Tampering with the Normativity of Life: Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency and the Politics of the Environmental Grotesque

Abstract This essay aims to conceptualize the politics of the grotesque in the Anthropocene by confronting its distorted nature with the politicised environments of ecological modes of governance. In its environmental guise, the grotesque disrupts the sentimentalized picture of a flourishing and vitalising Nature by exaggerating the polluted and distorted nature of our environments. As Erich Hörl, among others, have argued, the human use of our technologically saturated environments are not limited to the extraction of resources, they are also employed to manage and control the living beings they support. The central question I pose in seeking to conceptualise the politics of the environmental grotesque is the following: By what means and to what ends can we act once it is recognized tthe distorted nature of our environment has us in its grip? I will pursue this question by reading Pierre Klossowski’s influential and provocative book Living Currency (1970) in relation to contemporary theorisations of the role of technology in ecological modes of governance. I argue that Klossowski’s analysis of the secret solidarity between technical and artistic objects can be used to expand the scope of these theorisations and to develop an affirmative critique of the grotesque environments of the Anthropocene.