ImpulsIve Forces In and agaInst Words

ALPHONSO LINGIS
In his lecture nietzsche, le polythisme et la parodie given at the collge de philosophie 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 definitive elucidation in the phenomenology 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 In his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts nietzsche left unpublished and which date from the years of The Gay Science onward.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, tolerance, 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 experienced inwardly. now Klossowski presented nietzsches exposition of sensory experience 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 final 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 fluids and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess energies; 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 become multiple. For the phenomenology of edmund Husserl and maurice merleau-ponty, the movements of perception are intentional; they are from the first correlative with objects, or, for merleau-ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intelligible 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?

60

diacritics 35.1: 6070

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 reactive; confronting what is not from the first meaningful but resists or empowers, they laugh and weep, bless and curse. And it is these multiple and conflicting 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, reflections, 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 fleeand come back.1 they 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 formulates what individuals ask for from one another, out of their needs and wantsindividuals 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 dangers an organism had to judge quickly according to often fleeting 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, simplifications, reductions to identity. A multiplicity of appearances succeeding one another can be grasped as the same thing only by a viewer who posits 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 afflicted, consecrating and desecrating, upon the event that quickens 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 fixed is communicable to all who share the same code of everyday signsor specialized signs of a specific discipline. the essence in which all the properties and behaviors of the object are integrated yields for the mind a specific sense of dispassionate serenity. But for Nietzsche this serenity does not result from a resolution of the conflicting impulsive forces that actively engage the sensory event. Instead, passing to objective conscious thought that fixes the event with a word or set of words comes when the conflict of those multiple 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 finite, vulnerable and mortal, existence opens to the environment in order to find 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 and dissipated in the void; they are forces only in contact with other forces. When they encounter, fortuitously, an array of forces in the environment upon which they are quick1. Nietzsche, thus spoke Zarathustra [The Convalescent 3.2].

diacritics / summer 2005

61

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 field; 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 find an orientation, a direction, and the goal they may, or may not, then designate was not the final cause that first launched them as intentions. the useful end is a pale schema projected in consciousness 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 the event [Gay Science 360]. It is self-deception because every single time something is done with a purpose in view, something fundamentally different and other occurs [Will to Power 666]. 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 Science 354].) 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 superficial part of ourselvesfor our needs are intermittent and produced, for the most part, by the leakage and combustion of substance 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 generating excess energies. Yet all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual. . . . But as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be [Gay Science 354]. 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 upon the shark. It is afterwards that he will assign a goal to this plungeto test my swimming 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 conflicting 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 fish 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 their goals, that the identity of the I is produced in language which itself is driven by needy and vulnerable impulsesthe worst and most superficial part of ourselves. Can we acquire this lucidity, outside of and above what is called conscious thought, and live

62

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 knowledge 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 find yourself blessing the universe and her because she has made you laugh and laugh at yourself, until she has made you cry, until you find 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 no self-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, apparently, 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 find that this lucid thought finds its final formula in the incommunicable phantasm of the eternal return, and that its lucidity bears an intrinsic relationship to the delirium nietzsche confronted from the beginning and to which he finally succumbed. From 1877 to 1881 nietzsche suffered from periodic crises; periods of euphoria in which he devoted himself feverishly to his reflections 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 difficult to speak, alternating with furious attacks (the last one made me vomit for three days and nights, I longed for death!)2 In his letters, he speaks triumphantly of his writing 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 simplification, a falsification of our life in fact lived by the forces of multiple impulses, this interpretation had enabled the species to surface and had been driven by vital impulses. But now Nietzsche finds 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 organs of an organism. But of themselves these forces are multiple and conflicting and, as impulses, exist in exercise, in the striving to release and discharge themselves. they thus periodically disrupt the composition of the organism; they break through the individuality 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].

diacritics / summer 2005

63

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. . . .3 He had long combated the culture of his time and abhorred all that his mother and sister represented; now he exercises a suspicion, 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 tranquil 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 inorganic 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 themselves 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 impulses. 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 because 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 filter them. New excitations are filtered by the traces of earlier excitations; they enter as the same as, or else as different from, the habitual. these traces of earlier sensations ensure the permanence of the I, and when the I puts an end to thinking in order to act, it closes off the afflux 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 position) disappears. The person who decides to laugh or to suffer finds impulses to laugh or painful impulses already there and but adds a representation to themand the decision 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 organism 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 reaffirm its own cohesion and recapitulate itself. From the retrospective view of its own cohesion it grasps the physical 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 filters the excitations that reach it as so many messages from the multiple impulses of the body decodes them in language, that is, in what Klossowski calls the code of everyday signs, which exterior code has been installed in it. self-con3. Letter to Franziska Nietzsche, mid-July 1881 [Werke 3: 1170].

64

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 abbreviations of signs, assimilate the similar to identical. these signs are themselves activated by impulses engendering phantasms which can reexcite traces that are already significant 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 modified 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 the messages coming from those impulses, such that he does not see the conflict of impulses or what is happening that makes him write. the I becomes the grammatical subject of propositions, declarations about whatever 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 function 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 abbreviating system, to intentional states of the I. What nietzsche now seeks is a new and different lucidity, a thought that elucidates the 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 intentional 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 common 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 he lived in an explosive euphoria. several times, he wrote to peter gast, he could not leave his room, so inflamed 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 filling the eyes of a child overcome with laughter. and then, suddenly, in the intensity of this euphoria, he received the vision, hallucination 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 confirmation and seal? [Gay Science 341]. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra nietzsche shows in joy a will for the eternal return: o my friends have you ever said Yes to a single joy? . . . What does joy not want? . . . this world, oh you know it! [the drunken song 4.10].

diacritics / summer 2005

65

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 flux and reflux of intensities 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 innumerable 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 first efforts to communicate his ecstatic vision, in The Gay Science and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the I in a hallucinatory vision experiences itself as multiplied infinitely (does not the I maintain itself by an indefinite reinstatement of its identity?) and that a demon converts this into an indefinite reinstatement of the same I across the cycle of infinite time. But he also says that this very vision will make you each time other than what you are. this succession of metamorphoses, making the same life each time different, Klossowski sees finally affirmed 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 exultant moment of the vision of eternal return is a moment that required all previous moments, all the metamorphoses of previous states and lives; it affirms them and affirms 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 return to the I designated and delimited in the code of everyday signs, who shall seek to explicate 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 objective, 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 physiognomies, it issues in the image or phantasm of the universe as a perpetual flight from itself, and a perpetual re-finding 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 common 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 teaches that 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

66

Diana Cooper My Eye Travels (20012004)

life so consumed with suffering. Klossowski affirms it was rather terror before the loss of his reason. His physiological lucidity had brought him to a thought whose final 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 essentially a book of maxims, where the declamatory movement alternates with the enigmas and 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 efficacious 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 efficacy 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 euphoria finally issue in the irreversible collapse. On the brink of this night and silence, Nietzsche 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 Crucified 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 confidence. Yet Klossowski could not have done so without having shared something 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 livable. Has not Klossowski delineated what Philip Fisher has identified 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 find a picture of the self possessed of multiple and conflictingambivalentimpulses in any engagement with an event appearing in the environment. The conflict augments their intensity, 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 encountered. The sign claims to designate the essence, that is, the integrated configuration of its multiple features; in fact it is an abbreviation, a simplification. With this unitary sign the I as the unitary and abiding identity is affirmed 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 of others 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

68

that of themselves subside. the total and heightened sense of power and nondividedness they produce also issues in signs: prado, cambige, count robilant. . . . Klossowski delineates the irony that subsists in these last communications, an irony 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 clarified 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 unjustifiable, left aside as madness? Dionysos or the Crucified: the passions which indeed subside do not thereby abolish an intolerable state of conflict. 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 left with the prospect of a movement, a becoming, without goals and without terminations, without meaning: chaos, whose phases recur cyclically. But are there not transformations 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 transformations, which indeed form the subject matter of classic literature from Homer to shakespeare, exhibit not absence of causality but causality that can be utterly disproportionate 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 of Zarathustra too peremptory? Since it is impulses that fix and maintain the traces 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 something of nietzsches inner torment and metamorphoses, still it was only by understanding Nietzsches words that he could determine that lucidity as specific 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 simplifications, have overtones; they echo not only in other words but in the depths below them. and even the austere and abstract expression and 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 conscious thought, nietzsche also says that the recent exorbitant development of the language 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.

diacritics / summer 2005

69

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. of Nietzsche 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.

70