French Stua, VoL LTV, No.

5, 299-311

SIMULACRUM AND THE PLAY OF PARODY IN THE WRITING OF PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI

IAN JAMES
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Palimpsestes, parody, as a literary critical term, has developed an imprecise and confused meaning. Parody, he notes, is used variably to designate: 'tantot la deformation ludique, tantot la transposition burlesque d'un texte, tantot l'imitation satirique d'un style'.1 Genette's aim in Palimpsestes is to trace the specific history of the meaning of parody and then to elaborate a 'structural' definition of the term (where it becomes the 'transformation non-satirique' or ludique' of a text). His rethinking of parody within a structural typology of literature is rigorous but, like the traditional conceptions he opposes, necessarily implies the existence of an original which is parodied. In the writing of philosophical essayist, novelist, and translator Pierre Klossowski the term parody is re-figured in such a way that the notion of authentic origin is called into question. Parody is taken beyond Genette's considerations of literary typology and is rethought in much broader existential terms. For Klossowski the movement of parody within thought, representation and language marks the loss of any possibility of origin or essence within being or things. Within this vertiginous movement of parody traditional lines of demarcation between literary and philosophical discourse are redrawn in ways which impact greatly upon later writers and theorists. In what follows thefictionaland theoretical modes of Klossowski's writing will be analysed in order show the way in which the relation between literature and philosophy is shifted and blurred in his work. An initial consideration of his first novel La Vocation suspendue will be followed by a discussion of a philosophical essay TSIietzsche, le polytheisme et la parodie'. This twostranded approach makes it clear that on one level Klossowski's view of literature (as well as the narrative strategies he adopts) is mediated through an engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. However, consideration of the paradoxical logic underpinning both La Vocation suspendue and 'Nietzsche, le polytheisme et la parodie' reveals that, ultimately, Klossowski places philosophical/theoretical meditation alongside fictional writing within the same vertiginous movement of parody. Rather than allowing literature to be dominated by the concepts of theory, or theory to

AS GERARD GENETTE remarks in

PaBmpststes(Paris, Seuil, 1982), p. 55.

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be reduced to a mode of narrative fiction, both become, in Klossowski's terminology, simulacra. The specificity of the term 'simulacrum' insofar as it describes the status of both his philosophical and fictional writing will be investigated here. Klossowski was born in 1905 and remains perhaps one of the most neglected French writers of the post-war period. Closely associated with Georges Bataille from the late 1930s onwards, his literary-philosophical works, and in particular his commentaries on Sade and Nietzsche, have exerted an influence on thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. He is also the author of a number of significant novels: La Vocation suspendue, the trilogy Les Lois de I'hospitalite, and the 1965 winner of the Trix des critiques', Le Bapbomet? Klossowski is noted for his translations of Virgil, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Since 1972 he has dedicated himself to painting and has exhibited widely. It is perhaps as a commentator on Nietzsche, however, that Klossowski has made the greatest impact His first essay on the German thinker appeared in 1937 in the second issue of Bataille's journal Atepbaie which was entitled "Nietzsche et les fascistes'.3 Bataille, along with Klossowski, Andre Masson and Jean WahL, in publishing this issue, sought to rescue the German philosopher's work from its hijacking by German National Socialist ideology. Klossowski's contribution consisted in the essay entitled 'Creation du monde' and also in two reviews on books about Nietzsche, one by Karl Jaspers, the other Karl Lowith's Niet^sches Philosophic des cwign Wiedcrkunft des Gleichen.* It is in the second of these that Klossowski first explicidy discusses Nietzsche's doctrine of Eternal Return (or Recurrence), the motif which, as shall become clear, is central to his formulation of literature as 'contrefapon'. He then published two essays in the fifties, one an introduction to his 1954 translation of Die Frohlicbe Wissenscbafi? 'Sur

2 Pierre Klossowski, La Vocation sttspendne (Paris, Gallimard, 19J0); Les Lois de I'bospita&tt (Paris, Gallimard, 1965) (including: Robert! a star (Paris, Minuit, 1954). La Revocation de CL^dit de Nantes (Pans, Minuit, 1959) and Le Soujflatr, on, It Tbi&trt de soctfti (Paris, Pauvert, i960)); Le Bapbomet (Paris, Gallimard, 1965). Adphale, 1 (21 January 1937). 4 Nietqscbes Philosophic des ewigen Wiedtrkjmft des Oeichen, second edition (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1956). Fnedrich Nietzsche, Die JrlhUcbe Wissenscbaft, in Rritiscbe Studtenausgibe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 1 j vols (Berlin, de Gruyter, 196777), vol. 3. For the French edition see Le Got Savoir, translated by P. Klossowski (Paris, Gallimard, 1956). Throughout this paper citations from Nietzsche's texts will be given in their French rather than their English translations and followed with a reference to the original. To avoid the problems posed by the very different Anglo-American tradition of Nietzsche translation and commentary I have preferred to address myself here to a specifically French face of Nietzsche. Most importandy the Colli/Montinari edition organizes all the posthumous fragments according to chronological order (superseding the work Der \PUle x*r Macht, tendentiously arranged as it was by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Koselitz (Peter Cast) (Stuttgart, Kroner, 1959)). Also, the translators into French for the Gallimard Colli/Montinari complete works are by and large working within the same intellectual perspective from which Klossowski is reading Nietzsche.

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quelques themes fondamentaux de la "Gaya Scienza" de Nietzsche', the other a lecture given at the College de Philosophic in 1957, 'Nietzsche, le polytheisme et la parodie'; both of these were collected in 1963 in the volume Un sifuneste tUsir (which also contains several other essays from the previous two decades).6 Klossowski then wrote a number of essays based on Nietzsche's later fragments which were published between 1967 and 1969 and which were then collected in his full-length work, Nietzsche et le ccrcle vicieux (1969).7 Finally he gave a short paper at the conference on Nietzsche at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1973, entided 'Circulus vitiosus deus'.8 This extensive body of writing makes Klossowski one of the key commentators on Nietzsche in post-war France. His reading of die doctrine of Eternal Return and the emphasis he places upon the motifs of repetition, parody and simulacrum exert a significant influence in particular on the interpretations of Nietzsche by both Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. As Deleuze points out on a number of occasions, Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche and of Eternal Return is decisive for the critique of representation and identity which occurs in France during the post-war years. Such a critique attempts to think difference or alterity in a way which overturns the primacy of self-identity and the sameness of the Same.9 The aim of diis discussion is not, however, to demonstrate Klossowski's importance to die growth of a 'French Nietzsche', nor, indeed, is it to suggest that Klossowski's interpretation of the German philosopher has a greater merit than any odier (French or otherwise). Rather, the aim here is to show the way in which Klossowski's engagement widi die Nietzschean thought of Return collapses traditional distinctions between the literary and die philosophical in such a way that the two do not become the same as each other, nor does one assume a subordinate role to the other. Rather, both the literary and the philosophical

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UnriJitntjU dtsir (Piris, Gallimard, 1963), pp. 9-36 and pp. 187-128. Nietzsche et U emit mmux (Paris, Mercure de France, 1969). See also "Oubli et anamnese dans l'experience de Petemel retour du mime', in Nut^scbe, ed. by Martial Gueroult (Paris, Minuit, 1967) (this was a paper given originally at a conference on Nietzsche attended by among others Deleuze and Foucault). *La Periode turinoise de Nietzsche', L'pbimire (Spring 1968), 5785; Tx Complot', Change, 5(1969). 88-98. 8 In Nitt^scbe atgourd'btd (2 vols), Publications du centre culturel de Cerisy-la-Salle (Paris, UGE, 975)> 1,91'oj. This conference was a major event in the reappraisal of Nietzsche by contemporary French philosophers; other contributors included Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Kofrnan, Nancy, Lecoue-Labarthe, J.-M. Rey and numerous others. For an excellent general critical account of the French reception of Nietzsche, see Douglas Smith, TrtmsvaluatuiRs: Nietopcbi in Frana iSp-iyp (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). For a discussion of the importance of both this and the earlier Royaumont colloquium, see in particular pp. 15068. 9 See Gilles Deleuze, 'Conclusions: sur la volonte de puissance et Petemel retour', in Niehpcbt, cd. by Martial Gueroult, pp. 275-86; Diffimta et ripltitiim (Paris, PUF, 1968), p. 81, note 2, p, 91; and (with Felix Guattari) L 'Anti-CEthpt (Paris, Minuit, 197273), pp. 2728, pp. 7475. See also Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, la gtnealogie, lTiistoire', in ^.ptmitbk: bommagc & Jean Hyppohtt (Paris, PUF, 1971), pp. 14572. For a more detailed account of the relation between Klossowski and Deleuze, see Douglas Smith, Tranjvabiataiu, pp. 140-184.
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are given up to a parodic movement in which both affirm their difference from each other, but also, and crucially, from themselves. One of Klossowski's earliest theoretical meditations on literature is incorporated within his first work of fiction, La Vocation suspendue, and this in itself is indicative of the way in which theory and fiction have a mobile and ambiguous relation to each other throughout his work. An analysis of this novel will allow the emergence of the term 'simulacrum' within Klossowski's writing to be traced and its paradoxical logic to be elucidated.
Literature as simulacrum

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La Vocation suspendue is the story of a young seminarist and the crisis of faith he undergoes before leaving the priesthood and abandoning his faith.10 At the same time this novel incorporates a philosophical meditation on literature itself, on the nature of writing and its relation to transcendent truth. One is immediately struck on reading the first pages of La Vocation suspendue that as a novel it incorporates within itself a questioning of its own status. The novel immediately establishes itself as, in fact, a commentary on a novel, a novel which is itself entitled La Vocation suspendue and which, the reader is informed, was published 'sans nom d'auteur, edite a "Bethaven, 194...'"." What one is reading, then, is not a novel by Pierre Klossowski (even though it is) but a commentary on a novel, La Vocation suspendue, whose author, publisher and date of publication remain unknown. The uncertainties and the complexity of this mist en abyme will be analysed in more detail shortly. The theoretical argument of the novel can be found in its opening section. Klossowski's view of literature begins to emerge in discursive form as he launches a concerted attack on the Sartrian conception of litterature engagee'. La Vocation suspendue is described by Klossowski's narrator-commentator as being like any number of: ' "Entwicklungsromane" catholiques ou protestants'. 12 The commentator then proceeds to situate this unknown and unseen work within the context of a literary debate surrounding the moral function of literature and the projects of the 'Christian' and the 'atheist' novel. Authors such as Barbey d'Aurevilly, Bloy and Bernanos are cited approvingly as representatives of the former; the commentator clearly has Sartre and Camus in his sights as representatives of the latter. The text goes on to describe a perhaps surprising and paradoxical situation whereby it is atheist authors who, following their own logic, would write novels representing a moralizing world view, and Christian authors, who, following theirs, would
10 *La vocation suspendue', in Les Temps Modemu, no. 53 (March 19J0), 1 j37-88. All references to this work will be to the Gallimard edition cited above. For further detailed discussion of this novel see Marcel Spada, Futions d'Ervs (Ghent, Annales des hautes etudes de Gand, 1970), vm, 29-3611 La Vocationsuspendue,p. 11. 12 La Vocation nupendtic, p. 11.

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portray a world devoid of any order of morality. Atheist literature, according to this argument, affirms itself as specifically moralizing in the way it 'cherche a etablir une morale sans Dieu'. By linking the project of literature with issues of freedom and responsibility, a writer like Sartre, Klossowski's commentator contends, inevitably takes up a stance which is shot through with traditional moralism: TJn Sartre, un Camus se doivent d'etre des directeurs de conscience, puisqu'ils en sont a construire un decalogue qu'il y aura d'autant plus de merite a accepter qu'il sera plus loisible de le rejeter'.14 Such a moralistic stance relies necessarily on an ultimately mimetic project (what Sartre calls in Qu 'est-ce que la littemturt? a 'presentation imaginaire du monde en tant qu'il exige la liberte humaine'15). Christian fiction, the commentator of La Vocation suspendueholds, performs quite the opposite function. The task of Christian literature would be to present an immoral picture of the universe. The truth of God's existence and the proclamation of His greatness in all its manifestations are not the realm of fiction which by its very nature is concerned with falsity and illusion. In the first instance this argument repeats the Platonic conception of fiction and literary representation.16 If the world we experience is itself a falsification or pale shadow of the world of Ideas, then fiction, as mimesis or representation of the world, is doubly false; it presents a copy of a copy and lies at one further remove from the Truth to which only philosophical discourse can gain access. In the terms of the argument elaborated here by Klossowski's narrator-commentator, it is not the place of Christian authors to fictionalize Truth or to proclaim their writing to be God's word; rather they should create a fiction which would affirm God's absence (from the artificial fictional world) but which would thereby ultimately, as if by antithesis, also be an affirmation of God's presence (in the transcendent world of Truth rather than in the fallen world of fiction). The commentator notes with regard to Tauteur chretien': 'parce qu'il ne saurait etre un hagiographe de saints imaginaires, et qu'il n'est rien de plus outrecuidant que de parler de la grace comme si Ton en disposait, sa tache sera de representer ce que cela signifie quand on dit que la grace a ete refusee'.17 Christian literature then, insofar as it affirms the falsity of fiction, demands the

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La Vocation suspend*!, p. 17. La Vocation susptndkt, p. 20-21. Sartre himself notes: Ijien que la litterature soit une chose et la morale, une toute autre chose, au fond de l'imperatif esthetkjue nous discemons rimperatif moral', Qu'tst-ct que latittfmture?,p. 69. Comments such as this dearly provide the basis for Klossowski's critique of atheist literature in La Vocation suspendtu. It could be argued, however, that Klossowski's response to Sartre is rather one-sided and fails to take into account the complex problematic of Sartre's fiction itself. See Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literatim and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 15 Qu'est-a que la littirattm?, p. 69. 16 Plato, Republic, translated by H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 195 5), Book x, 11,370-86. 17 La Vocation suspendue, p. 20.
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portrayal of a world founded upon moral and theological absence, which would, in its final moment, imply moral and divine presence. Klossowski, in the guise of his narrator-commentator, is keen to foreground the artifice of art This renders the truly Christian writer by dint of being a writer capable only of going against God's designs and trudis because of the very fictionality and falsity of his construct A Christian writer is a 'faux prophete' who must know that: 'tout ce qu'il dit du royaume des Cieux n'est qu'une contrefacon qui doit sans cesse fake appel aux appetits les plus charnels de ses lecteurs'. The conception of art and literature as 'contrefacon' grounds the opposition, implicit in this argument, to any Sartrian notion of an atheist litterature engagee'. For Klossowski's narrator in La Vocation suspendue literature in general is anti-mimetic and devoid of moral purpose or logic. The writer can only be a 'faux prophete' of immorality, always at work to produce false, counterfeit images of a world denied higher trudi, because the false image is die realm of fiction properly speaking. According to Klossowski, literature constitutes itself in the production of simulacra and differentiates itself from other modes of human creative activity, precisely by affirming its status as such. The simulacrum articulates the essential movement of fictional writing (and indeed of all art). Klossowski's use of this term describes the way in which literature, as self-conscious artifice, always affirms its own representations as false, as different from the 'real thing'. As such literature, as simulacrum, always also affirms its own internali2ed difference from itself, its lack of self-identity. However, Klossowski's originality lies in the way in which he takes the term simulacrum and moves it beyond its original Platonic conception (where it functions simply as a bad copy of an original).19 The simulacrum, in the Klossowskian sense, implies a movement of infinite repetition or copying in which the notion of both original and copy are lost. In La Vocation suspendue this abyssal movement of the simulacrum is rendered in the narrative structure itself and in a specific use oimise en abyme. All Klossowski's fictional work deploys various narrative strategies which mark their own self-conscious artifice and widi this a movement of internal self-distancing. His first novel La Vocation suspendue is set in occupied France and tells die (pardy autobiographical) story of a young seminarist, Jerome, whose vocation to the priesthood undergoes a number of crises and ultimately fails. On the most obvious level this story of a failed vocation marks a clear step away from the theological position Klossowski held before and during the War. It tells, in however indirect a way, of the failure of his
18 Ibid., pp. 2122. " For a commentary on the functioning of the simulacrum in Platonic discourse, see Gilles Deleuze, Lopque du sens (Paris, Minuit, 1969), pp. 292307.

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own vocation and his renunciation of Catholic doctrine. On a more complex level the novel itself has a narrative structure which is closely linked to this failure of theological perspective indicated above. The narrative of this novel sets itself up as a commentary on a novel called La Vocation suspendue. As such La Vocation suspendue is a commentary on a novel which bears the same name as itself. In the first instance the reader is left uncertain as to whether he/she is reading a novel or, in fact, is only ever reading a commentary on a novel. This uncertainty is compounded by the implication that, since the novel La Vocation suspendue is a commentary of La Vocation suspendue, the text La Vocation suspendue, which is commented upon, is itself also a commentary. The novel would therefore be a commentary of a commentary, which by implication would itself comment on a commentary and so on ad infinitum. The text would always be a commentary on a text which is in fact never encountered as such, but instead is infinitely deferred. The commentary/ novel recounts a story set in occupied France but at the same time it undermines itself as narrative. The events narrated are never present as events but are lost in a vertiginous spin of commentary. 20 In this respect La Vocation suspendue is a text which is never identical with itself; it speaks of the text whose title it bears but is never coincident with it. The ambivalent narrative structure of La Vocation suspendue underpins an uncertainty about identity in the novel as a whole. Just as the narrative is never self-identical as narrative, so the identity of the characters described is never fixed or easily determinable. The seminarist Jerome can be identified with Klossowski along with a host of other characters who suggest figures from the milieu Klossowski inhabited during the Occupation. At the same time La Vocation suspendue is a novel where a priest can also be an atheist psychoanalyst, where a nun can pose as a corpse for an avant-garde artist and where, at its climax, the atheist avant-garde artist is revealed to be a powerful and influential priest The boundaries between characters become permeable. One character can figure an aspect or potentiality of another whilst at die same time they can have double or interchangeable identities. With the loss of an originary sequence of events to which the narrative might refer comes a difficulty of tying characters down to fixed or discrete subject positions. The novel refers both to a historical event (the Occupation) and a biography (Klossowski's) but it does so only very indirecdy and allusively dirough the
20 In this sense La Vocation suspendui offers a more radical version of mist en ak/mt than one finds in such novels by Gide as Pakdes and Les Faux-Monnayturs. In both these texts the mist en abyme articulates a movement of open-endedness and incompletion. The Paludts or Faxx-Monnajeun within the texts in question are never actually written. La Vocation suspendae alludes to a moment of enunciation which is never encountered as such and which is subject to an infinite deferral in its entirety. This brings Klossowski's use of mist en abjmt close to what Lucien Dallenbach terms a 'mise en abyme transcendantale' (which he analyses in relation to Beckett's Watt) in Lt Recit spiculmrt: essai sttr la mise en abyme, (Paris, Seuil, 1977), pp. 13 3138. Dallenbach argues that this type of mise en abyme points to a structure given up to'un decentrement narratif generalise', ibid, p. 137.

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infinite diversion of a commentary as it comments on an always already commented text It both refers and defers in the very same gesture. As such La Vocation suspendue in the first instance appears to align itself with the Christian literature it alludes to in its opening pages. Like that literature, it affirms itself as a kind of 'contrefacon' but clearly, in its wider narrative structure and in the uncertainties which endlessly play across the text, all theological affirmation is abandoned. The 'contrefacon' of La Vocation suspendue no longer counterfeits the 'royaume des Cieux' but gives way to an infinite movement of parody in which all self-identity is lost In this infinite movement the novel affirms itself as simulacrum. In its initial outline as it is presented at the beginning of La Vocation suspendue Klossowski's view of literature (as false image) appears to be mediated, in part, through Platonic conceptions of Truth and representation. Fiction is seen as false image in relation to theological or philosophical discourse which articulates a higher level of truth. In common with Sartre, Klossowski's writing tends to theorize literature through the medium of philosophical categories and contexts. Yet the movement of the novel itself affirms the 'falsity' of fiction in a much more far-reaching manner in a way which overturns the notion of Truth or origin which underpins the Platonic argument and the initial true/false distinction that such an argument implies. What becomes clear, when one turns to Klossowski's commentaries on Nietzsche, is that theoretical meditation for Klossowski is caught up within the very same abyssal movement of parody as the fictional text La Vocation suspendue. As Klossowski draws on philosophy to theorize literature as 'contrefacon', his argument is itself included within a literary text which affirms itself as parody. In a moment of paradox, the philosophical argument which founds a theoretical perspective on literature becomes subject to the ineluctable play of parody it seeks to theorize. It is included within that very logic of literature it seeks to theorize.

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Eternal Return and the play ojparody

Described by Maurice Blanchot as 'un des plus importants ecrits sur Nietzsche en francais',21 Klossowski's essay 'Nietzsche, le polytheisme et la parodie' focuses on the Nietzschean doctrine of Eternal Return and derives from this two motifs, those of parody and simulacrum, which take on key importance for Klossowski in relation to the status of both hisfictionaland theoretical writing. The doctrine of Eternal Return is perhaps one of the most elliptical and elusive moments of Nietzsche's thought and is announced most dearly in Also sprach Zaratbustra. As a doctrine it centres on the imperative that Zarathustra formulates in the aphorisms T)e la Redemption'
'Le rire des dieux', in L 'AmtU (Paris, GaUimard, 1971), p. 204.

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and 'D'anciennes et de nouvelles tables'. Zarathustra brings together the possibility of Vouloir' and of 'necessite', 'necessity' referring here to the irreversibility of past moments of life (which by definition take on a character of necessity since one can retrospectively do nothing about them). Zarathustra speaks of the need to: 'racheter le passe de l'homme et recreer tout "cela fut", jusqu'a ce que dit le vouloir: "Mais ainsi le voulus, ainsi le voudrais!" \ 2 3 If the past is irretrievable, then to will it as it was is paradoxically to will necessity to will that which is beyond will. By willing every instant of our existence as necessary the doctrine of Eternal Return acts as an affirmation of amorfati. Crucially, however, what this doctrine affirms is that human existence is beyond the possibility of human determination, that it has its own necessity which always exceeds human volition or consciousness. Klossowski begins by asserting the resolutely paradoxical status of the doctrine of Eternal Return which is, he claims, a mode of thinking bound up with impossibility. Nietzsche's doctrine as a doctrine represents an attempt to 'enseigner l'inenseignable'.24 Such a formulation at once suggests the fundamentally paradoxical status of this doctrine and also its profound obscurity as a doctrine. For what, exacdy might this 'inenseignable' be? One might think that given its status as unteachable one simply cannot say what mat 'unteachable' is other than that it is unteachable, giving die whole doctrine a radier derisory status. This initial formulation is immediately qualified, however: cet inenseignable, ce sont des moments oil l'existence, echappant aux delimitations qu'apportaient les notions de ltiistoire et de morale dont decoulent ordinairement un comportement pratique, se revele comme rendue a elle-meme sans autre but que de revenir sur elle-meme.25 This unteachable, then, is nothing less than existence itself, not as it reveals itself to humans in die familiar categories of knowledge and perception but rather existence as it is prior to, or in, the moment when it escapes those categories. To begin to understand what is at stake here one needs to diink of the way in which the thought of Eternal Return exists primarily as a displacement of any theological, metaphysical or rational apprehension of human existence. For Klossowski, the doctrine of Eternal Return follows through a mode of thought that occurs in the wake of the Nietzschean T_)eath of God'. A universe without God and that, for Nietzsche, means a universe without transcendence or a higher plane of truth is necessarily a universe devoid of moral, conceptual or teleological explanation.26 The
22 Ainsi PaHtdt ZaratboHStra, translated b y Maurice d e Ganddlac (Paris, Gallimard, 1971), ' D e la R e d e m p t i o n ' , p p . 17;80, 'D'anciennes et de nouvelles tables', p p . 245-66. 23 Ainsi ParkatZaratboustni, p . 14S, AJso spracb Zaratbustra, in Kritiscbt StudienoHsgibe, rv, 249. 24 Un sifiinestt disir, p . 189. 25 Ibid., p. 189. 26 Ibid., p. 189.

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importance of Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche lies, precisely, in the way he reads the doctrine of Eternal Return as a radical apprehension of human finitude. Within this perspective, any moment of human existence is affirmed as both entirely fortuitous and at the same time, so utterly singular that it cannot be subordinated to, or determined in terms of, any principle outside, above or beyond itself. Existence is without teleological movement or rational purpose. When we consciously apprehend it in thought or language, that which is most essential to our existence (that is, its status as fortuitous singularity) necessarily escapes our apprehension. Existence, then, is never a stable substance nor a moment of presence which would link together in a linear temporality with other present moments; it is only ever a repetition of fortuitous instances, which in their repetition, repeat only their difference both from each other but crucially from themselves. This, to the sceptical reader, may indeed sound rather far-fetched both as a reading of Nietzsche and more generally as a philosophical description of reality. Yet it is important to note that Klossowski is not entirely alone in reading Nietzsche in this way,27 and also that such an apprehension of human existence as both unrepresentable, without self-identity, is a key paradigm of much post-war French theory.28 From the outset of his discussion, however, Klossowski himself expresses doubts as to whether he might not be charged with abusing Nietzsche's philosophy, by exploiting it for his own ends: Teut-etre aurais-je Pair de me servir de Nietzsche', he remarks, and writes in the expectation that: 'je n'echapperai pas au reproche, sous pretexte de montrer le sens de la parodie chez Nietzsche, de faire moi-meme de la parodie, et done de parodier Nietzsche'.29 However, he is not putting in these disclaimers merely to fend off the critics he may encounter amongst professional philosophers or academic commentators. Rather he is emphasizing an important aspect of his reading of Nietzsche itself. His relationship to the German philosopher's text may be, he suggests, one of falsity or error. This is not, he stresses, a matter of his own personal whim or unavoidable incompetence but is very much part of the structure of what he is seeking to do with Nietzsche and more importantly what Nietzsche does with him in the process of interpretation. As he puts it: 'pour autant que Ton est amene a interpreter la pensee d'un esprit que Ton cherche a comprendre et a faire comprendre, il n'en est point qui, autant que Nietzsche, amene son interprete a le parodier'.30 From the outset Klossowski suggests that there is something strange about
27 Klossowski follows Batailk's reading of Eternal Return closely here. See Georges Bataille, Sitr Nittyubc, in CEumicomputes, vi, 11205 (P- 23)M Deleuze's argument in Difflma et rfpititioH is most obviously indebted to Klossowski's formulations. 25 UnnfiiHeiteiUsir,p. 187. 30 Ibid., pp. 187-88.

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Nietzsche's text insofar as it necessarily forces his commentators to parody it This, indeed, is very strange. Parody traditionally implies various forms of reproduction and deformation of an original piece for satirical or debunking purposes. How is it possible, then, that a text will necessarily make any commentary on it a parody, a deformation, a betrayal of its substance? Indeed, if a commentary on Nietzsche's text is always necessarily a parody, how much of the original force of this term remains? Parody as, if you like, a bad copy of an original can only really have its traditional meaning in relation to a possible good copy, a possible faithful rendering of the original. Klossowski's motif of parody is of crucial importance for the way he thinks about the relation of literature and philosophy, but this is so only insofar as parody brings the notion of origin, of an originary and authentic existence into question. Existence, the doctrine of Eternal Return affirms, can never be thought of as originary, because, as random flux and repetition, it has always withdrawn from thought already. Parody is, to use a by now familiar coupling, always already at play in the movement of thought. It articulates the necessary loss to thought of an originary or authentic moment of presence or selfpresence.31 In the movement of parody die concept of origin becomes an encounter widi the impossibility of thinking an originary moment This loss of origin, ineluctably, renders impossible the very movement of thought itself, since thought is only ever an infinite parody of that original instance of self-presence which conscious thought implies.32 According to Klossowski, consciousness always necessarily constitutes itself in the performance of a role. To think is to enact the fiction of a self-same self: 'On ne peut pas ne pas se vouloir, mais on ne peut jamais vouloir autre chose qu'un role. Savoir cela, c'est jouer en bonne conscience. Jouer le mieux possible revient a se dissimuler'.33 Paradoxically, then, the only way to live one's existence in good conscience is always self-consciously to dissimulate, to perform a role that one knows to be a fiction or mask, because diat is what one is always doing anyway. In the movements of parody, honesty and dissimulation, authenticity and falsity cease to function in opposition to each other, and properly

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31 In this respect Klossowski's key motif of parody dearly prefigures Derrick's formulation of the trace as la disparition de l'origine'. See Jacques Dcrrida, Dt la grammatokgu (Paris, Minuit, 1967), p. 90. Derrida, though, is suspicious of the term parody itself, arguing against Klossowski that the parodic gesture can all too easily leave that which is parodied intact. See Niet^xbe aigoitrd'biu, 1, 111-

12.
32 Klossowski, like Lacan, rewrites m e Cartesian cogito: *On n'est jamais la o u Ton est, mais toujours la o u Ton n'est que l'acteur d e cet autre q u e Ton est', Un afimeite disir, p . 218. Lacan's "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient', where he gives his version of the cogito, and Klossowski's essay both appear in 19)7. 33 Un sifineste distr, p . 218.

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speaking they just cease to function, for there is no point of origin or selfidentity upon which any of these terms can be founded. The motif of inevitable error or dissimulation takes on key existential significance. The only imperative that inevitable error imposes is that it should always be recognized and affirmed as such in the doctrine Eternal Return. Error founds Klossowski's commentary on Nietzsche, for to read Nietzsche is necessarily to parody him. According to his own doctrine of Return, Nietzsche has, in writing under the name Nietzsche, always already parodied himself. And the doctrine of Eternal Return? That too, of course, is a parody; it thinks an existence which is beyond thought but as thought it can never be coincident with that existence; it can only simulate and dissimulate it The doctrine of Eternal Return is what Klossowski calls a 'simulacre de doctrine'. The uniqueness of this doctrine in comparison to any other is its status as simulacrum, simply that this doctrine of existence marks within itself a necessary simulation or dissimulation of existence; it affirms the play of parody within itself. This simulacrum describes existence as Eternal Return but in so doing points to itself as an inevitable falsification of that existence it describes. As a doctrine the simulacrum of Return is a kind of wilful error; it always affirms that it is not representing what it is representing, it incorporates its own difference from itself within itself. The doctrine of Eternal Return asserts its status as lucid and inevitable error but in so doing it affirms existence as that which is occluded from thought and representation: 'L'erreur voulue, sous la raison meme du simulacre, rend compte de l'existence dont l'essence meme est la verite qui se derobe, la verite qui se refuse'.34 So this doctrine, as resolutely and self-consciously parodic, enacts a play of parody which is always already at play, even in its very formulation as a doctrine. It articulates a movement of infinite dissimulation which is without beginning or end. The simulacrum is always a false image. However, it is not a bad copy of an original form (as it is for Plato); rather, it always implies an infinite regression in which all origin is lost. By writing fiction which contains philosophical argument and philosophical arguments which affirm themselves as a kind of fiction, Klossowski problematizes the relation between literature and philosophy. On one level, he clearly seems to be theorizing literature from a philosophical perspective and thus subordinating the literary to the philosophical. Yet at the same time he places both his fictional and his theoretical writing within the ineluctable play of parody, affirming their status as simulacra. In this sense both the theoretical/philosophical and the fictional are ultimately subsumed into a broader logic, that of wilful error. Writing is returned to an existence which is without foundation in any instance of transcendence or originary plenitude
54

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Ibid., p. 217.

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of Being. Certainly Klossowski's work has all-embracing and existential implications which we may or may not wish to accept. His specific articulation of the 'simulacrum' points forward to the developments of writers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, both of whom stress the shared basis of philosophical and literary discourse in the figural aspects of language.35 I would argue here, however, the manner in which Klossowski re-situates the relation of the literary to the philosophical reaffirms that which has always been the most proper attribute of literature, that is, its impropriety, its status as 'erreur voulue', as self- conscious artifice. In the play of parody the writings of both Nietzsche and Klossowski are affirmed as infinitely different from themselves as they open thought up to the impossible thought of Return. Klossowski is far from offering a theoretical meta-discourse of the literary. His own texts (La Vocation suspendue or the essay on Nietzsche), as they theori2e Eternal Return, parody, or the simulacrum, are themselves parody and simulacrum. The movement of parody in Klossowski's writing knows no bounds, no origin and no goal. So when Klossowski comes to represent it in his essay on Nietzsche, it has always, he would argue, already represented him.
DOWNING COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

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35 De Man sums this tendency up best in Allegories ofReading, remarking on the way in which, in the wake of Nietzsche, intuitions about the figural, rhetorical nature of thought and language have inaugurated a critique of metaphysics: 'The key to this critique of metaphysics, which is itself a recurrent gesture throughout the history of thought, is the rhetorical model of the trope or, if one prefers to call it that, literature', Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979)- De Man notes that this 'tropological', figural quality of language is fundamental to all discourse as such: "The trope is not a derived, marginal, or aberrant form oflanguage but the linguistic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode among others but it characterizes language as such' (Allegones of Reading, p. 105). The relationship between Klossowski's term 'simulacrum' and De Man's conception of rhetoric or tropes is worth further investigation.