Living Currency

Description

'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970. Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.

Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was a French philosopher, translator, and artist. Vernon W. Cisney is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2014), as well as Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative (2017). Nicolae Morar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies and an Associate Member of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. He is currently writing a book entitled Biology, BioEthics, and BioPolitics: How to Think Differently About Human Nature. Daniel W. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh 2012) and also the translator, from the French, of books by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Klossowski, Isabelle Stengers, and Michel Serres.

[A] good book that advances a key to understanding Klossowski's literary and visual relationship to the exploited and monetized body ... [It] is thoroughly enjoyable for those who possess a keen interest in Klossowski's written and visual works. * The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics * Michel Foucault called Living Currency "the greatest book of our time" " insofar as it provided conceptual resources that would allow French thinking to move from Bataille's Accursed Share to the libidinal economics of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others. Using Sade to reframe Marx and Fourier to rethink Freud, Klossowski's two essays in this volume revealed heretofore unappreciated dimensions of the roles played by desire and pleasure in the economics of industrial production that have continued to inspire theorists interested in the economic relations between affects and needs. -- Alan D. Schrift, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy, Grinnell College, USA. Essayist, novelist, painter, translator, former Dominican novice, sometime theology student, occasional film actor and playwright, Pierre Klossowski is one of the twentieth century's most original and inventive artists. The Living Currency is his most intriguing and premonitory book, bringing together insights from Sade, Fourier, Marx, Nietzsche, Keynes, and Freud to explore how industrial or postindustrial economies are based not on the distribution of goods, but on the circulation of desires and fantasies, and how bodies are primarily objects of voluptuous consumption and libidinal exchange too. Here is a text that radically changed the agenda for Foucault, Deleuze, and many other French thinkers in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and there is every chance it will do the same for international audiences in the first quarter of the twenty-first. -- Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick, UK The two essays presented here are Klossowski's last theoretical works; they are essential to our understanding of this original and important thinker. -- Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA