Pierre Klossowski

“Such is the world as it appeared to Nietzsche under the monumental aspect of Turin: a discontinuity of intensities that are given names only through the interpretation of those who receive his messages; the latter still represent the fixity of signs, whereas in Nietzsche this fixity no longer exists. That the fluctuations of intensities were able to assume the opposite name to designate themselves - such is the miraculous irony. We must believe that this coincidence of the phantasm and the sign has existed for all time, and that the strength required to follow the detour through the intellect was 'superhuman”

“The landscape of Turin, the monumental squares, the promenades along the Po river, were bathed in a kind of 'Claude Lorraine' luminosity (Dostoyevsky's golden age), a diaphonousness that removed the weight of things and made them recede into a infinite distance. The stream of light here became a stream of laughter - the laughter from which truth emerges, the laughter in which identities explode, including Nietzsche's. What also exploded is the meaning that things can have or lose for other things, not in terms of limited linkage or narrow context, but in terms of variations of light”

“Les dieux ont enseigné aux hommes à se contempler eux-mêmes dans le spectacle comme les dieux se contemplent eux-mêmes dans l'imagination des hommes.”