DOCSLIB.ORG

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle PIERRE KL,OSSOWSKI Translated by Daniel W. Smith The University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The Athlone Press, London, NW11 7SG First published in France in 1969 by Mercure de France, Paris as Contents Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux O Editions Mercure de France 1969 Enghsh translation O The Athlone Press 1997 Printed in Great Britain Translator's Preface vii ISBN: 0-226-44386-8 (cloth) Introduction xiv ISBN: 0-226-44387-6 (paperback) The Combat against Culture 1 Publisher's note The Valetudinary States at the Orign of a Semiotic The publishers wish to record their thanks to the French of Impulses 15 Ministry of Culture for a grant towards the cost of The Experience of the Eternal Return 55 translation. The Valetudinary States at the Origin of Four Criteria: Decadence, Vigour, Gregariousness, Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data the Singular Case 74 Klossowski, Pierre. Attempt at a Scientific Explanation of the [Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux. English] Eternal Return 93 Nietzsche and the vicious circle / Pierre Klossowski ; The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine 121 translated by Daniel W. Smith. The Consultation of the Paternal Shadow 172 p. cm. The Most Beautiful Invention of the Sick 198 Includes bibliographcal references and index. The Euphoria of Turin 208 ISBN 0-226-44386-8 (cloth : alk. paper). - Additional Note on Nietzsche's Semiotic 254 ISBN 0-226-44387-6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. I. Title. Notes B3317.K6213 1997 Index 193--dc21 97-14379 CIP This book is printed on acid-free paper. Translator's Preface To Gilles Deleuze Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle ranks alongside Martin Heidegger's Nietxsche and Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy as one of the most important and influential, as well as idiosyncratic, readings of Nietzsche to have appeared in Eur0pe.l When it was originally published in 1969, Michel Foucault, who frequently spoke of his indebtedness to Klossowsk~'swork, penned an enthusiastic letter to its author. 'It is the greatest book of philosophy I have read,' he wrote, 'with Nietzsche hmself'2 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle was in fact the result of a long apprenticeship. Under the influence of Georges Bataille, Klossowski first began reading Nietzsche in 1934, 'in competition with Kierkegaard7.3During the next three decades, he published a number of occasional pieces on Nietzsche: an article in a special issue of the journal Acdphale devoted to the question of 'Nietzsche and the Fascists' (1937); reviews of Karl Lowith's and Karl Jasper's books on Nietzsche (1939); an introduction to his own translation of The Gay Science (1954); and most importantly, a lecture presented to the Collitge de Philosophie entitled 'Nietzsche, polytheism, and parody' (1957), which Deleuze later praised for having 'renewed the interpretation of Niet~sche'.~ It was not until the 1960s, however, that Klossowski seems to have turned his full attention to Nietzsche. Nietxsche and ... vlll Nietxsche and the Vicious Circle Translator's Pvefdce ix the Vicious Circle grew out of a paper entitled 'Forgetting of the vicissitudes of his religious crisis.ll During the next and anarnnesis in the lived experience of the eternal return decade, he wrote what is perhaps his most celebrated work, of the same', which Klossowslu presented at the famous The Laws ofHospitality, a trilogy that includes The Revocation Royaumont conference on Nietzsche in July 1964.5 Over of the Edict of Nantes (1959), Roberte, ce soir (1954), and Le the next few years, Klossowski published a number of Soufleur (1960), and in which he created Roberte, the additional articles that were ultimately gathered together central sign of his entire oeuvre.12 In 1965, he published The in Nietxsche and the Vicious Circle in 1969.6 The primary Baphomet, an allegorical version of the Eternal Return that innovation of the study lay in the importance it gave to received the coveted Prix des Critiques.13 During this period, Nietzsche's experience of the Eternal Return at Sils-Maria he also produced numerous translations of German and Latin in August 1881, of which Klossowski provided a new and texts, including works by Benjamin, Kafka, Kierkegaard, highly original interpretation. The book was one of the Heidegger, Hamaan, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Klee, Nietzsche, primary texts in the explosion of interest in Nietzsche that Suetonius and Virgil. Since the publication, in 1970, of Living occurred in France around 1970,7 and it exerted a profound Currency, an essay on the economy and the affects, Klossowski influence on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) and has devoted himself almost exclusively to painting.14 His large Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1975).8 In July 1972, a second 'compositions', as he calls them, executed in coloured pencils major conference on Nietzsche took place in France at on paper, frequently transpose scenes from his novels, and Cerisy-la-Salle, which included presentations by Deleuze, have been exhibited in Paris, Zurich, Berne, Cologne, New Derrida, Lyotard, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and Ganddlac, York, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid and elsewhere.15 Through- among many others. Klossowski's contribution was a paper out all these endeavours, Klossowski has remained almost entitled 'Circulus vitiosus', which analysed what he called the unclassifiable, singular. Novelist, essayist, translator, artist, he 'conspiracy' (complot) of the eternal return. It was the last text categorically refuses the designation 'philosopher'. 'Je suis un he would write on Nietzsche.9 "maniaque",' he says. 'Un point, c'est tout.'l6 It is hoped Klossowski is himself a rather idiosyncratic figure whose that this translation of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle will work on Nietzsche constitutes merely one aspect of an provoke renewed interest in Klossowski's remarkable work extraordinary and rather enigmatic career. The older brother in the English-speaking world. of the painter Balthus, he was born in Paris in 1905 into an old Klossowski describes his books on Nietzsche and Sade as Polish family, and in his youth was a close friend and disciple 'essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of of Rainer Maria Rdke and Andre Gide. In the 1930s he problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other'.l7 participated in the Collkge de Sociologie with Michel Leiris, He has developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary to describe Roger Callois and Georges Bataille, with whom he main- such physiognomies, and some of his terminological inno- tained a lifelong friendship. In 1939 he entered a Dominican vations deserve comment here. seminary, where he studied scholasticism and theology, but (1) The term fond has a wide range of meanings in French then underwent a religious crisis during the Occupation. In ('bottom', 'ground', 'depth', 'heart', 'background' and so on), 1947, after having participated in the French Resistance, he and has been translated uniformly here as 'depth'. Klossowslu returned to the lay life, married, and wrote a now-famous almost always uses it in the context of the expression le study of the Marquis de Sade entitled Sade My Neighbor.1° His fond inkchangeable ('the unexchangeable depth') or le fand first novel, The Suspended Vocation (1950), was a transposition unintelligible ('the unintelhgible depth'), which refers to the x Nietxsche and the Vicious Circle Translator's Prefdce xi 'obstinate singularity' of the human soul that is by nature of himself, 'are dictated by one or more obsessional (or non-communicable. "obsidianal") instincts that seek to express them~elves.'~O (2) Impulsion has been rendered throughout as 'impulse', A 'simulacrum', by contrast, is a willed reproduction of and its cognate impulsionnel as 'impulsive'. The term is a phantasm (in a literary, pictorial, or plastic form) that related to the French pulsion, which translates the Freudian simulates this invisible agitation of the soul. 'The simulacrum, term Triebe ('drive'), but which Klossowski uses only in in its imitative sense, is the actualization of something in itself rare instances. Nietzsche himself had recourse to a varied incommunicable and nonrepresentable: the phantasm in its vocabulary to describe what Klossowslu summarizes in the obsessional ~onstraint.'~~If Nietxsche and the Vicious Circle term 'impulse': 'drive' (Triebe), 'desire' (Begierden), 'instinct' is primarily an interpretation of Nietzsche's physiognomy, (Instinke), 'power' (Machte), 'force' (Krafte), 'impulse' (Reixe, it is because it attempts to identi@ the impulses or powers Impulse), 'passion' (Leidenschaften), 'feeling' (Gefiilen),'affect' that exercised their constraint on Nietzsche (notably those (Afekte), 'pathos' (Pathos), and so on.18 The essential point associated with his valetudinary states), the phantasms they for Klossowski is that these terms refer to intensive states of produced (notably the phantasm of the Eternal Return that the soul that are in constant fluctuation. Nietzsche experienced at Sils-Maria in August 1881),and the (3) Klossowski's use of the term 'soul' (dme) is in part various simulacra Nietzsche created to express them. derived from the theologcal literature of the mystics, for (5) Simulacra stand in a complex relationship to what whom the unexchangeable depth of the soul was irreducible Klossowski, in his later works, calls a stkrkotype ('stereo- and uncreated; it eludes the exercise of the created intel- type').22 On the one hand, the invention
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Pierre Klossowski: Works in English and Translations Compiled by Rainer J
    Bibliography Pierre Klossowski: Works in English and Translations compiled by Rainer J. Hanshe FICTION Roberte Ce Soir – and – The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, tr. by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002 [1950 and 1959]). The Baphomet, tr. by Stephen Sartarelli, Sophie Hawkes (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1998 [1965]). Introduction by Michel Foucault. Diana at Her Bath; The Women of Rome, tr. by Stephen Sartarelli, Sophie Hawkes (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1998 [1956 and 1968]). L’ adolescent immortel (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).* Agonist 78 Pierre Klossowski Biblography Pierre Klossowski Bibliography Le Mage du Nord (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1988).* Les derniers travaux de Gulliver (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1987).* Pierre Klossowski Biblography La Ressemblance (Marseille: André Dimanche, 1984).* La Monnaie vivante (Paris: Éric Losfield, 1970).* Pierre Klossowski Biblography Le Souffleur ou le théâtre de société (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1960).* Pierre Klossowski Biblography La Vocation suspendue (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).* PHILOSOPHY & CRITICISM Such a Deathly Desire, tr. by Russell Ford (New York: SUNY Press, 2007). Écrits d’un monomane: Essais 1933-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).* Tableaux vivants: Essais critiques 1936-1983 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).* “Tragedy” and “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution” in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology (1937-39), tr. by Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, tr. by Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). “Sade, or the philosopher-villain” in David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts, Allen S. Weiss, Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 33-61. Sade My Neighbor, tr.
    [Show full text]
  • H-France Review Vol. 19 (December 2019), No. 267 Jonas Hock
    H-France Review Volume 19 (2019) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 19 (December 2019), No. 267 Jonas Hock, Bekenntnis und Ambiguität: Pierre Klossowskis Frühwerk. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 213 pp. Notes and bibliography. 39.00€. (hb). ISBN 9783825368784. Review by Leslie Hill, University of Warwick. Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) is, with little doubt, one of the twentieth century’s most singular and intriguing figures. From the outset, his life was never markedly orthodox. His early years were polyglot and peripatetic. He was born in Paris to the painter, art critic, and stage designer Erich Klossowski and to Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro, a notable painter in her own right (under the name Baladine), both of whom were originally from Poland and had German nationality. Most of his teenage years were spent in Switzerland, alongside his younger brother, the future painter Balthus, and his mother, who, after separating from her husband in 1917, embarked on a lengthy amorous liaison with the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Happily, however, through the good offices of Rilke, and as a result of the latter’s friendship with André Gide, Pierre was finally able to return to France where, among other things, he helped Gide correct the proofs of Les Faux- monnayeurs before being enrolled at the prestigious lycée Janson de Sailly in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1930s, having now acquired French nationality, Klossowski remained a peripheral, eccentric figure, albeit one who found himself at the often controversial cross-section between some of the most influential intellectual movements of the time. In 1932, he began work as secretary to René Laforgue, one of the leading figures in French psychoanalysis, and was encouraged by Marie Bonaparte to emulate her pioneering work on Edgar Allan Poe by undertaking a similar study of the Marquis de Sade, which, when Klossowski’s article was published, caused such scandal he was promptly dismissed.
    [Show full text]
  • Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski Translated from the French by Jordan Levinson
    Living Currency By Pierre Klossowski Translated from the French by Jordan Levinson A letter from Michel Foucault to Pierre Klossowski regarding the book Living Currency, winter 1970 Dear Pierre, I should have written to you as soon as I first read Living Currency; it knocked the wind out of me right away, of course, but still I could have given you more of a reaction. Now, after having reread it several times, I know that it is the greatest book of our times. It gives one the impression that everything that counts one way or another – Blanchot, Bataille, Aside from B. and the M. too – leads straight to it, insidiously: but there it is – it’s been said, and indeed it’s so great a book that everything else falls back and only counts half as much anymore. That was precisely what we should’ve been thinking about: desire, value, and simulacrum – the triangle that dominates us, and, starting so many centuries ago, has constituted us throughout our history. Those who said it then and say it now, Freud-and-Marx, tried desperately for it: now we can laugh about it, and we know why. If it weren’t for you, Pierre, all we’d be able to do is say we’re against those truths that Sade had pointed out once upon a time, truths no one but you has ever really gotten around – nobody, in fact, has ever even come close. You said it, and our fate vanished into thin air. What you have done for us all, Pierre, is truly beyond all thanks and recognition.
    [Show full text]
  • Evil Spirit: Deleuze, Klossowski, Derrida Deleuze, in a Short Essay on Pierre Klossowski's Novel Le Souffleur1, Speaks Of
    Evil spirit: Deleuze, Klossowski, Derrida Deleuze, in a short essay on Pierre Klossowski’s novel Le Souffleur1, speaks of his “system of pure breaths” which, mythical, becomes at a certain point “a philosophy”: It seems that breaths, in themselves and in ourselves, must be conceived of as pure intensities.2 These breaths of pure intensity have the same character as the Nietzschian “relations of force”3 playing within and against one another which Deleuze had earlier invoked in Nietzsche and Philosophy4 and Difference and Repetition5; and it is indeed Klossowski’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return, from his 1957 lecture6 through to his book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle7 (dedicated in the exergue “to Gilles Deleuze”), which drives the movement within this nexus of texts. These are evil spirits or evil breaths – that is, evil to the prevailing philosophical/political order8. Avoiding reference to that perhaps more conventional thread of breath which leads through the Hebrew ruah (as in ruah haqqodech – holy spirit), Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus, German Geist9….etc, these evil breaths have of themselves no being, no existence, but are instead pure intensities defined only in their difference to one another. But this not in a privative sense, not in the sense that they somehow lack being; but rather in the sense that they “are” prior to any 1 and the other parts of his trilogy, Roberte and Le Baphomet. The essay dates from 1965, and is reprinted in Logic of Sense in slightly amended form 2 p297, Deleuze, G ‘Klossowski or bodies-language’ pp280-301 in Logic of Sense (Logique du sens 1969, trans M Lester & C Stivale), NY, Columbia University Press 1990 3 ibid 4 pp47-49, Deleuze, G Nietzsche and Philosophy (Nietzsche et la philosophie 1962, trans H Tomlinson) London, The Athlone Press 1983.
    [Show full text]
  • Living Currency, Pierre Klossowski, Translated by Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar and Daniel
    LIVING CURRENCY ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, Louis Althusser Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, Louis Althusser Being and Event, Alain Badiou Conditions, Alain Badiou Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou Key Writings, Henri Bergson Lines of Flight, Félix Guattari Principles of Non-Philosophy, Francois Laruelle From Communism to Capitalism, Michel Henry Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri The Five Senses, Michel Serres Statues, Michel Serres Rome, Michel Serres Geometry, Michel Serres Leibniz on God and Religion: A Reader, edited by Lloyd Strickland Art and Fear, Paul Virilio Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio Althusser’s Lesson, Jacques Rancière Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancière Dissensus, Jacques Rancière The Lost Thread, Jacques Rancière Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière Félix Ravaisson: Selected Essays, Félix Ravaisson LIVING CURRENCY Followed by SADE AND FOURIER Pierre Klossowski Edited by Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Collection first published in English 2017 © Copyright to the collection Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
    [Show full text]
  • Effects of the Agrégation De Philosophie on Twentieth- Century French Philosophy
    Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth- Century French Philosophy AL A N D . S C HRI ft much attention has been paid to developments in French philosophy over the past half century, and it has been frequently noted that the recent history of French philosophy differs significantly from its counterparts in England, Germany, and the United States. While many reasons for these differences have been suggested, in what follows I would like to suggest that there is an important and unique French institution—one with no equivalent in the English-speaking or German academic systems—that has had a significant impact on developments in French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. This institution is the Agrégation de Philosophie, and its effects are virtually unknown among philosophers outside France. Even within France—while knowledge of and experience with the agréga- tion is part of the intellectual formation and career of virtually every academic educated in France, including every philosopher teaching in a university and the majority of philosophers teaching the classe de philosophie in French lycées—French philosophers themselves seem relatively unaware and uninterested in the history of the agrégation and the effects that this history has had on philosophical practices in France. What I hope to do in the following pages is explain how the agréga- tion de philosophie works, and suggest that its impact on the education of French philosophy students and the teaching corps in both the university and lycée helps explain a number of developments in French philosophy over the past century. I will also explain why the French philosophical tradition differs from its American counterpart in some very significant ways.
    [Show full text]
  • Things Beyond Resemblance
    things beyond resemblance COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS Collected Essays resemblance ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR things beyond on THEODOR W. ADORNO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hullot-Kentor, Robert. Things beyond resemblance : collected essays on Theodor W. Adorno / Robert Hullot-Kentor. p. cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13658-7 (alk. paper) 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969.I.Title. b3199.a34h85 2006 193—dc22 2006017599 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, editors Advisory Board J. M. Bernstein Eileen Gillooly Noël Carroll Thomas S. Grey T. J. Clark Miriam Bratu Hansen Arthur C. Danto Robert Hullot-Kentor Martin Donougho Michael Kelly David Frisby Richard Leppert Boris Gasparov Janet Wolff Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collec- tions, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance.
    [Show full text]
  • Knowledge and History. the Postmodern French Humanities and Deleuze's Nietzscheanism
    Management Inspirations Marek Kwiek Knowledge and History. The Postmodern French Humanities and Deleuze's Nietzscheanism INTRODUCTION - „THE POSTMODERN TURN" guages, war machines or nomad art), I would like to focus on AS „THE NIETZSCHEAN TURN"? his Nietzscheanism which, I suppose, has turned out to be most The general context for this essay is the following: postmodern useful in the humanities generally today. I appreciate his im- philosophy was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, especially in pressive monographs on Hume, Bergson, Kant, Spinoza or his postwar French readings from Bataille to Blanchot to Deleuze Leibniz, as well as the books he co-authored over the years with to Klossowski. It was Nietzsche in these readings who provided Felix Guattari; but it was his book on Nietzsche - Nietzsche et la basic contours of a new self-image of the philosopher (or the philosophie - that exerted the greatest, although hidden influ- humanist, more generally): instead of (modern) thinking about ence, on French, and subsequently American thinkers in recent changing the social and political world, philosophers now found three decades. It was Deleuze who introduced to the intellectual new terrains for thought. no longer associated with History, and arena a new figure of the philosopher: called Nietzschean first less and less associated with politics. From the perspective of and then merely postmodern. It was in Deleuze's book(s) and this essay, it is interesting to think about philosophy through the articles that the whole generation of such seminal writers as lenses of the self-images philosophers (more or less consciously) Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Jean-François Lyotard assume.
    [Show full text]
  • French Nietzscheanism and the Emergence of Poststructuralism
    1 French Nietzscheanism and the Emergence of Poststructuralism Alan D. Schrift Grinnell College 1968 may be the watershed year in recent French cultural history, but by the time French students began tearing up the cobblestones of the Latin Quarter and occupying the Sorbonne, a philosophical revolution that would change the course of French philosophy for the remainder of the 20th century was already well under way: in 1966, Michel Foucault published The Order of Things; that same year, in October, Jacques Derrida presented “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the critically important conference on “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins University, and the following year saw the publication of his triumvirate Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena; and Gilles Deleuze’s two theses – Difference and Repetition and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression – while published in 1968, were completed before the events of May. What these works announce is the posting of structuralism, that is, a distinctly philosophical response to the challenge posed to philosophical thinking by the emergence of structuralism as the dominant intellectual paradigm in the late 1950s, and collectively they set the philosophical agenda for the remainder of the century in terms of what we, outside France, refer to as “French philosophy.” There are a number of stories that might be told about the emergence of structuralism, but I’d like to highlight one – namely, that structuralism rose in popularity proportionate to the fall from hegemony within the French academic and intellectual world of philosophy as the master discourse.
    [Show full text]
  • Beauvoir, Merleau·Ponty, and the Phenomenology of Relation
    BEAUVOIR, MERLEAU·PONTY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELATION This essay addresses the way in which Simone de Beauvoir's first novel, L'invitee (1943), anticipates certain thematics in Le deuxieme sexe but does so in a more phenomenological and less dialectical fashion. Like many of her contemporaries (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski), Beauvoir wrote both philosophy and fiction, and often these two genres are hard to distinguish. Just as L'invitee is frequently read as a mouthpiece for existentialist philosophy, so Le deuxieme sexe is itself a mouthpiece for a continued investigation of some of the themes first introduced in fictional form in L'invitee, most notably-and what will be at issue here--a phenomenology of relation to others. Whereas L'invitee concems an intricate trio of relationships modeled after Beauvoir's own experiences with Sartre and Olga Kosakiewicz, most of Beauvoir's discussions of relationships in Le deuxielne sexe concern the two-person couple, primarily heterosexual. While Le deuxieme sexe overtly addresses woman's relation to man in the couple, as well as spaces where woman is independent of this construct, L'invitee, through the inner reflections of the character Fran<;oise, explores more broadly woman's relation to others. It is this phenomenology of how to perceive and relate to others, a phenomenology blatantly at issue in L'invitee, that is, 1 will argue, the unresolved subtext of Le deuxieme sexe. Merleau-Ponty on L'invitee Of signal ill).portance to this argument is Maurice Merleau­ Ponty's exceptional response to L'invitee, "Le roman et la metaphysique," collected in 1948 in Sens et non-sens, just before the appearance of Le deuxieme sexe in 1949.
    [Show full text]
  • SMITH-DELEUZE 9780748643332 PRINT.Indd I 16/04/2012 16:37 SMITH-DELEUZE 9780748643332 PRINT.Indd Ii 16/04/2012 16:37 Essays on Deleuze
    ‘For the last fifteen years, all of us have read one or two of Daniel Smith’s remarkable essays on Deleuze. But now, we have all of them. Finally and thankfully, we have Essays on Deleuze, a book that will become immediately essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century continental philosophy.’ Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University ‘For many years now Daniel Smith’s work has led us through Deleuze’s philosophy with an unmatched clarity. It is thanks to him that the many historical connections of that philosophy have been grasped in their full rigour and depth. No researcher on Deleuze’s philosophy can pass this work by. No reader can fail to benefit from an engagement with Smith’s groundbreaking interpretation.’ James Williams, Professor of European Philosophy, University of Dundee Essays on Deleuze gathers twenty of Smith’s new and classic essays into one volume for the first time. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and Daniel W. Smith is widely recognized to be one of his most penetrating interpreters, as well as an important philosophical voice in his own right. Combining his most important pieces over the last fifteen years along with two new essays, this book is Smith’s definitive treatise on Deleuze. The essays are divided into four sections, which cover Deleuze’s use of the history of philosophy, an overview of his philosophical system, an analysis of several Deleuzian concepts, as well as an assessment of his position within contemporary philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Critique After Nietzsche Columbia University 2016-2017 Seminar L
    CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THOUGHT: CRITIQUE AFTER NIETZSCHE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016-2017 SEMINAR L-8866 S (CROSS LISTED IN ICLS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE) Professor Bernard E. Harcourt Professor Jesús R. Velasco Law/Political Science/ICLS Latin American and Iberian Cultures/ICLS Columbia University Columbia University Jerome Greene Hall, Suite 603 301 Casa Hispánica, 612 W116th Street [email protected] [email protected] (212) 854-1997 (212) 854-8486 THURSDAYS, 6:00 PM TO 9 PM 14 SESSIONS SPREAD OVER THE 2016-2017 ACADEMIC YEAR This seminar will be cross-listed in Law, Political Science, LAIC, and ICLS Admission will require a paragraph statement of interest and instructor consent. The first class will meet on Tuesday, August 30, 2016. Seminar Description Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great masters of suspicion from the nineteenth century, radically challenged the way we think and engage the world. Nietzsche’s writings and thought had a tremendous influence across the disciplines, upending many— especially philosophy, political thought, philology, and critical theory—and significantly marking others, such as law, anthropology, and the humanities. A number of contemporary critical thinkers in the 20th century—Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Ali Shariati, and others—drew inspiration from Nietzsche’s writings and developed a strand of critical theory that has had great influence in disciplines as varied as history, law, philology, and the theory of science. These twentieth century thinkers helped forge a unique Nietzschean strand of contemporary critical thought. Seminar Syllabus: Critique After Nietzsche (Harcourt & Velasco) ………………………………………………………………………………………………….
    [Show full text]