The Sacrament of Resemblance
Apropos Pierre Klossowski's Such a Deathly Desire
“The intelligentsia of our generation […] finds itself carried away by an ever more frantic questioning of the reality of this world, and yields to an enchantment of absence—not of a world absent from this one, but of an absence of world in things and beings, by means of language.”
—Pierre Klossowski, Such a Deathly Desire, §137
Pierre Klossowski’s Such a Deathly Desire opens and closes with two texts on Nietzsche, from 1956 and 1957. Between them we find two essays on Gide—dealing with his life and correspondence—followed by a preface to Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Un prêtre marié (1960), one apropos Bataille’s L’Abbé C… (1950), one on Brice Parain (undated), and a fragment of a study on Blanchot from 1949 of which only the second part remains. They read less as discrete pieces than as fragments—or better yet, aspects—of a single, larger thesis: that the “deathly desire” of the title is the very impulse that will later haunt Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
In Such a Deathly Desire, Klossowski is monomaniacally committed to exposing the mechanics of the simulacrum. Each essay can be read as a variation on the same gesture. The book’s construction—its sequencing, even its rhythm—works like a thresher shark, circling its contemporaries with Nietzsche for a caudal fin. I turn to this volume rather than the better known one on Nietzsche because it is here, as far as I can trace, that the simulacrum first surfaces as Klossowski’s idée fixe. While the “phantasm,” so prominent in The Vicious Circle, remains discreet, the simulacrum is already in full swing and explicitly thematised. The phantasm will later be inferred from its obsessional mechanics, already rehearsed in these earlier case studies.
The essays form a pattern-book on the dynamics of simulation. The piece on Parain is a particularly complete instance of it, pointing forward to the following fragment on Blanchot, more explicit though incomplete—as though each text tested a different depth of surfacing for the same submerged matter.
In “On Maurice Blanchot,” Klossowski reverses Tertullian (whose twin appearances in SADD are themselves fascinating). Where Tertullian insisted that the flesh became word in the Incarnation (caro factum est verbum), anchoring representation in divine presence, Klossowski inverts the formula: language is constituted by absence, the word is made flesh only as disappearance. He writes:
“If representation resides in the image of the truth, the truth is never more than an image and the image itself is no more than an absence of being, that is to say, presence of nothing; language itself consists of this; since, for one thing to serve as image for another, it must have ceased to exist in itself. The image of something never designates more from this other thing than its absence. And so nothingness doesn’t only found resemblance: it is resemblance itself.”
This is the governing intuition of the book, tested through its recursive repetitions. That Such a Deathly Desire is a compendium of re-views—each author a mirror in which the same absence gleams—makes impeccable sense.
The coherence of this method would not be lost on Klossowski’s contemporaries. Writing in 1964, Foucault describes the simulacrum in “The Prose of Actaeon” as “the simulation of an existence (and language) in constant becoming,” recognising in it a distinctly Klossowskian discovery. Klossowski’s simulacrum is not the false copy of a real but the event of resemblance without model. Before Deleuze and Baudrillard codified its philosophical afterlife, Klossowski located its origin in the ecstatic theft of representation itself. Each simulacrum is a latrocinium—an act of theft committed by the spirit upon its own likeness. The mind abolishes itself by duplicating its own disappearance. The image does not veil being; it replaces it with the motion of its erasure.
Hence the paradox: the gesture that erases the sacred sign is as indelible as the sign itself. The simulacrum inherits the sacramental logic it profanes. It must be repeated to maintain its subtraction, tracing bar after bar over the supernatural world it claims to have abolished. What pretended to be absolute subversion becomes absolute repetition. In this sense, Klossowski’s “deathly desire” is not a drive toward nothingness but toward the unceasing restoration of nothingness—its perpetual mise-en-scène.
Each essay in the book reenacts this operation: an author—Bataille, Gide, Parain, Blanchot, Nietzsche—is compelled to efface the sacred while remaining caught in its indelebility. The simulacrum is the syntax of that compulsion, the grammar through which negation survives itself. Foucault’s reading clarifies the rapture behind this theft: ecstasy is the moment when the mind contemplates itself outside itself, glimpsing its own undoing from a distance, yet only able to enact that undoing in the form of a simulacrum. The spirit’s highest state—its attempt to abolish itself—is condemned to mimicry.
Baudrillard will radicalise this logic into the order of the hyperreal, where the simulacrum no longer refers to an absence but proliferates its own positivity. Yet in Klossowski, the simulacrum remains haunted by the sacred it erases: its thefts are still ritual, its absences still consecrated. The hyperreal is merely the desacralised residue of this economy—the exhaustion of repetition once its liturgical necessity has been forgotten.
Klossowski’s deathly desire is thus a theology of simulation before simulation became technological: the moment when the sacred and the counterfeit become indistinguishable because both are sustained by the same ecstatic compulsion to repeat, to erase, to resemble.
In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, this compulsion achieves its metaphysical formulation. The eternal return is not the recurrence of the identical but the return of the simulacrum itself—the repetition of repetition, the infinite rehearsal of disappearance. What returns is not being but the gesture that abolishes being. Nietzsche’s recurrence, as Klossowski reads it, is the apotheosis of this “deathly desire”: existence becomes the theatre of its own substitution, every instant the simulacrum of all others. The circle is vicious because it cannot break from its own ecstatic theft, yet divine because only through that theft does the image of the world persist. The eternal return is, finally, the supreme liturgy of the simulacrum—the consecration of nothingness through its infinite reenactment.
Balthus. The Room. c. 1953. Oil on canvas. 335 × 270.5 cm. Private collection.