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Living Currency
'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.
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.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Pierre Klossowski
95 books120 followersPierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 11, 2022
Será que se pode atribuir aos seres humanos e às suas sensações voluptuosas um valor de moeda?
Ensaio filosófico que pretende remeter para um imaginário que talvez não seja assim tão irrealista!
“Como é que a “pessoa” humana pode desempenhar a função de moeda? Como é que os produtores, em vez de “se oferecerem” mulheres, se fariam pagar “em mulheres”? Como é que os empresários, os industriais, vão então pagar os seus engenheiros, aos seus operários? “Em mulheres”. Quem sustentará essa moeda viva? Outras mulheres. (...) Quem manterá, quer dizer, sustentará essa moeda viril? Aqueles que dispõem da moeda feminina.”
Ensaio filosófico que pretende remeter para um imaginário que talvez não seja assim tão irrealista!
“Como é que a “pessoa” humana pode desempenhar a função de moeda? Como é que os produtores, em vez de “se oferecerem” mulheres, se fariam pagar “em mulheres”? Como é que os empresários, os industriais, vão então pagar os seus engenheiros, aos seus operários? “Em mulheres”. Quem sustentará essa moeda viva? Outras mulheres. (...) Quem manterá, quer dizer, sustentará essa moeda viril? Aqueles que dispõem da moeda feminina.”
October 7, 2019
An economy of the affects in fewer than 20 compact pages, years before Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy, or Simulacra and Simulation, all of which owe a debt to Living Currency. The rest of the book comprises a complementary essay on Sade and Fourier, two glowing paragraphs á la fanboy Michel Foucault, a helpful introduction, and an essay about Klossowski’s personal and intellectual relationship with Walter Benjamin.
New translation is welcome. A key term fantasme is translated “phantasm”-- in contrast to the more Freudian sounding “fantasy” in the previous translation. Would not be such be a big deal, were it not the cornerstone of the Klossowskian ontology.
New translation is welcome. A key term fantasme is translated “phantasm”-- in contrast to the more Freudian sounding “fantasy” in the previous translation. Would not be such be a big deal, were it not the cornerstone of the Klossowskian ontology.
June 12, 2018
Numeraire as possessing human beings as commodities, a living currency, decentred through desire for voluptuous emotion; critique of Marquis de Sade's object perversion through obsessive fantasy to obtain this repetitive ideal. Exchange of currency for wished, disposable objects (& human being's used as objects) as only one derivation from direct trading of human beings, slavery: ergo covert implicit slavery practiced (Klossowski is reluctant to delineate such as actual slavery due to choice to accept/not accept a wage & participating in empire, however I would argue it as apt if one does not refuse. Simulacra as reproduction of reality through fantasy in the realm of a staged aggressive play, where voluptuous emotion develops/portrayed.
The mechanism's of voluptuous emotion are through sublimation of existing preferences or increasing in fantasy value through object perversion), contributing to total expansive commodification whose subjects identify themselves through the empire's apparatus whose medium is numeraire. Those who do not sell themselves as objects are considered worthless, enables violence against them.
''[The subject] is a fiction created out a necessity which is as uncontrollable as it is deliberately constructed''
The mechanism's of voluptuous emotion are through sublimation of existing preferences or increasing in fantasy value through object perversion), contributing to total expansive commodification whose subjects identify themselves through the empire's apparatus whose medium is numeraire. Those who do not sell themselves as objects are considered worthless, enables violence against them.
''[The subject] is a fiction created out a necessity which is as uncontrollable as it is deliberately constructed''
June 5, 2023
It is a heavy reading, with some great one-liners. I found the closing essay more engaging than the main body of the text. I purchased a copy of the book because I saw the 1970 edition (with erotic photographs) featured in Akio Jissoji's film Poem. I'd rather recommend that film than this book.
November 18, 2022
Honestly I am scared to review this book, because if I mess up, my philosopher friends will kick my ass. I found the concepts Klossowski brings up to be quite interesting, the imaginary debate between Sade and Fourier was amusing, though being imagined, there was very clearly a perceived bias on Sade's side (something of his own admission). In a lot of ways, his perceived victory in the debate hinges on the concepts of phantasms and simulacra that Klossowski introduces to be actually valid and to have the properties he claims them to have. But his conceptual libidinal economy that becomes more established and grounded in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is quite influential so for that alone, it is worth a read.
Btw, I haven't read Baudrillard yet so I can't confirm this but I wonder if his simulacra are associated with Klossowski's in some way.
Btw, I haven't read Baudrillard yet so I can't confirm this but I wonder if his simulacra are associated with Klossowski's in some way.
February 10, 2021
pretty novel - like reading Benjamin with Sade and Fourier hovering over your shoulder. it suffers for its brevity though (not nearly long enough for its own ambition). still, required reading if you’ve been reading Deleuze, Lyotard, or have any interest whatsoever in “libidinal economy” or whatever
September 8, 2021
"No dia em que o ser humano houver superado, logo reduzido, a perversão externa, ou seja, a monstruosidade da hipertrofia das 'necessidades', e consentido em contrapartida a sua perversão interna, ou seja, a dissolução da sua unidade fictícia, organizar-se-á uma concordância entre o desejo e a produção dos seus objectos numa economia racionalmente estabelecida em função das suas impulsões; logo, uma gratuitidade do esforço responderá ao preço irracional."
June 18, 2021
Among my most cherished and treasured friends is a woman only slightly younger than myself of Egyptian-Muslim descent, an enterprising engineer recently deployed by the United Nations but also a onetime anarchist squatter and connoisseur of occult refinements. Well, she was those latter things when we were young, and for a brief while, when I was in grad school, next-door neighbours. Our demons are not dissimilar, so my friend and I have had occasion to be of considerable value as sounding boards for one another in our recent mutual incarnations as unaccountably got-they-shit-together fully-developed adults (that rarity of rarities). The year of novel coronavirus and of awfully screwy plague has been one of a kind of immobilization I am confident I knew all along was the only true possibility for mobilization; all my special friends and collaborators have struck me as being absolutely perfect and absolutely perfectly situated during this wildly exciting time…perhaps a time exciting, largely, only to myself and to my fellow cockeyed visionaries. Or just let me lay it down like that, please. For “expedience,” let’s say. My very lovely and very brilliant friend, she of the Egyptian parentage, who lost her father recently to the novel coronavirus, is set off yet again on a serious international mission of great import, but before leaving sends me a book in the post, which is to say a book of poems, this being BLACK FEZ MANIFESTO, &C. by Hakim Bey, a anarchist mystic vaudevillian who very much either is crucial to one’s mythopoetic constitution or is not. A couple days ago, opening the book at random for the first time upon having received in with the day’s mail, we find an evocation of Hindu practice and of the utopian project of Charles Fourier (April 1772 – October 1837), one big circuit closed in as concupiscent and lavishly simple a manner as only Gods on Their Mountain might be imagined capable of proffering demo:
a Sexual Angelicate with its own
self invested hierophants in a veritable phalanx
of 18th century spunk & know-how
The evocation of “18th century” as well as of “Angelicate” and “hierophants” and obviously in another sense “spunk”—all of it coheres such as to make clear that Fourier is meant to hover over our seance. But if you replace 18th century with the 21st…shit, I guess all I’m saying is I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more ‘at home.’ I think this in itself maybe turns out to be a valuable insight. As it should happen, in his really terrific introduction to the Bloomsbury edition of LIVING CURRENCY, a book containing English translations of the titular Pierre Klossowski piece as well as the same author's slightly earlier “Sade and Fourier,” Daniel W. Smith, a commentator who def knows his way around a scholarly capital-I Introduction—I’m looking at you University of Minnesota Press’s ESSAYS CRITICAL AND CLINICAL by Gilles Deleuze!—suggests that we really ought ask ourselves of this specific book especially what kind of relevance it might have…uh, ‘currently.’ You note that word I cordon off ever so slightly? We might wish to meditate upon this word…first…above all. Think: 1) the river (its current, fluxal, going a good deal more than two directions); 2) “current events” (news cycle, absurdist displays of hideous theatre ‘performed’ as intermediary on behalf of inscrutable mechanisms of insidious capture); 3) currency (money, exchange value, oblique circulation). The “Living Currency” that appears in the Bloomsbury as the lengthier of two essays by Klossowski, appeared in France in 1970, sort of immediately after the vertiginous events of 1968, traditionally held-together in the most nebulous discursive sense under the umbrella of the metonym “May.” In May of 1968, Klossowski is about to turn sixty-three years of age. He’s a old hand and boulevardier, to be sure, but also very much a product, like his pal Georges Bataille, of the incomprehensible interwar fiasco of the 1930s. Much like Antonin Artuad and the German artist Otto Dix, these two aforementioned are acutely metaphysical or theophanic sensibilities that have gone down into the trenches with humankind and instead of finding God, in fidelity to the old homey/hoary cliche, have found deeper and far more immediately discomfiting pre-Christian gnosis immanent to Christianity itself. There is no cause really here to elaborate. Suffice it to say, it would appear that in looking back, perhaps largely by way of Saint Augustine, to the pre-Christian space of myth and ritual in Roman society we start recognizing very quickly—I know I do—the cousins of the Tibetan Tulpa and Haitian Loa and What Have You. And is there not in Wagner, from the standpoint of the Wagner System’s central hardware, just a whole lot of Black Forest and Black Roots. Talking, Screaming, Dissimulating. It gets heinous. It gets as heinous, in fact, as the 20th century. Klossowski, in the essay from which the collection takes its name: “There is no difference between the fabrication of a useful object such as a ballistic missile, and the act of fabricating a simulacrum such as the Callipygian Venus, except that the reasons for their wasteful experimentation are the inverse of each other. The sole ‘utility’ of the ballistic missile is to cause ‘anguish’ in the world of sterile uses, whereas the Callipygian Venus is simply the laughing face of the bomb, turning its utility into ridicule.” It sounds exactly like the highly-charged, curdling malevolence that takes some kind of Saint Teresa trip far to its outermost limits in much of Georges Bataille. Well, right, yes. Therein lies the whole concept of the Acéphale: you simply reverse the polarity, switch out one head for another, or the moon for the sun (if you prefer), and blow your head off invisibly with the skull in your stomach. Maybe if you kill a friend you will reap the whirlwind. Both Bataille and Klossowski exhaustively explore precedent, Bataille ultimately more the Anthropologist and Librarian, Klossowski more, as Mark E. Smith might put it, the Hip Priest. For both Bataille and Klossowski, sometime around the advent of the monstrosities of the Second World War, the Marquis de Sade suddenly becomes the only person from the 17th century who would appear to have read the cards right. As far as how this all settled for Klossowski by 1970, a man in his sixties shortly to be devoting himself entirely to visual art, we find this business of Libidinal Economy as the Motor, Coolant, and Lubricant of All Cosmic or A-Cosmic Exchange. For Sade, “beings can never communicate among themselves except as trafficable objects.” It is a simple formulation in a fantastically erudite essay that cannot afford to rest on them, but already here we have a very nice vantage from which to assess a terrain whereon the law of exchange is living organic myth-systems and living organic bodies in ‘fluid exchange’ before anything gets civilizationally consolidated. To watch a living system like this operate before the gaze, or at least a gaze complexed within gazes, I found it useful to revisit Maya Deren’s posthumously-assembled anthropo-cinematic study DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI. If you like, you can watch that film and then go back to Daniel W. Smith’s Intro and consider the possibility that Deren was actually shooting the same pagan business against which Augustine was so fond of boisterously railing. Sade’s truly revolutionary initiative, as least according to Klossowski, is to place at the heart of Libidinal Economy and the Metaphysical Laws of Exchange the presiding constitutive requirement, in an almost purely administrative sense, of what Sade himself called the ‘integral monster’ or ‘integral perversion.’ What this ultimately amounts to, however, is a philosophy of values. It does this pretty nakedly. You end up either on the side of Ludic Play or on that of “the circuit of manufacturing efficiency” and therefore of the Industrial Regime (i.e. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man). The essay “Living Currency,” finding first its audience with the kids of ’68 and perhaps now again with us, ends up privileging impulsive forces, violent destabilizing passions, ritual praxis, and the advanced cultivation of aesthetics (all part and parcel of “voluptuous feeling”). Daniel W. Smith pitching it for the broad-lay-of-the-land set: “For Leibniz, ‘force’ is the sufficient reason of movement, and Klossowski uses the term in a similar fashion in order to put impulsive forces on the same plane as physical forces." As in Nietzsche—certainly the Nietzsche of Klossowski and Deleuze—we have a poet and mystic and apparently disgruntled institutional pedagogue with an ontology of force and the desire to wield it against the dominant, but with Sade in the passenger seat it is clear that Klossowski has stumbled onto astonishing correlations that many will simply ignore because the implications end up being absolutely devastating (for the standpoint of the Functioning of the Dominant). Klossowski is not just enjoying being sinister for its own sake when he appreciatively notes the unwieldy and impressively batshit complexity of the pursuit Sade continually undertakes to assess the value of distinct acts of perversion within a given societal microcosm, such, for example, that phantasms and exchanges structured dialogically around the nominally non-exchangeable connoisseurship of perversities will tend to lead to such calculations as those which would see a fundamental commonality between a “large number of victims” and a "derterminate" mass-productivity schema. It’s not a good place to find yourself; it would seem that Klossopwski has the more sober handle on this conundrum than does Bataille. I think I attribute this largely to one thing: in 1970, or thereabouts, Pierre Klossowski has the Marquis de Sade for now and Charles Fourier hopefully for later. Or, as Daniel W. Smith essentially signs off: “Fourier’s entire effort was aimed at overcoming the ‘external’ perversion of the industrial economy (the monstrous hypertrophy of ‘needs’) so that humans could consent to their ‘internal’ perversion (the dissolution of their fictive unity), thereby producing a ‘harmony’ between the life of the impulses and the productions of the economy.” Well, okay, this is what I say on my way to having a world: The 21st Century Proper owes COVID some gratitude and is moving toward Confucius and Plenty. We have to explore Fourier and begin to make a break from Sade. Fourier might, I think, by a good deal more Confucian than we had imagined, just as the Chiense century may be a different Chinese century then we imagined. Yes, I am interested, as an artist and spiritual practitioner or whatever, in trans-individuation and transversality and transsexuality; this is Hakim Bey’s Fourier-adopted Romantic Angelicate, Closed Circuit, Secret Gnosis of the Central Nervous System's Basic Operational Polarity (made known only to those who make themselves known to Voluptuous Feeling, Impulsive Forces, or the equivalent). The Angelicate closes the loop. It could be one self-sustaining angel person or a doublet or some perverse phantasm shuffled about like a host-happy Haitian loa on the prowl. It might also just mean that when the hypertrophy or want overshoots the mark, the TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN three cherries slot machine blows its top and everybody gets to chill the fuck out. We don’t lose the mass-reproducible, value just moves to other things which always ought to have been better prized…which is to say “Hierophants,” or the personal daemon’s preferred simulations and arte-facts. If intelligence loses its insistence on the value of dissimulation and trickery, algorithms would actually become extremely Fourier-like, helping to organize communities and practices that might take the air out of the more violent streak inherent to impulses (at least from a historical standpoint). Maybe we can afford to be utopian right now, because it does not seem inconceivable that Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point ends up having to do with Prosperity & Plenty For All and The Autism Spectrum Bird’s Eye hacked by all those programmer- and coder-kids who hit their 10,000 hours as teenagers. Where is the “integral monster” most evident in our current culture/myth arena? The Angelicate is everyhere right now, I assure you, but the glaringly obvious example is Netflix Smash Hit THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT, where the young chess prodigy orphan fits the bill as though tailor-made. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon never descends into the necrotic collapse of Geroges Bataille’s BLUE OF NOON, and if she comes anywhere near that, I assure you it’s purely cosmetic. What Beth Harmon achieves is the erasure of the bonds imposed upon and about a cartwheeling intelligence, and in her personal-impersonal triumph she realizes a dialogic synthesis or hyperreal praxis on the other side of a phantomic Iron Curtain. The glorious joke very soon may be that fortune cookies conquered the world in the 19th century and the President of the United States is suddenly a black woman whose strongest asset is her wry grin. I’ll fuckin’ take that any day. Think also of the wonderful and actually Academy-Award-for-Best-Picture-Winning PARASITE, directed by the often great Bong Joon-Ho, which almost feels like autism’s memory of the last of the schizophrenic hauntings. “The economy of pleasure still remains latent,” writes Pierre Klossowski, “and perhaps it will never be able to emerge as long as the industrial regime limits the conditions of pleasure to the domestic sphere and a system of law based on the family unit.” That set-up isn’t at all the same as it was in 1970. David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS tells us that “the owls are not what they seem,” but well before that Klossowski implicitly demonstrates the following: manufacturing efficiency and Hegel don’t know a goddamn thing about owls. Owls are warnings. It's not Minerva, and trust me, you wouldn't want it to be. Owls are never encouragement. The things is—respective of TWIN PEAKS and PARASITE—what if all that bloated work of haunting, all that stalking malevolent PRESSURE, was the work of history, which is effectively completed. Well, glory be unto God the Bog and the Crackerjack Box People.
a Sexual Angelicate with its own
self invested hierophants in a veritable phalanx
of 18th century spunk & know-how
The evocation of “18th century” as well as of “Angelicate” and “hierophants” and obviously in another sense “spunk”—all of it coheres such as to make clear that Fourier is meant to hover over our seance. But if you replace 18th century with the 21st…shit, I guess all I’m saying is I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more ‘at home.’ I think this in itself maybe turns out to be a valuable insight. As it should happen, in his really terrific introduction to the Bloomsbury edition of LIVING CURRENCY, a book containing English translations of the titular Pierre Klossowski piece as well as the same author's slightly earlier “Sade and Fourier,” Daniel W. Smith, a commentator who def knows his way around a scholarly capital-I Introduction—I’m looking at you University of Minnesota Press’s ESSAYS CRITICAL AND CLINICAL by Gilles Deleuze!—suggests that we really ought ask ourselves of this specific book especially what kind of relevance it might have…uh, ‘currently.’ You note that word I cordon off ever so slightly? We might wish to meditate upon this word…first…above all. Think: 1) the river (its current, fluxal, going a good deal more than two directions); 2) “current events” (news cycle, absurdist displays of hideous theatre ‘performed’ as intermediary on behalf of inscrutable mechanisms of insidious capture); 3) currency (money, exchange value, oblique circulation). The “Living Currency” that appears in the Bloomsbury as the lengthier of two essays by Klossowski, appeared in France in 1970, sort of immediately after the vertiginous events of 1968, traditionally held-together in the most nebulous discursive sense under the umbrella of the metonym “May.” In May of 1968, Klossowski is about to turn sixty-three years of age. He’s a old hand and boulevardier, to be sure, but also very much a product, like his pal Georges Bataille, of the incomprehensible interwar fiasco of the 1930s. Much like Antonin Artuad and the German artist Otto Dix, these two aforementioned are acutely metaphysical or theophanic sensibilities that have gone down into the trenches with humankind and instead of finding God, in fidelity to the old homey/hoary cliche, have found deeper and far more immediately discomfiting pre-Christian gnosis immanent to Christianity itself. There is no cause really here to elaborate. Suffice it to say, it would appear that in looking back, perhaps largely by way of Saint Augustine, to the pre-Christian space of myth and ritual in Roman society we start recognizing very quickly—I know I do—the cousins of the Tibetan Tulpa and Haitian Loa and What Have You. And is there not in Wagner, from the standpoint of the Wagner System’s central hardware, just a whole lot of Black Forest and Black Roots. Talking, Screaming, Dissimulating. It gets heinous. It gets as heinous, in fact, as the 20th century. Klossowski, in the essay from which the collection takes its name: “There is no difference between the fabrication of a useful object such as a ballistic missile, and the act of fabricating a simulacrum such as the Callipygian Venus, except that the reasons for their wasteful experimentation are the inverse of each other. The sole ‘utility’ of the ballistic missile is to cause ‘anguish’ in the world of sterile uses, whereas the Callipygian Venus is simply the laughing face of the bomb, turning its utility into ridicule.” It sounds exactly like the highly-charged, curdling malevolence that takes some kind of Saint Teresa trip far to its outermost limits in much of Georges Bataille. Well, right, yes. Therein lies the whole concept of the Acéphale: you simply reverse the polarity, switch out one head for another, or the moon for the sun (if you prefer), and blow your head off invisibly with the skull in your stomach. Maybe if you kill a friend you will reap the whirlwind. Both Bataille and Klossowski exhaustively explore precedent, Bataille ultimately more the Anthropologist and Librarian, Klossowski more, as Mark E. Smith might put it, the Hip Priest. For both Bataille and Klossowski, sometime around the advent of the monstrosities of the Second World War, the Marquis de Sade suddenly becomes the only person from the 17th century who would appear to have read the cards right. As far as how this all settled for Klossowski by 1970, a man in his sixties shortly to be devoting himself entirely to visual art, we find this business of Libidinal Economy as the Motor, Coolant, and Lubricant of All Cosmic or A-Cosmic Exchange. For Sade, “beings can never communicate among themselves except as trafficable objects.” It is a simple formulation in a fantastically erudite essay that cannot afford to rest on them, but already here we have a very nice vantage from which to assess a terrain whereon the law of exchange is living organic myth-systems and living organic bodies in ‘fluid exchange’ before anything gets civilizationally consolidated. To watch a living system like this operate before the gaze, or at least a gaze complexed within gazes, I found it useful to revisit Maya Deren’s posthumously-assembled anthropo-cinematic study DIVINE HORSEMEN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI. If you like, you can watch that film and then go back to Daniel W. Smith’s Intro and consider the possibility that Deren was actually shooting the same pagan business against which Augustine was so fond of boisterously railing. Sade’s truly revolutionary initiative, as least according to Klossowski, is to place at the heart of Libidinal Economy and the Metaphysical Laws of Exchange the presiding constitutive requirement, in an almost purely administrative sense, of what Sade himself called the ‘integral monster’ or ‘integral perversion.’ What this ultimately amounts to, however, is a philosophy of values. It does this pretty nakedly. You end up either on the side of Ludic Play or on that of “the circuit of manufacturing efficiency” and therefore of the Industrial Regime (i.e. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man). The essay “Living Currency,” finding first its audience with the kids of ’68 and perhaps now again with us, ends up privileging impulsive forces, violent destabilizing passions, ritual praxis, and the advanced cultivation of aesthetics (all part and parcel of “voluptuous feeling”). Daniel W. Smith pitching it for the broad-lay-of-the-land set: “For Leibniz, ‘force’ is the sufficient reason of movement, and Klossowski uses the term in a similar fashion in order to put impulsive forces on the same plane as physical forces." As in Nietzsche—certainly the Nietzsche of Klossowski and Deleuze—we have a poet and mystic and apparently disgruntled institutional pedagogue with an ontology of force and the desire to wield it against the dominant, but with Sade in the passenger seat it is clear that Klossowski has stumbled onto astonishing correlations that many will simply ignore because the implications end up being absolutely devastating (for the standpoint of the Functioning of the Dominant). Klossowski is not just enjoying being sinister for its own sake when he appreciatively notes the unwieldy and impressively batshit complexity of the pursuit Sade continually undertakes to assess the value of distinct acts of perversion within a given societal microcosm, such, for example, that phantasms and exchanges structured dialogically around the nominally non-exchangeable connoisseurship of perversities will tend to lead to such calculations as those which would see a fundamental commonality between a “large number of victims” and a "derterminate" mass-productivity schema. It’s not a good place to find yourself; it would seem that Klossopwski has the more sober handle on this conundrum than does Bataille. I think I attribute this largely to one thing: in 1970, or thereabouts, Pierre Klossowski has the Marquis de Sade for now and Charles Fourier hopefully for later. Or, as Daniel W. Smith essentially signs off: “Fourier’s entire effort was aimed at overcoming the ‘external’ perversion of the industrial economy (the monstrous hypertrophy of ‘needs’) so that humans could consent to their ‘internal’ perversion (the dissolution of their fictive unity), thereby producing a ‘harmony’ between the life of the impulses and the productions of the economy.” Well, okay, this is what I say on my way to having a world: The 21st Century Proper owes COVID some gratitude and is moving toward Confucius and Plenty. We have to explore Fourier and begin to make a break from Sade. Fourier might, I think, by a good deal more Confucian than we had imagined, just as the Chiense century may be a different Chinese century then we imagined. Yes, I am interested, as an artist and spiritual practitioner or whatever, in trans-individuation and transversality and transsexuality; this is Hakim Bey’s Fourier-adopted Romantic Angelicate, Closed Circuit, Secret Gnosis of the Central Nervous System's Basic Operational Polarity (made known only to those who make themselves known to Voluptuous Feeling, Impulsive Forces, or the equivalent). The Angelicate closes the loop. It could be one self-sustaining angel person or a doublet or some perverse phantasm shuffled about like a host-happy Haitian loa on the prowl. It might also just mean that when the hypertrophy or want overshoots the mark, the TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN three cherries slot machine blows its top and everybody gets to chill the fuck out. We don’t lose the mass-reproducible, value just moves to other things which always ought to have been better prized…which is to say “Hierophants,” or the personal daemon’s preferred simulations and arte-facts. If intelligence loses its insistence on the value of dissimulation and trickery, algorithms would actually become extremely Fourier-like, helping to organize communities and practices that might take the air out of the more violent streak inherent to impulses (at least from a historical standpoint). Maybe we can afford to be utopian right now, because it does not seem inconceivable that Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point ends up having to do with Prosperity & Plenty For All and The Autism Spectrum Bird’s Eye hacked by all those programmer- and coder-kids who hit their 10,000 hours as teenagers. Where is the “integral monster” most evident in our current culture/myth arena? The Angelicate is everyhere right now, I assure you, but the glaringly obvious example is Netflix Smash Hit THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT, where the young chess prodigy orphan fits the bill as though tailor-made. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon never descends into the necrotic collapse of Geroges Bataille’s BLUE OF NOON, and if she comes anywhere near that, I assure you it’s purely cosmetic. What Beth Harmon achieves is the erasure of the bonds imposed upon and about a cartwheeling intelligence, and in her personal-impersonal triumph she realizes a dialogic synthesis or hyperreal praxis on the other side of a phantomic Iron Curtain. The glorious joke very soon may be that fortune cookies conquered the world in the 19th century and the President of the United States is suddenly a black woman whose strongest asset is her wry grin. I’ll fuckin’ take that any day. Think also of the wonderful and actually Academy-Award-for-Best-Picture-Winning PARASITE, directed by the often great Bong Joon-Ho, which almost feels like autism’s memory of the last of the schizophrenic hauntings. “The economy of pleasure still remains latent,” writes Pierre Klossowski, “and perhaps it will never be able to emerge as long as the industrial regime limits the conditions of pleasure to the domestic sphere and a system of law based on the family unit.” That set-up isn’t at all the same as it was in 1970. David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS tells us that “the owls are not what they seem,” but well before that Klossowski implicitly demonstrates the following: manufacturing efficiency and Hegel don’t know a goddamn thing about owls. Owls are warnings. It's not Minerva, and trust me, you wouldn't want it to be. Owls are never encouragement. The things is—respective of TWIN PEAKS and PARASITE—what if all that bloated work of haunting, all that stalking malevolent PRESSURE, was the work of history, which is effectively completed. Well, glory be unto God the Bog and the Crackerjack Box People.
Read
October 20, 2012I located an English translation of this text by Jordan Levinson on Scribd.
March 30, 2018
Pretty good summary here on page 81;
"It is the very same interpretative capacity of the preliminary emotion that first instigated the deduction from the instinct to procreate. The pulsional force thus deducted then supplies the material for a phantasm, which is a 'fabricated' object. The emotional value accorded the use of a phantasm by a pulsional force only occurs with this use, in the same way that the use of a phantasm in perversion to procure emotion precisely depends on its being non-exchangeable. Therein lies the principal evaluation of this emotion: since it is indeed an impulse, which we call perverted because it impedes the gregarious fulfillment of individual unity (namely the procreative function of the individual), it manifests itself by its very intensity as that which is non-exchangeable and thus priceless. And whatever physiological unity the individual might eventually attain, in his physical appearance, is is still no match for the constraint of being under the exclusive control of phantasm."
"It is the very same interpretative capacity of the preliminary emotion that first instigated the deduction from the instinct to procreate. The pulsional force thus deducted then supplies the material for a phantasm, which is a 'fabricated' object. The emotional value accorded the use of a phantasm by a pulsional force only occurs with this use, in the same way that the use of a phantasm in perversion to procure emotion precisely depends on its being non-exchangeable. Therein lies the principal evaluation of this emotion: since it is indeed an impulse, which we call perverted because it impedes the gregarious fulfillment of individual unity (namely the procreative function of the individual), it manifests itself by its very intensity as that which is non-exchangeable and thus priceless. And whatever physiological unity the individual might eventually attain, in his physical appearance, is is still no match for the constraint of being under the exclusive control of phantasm."
February 10, 2023
My beloved monomaniac. A breath, a pulsion, a will to power interpenetrating form and bubbling over into a kind of sybaritic frenzy. The brisance of perversion vis-à-vis invested appetencies: a youthful fellatrand and his oh-so-dear price, Juliette’s meticulous accounting of ways she can be objectified. A thorough adumbration of bodies inexchangeable, suspended between Fourier’s gregarious passional series and Sade’s integral monstrosity, transcending the universal equivalency and prostitution of exchange value. Typically dense, but enduring.
January 4, 2018
I am currently in the process of making my notes on this work amd collecting my thoughts. Hopefully I will get to writing a review soon. It also concerns me that my thoughts on this work and Guyotat's Eden Eden Eden are going to become interpenetrated and co-parasitized by one another. But such is the mad game of writing, I suppose.
February 15, 2020
A very very dense but at the same time an interesting essay. As it hugely deoends on the works of Sade and Fourier, having read them should help better understand the essay.
April 29, 2023
No creo haber entendido nada
June 21, 2023
Studying 'Living Currency' for class. The essay at the end which gives more historical context and points out the similarities/differences between Klossowski + Benjamin was really good.
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