Elana Commisso
Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism
University of Western Ontario
elanacomm@aol.com
(416) 480 1160
Lived Culture and the Uncivilized Scene of Theoretical Simulation: Nietzschean Ontoaesthesis and Twentieth-century French Theory.
The distinctive recuperation of Nietzschean thought in post-war France is tied to a
(re)turn of the aesthetic in twentieth-century French theory. The theoretical appropriation
of Nietzsche, in particular within the French context, encounters the aesthetic as aesthesis
– the movement of forces that produces affection and sensation. Strangely, Nietzsche
becomes the father figure of different yet necessarily related twentieth-century
expressions of a theoretical topos, where the onto-aesthetic Dionysian art of thought
performed by Nietzsche initiates the project of “critique”. The following work examines
the theoretical extension of the Nietzschean project of critique, and in particular focuses
on the themes of lived culture, the fable, and the simulacrum as they are developed by
Pierre Klossowski1 in his 1969 work Nietzsche and the Viscious Circle. A close reading
of these Nietzschean themes, as treated by Klossowski, will enquire into how the cultural
emerges in the twentieth century as a site of encounter for the aesthetic and the ontic, a
site distinctly punctuated by the simulacrum, itself a topos of theoretico-cultural
production.
Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments is highly idiosyncratic; it
engages Nietzsche’s work as the expression of a psycho-physiological struggle
manifested as an obsessive chronicle of a self-inflicted psycho-physical terminal illness.
This frame enables Klossowski to read Nietzsche reading his multiple and unstable selves
in an ekphrastic expression of the very agitation that Nietzsche suggests is produced by
the forces behind the willed reproduction of the simulacrum2. Klossowski as spectator,
and Nietzsche as protagonist, become implicated in the very simulacric scenes that they
describe as they repeatedly produce their non-identical selves in their theoretical
production. What is present(ed) in the simulacrum is not a coherent or intelligible entity
in itself, but the expression of agitation; what Klossowski calls a phantasm, an affect or
pathos that is the force of the cultural matrix that constitutes being.
The Nietzschean figuration of the simulacrum (trugbild), in particular as Klossowski
develops and emplots it, inaugurates a vertiginous relation of thinking and being in the
form of a “lived culture”. Simulation, and in particular the practices of simulation, are the
modes of cultural onto-expression championed by Klossowski and Nietzsche. Simulation
assumes itself in the simulacrum, which, however, has no content and is simply an
expression of a force. Simulation then, as it returns in the twentieth century, is an
aesthetic event that emerges in a necessarily dissonant relation with the discursive
1
Klossowski was an important translator and critic of Nietzsche in post-war France.
The simulacrum, as Klossowski explains it, is “a willed reproduction of a phantasm… that simulates th[e]
invisible agitation of the soul” (xi).
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practices of representational metaphysics, and in particular the Platonic concept of image
as artifice. The simulacrum (re)appears in the world of fable, in the world as fable, the
involuted and incoherent cultural one-dimensionality of being. The fable, an aesthetically
coded mode of being in the world, is determined by the signs of a pulsional semiotic
where simulation obtains. The fable is the aesthetic matrix of being that “becomes” in the
overcoming of the real and apparent worlds described by Nietzsche in Twighlight of the
Idols.
The Platonic image and the Nietzschean simulacrum appear in the twentieth century on
the horizon of the aesthetic. The former, a logocentric or structural repression contained
discursively, and the latter a willed affirmation in culture which permits the turning-inon-it-self of philosophical thought as struggle, are not opposed, but rather obliquely
interfaced. This interface is the force that drives critique, which ties traditionally distinct
discourses and folds them into the larger domain of the cultural, as both an expression of
and enquiry into being as such. What Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche privileges, is the
experience of the unidentifiable as a (re)turn of the aesthetic to being, in the form of an
artistic endeavour. I plan to read this endeavour, which for Klossowksi takes the form of
theoretico-cultural production, as an expression of Nietzschean onto-aesthetics unique to
twentieth-century French theory.
2