The Nietzsche Podcast 122: Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, pt 2 - The Conspiracy of the Vicious Circle
Oct 21, 2025
Explore the intriguing concept of the Eternal Return, where meaning collapses into absurdity. Learn how Nietzsche's views on forgetting and the nature of identity change our understanding of life. Klossowski's insights reveal a world where the self is just a series of moods devoid of goals. Delve into the tension between will and ethics, and Nietzsche's provocative experiments aimed at fostering exceptional individuals. This journey challenges the notion of clarity and purpose in a goalless reality, shaping a new philosophical landscape.
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Return Reveals A Discontinuous Self
- Klossowski reads Nietzsche's eternal return as revealing a discontinuous self made of moods and forgetting, not a coherent ego.
- This makes meaning, goals, and moral responsibility collapse into endless repetition without completion.
Forgetting Is Built Into The Return
- Nietzsche values forgetting as the rule of life and the return demands forgetting each relived life.
- Thus the imperative to will the return conflicts with inevitable amnesia across discontinuous states.
Feeling Becomes A Reified Sign
- The eternal return arrives as a highest tonality, a revelation formed in intense feeling that later becomes a conceptual sign.
- Turning that feeling into a persistent doctrine risks losing its original lucidity and meaning.
