Select Page

Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality: A mise-en-scène of the Perverse Structure

by | Vol 33 (1) 2015

A substantial part of Pierre Klossowski’s philosophical writings is dedicated to the works of Marquis de Sade, but Sade’s influence can also be traced in his literary and visual oeuvre. In his play Roberte, ce soir, Klossowski dramatizes scholarly Octave’s quest for the ultimate realization of his wife Roberte. He wants Roberte to be actualized as the Roberte, Roberte le signe unique. The play shows Octave’s unrelenting attempts to realize a Roberte without lack. He creates his own laws and revises existing theories beyond their limits in order to reach his goal. The author argues, using Lacan, that an analysis of Klossowski’s play Roberte, ce soir reveals the structure of perversion. As Lacan indicates, the pervert disavows castration. He does so by situating himself in the place of the lack for the other, in an attempt to behold the other’s enjoyment. Klossowski’s work, the author argues, can be conceptualized as a dramatic staging of the central issue of the pervert’s relation to the other.

Related articles

  • The Laws of Repetition, A Meditation

    In this meditation, the author enumerates, in reference to his clinical practise as well as to his reading of Freud and Lacan, six laws of repetition: 1. repetition is continuous; 2. repetition operates in function of life; 3. repetition does not come down to mere reproduction but exists only through variation; 4. in repetition, smaller and bigger "rounds" are to be differentiated; 5. repetition operates in function of the cruelty of jouissance; 6. when one realizes that, beyond any mastering…

  • Reflections on the structure and finality of psychoanalytic interpretations

    This article differentiates between two forms of interpretation: symbolic and imaginary. It is argued that an analytic interpretation always revisits a symbolic interpretation made by the subject, resulting in the subject also making an imaginary interpretation.. Furthermore, a psychoanalytic interpretation can only be of service to the analytic cure if the analyst makes a cut between the (revisiting of the symbolic) interpretation made by the analyst and the imaginary interpretation made by the analysand.

  • Mathematical realism and the impossible structure of the real

    This article discusses the influence of Koyré’s epistemology on Lacan’s conception of the real and more broadly on his critical examination of the relation between science and psychoanalysis. The discussion necessitates a systematic return to Koyré, whose visibility in contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical debates is rather marginal despite his major contribution to the development of epistemology, philosophy and structural psychoanalysis in 20th century France and beyond. The article embeds Lacan’s teaching in a broader intellectual movement of French philosophy of…