The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Klossowski writes beyond our sense of realism, to bring about meditations on life, death, morality and so on, from the depths of gnostic heresy. The mix of breaths reveals the hallucinatory experience wherein hermeneutic literalness exceeds our sense of self. This is the gap inherent within language and the gap inherent within ourselves brought to page.
It’s difficult to write about this book, since it defies any sense of genre. Obviously people would say this is experimental. But it succeeds in convincing us that this view — of the intermix of personal, interpersonal, political, social, and so on — that reality is interconnected with knowledge and morality. How we live and exist among others is not an actual reality the way most of us believe, but an intermix within the gap inherent between us and others, within us and within others. We navigate this interstice often with blind faith. When we start to question the fundamentals of an ideology, or when we expect that within a view the truth will be apparent, that is where we become more lost than ever.
Although this book is a fiction it shows us something of how we are by showing us how we illicitly exist within the gaps of our knowledge by extending everything at once and contradicting itself in the point of the other.
