Living Currency

[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