Impulses, Phantasms, and Individuality: The Impulsional Theories of Klossowski and Nietzsche

What is an individual? This video covers Pierre Klossowski's concepts of the impulse and the phantasm as it relates to the notion of individuality. Also covered is Nietzsche's theory of forces or drives.
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[@reginaldmolehurst459]

This is excellent and beautifully produced. it is worth noting that Klossowski's concept of impulses is very similar to Brian Massumi's thinking around "the autonomy of affect". He argues that affect is ontologically foundational and autonomous.

[@marioauthier2641]

Excepted Massumi's wrote this way after Klossowski...

[@paulwells411]

Good video. There no understating the influence Klossowski had on Deleuze and Foucault and his thought continues to be the most potent. Would love to see a video on his work on Sade.

[@AcidHorizon]

Thanks for the feedback. I read Klossowski’s book on Marquis de Sade over the summer. Your request might be an excuse for me to gather at my notes and write a summary.

[@jerrimenard3092]

I agree, I would love to see more on Sade.

[@athko]

What texts by Klossowski are most relevant to this? Just Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle or are there other texts?

[@AcidHorizon]

One essay you should not overlook, is his essay on Nietzsche and polytheism from the compilation of essays entitled, “Such A Deathly Desire”.

[@Ottrond]

very glad to see essays from you guys

[@sankyroxxx]

I'm curious if there's anything new in all of this. Obviously we have drives and they push us to take action. And some of those drives might work together to create bigger drives. And sure, sometimes language or art might not be the best medium to communicate it -- this has more to do with the nature of language than anything to do with drives as such. Calling it impulses or drives or phantasms is just muddying things unnecessarily.

[@AcidHorizon]

Well given Klossowski is not new, you're right. But affect theory has birthed new concepts which have been pursued by various thinkers in different lineages. The claim that "language or art might be the best medium to communicate" doesn't unsettle the fact that the irruption of affect is still plagued by the problem of singularity and its ultimate incommunicability (if we follow Klossowski's view). This gets picked up again in Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, and others in what I believe have been novel ways. Klossowski's ideas have been useful for those thinkers in their critique of the nature of communities, the politics of religious eschatology, and so on. This video by itself won't deliver all the goods for those purposes--we really only get half of his basic theory here. In any case, I think Klossowski provokes some questions which reverberated in a way that moved thought to new new places. As evidence to whether Klossowski presents something new, Deleuze himself credits Klossowski with putting forward the theoretical tools to overcome the parallelism of Freudomarxian thought.

[@Spiritchaser93]

We understand the sense of language, which is pre-linguistic on the one hand (there must be a foundation of language which is grounded in our interaction with the world) but also requires the invention of new sets of vocabularies in order to articulate Ideas. Now, all of this is very much beyond the will of the individual, rather we have to say that such forces are universal but pass through bodies and create different effects on different bodies. There can be no same aggregate of forces which act on any particular body at any point in space-time, hence reality is always exceeding the capacities of minds to grasp. What thinkers like Deleuze does, in mining the history of philosophy and reading into Nietzsche by way of Klossowski, is to re-create the Ideas and "spirit" of the aforementioned philosophers. The task of philosophy is afterall, not simply an interpretation or communication of information, but a process of creating concepts and systems of Thought. That is philosophy's way of confronting chaos, or cutting the plane of chaos in a different way than science, which operates by way of functives and variables. Do not let the "success" of science detract from the fact that philosophy is always necessary as long as there is Thought, for science proceeds via isolation and repeatability only through ceteris paribus situations - ie. to formulate a law, one always has to ensure that it works only in a limited or regional case. Even the most "universal" of scientific laws, like the general theory of relativity, is always an ideal case which never obtains in reality. The task of philosophy is to enable Thought to express itself in new ways, by cutting up reality according to the boundaries of each concept and how each concept relates to one another. The meaning of each new concept is differential - it defines itself against a background of other concepts. Hence, I never understand why the modern-day attitude that rails against philosophy as gibberish or unnecessary holds philosophy to a different standard than the sciences, when both disciplines approach the same chaos differently.

[@sankyroxxx]

@@Spiritchaser93 sorry if I gave the sense that I'm saying science is more valuable than Philosophy. I didn't mean to.