The Vision, the Riddle, and the Vicious Circle: Pierre Klossowski Reading Nietzsche’s Sick Body through Sade’s Perversion

Abstract

By comparing Pierre Klossowski’s works on Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, the paper attempts to clarify his understanding of the part played by the ‘bodily remainder’ in recruiting a following of readers to their texts. Klossowski’s designation of the ‘simulacrum’ of eternal return in Nietzsche’s philosophy is compared with his account of the role played by sodomy in Sade’s writings. Klossowski contends that, through these figures, a bodily contagion (represented by sickness and perversity, respectively), is communicated to the reader, but esoterically: that is, only to a select few, whose bodies can replicate the impulses that the text conceals. Ultimately, what Klossowski’s interpretations of Nietzsche and Sade achieve, however, is the dissimulation of identity, as well as of a decisive difference between the reader and the philosopher whom she reads.