Showing papers in "Diacritics in 2005"

Interrogating Hybridity: Subaltern Agency and Totality in Postcolonial Theory

Abstract: In this essay, the author presents the Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant's Poetique de la Relation in a new frame by reading his text as it accomplishes a type of grand-scale theorizing. The notion of Relation in Glissant is followed in its various connections to a Marxian notion of dynamic totality. The Marxian/Hegelian subtext of Poetique is seen as productively revealing for reading Glissant both historically and theoretically. Glissant's theorizing of difference is shown to be an important contribution to contemporary revisions of Marxian-informed thought.

Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche: Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, Stereotypes

Abstract: in his writings on nietzsche, pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in nietzsche’s own oeuvre. these concepts are Klossowski’s own creations, his own contributions to thought. although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher (“Je suis une ‘maniaque,’” he once said, “un point, c’est tout!”),1 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. from this point of view, his nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Gilles Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts [deleuze and guattari 2]. no doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of his exceptional oeuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through his difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). in what follows, then, i would like to examine three of Klossowski’s most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets nietzsche’s thought.

Foucault's Aestheticism

Abstract: "Foucault's Aestheticism" asks to what extent critique as Foucault conceives it can be read as a form of style. Starting from Foucault's description of "aestheticism" as "self-transformation," Lamb argues that accounts of Foucauldian critique have often sought to establish Foucault's position as one of affirmation or opposition without carefully setting out the terms by which his practice and relation to the self shift with respect to the institutions, disciplines, and practices that form his objects of study. By focusing on Foucault's description of modernity as an ethos against the reception of his history of classical ethics, the essay concludes not only that an impersonal style often functions crucially in Foucault's critical practice but also that no account of his style can afford to ignore the changed understanding of style at which Foucault ultimately arrives, an understanding in which style constitutes less the final expression of an authorial position than a provisional practice of self-modification.

Hospitality After the Death of God

Abstract: Pierre Klossowski’s fiction has been only sporadically published in English, and largely dismissed as perverse erotica or soft-core porn. When his 1965 trilogy les lois de l’hospitalité was partially translated in English (under the title roberte, ce soir & The revocation of the Edict of Nantes), its Library of Congress classification characterized it simply as “erotic fiction—French.” Even in France, Klossowski has become the very signifier of perversion. His artwork graces the cover of Serge André’s l’imposture perverse and of numerous erotic novels, he has been “diagnosed” as a pervert by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and unironic readers of his Sade mon prochain hail him as Sade’s disciple and heir.1 Admittedly, the larger stakes of Klossowski’s work are easily obscured by its free adaptation of the stock themes of libertine literature. His fictional works, like his visual compositions (essentially representations of rape scenes, often on historical themes— Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Lucretia), explore the conflict between a woman’s chaste moral attitude and her gradual surrender to an assailant’s advances. The laws of Hospitality concerns the erotic awakening of “hospitality” in a woman, which exposes a contradiction within her moral character and reveals her symbolic identity to be without foundation. Its protagonist Octave, who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, is a collector of artworks that eroticize the moment of moral hesitation experienced by women submitting to the sexual advances of a chance stranger—or even a “spiritual” apparition. His “laws of hospitality” are the fruit of his desire to experience this operation firsthand; they name a practice wherein the master of the house “offers” his wife to fortuitous guests, in order to savor the moment of her surrender. However, the stakes of Klossowski’s “perverse” meditations are very different from the Sadeian project of uprooting religious morality. Sade challenges the patriarchal and religious authorities of his day by demonstrating that the paternal signifier on which their laws are based is without foundation. In proving that the law cannot hold

Klossowski, Deleuze, and Orthodoxy

Abstract: Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic. For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure. Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone

Biopolitics and Duopolies

Abstract: Foucault's notion of the biopolitical traces the evolution from the sovereign state to alternative forms of control, different techniques of domination—not reducible to state domination—and resistance. Of great interest in this development, particularly within the context of so-called "globalization," are Foucault's comments on race: Foucault suggests that the race struggle precedes even the class struggle, and that racism is but a by-product of the former. This article, via Society Must Be Defended, examines these matters in the light of other Foucauldian concepts such as control society, governmentality, and the population.

Tragedy, Comedy, Parody: From Hegel to Klossowski

Abstract: while it has perhaps always accompanied philosophical thought—one immediately thinks of Plato’s dialogues—the problem of the communication of that thought, and therefore of its capacity to be taught, has been particularly insistent in the work of postKantian thinkers. One could cite Fichte’s repeated efforts to formulate a definitive version of his Wissenschaftslehre, the model of the Bildungsroman that Hegel adopts for his Phenomenology of spirit1 Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works,2 Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra, and Heidegger’s uncompleted Being and Time. Certainly each of these projects is quite distinct from the others, and the puzzles and difficulties of these works cannot be reduced to some single element, some trace of a philosophical zeitgeist. Their common preoccupation with the problem of the communicability of thinking, however, raises the question of the modality of such a communication. How has thinking come to be so fundamentally troubled by its own expression? That Kant’s critical philosophy has precipitated this preoccupation ought to come as no surprise, for it was Kant, most famously in the Critique of Pure Reason, who sought to definitively set the limits of philosophical thinking. In doing so, however, Kant was unable to remain utterly silent about what he himself set outside the bounds of meaningful thought and speech: things-in-themselves. That this meaningless element is an essential component of Kant’s philosophical exposition3 is an indication of

Evaluating Klossowski's Le Baphomet

Abstract: on 14 June 1965, Roger Caillois resigned from the jury of the prestigious Prix des Critiques. His resignation was provoked by the majority decision of the jury to award the critics’ prize that year to Klossowski’s final novel, Le Baphomet.1 Le Baphomet, a singular, walter scott-inspired tale about the Knights templar, is set, initially at least, at the beginning of the fourteenth century just before the dissolution of the templar order at the behest of the then French king, Philippe le Bel. after the historical prologue the action is transferred to a seemingly atemporal sphere, where the disembodied souls of the former Knights templar await the moment when the last Judgment will be pronounced and they will be reunited once more with their earthly bodies. the setting, tone, and style are at first gothic, but with the appearance of the disembodied spirit of saint teresa of avila baroque elements begin to dominate and to mix with evocations of Masonic and esoteric ritual, gnostic heresy, and theological but also philosophical discussion. these are accompanied by the appearance of Philippe le Bel himself and the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, the “Antichrist,” initially in the form of an anteater. with its unorthodox and often archaic vocabulary and syntax and, after the historical prologue, its discontinuous and fantastical narrative presentation, in which the boundaries between persons and identities appear permeable and insecure, Le Baphomet engages the reader in a textual experience that can be both baffling and obscure. It is also a work that can appear to lack any intellectual or formal coherence, one whose multiplicity and evident complexity may seem to promise rich possibilities of interpretation and literary value but whose narrative disorder and stylistic singularity can ultimately leave the reader frustrated with the sense of having been exposed to something of a literary mess. this, at least, was the view of Roger Caillois when he resigned in protest at the decision of the Prix des Critiques jury to confer its honor on Klossowski’s novel. Caillois was himself a singular writer whose work can be situated at the intersection of a

Klossowski's Alternative

Abstract: These are mythic and etymological conditions, probably idealized and in any case obsolete-what does the archaic institution of hospitality (supposing it was ever practiced in its ideal form) have to do with the crisis of social relation today? In what follows I propose an extended Klossowskian response to this question. But as a preliminary abbreviation let us turn the question around: is any social relation, today or any other day, even possible without passing through-or holding open-the moment of hospitality, of reception of the other, friend or stranger? When I let the other cross my threshold and penetrate the precinct of my home, my family, my own and proper extension of Self, when I give him my friendship and trust, it is then he becomes dangerous to me.1 Menelaus gave Paris his trust as an honored guest, whereupon his guest-friend abducted his wife, instigating the Trojan War. What is the psychic situation conditioned by receiving the other inside my Self? Taken literally, topologically, it is that the other as stranger becomes a part of me, inside me, that is, outside my control. What is inside and what is out, who is me and who is not-me? What and where is the psyche; what is its topology? Does it have an interior and exterior separated by a border between? "To see in the human soul a place [lieu, locus]-no longer to regard the human person otherwise than cohabited by the powers that can take possession of it: exterior powers, autonomous, those evoked by the Gospel-the ornate house that awaits the visit of demons and which, visited, is the parable 1. Strategies for survival and reproduction include many variations on "tit for tat" (to play an honest and nonviolent game but retaliate hard to punish cheaters), including varieties of cheating such as adultery and murder. These programs of intraspecies interaction are designed through natural selection as alternative strategies for long-term reproductive success: males compete for access to females but most refrain from killing each other out of a rational genetic calculation of the likelihood of retaliation-including, in humans (and in apes), the possibility of revenge by family and tribal members (lex talio). To deny that hospitality "emerges" from this biological context would be a massive Verleugnung; hospitality and law are symbolic (cultural) transforms of biological development. The whole question, then, concerns that difference. See Wright and Pinker for summaries of the "evolutionary psychology" of Williams, Hamilton, Trivers, and others.

Impulsive Forces In and Against Words

Abstract: In his lecture "Nietzsche, le polyth6isme et la parodie" given at the Collbge de Philosophie in 1957 and published in 1963 in his Un si funeste disir, Pierre Klossowski explicated certain radical passages from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, a work he had newly translated into French (two prior translations existed). In the philosophical world of France where perception seemed to have found its definitive elucidation in the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience, as Klossowski laid it out, was so radically different from that phenomenology that it could not be assimilated. In his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts Nietzsche left unpublished and which date from the years of The Gay Science onward. Philosophers, Nietzsche had written, do not simply coordinate and justify the works and science of society; they break at least in part with the common language by formulating their own aggressivity, tolerance, intimidation, anxieties, need of solitude, or need to forget themselves. And Nietzsche too speaks not of what is common and communicable but of what he experienced inwardly. Now Klossowski presented Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience as an exposition of the experience peculiar to Nietzsche, in the most troubled period of his life. This experience, moreover, Klossowski aimed to show, was wholly premonitory of Nietzsche's final state, in which he could no longer say what he was experiencing nor who he was. The environment is not simply passively impressed upon our sensory surfaces; we have to awaken, move our eyes, and focus on things and circumscribe their contours with our look, and assume a posture that enables us to advance our look. When we are born, and when we awaken each day, that is, are born again to the world, we are needy and vulnerable, to be sure; the organism is porous and needs to replenish fluids and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess energies; it is because excess energies have to be discharged that the organism moves into the environment and depletes its substance, and needs develop. Nietzsche calls these excess energies impulses, also multiple wills to power, that is, not conscious drives to acquire power, but positive forces that expand and exist only in expansion. They seek resistances on which to discharge themselves. They push against one another and become multiple. For the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the movements of perception are intentional; they are from the first correlative with objects, or, for Merleau-Ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intelligible essence or sensory meaning, arising against a background of potential objects or latent things. Yet every glance around us encompasses innumerable unnamed and unnameable shapes, hues, textures, slidings, illuminations. Do not in fact the excess energies of life open upon an environment of swarming sensory patterns, streamings, scintillations, and shadows which quicken life before or without acquiring meaningful identities?

The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous Paratext

Abstract: upon its publication, Le bain de diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. klossowski’s name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as bataille, beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossowski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault [“La prose d’Actéon”], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L’arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.

Against Theory Beside Romanticism: The Sensation of the Signifier

Abstract: Walter Benn Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History makes the ostensive cul-de-sac of identity politics the dominant symptom of postmodernism per se. The Shape connects its argument to the controversy over intention and interpretation created by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels's twenty-year-old essay "Against Theory." This very connection, however, highlights the not-quite-acknowledged presence of a certain type of romanticism in both works that each also wants to attack. Misunderstanding Paul de Man's notion of materiality, Michaels becomes the latest thinker hoping to free us from the inchoateness of romantic sensation, both as the indulgence of sensory experience and the cognitive sloppiness (from Michaels's perspective) of nonmeaning as the sense of meaning. Far from a Fukuyama-inspired postmodern condition, Michaels's scenario actually adumbrates a basic problem between romanticism and modernism-as-modernity.