A Moeda Viva

Pierre Klossowski was born in Paris in 1905 into a family of Polish origin. He was the older brother of the celebrated painter Balthus. His father was a painter and art historian. His mother had been a disciple of Pierre Bonnard, one of the most important French painters of the first half of the 20th century. The fact that the family was so connected to the arts was crucial to the formation of the two brothers, who, for example, associated during their adolescence with such influential figures as Rilke and André Gide.
In 1935, after spending some time in the circles of the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society (in whose journal he also published his first text on Sade), Pierre Klossowski came into contact with Georges Bataille, with whom he established a friendship that lasted until the latter's death. It was thanks to Bataille that Klossowski met Breton and Maurice Heine in the "Contre-Attaque" group, and that he later collaborated with the journal "Acéphale" and became close to André Masson.
During the Occupation, he studied scholasticism and theology at the Dominican faculty of Saint-Maximin, and later in Lyon at the Fourvière seminary, and finally in Paris at the Catholic Institute. This did not prevent him, however, from establishing contact with various resistance networks. Even after the liberation of France, he collaborated with the ecumenical magazine "Dieu Vivant".
The year 1947, however, marks a major turning point in his life. It is the year Klossowski marries and publishes a work that would become iconic, "Sade mon prochain". This marks the beginning of an absolutely remarkable literary career, characterized by the publication of the novels "La Vocation suspendue" (1950), "La Révocation de l'Édit de Nantes" (1959), "Roberte, ce soir" (1954), "Le Souffleur" (1960) and "Baphomet" (1965; Critics' Prize 1965). He also published the essays "Le Bain de Diane" (1957), "Un si funeste désir" (1963) and, most notably, an extraordinary exegetical work entitled "Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux" (1969). In the last twenty years of his life, he dedicated himself almost exclusively to painting.
He died in Paris on August 12, 2001, six months after his brother's death. He was 96 years old.