Recluse

Abstract

AbstractWe find when we look closely at the word Recluse that it harbours an essential ambiguity, what Benjamin might call a dialectics at a standstill. It is a word-image of something at once opening and closing, showing itself and withdrawing, as if this is how we are to understand the disclosing of power in any constellation or diagram. And we are able to recognise as a conceptual personae, as the hinge of that ambiguity, the figure of Pierre Klossowski, who at different times was an associate of Benjamin and of Foucault. We turn to a translation Klossowski undertook of a text by Kierkegaard on Greek and modern tragedy, a translation said to have been influenced by Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. We focus especially on the notion of guilt in Attic and modern tragedy and in doing so look as well at how Foucault reads Greek tragedy as a will-to-know. This concern with guilt prepares us for how to approach Benjamin’s 1921 essay on capitalism and religion, a work whose focus is on guilt and debt. Our own reading of this is especially informed by the German Idealist philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling, and especially his understanding of an ontology of evil, whose ground-in-existence is longing. The chapter concludes with bringing into discussion those Nietzschean concerns we find in Klossowski with Benjamin’s Nietzschean reading of capitalism and religion, along with Deleuze’s Nietzschean unfolding of Foucault’s Panopticism. All the while we find architecture’s withdrawal all the more unsettling, as we discover that every grounding ground or certainty is only ever an effect of an existence that has no other meaning than that it is.