Pierre Klossowski

Pierre Klossowski (9 August 1905 – 12 August 2001) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.

Life
Born in Paris, Pierre Klossowski was the older brother of the artist Balthazar Klossowski, better known as Balthus. Their parents were the art historian Erich Klossowski and the painter Baladine Klossowska. His German-educated father came from a family supposedly belonging to the former Polish petty nobility (drobna szlachta) and bearing the Rola coat of arms. His mother, Baladine Klossowska, was born as Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). When he was 18, Pierre was André Gide's secretary and worked on the drafts of Les faux-monnayeurs for him. Klossowski was responsible for a new publication of The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings by the Marquis de Sade in 1964.

Writing
Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality. He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.

His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Film
Klossowski also appeared in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar as the avaricious miller who desires Marie, a character played by Anne Wiazemsky.

He was involved in:
 * Raoul Ruiz's La vocation suspendue, 1977, 90';
 * Raoul Ruiz's L'hypothèse du tableau volé, 1979, 66';
 * Pierre Zucca's Roberte, 1979, 100';
 * Alain Fleischer's Pierre Klossowski ou l'éternel détour, 1996, 106'.

His text on de Sade is mentioned in the bibliography at the beginning of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and quoted several times through the film.

Drawings
An exhibition of Klossowski's drawings and life size sculptures made after them with sculptor Jean-Paul Réti ran from 20 September to 19 October 2006, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris along with a film retrospective.

Translations

 * Friedrich Sieburg, Défense du nationalisme allemand, Grasset (1933)
 * Friedrich Sieburg, Robespierre, E. Flammarion (1936)
 * Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus suivi de Investigations philosophiques (1961)
 * Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (1971)
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir
 * Walter Benjamin, L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée [in consultation with the author for the first publication of the essay in 1936]
 * J. G. Hamann, Les Méditations Bibliques, Minuit (1948). Critical edition, Éditions Ionas, 2016, read online.