Pierre Klossowski – författare

'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

Now published in English, this work takes a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche's thought and his life. The author emphasizes the centrality of the notion of "eternal return" for understanding Nietzsche's propensities for self-denial, self-reputation and self-consumption. Nietzsche's ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, he made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche's belief that questions of truth and morality are basically questions of power and fitness, resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

Together, these two novels comprise one of the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary fiction. Both feature Octave, an elderly cleric, his striking, austere, yet sensual young wife, Roberte and their nephew, Antoine. In Roberte Ce Soir, the heroine engages in a ritual of hospitality, designed by Octave, whereby she offers herself to any guest who shows desire for her. This device becomes a circular game of realizing one's own identity through the reaction to a third person since, Klossowski asserts, the body is the envelope of the soul and its every expression is a permissible condition of spiritual progress.In The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the scholastic aspect of Roberte Ce Soir gives way to a more complex story composed of situations that throw a strange light on human behaviour. Roberte is now a socially and politically well-situated member of the official council for censorship. Dissatisfied by marital legitimacy, she discovers the world of sexual perversion and imposes on herself the duty of exploring it - the ultimate goal of her scandalous yet farcical task is the achievement of complete freedom.

Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment.Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines-including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy-Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities.

''I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.'' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski''s La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

''I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.'' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski''s La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Die hier vereinten Texte der führenden Köpfe des französischen Poststrukturalismus machen mit einer bis heute ungewohnten Herangehensweise an das schwer zu fassende OEuvre Friedrich Nietzsches bekannt. Die Autoren dieser Sammlung stellen insgesamt die Legitimität in Frage, Nietzsches Werk nach der Logik des Gegensatzes von Metaphysik und Nicht-Metaphysik, Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung, Philosophie und Literatur zu bestimmen. Das Buch lässt eine Diskussion des »guten« oder »bösen« Nietzsche hinter sich, stattdessen führen die hier versammelten Lektüren Denkbewegungen vor, die zeigen, wie fruchtbar Nietzsches Schriften für ein Denken der Vielfalt und Differenz zu machen ist und welche Impulse auch heute noch von seinen Schriften ausgehen. Hamachers Sammlung will Nietzsche aus ideologisierenden Festschreibungen lösen und dazu beitragen, Nietzsche erneut zu lesen.

Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment.Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines-including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy-Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities.