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Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name
Novelist, essayist, translator and painter Pierre Klossowski (1905- ) is one of the most singular figures in twentieth-century French thought and writing. His readings of Sade and Nietzsche exerted a decisive influence on a subsequent generation of writers including, among others, Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault. Klossowski is also the author of a number of significant novels, among them the trilogy Les Lois de l'hospitalite and Le Baphomet (winner of the 1965 Prix de Critiques). This is the first book in English devoted to Klossowski's writing, and aims to show the key contribution he makes to the development of post-modern thought and aesthetics. (Legenda 2000)
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First published December 1, 2000
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November 3, 2019
This text by Ian James is an invaluable resource in the still largely neglected study of the thought and influence of Pierre Klossowski. Rather than comparatively associating him with more well known figures in the tradition, who have garnered much from his intricate and often quite maddeningly labyrinthine thoughts and writings, James works carefully through the range of Klossowksi's oeuvre, following the traces which at times depart from his own works down the paths of errant influence, only to return in the form of further masks. What is unmasked and explicated in this extended treatment is the thread of parody, and its (de)constitutive resonances on propriety and nomination.
Much like his contemporary, Blanchot, Klossowski, be he writing of Sade or Nietzsche, Acteon or the fictional Octave, is always in a sense also writing of himself. The figural play of parody, however, inverts the repetitional or mimetic play of circularity, vitiating it and rendering its violent viciousness refractorily upon the subject in question. What I mean is that though Klossowski may be writing of himself when writing of others, it is never the self-same self of an essential or transcendental subject, subject to similitude and identity. The self of Klossowski which is referred to in the return of writing upon another is always other than the mask of the nominal identity of "Klossowski" from whence the work "originated." His works unwork this identity, parodying it and evincing it as but another mask in the infinite play of abyssal mimesis, without originary identity or presence.
The play of masks and gods, of forces and phantasms, that trace their marks throughout his thought and writings weaving a drama of faulty attempts at (re)presenting the impossible of (re)presentation - what every parody demands and yet deforms, translates and yet transforms. James follows the phantasmagorical shifts in Klossowski's thinking, all the while aware of and explicitly pronouncing his own necessary parodying, the always already faulted and defaulting attempt at inscribing beneath a proper name what always already diverts and diverges from any identificatory correlation with said identity, and thus marks the exigency of parody, and the demand for infinite return, repetition, and rewriting or remarking.
My apologies for the lack of clarity in the above paragraphs. There is neither the time nor the space here to lay out what needs be said regarding Klossowski. It took James an entire book which, in a sense, only attests to what ever divigates beyond the limits of its pages and its bindings, suggesting the need for an expanded or altered return to the texts which gave rise to this study. Of course, these texts too will not be the self-same - the labyrinth of its figures ever shifting and playing with thought. The text returned to is ever a parody - not of the self-same identity as the text it is or was, but of the very metaphysical conception that there ever was such an origin in the first place; that there could be such a "first place," an archaic presence or image which would not be but another mask for some subterranean force of differntiation and altering expression.
Representation crumbles, the mirror shatters, as the fragments fall back and return into the infinte play of masks in the abyssal absence of origin. To see this, to glimpse it, is to see the death of God, to be stricken by its madness, and transformed and so consumed by the beastial forces one once took to be one's friends or trusted companions. Everything crumbles; everything fades. But only so as to return, altered, in yet another parodic presentation of or in the phantasmic play of the divine, devoid of grounding or Godhead.
Much like his contemporary, Blanchot, Klossowski, be he writing of Sade or Nietzsche, Acteon or the fictional Octave, is always in a sense also writing of himself. The figural play of parody, however, inverts the repetitional or mimetic play of circularity, vitiating it and rendering its violent viciousness refractorily upon the subject in question. What I mean is that though Klossowski may be writing of himself when writing of others, it is never the self-same self of an essential or transcendental subject, subject to similitude and identity. The self of Klossowski which is referred to in the return of writing upon another is always other than the mask of the nominal identity of "Klossowski" from whence the work "originated." His works unwork this identity, parodying it and evincing it as but another mask in the infinite play of abyssal mimesis, without originary identity or presence.
The play of masks and gods, of forces and phantasms, that trace their marks throughout his thought and writings weaving a drama of faulty attempts at (re)presenting the impossible of (re)presentation - what every parody demands and yet deforms, translates and yet transforms. James follows the phantasmagorical shifts in Klossowski's thinking, all the while aware of and explicitly pronouncing his own necessary parodying, the always already faulted and defaulting attempt at inscribing beneath a proper name what always already diverts and diverges from any identificatory correlation with said identity, and thus marks the exigency of parody, and the demand for infinite return, repetition, and rewriting or remarking.
My apologies for the lack of clarity in the above paragraphs. There is neither the time nor the space here to lay out what needs be said regarding Klossowski. It took James an entire book which, in a sense, only attests to what ever divigates beyond the limits of its pages and its bindings, suggesting the need for an expanded or altered return to the texts which gave rise to this study. Of course, these texts too will not be the self-same - the labyrinth of its figures ever shifting and playing with thought. The text returned to is ever a parody - not of the self-same identity as the text it is or was, but of the very metaphysical conception that there ever was such an origin in the first place; that there could be such a "first place," an archaic presence or image which would not be but another mask for some subterranean force of differntiation and altering expression.
Representation crumbles, the mirror shatters, as the fragments fall back and return into the infinte play of masks in the abyssal absence of origin. To see this, to glimpse it, is to see the death of God, to be stricken by its madness, and transformed and so consumed by the beastial forces one once took to be one's friends or trusted companions. Everything crumbles; everything fades. But only so as to return, altered, in yet another parodic presentation of or in the phantasmic play of the divine, devoid of grounding or Godhead.
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