Intentionality Without Ends and the “As-If” Agent: Reading Klossowski’s Nietzsche Alongside Practising Theory
摘要
In conversation with Pierre Klossowski’s 1969 work Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, this chapter asks what the practitioner—as artist, mover, yogi, lover, thinker, etc.—might tacitly know about how action obtains, and how this then informs their approach to practices, to actions more generally, as well as to conceptualisations of “doing” in daily life. Taking cues from Klossowski’s analyses, the chapter argues that artists (as cipher for those who-embark-intentionally-without-knowing-whereto), create—in the future anterior—what will have been “agency”: a stabilised “after-effect”, constituted retroactively by the movement of a delicate methodology. By forgetting or subtracting “themselves” from the imprecise fiction of a discrete and mostly conscious agential self, “artists”, read inclusively, may turn out to have been “those” able to operate at the indeterminate membrane between structure and relaxation, with an at once goal-less and non-arbitrary intentionality that sets going the repetitions-we-are differently.