Following a couple of less interesting chapters focused on the biography of Nietzsche's madness, Klossowksi ends his epic little book with a brief but very complex: "Additional Note on Nietzsche's Semiotic". The return to semiology brings us back to the same themes we encountered in Chapter 2: "The Valetudinary States at the Origin of a Semiotic of Impulses". Here though, Klossowksi's focus will be more specific than the earlier chapter. He asks: what is thinking a sign of? In particular, he wants to investigate what type of thinking requires Nietzsche to write in aphorisms? He treats this not as a question of literary style, but, just as he has done throughout the book, as a way to reflect on what experience might have led to this particular expression. It's almost as if he wants to pose the question at the level of physiology. What is happening in an organism when it thinks? And what is happening in Nietzsche the man or the organism that leads him to express his thinking in aphorisms instead of constructing a complete system of thought?
The impulses do stuff. They are neither coherent nor incoherent, meaningful or meaningless, they just execute. They act, but without goal, attention, or will. How can we tell others about what's 'authentically' going on with these impulses? Using concepts everyone shares seems to classify, categorize, and falsify them because all our concepts our installed in us by a society that revolves around preserving the identity and good community standing of an interchangeable human unit. Concepts are gregarious signs meant to be persuasive to other subjects. As a result, they can only express what can be captured by an interchangeable identity. However, what's 'authentically' us is never our identity, which by definition we share, but our difference (obviously, this inverts the way the word 'authentic' works in our current discourse, which is why it gets the 'quotes'). In other words, how can we express the particularity or singularity of a determined configuration of our impulses? Only by admitting that the thoughts that would adequately express the actions of the impulses aren't our thoughts, that is, are not the thoughts of our subject, our homunculus. We don't do our own thinking. Our impulses 'think' and what we normally call our thoughts or intellect can only be our post hoc interpretation of of what already happened at some level below the intellect. An aphorism is meant to express this situation by admitting that our thoughts do not actually form a coherent system of their own, but occur to us for all kinds of spurious reasons. Thoughts are fortuitous, not willed by a thinker, and the aphoristic style expresses each thought as an unexpected and singular jewel that just happened to us, rather than a building block in a coherent conceptual system everyone should share.
How could Nietzsche translate the arbitrary freedom of the unintelligible depth into a persuasive constraint? Will not
discourse simply become arbitrary and devoid of any constraint? No doubt, if the conceptual form were maintained. It is therefore necessary for this form to reproduce - under the constraint of the impulsive fluctuations and in a completely desultory manner - the discontinuity that intervenes between the coherence of the intellect and the incoherence of the impulses. Rather than pursuing the birth of the concept at the level of the intellect, it comes to interpret the concept. Such is the form of the aphorism.
"One should not conceal and corrupt the fact that our thoughts come to us in a fortuitous fashion. The profoundest and least exhausted books will probably also have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal's Pensées. The driving forces and the evaluations lay below the surface a long time; what comes out is effect." (NVC, 255)
But aphorisms are not meant to merely reflect but also to actually create a situation in which thoughts begin and end abruptly, arising and passing away according to conditions that have nothing to do with the 'laws of thought' enshrined by logic. In fact, whenever we go to express a thought in language, it's already gone. All we can hope to do is to represent the configuration of impulses that gave rise to, or better yet, constituted, the thought. Before we get to the level of thinking as an attempt to communicate an impulsive state -- which Klossowski (sometimes) distinguishes as the "intellect" -- we have to realize that thinking is already an impulse in itself. What kind of impulsive state leads us to think, before it becomes a question of speaking? Thought is really a suspended action, a resisted action, an action the impulses didn't carry out, for some unknown reason. Klossowski calls it a "premeditated action" to emphasize that the (intellectual) thought merely happens to us after the fact, even though we have the illusion that we, the thinker, thunk it. The idea basically seems to be that impulsive actions become thoughts when they do not come to pass, which turns thought into a representation of possible action. Thought, then, arises (or maybe dominates?) as an impulse when there is some resistance to action, when some impulse blocks the discharge of others. Aphorisms then are meant to reflect not only the spontaneous and fortuitous nature of thinking, but to reflect the way thought resists action -- precisely by resisting the action of (more) thought. the aphoristic style reflects a lack of system in a impulsive thoughts, and also actively prevents us from constructing a system by bringing thoughts to a stop when they are still in a fragmentary and allusive state. Aphorisms are thought resisting itself.
I think this is a brilliant idea, and one that had a major influence on Difference & Repetition, so I'll quote the whole paragraph that expresses it.
To prevent discourse from being reduced to the level of a fallacious coherence, it must be compelled toward a type of thought that does not refer back to itself (i.e., to the intellect), in a kind of edifice of subsequent thoughts, but is pushed to a limit where thought puts a stop to itself [mette un terme a elle-meme]. Insofar as thought turns out to be efficacious, it is not as an utterance of the intellect but as the premeditation of an action. In the latter case, what thought retains from the intellect is only the representation of a possible event - a (premeditated) action in a double sense. Since thought is the act of the intellect, this act of premeditating - which is no longer a new intellectual act but an act that suspends the intellect - seeks to produce (itself in) a fact. It can no longer even be referred to as a thought but as a fact that happens to thought, as an event that brings thought back to its own origin. There is something resistant in thought that drives it forward - toward its point of departure.
Nietzsche, following this process to its source, thus discovers that of which thought is only a shadow: the strength to resist. (NVC, 256)
Clearly though, there's another kind of thought that doesn't put a stop to itself, but in fact reinforces itself. This type of thinking uses its representations to refer back to other representations of possible actions, ie. other thoughts, in an endless chain of papañca. While this signifying chain takes itself to be something solid and meaningful, it's actually just a series of non-events referring to one another. It creates a coherent self-referential system of fixed signs, a code, that hides its origin in the experience of the impulses as well as its own manner of construction. It becomes a code we mistake for reality, a map we confuse with the territory.
How then is the intellect constituted so that the agent [suppôt] is capable of producing only representations?
Representations are nothing but the reactualization of a prior event, or the reactualizing preparation for a future event. But in truth, the event in turn is only a moment in a continuum which the agent isolates in relation to itself in its representations, sometimes as a result, sometimes as a beginning. As soon as the agent reflects on it. it is itself only the result or beginning of something else.
Every meditation that happens to us is only the trace of something prior, a 'pre-meditation' incorporated into ourselves - namely, a premeditation of the now-'useless' acts that have constituted us, so much so that our representations only reactualize the prior events of our own organization. This would be the origin of the intellect's representations and its products, of our thoughts that keep us from pre-meditating anew. (NVC, 256)
Since it remains hermetically enclosed in a world of signifiers referring to other signifiers, this type of thinking can't produce anything new. It can only "reactualize" things that were never quite actual to begin with. Klossowski doesn't say it explicitly here, but this is the code of everyday signs (or "stereotypes" mentioned in the preface xi) we saw earlier in the book. Here we can see that these signs are gregarious not only in a social sense, but because they form a way the subject can communicate with its own past identities. The very identity of the self is constructed and maintained across time with this kind of self-referential code. Without it, every impulsive state is realized as singular. The conceptual proliferation we usually call thinking requires an (inherently gregarious) principle of identity that tries to understand and incorporate any new impulse by absorbing it into the same old "comprehensive" code.
By contrast, the type of thinking Klossowski is interested in is a way of "comprehending" things not by incorporating them into an existing shared code, but precisely by resisting the code's proliferation. Such resistance can't be shared, but is unique to each of us, and expresses exactly what makes our current impulses different from all the past ones. "For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ." Resistance brings the machine to halt and introduces a gap that allows us to avoid the same old re-actions. This is exactly what real thinking is all about -- changing your mind. It's not a doing, however, but an un-doing of the straight jacket we constantly try to force experience into. And it's already happening every time we go to look for it.
But perhaps there is a different origin to the organization that is particular to each of us: something in that organization has resisted certain external actions. Something in us was therefore able to resist until now, though not at the level of the intellect's coherence. Would this not be a new pre-meditation of acts to come . . . ?
Nietzsche's aphorisms, by consequence, tend to give to the very act of thinking the virtue of resistance to any 'conceptualization', to keep it beyond the 'norms' of the undemanding, and thus to substitute for 'concepts' what he called values, since every 'concept' has never been anything other than the trace of an efficacious act - not for thought itself but for the triumph of an unknown force [une force quelconque]. (NVC, 257)
["Quelconque" seems to refer to something more like "whatever", or "any old", "mediocre", "nondescript" -- which is to say gregarious -- force.]
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