Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, "Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle" is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche's thought and his life, Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche's propensities for self-denial, self-reputation, and self-consumption.
Nietzsche's ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, he made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring...

Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist Andre Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste...

'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.'
Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.

Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.