Secret, solecism and the unveiling of the unspeakable in the work of Pierre Klossowski

Abstract

Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), in most of his written and illustrated works, recounts artistically a single event: the unquestionable erotic desires of his wife Roberte, in other words Denise Morin-Sinclaire, a Protestant educator and inspector of the Censorship (The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1959; Roberte, ce soir, 1954; Le Souffleur, 1965 in the trilogy of the Roberte novels Laws of Hospitality, 1995). A woman with a multiple, paradoxical, contradictory mind, divided between repression and perverse pleasure, a kind of demon that actualizes itself as a pagan goddess in continuous metamorphosis, elusive and uncommunicable just as Diana is in front of her voyeur Actaeon (Diana at Her Bath/The Women of Rome, 1956). "Impenetrable", imperturbable, Roberte gives in to pleasure by betraying her own erotic will through gestures and a face that are mostly shared between repulsion and invitation to embrace. Through solecism, Klossowski thus demonstrates Roberte's incoherence and tries to "show us" his perverse secret that the written text is limited to evoking. At the same time, Klossowski as painter reveals to us, through the diaphanous drawings sketched inside his "living pictures" (tableaux vivants), the ghosts that inhabit Roberte's body and thereby declassify his fantasies. Only the pictorial work, visible, is thus capable of showing the secrets that haunt Roberte's mind, and the body language, replacing the coded language of the conventional world and bourgeois morality, finally reveals the unfathomable.
Pierre Klossowski then realizes in the act of writing, and drawing above all, his own fantasized will. He caresses with his hand, through his pencil lead, the body that is born of his mind and his own canvas (here a large format sheet). Writing and painting are offered to the "reader-spectator-voyeur" in their complicit and complementary relationship in order to stage a "figurative" enunciation that underlies any literary work that contains in itself the essence of a secret body.