Pierre Klossowski > Quotes

“There are many more languages than we think: and man betrays himself more often than he desires. How things speak! - but there are very few listeners, so that man can only, as it were, chatter on in the void when he pours out his confessions: he squanders his ‘truths’, as the sun does its light. - Isn’t it rather a pity that the void has no ears?”
― Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

“The landscape of Turin, the monumental squares, the promenades along the Po river, were bathed in a kind of 'Claude Lorraine' luminosity (Dostoyevsky's golden age), a diaphonousness that removed the weight of things and made them recede into a infinite distance. The stream of light here became a stream of laughter - the laughter from which truth emerges, the laughter in which identities explode, including Nietzsche's. What also exploded is the meaning that things can have or lose for other things, not in terms of limited linkage or narrow context, but in terms of variations of light”
― Pierre Klossowski

“Such is the world as it appeared to Nietzsche under the monumental aspect of Turin: a discontinuity of intensities that are given names only through the interpretation of those who receive his messages; the latter still represent the fixity of signs, whereas in Nietzsche this fixity no longer exists. That the fluctuations of intensities were able to assume the opposite name to designate themselves - such is the miraculous irony. We must believe that this coincidence of the phantasm and the sign has existed for all time, and that the strength required to follow the detour through the intellect was 'superhuman”
― Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

“Les dieux ont enseigné aux hommes à se contempler eux-mêmes dans le spectacle comme les dieux se contemplent eux-mêmes dans l'imagination des hommes.”
― Pierre Klossowski

“Transgression (outrage) seems absurd and puerile when it does not succeed in resolving itself into a state of affairs in which it would no longer be necessary. But it belongs to the nature of transgression that it is never able to find such a state. Transgression is then something else than the pure explosion of an energy accumulated thanks to an obstacle. It is an incessant recuperation of the possible itself--inasmuch as the existing state of things has eliminated this possible as a new form of existence, it would have to transgress it in turn. The possible as such would thus have been eliminated and would have to be recuperated yet again. What the act of transgression recuperates from the possible in what does not exist is its own possibility of transgressing what exists.”
― Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor

“Je me trouve sous la dictée de l'image. C'est la vision qui exige que je dise tout ce qui me donne la vision.”
― Pierre Klossowski

“A kind of intimidation – and even blackmail – seems to be inherent in the conflict between the need to survive and the ways one can enjoy oneself once survival is ensured.”
― Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency

“Come inizia l'intervista a Pierre Klossowski, in appendice all'edizione ES de Il Bafometto:

K: Io non sono né un romanziere né un filosofo, e nemmeno un artista: io sono un maniaco. Ognuna delle mie opere nasce da una mia mania.
Int: Una sola mania per tutte le opere, oppure per ognuna di esse una specifica mania?
K: La "monomania" consiste nel mettere instancabilmente in evidenza una sola e medesima cosa, nell'esporre una sola e una fisionomia, una sola e medesima scena ripetuta nelle sue variazioni infinite... La "monomania" rincomincia sempre, all'infinito. Al momento opportuno ritorna al punto di partenza. Si tratta di legittimare la monomania per mezzo dell'arte, di sottomettere la tensione a esibire a una pratica specifica, a una disciplina.”
― Pierre Klossowski