by Daniel Smith
IMPULSES AS FLUCTUATING INTENSITIES
Klossowski describes his books on both Nietzsche and Sade as “essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other.”3 This emphasis on the “physiognomy” of thinkers reflects Nietzsche's insistence on taking the body as a guide for philosophy rather than the mind, since the body is a more accessible phenomenon, less surrounded by myth and superstition. “The body and physiology as the starting point,” Nietzsche wrote. “Why? … The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible phenomenon … Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul.”4 Klossowski himself, however, when writing of the intensive status of the impulses, frequently makes use of the term “soul” (âme), which is due in part, no doubt, to his interest in the theological literature of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Theresa of Ávila. For the mystics, the depth of the soul is something irreducible and uncreated; it eludes the exercise of the created intellect, and can only be grasped negatively.5 None the less, if one can find a similar apophaticism (or “negative theology”) in Klossowski, it is related exclusively to the immanent and chaotic movements of the soul's intensive affects, and not to the transcendence of God. What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its “impulses”—their fluctuations of intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are in constant variation.
Nietzsche himself had recourse to a highly varied vocabulary to describe what Klossowski summarizes in the term “impulse”: “drive” (Triebe), “desire” (Begierden), “instinct” (Instinkte), “power” (Mächte), “force” (Kräfte), “impulse” (Reize, Impulse), “passion” (Leidenschaften), “feeling” (Gefühlen), “affect” (Affekte), “pathos” (Pathos), and so on.6 Klossowski frequently employs the musical term tonalité to describe these states of the soul's fluctuating intensities—their diverse tones, timbres, and changing amplitudes—which can take on various forms (“aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude, the forgetting of oneself”) (NVC 6). At bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls “obstinate singularity” of the human soul, which is by nature non-communicable; they constitute what he calls “the unexchangeable depth” (le fond inéchangeable) or “the unintelligible depth” (le fond inintelligible) of the soul. What makes every individual a “singular case” or an “idiosyncrasy” is the unique constellation of impulses of which it is constituted. For Klossowski, the term “singular” is opposed not so much to the universal but to the gregarious, the species, what Nietzsche calls the “herd,” which reduces the singularity of the individual to a common denominator, and expresses only what can be communicated. It is Nietzsche's theory of the impulses that lies at the origin of his doctrines of perspectivism (“there are no facts, only interpretations”) and the will to power. It is our impulses or drives that interpret the world, that are perspectival—and not our “selves.” All of us, as individuals, contain within ourselves such “a vast confusion of contradictory drives” that we are, as Nietzsche liked to say, multiplicities and not unities.7 It is not that I have a different perspective on the world than you; it is rather that each of us has multiple perspectives on the world because of the multiplicity of our drives—drives that are often contradictory among themselves, and that are therefore in a constant struggle or combat with each other. “Within ourselves, we can be egoistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure.”8 Moreover, each of our impulses is characterized by an internal will to power. “Every drive is a kind of lust to rule,” Nietzsche writes, “each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”9
It is true that we can fight against the impulses, struggle against the dominance of the passions—this is one of the oldest themes in philosophy, from Platonism through Christianity. But Nietzsche asks: Who exactly undertakes such a struggle against the impulses?
While “we” believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive [he answers], at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides.10
We tend to take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole of our ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives were not me but rather something else, something other inside me, a kind of “it,” like the Freudian “id.” When we talk about the “I,” we are primarily indicating which drive, at the moment, is strongest and sovereign within us; my so-called “self-identity” is in fact a differential flickering from drive to drive. In other words, there is no struggle of reason against the drives; rather, what we call our “reason” is nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions” (WP 387), a certain ordering of the drives.11 “Something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, “now strikes you as an error; so you cast it off and fancy that it represents a victory for your reason.” But it is less a victory for your reason, than a shift in the relations among your impulses, with their shifting intensities and tonalities.
Perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were a different person—you are always a different person—as are all you present ‘truths’ … What killed that opinion for you was your new life [that is, a new impulse] and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet.12
This emphasis on fluctuating intensities of the body's impulses is one of the consequences of Nietzsche's declaration of the “death of God.” One of Klossowski's most persistent themes is that the death of God implies the loss of both the identity of the Self and the coherence of the World. The Self, the World, and God are the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics, which Kant had exposed as transcendent illusions in the Critique of Pure Reason.13 In his essay on Klossowski, Deleuze emphasized the way in which Klossowski pushed Kant's thought toward a “new critique of reason”:
The order of God includes the following elements: the identity of God as the ultimate foundation, the identity of the world as the surrounding milieu, the identity of the person as a well-founded agent, the identity of bodies as the base, and finally the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else. But this order of God is constructed against another order, and this order subsists in God, and consumes him from within … The order of the Antichrist is opposed point by point to the divine order. It is characterized by the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and a change in the function of language, which now expresses nothing but intensities. (LS 292, 294).
If God is dead, then all possible creation comes not from God but from chaos—that is, from the impulses—and the self is only the prolonged extremity of chaos. The death of god does not imply a rejection of religion, however, but rather its revitalization, a claim that Klossowski explored in his early essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody.”14 Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents a fable explaining the transition from polytheism to monotheism (or what he elsewhere calls “monoto-theism”): when one of the gods declared himself to be the only god (the monotheistic god), the other gods (the gods of polytheism) laughed and slapped their knees and rocked in their chairs—until they laughed themselves to death!15 Polytheism died of laughter.16 For Nietzsche, the creation of gods is one of the fundamental creative tasks of rel
igion—just as for Deleuze the creation of concepts is one of the fundamental creative tasks of philosophy—and gods and demons are themselves the figures of the impulses and their fluctuating intensities. If polytheism is the expression of the multiplicity of the soul's impulses, its great mise-en-scène, monotheism implies the subordination of all the other impulses to the domination of a single, sovereign impulse, which Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, would identify as the impulse of ressentiment. The revaluation of values envisioned by Nietzsche necessarily implies the creation of new gods—that is to say, new affects. “How many new gods are still possible!” Nietzsche exclaims. “As for myself, in whom the religious, that is to say, god-forming instinct occasionally becomes active at impossible times—how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time.”17 What Klossowski found in the religions of antiquity was a growling chaos of demons and goddesses expressing the fluctuation of the impulses; his great text, Diana at Her Bath, is explicitly presented as a kind of polytheistic inversion of Augustine's monotheistic City of God, pointing to a religion of the future.18
But the question Klossowski constantly poses about the impulses is: What criteria of value one can apply to the impulses if we can no longer appeal to a transcendent order (as in Plato), or a transcendental subjectivity (as in Kant), or the moments of an evolutionary dialectic (as in Hegel)? The criteria must become internal to the impulses themselves: Which impulses are healthy? Which are expressions of morbidity or sickness? Which are singular? Which express a will to gregariousness? Which are vigorous? Which are decadent?19 If the impulses interpret, then the question is one of determining the “type” of interpretation offered by a given impulse or affect: active versus reactive, strong versus weak, healthy versus morbid, and so on.
In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski stresses the fact that Nietzsche's own valetudinary states provided him with a kind of laboratory in which he could study the life of the impulses. In his letters and notes, Nietzsche provides an almost constant evaluation of the implications of his migraines and illnesses. “My nervous system is splendid in view of the immense work it has to do; it is quite sensitive but very strong, a source of astonishment to me.”20 Or again:
My existence a dreadful burden: I would have rejected it long ago had I not been making the most instructive experiments in the intellectual and moral domain in just this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation—this joyous mood, avid for knowledge, raised me to heights where I triumphed over every torture and almost all despair.21
But exactly what experiments was Nietzsche conducting with his own impulses? When Nietzsche experienced his migraines, Klossowski surmises, he not only found it impossible to read or even write, but he also found it impossible to think. He experienced his migraines as an aggression of his organism that suspended his own thought, his own thinking. “Once he recovered his faculties, he tried to describe this suspension of thought, to reflect on the functioning of the brain in relation to the other organic functions—and he began to distrust his own brain” (NVC 23). Why this distrust? The issue concerns nothing other than our experience of the unity of ourselves as subjects. What makes us experience the chaotic life of the impulses as having a unity is the phantasm of what Klossowski calls, in French, the suppôt. This word is derived from the Latin suppositum, “that which is placed under,” and is closely linked to the terms substantia (“substance”) or subjectum (“subject”). For Klossowski, the suppôt (or self) is itself a phantasm, a complex and fragile entity that bestows a psychic and organic unity upon the moving chaos of the impulses. It does this in part through the grammatical fiction of the “I,” which interprets the impulses in terms of a hierarchy of gregarious needs (both material and moral), and dissimulates itself through a network of concepts (substance, cause, identity, self, world, God) that reduces the combat of the impulses to silence.22
“To understand Nietzsche,” writes Klossowski, “it is important to see this reversal brought about by the organism: the most fragile organ it has developed [namely, the brain, the nervous system] comes to dominate the body, one might say, because of its very fragility” (NVC 27). There is thus an intimate link, in Nietzsche's thought, between the intellect or consciousness, on the one hand, and language and communication, on the other. Both the intellect and language are in the service of the species, gregariousness, the herd—and not in the service of the singular case, the individual. As Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science:
It seems to me that the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man's (or animal's) capacity for communication … Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication … My idea is that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature … Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be … Whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid … All becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization … We “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species.23
Even our “inner experience”—that which is seemingly most personal and most immediate to us—is subject to the same falsification: “‘Inner experience’ enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands … ‘To understand’ means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar.”24 In Klossowski's terms, the function of language and the intellect is to convert the (unconscious) intensity into a (conscious) intention.
The task Nietzsche set himself, then, was an almost impossible task: to think without the ego, to think, not from the viewpoint of his conscious intellect, but rather from the complex viewpoint of the drives and impulses. “Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego!” Nietzsche admonished himself in one of his notebooks.
Learn gradually to jettison the supposed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Realize that egoism is an error! But not to be understood as the opposite of altruism! That would be love of other supposed individuals! No! Get beyond “me” and “you”! Experience cosmically!
And again: “What is needed is practice in seeing with other eyes: practice in seeing apart from human relations, and thus seeing objectively!”25
PHANTASMS AS OBSESSIONAL IMAGES
This brings us to the second fundamental concept of Klossowski's: the phantasm. In Klossowski, the term refers to an obsessional image produced within us by the unconscious forces of our impulsive life; the phantasm is what makes each of us a singular case. “My true themes,” writes Klossowski of himself, “are dictated by one or more obsessional (or “obsidianal”) instincts that seek to express themselves.”26 Or as he says elsewhere, “I am only the seismograph of the life of the impulses.”27 The word “phantasm” is derived from the Greek phantasia (appearance, imagination), and was taken up in a more technical sense in psychoanalytic theory (theory of fantasy). For Klossowski, however, a phantasm is not, as in Freud, a substitution formation. As Lyotard explains, the phantasm “is not an unreality or de-reality, it is ‘something’ that grips the wild turbulence of the libido, something it invents as an incandescent object.”28
Nietzsche himself tended to interpret the thought of the great philosophers in terms of their phantasms: that is, in terms of their dominant or sovereign impulses. Philosophers simply express the movements of their own intensive states under the guidance of their dominant impulse (the will to knowledge).
They claim it is a question of “the truth”—when at bottom it is only a question of t
hemselves. Or rather: their most violent impulse is brought to light with all the impudence and innocence of a fundamental impulse: it makes itself sovereign … The philosopher is only a kind of occasion and chance through which the impulse is finally able to speak … What then did Spinoza or Kant do? Nothing but interpret their dominant impulse. But it was only the communicable part of their behavior that could be translated into their constructions. (NVC 4–5)
