by Daniel Smith
This is not dissimilar to Heidegger's claim that a philosopher thinks only one thought (in his case, the thought of “being”), or Bergson's claim that every philosopher has one intuition, and that the vastness of a philosopher's œuvre can be explained by the incommensurability between this intuition and the means they have at their disposal for expressing it.29 In itself, the phantasm is incommunicable because it is unintelligible and unspeakable; but it is because it is unintelligible and incommunicable that it is also obsessive. Unintelligibility, incommunicability, and obsession are themselves the intensive components of Klossowski's concept of the phantasm.
Deleuze has provided a penetrating analysis of the nature of the phantasm in his book Proust and Signs—although he does not use the term “phantasm”—notably in the context of Proust's discussions of love (PS 26–38). Falling in love is an intensity, a high tonality of the soul, and our initial temptation is to seek for the meaning of that intensity, its explanation, in the object of our love, as if the beloved somehow held the secret to the intensity of our passion. But inevitably, the other person disappoints us on this score, and we then turn to ourselves to uncover the secret, thinking that perhaps the intensity was sparked by subjective associations we made within ourselves between the beloved and, perhaps, someone else (other lovers, our parents) or something else (a place, a moment). But this too fails. For what lies behind our loves—behind both the objectivist temptation and the subjectivist compensation—is precisely an incommunicable phantasm (which Proust himself called an “essence” rather than a phantasm). The fact is that our loves tend to repeat themselves; we fall in love with the same “type,” we fall into the same patterns, we seem to make the same mistakes—our loves seem to form a series in which something is being repeated, but always with a slight difference. This “something” is nothing other than our phantasm, which we repeat obsessively, but which in itself remains incommunicable, and continues its secret work in us, despite all our attempts to decipher it. But as Deleuze notes, this amorous repetition is never a sterile or naked repetition of a prior identity; it is always a clothed or masked repetition of a difference, a repetition that is always productive of new differences.
To repeat is to behave, but in relation to something unique or singular, which has nothing similar or equivalent … The mask is the true subject of repetition. It is because repetition differs in nature from representation in that what is repeated cannot be represented, but must always be signified, masked by what signifies it, itself masking what it signifies. (DR 17–18)
What Klossowski calls a simulacrum, as we shall see, is a mask that, denouncing itself as such, traces the contours of what it dissimulates—namely, the phantasm as such. Proust himself says that it is only in art that such essences or phantasms are revealed (not in the object, not in the subject); it is only in art that the time we have lost in our loves can be regained and recovered.
Readers of Klossowski's fictions will be familiar with the phantasm that was the primary object of his own phantasmic obsession: the figure of Roberte, which he calls (in his postface to the trilogy, The Laws of Hospitality) the “unique sign” of his work.30 Since the phantasm is by nature incommunicable, the subject who submits himself to its irresistible constraint can never have done with describing it. Klossowski's narrative work is thus traversed by a single repetition, carried along by one and the same movement. In effect, it is always the same scene that is repeated. The rape of Roberte in Roberte ce soir, the theatrical representations in Le Souffleur, the vision of the goddess in Diana at her Bath, the description of the statue of St. Therese in The Baphomet31—all articulate one and the same phantasm: the woman discovering the presence of her body under the gaze or the violence of a third party, who, whether an angel or a demon, communicates a guilty voluptuousness. Klossowski describes the entirety of his literary output in terms of his relation to this fundamental obsession: “I am under the dictation [dictée] of an image. It is the vision that demands that I say everything the vision gives to me.”32
What, then, was Nietzsche's fundamental phantasm? Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche's most intense phantasm was the eternal return. (One should note, however, that the eternal return was not Nietzsche's only phantasm—Greece was a phantasm for the young Nietzsche, and Klossowski does not overlook the phantasms revealed in Nietzsche's own loves, such as Lou Salomé and Cosima Wagner.) But Nietzsche's phantasm was precisely not the eternal return as one of the explicit doctrines of Nietzsche's philosophy, nor even the eternal return as a thought. It was, rather, the eternal return as a lived experience, which was revealed to Nietzsche in Sils-Maria in August 1881, and experienced as an impulse, an intensity, a high tonality of the soul—and indeed as the highest possible intensity of the soul. It was with the revelation of the eternal return that Nietzsche's quest to find the highest, the most powerful affect, the healthiest and most vigorous impulse, the most affirmative affect, was fulfilled. “Thoughts,” writes Nietzsche, “are the signs of a play and combat of affects; they always depend on their hidden roots.”33 On this score, Klossowski emphasizes the impression of strangeness felt by both Salomé and Franz Overbeck, his closest friend, when he revealed the eternal return to them—the disturbing tone of his hoarse voice, the spectacular character of the communication. Although Nietzsche would seek numerous forms of expression for the eternal return—ethical, scientific, or cosmological—none of them was capable of expressing the fundamental incommunicability of the phantasm itself. This is why Klossowski says that the eternal return is not a doctrine, but rather the simulacrum of a doctrine.
SIMULACRA AND THEIR STEREOTYPES
This, then, brings us to the third term in Klossowski's vocabulary: the simulacrum.34 A “simulacrum” is a willed reproduction of a phantasm (in a literary, pictorial, or plastic form) that simulates this invisible agitation of the soul. “The simulacrum, in its imitative sense, is the actualization of something in itself incommunicable and nonrepresentable: the phantasm in its obsessional constraint.”35 The term simulacrum comes from the Latin simulare (to copy, represent, feign), and during the late Roman Empire it referred to the statues of the gods that often lined the entrance to a city. More precisely, the simulacrum was an object that, although fabricated by humans, was the measure of the invisible power of the gods. According to Hermes Trismegistes, artists cannot animate the status of the gods by themselves; they have to invoke the souls of the gods, they have to seduce a demonic force, through imposture, in order to capture it and enclose it in an idol or image. Simulacrum is thus a sculptural term, which Klossowski applies, by extension, to pictorial, verbal, and written representations. Simulacra are verbal, plastic, or written transcriptions of phantasms, artifacts which count as (or are equivalent to, can be exchanged for) phantasms. In Klossowski, these demonic forces no longer refer to gods and goddesses, but to impulses and affects; more precisely, gods and goddesses are themselves simulacra of impulses and affects. In Klossowski, mimesis is not a servile imitation of the visible, but the simulation of the unrepresentable.36
For this reason, simulacra stand in a complex relationship to what Klossowski, in his later works, calls a “stereotype.”37 On the one hand, the invention of simulacra always presupposes a set of prior stereotypes—what Klossowski calls, in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, “the code of everyday signs”—which express the gregarious aspect of lived experience in a form already schematized by the habitual usages of feeling and thought (the herd). In this sense, the code of everyday signs necessarily inverts and falsifies the singularity of the soul's intensive movements by making them intelligible:
How can one give an account of an irreducible depth of sensibility except by acts that betray it? It would seem that such an irreducible depth can never be reflected on or grasped save by acts perpetrated outside of thought—unreflected or ungraspable acts.38
Klossowski explains the movement that, through the phantasm, translates the movement of the impulses into the code of everyday signs:
>
For the impulses to become a will at the level of consciousness, the latter must give the impulse an exciting state as an aim, and thus must elaborate the signification of what, for the impulse, is a phantasm: an anticipated excitation, and thus a possible excitation according to the schema determined by previously experienced excitations … A phantasm, or several phantasms, can be formed in accordance with the relations among impulsive forces … In this manner, something new and unfamiliar is misinterpreted as something already known. (NVC 47)
On the other hand, Klossowski also speaks of a “science of stereotypes” in which the stereotype, by being “accentuated” to the point of excess, can itself bring about a critique of its own gregarious interpretation of the phantasm: “Practiced advisedly, the institutional stereotypes (of syntax) provoke the presence of what they circumscribe; their circumlocutions conceal the incongruity of the phantasm but at the same time trace the outline of its opaque physiognomy.”39 Klossowski's prose is itself an example of this science of stereotypes. By his own admission, his own works are written in a “‘conventionally’ classical syntax” that makes systematic use of the literary tenses and conjunctions of the French language, giving it a decidedly erudite, precious, and even “bourgeois” tone, but in an exaggerated manner that brings out its phantasmic structure. As Klossowski writes, “the simulacrum effectively simulates the constraint of the phantasm only by exaggerating the stereotypical schemes: to add to the stereotype and accentuate it is to bring out the obsession of which it constitutes the replica.”40 If Klossowski gave up writing after 1970, it is at least in part because, in attempting to express the incommunicable phantasm, he wound up preferring the eloquence of bodily gestures and images—what he calls “corporeal idioms”—to the medium of words and syntax. “There is but one universal authentic language: the exchange of bodies through the secret language of incorporeal signs.”41
But whatever medium Klossowski uses, we can sense the vertiginous nature of this game between simulacra and stereotypes. If simulacra later became the object of demonology in Christian thought, it is because the simulacrum is not the “opposite” of the gregarious stereotype—just as the demonic is not the opposite of the divine, Satan is not the Other, the pole farthest from God, the absolute antithesis—but something much more bewildering: the Same, the perfect double, the exact semblance, the doppelgänger, the angel of light whose deception is so complete that it is impossible to tell the imposter (Satan, Lucifer) apart from the “reality” (God, Christ), just as Plato reaches the point, in the Sophist, where Socrates and the Sophist are rendered indiscernible. Klossowski's concern is not the problem of the Other, but the problem of the Same. The demonic simulacrum thus stands in stark contrast to the theological symbol, which is always iconic, the analogical manifestation of a transcendent instance.42 Since incoherence is the law of the Klossowski's universe, he who dissimulates the most is he who most resembles his invisible model.
THE TRIPARTITE ECONOMY OF THE SOUL: THE EUPHORIA AT TURIN
What one finds in Klossowski, then, is a kind of threefold circuit in the economy of the soul:
1. first, there are impulses, with their rises and falls in intensity, their elations and depressions, which have no meaning or goal in themselves
2. second, these impulses give rise to phantasms, which constitute the incommunicable depth and singularity of the individual soul (the “ego” or the “I” is itself a phantasm that ascribes a unity to our impulsive life in the service of the species or the herd)
3. third, under the obsessive constraint of the phantasm, simulacra are produced, which are the reproduction or repetition of the phantasm (through the exaggeration of stereotypes).
Impulses, phantasms, simulacra-stereotypes: a threefold circuit. If Klossowski presents Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle as primarily an interpretation of Nietzsche's physiognomy, it is because it attempts to follow this threefold circuit as it is expressed in Nietzsche's thought:
1. Klossowski first attempts to describe the impulses or intensive powers that exercised their constraint on Nietzsche (notably those associated with his valetudinary states)
2. he then identifies the phantasms they produced in him, notably the phantasm of the Eternal Return, as the highest and most affirmative affect of the soul; and
3. finally, he presents an exposition of the various simulacra Nietzsche created to express them: namely, the concepts, doctrines, and figures of what we know as Nietzsche's “philosophy.”
What is the aim or goal of this threefold circuit, its intention?
Nietzsche's unavowable project [writes Klossowski] is to act without intention: the impossible morality. Now the total economy of this intentionless universe creates intentional beings. The species “man” is a creation of this kind—pure chance—in which the intensity of forces is inverted into intention: the work of morality. The function of the simulacrum is to lead human intention back to the intensity of forces, which generate phantasms. (NVC 140)
But what exactly does this mean: “to lead human intention back to the intensity of forces”? On this question, perhaps the most important text in Klossowski's book on Nietzsche is the penultimate chapter entitled “The Euphoria of Turin,” which examines Nietzsche's breakdown and madness through an analysis of the letters and notes Nietzsche wrote during the week of 31 December 1888 through 6 January 1889.
There are two obviously problematic readings of Nietzsche's madness: either madness is taken to be the logical and internal outcome of Nietzsche's philosophy, or else it was produced by an external cause (a syphilitic infection), having nothing whatsoever to do with the philosophy as such. Klossowski cuts a middle path between these two extremes. No one, he says, was more aware than Nietzsche of the tension between the incoherence of the impulses and the coherence of the subject [suppôt] that makes these impulses a property of the self. This is, at least in part, what Nietzsche meant by the famous phrase of Ecce Homo, “Dionysus versus the Crucified”: Dionysus is the god of metamorphoses, of affirmation, who affirms the healthy and strong impulses in all their incoherence, whereas the Crucified is the god of the weak, of gregariousness, of the herd, the defender of the responsible self. This is why Klossowski emphasizes the importance of Nietzsche's migraines, for it was precisely when the lucidity of Nietzsche's brain was suspended that his self would be broken down into a kind of lucidity that was much more vast, yet more brief and fragile—a lucidity in which these mute forces and impulses of the body were awakened (NVC 31). By examining these alterations in his valetudinary states, Klossowski suggests, Nietzsche was searching for a new type of cohesion between his thought and the body as a corporealizing thought—that is, the body no longer as a property of the self, but as the fortuitous locus of impulses. Nietzsche, in other words, wanted to use his own lucidity to penetrate the shadows of the impulses. But how can one remain lucid if, in order to penetrate the shadows of the impulses, one must destroy the very locus of lucidity: namely, the self? For a long time, Nietzsche was content to observe this to-and-fro movement between the incoherence of the impulses (intensity) and the coherence of the self (intention).
What happened at Turin? It was the moment of apotheosis, where Nietzsche finally led “human intention back to the intensity of forces.” “Nietzsche,” writes Klossowski, “was never more lucid than during these final days in Turin. What he was conscious of was the fact that he had ceased to be Nietzsche, that he had been, as it were, emptied of his person” (NVC 235). Nietzsche did not suddenly lose his reason and begin to identify himself with strange personages; more precisely, Nietzsche the professor had had lost (or abrogated) his identity, and lucidly abandoned himself to the incoherence of the impulses, each of which now received a proper name of its own. The fact that he signed several of his letters as “The Crucified,” that he chose the physiognomy of Christ to mask the loss of his own identity, shows the enormity of Nietzsche's ecstasy: Dionysus and the Crucified are no longer in opposition, but in a tenuous equilibrium. Ni
etzsche's delirium, in short, passed through a series of intensive states, in which his impulses each received various proper names, some of which designated his allies, or manic rises in intensity (Prado, Lesseps, Chambige, “honest criminals”), while others designated his enemies, or depressive falls in intensity (Caiaphas, Wilhelm Bismarck, the “antisemites”)—a chaos of pure oscillations that was ultimately invested by “all the names of history” (and not, as certain psychoanalysts would have it, by “the name of the father”).
The seeming lucidity of Nietzsche's madness was attested to, curiously, by two of Nietzsche's closest friends. On 21 January 1890, one year after the collapse in Turin, Peter Gast, Nietzsche's amanuensis, visited his friend at the asylum in Jena.
He did not look very ill [Gast later wrote]. I almost had the impression that his mental disturbance consists of no more than a heightening of the humorous antics he used to put on for an intimate circle of friends. He recognized me immediately, embraced and kissed me, was highly delighted to see me, and gave me his hand repeatedly as if unable to believe I was really there.
But while going for long walks with Nietzsche every day, Gast could see that he did not want to be “cured”: “it seemed—horrible though this is—as if Nietzsche were merely feigning madness, as if he were glad for it to have ended this way.” These observations correspond with Franz Overbeck's feelings when he came to see Nietzsche a month later, in February 1890: