Obituary: Pierre Klossowski

THE NOVELIST, essayist, painter and translator Pierre Klossowski was one of the most original and influential intellectual figures in 20th- century French thought and writing. Brother of the painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski wrote novels, philosophical essays and translations which made a decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onwards.

Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish emigres (Balthus - Balthasar, who died in February - was two and a half years his junior), Klossowski spent his first 10 years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neo-Impressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, his mother, Baladine, also a painter, trained under Bonnard.

While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer- Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to Andre Gide. At 18 he became Gide's secretary and helped him work on the drafts of his 1926 novel Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters).

It was not until 1930, though, that Klossowski began his career proper, translating with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Holderlin, Poemes de la Folie. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator into French from both German and Latin, translating among others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine and Tertullian from the Latin.

He published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue Francaise de la Psychanalyse whilst working for the prominent Parisian analyst Rene Laforgue (who, scandalised by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, dismissed him immediately). Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friends and acquaintances, most importantly Georges Bataille, but also Walter Benjamin, Andre Masson, Jean Wahl and Maurice Heine. During this period he published articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acephale and in the avant-garde experiment of the College de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane).

During the years of the Second World War Klossowski trained in various Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La Vocation suspendue, published in 1950. In the post-war period he married a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbruck for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting.

After the war, too, Klossowski began publishing the influential works for which he will be remembered, literary philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche, but also six important novels written between 1950 and 1965.

Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain (Sade My Neighbour), was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a break from previous accounts which focused either on the biographical detail or the medical and psycho-sexual import of his life and writing. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers including de Beauvoir, Foucault, Blanchot, Barthes and the Tel Quel group, began to take Sade seriously as a thinker of textuality and of the transgressive potential of art and literature.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial anti-Fascist film Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) gives credit to Sade mon prochain, as well as other books inspired or influenced by it. In Britain the recent renewal of interest in Sade's work, marked by the success of Philip Kaufman's film Quills (2000), owes much to questions which were first raised by Klossowski: the relation of art and literature to issues of desire and crime, reason and pathology.

As a translator and interpreter of Friedrich Nietzsche, Klossowski also had an enormous impact on the emergence of philosophies of difference in France in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his readings of the Nietzschean doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, and the emphasis he gave to the motifs of parody and simulacrum, exerted a key influence on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and, arguably, Jacques Derrida.

In a French philosophical scene dominated largely by phenomenology in the 1930s and by Sartrian existentialism in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Klossowski's writings on Nietzsche helped to found a way of thinking which allowed certain, subsequently very famous, philosophers to counter the humanised Heideggerianism of Sartre, and also to challenge dominant structuralist modes of thought. It is from these philosophical displacements and critical re- inscriptions that what, in the English speaking world, became known as post-structuralism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.