Klossowski's Semiotic of Intensity

Time, Language and The Vicious Circle

Conor Husbands

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783110777697
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110659146
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Despite the increasing prominence of Klossowski's philosophical work, there exists no full-length or sustained treatment of his writings on Nietzsche. This study analyses Klossowski's semiotic of intensity as a conceptual foundation for his philosophy and interpretation of Nietzsche, grounded in the central principles of his theory of signs. It then explores its implications for the categories of chance, causality, individuation and time, drawing a series of parallels between Klossowski's texts and the work of other scholars, such as McTaggart, Eco, D. Z. Albert, M. Silverstein, Meillassoux, N. Land and J. Stambaugh. Throughout, this work lends accessibility to Klossowski's often opaque and idiosyncratic style. It should be relevant to anyone interested in Klossowski's philosophical work, in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship, or in the 20th Century linguistic and existential Continental tradition.

1 Introduction

At the end of it the reader … experiences utter vertigo … Reading the text afresh in translation in 1999 I had the distinct feeling that its readers still lie in the future.^1

Klossowski has a rare understanding of the details of Nietzsche’s thinking and of what is truly at stake in it. His book takes us further into the treacherous depths of Nietzsche’s thought than any other study I know.^2

When Ansell-Pearson states of Klossowski’s work that its true readers lie in the future, we must declare that he is in this regard profoundly, and doubly, correct. Not only is this current study doubtless as incomplete as the scant scholarly attention committed thus far to reaching an understanding of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle[a]. It is incomplete also because of the latter’s fundamental contentions, and what they imply for any possible reading of this text.

In Ansell-Pearson’s description, futurity has a dual role. First of all, it refers to a contingent fact: the absence of scholarly attention directed at Klossowski’s work, which might one day be redressed with a more sustained treatment than has yet appeared – a treatment which in turn might engage with the myriad aspects of the text which have escaped most commentators, namely the conception of intensity, the theory of signs, and the logical relations between this theory and the metaphysics of causality and time. This construal of futurity arises from even a cursory survey of any philosophical literature which seeks to respond to Klossowski’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Despite its reverberation through a generation of Continental thinkers, and the overt attention of some of the most recognisable among them, such as Foucault and Deleuze, there have been no sustained or systematic attempts to engage with it over more than a few pages within a work with a broader focus. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle[b] has been addressed sporadically, in short sections and articles which discuss particular themes in isolation, and which do not typically aim to deliver analytical exegesis.

Even putting aside breadth and depth of engagement, from a thematic standpoint, few if any of these emphasise the semiotic underpinning of the work and the importance of these principles for both Klossowski and Nietzsche. Daniel W. Smith, following Deleuze, rightly emphasises the central notions of impulses and phantasms, and their relations to simulacra and stereotypes. James and Faulkner, by contrast, emphasise Klossowski’s philosophy of the body, and its relation to the principle of identity.³ Ansell-Pearson himself leverages the distinction between intensity and culture in order to argue for an unavowed kinship between Klossowski and Bergson.⁴ It is the contention of the present work, by contrast, that any conscientious account of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle[c], and its concomitant thematic recapitulations in Such a Deathly Desire, Sade My Neighbour and other texts in Klossowski’s philosophical writings, must fulfil three conditions:

1. Grounding the metaphysical content of Klossowski’s work in his theory of signs, in whose terms this content is defined;
2. Stating and explaining this metaphysical content, including its implications for the philosophical categories of individuality, chance, causality and time;
3. Expositing the fundamental commitments and theses advanced by Klossowski in analytically transparent fashion, to the maximum extent possible.

The motivation for the present work is the observation that, considering all of these important readings tendered thus far, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that no project fulfilling these conditions yet exists. Thus, in the first sense of Ansell-Pearson’s term, it lies ahead, in the future. However, as we have already stated, this term is subject to a double meaning: it refers not only to a contingent state of scholarship or academia, but to a necessary result of the Nietzschean experience and doctrines.

Although they must be defended from synopsis according to the “fashionable tropes” of “the incompleteness of meaning” and “the infinite play of interpretation,” meaning, signification and interpretation are notions which stand in a close connection to the vicious circle which is the subject of Klossowski’s work, underwriting just the kind of futurity Ansell-Pearson predicates of Klossowski’s authentic reader. The infinite semiosis of signs, the indeterminacy of the position of events corresponding to them, the discontinuity of the moments in which these events inhere, and the deactualisation of the individual living them –all of these phenomena Nietzsche experienced as manifestations of the vicious circle, and all of these phenomena contribute to the kind of futurity which befits all possible readings of Klossowski’s work, including the currently attempted reading, as it would even the most fastidious reading.

Following this introduction, the second chapter of this work elaborates what it takes to be the central principles of Klossowski’s theory of signs. Signs are generated from fluctuations of intensity – a notion with a rich philosophical lineage which Klossowski will modify and develop. Fluctuations of intensity obey a tripartite dynamic: in fluctuating, an intensity divides, separates from itself, and eventually rejoins itself.⁵ This is what is experienced in the “moments of rise and fall”⁶ which, for Klossowski as for Smith⁷ and others, populate the Nietzschean experience. The second chapter analyses this description of Klossowski’s semiotic, and explores its main consequences. It situates the underlying conception of intensity in contrast to its predominant forerunners, both philosophical and scientific. This will lead us to five marks of intensity:

1. as the unity of a sensation;
2. as quality;
3. as confused (in the Leibnizian sense);
4. as divisible only with qualitative change;
5. as a hierarchy.

We shall then argue that if this intensity is to give rise to a theory of signs, it can only be understood in relation to what Klossowski refers to as the semiotic of the institutional code. The institutional code is parasitic on fluctuations, but modifies them in two main ways: it abbreviates and falsifies them with its representations. This code, he claims, is responsible for the experience of space, by virtue of the way in which signs are indexed to specific locations (in spatial experience, and indeed in time conceived as spatial). In itself, by contrast, intensity accommodates none of these features. This conclusion will also explain the critique of intentionality which is a constant refrain of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle:

The day human beings learn how to behave as phenomena devoid of intention – for every intention at the level of the human being always implies its own conservation, its continued existence – on that day, a new creature would declare the integrity of existence.⁸

The forces we improperly name ‘Chaos’ have no intention whatsoever. Nietzsche’s unavowable project 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.⁹

Subsequent to the analysis of this semiotic, these statements will form the basis for the esoteric typology of morals Klossowski attributes to Nietzsche – the notions of singular and gregarious forces, robust and decadent types, and the many other oppositional pairs of symptoms which allowed Nietzsche to formulate speculative diagnoses of his own physical state, and by analogy his prognosis for the species.

Klossowski’s semiotic of intensity, whilst doubtless among the eccentricities of recent decades’ philosophy of language, is not entirely without precedent. In particular, we will see several analogies begin to emerge between it and the work of C. S. Peirce, that of Eco, and even that of Wittgenstein. Both Peirce and Klossowski endorse the principle of infinite semiosis, as well as the premise that signs relate to the objects which determine them through a hierarchy of interpretation: chains of signs forming a hierarchy. But whereas in Peirce’s semiotic these objects are rigorously determinative of the meanings of these signs, that of Klossowski replaces such objects with the “phantasmic coherence”¹⁰ of the impulses – ultimately, that is, with no determinative object at all, and only deferment and indeterminacy.

If these semiotic considerations are indeed the foundation of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and its counterparts such as Polytheism and Parody, how do they entail the metaphysical content which comprises the remainder of the book? If Kellner is correct in taking each doctrine as “a translation into language”¹¹ of Nietzsche’s “most profound experiences which further put in question major philosophical concepts such as the self, life, fate, necessity, causality, and other key conceptions in the Western philosophical arsenal,”¹² then the question inevitably arises as to the provenance of these attacks on the tradition. The remaining chapters of the current study take this question as their guiding line of enquiry.

First of all, fluctuations of intensity, the starting point of the semiotic, force us to reevaluate our conception of the subject, self, or ego. The self Klossowski defines in the following way: “There is one sign … that always corresponds to either the highest or lowest degree of intensity: namely, the self, the I, the subject of all our propositions.”¹³

This definition, and its ramifications, governs Klossowski’s position as an interpreter of the Nietzschean critique of the self relative to the interpretations of Heidegger or Deleuze, for instance, or relative to psychoanalytical construals. The third chapter of this study discusses this position.

As an initial prerequisite for this discussion, it is necessary to resolve the apparent antinomy inherent in this definition: the self, according to Klossowski, corresponds simultaneously to opposite extremes of intensity (its “highest” as well as “lowest degree”), with opposite characteristics. The self is both the highest and lowest degree of intensity. Providing an explanation of this strange predicament will lead us to elucidate the relationship between intensity, impulses and forces, the body which they constitute and the self which is para...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Semiotic of Intensity
• 3 The Sign of the Self
• 4 Possibility and Fortuity in the Vicious Circle
• 5 Temporality of the Vicious Circle
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Person Index