Pierre Klossowski: The Pantomime of Spirits by Hervé Castanet (review)

Hervé Castanet’s monograph on the work of Pierre Klossowski bills itself as the first work of criticism to explicitly engage with both the written and the pictorial œuvre of this very significant, but perhaps still marginalized figure. First published in French in 2007 this English translation has a Foreword by one of Klossowski’s foremost commentators from the world of art criticism, Sarah Wilson. Both Wilson and Castanet make a strong case for the importance of Klossowski and for the place he occupies within the field of twentieth-century French literature, thought, and art. Rejecting the idea that he should be considered as an eccentric figure or as a fringe element of literary and artistic culture, Castanet admits the singular nature of Klossowski’s theorizing, fictional writing, and artistic production but nevertheless insists, along with Wilson, on the pertinence of his work in relation to the wider industrial, consumer society in which it was created and on its continuing relevance and contemporaneity. Taking as its unifying motif the centrality of the gaze in Klossowski’s theoretical, fictional, and pictorial production, the book offers a thorough overview of all of its most important elements. The structure follows the pattern of some existing criticism in that it begins with chapters on Sade and Nietzsche respectively and uses these as a critical and theoretical framework through which other aspects of the Klossowskian corpus can be approached, most importantly the Lois de l’hospitalité trilogy and the figure of Roberte, but also the later writing on Sade and Fourier, Klossowski’s ‘Gulliverian’ vision, and, by way of conclusion, the short meditation on myth, Le Bain de Diane. Most significantly Castanet’s book contains an albeit quite short chapter on La Monnaie vivante, one of Klossowski’s most challenging works, which has received very little sustained critical attention to date. Castanet gives illuminating readings that engage carefully and attentively with the detail of the fictional and theoretical works discussed. When he strays from a strictly Klossowskian language in his critical presentation it is a Lacanian lexicon that tends to take over. (Castanet is a practising psychoanalyst and professor of psychoanalysis.) Perhaps the most original and interesting aspect of this book is the way in which the commentaries on Sade and Nietzsche, together with those on the Lois trilogy, pursue the theme of economy, exchange, and the ‘unexchangeable’. Here the persistence of the Klossowskian concern with the gaze emerges as a sustained preoccupation with that which cannot be exchanged within any system of equivalence: the invisible life of bodily desire, the impersonal corporeal forces which exceed the limits of consciousness but which nevertheless offer the conditions of consciousness itself. Klossowski’s obsession with simulacra, hidden divinities, inner demons, and that which, beyond vision, imposes itself upon vision, emerges as the cornerstone of a critique or refusal of the economy of representation and exchange underpinning industrial consumer society. The interest and originality of this book lies in the way it convincingly demonstrates that Klossowski’s apparently singular preoccupations offer penetrating insights into the unseen, un-thought, and perhaps even pathological mechanisms of desire underpinning the industrial world of today.