Hervé Castanet Analyzes Klossowski's Pantomime of Spirits

Hervé Castanet, a psychoanalyst and professor of clinical psychopathology, has authored 'Pierre Klossowski – La Pantomime des esprits,' published by Editions Cécile Defaut. The essay explores Klossowski's lifelong oeuvre, focusing on the interplay between word, concept, and image. Castanet avoids a conventional monograph, instead deciphering what he terms the 'game between word-concept-image' and rejecting the view of Klossowski as merely 'a writer who draws and paints.' He traces Klossowski's intellectual journey, emphasizing his role as an active 'reader' who forged a unique thought and art. Three tutelary figures illuminate Klossowski's machinery: Sade (evil, perversion, body), Nietzsche (chaos-simulacrum), and Fourier (currency). This conceptual framework facilitates entry into Klossowski's work, where body, simulacrum, and exchange are the three modalities of the Klossowskian economy of the gaze. Castanet opens and closes his essay with the 'pantomime of spirits,' a arrested gesture where only bodies communicate as the gaze sublimates silence. In analyzing 'Le Bain de Diane,' Castanet notes Klossowski conceives the gaze as a demonic power mediating between the invisible divine and the human desiring to see: seeing the goddess undress is like the primal scene where the voyeur is annihilated, yet may choose to paint the forbidden invisible. The essay was reviewed by Léa Bismuth.