Klossowski - Impulsive Forces in and Against Words

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Impulsive Forces In and Against Words

Alphonso Lingis

diacritics, Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 60-70 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/dia.2007.0015

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Bibl. Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg (22 Dec 2013 10:55 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v035/35.1lingis.html
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60

IMPULSIVE FORCES IN AND

AGAINST WORDS

ALPHONSO LINGIS

In his lecture Nietzsche, le polythisme et la parodie given at the Collge de Phi-

losophie in 1957 and published in 1963 in his Un si funeste dsir, Pierre Klossowski

explicated certain radical passages from Nietzsches 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 denitive elucidation in the phe-

nomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Nietzsches 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published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts Nietzsche left unpublished and which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, tol-

erance, 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 expe-

rienced inwardly. Now Klossowski presented Nietzsches exposition of sensory expe-

rience 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 Nietzsches nal 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 uids

and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess ener-

gies; 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 be-

come multiple.

For the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the move-

ments of perception are intentional; they are from the rst correlative with objects, or,

for Merleau-Ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intel-

ligible 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?

diacritics 35.1: 6070


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diacritics / summer 2005 61

What in classical epistemology were called sensations were the information bits

these forces impressed on our sensory surfaces, resulting also in sensory affects of

pleasure or pain, according to the passive conception of our sensibility. For Nietzsche

the multiple impulses that confront the forces of the environment are active and not re-

active; confronting what is not from the rst meaningful but resists or empowers, they

laugh and weep, bless and curse. And it is these multiple and conicting impulses, not

a conceptual grasp of the essences of things, that know environmental events, know the

forces exerted by the multiple hues, textures, glows, savors, reections, halos, echos,projections, and shadows scattered about us.

The impulses do more than know all that; they exalt and consecrate events of the

world, they put over each an azure bell of blessing, they give them a space to stand

forth and to dancethey come and offer their hands and laugh and eeand come

back.1They give themselves form and multiple forms and dance with all things. They

are Apollonian and Dionysian.

What is called conscious thought is elaborated in words of the common language

wholly determined by its utility in communicating with otherswhat Klossowski calls

the code of everyday signs. This language is not contrived to set forth the incomparable

individuality of the experience of an individual but to serve the community; it formu-lates what individuals ask for from one another, out of their needs and wantsindi-

viduals viewing themselves therefore as needy and dependent, herd animals. It is

governed by the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle: that

there are things, that there are enduring things, that things are what they appear to

be. From the beginning, in order to survive in an environment containing mortal dan-

gers an organism had to judge quickly according to often eeting appearances, had to

overlook the unending differences between similar threats, had to reduce similarities

to identity. The words that designate things are abbreviations of multiple signals sent

forth by those things, simplications, reductions to identity. A multiplicity of appear-

ances succeeding one another can be grasped as the same thing only by a viewer whoposits himself as the same agent in the different phases of perception. Thus the code of

everyday signs identifying things requires the term designating the identity of an I.

When we pass from sensory perception, that is, the unleashing of multiple active

forces, hilarious and aficted, consecrating and desecrating, upon the event that quick-

ens them to the conscious thought that designates the essence of that thing with a word

or set of words, the objective knowledge we have thus xed is communicable to all

who share the same code of everyday signsor specialized signs of a specic disci-

pline. The essence in which all the properties and behaviors of the object are inte-

grated yields for the mind a specic sense of dispassionate serenity. But for Nietzsche

this serenity does not result from a resolution of the conicting impulsive forces thatactively engage the sensory event. Instead, passing to objective conscious thought

that xes the event with a word or set of words comes when the conict of those mul-

tiple impulses exhausts them. The dispassionate state comes from exhaustion of the

sensory impulses; objective conscious thought is the weakest form of knowledge.

Martin Heidegger declared all perception to be interested; the nite, vulnerable

and mortal, existence opens to the environment in order to nd there the place and

complements of its existence to come. Perception is practical; objects are objectives.

But for Nietzsche it is the excess energies an organism generates that opens it to an

environment full of alien forces nowise envisioned or envisionable as complements of

its needs. These energies have to be discharged, but they are not simply released anddissipated in the void; they are forces only in contact with other forces. When they en-

counter, fortuitously, an array of forces in the environment upon which they are quick-

1. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [The Convalescent 3.2].


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ened, empowered, they advance and expand and release themselves. The world, then, is

not, as Heidegger declared, primarily and for the most part a practical eld; the strong

movements of life are not practical initiatives produced by envisioning a goal that is a

means to a yet further goal. The excess energies of life nd an orientation, a direction,

and the goal they may, or may not, then designate was not the nal cause that rst

launched them as intentions. The useful end is a pale schema projected in conscious-

ness that does not want to acknowledge that the ship is following the current into

which it has entered accidentally. It is a pretext, a self-deception of vanity after theevent [Gay Science360]. It is self-deception because every single time something

is done with a purpose in view, something fundamentally different and other occurs

[Will to Power666]. The goal is chosen for its beauty rather than its truth. It acquires

its identity from language, when the one engaged in life feels the need to explain and

justify his movements to others. (But may it not answer to the Apollonian urge to make

things and our own lives beautifulas artists do . . . by looking at [things] through

tinted glass or in the light of sunset . . . . [Gay Science354].)

The language of conscious thought, the code of everyday signs, designates what

in us we need to communicate to others: our needs, our vulnerability. It designates us

as a bundle of needs, the worst and most supercial part of ourselvesfor our needsare intermittent and produced, for the most part, by the leakage and combustion of sub-

stance that result from the movements driven by our excess vitality; they are surface

phenomena possible only because the core of our bodily substance is a plenum generat-

ing excess energies. Yet all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique,

and innitely individual. . . . But as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they

no longer seem to be [Gay Science354].

Moving at random among the coral reefs, the diver comes upon a shark. The shark

is not the object-objective of a conscious intention that would have activated his bodily

forces; in fact it was the energies in excess in his daily practical and utilitarian sphere

that drove him to the humanly uninhabitable ocean, where he fortuitously came uponthe shark. It is afterwards that he will assign a goal to this plungeto test my swim-

ming abilities, to learn about ocean life, to have a great story to tell. If he has

assigned to this dive the goal of seeing a shark, he is conscious of the gratuitousness of

this goal.

Confronting boldly the lord of this domain with all his sensibility at the boiling

point, he feels his jointed body cumbersome before the terrible effortlessness of its

movements, feels the utter alienness of this form of life to his, feels the impossibility

of reciprocal understanding. His gaze meets the opaque and expressionless yellow of

the eye of the shark looking at him, feeling the unknowability of what that eye sees. He

feels the wild force of his own impotent power to keep it at bay, feels hilarity and terror,feels the exaltation that says yes to this monster. Finally, as we say, we tire of looking at

anything, however grandiose; the inner combat of conicting feelings leaves a feeling

of exhaustion. He may disguise this state as understanding: now I know what a shark is

like. The image retained, and the words that will designate it in the common language,

are abstractions and abbreviations of a complex and internally contradictory encounter.

The diver will surface or rise to shallow depths to confront, one after another, coral

sh shaped by a delirious geometry and emblazoned surface patterns whose utility is

inconceivable.

Nietzsche would have us understand that the movements of our lives are not so

many practical intentions, that we do not will what we nonetheless designate as theirgoals, that the identity of theI is produced in language which itself is driven by needy

and vulnerable impulsesthe worst and most supercial part of ourselves. Can we

acquire this lucidity, outside of and above what is called conscious thought, and live


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with it? No doubt there are moments when such lucidity glows in behaviors governed

by common sense. My wife, we say, the expression claiming to sum up a knowl-

edge of her only we have because of our marriage; we live as one, man and wife. But

something in us, and those we are talking with, understands that you do not know a

woman until you nd yourself blessing the universe and her because she has made you

laugh and laugh at yourself, until she has made you cry, until you nd yourself cursing

her and yourself because she makes you weep as not the cruellest enemy could.

But what is that integral and incomparably individual bottom of ourselves that noself-consciousness could grasp in the most subtle words? It must be with some higher

lucidity, outside of and above what is called conscious thought, that Nietzsche pursues

his elucidation. How is this lucidity produced? And how is it that it could be, apparent-

ly, formulated in these wordswords we understand, words of a common language?

In Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux Klossowski examines the unpublished manuscripts

contemporary with The Gay Science for answers to such questions. But he will nd that

this lucid thought nds its nal formula in the incommunicable phantasm of the eternal

return, and that its lucidity bears an intrinsic relationship to the delirium Nietzscheconfronted from the beginning and to which he nally succumbed.

From 1877 to 1881 Nietzsche suffered from periodic crises; periods of euphoria in

which he devoted himself feverishly to his reections on aspects of history, arguments

of scientists and philosophers, art and politics. Then came the time when his migraines

blurred out his cerebral activity and blinded his eyes. Continual pain; for many hours

of the day, a sensation closely akin to seasickness, a semi-paralysis that makes it dif-

cult to speak, alternating with furious attacks (the last one made me vomit for three

days and nights, I longed for death!)2In his letters, he speaks triumphantly of his writ-

ing done despite all the suffering. But he also comes to see that it is his cerebral activity

itself that leads to the breakdown, a revenge of his body upon his brain.Although our life as interpreted by conscious thought had been a simplication, a

falsication of our life in fact lived by the forces of multiple impulses, this interpreta-

tion had enabled the species to surface and had been driven by vital impulses. But now

Nietzsche nds himself prostrate from the aggression of his body against his mind.

In fragmentary notes, scribbled when he hardly had the strength to do so and which

he himself could barely read, he seeks in physics and biology a vocabulary in which

to formulate his own experience. These fragments have generally been left aside by

Nietzsches readers, as stamped with a now obsolete positivism. Klossowski sets out to

put them together in his own words.

The body is envisaged as a multitude of forces which are composed into the organsof an organism. But of themselves these forces are multiple and conicting and, as im-

pulses, exist in exercise, in the striving to release and discharge themselves. They thus

periodically disrupt the composition of the organism; they break through the individu-

ality of the organism. The states of inner violence are experienced as pain inasmuch as

they break up and break through states in which they had been held in the equilibrium

of the organism and which had been experienced as contentment. These latter states

leave intensive tracestraces of equilibriumin the brain which can represent them

and reactivate them.

In the terrible sufferings of his body Nietzsche now sees outbursts of energy. If

these impulses attack the conscious thought that he had been pursuing in his books,the conscious thinker he had been, shaped by the culture of nineteenth-century Europe

2. Nietzsche, Letter to Doctor O. Eiser, January 1880 [Werke 3: 1161].


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and by his family upbringing, Nietzsche will take the side of the body, of his nervous

system [which], given the enormous activity that it had to furnish, astonishes me with

its subtlety and its marvelous resistance. . . .3He had long combated the culture of his

time and abhorred all that his mother and sister represented; now he exercises a suspi-

cion, hatred, and rage against his own conscious person. He judges that the states free

of physical oppression to which he had devoted his writing were experienced as tran-

quil and pleasurable only because they represented the body as having attained again a

harmony of its forces.Every movement, Nietzsche wrote, is to be conceived as a gesture, a kind of

language in which (impulsive) forces make themselves heard [SW 12: 16]. In the inor-

ganic world, the communication is immediate; there is no possible discussion between

the strong and the weak. But in the organic world communication is realized through

interpretation. The multiple impulses of a body are felt by different and competing

impulses as signals. These signals compose a code proper to them. Impulses respond to

variations in other impulses; they represent excitations that have taken place or could

take place. They also produce representations of themselves by separating from them-

selves and returning to themselves. This separation and return Klossowski sees in the

movement from crest to trough and trough to crest in the surging and ebbing of impuls-es. These representations are images of what has taken place or could take placein

Klossowskis terminology: phantasms.

The brain maintains the upright position of the body, and excitations that the brain

receives from bodily impulses are decoded according to the criteria of the upright body:

up and down, before and behind. Everyone can lie down and sleep, to be sure, but be-

cause one remains certain of being able to change position or rise again, one thinks of

the body as ones own. For the person, for the brain, the body is but an instrument of

consciousness.

The immense number of excitations that reach the brain would overwhelm it did

it not lter them. New excitations are ltered by the traces of earlier excitations; theyenter as the same as, or else as different from, the habitual. These traces of earlier sen-

sations ensure the permanence of the I, and when the I puts an end to thinking in order

to act, it closes off the afux of new excitations.

It is bodily impulses that laugh, tremble, are exhausted, and suffer. In the great

intensity of pain, as in voluptuous pleasure, the person (maintaining the upright posi-

tion) disappears. The person who decides to laugh or to suffer nds impulses to laugh

or painful impulses already there and but adds a representation to themand the deci-

sion is itself an impulse.

Inasmuch as an organism is composed of multiple impulses, they seem to form an

individual. But the excess forces of the impulses held by the composition of the organ-ism produce what we call growth: a succession of compositions at different ages; they

are so many different compositions. The body is the same only insofar as one same

I seeks to identify with it. In the measure that the body ages and external forces and

also internal impulses undermine its composition as an organism without a still more

mature organism composition taking form, the I seeks to reafrm its own cohesion and

recapitulate itself. From the retrospective view of its own cohesion it grasps the physi-

cal disintegration. This I cannot create for itself a different body because it is itself a

product of the impulses of this body.

The brain that lters the excitations that reach it as so many messages from the

multiple impulses of the body decodes them in language, that is, in what Klossowskicalls the code of everyday signs, which exterior code has been installed in it. Self-con-

3. Letter to Franziska Nietzsche, mid-July 1881 [Werke 3: 1170].


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scious thought is elaborated in this code, as is the conscious I itself. Conscious thought,

the coding of impulses and their phantasms according to signs of the everyday code,

is partialits signs are all abbreviations of signsand intermittent. Even when we

are alone and silent this code subsists in us; our inner dialogue is formulated in this

external code. Even our dreams are made of this code, formulating strange or banal

combinationsand thus are susceptible of being recounted to others in our waking

state. Already in playfulness, or in a state of fatigue or illness such strange or banal

combinations take form. Conscious thought is elaborated in signs of the everyday code, which, as abbre-

viations of signs, assimilate the similar to identical. These signs are themselves acti-

vated by impulses engendering phantasms which can reexcite traces that are already

signicant in this code. In doing so, other traces are eliminated, and thus the impulses

themselves are altered. That one thought follows another, apparently engendered by the

prior one, is the sign, Nietzsche says, of the way the whole situation of impulsive forces

has been modied in the interval [NVC 50].

When excitations that occupy all the available signs of the everyday code reach

the brain, other chains of signs already formed are deactivatedthis is what is called

forgetting. Thus as Nietzsche writes about the impulses, this very activity silences themessages coming from those impulses, such that he does not see the conict of im -

pulses or what is happening that makes him write.

The I becomes the grammatical subject of propositions, declarations about what-

ever happens to it from within or from without. The impulses are represented by the

signs of the everyday code (abbreviations) as unities, and so are constituted in the func-

tion of the identity of the I, consciousness, or intellect. They are interpreted as passions

affecting the unity and coherence of the I, or as its own penchants and inclinations.

Impulses and repulsions acquire sense only insofar as they are reduced, by the abbrevi-

ating system, to intentional states of the I.

What Nietzsche now seeks is a new and different lucidity, a thought that elucidatesthe body and its impulses and the signals they emit, bringing to light what Zarathustra

calls the Self, the great intelligence that inhabits the body. Klossowski sometimes calls

it a physiological thought. This thought no longer functions to maintain the identity

of the I. The lucidity that Nietzsche aims for, beyond the consciousness of conscious

thought, which condenses the signals issued by multiple impulses into signs of inten-

tional goals, would restore the impulsive spontaneity. This lucidity could only consist

in a simulation of the impulsive forces and their phantasms. (But is not the loss of com-

mon reason madness?)

Pleasure, Nietzsche had understood, is the feeling of expanding power within. In

the summer of 1881 the impulsive forces in Nietzsche had reached such a pitch that helived in an explosive euphoria. Several times, he wrote to Peter Gast, he could not leave

his room, so inamed were his eyes from the tears he had shed the day beforetears

not of despondency but of joy. Such are the tears we sometimes see lling the eyes of

a child overcome with laughter.

And then, suddenly, in the intensity of this euphoria, he received the vision, hal-

lucination or phantasm, of the eternal return of all things.

This vision would change you as you are or perhaps crush you . . . . Or how well

disposed you would have to be to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently

than this ultimate eternal conrmation and seal? [Gay Science341]. In Thus Spoke

ZarathustraNietzsche shows in joy a will for the eternal return: O my friends haveyou ever said Yes to a single joy? . . . What does joy not want? . . . this world, oh you

know it! [The Drunken Song 4.10].


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The joy that Nietzsche wrote no one he knew could understand, and in which he

saw the vision of eternal return, brings its own conviction. In this ecstatic joy the I, felt

through surges of intensity and designated and delimited in the code of everyday signs,

breaks out of those delimitations and the language of conscious thought. The one who

feels this joy no longer discerns any difference between the ux and reux of intensi -

ties of the impulses constituting his life and those of all material reality.

The vision of eternal return, fruit of extreme lucidity, shows that this lucidity will

and must be forgotten. For it reveals that this life as I now live it I have lived innumer-able times and shall live innumerable times more, but also, Klossowski points out, that

those lives have fallen into oblivion, as shall this life and this moment of revelation.

Were I to remember my former lives and prior revelations of the eternal return, I would

maintain myself in myself and outside of the cycleand thus its revelation would no

longer be veridical.

Klossowski notes that in Nietzsches rst efforts to communicate his ecstatic vi-

sion, in The Gay Science and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the I in a hallucinatory vision

experiences itself as multiplied innitely (does not the I maintain itself by an inde-

nite reinstatement of its identity?) and that a demon converts this into an indenite

reinstatement of the same I across the cycle of innite time. But he also says that thisvery vision will make you each time other than what you are. This succession of meta-

morphoses, making the same life each time different, Klossowski sees nally afrmed

clearly when, in his letter to Jacob Burckhardt, he wrote, I am Prado; . . . I am Lesseps

. . . I am ChambigeI am every name in history [Portable Nietzsche 686]. The exul-

tant moment of the vision of eternal return is a moment that required all previous mo-

ments, all the metamorphoses of previous states and lives; it afrms them and afrms

the change of this life it will effect when assumed and all subsequent metamorphoses,

until the day comes when this very life and this moment recur.

The very truth of eternal return requires that this ecstatic and visionary state re-

turn to the I designated and delimited in the code of everyday signs, who shall seek toexplicate this experience in that code. This most exultant feeling would be the highest

thought. But in the explication the vision of eternal return becomes incoherent: the I

who can be designated only as that which maintains itself identical (and only as such

can maintain the identities of the signs of the everyday code) declares that it is but a

fortuitous moment of the cosmic cycle, destined to oblivion, that its will is without ob-

jective, both will and objective being illusory, and that its intention creative of meaning

for its actions and its existence and for the existence of the universe is illusory. The

vision of eternal return coded as a sign becomes a vicious circle.

But when the ecstatic joy expands from Nietzsches body into fabulous physiog-

nomies, it issues in the image or phantasm of the universe as a perpetual ight fromitself, and a perpetual re-nding of itself in multiple gods [NVC 65]. The sign of the

eternal return as a vicious circle becomes circulus vitiosus deus.

So far from conscious thought, elaborated in the code of everyday signs or com-

mon reason, has Nietzsches new physiological lucidity brought him that it issues in

a sign that is true both internally and externally, personally and cosmically, true for all

that has ever, will ever, could ever come to pass in the world as it is true in thought. But

this sign formulated as a communicable thought, in the code of conscious thought, has

only the incoherence of a vicious circle. It can exist only as a phantasm of the moment

of highest intensity in life.

Zarathustra convulses in disgust before the doctrine of eternal return: for it teachesthat the human-all-too-human irremediably forever returns. Lou Salom and Franz

Overbeck reported that Nietzsche himself experienced exultation but also terror before

the doctrine. Lou Salom understood it was horror before the irremediable return of his


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Diana CooperMy Eye Travels (20012004)


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life so consumed with suffering. Klossowski afrms it was rather terror before the loss

of his reason. His physiological lucidity had brought him to a thought whose nal

formula is incommunicable.

In order to be able to live, and thus to act, with his supreme doctrine, Nietzsche set

out to move thought from a lucidity that records what is to one that formulates what

will be possible: thought as creation and artwork. He very rapidly wrote Thus Spoke

Zarathustra. But, Klossowski says, this poem in its dithyrambic development is essen-

tially a book of maxims, where the declamatory movement alternates with the enigmasand their resolution in images: a staging of thought in wordplays and similes [NVC 99].

It remains, Klossowski says, in the domain of the unintelligible.

To demonstrate not only to others but to himself that his supreme thought is ef-

cacious and consequential, that it will mark a decisive break in history, Nietzsche

multiplies fragmentary elaborations where the contemporary descent into nihilism will

require a will, that of the future Masters of the Earth, capable of creating a goal for

themselves and for humanity. The efcacy of goals is reintroduced, and the will to

power ceases to be the pure inevitable expansion of power to become a will for power.

Nietzsches efforts to formulate a coherent discourse eclipse the supreme thought, that

of eternal return. Then in the last months of 1988 in Turin Nietzsches extreme intensities of eupho-

ria nally issue in the irreversible collapse. On the brink of this night and silence, Ni -

etzsche sends laconic notes and letters to his friends, where the Nietzschean expression,

the Nietzschean vocabulary subsist, but no longer the Nietzschean I; he who writes, he

says, is now Prado, Lesseps, Cambige, Count Robilant, Carlo Alberto, Antonelli, all the

names of historyand the Crucied and Dionysos.

Pierre Klossowski has mapped out what Nietzsche sought in this physiological

lucidity in a language that is communicable, indeed in abstract and stable terminology

and coherent explanationsa product of conscious thought from which emanate calm

and condence. Yet Klossowski could not have done so without having shared some-thing of Nietzsches own inner turmoil, a decentering that turned different phases of

a life experience into discontinuous metamorphoses, in the felt proximity to madness.

Klossowskis book could only be an effort, through language, to make such a life liv-

able.

Has not Klossowski delineated what Philip Fisher has identied as two distinct

politics of the inner life: the traditional heroic life, centered in courage and honor,

and the post-Rousseau life of the feelings, with its center in romantic love and the

experience of nature [Fisher 41]? In the texts published in The Gay Science, we nd a

picture of the self possessed of multiple and conictingambivalentimpulses in any

engagement with an event appearing in the environment. The conict augments theirintensity, but also leads to exhaustion. This state of exhaustion revives the sense of the

organism as needy and vulnerable, and the predominance of the category of utility. The

self feels a need to resolve this state in a useful and communicable trace and marks it

with a sign from the code of everyday signs: it is a shark, a shade tree, a bus I encoun-

tered. The sign claims to designate the essence, that is, the integrated conguration of

its multiple features; in fact it is anabbreviation, a simplifcation. With this unitary sign

the I as the unitary and abiding identity is afrmed and maintained.

When this conscious I vacillates, what surges are the impulses in their passionate

form: rage, ambition, jealousy, fear, surprise, wonder, disgust, exhilaration, joy. Each

of these occupies the whole space and time of the organism, excluding the claims ofothers and the claims of past and future states of that organism. But each of them has

its own endurance, and subsides. Klossowski depicts them as periodic upsurges, waves


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that of themselves subside. The total and heightened sense of power and nondivided-

ness they produce also issues in signs: Prado, Cambige, Count Robilant. . . .

Klossowski delineates the irony that subsists in these last communications, an iro-

ny and sense of humor about himself that Nietzsche had rarely exercised so freely. The

effort to maintain irony would be a desperate effort to maintain a sense of his identity

over and above the identity of each of these episodic passionate states. But madness,

where the legitimacy of all acts of will, all thoughts, perceptions, and passions is no

longer recognized by society nor can be by the organism that supports or endures them,is nigh. Klossowski has not completely claried the functioning of this other language:

that which names the passions of rage, jealousy, ambition, exhilaration, adoration with

the names of Prado, Cambige. . . . This nomenclature designates the surges of passion

released in Nietzsches organism with recognizable names in the code of everyday

signs. Would they then be a desperate effort to rescue the life forces in him from the

incommunicable and thus unjustiable, left aside as madness? Dionysos or the Cruci-

ed: the passions which indeed subside do not thereby abolish an intolerable state of

conict. The passions do not only subside; they block one another.

Nietzsche cannot diagram the movements, transformations, and reversals of these

impassioned states with the concepts of means and ends, intentions and goals. He is leftwith the prospect of a movement, a becoming, without goals and without terminations,

without meaning: chaos, whose phases recur cyclically. But are there not transforma-

tions intrinsic to the passionate states? Fear leads to shame, jealousy to rage, ambition

to guilt, wrath to mourningbut not the reverse, Fisher points out [35]. These trans-

formations, which indeed form the subject matter of classic literature from Homer to

Shakespeare, exhibit not absence of causality but causality that can be utterly dispro-

portionate to the event that set it in motion, that can be unpredictable.

Is not Klossowskis opposition between the coherent language of conscious

thought, formulated in the fundamentally utilitarian code of everyday signs, and the

language ofZarathustra too peremptory? Since it is impulses that x and maintain thetraces that conscious thought will code with the communicable signs, these signs, the

words elaborated by conscious thought, must still designate obliquely the phantasms

engendered by those impulses. Although Klossowski could have understood what was

brought to light by Nietzsches physiological lucidity only by having shared some-

thing of Nietzsches inner torment and metamorphoses, still it was only by understand-

ing Nietzsches words that he could determine that lucidity as specic to Nietzsche.

Each time Nietzsche utters the secret doctrine, his voice trembles, and Lou Salom and

Franz Overbeck sense the exultation and horror that is compressed in his words. Words,

though they be abbreviations and simplications, have overtones; they echo not only in

other words but in the depths below them. And even the austere and abstract expressionand vocabulary of Pierre Klossowski vibrates with turbulent phantasms.

Although aphorism 333 of The Gay Science does declare that all the words of

self-consciousness are but herd signals, contrived for utility and communicability and

hence incapable of bringing what is integrally and incomparably individual to con-

scious thought, Nietzsche also says that the recent exorbitant development of the lan-

guage of self-consciousness awaits the artists who will use this language not to register

the truth of the impulses of the organism, but rather to consecrate, intensify, glorify, and

consume them.


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70

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Philip. The Vehement Passions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.

Klossowski, Pierre.Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.London: Athlone, 1997. Trans.

Daniel W. Smith. Trans. ofNietzsche et le cercle vicieux. Paris: Mercure de France,

1969.________. Un si funeste dsir. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage,

1974.________. Letter to Jacob Burckhardt. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.

New York: Penguin, 1982. 68586.________. Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino

Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980. [SW]________. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New

York: Penguin, 1982. 103439.________. Werke in drei Bnden. Ed. Karl Schlechta. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1960.________. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967.

Documents

Klossowski - Impulsive Forces in and Against Words