ABSTRACT
The notion of simulacrum especially informs the mystical poetics that Pierre Klossowski associates with an unusual and not uncontroversial form of erotic behavior, as depicted above all in the three novels making up the trilogy: Roberte, ce soir, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and Le Souffleur. The French propensity to incarnate ideas in depictions of the carnal reaches a high point in Klossowski’s fiction, which indeed resembles Sade’s in a few ways. Klossowski approved of the critic Jean Roudaud’s remark that he had set to work narratively Giordano Bruno’s definition of thinking as “speculating with images.” The “demonic” aspects of Klossowski’s artistic philosophy, in its later stages, perhaps seem closer to the psychoanalytical paradigms of obsession and phantasm than to Christian concerns evil and the Devil. The crucial difference between Klossowski and Sade is that the former’s explorations of fear and phantasm are aimed at very special forms of mystical purity.
