Pierre Klossowski

Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) var en av efterkrigstidens mest särpräglade franska intellektuella - författare, filosof, översättare och konstnär. Genom sina romaner och originella tolkningar av markis de Sade och Friedrich Nietzsche kom han att omforma synen på begär, språk, subjektivitet och tänkande. Nietzsche och den onda cirkeln utgör den filosofiska höjdpunkten i detta livsverk - en dramatisk och experimentell läsning av Nietzsche som utövat ett djupt inflytande på tänkare som Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze och Jacques Derrida. Boken presenteras här för första gången i svensk översättning av Johan Sehlberg och Gustav Strandberg, som också skrivit förordet.

'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.

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.

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.