have been concerned with culture at the expense of nature. Cultural studies has insistently reminded us that culture is the prism through which we view nature, to the point wher it has forgotten that it is not culture (language) that has a hole in the ozone.

Can we re-read the European romantics and their poetics of place from this perspective?

I presume that is what Heidegger did.