Elana Commisso
Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism
University of Western Ontario
(416) 480 1160
Lived Culture and the Uncivilized Scene of Theoretical Simulation: Nietzschean Onto-aesthesis and Twentieth-century French Theory.
The distinctive recuperation of Nietzschean thought in post-war France is tied to a (re)turn of the aesthetic in twentieth-century French theory. The theoretical appropriation of Nietzsche, in particular within the French context, encounters the aesthetic as aesthesis – the movement of forces that produces affection and sensation. Strangely, Nietzsche becomes the father figure of different yet necessarily related twentieth-century expressions of a theoretical topos, where the onto-aesthetic Dionysian art of thought performed by Nietzsche initiates the project of “critique”. The following work examines the theoretical extension of the Nietzschean project of critique, and in particular focuses on the themes of lived culture, the fable, and the simulacrum as they are developed by Pierre Klossowski[1] in his 1969 work Nietzsche and the Viscious Circle. A close reading of these Nietzschean themes, as treated by Klossowski, will enquire into how the cultural emerges in the twentieth century as a site of encounter for the aesthetic and the ontic, a site distinctly punctuated by the simulacrum, itself a topos of theoretico-cultural production.
Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments is highly idiosyncratic; it engages Nietzsche’s work as the expression of a psycho-physiological struggle manifested as an obsessive chronicle of a self-inflicted psycho-physical terminal illness. This frame enables Klossowski to read Nietzsche reading his multiple and unstable selves in an ekphrastic expression of the very agitation that Nietzsche suggests is produced by the forces behind the willed reproduction of the simulacrum[2]. Klossowski as spectator, and Nietzsche as protagonist, become implicated in the very simulacric scenes that they describe as they repeatedly produce their non-identical selves in their theoretical production. What is present(ed) in the simulacrum is not a coherent or intelligible entity in itself, but the expression of agitation; what Klossowski calls a phantasm, an affect or pathos that is the force of the cultural matrix that constitutes being.
The Nietzschean figuration of the simulacrum (trugbild), in particular as Klossowski develops and emplots it, inaugurates a vertiginous relation of thinking and being in the form of a “lived culture”. Simulation, and in particular the practices of simulation, are the modes of cultural onto-expression championed by Klossowski and Nietzsche. Simulation assumes itself in the simulacrum, which, however, has no content and is simply an expression of a force. Simulation then, as it returns in the twentieth century, is an aesthetic event that emerges in a necessarily dissonant relation with the discursive practices of representational metaphysics, and in particular the Platonic concept of image as artifice. The simulacrum (re)appears in the world of fable, in the world as fable, the involuted and incoherent cultural one-dimensionality of being. The fable, an aesthetically coded mode of being in the world, is determined by the signs of a pulsional semiotic where simulation obtains. The fable is the aesthetic matrix of being that “becomes” in the overcoming of the real and apparent worlds described by Nietzsche in Twighlight of the Idols.
The Platonic image and the Nietzschean simulacrum appear in the twentieth century on the horizon of the aesthetic. The former, a logocentric or structural repression contained discursively, and the latter a willed affirmation in culture which permits the turning-in-on-it-self of philosophical thought as struggle, are not opposed, but rather obliquely interfaced. This interface is the force that drives critique, which ties traditionally distinct discourses and folds them into the larger domain of the cultural, as both an expression of and enquiry into being as such. What Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche privileges, is the experience of the unidentifiable as a (re)turn of the aesthetic to being, in the form of an artistic endeavour. I plan to read this endeavour, which for Klossowksi takes the form of theoretico-cultural production, as an expression of Nietzschean onto-aesthetics unique to twentieth-century French theory.
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[1] Klossowski was an important translator and critic of Nietzsche in post-war France.
[2] The simulacrum, as Klossowski explains it, is “a willed reproduction of a phantasm… that simulates th[e] invisible agitation of the soul” (xi).