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 them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche's belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

'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.

Awarded the Prix des Critiques in 1965, this elegant novel will be of considerable interest to those with a taste for the rarefied currents of contemporary French intellectual experimentation. Opening with the events precipitating the dissolution of the Templar Order in 1307, the setting moves quickly beyond the historical into the theological as the focus shifts to the disembodied spirits of the dead, martyred members of the Order. Klossowski, who identifies this work as "gnosis or fable, or Oriental tale," investigates the problematic nature of identity by asking what becomes of a soul dissociated from a body. This question is further complicated by the "pure" souls' erotic interest in the alluring and recently abandoned body of a young page, variously populated by the spirits of the dissipated Grand Master of the Order and of St. Theresaa situation that allows Klossowski to stage a discussion of idolatry and the nature of deities. Foucault's essay further illuminates the theoretical principles at stake in Klossowski's adumbrated visions of eternity.

La 4ème de couv. indique : "Le Baphomet, transformant en mythe la légende des Templiers, traduit, avec une somptuosité baroque, cette expérience de l'éternel retour – assimilée ici aux cycles de la métempsycose et rendue par là plus comique que tragique (à la manière de certains contes orientaux). Tout se passe dans un au-delà tourbillonnaire – royaume des esprits –, où il est naturel que, sous une lumière d'invisibilité, toutes les vérités perdent leur éclat, où Dieu n'est plus qu'une sphère lointaine et fort diminuée, où la mort surtout a perdu sa toute-puissance et jusqu'à son pouvoir de décision : ni immortels ni mortels, livrés au perpétuel changement qui les répète, absents d'eux-mêmes dans le mouvement d'intensité qui est leur seule substance et fait de leur être identique un jeu, une ressemblance sans rien à quoi ressembler, une inimitable imitation, tels sont les "souffles", paroles d'esprit ou paroles d'écrivain, comme sont telles les figures et les œuvres formées par ces paroles."