Pierre Klossowski, elder brother to painter Balthus, was a writer, translator and artist. At a young age he was educated by spending time with Rainer Maria Rilke and André Gide. In the 1930s, he was befriended by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and André Masson. At the same time, Klossowski began studying the works of the Marquis de Sade, taking particular interest in the philosophical implications of pornography, rather than the violence and excess that characterises it.
At the end of the Second World War, he married the woman who, under the pseudonym ‘Roberte’, became his inspiration and the protagonist of his literary and artistic work. The erotic novels Klossowski wrote starting in the 1950s combined narrative invention and philosophical speculation; their content influenced the positions of some of the most important French thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
He started drawing in 1952, first with pencil and then with pastel colours, with the aim of illustrating or, more precisely, giving substance to the visions described in his stories…
Pierre Klossowski
The Phantasms of Perversion: Sade and Fourier
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Pierre Klossowski
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
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Pierre Klossowski
Sade my Neighbor
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Pierre Klossowski
A Destructive Philosphy
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