‘The Prey or the Shadow’: Klossowski, Kierkegaard, Desire

Abstract

During the late 1930s, towards the beginning of a long and colourful career as a translator, writer, novelist and painter, Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) proved an attentive reader of the work of the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55). This article examines Klossowski's twofold engagement with Kierkegaard, the first in the form of a commentary, published in Bataille's magazine Acephale in 1937 addressing the Dane's use of Mozart's Don Giovanni in his philosophical treatise Either — Or, the second, a year later, being a translation of an essay by Kierkegaard, also originally part of Either — Or, offering an alternative interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone to the one proposed by Hegel. The aim of the article is to examine how Klossowski, in these texts, problematizes the possibility of mediation and translatability, and emphasizes instead the irreducibility of immediacy, secrecy, indirection.