Lyndon Baines Johnson Never Elaborates (Chapter 10)

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.]

Emptiness and the Simulacrum (Chapter 6)

Chapter 6 of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is such a long and winding essay that I need to outline its entire trajectory to feel like I understand Klossowski's crucial idea about, "The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine".  Closely tied up with the idea of the Return's selection is the equally difficult concept of the simularcum, which Klossowski here uses in a positive sense, as if the very goal of ER were to produce a simulacrum.  As we dive into these ideas, we can try to hold a single, albeit paradoxical, thread as our guide -- the selection of the Return is already a production, and the production already a selection.  This means that the re-production that constitutes the simulacrum is simultaneously cause and effect, epiphenomenon and ground of phenomenon itself.  It's clear that, like always, we're going around in circles here.  But this is the only adequate way to respond to another version of the basic question that the paradoxical experience of ER always poses for us.  What does this momentous experience actually change for us?  What are we supposed to do about the revelation that we've done all this before?

Klossowksi begins exploring this paradox by reminding us that Nietzsche doesn't believe in the concept of the will (as we normally understand it) at all.  To believe that we have some sort of (inevitably homuncular) will power is always, for Nietzsche, to confuse cause and effect.  The feeling of willing arises from a particular arrangement of power dynamics amongst the impulses or drives.  When one impulse succeeds in dominating others (which is what every drive 'wants' to do) it construes this state as a 'goal' that the agent's 'will' sought to reach.  But both the goal, and the will power needed to arrive, there are epiphenomenal illusions.  All we can really say is that nature works.

'Nature has no goal and realizes something. We others have a 'goal' but obtain something other than this goal.'
   We interpret our obscure impulses, in accordance with institutional language, as if they had a will, which presupposes a cause exerting its effect. A play of forces, of relations between forces, fallaciously interpreted. (NVC, 122) 

If Nietzsche doesn't believe in the efficacy or even existence of the will, it would seem that the question of what to do about ER simply falls apart.  Nobody does anything at all.  But here is precisely where the paradoxical subtlety of the Return reveals itself.  Even if our will is an illusion, we nevertheless act in the world.  And of course, we always act (pretend) like we have a will and a goal.  These 'illusions' seem to be necessary byproducts of our every action, and they too must return.  ER seems to itself invent the illusion that keeps the wheel turning (or at least accompanies its turning).  We must posit a goal because without it, or without faith in things being guided by a divine plan, we would not act at all, but merely sink into a passive nihilism.  The will is a 'necessary illusion'.

     "If no goal resides in the whole history of human destinies, then one must be inserted into it: assuming that a goal is necessary for us, and on the other hand, that the illusion of an immanent end has become transparent to us.  A goal is necessary for us because a will is necessary for us - our dorsal spine. The will as a compensation for belief, for the representation of a divine will, which offers something to our intention." 
     But to give a meaning and a goal to existence - what would this amount to? To nothing, insofar as existence (under the guise of human destinies) invents meanings and goals by itself, through individuals and societies. (NVC, 123)

 

Now the question of the selective power of the Return comes into better focus.  Does ER select things on its own, or does it require our conscious help?  Yes!  These two options are no longer mutually exclusive when we understand that ER produces a 'real illusion' -- a simulacrum -- of the will.  To believe in the Return of all things is to acknowledge ourselves as automata, to will not to have our own will ... only to paradoxically having this very simulation of willing brought back to us and repeated as a simulacrum.  

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While this solves the problem of whether or not the Return requires us to do something, it doesn't provide any guidance on exactly what to do.  Should Nietzsche tell the world about ER (and if so, to what end?), or should he keep it to himself?

   ... either the selection depends on the disclosure of the Eternal Return (as a sign of the Vicious Circle: putting humanity to the test; the result: a new species, or rather, the attaining of a higher level through which every orientation, every decision, and all behaviour would be changed. A scientific demonstration of the Eternal Return becomes necessary.)
   or else the selection will take place in secret (the Vicious Circle), that is, it will be undertaken in the name of this secret by certain experimenters (the Masters of the Earth). A purely experimental doctrine of selection will be put into practice as a 'political' philosophy. (NVC, 124)

Klossowski's focus in this chapter will be on the second of these two options, the idea of the philosopher as an 'attempter' who tries to create the conditions of the (anyways inevitable) Return.

The term 'Versucher', which occasionally appears in Nietzsche's texts, has the double meaning of 'experimenter' and 'tempter'. Every creator is at once someone who tempts others and who experiments on (tempts) himself and others in order to create something that does not yet exist, a set of forces capable of acting upon and modifying that which exists.  (NVC, 127)

It's important to pause here to appreciate the context around this philosophical 'tempter' or 'imposter', and consider what kind of conditions they select.  Naturally, it's tempting to think of this person as some sort of Übermensch dictator breeding a new race of humans who are tough enough to realize Nietzsche's philosophy.  Despite Nietzsche's incendiary language about Masters and Slaves, however, Klossowski makes clear that this is not what we're talking about.  Remember, the experiment itself is quite paradoxical.  Perhaps you might even call it a simulacrum of an experiment.  After all, the goal is to create the conditions for an action that has already occurred, to fabricate as an aim what was already inevitable. In other words, the point is to create someone capable of supporting the idea of the Return, someone capable of affirming themselves as an automaton (obviously a strange sort of 'Master').  This ability actually defines who is a Master and who a Slave for Nietzsche.  

The Master and the slave are states which, respectively, are the result of a test. And this test always remains the adherence to the sign of the vicious circle, or its rejection. (NVC, 126)

So when Nietzsche so often focuses on the violence and cruelty and monstrousness of the Master, these traits are aimed first of all at the Master's own identity.  As we've seen, to embrace the Return means to dissolve your own identity, to accept that you will forget this singular moment, and to understand that to return to it, you must pass through a whole series of other identities before it comes back to you as a new revelation.  This is not exactly the road to world domination.  It does, however, make some sense to suggest that this experimenter aims at a disruption of the political status quo.  To 'make' the return happen, we have to create the conditions in which identity, and its correlates, gregariousness and equilibrium, fall apart.  

If the meaning of all eminent creation is to break the gregarious habits that always direct existing beings toward ends that are useful exclusively to the oppressive regime of mediocrity - then in the experimental domain to create is to do violence to what exists, and thus to the integrity of beings. Every creation of a new type must provoke a state of insecurity: creation ceases to be a game at the margins of reality; henceforth, the creator will not re-produce, but itself produce the real. (NVC, 129)

The final line of this quote encapsulates the strange status of creation in Nietzsche's philosophy.  In a sense, it's always the ultimate thing he strives for, the ultimate test of value.  But this ultimate action is only possible because the identity of both creator and creation are empty, fabricated.  Creators produce the real only by acknowledging that there is no such thing.  They liberate us and themselves from the straight-jacket of identity, which always cloaks the average forms necessary for the life of the mediocre masses beneath a veneer of essentialism and 'common sense'.  In fact, just as the singular Master is defined by her capacity to operate without identity, the masses of slaves are defined by the fact that their identities are fixed in place as so many interchangeable units.  These definitions are what make Nietzsche sound like he's talking about a 'political' philosophy when his actual concern is an ontological creativity.  This is the thrust of the fantastic long quotation from Nietzsche's notebooks that Klossowski reproduces on pp. 130-132 and proceeds to comment on.  All the traditional values we hold to be highest -- Truth, Goodness, Reason, Beauty -- are merely deceits fabricated by the attempt to contain creativity within an average form suitable for reproduction across a mass of people.  The philosopher breaks these forms open to reveal the societal will to power (not the will to knowledge, reason, or moral goodness) that fabricated them and then proceeds to experiment with new forms.  That passage ends with the commentary:

To be fair to Nietzsche, we must first of all emphasize the shocking nature of this proposition: "The simulacra are ours! Let us be the deceivers and the embellishment of humanity!"  This is what all potentates worthy of the name are supposed to say. But Nietzsche now wants the savant to speak this kind of language. In this sense, he is taking up an occult conception of political mystification and making it pass into the hands of the philosophers. (NVC, 131)

What we see at work here is a positive notion of the false, which, as the basis of artistic creation, is now extended to every problem raised by existence. Mystification, according to Nietzsche, is not simply the way a potentate operates It is the very ground of existence. (NVC, 132)

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But wait, what are "new forms" in a world governed by the eternal return?  This homage to the freedom of creativity is a peculiar one.  Creativity has a deconstructive aspect, bordering on nihilism, where traditional forms are revealed as empty expressions of the will to power.  But its reconstructive aspect is equally empty.  Those new forms, those simulacra that the philosopher uses to embellish humanity to his taste are merely another expression of a different will to power (the number of "wills to power" is a strange question), namely, the philosophers own.  Like the traditional societal simulacra (which Klosskowski will now start referring to as products of the "intellect"), what the experimenter creates is simply the simulacra that she must create to become, that is to return to, what she is.  This is a strange kind of 'creation' that seeks only to retrace the forces that account for itself, which Klossowski's calls the life of the impulses.  We saw early on in the book that these impulses operate via attractors called phantasms at what we would usually refer to as an 'unconscious' level.  This term becomes problematic, however, when we deny the separate reality of a 'conscious' level that would contrast with it.  In fact, the idea of our consciousness and intellect is nothing but a 'creation', and it's creation all the way down as well.

This line of thinking leads directly to a full statement of non-duality, albeit one that contains Nietzsche's characteristic (mis?)interpretation of Nirvana as a kind of final nihilism:  

If we affirm that 'the only being guaranteed to us is being that represents itself, and is therefore changing, non-identical to itself, completely relative' - in other words, that existence is sustained only through fabulation - then we are stating clearly that existence itself is a fabulation. Thus Nietzsche, who feared the spread of Nirvanaism in the West, was in fact simply dreaming of inverting this Nirvanaism into a praxis of the simulacrum: the attraction of nothingnes can be overcome only by developing the very phantasms the Buddha tried to liquidate. (NVC, 132)

This is about as close as you can come to the Tantric perspective that embraces everything that arises as "a magician's illusion" or a "beautiful display".  While it at first appears to break the world into two distinct systems -- an unconscious one whose 'aims' are defined by the attractive quality of the phantasms and a conscious one that creates simulacra -- the fact that the simulacra are nothing but a conscious redoubling of the unconscious forces that made them possible means that these two systems are non-dual.  The simulacrum is a willed copy or simulation of a phantasm that operates beneath the level of will.  It is precisely the necessary illusion we saw was produced by (and productive of) the Return.

   Nothing exists apart from impulses that are essentially generative of phantasms.
   The simulacrum is not the product of a phantasm, but its skillful reproduction, by which humanity can produce itself. through forces that are thereby exorcized and dominated by the impulse.
   In the hands of the 'imposter' philosopher, the Trugbild - the simulacrum - becomes the willed reproduction of
non-willed phantasms, born from the life of the impulses. (NVC, 133)

To fix a goal, to give a meaning - not merely to orient living forces, but also to elicit new centers of forces: this is what the simulacrum does: a simulacrum of goal, a simulacrum of meaning - which must be invented! Invented from what? From the phantasms of the life of the drives - the impulse, as 'will to power', already being the first interpreter. (NVC, 135)

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However, despite the fact that the simulacrum is not ultimately different from the phantasm, these two levels can also fail to correspond.  In fact, most often they do fail.  Nietzsche's critique of a traditional notion like Truth as a simulacra that doesn't recognize itself as such revolved around exactly this failure.  The intellect, our gregarious inheritance that  seeks to see the world through exchangeable identities designed to benefit the species, can easily misinterpret the phantasms that arise within the individual.  Thus it replaces the messy world of the impulses with common sense ideas of what our goals should be, eg. truth, pleasure, even survival.  In other words, the intellect functions just like what we often disparagingly call our 'rationalizations'.  As in, "I was just trying to be honest, not seeking revenge".  So we cannot safely look to the intellect for a simulacrum that corresponds to our individual phantasms, but instead have to rely on the more plastic power of art.

Now there is only one mediator that can say what a phantasm 'wiils': through its conventional procedures, art essential reconstitutes in its own figures the conditions that have constituted the phantasm, namely, the intensities of the impulses. The simulacrum, in relation to the intellect, is the license that the latter concedes to art: a ludic suspension of the reality principle. (NVC, 134)

The idea of a mismatch between the life of the impulses and the world of the intellect is clearly a powerful one.  But we can see a danger here of reintroducing a duality between art and the intellect.  After all, we are in effect saying that the categories of the intellect are a sort of 'fake simulacrum', which seems like an incoherent idea.  Klossowksi's next twist, then, is to begin brilliantly dismantling the duality he just described.  In the end, both intellect and art reflect a single voice of being -- the will to power.

It might be objected, however, that if the fluctuations of intensity in the impulses are necessarily inverted by the intellect, in accordance with a meaning and a goal (the guarantors of gregarious security), it goes without saying that the herd's 'will to power' would win out over al the other impulses. How can we fail to recognize that the intellect and its categories are the organic products of this primordial impulse (of the conservation of the species), and that if there is a phantasm, here as elsewhere, it is one that has managed to produce its own simulacrum - the most efficacious simulacrum of humanity - from which human behaviour has created for itself a whole set of diverse spheres, all of which are so many aspects of the reality principle - namely, the demarcation between acting and non-acting.  Now knowledge itself - initially contemplative and theoretical, then increasingly experimental - is also an interpretive 'will to power' that in each case reinvents the real in terms of its own modes of apprehending its objects, and then of manipulating them. It is here that two wills to power collide: the gregarious will to power, and the will to power which, through individual initiative, breaks with gregariousness. (NVC,135)

All the concepts we earlier disparaged as fictions or illusions are actually what we might call 'collective simulacra'.  God, Self, Will, etc ... can be seen most clearly as simulacra produced by the impulsive life of the social body.  These appear to be the illusions necessary to hold society together as if it were an organism.  Perhaps, whether independently, or, more likely, as a byproduct of manufacturing social subjects, a new level of individual phantasms and simulacra have been produced.  But can this level claim to be any more real and fundamental than the gregarious social one?  All we can say is that two wills to power collide -- the individual, and the idea of subject society installs in this individual.

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At this point we move from metaphysics into truly strange political territory (what follows is my limited understanding of the very complex passage on pg. 138-9).  If we interpret all the concepts Nietzsche usually wishes to deconstruct (subject, knowledge, etc ...) as societal simulacra, then we have to admit they they too reproduce some sort of social phantasm.  As we saw earlier, the role of this reproduction is to posit what what was already happening on its own as an intention.  So the social system that fabricates our intellectual reality (which in the modern world is 'science', the ultimate social arbiter of what is knowledge) already has its own impulses and phantasms.  The forces that 'unconsciously' structure this system are redoubled in the form of the concepts that we consciously consider common sense.  For Klossowski, the essence of this system is the production of exchangeable unitary identities that possess an intention, a will (ie. morally responsible agents or subjects)  This is both a description of what the social machine unconsciously produces, but also of what, in the manner of all simulacrum, it goes on to posit as necessary (meanwhile forgetting that the necessity is only relative to its own mode of life).  It's as if the structure of society were itself projected on the natural world, and, no surprise, found itself mirrored there.  Science says: there must be objects which follow laws that scientists can know.  Society says: there must be subjects who follow laws that the government can know, and there must be consumers who follow laws of desire that businesses can know.  Through modern science and industry, we effectively produce the subjects (natural and human) that will follow these laws.  And we do this 'in order' to reinforce the functioning of the existing system of subjectivity.  Unfortunately (from the perspective of maintaining society) the methods by which we fabricate phenomenon go well beyond this 'goal'.  Remember that in Nietzsche's world nothing has a true goal, and no organism 'wills' its own self-preservation, but everything simply executes.  Our modern society tends to the over-production of subjects and objects.  This is not actually the goal of society, but merely the way it functions.  The subject/object machine that fabricates identities cannot be turned off.  Eventually, this over-production actually destabilizes society, and allows for the possibility that certain unique individuals will be produced who escape this schema entirely.  They gain the power to invent their own simulacra in place of the social simulacra that no longer function to hold their identities in place.

The day human beings learn how to behave as phenomena devoid of intention - for every intention at the level of the human being always implies its own conservation, its continued existence - on that day, a new creature would declare the integrity of existence. (NVC, 139)

As we've seen, "inventing your own simulacra" is an oddly passive sort of creative activity.  Since it involves consciously redoubling the workings of your unconscious automata, it is akin to affirming your own existence as a pure product of chance encounters between forces, amongst them the social forces that accidentally produced you as a byproduct of their over-production of objects.  Ultimately, the simulacrum is produced only at the point where an agent is able to see itself as completely devoid of will or intention, to dissolve itself into a meaningless chaos. 

Laws exist only because of our need to calculate. Only quantities of force exist. Chaos, then, is already nothing more than the term of a negative formulation that we establish on the basis our own conditions of living. Chaos does not exist as an intention. And we cannot conceive of ourselves other than intentional beings. Where does this impossibility come from? From the fact that the forces we improperly name 'Chaos' have no intention whatsoever. Nietzsche's unavowable project is to act without intention: the impossible morality. Now the total economy of this intentionless universe creates intentional beings. The species 'man' is a creation of this kind - pure chance - in which the intensity of forces is inverted into intention: the work of morality. The function of the simulacrum is to lead human intention back to the intensity of forces, which generate phantasms.  This is not the function of science which, denying intention, compensates for it in beneficial and efficacious activity.  (NVC, 140)

The production of the individual simulacrum by the experimental-philosopher passes through the decay of what we were calling the social simulacra that science and intellect succeeded in producing.  Klossowksi argues (pp. 146-147) that we should read Nietzsche's descriptions of the way the philosopher will employ the means of science to go beyond science's reinforcement of the current institutional forms (justifying schemes that otherwise sound dangerously like eugenics to post-war ears) in the light of this 'the goal is a lack of goal' philosophy.  In other words, it's not that the overhuman has a goal for society, but that the overhuman is the (secret) goal of society.  Seen in this context, the overhuman seems to function as the precise simulacrum corresponding to the breakdown of the old social simulacra (ie. the death of god).  Perhaps society's goal all along was to produce a new kind of human through its crashing and burning.

Thus formulated, the postulate of the 'overman', which is not an individual but a state, is the means by which Nietzsche - who does not believe existence has a goal - will nonetheless give existence both a meaning and a goal to pursue. In this way, Nietzsche winds up substituting the creative initiative of the individual for the million random events of existence. In doing so, however. he is suppressing the crucial point of his thought, namely, that these 'random events' were implicit in the Eternal Return. which alone makes them succeed in producing something, independently of the willing or non-willing of humans. (NVC, 148)

I think reading the overhuman as a 'goal', in precisely and only the way the simulacrum is a goal, goes a long way towards helping us understand why the overhuman is such an important concept in the early parts of TSZ, but then fades as the story progresses.  The "creative initiative of the individual" is in fact identical to the "million random events of existence".  It's just that we're more accustomed to starting from the perspective of an individual with will.  

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To summarize the political argument so far.  One the one hand, 'modern society' or 'humanity' considered as an agent produces certain phantasms like Will, and the Self, that structure how it operates.  These phantasms in a sense reflect the 'industrial creativity' of the modern world.  This agent appears to function by machining humans into identical and exchangeable commodities -- namely, consumer subjects.  On the surface, the goal of the machine appears to be the production of exactly these uniform subjects.  On the other hand, it appears that this machine works almost too well for its own good.  Because they don't ultimately have any goal at all, the methods of science and the productive power of the commodity economy can't stop.  They must produce the material overabundance and decadence which the philosopher can use as raw material for selecting something new.  In this sense, Nietzsche can depict the overhuman as the unacknowledged 'goal' of all this overproduction.  The whole system is secretly aimed at the overhuman, who accidentally, but necessarily, appears as its Master.  After all, this system is for him.  Of course, it's a strange kind of master who is as much a product of as a producer of the social and economic system, but this confusion is always part of the simulacrum.   In short, the overhuman is the simulacrum of humanity as a social species.

[I can see that there's some confusion here between the phantasm and the simulacrum.  For example, Is the Self a phantasm of society or a social simulacrum?  I'm not sure Klossowski is completely consistent in the use of these terms.  They both mean something that operates like a goal.  The distinction is supposed to be that the phantasm is impulsive and unconscious, whereas the simulacrum is symbolic and conscious.  However, we've also seen Klossowksi argue that the distinction between conscious and unconscious is relative to the notion of consciousness, and that it dissolves when we realize there is ultimately nothing more than 'blind' impulses (the will to power).  A more fundamental distinction might be founded on the idea that the simulacrum is always the return or reproduction of a phantasm. In other words, the simulacrum is a copy, not the original.  It's such a perfect copy, however, that its role is less to reproduce the original than it is to produce the original again, in the sense of the Eternal Return (see Pierre Menard).  It's a copy, but one that's paradoxically necessary for there to even be an original.  Obviously, this makes a complete hash of the difference between a model and a copy, but it leads us in a useful direction.  Ultimately, a simulacrum is self-reinforcing structure, akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We might think of it as a fractal that always contains a copy of itself.  It's an image that reproduces itself endlessly.  By contrast, the phantasm only happens once.  It's a fleeting structure that seems to serves as a goal or attractor, but that lacks any power to reproduce itself once it's reached.  This distinction will make more sense in a moment when we examine how the concept of 'a human identity' proves to be unstable and self-defeating, whereas the more mutable concept of the 'overhuman' is produced by a sort of inevitably successful conspiracy.]

In the next section (pp. 153-157), Klossowski goes on to give this same idea a statistical or demographic spin.  If we take seriously the idea that 'the human species' or 'society' can be an agent, then we can ask: what would make a species powerful?  Do we judge the power of a species simply on the basis of the number of identical units that comprise it?  This sounds like a common sense definition of power at first, but turns out to completely crumble upon further inspection.  Is a body a more powerful agent simply because it has more identical cells?  Of course not.  That's just a heap of cells.  The power of an agent depends much more on the internal differentiation and organization of its parts.  If by 'humanity' we just mean the pile of all the identical units we call 'humans', then humanity as an agent will only be as powerful as the individuals it produces.  If our modern society succeeds in mass producing a sea of individually powerless and completely exchangeable identities, then how powerful an agent is it?

To the degree that humanity seeks consistency in and through its conservation alone, it falls ever further into inconsistency. The increase in the number of agents of existence is pro­portional to the decrease in the power of each of them.  If power is already the violence of the absurd, then at the level of gregariousness it must find in the individual agent some. meaning for the species. Hence. the more the species grows, the more it perpetuates itself for nothing. For the species, as a whole, cannot act as the sole agent of existence, which alone would account for the singularity of each individual. (NVC, 153)

The point Klossowksi seems to be making here (in extraordinarily compressed form) is that a species whose power lay in the reproduction of its identical unit would be self-defeating.  If its 'goal' (ie. its phantasm, the structure of its functioning) is to produce more and more human widgets, then as we've seen, these individual widgets function like a societal simulacrum.  As this production multiples, however, the quality of the widget produced changes and declines.  Society in fact fails to reproduce the ideally average type of human it posits as its goal.  Not only humans, but 'humanity' deteriorates.  Which means that the simulacrum it produces (the individual) doesn't work the way a simulacrum is supposed to, which is to produce the Return of the original.  Essentially, the species blows itself up as a stable agent.  

At the level of the species, then. the unbridled power of propagation destroys the species' raison d'etre: it cannot be its own justification. It is justified only in terms of the differences it is able to produce in relation to itself, that is to say, the different degrees of intensity of existence. But the greater the number of living beings becomes, the more these differences tend to be effaced, for each difference is reproduced at the same rhythm, and consequently they re-form a homogenous totality in which this difference is in turn annulled. (NVC, 153)

Obviously, this disintegration of the agent should remind us of Klossowski's central thesis about the way that individual identity dissolves in the eternal return.  The point here is precisely that the species as an agent cannot be the sole stable agent of evolution.  This agent too must dissolve into a series of differences, and as this differentiation increases, its statistically inevitable, though (from the perspective of the species) accidental and monstrous, byproduct, is the overhuman.  The ubermensch is literally a mutant; but with enough simple reproduction, mutation is inevitable.

Similarly, as propagation, power also exceeds the human species as the sole agent of existence and it is by exceeding it that power turns the species into a teeming monstrosity: at this stage, the species is no longer the master of its own destiny.

The total devalorizalion of power through the propagation of the species, the usurping agent of existence, has as its counterpart the singular case, which is where surplus power finds its image: the image of chance. For if the singular case can be defined only negatively in relation to gregariousness, it is defined positively with regard to power. The singular case is not hereditary, and its originality cannot be transmitted; on the contrary, it is a threat to the species as species; in relation to it, gregariousness is nothing more than a raw and living material, characteristic of an elaboration of chance. (NVC, 154)

Klossowski suggests that if we keep in mind this backdrop of Nietzsche's 'political' philosophy -- the Return needs a reintegration that follows a cycle of decadence and disintegration -- we can reinterpret a number of the concepts he's famous.  For example, he often writes in praise of the necessity of slavery.  But who is a slave in this system?  Almost everyone in fact, and most of all those we consider the rulers, those who serve to reinforce the working of the homogenizing 'human rights' machine.  It isn't that the overhuman is a pre-established goal, and slavery is a necessary means to produce that end.  Recall that for Nietzsche the 'goal' is always an illusion, or at best a simulacrum.  Instead, the overhuman is produced as a sort of justification for slavery after the fact.  Nietzsche frequently says that the overhuman gives humanity a goal in the same way we give someone a gift ("Zarathustra replied. 'Why did I speak of love? I bring mankind a gift.' ").  To bear all that suffering and its endless Return, we must conceive that it is for something.  As if the means justify themselves by finally producing an end.  This is how we 'rationalize' the absurdity of universal slavery.

What is our function, our cloak of slavery? Our teaching? - Slavery must not be suppressed, it is necessary. We would simply like that such (men) for whom we are working always be formed, so that we do not waste this enormous mass of political and commercial forces. If only for there to be spectators and non-partners! (NVC, 157)

Similarly, the cruelty and 'license with regard to every virtue imperative', that makes Nietzsche's overhuman appear monstrous is simply a vivid way of describing a mutant who escapes the dominant commodification of life we see in modern societies.  These 'virtue imperatives' are precisely the phantasms that structure a societal machine that appears to be aimed at the production of 'equilibrium man'.  For example, in this passage you can hear Klossowski's 1969 echo of Zarathustra's 1882 description of the "last human".

As exploitation developed, it demanded, under the pretext of a massive (and thus average) saturation, that completely conditioned reflexes be substituted for the appetitive spontaneity of individuals on a vast scale. Consequently, it also arrogated to itself the 'moral' and 'psycho-technical' mission (inherited from the essentially punitive element of the economies of the two world wars, which were prototypes of planetary planning) of exterminating any impulse that might induce human nature to increase its emotive capacity - notably, the propensity of the individual to put its 'useful' specificity at risk by seeking that which exceeds it as an agent: namely, the most subtle states of the soul, which are capable of inducing a rapture that surpasses its congenital servitude, and therefore of producing an intensity that corresponds to the impulsive constraint of its own phantasms - even if they are themselves due to this congenital servitude, thus magnified. (NVC, 157)

The last human is the completely virtuous, completely productive, completely satisfied, completely average, phantasm of society.  A perfectly manufactured cog in a machine.  In short, a slave.  But the overhuman is a slave as well, albeit one who becomes master by acknowledging the internalized conditions of their own slavery.  In fact, as we've observed, the overhuman is a byproduct of society, really a sort of inevitable parasite on society.  We have to hear Nietzsche's constant praise of "nobility" and "aristocracy" in this light.

... the 'aristocratism' which, according to Nietzsche, must be represented by at least ant group, one particular case, not as a fraction of humanity but as its surplus (and hence, for the totality, as an exterminable, shootable, odious leech).

This aristocracy is not the cause or controlling force in the machine, but its autonomous surplus product, a little piece of the machine that escapes its attempt to control and average human life.

 ... a new mercantile class that wis incapable of revolting, and for this reason was enslaved by the satisfaction of its own needs. Those who are excluded are excluded by their own moral non-satisfaction: superior natures, living prostheses, austere and sober. But the 'main consideration' is 'not to see the task of the higher species in leading the lower (as, e.g., Comte does), but the lower as base upon which the higher species performs its own tasks - upon which it alone can stand'.  (NVC, 158)

In a way, Nietzsche's political vision is not that far from Marx.  Both foresee the inevitability of a 'socialism' in which all desires are fulfilled and almost everyone become equal.  Marx imagines, however, this is a world of a million Masters, whereas Nietzsche argues, much more presciently, that this is a state of near universal Slavery.  The only Masters to appear at the end of this (failed) trajectory towards equilibrium are those rejects who grasp the way their desires have been machined by the gregarious forces of society.  This effectively turns Marx's socialist utopia into an accidental conspiracy on behalf of one human-- the overhuman.

The 'rulers'(industrialists, military men, bankers, businessmen, bureaucrats, etc.), with their various tasks, are merely effective slaves who work unknowingly on behalf of these hidden masters, and thus for a (contemplative caste that ceaselessly forms the 'values' and the meaning of life. (NVC, 159)

  

There are a number of other insightful passages in this section (pp. 159-165) that I'm tempted to quote (from both Nietzsche and Klossowksi).  But I think the main idea is probably fairly clear by now, and we should try to steer the discussion back to its starting point in the Eternal Return.  The attempt to perfect the mechanism of society into a system for total human and planetary dominance necessarily breaks down and defeats itself.  Society destabilizes itself and the human species fractures.  Humanity's "self-domestication" is the tragedy of Zarathustra.  But if a few of us can really live through and fully experience our universal servitude, it can produce a catharsis.  This is one of the great lessons of the Return.  Even the worst is necessary!  Even the smallest and most pitiful must also return. That's the only way we also get the greatest.  Paradoxically, like Oedipus, humanity must resist the idea of ER in order to fulfill it.  

If the enslavement of everyone coincides with justice, the only practicable justice, it is only because, somewhere, freedom bursts forth from an iniquitous and absurd flash that servitude alone can have an equitable meaning. It is in this relation, in this tension - in this final intensity - that the luminous achievement of the sinister Circle appears. (NVC, 166)

At the end of the chapter (finally), Klossowksi comes back to the theme of the Return as a selective doctrine.  Like everything about ER, the idea of selection has become a paradoxical one.  What we've seen is that society is secretly 'selecting for' the production of a new type of human, though in an entirely accidental fashion that belies its self-conscious goal of reproducing the average type of human.  Since this 'selection' doesn't require any intention, we might call it 'natural selection'.  But this of course makes for a strong contrast with the idea of Darwinian selection, which is all about reproducing the 'fittest' unit, namely the one that most perfectly reproduces itself.  In a sense, the Return is selecting for mutation, for variability, for the ability to create a difference, rather than for the repetition of the best reproduction.  And yet, since it's this same difference that comes back, and only comes back by producing a will capable of willing itself, we might equally call ER the most 'artificial' form of selection.  So is the Return a real metaphysical law that exists in its own right, or is it merely another quasi-religious illusion for us to believe in?  As always, the answer is yes.  That's what the simulacrum -- emptiness -- is all about.

On the one hand, the meaninglessness of existence serves as an argument for the philosopher to free his hands and start pruning on the spot. On the other hand, the 'truth' of the Return is virtually renounced as a chimera, and
considered as a pure phantasm. Hence it is the simulacrum of a doctrine invoked by those who pursue the simulacrum of a goal: namely, the 'overhuman'. (NVC, 169)

The Beginning is the End (Chapter 4)

What does it mean for the man we call 'Nietzsche' that he experienced the intense moment he later elaborated as the thought of the Eternal Return?  Klossowski pursues this question in his next two chapters as a natural extension of his interpretation of ER.  If the content of the thought of ER dissolves the subject who thinks it, Nietzsche could not help but wonder what the fact that such a thought occurred to him might mean.  Is this a special insight that can only occur to a singular individual as some sort of culmination of the history of thought?  Or, on the contrary, does the way ER projects its thinker outside himself and into other identities indicate the incipient breakdown of Nietzsche's individual lucidity?  In other words is the thought of ER the beginning of his madness?

Needless to say this question can't get off the ground without a definition of madness.  While Klossowski doesn't tackle this latter directly, he does introduce his discussion of why Nietzsche might have been so keen to find a 'scientific proof' for ER -- in part to prove his own sanity -- by examining a set of dualities related to the definition of lucidity versus madness.  Nietzsche was obsessed with distinguishing between weakness and strength, sickness and health, exhaustion and over-abundance, what is singular and what is common (or as Klossowski calls it, "gregarious").  This last duality gives us a clear point of connection to that between sanity and madness; after all, it is society that decides who is 'mad'.  

How lucid can Nietzsche's singular experience be if he is unable to effectively communicate the intensity and consequences of it?  On the other hand, doesn't communication depend on some shared code of everyday signs and hence certain shared and exchangeable experiences?  You know what I'm talking about because on some level we have both had 'the same' experience in common.  And we need to share not only that experience, but the whole framework of a subject who possesses experiential objects.  Grammar insists on it.  Communication seems to be a standardizing, averaging, 'normalizing' process that relies on some sort of identity of the individuals involved.  But how could the experience of ER, whose centrifugal force tears apart the identity of the subject by hurling it outside itself, ever be communicable?  The felt reality of the experience seems to defy the assumptions that would allow us to communicate it.  Any attempt to do so would appear to require us to falsify the experience by reconstructing a subject.  But if ER is not communicable, was it even a real thought?  In fact, if it can't be woven into Nietzshce's philosophy -- which like all philosophy is most concretely a species of literature -- then does the experience have any consequences or meaning at all?  It's almost as if the content of the thought of ER is trying to prove to Nietzsche himself that the intense experience which gave birth to it was merely a moment of passing madness.  A phantasm.

Similar paradoxes arise if we consider the question of whether Nietzsche should interpret his experience as a symptom of his frequent sickness or a sign of some new health.  If our definition of a healthy organism is one with the ability to maintain its individual identity and integrity in the face of a fluctuating environment, then ER appears to be the worst kind of sickness.  Indeed, no thought could serve to eliminate the barriers between individual and world faster.  The idea that we are merely repeating the same life over and over again robs us of meaning, goal, will and identity all at once.  It might signal a sort of terminal illness. The affirmation of everything that it implies, like the explosion of identity it requires, might simply reflect the death throes of an organism lacking the strength to hold itself together.  Indeed, from the point of view of the thinking subject, the thought of ER is almost a sort of identity suicide.  On the other hand though, Nietzsche constantly reminds us that the deepest power and strength lie not in preserving our self but in overcoming it.  ER feels like an ecstatically affirmative thought that reflects a power so deep it doesn't need to define or protect itself.  Is its thinker helpless to resist his own dissolution, or so strong he can afford to yield to it?

Was it necessary to attribute to power the positing of a goal or the interpretation of a meaning? Or on the contrary, was not the very fact of believing in a goal or a meaning a manifestation of pure impotence? Did not the greatest strength lie in living absurdly, in affirming the value of life apart from any signification and goal? (NVC, 95)

Klossowksi suggests that it was Nietzsche's concern with what the experience of ER meant for his own organism that led him to the search for a scientific, or at least systematic, formulation of the idea.  The more personal communication he attempted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained filled with the paradoxes we've just discussed.  A "book for all and none" that stars a hero who becomes a buffoon (NVC, 99) hardly resolves any ambiguities.  But then again, neither does Klossowski's discussion of Nietzsche's attempt to give ER a scientific foundation.  In fact, what he discovers in reading Nietzsche's encounter with physics and biology is simply another paradoxical non-duality between spirituality and mechanism.  What seems to have interested Nietzsche most in the natural sciences was the idea that the universe could never come to an equilibrium.  Whether he was talking about the transformations of a finite cosmic energy in an infinite time, or observing that stable self-reproduction cannot be the 'goal' of an organism, what mattered to him was the ceaseless and senseless change that nature always shows us.  It's the unstoppability of this change, combined with the assumption of a finite amount of conserved energy, that leads to the idea of a Return.  

Thinking of ER in terms of the constant unfolding (and necessary re-folding) of energy or will to power illustrates the paradox of the experience of ER in a new way.  The most intense or 'spiritual' moment that appears to be the culmination of everything immediately converts into its opposite, the completely meaningless eternal fluctuation of the same quantity or energy or power.  The highest spirituality converts into the most complete mechanism.  As a result, there's no way to tell whether the intensity of ER is important or meaningless, a sign of power or its absence, a symptom of sickness or health.  All these dualities are constructed from the perspective of an agent that ER liquidates only to rebuild again.  The Return necessarily produces (and destroys) the illusion of an agent that could think it and will it.  But the experience itself is beyond any dualisms we would use to interpret it. 

No Destination, No Traveler, No Journey (Chapter 3)

Imagine if, at the precise moment of the intense revelation of your Spiritual Awakening, you get the sense that this has all happened before, and that you are only returning to relive a moment you have already lived many times.  It's a paradoxical idea; how can this be the second (much less the Nth) time you've become Enlightened?  Surely you would be forever marked by a moment like this in some unforgettable way, no?  How could you have forgotten your own self-transcendence?  It sounds like some sort of New Yorker cartoon guru joke.

This is the simplest formulation of the paradox of the experience of Eternal Return.  Of course, there are many paradoxes built into this idea; we could even argue that it is the single most paradoxical idea in all of philosophy.  But the most interesting thing about Klossowski's treatment of the concept is the way he mixes philosophical with biographical considerations.  What primarily interests him isn't ER as a doctrine, but as a lived experience.  While it oversimplifies a, "brilliant, profound, but extremely taxing" text (per Graham Parkes' description on the back cover), it's mostly fair to say that Klossowski traces all the paradoxes of ER back to this experiential contradiction between the uniquely intense emotional tone of the moment Nietzsche experienced in Sils-Maria in 1881, and the content of the thought that this "peak experience" was something that had already happened before.

The first corollary of this uniquely repetitive experience is that having it means you will necessarily forget it.  The experience doesn't stay with you, but always happens afresh in exactly the same way.  If this experience were about something mundane like where you put you keys, we might simply call this cycle of remembering and forgetting "brain damage".  But the moment of ER does not feel like remembering a fact or a past incident.  It is a transformational moment, a moment that we feel changes us completely -- from one who was asleep to an awake being.  As Nietzsche puts it in the Gay Science #341: "If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you."  In other words, it's a moment in which our whole identity shifts, but in such a way that we know we will lose this new identity.

I learn that I was other than I am now for having forgotten this truth, and thus that I have become another by learning it. Will I change again, and once more forget that I will necessarily change during an eternity - until I relearn this revelation anew? (NVC, 57)

What will we become when we lose the awakened identity of the moment of ER?  Well, because we have to return to this very same identity by the exact path we took to arrive at it, our future will have to repeat our past.  We will have to somehow dissolve into the universe, as it were, only to gradually reemerge through the precise chaotic process of cosmic, geophysical, biological, and cultural evolution that we know led up to the moment of our revelation.  In short, we have to become everything. Obviously, this sort of dissolution goes far beyond how we typically think of forgetting.  No normal self identity could persist through such an immense sweep of transformation.  Klossowski suggests that this multiplication or dissolution of identity is the core consequence of the paradox of ER.

... by embracing in a single glance the necessity of the Return as a universal law, I deactualize my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through so that, in accordance with the circular movement, I once again become what I am at the moment I discover the law of the Eternal Return. (NVC, 57)

If the experience of ER implies a dissolution of the everyday conception of the self, we might next ask who exactly is having the experience?  This question starts to carry us into tricky territory because the very nature of the experience eliminates the subject who would allegedly have it.  If we were to try to communicate the experience, to point at 'who' had it, we could only really point at the whole circle created by the Eternal Return.  The experience is not merely our experience of the entire trajectory of the return, but is more like the trajectory's experience of itself.  While the thought of ER tends to reinforce itself, it has the effect of shaking us to pieces; 

For if, in this ineffable moment, I hear myself say, 'You are returning to this moment - you have already returned to it - you return to it innumerable times', no matter how coherent this proposition may seem to be in terms of the sign of the Circle from which it is derived (for it is itself this very proposition), as an actual self in the context of everyday signs, I myself fall into incoherence. (NVC, 64)

Klossowski closes chapter 3 by examining another strange consequence of this idea that only the whole circle is coherent, whereas any particular point on it is 'unstable' in the sense that it immediately implies all the other points.  When Nietzsche goes to communicate his shattering experience of ER in the Gay Science and Zarathustra, he speaks of it not in terms of a proven doctrine or established fact, but in terms of something we must believe in, as if it required religious faith of sorts.  That is, we are supposed to will ER.  But if the content of the idea does away with the subject, who is left around to do any willing at all?  And what exactly would they will anyhow?  The experience of ER feels like a uniquely important moment, as if it were the very purpose of existence, or at least of our lives.  But in fact, this singular moment is any and every moment.  If we attempt to will the return of the heightened self of the moment of ER, we are forced to will our own dissolution, or our transformation into something other than this self.  Trying to will the 'point' of ER just carries us around in endless circles.  We end up willing the forgetfulness of our self and our will, with the goal of returning to this same 'special' moment ... at which we re-will our very lack of will, ad infinitum.  In brief, willing ER is like no-one trying to get back to no-place.

While Klossowski's discussion of these texts is highly compressed (he prefers to work mainly with unpublishd material from the notebooks) he seems to be pointing to the same issue I mulled over in Heidegger's reading of the "On Redemption" chapter.  There, the question was how to overcome the will's ill-will towards the past as a territory it cannot alter.  The answer was that we have to will the past, or to "re-will the non-willed" as Klossowski puts it.  This is more difficult than it sounds, because to will the return of the powerful moment of ER, we must will the return of not only this endpoint, but of all the crippled powerlessness that preceded it.   We gain power only by paradoxically affirming our powerlessness.  We return to our self, only by becoming everything else.  Klossowksi points out that this distinguishes ER from a simple version of fatalism, because it throws into question what exactly our fate is.  We typically interpret fatalism as the idea that everything inexorably leads up to a particular point irrespective of our will.  But fatalism still culminates in a particular point, at some special event that defines us an an individual -- our fate.  With ER, the culminating point is empty, and does nothing except throw us back into circulation.  Thus we can no longer justify the past by means of the present.  The idea that, "it was all worth it because I arrived just here and now," no longer carries any force when here and now immediately spin us out into everywhere and anytime.  Just as Nietzsche created a nihilism so extreme that it overcomes itself, he invented a fatalism so extreme that it overcomes the very problem of whether our will is free or determined; in fact, there's no will at all!

Re-willing is the pure adherence to the Vicious Circle: re-willing the entire series one more time -- re-willing all experiences, and all one's acts, but not as mine: this possessive no longer has any meaning, nor does it represent a goal. Meaning and goal are liquidated by the Circle. (NVC, 70)

Nietzschean Not-Self (Chapter 2)

Klossowski's second chapter appears to be a completely separate essay that does not build on the first one.  This means we have to start again from scratch with another difficult and slippery text.  The main goal seems to be to elaborate a Nietzschean theory of not-self (anattā) that would apply successively at various levels of abstraction ranging from the personal, to the psychic, and all the way down to the organic. 

Klossowski begins at the personal level, with a discussion of the relation between Nietzsche's writing and the fluctuations in his health.  The letters he quotes demonstrate that while Nietzsche's famous migraines often kept him from writing and even thinking, these same sufferings seem to have been brought on by Nietzsche's own overactive brain.  So Klossowski's first point is that this cycle -- a thinking that rises to a fever pitch which blots out thinking, resulting in a forced rest that restores thought but resets the mechanism -- got Nietzsche thinking about the relationship between a thinking brain and suffering body.

The act of thinking became identical with suffering, and suffering with thinking. From this fact, Nietzsche posited the coincidence of thought with suffering, and asked what a thought would be that was deprived of suffering. Thinking suffering, reflecting on past suffering - as the impossibility of thinking - then came to be experienced by Nietzsche as the highest joy. But does thought really have the power to actualize itself without itself suffering, without reconstituting its own suffering? Does thought itself suffer from its own inability to actualize itself? What then is doing the suffering or enjoying? The brain? Can the cerebral organ enjoy the suffering of the body of which it is a function? Can the body rejoice in the suffering of its supreme organ? (NVC, 23)

While the questions that conclude this passage are at this point rhetorical, they introduce the main idea of the essay -- the material and the spiritual are not always on the same page, and perhaps are even directly at odds with one another.  In itself, this idea would be neither novel nor surprising.  Almost every religion, and particularly Christianity, has long claimed that the gross materiality of the body is an impediment to spiritual development.  The thinking soul has a moral obligation to transcend the suffering of the body; salvation lies in precisely this transcendence.  The interesting thing about Nietzsche is that he runs this same logic backwards.  In his case, it's actually the thinking soul, and the brain itself, that is the cause of suffering.  It's only when the attempt to identify with and carry out this thinking is released that the episode passes and Nietzsche begins his convalescence.  In other words, Nietzsche experiences his own brain as a sort of parasite (perhaps the sort of "metaphysical virus" mentioned on pg. 6) attacking his body, which the body in turn fights back against.  Obviously, it becomes difficult to know who's who here.

The agonizing migraines, which Nietzsche experienced periodically as an aggression that suspended his thought, were not an external aggression; the root of the evil was in himself, in his own organism: his own physical self was attacking in order to defend itself against a dissolution. But what was being threat­ened with dissolution? Nietzsche's own brain. Whenever his migraines subsided, Nietzsche would put his state of respite in the service of this dissolution. For the dissolution was judged to be such only by the brain, for whom the physical self and the moral self apparently coincide. But the body provided Nietzsche with a completely different perspective, namely, the perspective of active forces which (as organic and therefore subordinate functions) expressed a will to break with this servitude. But they could do so only if this will passed through the brain. The brain, on the other hand, could experience this only as its own subordination to these dissolving forces: it was threatened with the impossibility of thinking. (NVC, 24)

This passage is complicated not simply because it tries to express the circular aggression of body attacking brain because brain attacked 'first', but also because it alludes to the way these two sides are not symmetrical.  Nietzsche does not merely invert the Christian moral relationship between between body and soul, but distinguishes them in kind in a new way.  'The body' is composed of a multitude of forces or drives that have no pre-established unity amongst them.  By contrast, the brain takes for granted its own unity as well as the unity of its moral self with a physical self (that it also presumes to be a unity).  As a result, it's only on the side of the brain that there can be anything like a fear of dissolution, because it's only on that side that some unity has been posited.  'The body', as we'll see more clearly in a moment, is a chaotic interaction of various impulses that have been imperfectly and temporarily captured by an organism.  Unlike a Christian's identification with their immortal soul, the identification of 'Nietzsche' with 'his body' cannot help but be a paradoxical affair once the founding principle of a unit of identity has come into question.

Nietzsche experienced this dissolving confrontation be­tween somatic and spiritual forces for a long time, and he observed it passionately. The more he listened to his body, the more he came to distrust the person the body supports. (NCV, 24)

Here we see the beginning of the transition to Klossowski's next level of analysis.  Instead of the the brain, he will begin to talk about the conscious self or the person that we often identify with the brain.  But how does this conscious self that we always imagine is 'us' actually get produced by the body?  

Klowssowki here gives us an intriguing, but in my mind not completely satisfying, explanation of how the brain forms consciousness in response to bodily pain.  The idea seems to be that the body sets up the brain as a specialized organ for combatting a painful excitation that appears to invade from the outside.  However, this system for avoiding pain or pursuing pleasure can only work if the brain codes the excitations coming from the body according to whether approaching or retreating from them has resulted in other painful or pleasant excitations in the past.  Since the excitations coming from the body are so manifold, the brain has to reduce them to a simple code of valence, and the key to this code is nothing more than whether it is self-reinforcing -- does classifying an excitation as painful lead to actions that avoid other excitations that would be classified as painful?  Klossowski's idea seems to be that this valence code is almost completely self-referential and independent of what the excitation might actually mean for 'the body'.  As a multiplicity, the body doesn't have a single point of view on what is pleasurable or painful.  The brain, however, as possessor of a unified code, does have a single point of view, though this viewpoint is only constructed from what habitually appears pleasant or painful for the brain.  This unified self-reinforcing viewpoint is what we call consciousness.  

   The body wants to make itself understood through the intermediary of a language of signs that is fallaciously deci­phered by consciousness. Consciousness itself constitutes this code of signs that inverts, falsifies and filters what is expressed through the body.
   Consciousness is itself nothing other than a deciphering of the messages transmitted by the impulses. The deciphering is in itself an inversion of the message, which is now attributed to the individual. Since everything leads to the 'head' (the upright position), the message is deciphered in a way that will maintain this 'vertical' position; there would be no message as such if this position were not habitual and specific. Meaning is formed in the upright position, and in accordance with its own criteria: high, low, before, after. (NVC, 26)

From a biological perspective, this explanation isn't quite satisfying because it seems that my body comes with any number of pre-programmed interpretations or reflexes that don't depend much on my consciousness of their valence.  I drop hot things, orient on noises from nearby foliage while hiking, and duck when people swing a cleaver at my head.  So it seems that my organism probably has some sort of unity, some sort of 'mind of its own', independently of my consciousness.  However, I'm willing to investigate whether the unity of my body may perhaps be an illusion, and whether these reflexes can perhaps be de-conditioned.  And it's clear that moving the unity back to the level of the organism doesn't solve the philosophical problem of how it arises to begin with, so perhaps the objection is not so important.  At any rate, Klowssowski seems to be adopting the hypothesis that the body has no unity of its own.  It's unity is fictitiously imposed by the consciousness installed on top of it, which seeks to keep itself upright simply because that's what it has always done.  

Nietzsche did not speak on behalf of a 'hygiene' of the body, established by reason. He spoke on behalf of corporeal states as the authentic data that consciousness must conjure away in order to be an individual. This viewpoint far surpasses a purely 'physiological' conception of life.  The body is a product of chance; it is nothing but the locus where the group of individuated impulses confront each other so as to produce this interval that constitutes a human life, impulses whose sole ambition is to de-individuate themselves. (NVC, 26)

 

At the end of this passage we see the idea I mentioned earlier -- the body is a chaos.  This chaos is structured by a clash of impulses that seek to "de-individuate" themselves, which I think is another way of talking about the will to power.  In truth, the impulses don't want anything at all, even power.  Goals and intentions are fictions posited at the level of consciousness.  Instead what the impulses 'want' is simply to act, to dominate, to "draw their ultimate consequence at every moment" (NVC, 45) -- in other words, to make themselves universal.  It's as if each impulse wants to swallow everything and is only prevented from doing so by the all the other like-minded impulses it encounters.  We can imagine shifting constellations of warring Leibnizian monads, red in tooth and claw, without a pre-established harmony between them.      

From each of our fundamental impulses comes a perspectival appreciation of every event and of every lived experience. Each of these impulses is hindered or favoured or flattered by every other impulse, each with its own formative law (its risings and fallings its own rhythm, etc.) - and one impulse dies when another one arises. (NVC, 44)

The fortuitous and chaotic body does nothing to preserve itself because it has no sense of self at all.  The conscious brain built on top of it, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the body within a set of states compatible with its own cerebral existence, almost as if the whole point of having a body was merely to produce a conscious brain.  The root of the principle of identity that we see developing here always goes back the brain's desire to code the flux of the body in a simple, consistent, and upright way.  But the branches of that principle have profound ramifications.  Once some identity has been installed in the organism, the chaotic body becomes my body.  All the forces or impulses felt in this body must be assimilated to the code that constitutes the unity of the conscious brain.  These are the initial steps in forming a person or self that maintains a continuous identity over time despite the fluctuations of the body.  This person is actually a product of the body, but the way it takes possession of the mechanism that created it leads us to reverse the cause and effect.  

   The body, insofar as it is grasped by consciousness, dissoci­ates itself from the impulses that flow through it, and which, having come together fortuitously, continue to sustain the body in an equally fortuitous manner. The organ that these impulses have developed at the 'highest' extremity of the body considers this fortuitous yet obvious sustenance to be necessary for its conservation. Its 'cerebral' activity therefore selects only those forces that preserve this activity, or, rather, those that can be assimilated to it.  And the body adopts only those reflexes that allow it to maintain itself for this cerebral activity, just as the latter henceforth adopts the body as its own product. 

   To understand Nietzsche, it is important to see this reversal brought about by the organism: the most fragile organ it has developed comes to dominate the body, one might say, because of its very fragility.  (NVC, 27)

This is one of Klossowski's main points, so it pays to belabor it.  We have magicked up a self-referential identity that rests on nothing but its own continuity, yet which appears to be not only a solid thing in itself, but to be the 'head' and owner of a body as well as the cause of its actions.   The body possessed in this way is the impulsive body enslaved (to choose the most dramatic term) by our self.  The tail has come to wag the dog.  The epiphenomenon has become the phenomenon.  The 'means' has come to posit itself as end, with the quotes here indicating that the very distinction between means and ends cannot exist at the level of the fortuitous and impulsive body.  The notion of an aim or endpoint only comes into existence alongside the principle of self-identity.  

So how can we combat this cerebral takeover that imprisons the impulsive body within a fictitious self?  Can we set a conscious intention to overcome the tendency to construct of a conscious state that constantly classifies and assimilates anything new to its unconscious and habitual patterns?  Won't that just enmesh us more deeply in the same problem?  It seems like our only option for liberating the body would be to go back to being 'unconscious', to do away with our own brain and self entirely.  But what could this even mean?  In fact, the distinction between conscious and unconscious meets with the same fate as the distinction between means and ends.  It is only from the perspective of and by contrast with consciousness that there is anything that could be called the unconscious.  Consciousness is really nothing more than the new application of an old and often repeated code -- which Klossowski increasingly calls, "the code of everyday signs", ie. words.  The 'unconscious' and habitual world would seem to be structured in the same way and by the same codes as the conscious one.  From the perspective of the liberated impulsive body, both sides of this code's assimilation are equivalent fixations and falsifications of its ceaseless and manifold flux.  Indeed, the only difference seems to be that one side speaks in the present while the other side remains silently implied by the past.  

Moreover, let us try to understand how. given his notion that conscious life is subordinated to fluctuations of intensities, he explains what we call an intention and a goal at the level of consciousness, and what this latter term signifies in relation to the term unconsciousness. What do these these refer to in Nietzsche? Are they different from the term conscious and unconscious, in Freud's sense of the 'iceberg'? For it would seem that neither consciousness nor unconsciousness - nor willing or non-willing - have ever existed. Within a system of designating fluctuations, there is only a discontinuity between silence and declarations in the agent. (NVC, 37)

What we need to find instead of this code of everyday signs is something like 'the unconscious of the body' rather than a cerebral or individual unconscious.  But this would seem to be some sort of impossibly complex representation of the constantly shifting battle of the impulses, created by means of those very impulses. If we do away with the level of the conscious code that only pretends to float free of the impulsive body, we would be left with the infinitely subtle 'language' of this body alone.  This 'language' wouldn't be any sort of fixed and continuous code though, but something closer to a music that can swing rapidly and discontinuously from one affective state to another.

To use conscious categories as a means to attain an end outside consciousness is still to remain subordinate to the false perspective of consciousness. A consciousness that would be conscious of being an instrument of Chaos would no longer be capable of obeying the 'aim' of a chaos that would not even ask it to pursue such an aim. Chaos in term would then be 'conscious' -- and would no longer be Chaos. The terms conscious and unconscious are therefore applicable to nothing that is real. If Nietzsche made use of them, it was only as a 'psychological' convention, but he nonetheless let us hear what he did not say: namely, that the act of thinking corresponds to a passivity, and that this passivity is grounded in the fixity of the signs of language whose combinations simulate gestures and movements that reduce language to silence. (NVC, 43)

Klossowski's essay ends with an exploration of how such a 'language of affects' (analogous to a "culture of the affects") might differ from the code of everyday language, and how this everyday code could have been built on top of the impulsive body.  Because the new 'language' we are looking for would operate below the level of our everyday language, Klossowki begins all the way back at the beginning with a discussion of what separates the organic from the inorganic.  Nevertheless, this way of presenting things leads to a bit of confusion in my mind.  We've been talking all along about various levels of duality -- a thinking mind and a suffering body, a brain that habitually codes for valence and an impulsive body, a continuous conscious self, and a discontinuous chaotic body.  Some form of 'the body' is always the term employed for the multiple, flowing, side of the duality, for Becoming as opposed to Being.  Yet now, in trying to answer the question of how codes get formed, Klossowski employs the same dualism in a way that seems to put the impulsive body on the side of the inorganic.

   'Every movement should be conceived as a gesture, a kind of language in which (impulsive) forces make themselves heard. In the inorganic world there is no misunderstanding, communication seems to be perfect. Error begins in the organic world.'
   In the inorganic world, communication seems perfect. Nietzsche means: there is no possible disagreement between what is strong and what is weak. 'Every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment'. he says elsewhere. Persuasion is immediate.
  In the organic world, by contrast, where exchange and assimilation are necessary, misunderstanding becomes poss­ible, since exchange and assimilation take place only through interpretation: from trial and error to certainty - the certainty of the conditions of existence. The latter can be obtained only after a long experimentation with the similar and the dissimilar, and thus with identity. Only then can points of reference, repetition and comparison appear - and finally, comparable signs.
  Now in a universe dominated by the inorganic, organic life is itself a fortuitous case - hence a possible 'error' in the cosmic economy. It is within this economy that interpretation, grounded in the fear of error, becomes susceptible to error.  Even if the origin of organic life lies in purely random combinations, it can no longer behave randomly once it comes into existence. It must believe in its necessity, and therefore it must maintain the conditions of its existence, and to do so it must avoid chance and not commit any errors. Hence the double aspect of error in Nietzsche: life depends on an illusion (its 'necessity') - whence the verdict: 'Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.' (NVC, 45)

Viewed from the perspective of the energetic fluctuations of the inorganic, organic life is nothing more than a temporarily self-reinforcing feedback loop. From the organic perspective though, this same feedback loop appears to be selective, to have a goal and a will (its own self-preservation).  It's the same dualism we saw before, but now the organic (the body) is on the side of an illusory principle of unity, namely the unified organism (which appears to contradict the earlier idea that the body has no unity of its own but borrows it entirely from the self, thus pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, as it were).  

This curious inversion seems intended to situate the impulses somewhere between the level of the inorganic and the level of a fully signifying conscious self.  Perhaps this is why Klossowski earlier introduced the idea of the brain as a level of analysis or intermediary step between the body and the person?  It's not clear to me if I'm missing something important here, or whether Klossowski is not being completely sober and consistent in his terminology.  At any rate, the idea now seems to be that there are 3 levels.

1) The inorganic has no need of the concept of valence and the unified perspective of interpretation this implies -- at this level things just happen, there is perfect communication and no need of signs.  This is what we were earlier calling the "impulsive body", which we saw the brain fighting against with its "code".  

2) Once an organism has been formed though, the various excitations it receives are interpreted according to a "code of signs" that classify them as attracting or repelling the organism.  Klossowski will now refer to this level as the level of impulses and "signs" (ie. not quite a "code" properly speaking).  Impulses in this sense do appear to refer to the unity of an organism (as I argued before that they should).    These impulses are not just a raw energy or dimensionless number, but are a sort of vector defined on one end by the unity of the organism, and on the other end by what the impulses 'seek' or 'avoid'.  The quotes here indicate that even at this level, an impulse in itself has no goal or aim, and in fact is not even individuated.  It's only the constellation of impulses, and their interrelationship in service of maintaining an organism, that individuates them and produces the appearance of what we might term an "attractor" (to distinguish it from a goal), or what Klossowski calls a "phantasm".  Thus a phantasms seems to be the motive force for an organism, whose movements and "gestures" are the signs of the impulsive forces reaching a fragile and moment to moment arrangement consistent with the existence of the organism.  

3) Finally, a conscious signifying level is installed on top of the organic level.  This is the level of a "code", or what Klossowski will call (following Nietzsche) the "abbreviation of signs".  At this level the phantasm that momentarily bound and ordered the impulsive organic level and attracted the organism is retroactively posited as the original goal.  We already explored the logic of this inversion of cause and effect earlier.  Klossowski again finds its root in the way a fixed code must necessarily compress or abbreviate the rich language of organic signs in a way that keeps the battle of impulses within the narrow range of states compatible with its own (the code's) continued existence.  This compression is lossy however, and the signs are always overflowing the code scheme in the same way music defies our ability to talk about it.

This at least is my interpretation of the complicated section on pages 45-48.  For the most part it seems to reflect the idea of capture and over-coding we've discussed.  Except that there appears to be a duplication of that same logic in moving from levels 1 to 2 and levels 2 to 3. The upshot is that the abbreviation of signs in level 3 quiets the tumult of the impulses by fixing them in a rigid conscious code.

'The contradiction is not between the "true" and the "false" but between "abbreviations of signs" and the "signs " themselves.'  What this means is that the impulses - which confront and interpret each other through their fluctuations of intensity and, at the level of organized beings, through gestures - create forms out of these movements and gestures, and cannot be distinguished from this invention of signs, which stabilizes them through abbreviation. For in abbreviating them, these signs reduce the impulses, apparently suspending their fluctuation once and for all. But in the intervals of the (fixed) signs of language, the intensity of the impulses can only be designated in an intermittent and arbitrary manner, in comparison with these abbreviations. Their movement is constituted as a meaning only if they take this designating abbreviation as their aim, and reach it through a combination of unities. The latter then form a declaration which sanctions the fall of the intensity, once and for all. (NVC, 48)

Given this story of the genesis of signs and abbreviations of signs, the final question is how we could make our way back towards the language of signs, thus liberating ourselves from the constrictive, compressing, code of consciousness.  Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche answer to this question is fascinating, but also, I suspect, preliminary; we will almost certainly understand it better as the book progresses.  The basic idea is clear though.  We can't, nor would we want to, go backwards into 'unconsciousness'.  What we can do, however, is to use our conscious "abbreviations of signs" (ie. words) to simulate the forces underlying those abbreviations.  It's kind of like: (simulating your own computer's hardware (simulating your own computer's hardware (...) ) ).  Obviously, to do this, you have to treat your self as an impulsive automaton that operates according the the levels and logic we've described.

First, one must admit everything that is purely 'auto­matic': to dismantle an automaton is not to reconstruct a 'subject'. Since perspectivism is the characteristic illusion of this automaton, to provide it with the knowledge of this illusory perspective, the 'consciousness' of this 'unconscious', is to create the conditions of a new freedom, a creative freedom. The 'consciousness' of the 'unconscious' can consist only in a simulation of forces. It is not a matter of destroying what Nietzsche calls the abbreviation (of signs) by signs themselves - the encoding of movements - but of retranslating the 'conscious' semiotic into the semiotic of the impulses. The 'conscious categories' that avoid, repudiate and betray these movements - and thus remain ignorant of the perpetual combat of forces - sustain the automatism under the apparent spontaneity of thought. To recover an authentic spontaneity, the producer of these 'categories', the intellectual organ, must in tum be treated as a simple automaton, a pure tool. By consequence. as a spectator of itself, the automaton finds its freedom only in the spectacle that moves from intensity to intention, and from the latter to intensity. (NVC, 50)

The idea of a conscious simulation of the unconscious gives new meaning to the Eternal Return.  If we believe that we necessarily repeat what has come before, we turn ourselves into a sort of automaton.  Here we can see ER as the perfect symbol of the emptiness of the do-er.  The impulsive action has occurred before, without any need for the conscious aim we imagined was its purpose and cause.  Of course, we might legitimately wonder whether it's safe to let our automaton cross the street (again?).  Does consciousness and intention have some crucial evolutionary role in keeping us alive?  Are the errors it produces, the falsifications and abbreviations, completely avoidable, or are they truths: errors necessary for life?  Or do we lose nothing if we imply let these errors come and go while we live the unconscious forces that produced them to begin with?  What kind of life would this be that persists through the emptiness of consciousness?  Klossowski leaves the essay with these questions.

   On the one hand, forgetfulness and unconsciousness are necessary to life; on the other hand, there is a 'will to unconsciousness' which, precisely because it is willed, implies the consciousness of our conditioned state: an irresoluble antinomy.
   Now 'life itself created this grave thought [of the Etemal Return]; life wants to overcome its supreme obstacle'. (NVC, 54)