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Title: The Book Of Pleasures
Author: Raoul Vaneigem
Date: 8 January 1979.
Language: en
Topics: desire, free love, pleasure, situationist
Source: Retrieved on January 10, 2011 from http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/vaneigem/bop/bop.html
Notes: Le Livre des plaisirs (Encre 1979). Translated by John Fullerton as “The Book of Pleasures” (Pending Press. 1983)

Raoul Vaneigem

The Book Of Pleasures

Preface. STARTING FROM SCRATCH

The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our inhuman history

has ever known. It will lift as life dawns. Death stares at our passions

and we mute them; we mesh our desires with what is inimical to life; and

we base the greater part o f existence on the bloody search for profit

and power. We have been doing it for centuries and we have had enough.

We have had enough of revolutions dyed in blood by intellectuals.

Violence too is changing sides.

Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market,

is the everyday production of misery, a totalitarian industry. It too is

in what you call crisis, in fact the death spasm of this whole

civilisation.

The only human thing this society based on commerce has made is the

mould cast in parody of itself, which serves to propagate it world-wide.

The fragmentation that exchange value imposes on life can only tolerate

fragmented people, embryos shrivelling in society’s incubators,

creatures never to be masters of themselves, but slaves. Once cloaked in

divinity, then fleshed in ideology, power is now revealed in its bare

bones: Economics. If this carries all the bets, the game from now on

must go against us.

Is it true that life makes sense because of death? Or that we have

energy in order to work? That sooner or later judgement is passed on

everything either by gods or men or history? That everyone has to pay in

the end? For one reason or another, or even for no reason? Or is it

maybe that existence is precious because nobody exists except behind “I

must work” identities? All in all, do authority and money really

regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the

smell of thyme on a mountainside, since they govem what they cost? If it

is and they do, then the world is upside down, and I want to set it

right.

Daylight has not yet dawned on real life. But behind all you shadowy

figures, it is pushing through, under my very feet. We are all so sick

of the whole shebang that we want to give up dying whilst gesticulating

like the living. In the pit of despair the road stops...or climbs. Am I

the only one to oppose your society-in which desire turns to rape and

the will to live becomes deadly? For me, joy cannot be sold, desire

cannot be priced, and I do things because I feel like it, unconstrained

by the laws of “scratch-my-back”. Even the discouragement and lack of

confidence drummed in since childhood have lost their power to persuade

me otherwise.

And do not kid yourselves that the triumph of commerce can conceal its

appalling effects on humanity. For you cannot resist the historical fact

of life by processing it simply into profit and loss. Collectively, our

will to live will smash the supremacy of senile economics.

Everyone is so bored with the pleasures of survival-pleasures of a world

upside-down — that we have to open up and free life’s pleasures, that

they may spill out everywhere. If we give them free rein we demolish the

current dominant ethic, but it will not be destroyed till we let desire

rip. Revolution no longer lies in refusing to acquiesce and survive but

in taking a delight in oneself that everyone conspires to prohibit,

particularly the militants... Yet the weapon we can all use to fight the

proletarianisation of body and feeling is pleasure unstinted and

unopposed.

Most people have lived in opposition to the flow of life. Yet it is

becoming obvious that this perspective is now being reversed and the

architects of topsy-turvy confounded. It announces the end of the

economic era and introduces universal self-management. You can hear it

in people’s heartbeats, it is at the heart of present historical

conditions: freedom at last to enjoy so many pleasures. It sabotages the

shopkeeper’s mentality which paralyses the muscles and grates the nerves

and stifles desire in the name of work and duty, compulsion, exchange,

guilt, intellectual control and the will to power. By reversing my

perspective, I can distinguish between sound reasoning which ends up

killing me, from my desire to live, reasoned or not. Refusing to survive

is replaced by affirmation: nothing can satisfy my appetite except more

life.

People grow so used to fear, to murder, to contempt and hate that they

become deaf to whatever in them whispers that maybe they are wrong and

their attitude simply reflects what they loathe in their own lives. That

is why they prefer drugs to suppress their despair — the illusion of

instant cure keeps them going. But the canker which devours them

remains.

Freedom has no worse enemy than these cure-all panaceas which claim to

transform society. For these veils of exorcist ritual simply serve to

smuggle the old world back in. Lawyers for the revolution or sniffers of

radical chic, whatever pedigrees these grocers have, they are our

adversaries, armour-clad in neurosis, and will bear the full brunt of

the violence of those who live without restraint.

I know well the wise men who denigrate survival, having in many ways

been one of them. Under the cassock of that high-brow criticism moves

the secular arm of far more pemicious inquisitions. But they merely

project the disgust they feel at themselves towards others.

Since the system spreads by destroying its producers and thus by

destroying itself, the problem is how to avoid becoming an accessory to

trade. Those who whimper in pain, unable to relax enough to enjoy

themselves, give up extricating their desires out of the mercantile

stranglehold, and make money because they cannot make anything else.

Such potential suicides are notable for the way they slag the

Establishment; but however convinced they seem, they remain its lackeys

to be dug back into the social midden. They have grown quite used to

suffering because things don’t change, and have also grown to respect

their neighbours’ wish to leave things as they are. You cannot tell

apart their funeral dirge from the old world’s De Profundis.

“Love and friendship are just illusions,” they whine, snivelling

senilities of the recluse. No doubt that is why we pay them so much

attention, these ossified landowners and disillusioned civil servants.

Decay ennobles.

Toilers for order, toilers for chaos, for inhibition or psychic lib.,

the auto-destructive process of trade programmes the curriculum vitae of

inexistence. Death grabs and you stumble from life, wom out with keeping

the books and balance-sheets of daily misery, or with strutting your

stuff like a ham politician because of the wonderful way you are

managing to die.

Though you loathe power you revere it nonetheless, for from it you have

borrowed that arrogant attitude of rejection which endorses all your

contemptible acts. But life mocks those even with the most wonderful

theories. Only from pleasures is born audacity and laughter, which rings

out at orders and laws and limits; it will fall upon all who still

judge, repress, calculate and govern, with the innocence of a child.

While intellectuals devise ingenious methods of slipping through the

keyhole, those with a world of desires to achieve are breaking down the

door, an act of particularly gross behaviour for those fastidious

mechanics in social engineering who think they see light at the end of

the tunnel. But it is life itself seeking fulfilment. The increasing

abstraction of the commercial process has turned our heads into the last

place left to hide; but even there all that remains is the shadow of

power in a tower of skulls. The scars of age, source of so much

nostalgic reminiscence, are the wounds of self-renunciation, pleasure

mutilated and bled to death by a mania for appearances, a need to

dominate, and the will to power.

Your truths have little but the bitterness which has sown them, their

edge honed on generations who learned to accept things only if

accompanied by kicks, cuffs and mortification. But all arguments cut

both ways and set up their own repression. What is knowledge worth when

it is founded on the tacit postulate that oneself is one’s own worst

enemy?

An influential person quickly discovers that though he controls others

he has no real existence for them. Should he hope to safeguard this

phantom self “for the good of his fellow-men”, he loses and deceives

himself as well as his public. That is why I do not intend to try to

convince you: I do not care to add scorn to whatever contempt you

already have for others. However rapt your attention to the various

messengers of self-destruction, whom I am sure will repay your attention

with interest, I prefer, rather offhandedly, to wait until sooner or

later you grow deaf to everything that does not increase your pleasure.

It is much more the lack of fun which batters us than over-abundance and

indulgence. Let the dead bury the living dead. My well-being does not

dine upon virtue and certainly not upon revolutionary virtue. I feast

upon what is alive and kicking. Dead truths are venomous, as all who

give up their desires discover.

What’s a book worth which does not say more than all the others? What

returns each man to himself is written with the taste of plenty, not

under the scourge of directives. The ‘Book of Pleasures’ is bound to be

tainted with the life of intellectualism, separate thought which rules

over the body and oppresses it. But the lie that we each carry can be

dissolved only by doing exactly what we want to do, without qualm or

hesitation. May your desires wipe out whatever lies remain here, and

efface the grand inquisitor from your brain.

In all beings, in all things, in all creation, I take what pleases and

leave the rest. Keep away, serious critics! This is not for you. Why

should you put up with me if you cannot stand yourselves? I don’t give a

toss what you think of this book; so what you do with it is up to you. I

have nothing to exchange. If you know all this and better, go to it!

Whoever learns to love himself is beyond the plots and spells of shame

and guilt and the fear of loving; and knows too, that despite my errors

I do not veer an inch from my desire to create a society based upon the

individual will to live, by globally subverting the society which has

stood everything on its head.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in

being what I am? To enjoy myself in such a way that never again do I get

bogged down in other people’s misery. If these righteous citizens knew

what dynamite they humped about every step of the way.... Humility’s

tatters and megalomania’s trumpery have between them successfully

persuaded the sober how insignificant they are; look at them, they are

so graceless, and their eyes are dead to what’s left of life beyond

affective blocks and compensatory binges. Who will shatter the rock that

for millenia has sat upon individual autonomy? For so long now learning

to live has meant learning to die.

“When I come to make a wheel,” said the wheelright. “I can’t go at it

slowly, or it will turn out weak and uncertain. Whereas if I go hard at

it, it’ll be firm but grossly proportioned. But if I take it steadily,

at my own speed and so that it feels right, it will turn out just as I

wish. You can’t explain the feel for it in words.” The words here begin

where my lived experience falls silent. If you take these words so they

‘feel right’, I get a chance to mesh with every person’s experience and

go forward with it. Only the individual will to live can make the Book

of Pleasures what it is to me, an urge to have fun that nothing and

no-one outside myself has imposed on me.

I like the Viennese humourist’s quip: “There are a lot of people who’d

love to hit me, and many who’d like to chat with me for an hour. They

are generally the same people.” Cut me or lionise me, it’s a joke either

way! But I can’t shield myself from the feeling that whoever represses

himself, refusing his own desires and turning towards death, adds a

shackle to my emancipation I could well do without .

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it. When you

decide to treat yourself as your only point of reference you will cease

to be trapped by name-dropping — yours or mine — or by deferring to

other people’s opinions, or by the particular way they see things. And

you will cease to link yourself to the people whose everpresent memories

of having taken part in a movement in history still prevent them from

deriving any personal benefit from the experience.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives. We waste so much energy

in living vicariously, it is really hard work, when it would be enough,

if you love yourself, to apply this energy to the achievement and

development of the incomplete being, the child within. I wish to reach

the anonymity of desire and be carried away on the flood.

In endlessly denaturing what still seemed natural, the history of trade

has reached a point where either we perish with it or recreate nature

and humanity completely afresh. Beyond the inversion in which death

battens on life, life leaps up, and swiftly sketches society where

pleasure comes of its own accord.

At any one moment, my ‘me’ is to be found tightly tangled in the

detritus of what oppresses me; heated debate erupts in the attempt to

disentangle the twisted filaments and liberate utterly the sexual

impulse as the breath that gives life perpetually. It ought never to be

stifled. That’s why enjoying yourself also presages the end of work and

holding back, exchange, intellectuality, guilt, and the will to power. I

see no justification — except economic — for suffering, separation,

orders, payments, reproaches or power. My struggle for autonomy is that

of the proletarian against his growing proletarianisation, of the

individual against the omnipresent dictatorship of goods for sale, the

commodity. Life erupting has kicked a breach in your death-oriented

civilisation.

Will you now accuse me of being overly subjective? Probably you will;

but take care, because one day your own subjectivity may tap you on the

shoulder and remind you of the life which you are most lamentably

losing. Over your realism my naivety has one incomparable advantage: it

is brimming over with most amusing monsters, in contrast to what you

call planning and foresight which accustoms you to live with a distrust

for pleasure which reaches back thousands of years.

Individuals are being born again and I am glad, glad as at spring

burgeoning again in the earth. Were I alone in feeling it, the

entertaining folly of having desired to conquer death by liberating all

desires from it would remain.

Chapter 1. INTENSE PLEASURE IMPLIES THE END OF ALL FORMS OF WORK AND

OF ALL RESTRAINT

1. The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases

itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

The factory has invaded the territory of everyday life. For years the

privileged zone of alienation, factory walls simultaneously bounded the

proletariat’s prisons and the bourgeoisie’s liberties. Those who escaped

at nightfall briefly revived in the merrymaking of love and alcohol that

vitality which labour’s daily constraints had failed to break. Ten hours

a day of noise, exhaustion and humiliation were unable entirely to wear

them out. It was society’s sinister curse which forced them to match

their energies to the rhythms and wear and tear of machines. But the

employers’ profit-seeking and foetid nets of exploitation did not poison

their fundamental welling of desire, their sexual exuberance in life

itself and for themselves.

The economic crisis still experienced as specifically economic

encouraged the proletariat to acquire the means to accede to the

pleasures the bourgeoisie had previously reserved for itself. The

constant threat of hunger made them overlook the fact that life bought

with wealth and power was fundamentally life reduced to economics. The

right to pleasure thus appeared as a conquest, although pleasure had

just been taken over as an object of trade.

Illicit pleasures are banned until they become profitable. Capitalism’s

need to expand has transformed the world into one gigantic market in

which every one of life’s myriad manifestations is reduced to just

another sales pitch. In so doing, capitalism grows but digs its own

grave by killing off the producers who make the expansion possible .

We all know in what contempt the aristocracy held the work which

guaranteed its survival. Where feudalism cared only to see theomorphic

shit the bourgeoisie has erected its nutrition centre out of the basic

substance of economics, and the bourgeoisie has forcibly exposed the

true excrement in both religion and economics.

The bourgeoisie redeem work, thanks to which they seize power, but the

right they arrogate to themselves, to rank manual below intellectual

work, profitably repeats the hierarchical ritual. Knowledge establishes

a new temple of power. Pleasures which over-stepped the limits had

previously been expiated with penances, masses and mortification: the

bourgeoisie are the first to propose redemption through work. Sin is

cheerfully desacralised, given a cash value, and identified with a right

to profit.

The crime of idleness is absolved when it acts as a stimulus to consume.

This ancient antidote to work is here seen transformed back into work

what could be more efficient in getting the workers back to the bench

than improving access to the factories of “choose

your-own-consumer-goods”?

Making pleasure democratically accessible coincides — though it is

scarcely coincidence — with the conquest of new markets where simple

enjoyment is called comfort and happiness possession. In so doing,

however, the bourgeoisie crystallise the inexpiable sin: refusal to pay.

So enjoyment outside a transaction is the absolute economic crime.

Our apparent freedom to do whatever we like shows how whatever we choose

serves the economy. Just as bread earned by work tastes acidly of sweat

and wages, marketable pleasures are more tedious than the boredom it

costs to produce them. The survival pleasures swindle is part of the lie

of abstract freedom. The history we lead with every turn of the wheel is

not the history of our desires but rather of a lifeless civilization

which is about to bury us under its dead weight.

For pleasure has only ever existed by default. To begin with it was

shoved into the decent obscurity of night, into the cupboard, into your

dreams, the inner world which is not abroad in the light of day, which

is the measured light of work-time. But production quotas have ended up

subjecting the secret world of desire to the scanners of their

self-seeking science and, since it is impossible to abolish desire,

economic necessity is instructed to obtain maximum profitable usage. The

transformation, by constraint and work, of actions and behaviour which

have long remained outside the immediate orbit of the economy, shows

clearly enough that the mercantile process evolves only by appropriating

life, and uncovering only what it can exploit. Nothing will escape its

voracious appetite if humanity becomes increasingly strange to itself.

We are stricken with survival sickness in a world totally upside down.

Man is the only creature capable of realising his desires by changing

the world. Yet, until now, all he has realized has been the exchange of

his life-force for the production and accumulation of goods. For

thousands of years the system governing history has operated on the

social need to transform our sexual potential into the energy for work.

For as long as there have been kings and priests, in a process as

invariable as the inequalities between classes and as progressive as the

history of trade, power and economy, like a pair of vampires, have

sucked fresh blood to warm their frozen veins.

If we are to believe what we’re told, the pressure of a hostile natural

environment inexorably pushed a fledgling humanity towards exchange,

division of labour, class society and mercantile civilization. What a

pretty kettle of fish! As far as we are concerned that road stops here,

where the killing joke pointing the irony is that amidst all this wealth

that could feed every desire for life passion is utterly absent.

In a world where the only thing forbidden is the autarkic act, all is

permitted except absolute pleasure. Religion viewed all pleasure as sin,

so in the heaven of trade, it was translated into the castrating aspect

of the need to produce. But profits were such that pleasures managed to

emancipate themselves from sin: they redeem themselves by paying up, and

their apparent liberty simply reveals the economy’s growing influence as

it develops its true terrestrial potential. Just like salaried workers,

pleasures cost the life of a proletarian.

There will be no proletarian emancipation unless we strike the shackles

off pleasure.

The economic animal rules by punishing its sexual nature. That is what

legends of gods being castrated are all about: Osiris, Zagreus,

Dionysus, Christus, and Huitzilopotchli embody the economy’s repression

of sexual energy. As an autonomous power apparent everywhere, it

reflects the primacy of work and the division of labour. Doesn’t the old

religious myth tell of divine beings who “die in the flesh and are

reborn in the spirit”? It is a perfect model of the world inverted.

If one is to believe power’s fairy-tales, Jupiter and Jesus experienced

fleshless couplings upon Olympus and Golgotha, and the pure abstraction

of their celestial sexual satisfactions consoles us for having, here

below in the valley, mere tears at pleasure cut short by production

anxiety.

Isn’t it simply that life has been overtaken by alienating work, and

this has smashed up the sexual universe and exploded the unity people

shared when they were simply gatherers, before hunting and agriculture

brought slavery and class society?

It does not matter if in fact there ever were a state of society before

trade civilisation, a vegetal era marked by femininity and mythically

identified with the Golden Age. We will never return. We stand now upon

the threshold of the unliveable, filled with compensatory nostalgia for

a past that never was but inseparable from a history based upon the

degradation of the will to live. This is the turning-point.

If it is true that sexuality isn’t everything, it is, alas, because it

is everywhere set behind glass, frozen, totalitarian, stood on its head.

Are angelic pursuits like politics, numismatics, business and fishing

really doing their best to chase sex away? For it returns on the lam of

the negative, charged with rancour, contempt and hate. Wherefore so much

ferocity in the competitive rivalry of huge companies, of shopkeepers

and their nations, if not because sexuality repressed at the front door

comes through the window at the back, and bearing not life but death?

How else does one explain the bloody emotional plagues which ravage

proletarian struggles for emancipation?

Butchered sexuality turns the rage to destroy what it cannot create

against itself. Those who have lived in the shadow of religions all bear

the black feature of the sexual sun inverted. Since we still see the

celebration of erotic ardour couched in funereal allusions, we have to

believe that the venom of dead gods has never ceased to poison us.

In contrast to sectarian insistence that pleasure is always mingled with

pain, those sinister pleasure-seekers who ritually liken orgasm to a

‘little death’, Reich gladly recognised in genital satisfaction a

well-spring of life and healthy sexuality. However, genitality was taken

to be the whole gamut of sexuality when it was only a part of it. This

is to put all your money on partial sexual emancipation; in the end you

receive the prize you deserve: an even greater alienation.

In a sense, taboos and religious and moral prohibitions have protected

orgasm from the vicissitudes of mercantile recuperation. Once revealed

by that partial liberation the bourgeoisie introduced into society and

into our individual bodies, genitality was to finish up in the hands of

specialists in sexual economics. Cut off from the struggle for autarkic

life, isolated from the reversal of perspective, it fell into the power

of a system of oppression pursuing the piecemeal conquest of sexuality

and thereby mopping up one of the last pockets of resistance.

Packaged as liberation, genitality becomes profitable. As with most

passions, in the greatest and growing sector of life, it joyfully enters

the universal factory: to work. Isn’t this exactly what castration is?

Into the museum with male castration, that nightmare which haunted

patriarchal power with chromographs of tiger hunts with phallus hoist,

the Vendome column, and the last bullet! And let no-one attempt to

replace castration with orgastic stasis, with unhappy fumblings instead

of feminine or masculine or childlike genitality. The economy is

clutching at life so hard it is stifling it, and that is the end of an

evolution. Under such circumstances, people separated from their will to

live are effectively castrated.

2. The world upside-down reaches the point at which it might

possibly right itself when proletarianisation through work and

constraint has no choice but to die — or to put creative pleasure

foremost.

Fundamentally, saleable pleasure panders to sexual impotence. Aware of

its growing debility, life contemplates the history of its exhaustion,

and finds itself immediately faced with a choice: either the

consolations of death, or the world-wide reversal of the world

upside-down. The time when the former sustained the illusion of the

latter is over, and over too is the route to annihilation passing itself

off as public welfare and happiness.

When I reflect how the human race has persevered in its attempts to

exterminate itself through wars, slavery, torture, hate, massacres,

epidemics, money, power, work, whatever has not actually died seems to

me all the more irreducibly elemental. Upon this final burst of life

which can no longer be extinguished or hidden, l want to found a

radically new society.

There is no mystique to life, only to its absence, nor reasons for life,

only reasons for commercial imperialism which encircles it, and which

confirms by its inability to swamp it, the indomitable character of

life. The word ‘life’ loses its ambiguity as the structuring imposed by

trade shows up everywhere through our so-called human relations. Life’s

reality does not accord with these loves you can buy and enjoy retail,

and which go off to the factory as yesterday they went to the brothel,

to sin, to the convent, to the family. Competitive bidding pares them

down to boney profit-earning and production. Life cannot be reduced to

some sort of vaginal, phallic, anal, digestive, cervical or clitoral

spasm. It has no truck with economics whether sexual or gastronomic,

political, social, intellectual, linguistic or revolutionary — it falls

outside production norms. Nor does it replace old taboos with directives

to break them. Life has neither goal nor finality. It escapes the

economy and for fun will destroy it.

By breaking into history, by welling up just where moribund society

meets individuals increasingly much less dependent upon it, life becomes

strange and new. It does not matter that its discovery exposes how

fragile it is to the vagaries of individual consciousness, to

understanding clouded with confusion at its lack of energy and

consequent rebuffs. As emancipation gropes through the dark it comes

upon more marvels between earth and sky than commercial civilization has

ever dreamed of.

Death is what the dominant world thinks about. The more life decays, the

more the market reckons on the scarcity of intense pleasure and

multiplies the number of survival pleasures on offer; which, as they are

sold and bought, turn instantly to constraint and work.

As smug as a curate you decry the bureaucratic and bourgeois class as

the carrion-crows of mercantile conquest, the undertakers’ racket in a

society which tears itself to pieces in the race for profit and power.

But at least credit them with the sincere expression of their withering

away. How excited they become over the price of things, accepting misery

as though money were bound to bring it, and showing just how

contemptible they are with their hatred for all that lives, their

justice, their police forces, their freedom to kill, their civilisation.

But you who claim to be from the other camp, who bet on the breakdown of

commodity distribution, on the end of the State and on the coming of

classless society, who between the cheese and the sweet, start singing

of revenge that sounds already like marching boots, are you any

different from your enemies? Do you reek any less of death?

Do not tell me that you are celebrating the last days of the old world

in advance. To wait patiently, even impatiently, for the final

somersault of this society that gobbles us and drags us down the

whirlpool of its long agony, is the way dead men pass the time. You

promised yourselves the jubilee you are dying of waiting for so long

ago, that all you have left is the desire to die. You spend as much time

prophesying the apocalypse as a civil servant in calculating his future

promotions. Like him, you have managed to find the market in boredom

interesting.

Whether you are contemptuous of the old world or laud its virtues, you

change the words but not the tune: political churches and family

versions and cold buffet tables where everyone sounds identical — heroic

and imbecilic — and where they sing the suicides’ hymn.

The camp of the official revolution is bureaucracy’s court of miracles.

There, theologians mull over the Great Night and with subtle

discrimination carve up the territory of angels and demons, while the

crippled of the next insurrection work out which lines to follow, and

the puritans finally resolve to profit from life, since only pleasures

count for anything. They rub shoulders with the prosecution extolling

the virtues of sin, preaching the duties of refusal, awarding

certificates for radicalism, and denouncing the prevailing misery. To

these judges reply counsel for daily life, and as scorn and contempt

echo hate and derision, there rises from these communal assemblies a

stench every bit as piss-ridden and carbolic as those that rise above

central committees, G.H.Q’s and police barracks. From such assemblies

stride those glorious individuals resigned to misery, and the lost souls

of terrorist dawns. For the cast of the dice on which you risk your life

by doing in some magistrate or other public nuisance is only the

harbinger of the final grand devaluation where death will be as nought.

The most destitute forms of survival draw from the false freedom of

nothingness and the contemplation of it an unlooked-for rise in price.

All deaths are paid for in advance at usurious rates.

No-one will right the world upside down with any part of him which is

itself upside down. We have fought the economy too much as economists

and used this behaviour as an alibi. You don’t fight consciously against

regimentation by unconsciously regimenting yourself.

The development of intellectuality, which is inherent in trade’s

development, makes everyone willing to criticise the old world with a

lucidity they neglect to apply to their own individual destinies. The

irony of the world upside down confirms it so well that revolutionary

theory’s best guard dogs, though never ceasing to bark at the same

pitch, are turning into power’s best guard dogs.

We have lived through the becoming of trade, in a deathly dialectic

which is precisely the history of the economy feeding on humanity, the

history of an empire which grows and perishes to the exact extent that

men produce it and submit to its power, thereby slowly reducing

themselves to pure exchange values. Here we all are gathered together,

at its extreme and final stage of development, to assist at its demise.

We are, however, condemned to die with it, at least if we remain trapped

in the trading reflex, if we allow the possibility which is staring us

in the face to slip away, to set up a life dialectic, an evolution in

which what is human finally escapes the economy completely.

Death draws power’s lines of perspective so clearly that the feeling for

a radically different way of doing things is beginning to catch the

enthusiasm of anyone who has not given up living. The feeling starts

with private individuals, in their irreducible subjectivity, in that

part of life on which encouragement to work and submit to a particular

regime only breaks its teeth.

Out of these stiff and ridiculous pawns on the chequer-board of profit,

which to varying degrees we all are and where we find ourselves, life

emerges in sudden jolts. This is where reversing the world upside down

takes root, where we create the society which is based on intense

individual pleasure and the destruction of all that hinders it. By

destroying mercantilism everything becomes immediately freely available.

These are not the fictions of a creature oppressed. They announce

neither Golden Age nor lost paradise. They are a world in becoming, in

which sooner or later each element forms into its opposite, dies and is

reborn. But this becoming will have nothing in common with trade-based

civilization. Let it be understood once and for all that beings and

things do not change in similar ways in a society which reduces life to

the production of dead things, and in a society whose history emanates

from individuals’ will to live.

3. History about to undergo fundamental change, manifests in the in

individual as a fundamental change in his life.

The end of the proletariat also means an end to the proletarianisation

of the body. Beneath the misery of the labouring classes,

nineteenth-century philosophers divined the incubation of total man and

the age of liberty coinciding with the end of class society. Today only

those modern philosophers who are tied to desks do not yet know that the

proletariat remains an abstraction until founded on the struggle by

every proletarian against the proletarianisation of his own body.

Stripped of its myths, with its spectacle and its misery in flat

contradiction, the economy is simply a disease of the will to live, the

very cancer of life. Its roots push further and further into an

increasingly fragmented body as the economy invents a gastro-intestinal

version of itself, to match a genital, ocular, and cervical version, an

economics of the vital organs, functions and reflexes, which, modelled

upon the dominant world, imposes return norms, profit margins and

savings, expenses, will-to-power, and exchange.

And while this monstrous abstraction takes over gestures, muscles and

bearing, any check on its advance holds the rest in check. There is not

a disease, a satisfaction or a gesture which does not immediately

translate the permanent struggle between the desire to find pleasure in

all things and the fragmentation of the body into productive zones.

Class struggle is indissolubly in the street and in me.

The best obtained by constraint becomes the worst. Despite indignant

protestations to the contrary, most people work to proletarianise

themselves. It is unprecedented how the hunger for freedom is presently

fed so many orders. Joyful libertarians, who damn me as an autonome,

corner themselves by praising idleness while feeling guilty for

contributing nothing to the revolution. Your hatred for trade masks a

deeper loathing, which reaches you when you glimpse yourself in the

mirror of absent life, more and more like that which you attack. What

interests you in this final battle is to have done with yourself.

Rejecting dominant society has become as tedious and constraining as

accepting it because both one and the other obey the same master.

Whether you fancy yourself as high-priest of negativity or hero of

radical purity the old world goes down skid row very well on its own.

Since trade progresses by negating itself, it fattens all the better on

your criticisms of it since they mostly flow from your own economic

reflexes: your need to keep up appearances, the work you do born of your

will to power, your guilt and debts, the occasional blow-out.

No lesson is a good one, because every lesson is an imposition. If l

give orders I join the intellectual workers, if I accept them I join the

manual: I don’t want to be a part of either. Where there is constraint

there is work; and where there is work there is no pleasure. What

prevents me from unreservedly enjoying myself stems from the world

upside-down, even the impulse to reject it.

A pleasure curbed is a pleasure lost. The idea that one must orgasm at

any price is just refurbishing old proscriptions with the same old

consequences: timely support for those for whom revolution is a duty,

radicality a test, life a spectacle.

While the old moles of the critique work at the collapse of the old

world, love-libertarians work to improve the sexual economy. Obligatory

pleasure replaces forbidden pleasure. Enjoyment is faced like some exam,

with pass or failure the key. Eating, drinking, and making love ornament

a good reputation. To win your badge of radicality, just indicate here

the average length of your orgasms!

The sins of debauchery are finished since pleasure started to clock in

at the factory each day. Break all taboos, economic progress demands it!

Obligatory emancipation certainly bolsters up the fundamental

prohibition; it excludes all pleasure which claims to escape constraint,

work and exchange.

Where pleasure does not demolish economics, there’s only halfhearted

economical freedom, in which each liberty taken conceals an impulse

stifled, and each stifling is in the name of liberty.

Aesthetes of the good life and bureaucrats of classless society are off

the same shelf, while those who find misery salutary hob-nob with the

anti-survivalists. The crush of rivalry is thickest around pleasure. Any

return to the past merely attempts to gild what is only there to hold a

price-tag. Sex has hardly emerged from having to produce babies before

it lines up to compete for bigger, better, longer orgasms. But for that

reason do we have to go back to courtly love, flirting without

fulfilment, or the china-doll syndrome? Or any other archaic chastity?

But the inverting of bygone pleasures is not the least of today’s

awkward pastimes. We’ve all seen groups resolutely opposed to Family and

State appeal to clan organisation and revive mystic solidarity, severing

friendships to follow the honourable course of action. Artists in

regression and modernisers of recuperation come from the same piss-pot:

Business.

As for nit-picking distinctions by forensic pathologists, what do I care

for your carefully-labelled glass jars marked heterosexuality,

homosexuality, perversion, sadism, coprolalia, normality and deviance?

Pleasure has no frontier and I expect to be prepared against any

attempts to limit it. When what is desirable and pleasureable turns into

necessity I flee as I would from work. I am not turned on by their

death-wish which only operates in business anyway as far as I can see.

Power’s mangy curs can worry the scabs of mastery and submission,

frustrating and being frustrated, causing suffering and suffering

themselves, and keep it to themselves. I don’t wish to know those who

enjoy being proletarianised.

Work is the opposite of creativity. As human behaviour usually conforms

to commercial mechanisms, history has ceaselessly impoverished the part

officially set aside for creative people. Artists, craftsmen, sorcerers,

poets, composers, visionaries — anyone who arrogates the passion for

creating to themselves — have been wrung through the mangle of

industrialisation and the breakdown of the artisan class by the

marketing of culture and concretisation by trade, and dried out under

the ministration of bureaucrats.

Creativity is steam-rollered by work just like any other manifestation

of life. Seeing how directly it now serves commercial interests shows

that its rivalry was only ever tolerated, if repressed and inverted.

Our feeling for the past had better not hide the misery and wealth of

our present! However moving I find the works of musicians, painters,

engravers and builders, I can see all too clearly the signs of passion

defeated and involuntary renunciation. The vivid flash of their

explosive energy lingers with us; it should never have been fettered by

intellect, survival considerations, money or the will to power. What

delights me is that you can still feel the sexual impetus when you get

close — which is the desire to go further and reverse the inverted world

of creation.

What is genius, familiar spirit and breath of inspiration? Showcases to

which the organisation of labour allows a narrow margin of freedom, a

false liberty parodying the autarkic nature of life itself. Perhaps in

pre-agrarian eras a primitive creativity existed, involving the whole

body, simultaneous and social, channelling natural forces, and of which

magic, alchemy, art and inventive deliriums are just memories.

What is certain is that the need to produce represses creativity,

fragments it, and turns it towards its negation. Creativity is the

aborted child which alchemy attempts mystically to bring to life,

sensual experience condemned to go into exile in the head as

intellectual work escapes from manual work, the unexplained from which

the scientific unconscious derives its windfalls and which the economy

recuperates.

The end of tolerated creativity — the end of all forms of art —

nevertheless identifies the passion for creation with free and intense

pleasure in life. Upon this rock the fundamental prohibition commercial

society has never ceased to build its churches of liberty. The disgust

for forced labour and the allure of creative work allows the

do-it-yourself trade to turn us each into his own employer. Staining

glass, cuisine, distilling liqueurs or arranging flowers, telling

stories and singing, relaxing and dreaming are creative pleasures; the

imperative to produce has no scope for them.

The ideas that to escape survival sickness, one must create, manages to

create a void in what could eradicate it. If it is true that a pervasive

discontent gnaws at us all, even those who reckon themselves happy; if

it is beyond dispute that creativity — by which I mean the construction

of life according to our desires — is absent worldwide, you may now

rejoice: we are each of us about to be given formal notice of our

obligation to produce our own happiness.

By revealing and opening up the SCAM, Leftism cut the ribbon on the

back-roads of work. Originally you could look on the scam as a

self-defence mechanism for pleasure. It taught me to work as little as

possible, to get hold of useful money without wearing myself out, to

dance past orders, to ridicule superiors, to steal from the state. But

the ruinous condition of the job-market swiftly turned it into parallel

work. It has become a means of making money without having to go into

business. Autonomy-as-sauce tarts up reality in which you can each be

your own boss, and exploit yourself directly.

That the law of the scam necessarily rules in prisons, factories,

barracks and Iron Curtain countries gives the analogy by which to

measure our jailhouse universe. The scam’s best ally is the oppression

which justifies it.

Behaviour determined by economic considerations is so wretched that it

considers avoiding work a great pleasure, that is, when it doesn’t push

the joke to the point of losing more energy in the ingenuity of

avoidance than in doing the work itself.

Every chain of events is sinister. Do not ask me to choose between the

chain you have to fasten yourself and the one which turns duty into

normal convention, a promise into a contract, and your fear of others

into dominating them. I do not want to fight the commodity with what it

absorbs of my life but with what life recovers by smashing it. There is

no other way to be creative.

From pleasure’s diminishing returns comes the desire for real-life. When

‘living too hard’ means living intensely, you can question yourself

about how fundamentally inhuman this world upside-down is. Do you have

to wait till this exuberance, paradoxically lived out in a passionately

self-destructive way, attenuates into survival care and moults through

patient labour into an object for exchange?

We used to fling ourselves at pleasure as into a fight with the odds

against us. Now it is pleasures which hurl themselves on us in order to

rip off whatever is still warm and palpitating until, we are bled white

with boredom.

Nothing cures survival sickness. Teeth will not sprout again on stumps.

Survival pleasures are the last stage of this incurable disease called

life turned toward death; the final petty irritations of life capsized.

But the old fatalism of death as king is now shown up as an imposture.

For in the very decay of the abstraction freezing life we see the social

resurgence of the will to live. Economic imperialism which was falsely

identified with our universal destiny is faltering in its attack. We can

destroy it now because everyone can feel the conflict in himself between

his urge for enjoyment, and the false satisfactions of commercialised

pleasure exciting him yet denying him gratification. Such awareness is

perceived directly in the body.

The psychosomatic landscape constantly modifies its profile according to

the collision between life’s desires and their falsification via the

economy. Thwarted pleasures reflect back through all the organs like

echoes of commercial castration. Every illness is an expression of some

disorder in the will-to-live. Heart murmur, toothache, love-sickness.

Analogies of the kind children, dreamers, lovers and madmen adopt

readily give the lie to the doctors’ quackery and deadly ritualised

mumbo-jumbo. It’s a clear pointer to cure for cardiac, genital,

abdominal, urinary, cervical, respiratory, intestinal, even cellular

disorders (the infamous cancer argument). It has never been so obvious

that a cure based on the emancipation of pleasure demands the

annihilation of mercantile civilisation.

Survival sickness devours the bourgeois-bureaucratic class and

proletariat alike. With one difference however. the first lot reason in

terms of remedies, in other words, of organising the disease. They

conceive of no other remedy than death, which they identify with the

death of the entire human species. The second has long let itself be

caught in the trap. It has negated its proletarian condition with the

means sold to it by a dominant class, itself proceeding quite

unconsciously to proletarianise itself.

When emancipation proletarianises, it masks oppression. The moment a

person who is ill accepts the illness he is incurable, the moment his

will to live tolerates it like a parasitic implantation which only

treatment from outside can reabsorb or extirpate. Because the commercial

process the ruling class directs and which directs it in turn has such

fatal consequences, such also are its remedies. The therapeutic it

recognises either cures or kills you. Its final solution to survival

sickness hangs on an apocalyptic upheaval of the commodity system

world-wide.

For the proletarians however, the liquidation of the trading system is

only an effect of freeing pleasure. They can take the direct route to

the end of proletarianisation — and the end of survival — because they

are not the managing directors of their own alienation. They undergo the

hustle of life as an oppression emanating from the ruling class, and

when they feel the conflict between free sensual gratification and

economics, there is nothing to hold them back from jettisoning work,

constraint, intellectualism, guilt, or will to power.

I want to fight for more fun, not for less pain.

4. You reverse the perspective of power by returning to pleasure the

energies stolen by work and constraint.

Whatever represses pleasure will be destroyed by it. Sabotage,

absenteeism, voluntary unemployment, riots, wildcat strikes, stealing

for fun and doing things for the hell of it — the ax is laid to the

commercial tree and I’m delighted.

As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. If you are not

resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your

life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose

and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged.

I am not calling on you to make an effort, but to leave things alone.

Because of the tyranny of commercial relations, pleasure’s ways are

secretive; but it is still from pleasure that the ground is cut away,

where the foundations are sunk and the powerful edifices of State,

profit and hierarchical power are erected and decay, and which is at the

source of so much error, so many pointless battles. In the search for

endless pleasure, the proletariat returns to what it could not take by

assault, as jungle invades a town when the structures of state collapse.

Working a little to get by, keeping the way I rob the State legal,

nervous about touching a girl on the street, or of assaulting the

policeman who calls me over, are some of my constraints, society’s way

of clubbing me over the head and compelling me to do what I don’t want

to. But power doesn’t have me by the short and curlies twenty-four hours

out of twenty-four. Why stretch out all day the economist behaviour it

demands of me for a few hours? Why move me from one factory to another,

set me up in controversy to make money out of me, push my views on the

Opinion Exchange, bind me with ties of affection, force me into your

rhythms, measure my productivity, tell me ‘I must’ and stifle ‘I want’,

make me pay for my pleasures and compensate my inevitable frustration

with the small change of aggression? Why?

Submission to discipline is the strength of the State, and is never so

powerful as when it can take advantage of self-denial. But lucidity is

more intimate. The enemy is a creature of habit. To prolong the pleasure

of writing this book, am I to transform it into drudgery, forced labour,

production batches, time schedules, hourly rates? Or worry what you’ll

think of it, or whether the text does its job and makes sense? I shall

be content to throw light on my desires, reinvent those that are

cockeyed, reach a free state of spirit and cast this summary in

book-form into the shops, where you can steal it, keeping what pleases

and throwing out the rest.

Every time you work you destroy yourself. The little time I find myself

locked up in barracks, as it were, is always enough to make me desert

and create occasions for deserting. I allow myself to be won over by the

release from the agreement to do what is boring me. The taste for

pleasure without reference to anyone else or their opposition

spontaneously renders me perfectly useless to mercantile society, which

makes its uselessness to me all the more obvious.

Pleasure avoids becoming a commodity on condition that it destroys it.

But this it undertakes only if it can escape a while. For it is not the

hungriest who have made hunger strikes, nor those who enjoy themselves

least who revolt for universal self-management.

Any temptation to live is an attempt to do so. Momentarily saved from

the grip of the commodity I understand better how to break it. Only my

pleasures penetrate my shelter, where l am free of constraint, and exist

only for myself, to the delight of whatever attracts me. I do not worry

over the consequences.

When the struggle against misery becomes the struggle for passionate

abundance, you get the reversal of perspective. Doesn’t each of us dream

of making what gives him intense pleasure the ordinary stuff of his

everyday life? As you slide down the slopes of pleasure till you reach

the sweet water in which life is reborn do you not feel the old

obligations to produce, earn a living, educate yourself generate

reputation and promotion, give and take orders? But it is really so easy

to turn your back on work, fear, rewards and punishment, to smash the

mirror of roles and discover on the other side of the only real truth of

life, the overflowing richness of amorous embrace, the exultation in

creating, a chance encounter, the changes in organic rhythms, the taste

of life restored to whatever you are, free from the merchants of

universal blandness. If you reach the heart of yourself you know how to

build the world out of the ruins around you.

It was a mistake to rail against the uselessness of salon

revolutionaries, for no revolution has succeeded whose fate was not

sealed in intellectual cenacles, unfortunately for those who had to

spill their blood.

Over drawing-rooms and pubs, religious sects and family gatherings, bed

at least has the advantage of giving least encouragement to

speechifying, profligacy, recuperation, work to the greater glory of

battle, and the waging of war by dint of proclamation. Rather it

inclines one to idle and dream, caress, make love till you grow deaf to

orders, insensible to fear, hungry for endless voluptuous pleasures. And

what a privilege! Those who rise from bed to arm themselves at least

know why they go to fight.

Instead of preaching revolt and radicality, leave every proletarian time

to recall what life is and to drop what prevents him living it, to

discover, behind the conflicting wills imposed on him, what it is he

really wants. Abandon him to his pleasures and bad trips, his sympathies

and antipathies, to his sparkle and drive and his laziness, excitation

and detumescence. Get off his back and let him lie on it!

When they are caught in the irrepressible rush of sexual excitement

people quickly discover a violence which they can use to satisfy their

pleasures, and equally to smash down what stands in the way of

satisfaction. The revolution will be a gathering of speed as the living

race towards life. Then we will see if such a tide-race leaves the

stucco walls of hierarchy, State and commodity civilisation standing.

It is only a matter of reversing the order of priorities, of opposing

the look of love to the perspective of profit and power, of ceasing to

ride our passions against nature. Reversing perspective is not the

reversal of the world upside-down but is its consciousness and initial

practice. Each one starts with him/herself, creates his/her autonomy and

finds his/herself at the centre of a struggle between the will to live

and the power which transforms it into death-reflex. The class struggle

is suddenly as present in the individual as it has always been in

society. And it raises a query at once personal and collective: What

freedom can a person hope for if his function is to impose work and

constraint?

On the far side of sexuality reduced to the genitals lies global

sexuality. Since market exchange lifted the remaining mysteries from

pleasure in order to rank it in profitability graphs, success and

failure rates, specialisation needs and hierarchic models, the fear of

sin which was so easily alleviated by bleeding yourself with the leech

of devotion, has given way to anxiety about other people, and fear at

not fulfilling the contract, and an obsession with maintaining a balance

among one’s conflicting emotions.

As the last stage in sexual fragmentation and dysfunction, genitality

has promoted orgasm to the rank of universal model of satisfaction and

frustration. And what better reproduction of the mechanisms governing

us: a charge-discharge mechanism reducing erotic tensions to zero in a

subtle coven of erogenous triggers, with feedback, ball bearings,

regulators, lubricants, changes of oil, and all this to culminate in

spending, in loss of self, a consumption of vital flux for which

recuperated work, deposit arrangement and retention schemes offer to

compensate.

Sexuality reduced to orgasm carries impotence as the indelible mark of

economic castration.

If, on the other hand, loving gives a sense of fullness, an exhilaration

like nothing else, it is because the grip of trade is less blatant here

than in the pleasures of eating, drinking, looking and travelling. It is

not in love to reduce itself to genitality and its concomitant forms of

chastity. It has withstood economic encroachment so well that it is one

of those increasingly rare states which are indescribable. The unsayable

reveals the presence of life, which is nothing if it does not become

all.

Every satisfaction is sexual and comes from the world-wide sexual

impulse. But separated from others, it swiftly reproduces separation

from life and yields to the death reflex.

You always want to recreate pleasures in their sexual unity, in

opposition to that reductionism which separates them. If ever you have

tasted the unquenchable thirst for intense pleasure you know that the

life-force is a spring which never runs dry. One pleasure calls to

another, and though one tires of an isolated amusement, a multitude of

desires wakens a host of joyous satisfactions. And this is how one

fulfilment undoes ten frustrations, time condenses instead of trickling

away, and a moment contains eternity.

Life with all the stops out is the only thing I live for. You won’t find

it among your furtive pleasures and chance bits of luck, as evasion or

childishness, before you wake up for the morning shift and a reasonable

dose of submission. The only reality which matters to me is this one,

for it is the only one to create.

If you don’t make your own life you lose it. Social disintegration has

left individuals as the basis for what can be launched against this

process. It leaves it up to them, however, either to fall for business

reductionism or to found a society free from every kind of power,

profit, and exchange, according to their desires.

Where lies voluntarism? In giving way to fun the more fun I want to

have; in that pliant state in which the more I wish to enjoy myself the

less I work; and in pleasure, where the less I work the more I want to

set up the conditions suitable for endless pleasures? Or is it, perhaps,

in the blank wall of the State, the spectacle, in the goods on sale,

which is what revolution’s pimps and theory’s travelling salesmen are

working to distribute?

All pleasure is creative if it avoids exchange. Loving what pleases me,

I have to build a space in life as little exposed as possible to

pollution by business, or I will not find the strength to bring the old

world down, and the fungus among us will rot my dreams. While the State

is in disarray, strike hard at business and its friends.

Doing exactly what you feel like is pleasure’s greatest weapon,

connecting individual acts with collective practice; we all do it.

If disgust with life at the level of getting by made the movement of

1968, laying hold of life will begin the era when universally people

will run their lives themselves.

5. Individual excitement is born in the moment of abolishing work,

and becomes collective as it joins the diversion [détournment] of the

means of production.

The rhythms of business society have overprogrammed the body to dance

fear, contempt, humiliation, and the seeking of revenge: it’s the dance

of the carnivore, the hunter, the copper, the terrorist, the bureaucrat.

Don’t you feel now how it could be to walk like the cats, unpredictable,

partisans of living life to the limits, guerillas for pleasure, poets of

lightning autonomy, in league with an irresistible force?

Business relations can be poisoned; so too can the will to live. So we

will give this dead civilisation its coup de grace now, not through the

force of things but in the excitement and enjoyment which obliterates

them.

Crises multiply, we no longer count the shocks, the old State and

economic edifice reels. You might think a huge burst of laughter would

bring it down.

Creating for fun is spreading throughout what used to be models of

organisation for everyday life — the factories. More and more

unselfconsciously sabotage transforms assembly lines into amusement

arcades, changes a warehouse into a free distribution centre, the boss

and the agitator get greeted with jeers and cat-calls. So who is going

to seize the factories to organise work in another form in them?

Everything work has produced has been stolen from the creativity of

millions of proletarians. So are you astonished to see real creative

workshops emerging from the systematic dismembering of the factories? Do

you doubt that these dry wombs of business could give birth to what we

need to construct our homes and our pleasures, upon the ruins to build

our dreams, adventures, music, our roving upon earth and water, in air

and fire?

I am well aware of the limits beyond which an object loses its charm.

However pleasing, this wine glass bears the mark of profitability cut

into each of its seductive facets. Even stolen, it is tainted with the

infamy of price. Everything about it follows a fundamental corruption,

and one fault ruins the whole. The pleasure of draining it, gazing at

it, holding it in my hand, is smeared with the sticky thumbprint of

business.

From now on l would like all objects however trite to escape power’s

surveillance, for surely at the very least the diversion [détournment]

of methods inherited from capitalism should eliminate at root what in a

fine piece of cut-glass troubles the free flow of my thoughts. It is

impossible to enjoy anything made by work and constraint.

I like to think a front-runner of such a generalised move towards

diversion [détournment] is to be found in ecologist technology. Not that

solar energy, soil regeneration, an end to deep ploughing, or the study

of vegetal sensitivity escapes capitalism’s exactions with its restyling

of stock, its development of the anti-pollution market. But, behind the

cynical wheeling and dealing which snuffles at every trough, a

long-distant desire to recreate nature comes through.

Nature has never really existed. Originally assimilated to divine power,

the rule of nature was the law of the gods, or, in fact, of sorcerers

and priests. When the production economy developed, nature becomes the

object of work, exploitable material. In the end it shares with the

proletariat the doubtful privilege of being recognised as an object but

not as subject.

The laws of profit and the society managing to survive them can consider

nature only in terms of separate existence, not as central to the life

of intense pleasures we demand today. Work-centred civilisation

considers nature hostile. How could it do otherwise? Work has always

treated nature as an enemy, in its usual habit of twisting things

back-to-front to fit its point of view: profit first, and on with the

exploitation until we are all destroyed.

And yet you could say that a certain kind of nature does respond to the

systematic denaturation of the economy. However compliant with the

demands of capital are the great inventions of the wheel, the boat, the

compass, the bed, cooking, dialectics, what you will, since born to and

nursed by profitability, they may stem from one of life’s ironies, the

sexual totality panic button buried in the subconscious. We now know

what part the primordial relationship of woman and child has played in

architecture, navigation, and a whole group of discoveries attributable

to the single need to produce.

In childhood — you have forgotten — you find it funny to wipe your nose

and the rest on the serious scientific attitude, which is another name

for serious profit accounting. The will to live reduces the bogus

miracles of commercial society to their proper proportions — anodyne.

Work and constraint trace the roads to impotence. Out of revulsion,

people start to learn how to free themselves and what they want from the

commodity-matrix, as the only way to create a human context. And so

gradually we are finding out how to get what we want from things and

circumstances, which in fact is the only way we can relate to them. We

will achieve by our own individual creativity what compulsion has never

managed to make us achieve collectively. This is the basis for

assemblies of universal self-management.

Chapter 2. INTENSE PLEASURE MEANS THE END OF EXCHANGE IN ALL ITS

FORMS

1. In civilisation based on trade, all change turns into exchange.

The history of civilised man has been only the history of the goods he

produced, which self-destruct while destroying the producers. Barter is

the starting point. It is set up with the agrarian economy and

terminates in the industrial era. Its acutest crisis occurs at the point

of maximum expansion and internal decay, which so rarefies life that it

is business relations which have a human face. And this human face is

what socialism hopes to give itself!

When individuals have left only the miserable production of their

misery, a way out suggests itself — the demand for self-management. This

time the final swindle will spill the beans on all the others that were

swung before. If each stage of economic development runs with blood

spilled to get reforms which only modify slavery, it signifies quite

clearly that all struggles for freedom obey a law of business expansion.

Social conquests have only ever ratified results obtained in advance.

Their victories have always been those of trade. People thought they

were fighting for justice, equality and liberty, but in fact they were

fighting for economic imperialism, for the painful birth of a new

business practice, the implantation of an agricultural system, the free

circulation of goods, for industrial production, for the obligation to

consume.

The above examples show change opening new doors on a world quite

definitely circumscribed. How can an organisation founded on the

perpetual exchange of the life-force into work-force tolerate a change

of life which is not just a new form of work?

Without individual emancipation, the engine in business’s drive to

self-destruction is class struggle. The bourgeois-bureaucratic class and

the proletariat are two objective abstractions in an identical

alienation lived differently. They reveal the contradictory movement in

the nineteenth century strengthening and enfeebling the commercial

process.

The dominant class is the agent of commercial expansion. The

proletariat, which aims to liquidate the bourgeoisie and dissolve itself

as a class, is the destructive element in trade. But while working for

the expansion of that trade, the dominant class works also at its

decline. It behaves as a class condemned to impoverish the human element

in itself. It has no way out but death, and, as such, it obeys to the

letter the economic system’s path of development.

The proletariat itself need not necessarily end up as the a-human

abstraction the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats turn into. But if it does

renounce its aim to create a society based on the will to live and gives

up attempting to destroy the economy, it will trap itself in the

negative function of trade, as proletariat abstracting itself from

itself. In this way it becomes the agent of business self-destruction,

and works to renew trade and decay life, in pursuit of universal

proletarianisation.

In this sense the proletariat wages a suicidal struggle, and its project

of a classless society is as attractive as a cemetary. The most

vociferous defenders of the proletariat know it.

In the nineteenth century, however much it spat back out on the plate,

the industrial and industrious mentality absorbed the militarism of the

Ancient Regime, rigid with pride and servility. It fed on the diet with

declining appetite as progress in commerce imposed it more heavily on

the will to live — it is significant that each decisive step in the

expansion of commerce was expressed by social melancholy and funereal

taste, in the suicidal ardour of pointless slaughter. It is on the skids

today, treating human beings only as something costing money, as

capital; it differs from feudal or despotic prodigality by doing it

cheaper. It conquered its democratic laurels with that political art

which has now been reduced to capacity to govern; in other words, if you

don’t pay it some attention, it will pay attention to you.

Politics is only ever jacobin, leninist, authoritarian. What else could

it be, seeing that it is only economic understanding of human affairs,

and that the exercise of power has passed from feudal pomp to State

apparatus? It has long sown confusion by treating as identical those who

know they are the proletariat and the politicised proletariat.

Individuals are abstracted from their particular struggles for life and

turned into pawns for the chess-board of imperialist economics. This way

of looking at things — the economist attitude propagated in the name of

lucidity — is why the timid attempts at anarchist self-management in

Spain aborted and why the will to live has never been at the centre of

the seizure of consciousness.

We have only ever exchanged one kind of survival for another. The worst

is taking place today under the politically popular slogan of ‘Changing

life’.

2. The world upside-down can revert when exchange (the motor in the

proletarianisation process) can choose only between putting enjoyment

first, as freedom to do what you will, or death.

Exchange is the shortest route between one trap and another. Long lines

of steel cages with lonely occupants roll down the canyons of our city

jungles. It takes a snarl up and a crash to wrench these creatures from

their hypnotic fixations, and then they only show rage. Like a robot,

the motorist is so enmeshed in the commodity he becomes part of it.

What is human in us is slowly turning to stone. Treat your heart as a

motor, your skin like coach-work, and you can evaluate your movements in

terms of mechanical jigs. Suddenly a man in the crowd stops, smacks

himself on the forehead, and fires at random into the passers-by, trying

to drag as many toward death with him as he can.

Exchange paralyses the living. The sensation of being caught like a rat

in a trap is enough to set one seething with rage, the gnawing pangs of

freedom skewered like a kebab on the prong of impotence. Emotional

plague blinds one to everything except the shade of death.

Moments are rare when you don’t feel the cold hand of business clamped

on your shoulder, and life trickling down the runnels of profit and

power. Every step conceals a pitfall. If you escape the family you

stumble into the couple, if you flee solitude you fall in with the

group. From school we leap to the assembly-line, from barracks to

political organisation, from society to the cemetary. As you grow older

and your roles get more complicated, your sacrifices turn into permanent

renunciations; each step is no easier or cheaper. Commercial relations

are responsible for every discomfort I feel.

Ah, but you say, people change, they grow up, change their ideas,

improve with age, or fail to reach their potential, get quite the wrong

idea about themselves, or maybe surpass themselves. Really they are just

thrashing about. They escape from one trap and fall in another,

struggling and squirming in their private Nessus’ shirt. What they are

looking for is the person refusing to find it; when they curse the

exile’s path they expel themselves again from life.

A society based on trade destroys itself with repressive measures which

evoke explosive revolts. The soldier, the bureaucrat, and anyone with a

little power to wield knows how the body’s musculature seizes up and

blocks the welling of desire. They know well enough that the need to set

an example and maintain a front double-bolts the padlocks on their

diaphragm, that great gate of the will to live and let live of their

libido.

Each time our ear is bent by social constraint — that rationalisation of

agreements that economics imposes on every group — a cop, a soldier, or

a priest wakes up. If one is to judge by people’s ordinary behaviour,

these ancient reflexes are hardly less obvious among those who decry

them the loudest.

When the body, stuffed unctiously into its shell, assumes the

impassivity of the objects around it, the death dance twitches its arms

and legs, and the flow of pleasure breaks up piecemeal, like a rash of

boils, into scorn and hate and the tics of frustration. The moment it

becomes aware of it the proletarianised body recognises a fundamental

repression which spawns all the others and which causes the ebb and flow

of regulatory rage. The history of trade across the ages has reached its

apogee under spot-lights: its very materiality reveals how the economy

can only repress life.

When the psychoanalysts declared the body ineluctably mysterious, the

process of commodity exchange had not yet reached its fullest state of

development. Now we can see that it grows in fits and starts, and

reveals in that perpetual motion of exchange an increasingly absurd

mechanism for turning the world upside down, as if an iron lung or a

force pump were to draw out of the body’s sexual energy the work-energy

to repress it.

Whatever is repressed is inverted and creates its own opposition.

Compelled endlessly to expand and renew itself, the process of producing

goods for sale sheds whatever forms impede its development. In one of

these changes, which might, variously, signal a burst of revolutionary

activity or another fashionable contortion, psychoanalysis is born.

While it does reveal the complexity of the conflict between ‘pleasure

principle’ and social necessity, it masks the simple nature of exchange

and dissimulates the new oppression in the rejection of the old. For

though it denounces the morbid nature of repression it is only to

encourage the sort of release which proves twice as profitable. It

relieves the tension and fits you back in, at a profit.

The number of release mechanisms is equalled only by the number of

frustrations, but, byzantine as they are, the psychoanalytical sciences

agree at least on this elementary truth: they are all paying ventures

both in money and power. Whether they write learned footnotes on the

repressed sadism evident variously in the surgeon, housewife and mother,

policeman and assassin, or whether they recognise sadism as a form of

inverted pleasure, they cannot admit without repudiating themselves that

the fundamental repression is the inversion of life due to the need to

produce profit and prestige.

We are not less barbaric than the Mongol hordes, merely more

bureaucratic, more democratically distributed, nearer to death seen as a

hard-won exit... The racket is worn out. It’s moribund. They wheel out

the old prohibitions, and break them, but increasingly verbal

incontinence is enough: when too many people get worked up over crimes

committed by the State, stories released about assaults on the police

lower the temperature. The push-me/pull-you of conflicting emotions

maintains the body’s effective blocks while wet dreams about the great

break-through keep us below the low-water mark of impotence.

Repetition breeds the emotional plague. The sensation of being paralysed

in turn paralyses; fleeing from the trap reproduces the trap; the race

for change guarantees that nothing will change. Worry, stress, fear,

shame, contempt, aggression, will to power are all born of a repressed

will to live, itself repressive. You get worn out if you feel you have

always got to conform, play your part, do your duty, or accept the way

things are.

These emotional squalls which gust round us like an unhealthy fog were

once grist-to-the-mill for tribunes, orators, and others subscribing to

power. Their grocer-style shamanism drew heavily upon illusory hopes of

a sudden upheaval, the coming of the Kingdom of the Just. But the anger

they aroused in the crowds was not life bubbling up, so much as an

animal tearing at a chain. This form of getting your kicks is the same

as getting the insults you worked full quota for at fantastic reductions

in the bargain basement. Locking up the body in fraudulent

emancipations, mob anger tears down the prisons only to erect new ones.

Tear-jerking politicians with a quiver in their voice now merely make us

laugh, the more so because you can’t hide the misery in society under

the blanket of grandiose nationalist (or internationalist) ideology any

more. Fascism and Stalinism base their appeal for change on the

we-must-tighten-our-belts syndrome, or self-destructive hysteria. As a

result the emotions you can call on to encourage self-repression are

narrow indeed. And hero-worship and leadership cults go bust through a

short-fall in mystery and razzamatazz. When you know for certain that

every moment is like every other moment, that everywhere’s the same,

that all adventures can be repeated indefinitely, that wherever you swim

it is the same waters of profit, under the same sun of goods-for-sale —

you can grok it: boredom is what exchange is all about, its

distinguishing state of consciousness. Emotional plague is a variant of

suicide in which you feel you merely die faster if you struggle and

anyway there’s no change to look forward to.

Death has no more alibis. How can you deepen despair or survive more?...

Dance-time is here, folks, the artistic ballet of fucking it up, and

shaking the old world to the ground.

History showed us over ten years ago the perfect way to topple our

trade-based civilizations in their final self-destructive phase. I’ll

say it again: one trick is enough: free your pleasures, individually and

collectively.

3. History will not turn the corner until each of us has.

I am no-one’s representative and I have no programmes to push. Why

should I get involved in the mayhem of buying and selling? You might

think all those struggles between warring tribes or between one

religious mob and another pretty pointless, and think much the same of

political chicanery, rival factions, and family feuds. Yet you still

spoil for a fight and shout a lot when it comes down to ensuring things

are done the way you like them to be.

Threatened relationships, groups, communities mean nothing to me if they

mean supporting your friends at the expense of your neighbours, and when

an expression of friendship involves signing mutual aggression-defence

pacts, when the pleasures of drinking, lovemaking, talking and having a

meal are paid for according to the dominant code of exchange, when you

never get anything for nothing, when natural sympathies and antipathies

wince each time they fail to concord with some radical theory, and when

value judgements carefully overlook the fact they are based on a world

inverted.

Don’t expect binding agreements, in fact expect nothing. I am no

standard to go by, no way of measuring your conscience, no qualified

judge of success or failure. I don’t figure in your calculations; don’t

count on me, or on being on my side.

I don’t claim to escape all the traps set by exchange. However, if your

laws, and judges, law and order, licensing and financial services, your

rules, your roles and conventions force me from time to time to go

against my wishes, I know how to look and listen, speak, act and be

present without taking anything in or giving anything out.

Watch out that you don’t confuse a refusal to trade with the avoidance

of traps through some ivory tower isolation. The garden I wish to tend

is the one in which grow my life-long pleasures, it cannot be cultivated

till it embraces the whole planet.

As far as the rest goes, it isn’t because I don’t want to get involved

that I keep out of your mud-slinging polemics, competitive reflexes,

crimes, and expensive pleasures. I simply aspire to utter

gratuitousness, utterly useless personal pleasure. From this will to

increase my enjoyment, whatever it consists of and however idle or

passionate, I raise my spontaneous self-defence against being

proletarianised by exchange.

The appropriation of people and things does not disgust me as a

manifestation of injustice or as the basis of class society. Rather

because it sets limits to my desires, imprisoning them, terrorising

them, and transforming them into pieces of property. Those who ‘don’t

want to get involved’, because ‘it’s not my affair’, and ‘none of my

business’, are like the guardians of a tomb. They condemn racism,

jealously, greed, property, hierarchy only as a form of exorcism to

alleviate their inability to stand on their own two feet without

inciting comparison or soliciting approval. If you are awake to pleasure

without limits, what price mother-country and frontiers, masters and

slaves, gain and loss? Sexual exuberance is its own high, carrying

enough impetus in its space and time to break whatever hems it in.

The exhaustion of exchange leads to global change. Survival pleasures

work for the survival of the system which produces them. The misery they

bring expresses the unbearable boredom which generalised exchange,

omnipresent business, and the cancerisation of life by the economy leads

to.

In eras where trade scarcely moved as a result of religious occultation,

the voyage and the adventure chiselled themselves into the art of

constructing a destiny for oneself aided by or in spite of the gods.

Pleasures and trials punctuated life on its way towards its inevitable

conclusion, towards death sought as a challenge or fled from through

trickery. The hard knocks of existence paid the price of the right of

passage leading from this vale of tears to another world, paradisical

and infernal, true mythic fresco of our survival pleasures now

demystified.

Death no long watches at the window of the after-life. Instead it

siphons life away and hardens off our bodies till they reach the

condition of goods for sale.

Why should we bother to get out of bed? The same pleasures rule in every

clime, forbidden and inverted. Nevertheless, the need for movement

persists, though surrounded by a growing pile of punctured illusions. If

you go out on Sundays to admire the forest set behind its concrete

curtains, cross the oceans or among pygmies who subsist on barter and

hospitality, console yourself for the inhumanity of industrialised

tribes, you end up feeling so strongly that you have lived celluloid

life a million times through the same movies that you have nothing left

but a passion to alter everything. Here and now.

Why flee until time or geography or social security cheques run out,

when all around us the will to create a society in which life changes

according to our passions is growing? Desire once mobile will bring

about strange mutations: for though lovers swear undying vows that

cannot be bought and sold there is quite a variety of forms that love

can take, as they are finding out; and individual architecture will be

quick to rise upon the ruins of buildings which were paid for. We know

the pleasure of matching a house to every fantasy, dream, or childhood

memory.

The taste of metamorphosis is born of a disgust with roles. Fashion,

propriety, prices, what is in and what is out of date, the singular and

the banal have always imposed on sartorial art a code of representation

scarcely compatible with the fantastic desire to transform ourselves.

Now that the spectacle has become so impoverished, in addition to the

misery of clothes being uniforms showing position in the hierarchy, as

in the past, roles expressed by dress are now compacted to functions in

some socio-bureaucratic ‘organogram’.

Blue work-denim clothes directors, women writers and labourers alike.

Interchangeability brings home the lesson that everyone has his price,

whether worth it or not, in the market of daily life. So, at the stock

exchange where life is lost, a fall in price has the same value as a

gain. If money makes for happiness or unhappiness, it is only the

happiness or unhappiness of commodities.

Profitability is what makes the Emperor’s nakedness appear like new

clothes. What good are disguises? We keep them to hide some trifling

liberty, some furtive peccadillo, some small job-lot in debauch which

acquires us kudos when we admit to it. All roles are out-worn. Although

they look human, their frequent patching lets the functional bone

structure poke through, as bodily mechanism reproducing the economic

mechanism which has been humanised.

There was a time when a policeman had a chance to recover some remnant

of humanity when he stripped off his uniform. But when that uniform is

the muscular cuirass of the torso, so that the functions of the boss,

slave and star are how the proletarianisation of the body manifests, and

when the exchange of life into social forms operates directly through

osmosis of sensation and the glaciation of those forms into the opposite

of what they set out as, what can we hope from emancipation except a

sudden unleashing of the will to live, or the multiplicity of desires

patiently returned to life?

You accuse children of inconstancy and inconsistency because they are

slow to acquire the metallic skin which serves you as protective

packaging, and which adapts perfectly to the range displayed on the

social shelving systems. And yet, do you not long to smash these rusty

breastplates to pieces? However much they assure you of some sort of

glory, it is at life’s expense. Will you not find in the child you have

been what you would have liked to have been, and what it is really

possible to become once the social form which reduces us to its basic

function of producing has been abolished?

What defines is necessarily odious. So often you have attempted to peg

me down on your pinboards, hoping to seize me by one end, any end, by my

name, registration number, profession, nationality, salary, reputation,

some story of getting me on to your chessboard. But autonomy based on

the freeing of intense pleasure cocks a snook at classifications and the

confusion and indifference which corresponds to them. It shakes itself

and takes a dust bath amid the thousand facets which make up the

irreducible singularity of an individual, his desires and his passions,

from the instant he is resolved to live instead of to fear. Roles have

been the last market-oriented inversion of the metamorphosis to come.

We have planned too frequently on not having enough and not enough on

having plenty. If love is blind, it’s just that it sees nothing through

power’s eyes. Do not expect love to judge or govern for it ignores the

relationship of exchange. Sufficient unto itself. As sexuality’s horn of

plenty, love is the finest expression of the will to live in this world

where castration is rife, and it is the strongest element of our

splendid savagery.

If, nevertheless, lovers who yesterday adored each other suddenly split

from each other in hatred and contempt, it is quite unreasonable to seek

some eternal law of decline, some fatality of tiredness. It actually

comes about through the chain of exchange which ages passion, wears out

the heart’s enthusiasm, weakens impulses, causes love to stoop and

leaves desire dozing on the pillows of habit.

A passing tiredness is enough, a despondency in the will to live, whose

sinusoidal rhythm differs in every person. But even when you rest from

love, in some deep silence, passion still wells in anyone who can keep

his appetite whetted. However, instead of remaining avid for every

feeling until the heart of satiety is reached, we find lovers appealing

to duty, demanding proofs, seeking for a return on their affection.

Norms are installed which must be scrupulously respected, scatterbrained

thoughtlessness is banned, while clumsiness, incongruities and fantasy

become occasions for reproaches and sanctions. If they don’t set about

making the change to rediscover themselves, they’ll have to borrow the

crutches of a society which has generously sawn off their legs. Cold

reason sees off the delirium of abundance and returns to argue the part

of things. This is the invidious time when debts are claimed and must be

paid, when rights mutually agreed to are exacted as duties paying

interest and when an exchange of kisses parallels the exchange of gifts

by those whose prestige is threatened.

In order mutually to appropriate each other and to measure each other’s

affection for the other, people end up persuading themselves that “their

eyes are opened”, that qualities offered are only on loan, that

generosity is badly repaid, and that the attraction was in no way

justified. Love complains of having spent all its funds, while regrets

draw up a bankruptcy statement, passion goes to the bottom, affection

turns to trade and friendship to denunciation. But it is a sensible

arrangement and a private affair, a family affair, a thing between

partners, a frank exchange.

How can you live in a world in which you pay for everything? The few

great pleasures you have left to offer and to be offered you, you try to

exchange, tot up and estimate, weigh for their relative merits.

In their efforts to make the revolution and dispense with the shabby

dealings and dubious habits of the bourgeoisie, some people have dug up

and praised ancient modes of exchange, as though they were not as

repellent as any other. They call for the splendidly gratuitous potlatch

where the giver received his return in terms of power, gratitude and

ascendancy, for the presents he handed out prodigally to all around him!

And then for the brotherhood of blood, mutual aid, or the ideology of

solidarity. Are not gifts always linked to sacrifice, that loan at

interest with which religion has always stifled freely-given gifts?

Only when you get satisfaction from ripping off the State, the boss, or

a shopkeeper do you not get the general veto on free availability given

you in your change. When will we recognise that it is all ours, when can

we agree that the only reason for being protected against the wear and

tear of life’s pleasures is an economic one?

I look for no more amusements to console me in life’s absence. What

deficiency prompts one to do is botched from the start; for it is misery

only which allows itself to be bought and sold.

Put a price on something and you kill it. Something catches your eye?

Why not break whatever forbids you having it free? Can you hear it, all

you greengrocers, the word in the street, warning you: “If you ask him

to pay, he’ll smash the shop”?

To drink, insatiably thirsty, at the “cup of life” is the best guarantee

of its never running dry. Children know it they take everything as if it

were an unlooked-for present. Lively senses make their world live, long

before the economic imperative starts totting the bills run up by life;

before they learn about reciprocity; before they set out to deserve

their presents, demand their due, be rewarded for winning, or punished

for a depreciation, or thank those who remove one by one the charms of

an existence without opposition.

That is how passionate souls live who have rediscovered the child inside

themselves. Lovers give and take everything from each other and hold

nothing back. They give it to the one who offers the most without hoping

for anything in return. This way love grows ever stronger, and finds

fresh pleasure even when languid and exhausted. Measureless, priceless,

peerless is its intensity; and brimming with love those whose infinite

thirst for pleasure can never be satisfied.

If some chance encounter offers me your love and my love to you, do not

belittle the harmony of our desires by terming it exchange. There is no

exchange except in dubious transactions. To love, do I need to be loved?

Have I learned so well to love myself so little? If you are not filled

with your own desires you have nothing to give. The attitude of ‘you

gave me a present so I’ll give you one’ will lead you gently into

boredom, tiredness and death.

I am capable of anything when I am not waiting for anything or obliged

to do anything. Whatever it is you are asking me for you are likely to

find me without. I have more to offer those who are not hoping I will

give them anything.

It is a matter of taking it all, in fact, and giving it all away,

without verifying if portions are equal, or the scale of values similar

without comparisons or weighing the pros and cons, the rights against

the duties, the truths and the lies. Arrange it so that you always have

something to offer instead of always demanding.

As for my apparently unrealisable desires, a thousand reasons would not

make me give them up. I wish to keep every passion in me present and

lively. One day you may very well find the way to accomplish them,

whereas renunciation perishes everything it touches.

To say yes to life is no longer a dream imprisoned in endless sleep

awaiting one millenarian night. The economic priority is ceding to the

primacy of desires for life. Slowly now, then faster, round me, round

every individual in search of autonomy, whirls the collective

life-force’s shuttlecock, weaving the old world’s winding sheet.

And if death should intervene? It is not important, I do not want to

know.

4. Free action by individuals is waiting for the chance to clear the

way for universal free activity.

You do not pay for happiness; you tear it from the society selling it.

In the midst of the sweetest pleasures we are still so conditioned to

expect the handle flying back, the next ratchet where misfortune’s wheel

gets stuck, the next bill to pay, that the adventure already includes

the unhappy ending to all acts of subversion. However, the spirit of

defeat and despair is chewing its own tail today, like every other

vicious circle in trade. The passion for destruction has ceased to be

creative, and is no more than a substitute for it.

The industrial societies have led us into the depths of despair; free

activity, gratuitousness, leads us on out. When cashiers on strike cause

customers to drop their roles and help them take and give away the goods

freely, when workers start distributing the stockpile, when people stop

paying for rent, electricity bills, and transport, when looting ceases

merely to be sudden, sporadic and irrational and plays in the joyful

distribution of abundance, it is clear that proletarianisation demands

to be rooted out and liquidated.

But then the free fall into gratuity is part of working-class tradition.

If I were to draw a geographical and temporal map of the will to live as

it directly concerns how our society and my life are evolving, I would,

alongside the traps set for me, underline the moments of lived intensity

as places sheltered from the radiation of commerce, places where I have

succeeded in annihilating the economic hydra during moments of pleasure.

I would ink in the towns of Prat Llobregat that were burning money one

morning in 1932, the Catalan and Aragonese collectives trying out

universal self-management from 1936 onwards, and the instances of

refusing to pay which fresh innocence is multiplying everywhere. I also

would gouge in bureaucracy’s victories, and areas infested by the ruling

class, spots where police and bankers like to nest, and places flattened

by rapidly increasing proletarianisation. The map would reveal how

giving freely and intense pleasure develop around a person’s needs, and,

in spite of the deadly shadows cast by profit and power, what a unique

effect these two elements have on his life.

Setting fire to commissariats and barracks, prisons, tax-offices, banks,

money and factories brings me less pleasure than the change in

understanding profiled by these acts, namely breaking what prevents us

enjoying everything, and tolerating no check on pleasure. Sudden

outbursts of destructiveness have had their day. they now simply reflect

homage to this death-ridden society by would-be suicides, or alms that

the old dowager of leftist good works gives to the poor of her parish.

Giving as universal practice is central to setting intense pleasure free

and will cause business civilization to perish. Red dawns I find less

significant than the spark of life which sets them blazing.

Chapter 3. INTENSE PLEASURE CAUSES BOTH INTELLECT AND THE STATE TO

CEASE FUNCTIONING.

1. Commerce captures the intellect in its final expansive phase.

The route intellectuality has taken expressed the economy’s priority

concern with organisation. In the 19^(th) and the first half of the

20^(th) centuries commercial imperialism was based on two main

preoccupations: technical development and the conquest of markets. When

State capitalism appeared, an omnipresent economic organisation was

needed.

Commerce invests its power in the administration of resources where it

is likely to produce or spend itself within a closed circle. It has to

grow into the shape demanded by its blueprint of itself, and, as

executioner of its own judgement, organises and administers its own

death as well as the death of the societies which produce it.

Bureaucracy is the concrete form this abstraction takes; it drains

people’s individuality and treats them as the shadows behind consumer

goods. The State maintains itself through its bureaucracy and considers

itself in terms of bureaucracy, which is, in effect, the part of life it

annexes, controls and governs.

Those we see as citizens, cogwheels of State, happily describe

bureaucracy as an absurd excrescence, like a hernia which is curable if

treated the right way, or as an utterly ridiculous means to avoid having

to organise things better. It is, moreover, what the State has achieved

through thought separated from life, nothing else. That is what thought

separated from life is: the product of work which each of us feels

compelled to produce for society at the expense of his own life.

Now that trade has ceased to spread principally through wars and

colonisation it consolidates its conquest of the provinces of life with

the diligence acquired in its exploitative phase. The more its

organisational needs take shape, the more its abstraction becomes

tangible.

While consumable products are progressively humanised we are all free to

think as we like. But simultaneously what is human is being increasingly

consumerised by trade, and that only gives us the freedom to act

according to thought divorced from living. The business of thought is to

promote business. That’s what our freedom’s founded on!

By drawing the strength to work from our own lives, a process which

gradually does more and more damage, we each end up drained of life, our

body lost, no more than an image unreeled on a screen of dead thought in

a fantasy movie where real life forms and features are merely ‘on loan’.

There are still many of us who would fight for the franchise for images.

Intellectualised freedom is just a new mincer in the regimentation

sausage machine. Commodity totalitarianism propagates

parthenogenetically, through the head.

The intellectual party is bureaucracy’s reserve army. Since privilege

was the pretext for not working, the basis for aristocratic authority

was, ultimately, intellectual alone. By comparison, the bourgeoisie see

in their — dearly bought — right to govern, a victory for mind over

matter, intellect over manual labour. It’s managerial function is of

divine origin no longer, but it likes to think of itself as the thinking

part of ‘nature’. As, increasingly, cybernetic power absorbs manual

labour (the way industry absorbed craftsmanship), it becomes clearer

that work considered as a whole takes the form of intellectual work.

The intellectual function is a weapon from the master’s armoury. In

gaining possession of it, the slave is captured by it. It’s liberating

reason in turn enslaves, justifying all the State’s criminal creations:

gods, hierarchy, religion and the state of mind proper to it, and

everything which guarantees servility.

But the insurrectional myths of Prometheus and Lucifer also stem from

the intellect. It seizes opportunities to ridicule the gods, working to

bankrupt the sacred and sap the power of nobles, employers and office

mandarins. All uprisings spring from it; it has answered every call for

liberty. In the order of things, which is the definition of power’s

perspective, intelligence surely merits its reputation for being at once

the greatest and most fallible element.

Nevertheless, it sheds all ambiguity the moment its participation in the

contradictory development of trade is revealed. Equally religious and

anti-religious in agrarian societies, it turns ideological and

counter-ideological when the tangible abstraction of money and power

reaches into all human activities. It has never ceased both to attack

and consolidate the commercial system, whose movement of

self-destruction and reinforcement it embraces.

In short, the bureaucratic and bourgeois class gains as much from

repressing subversive ideas as from tolerating them as long as they

remain separate from people’s will to live. For ‘revolutionary’ thought

serves as an escape vent for the oppressive state which thought-in-power

sustains. Further, in its capacity as intellectual work, it can develop

the most astute and progressive of repressions — the one practised in

the name of emancipation.

If you bet that the spread of intellectuality will accelerate the

seizure of consciousness by the masses, in fact you are proposing that

the proletariat, traditionally condemned to manual labour, better its

situation by turning to intellectual work. So there you are in all

ignorance churning out the prose of automation, cybernetics, spectacle

and self-managed alienation.

The worst form of intellectualism is the one which denies itself, taking

the body’s part against the head, setting the dark and obscurantist

forces of the self against the clarity of reason, preferring manual to

intellectual activity as though they were not two states of the same

work dictatorship. Those who expect proletarian muscle to confirm the

exactness of their rational thought are like those who think two stripes

make a soldier. Their scorn for the intellectual cynically exorcises the

utter disregard in which they hold themselves. In the best Stalinist and

fascist tradition, they are sacrificing to the twin-faced cult of manual

and intellectual work, a horned god slipping through into radical

shrewdness as theory and practice.

The intellectual party keeps growing among the proletariat, and

constitutes the bureaucracy’s reserve army. This way the spiritual

rabble advantageously replaces the riff-raff in clerical raiment. They

too have their orthodoxies and heresies, excommunications and

ecumenicism. Alternately handing out praise and abuse in the worst

student rhetorical manner when set upon nit-picking critiques, these

thinkers with a touch of the proletarian tar-brush put revolutionary

theory out to graze, on the balding common of business. It is a vain

attempt to conceal that the intellectual function is at work in each of

us and that it proletarianises us by shoving the progressive corner or

trade, otherwise in decay, deeper into our heads.

To accept the intellectual function as the sole form of intelligence is

to work at repressing life’s desires, and to repress ourselves. The

illusion born of blows intellect has dealt capitalism has had its day.

It deals us much worse blows by encouraging each of us to abstract

himself and in this way concretely to achieve business’s

self-destructive plans. It turns emancipation into a weak discharge

squeezed out in a pitiable form of repression.

However, if the ruling class’s essential weapon is the intellect, it

reaches the proletariat (the class whose power is not recognised), as a

foreign intrusion: the mind which governs the manual labour by which

proletarians initially define themselves. It is only when the

proletariat tries to get hold of power instead of trying to destroy it

that it sheds its skin and finds the abstract consciousness of class,

the interpretation of which belongs to bureaucrats, the quartermasters

of proletarian revolution.

But even as emancipation turns its back on itself by working its way

through the intellect, the involuntary reaction of a person’s will to

live against his growing proletarianisation puts a radically different

weapon in the hands of each of us, to rid ourselves of all activities

keeping us from intense pleasure.

2. The world upside down reaches its possible turning-point when

proletarianisation through the intellectual reflex leads only to death

or to sensual intelligence.

Intellectuality grows at the expense of the will to live. Because the

division of work is reproduced in the division of the body, separation

between masters and slaves has made our heads into the receptacle of

separate thought. The appearance of an intellectual class and a manual

class has situated the power which controls and represses sexuality in

the rest of the body.

To judge by the cult of severed heads, priests and chiefs from the

outset seem actually to have lived this bodily split. I do not know what

natural death is, but the death we know begins its existence with

economic castration in the cradle of hierarchical power.

It has long been the custom to behead the condemned of the ruling class,

while guilty people from the lower classes — those libidinous deeps

which constitute the ‘working body’ of the State — are publicly yanked

by the neck and jolted about until emptied by reverse orgasm of the

shameful matter which composes them: sperm, urine, excrement.

White-coated torturers-psychiatrists, educators, the men who place the

electrodes — still take part in these grotesque ceremonies. The

increasing abstraction which is directing our lives shows more subtlety

in getting hold of us to empty us of our humanity. With its absurd

‘animal’ outbursts and crises neurotic reason has marked our era as the

humanist gulag and one which has most wrenched our body to pieces.

The cervical system is modelled on the commodity system. It translates

into power mechanisms the abstract organisation which is the economy,

and is the catalyst for the exchange reaction in which life transforms

itself into work. The head is the place where the body becomes a

stranger.

The more the need to control is openly identified with particular work,

the more the head is spokesman for the State, speaking even for those

areas of life it does not control.

Society is reduced to a market in which pleasures become work, and that

work intellectualised, and the muscular shell repressing sexual impulses

keeps the head above the melée, conferring on it the job of maintaining

order. In such a world how can normality avoid being permeated by the

whole range of neuroses?

Between the head which controls, governs, organises, and the rest of the

body which carries out orders and blocks desires welling up, ‘class

struggle’ is pinned threshing in the basically immobile world dominated

by the economy, and rarely escapes. This is equilibrium in terror, where

each part arrogates the right of insurrection and repression for itself.

Sometimes the body does give vent to its feelings, does insist on its

leisure, its liberties, its carnival, a riot. But what good is that,

since it remains likely to grow rigid again, repress its desires, and

filter off the energy to profit work?

The head, too, takes liberties, and knows as much about plunging into

extravagance, getting lost, raving and identifying with the body as any

earnest intellectual populist. What never disappears is separation.

Whether it watches over the apocalyptic beast slumbering inside us or

liberates it in an orgy of blood and debauch, the intellectual function

only reproduces the evolution of the commodity destroying itself as it

destroys life.

Those whom power has sent neurotic will only suffer the neurotics in

power to govern them. The more we spit out the medicines the hard school

and the kind-hearted alike make us swallow, the more the means of

getting us to ingest them are perfected. Yearning for intense pleasure

may become generally acceptable as psychosomatic ideology spreads. It

professes that “the organic and the psychic constitute a unity whose two

factors cannot be dissociated”, but only the better to overlook the

origin of that separation and the means of combatting it.

In the same way the cult of feeling is growing as feeling itself is

gradually reduced to abstraction, to mental image. While life hollows

itself and becomes an empty shell, sensualism flourishes on its tomb to

which little men avid for money come to smell the fruit ripening and the

new-mown hay. The more people confine intense pleasure to their heads,

the more they talk about sex.

Emancipation issuing from the head carries its rottenness with it. I

term an intellectual not the person who uses his head more than his

hands but one who works to repress his desires for life. Intellectuality

is not measured by how much one knows or by one’s erudition, or science

or reasoning ability or intelligence. It does not draw a line between,

on the one hand, thinkers, artists, ideologues, critics, organisers,

bureaucrats and leaders, and workers, labourers, boxers, illiterates,

peasants, butchers, ruffians and servicemen, on the other. It is present

in each of them since it expresses how the economy is anchored in the

individual, in the same way as culture, in the broad sense, imposes it

on society.

The intellectual function is part and parcel with the mechanics of

repression and finding the means to unwind. It bears the unmistakable

mark of the trap, of getting stuck, of emotional plague, of the

transition to stone. It sees intense pleasure only from the reverse

angle of inability in enjoyment, impotence, it considers pleasure’s job

as simply to be attractive and mask the absence of life.

The intellectual is proletarianised by the cerebral inflation of

business, by work producing thought separated from life. He manages to

comprehend people and things by forcing them through hoppers and milling

them; comprehension in the dominant world is part of the commodity which

negates and reinforces itself.

He grasps nothing except through necessity or constraint or outside

reason; because it is true, because he has to, or because the dogma has

descended from the heaven of ideas which he has so much respect for and

which he curses.

To base oneself on the intellective function is necessarily to be out of

step with one’s desires; it represses the will to live so as to benefit

the will to power of which it is the inverted version.

Because it does the heavy work the proletariat is better equipped to

finish with intellectuality than is the ruling class which organises and

imposes it. The proletarians have thus acquired the preferential right

unanimously to reject leaders. But the managerial principle re-emerges

and greases bureaucracy’s wheels when such a rejection does not come

directly from each person’s will to live.

The dominant language is economic deduction applied to the language of

the body. The economy has produced its language by producing the work

without which it could not exist and on which society has gradually

modelled itself. The transformation of life into productive force

necessarily expresses itself according to the abstract forms which drain

us of our humanity. All official communication is based on the inversion

of desires, which perpetuates our alienation at its root.

There is, however, an infra-language which the economy tries to

recuperate, in line with its need to conquer those areas of life it

still does not control. Around the black holes of current language,

power’s pronouncements dance wildly. What they cannot define, grasp and

name, they still try to score off and tolerantly dismiss as

“gratuitous”, absurd or clumsily expressed, as exceptional, legendary,

other-worldly or incongruous.

Old patriarchal power first identified the abyss from which dangerous

sexual impulses rise with woman’s mouth. For a woman intense pleasure is

still a song and a hymn to Pan, which is retained in music and poetry

only as a dim memory.

The sap of sensual language, the language of the body, grows thinner the

longer history continues. Initially woman is the evil box in which power

strives to lock the elusive.

Do not stories, literature, religions characterise her as the one who

talks too much and says nothing? She does not exchange words, she

bandies them wantonly. Gossip and chatterbox, faithlessly repeating

confidences, she symbolises the dark side of humanity, deaf to reason’s

arguments, rejecting economy of language through which the economy is

expressed. Untamed language which ancient rituals excelled at

recuperating and making sacred: out of the mouth of the pythoness seated

upon her tripod, her sex open above the sulphurous fumes rising from a

fissure in the floor, came words and ejaculatory cries which the priests

translated to their clients. In the same way, sorceresses danced naked

under the moon, mouth of the sky, until they fell into orgastic trance

and prophesised. Later, in their infinite condescension, men credited

women with a quality which they flattered themselves they had lost:

intuition, a mysterious ear which picks up the occult vibration of

things, communications which the economic criteria of language evidently

consider under-developed.

Women have long shared with artists, children and madmen the privilege

of shrieking, singing, weeping, throwing their arms about, offering any

old thing in gift, and betraying what is usually kept quiet. Since

industrialisation won them the priceless right to work in a factory,

gain a wage, run a business and command an airborne division — while

artists became civil servants and promoted culture — only children and

the so-called mentally ill are left to give confused expression to the

convolutions of language prised from the grip of trade.

Intellectuality manages to filter language through economics. From the

language of our daily lives through the postures crabbed by emotional

plague, expression and communication have become work, a constrained

form of existence, an abstract version of life. The critical and

negating aspect of the intellectual function has denounced the lie

inherent in the ruling language so thoroughly that this truth is now

imposed on us. But is not truth obtained by intellectuality the

spontaneous confession of business self-destruction?

What is intellectual truth worth when it dissimulates its fundamental

nature as untruth, as work, separation and castration? It is simply the

blood staining the world upside-down with its desire for death.

Speech which ‘kept its own counsel’ through silence and duplicity has

been modernised into speech as confession. The unconscious is revealed,

but only to profit fresh oppression; gestures interpreted and commented

upon form the substance of fresh indictments. Each one is now readable

for ease of sentencing. You must not get people wrong! Speak your whole

mind! And look sharp about it! The age of candour and transparency will

make us wish we still had the old forked tongue, the hypocrisy of

puritan and revolutionary bureaucrat. Then the separation was evident,

whereas now intellectual unity recasts the unity of life as perfect

abstraction. The tyranny of words to correspond to each event is worse

than the tyranny of silence, for life has nothing in common with the

language imposed on it.

Whether it sanctions the dominant world or not, language reduced to

intellectuality is simply work, and rejection of it work also. However

radical it would like itself to be, it does not dissociate from the

business incrustation which is destroying us. At worst, intellectuality

conceals how it functions repressively, at best, it hems in that which

there are no words for; either way, it betrays the intense pleasure

which carries within itself the end of intellectuality.

The language used here does not hide that fundamentally it is

discredited. The criticism it turns on itself does not escape business

processes — and knows it. It also does not intend to destroy itself in

its own movement. Where it necessarily must halt, on the threshold of

life, is where it expects its destruction at the hands of life to come;

it is through everyone’s sensual exuberance, by the personal

actualisation of desires, that it hopes to be annihilated. It is our

only chance to have done with the words and signs which govern both our

bodies and society.

When unity of feeling gets the better of separated thought, nothing more

will be named that will not destroy its name.

Intellectuality speaks the language of castration. Just listen to most

conversations. They are only prompts or leading questions, police

statements, accusations by the prosecution, or the defence lawyer’s

panegyrics. In verbal cat-fights between prestige and interest you can

have the last word but you cannot conceal that you are living your last

life.

The ferocity which springs from suppressing your desires finds vent in

back-biting, polemic, pin-pricks and bludgeonings which exist for no

other reason than the economy’s debilitation of humanity. Language is so

steeped in this fatality that essentially it paralyses any fundamental

questioning of the business system.

The more you allow the language of the will to power to lock up the life

impulse in rigid chest muscles, the more you find yourself overwhelmed

by each rush of negative emotion, and the more you are subject to wear

and tear in the exchange of contempt you experience at every encounter.

When you talk about a film or a friend, an adventure, an enemy, some

minor occurrence, you are simply making appreciative or deprecatory

statements born of what you yourself have renounced. They serve more or

less inefficiently to caulk your leaking ship against frustration with

conceit and gangrenous compensations. What good does it do to berate

politicians for their worm-eaten virtue or journalists for lying through

their teeth or radicals for becoming stars in the spectacle of

revolution? If you go armed with their language against them, you will

in fact rally them, and you will be wed for better or worse in a common

castration of desire.

If I were to speak for others and let them speak for me, I would lose my

life to the extent that I profited the language which makes me other,

and drop the thread of my desires for the knot of their inversion which

cannot be unravelled.

To beguile childhood, educational precepts intone the litany of gloom

and terror. The accounts of death, disease, accident, disaster and

everyday misery set the tone which the cry to revolt and the invitations

to give up trying, as well as guilt and ways to rid oneself of guilt,

simply modulate. The language of the family terrorises the whole of

life. This emotional plague, which warbles so heartrendingly or so

glacially ironic, which haunts our speech and our meals, our quarrels,

ruptures and reconciliations, all this language of the head wherein the

sexual invests in monstrous inversion, has, in spite of the variety of

intonation, gesture and expression, only one meaning: the initial

castration.

Confronted with language which abstracts each person from himself, hangs

him by the head, compares, measures and exchanges him at the whim of

syntax in power, it is about time that everyone pulled the wool from

what lies before and beyond their misery — the will to live — which

speaks no recognised language. We are going to harry the intellectual

function till it has not a leg to stand on, strip it of its

self-critical stance which is its alibi, and bring it to its knees at

the door of what is beyond words, so it can cry out only “Who’s there?”

That cry will encompass its destruction.

If you really want to love yourself in a world which loves you, your

intellectual existence will slowly disappear; you will no longer occupy

a place in the language structure because, in enjoying yourself you will

cease to work. Someone who is jealous, authoritarian and grasping is

quite capable of reasoning with himself and showing himself everything

about his attitude which stinks. For all that, he is not going to

change; on the contrary, he will stick all the harder to what he is, but

this time accompanied by masochistic twinges of bad conscience and

sadistic deceit and lies. Through self-analysis he may discover the

pleasures of life inverted under this mixture of anxiety and pleasurable

delight, and find himself all of a sudden about to reverse his

perspective. At this point self-destruction via the intellectual

function stops, and here too stops the Book of Pleasures. Here it is up

to each of us either to fulfil his prophetic ability and die of it or to

give over to his desires and impulses the energy he habitually uses to

persecute them. It is up to him to allow himself to be destroyed by his

intellectual function, or to dissolve it in utter relaxation in

pleasure.

The final use of intellectuality is to point to what it cannot grasp,

which is the life it tightens round which nonetheless destroys it.

3. History on the point of reversing passes through a reversal in

the individual’s life.

The function of the intellect is to detach intelligence from the desires

of life and turn it against them. Behind all your speeches and

arm-waving life laughs at your efforts. While your voice perorates

punctuated by your muscles for effect, your repressed desires take their

revenge like an audience suddenly aware of being duped by the speaker.

Your face turns red in parody of an erection while your fingers fiddling

with your ring are saying that a brief hug is better than a long

discussion, legs cross and uncross to approve what your fingers suggest,

while the stomach blends ironic gurgling with the will to power’s

slanging matches. In the speaker, listen for the distant echo which

declares against him.

The world of appearances is neurotic theatre. Affectation and

mannerisms, muscular spasms, a jutting lip, the military stare, hard

features and a studied voice, are so many doors slammed on life’s

desires, so many running nooses slipped tight round pleasure, and so

many mad outbursts to come contained in humble bowing and scraping,

flabbiness, listlessness and the frenetic urge to destroy oneself. You

might think one moment of true happiness enough to blow this

insubstantial haze away.

We have pressed so far into despair that there is nothing left in front

of us but the climb back to life. Do you not feel that, increasingly,

pleasure is shaking free from being dictated to by money or the head? It

is ages since sexuality winked at you out of a pun, the fantasies

contained in a look, in resonances or homophonies. Counting-rhymes and

landscapes, indescribable signs and messages are the threaded pearls of

eroticism repressed. There is nothing which does not pair and embrace;

but on the screen of repression you only get to see the licentious

insinuations of the puritan and the unhappy salaciousness of frustrated

love.

Initially, I like to believe, intelligence was a hand and a tool for

desires, to light the haphazard pursuit of their satisfaction. The paths

of sensory shrewdness have been interfered with and effaced by the

commercial routes of work and profit. The instinctive and rudimentary

practice of the first ages has, along with the tool which sprang from

its own creativeness, undergone an accompanying evolution the

transformation of men into masters and slaves to match the economic

recuperation of instruments invented in the play of desires.

So one sees the family mutilate the impressionable intelligence of the

child to set it to work, education and production. Reflect! says the

will to power’s mirror to the child. Be reasonable! teaches economic

reason. Where’s your head? fusses the intellect as it takes control of

the body. Sensual lucidity, which grows out of the awakening of the

first desires, is torn from global sexuality and passes into the service

of universal exchange, where it becomes intellectuality repressing,

directing and inverting the impulses of life.

What you call intelligence, a measurable and testable product judged by

its yield, I can only perceive as passion repressed, brought to heel and

made to produce. The intelligence born of the self-satisfaction of

desire, cares not a hoot for that kind. If it is true that everyone is

as stupid as what he represses — for there is no other sort of stupidity

— then intellectuality is really and truly stupidity committed by a

sensitive, sensual, sensory intelligence.

Putting intense pleasure first prepares for the end of separate thought.

The intellectual function works, while the intelligence of desire

creates. All the lucidity I wish for is born of the quest for pleasure,

in refining the thorn into the rose, in gardening sexual luxuriance into

an order of satisfactions beyond number. I care nothing for books and

learned dissertation, the art and ornament of the spirit. What do

knowledge, curiosity, science, and awareness matter to me if they do not

deepen the intensity of my pleasure, liberate my passions or feed my

will to live?

Each time groups form through thinking in a similar way rather than

because the desires they set about harmonise, business society does not

have to lift a finger to recuperate what these groups think up. However

at ease ideas may be in every head, they never leave power’s orbit. But

they rot what they contact and only intense pleasure can uproot and

destroy them, by going beyond them.

From now on the intellectual function perishes through over-nourishment.

In the extreme abstraction which has laid hold of pleasure, the point of

reversal is reached when the only language I aim to have always with me

is that of intense pleasure, as if I had one of those wines which need

to breathe and develop before being drunk.

Inverting the order of priorities, I wish to place the work of thought

in fee to what it has so long treated as frivolous, as merest nothings.

A dream, a fugitive memory, an impression, momentary luck, a kiss

driving me wild — those are what I wish to grasp with all the

clearheadedness they contain. In this I keep to the heart of my personal

history, and it is there I am aware of setting about what is now

historically possible: the elimination of the State and of its

omnipresent separate thought.

There is an alchemy at which every one feels himself to be mysteriously

adept, and whose imperatives science has veiled. It seeks a light none

can dim to counter deadly radiation by business — irradiation by life!

How can one understand reason in the presence of pleasure? The aerial of

desire picks up only what it wants to. Finding pleasure everywhere

interests me too passionately to halt at words attempting to pin me

down, to define, judge, inflate or whittle me down in accordance with

the variable lights of power in office and their ability to replace

themselves. He who goes his way seeking all the amusements you cannot

price quickly learns to avoid traps, slipping away without difficulty

from “you must” and “you can’t” which otherwise would injure him daily

with a thousand running sores. It is not the voluntarism of rejection

which leads to a game like this but the epidermal sensitivity of “I’d

like”, “I love”, “I like it”, “I do not like”, “I would really like”,

which is the music of the self’s opulence, the very impulse of the will

to live, the whirlpool of desire into which are carried word for word

measurement, judgement, comparison, evaluation, exchange.

The few societies in which trade is rudimentary have kept a livelier

imprint of sensual intelligence. In such places hands heal, looks

hypnotise, a softly spoken word unlocks rivers, a desire overturns laws

held immutable, signs charm animals and plants. Who is talking about

supernatural abilities? It is simply a matter of an approach to nature,

but one which “seduces” rather than, as do industrious spirits, reduces

it to an object of work.

The civilised body agonises, galvanised and sucked into a factory of

muscles and nerves and effort, sport, productive capacity, asepsis,

aesthetics, shame and torture, neurosis, and sado-medical experiment.

Nonetheless its double language is always putting out the contradictory

message of life and death. Anxiety, fear and oppression weigh upon and

contrast the thoractic cage, so that the heart like a bird inside it,

smashes against the bars and shatters, falls, and ceases to quiver. On

the contrary, the way happiness breathes, the way passion surges, our

hearts have the whole body to disport in and can be heard throughout.

The imprisoned heart is heard through a stethoscope and belongs to the

doctor. The passionate heart fills all space with life and rings like an

organ playing to fantastic echoes. The same applies to every organ of

the body.

We know that hands which smooth away pain, which create and caress, play

and excite one to intense pleasure, will soon prevail over those reduced

to manipulating commodities; and also we know that intelligence is going

to cease to identify with the intellectual function. If the brain only

operates at a third of its capacity, is not that precisely because it

works, because it has been cut off from the body and made to join the

head? Allow it to adapt to mounting desire and unite with the sexual

impulse, and we would be unable to refrain from the impression that we

are in the process of creating the superior intelligence of our animal

nature.

4. The end of the State and the end of intellectuality are one and

the same.

Sensual intelligence will bring about the classless society. How can we

get rid of leaders if we do not drop the intellectual function, work’s

permanent representative loose in our heads? Any rejection not based on

our will to live is simply another refusal of life. We treat people and

things the wrong way so habitually they usually reach us only to attack

and kill us. Life is what fills me with passion, not its murderous

abstraction.

A sudden shift of perspective and I see the attraction in some rock, or

in someone’s face, the feeling in the air, in the landscape, in a book

or a sonata, in a basil sauce. Why persistently treat the world in a

disembodied, hostile, uncaring way when the allure of possible pleasures

has the privilege of throwing trade out because it is so defective?

The profitability of people and things, and the false contemplative

freedom which goes with it, is opposed by the life in rock and plant and

people slowly coming together, which power knows nothing of. When it

eventually shakes loose, the economy and its client states will

disappear; instead, a society will arise in which technical riches serve

a wealth of individual desires. This is the collective struggle which

commerce and its cripples refuse to see being drawn up against them.

The new sensibility heralds a radically different world, for sensual

intelligence brings about the definitive end of work with all its

separations. True spontaneity is your desires in search of freedom: it

will dissolve the age-old nightmare of economics and trading

civilisation, with its banks, prisons, barracks, factories and deadly

boredom. Soon we will construct our houses, bring back street life, and

set winding paths though a nature reconciled to man. We will have foetal

areas, adventure zones, houses which are inspired, others that move,

other times where age has no meaning and reality no limits. We will

invent micro-climates to vary according to mood, and forget the era when

scientific bureaucracy was refining its weapons of metereological

destruction and ridiculing us as utopians. For spontaneity is innocence

and can undo the past which is so horribly with us, where everything

which kills is possible and everything which stimulates life is treated

as mad.

Chapter 4. INTENSE PLEASURE MEANS AN END TO GUILT AND TO EVERY KIND

OF REPRESSIVE SOCIETY

1. Life is the unpardonable crime for which trading business exacts

perpetual punishment.

What you restrain you always feel guilty about. How can what you

exchange be perfect? How can a society based on the reification of life

not find the simple fact of being human flawed? Guilt is to the economic

organisation of life what an insoluble debt is to the balance of

payments.

From our ancient belief in divine punishment we have retained the

machinery of suggestibility, and if there has been any progress in

intellectual work through the slow erosion of that mythical beyond,

which business no longer finds useful, there still remains a last prop

from ideological theatre in the projector and screen which priests used

to subjugate crowds. Intellectuality is caught in its own birdlime,

guilt-ridden at being an unrepentant cheat.

Birth is the sin for which only death can atone. At the heart of all

religions, this sin of origin has been gradually stripped bare by

economic imperialism; we can now gaze at its raw flesh: life, which

power has not managed to ingest and dissolve, absolutely free unfettered

pleasure. All the energy that men are forced to account for is totalised

as work energy which has to be paid for until the end of economic time,

when our disappearance from the scene will cancel the transaction and

annul all outstanding debts.

While the self-destructive business process casts itself as progress to

contrast with the barbarism of the past, penal rigours like torture and

death sentences glow like contraband. The democratic law condemning them

in the name of the rights of man is the same law that profits them by

making people pay by installments. The old collective guilt of religious

myth and the grand ideologies is as fragmented as society and leaves

individuals to deal with it privately as though they had something to

feel ashamed about.

This faculty for feeling guilty is the hidden persuader in a world where

you pay for everything, where you even owe money on what maims and kills

you, where they break your legs and sell you crutches. What woeful

repercussions putting up with guilt has; it inhabits us as the

intellectual function, as the duty towards incessant exchange, as the

interiorised depreciation of the economy. Its oft repeated lessons teach

us each day to dig the grave of regrets, with the pleasures that power

and profit repress. To turn your back on guilt, or to destroy it only

partially, to exorcise it, encourages it to return and encrust more

thickly.

Education is founded on fear of pleasure. Nothing is more calculated to

extinguish pleasure than your need to produce, be commercially viable,

serve some purpose. Any constraint whatsoever, however mild, excites the

faint-heart fear of living and free existence. At this point the child’s

apprenticeship begins.

Didn’t lies and dares, bullying and fighting, teach us to sharpen our

wits and focus our brains? Aside from sensual experience where we each

have to learn for ourselves, what pieces of knowledge can you think of

which were not forced into you by threats or summons, blackmailing you

to be virtuous in your own interest, your future, or your standing? How

many poems have you memorised, how many rules absorbed; how many

chronologies and theorems, craftily devised to direct you into obeying

and giving orders, showing respect and scorn? What erudition, what lofty

spirit — paid for at the price of punishment! What was knocked into me

under threat remains hostile to me for ever.

Repressed desire is irradiated with terror, and glazes the most

peaceable life with fright at every stirring of voluptuous feeling, or

passion surging from the stomach as though out of the bowels of the

earth, out of one’s mother, out of the forest. Work treats the desires

it represses into the night and dreams as evil spells. What is loveable

becomes detestable. Life as sin provokes its dreadful outburst

everywhere, delivering imagination over to the monsters of

unacknowledged longing, the venom of phallic serpents poisons the bushes

of these hollow dreams, and from maternal limbo issue ghosts, vampires,

vaginal ghouls and castrating dragons which watch over the hell of sex,

ever since the elite of the world upside down tricked it out in death’s

colours.

Horror, for the economy, is just an ordinary dream. It envelops

sexuality and only reveals it to daylight when shorn of its night time

damnation. In this way the seductiveness of life mingles with the

anguish of feeling it suddenly turn its face towards death. And this is

how envy, jealousy, resentment and vengeance manage so easily to push

out pleasure.

Count apprenticeship to inverted pleasure among the principal services

of the family and school. It guarantees the servility of the illness, of

the director’s office, police station, church, gaol. It is the smell of

agony, the stench of survival.

A society based on the exploitation of life draws its energy from

ever-present fear. That fear has started to be shared out democratically

to make it bureaucratise “spontaneously”, when it will beat in our

hearts like the life pulse itself.

Pain is the product of feeling at fault. The Hebrew myth in which Adam

and Eve were playing the game of the snake and the apple, condemned

humankind to bear children in sorrow and eat bread by the sweat of their

face. The cut-price reality of it now no longer makes anyone laugh;

economic tyranny drags the living from their beds every day and whips

them as they come down the production lines. No holy shroud can hide

from us the wound inflicted on life; everything we touch is spattered

with blood from it.

All suffering stems from this primeval aggression cynically presented as

the result of a fault we committed. Education’s only aim is to make

children remember it, and, since no matter what we do. education marks

us for life, the age-old resignation to death as our fate will soon give

way to a deserving suicide on an easy conscience; and State bureaucracy

will reap an even bigger profit.

But once a radically new society appears, which will ruin the economy

and harmonise our desires, I maintain that the only real kind of

suffering — the pain of self-destruction and the sorrow of having

accepted death — will no longer exist. Instead of inflicting fits of

anxiety on yourself, torturing yourself with visions of being abandoned,

breaking your arm, having stomach-aches and kidney troubles, asthma or

cancer, you need feel only the capricious absence of pleasure,

unexpected sorrow, or the false slips made in exhaustion. These versions

of sod’s law add their own detours to the population better than legions

of helmeted killers. Inside military uniforms there is sometimes a faint

spark of life able to beam out through the robot, but the shiver of fear

is worse than death, it is the ripple of life draining away. Everywhere

power advances, where your prestige saunters, and authority confirms its

presence, you can smell the musty odour of angst-ridden pleasures and

guilty happiness. You recognise the whiff of the guts as they knot and

relax, the specific sweat of hate, and contempt, of examinations and

sinuous progress of desire; only the compulsions of power find malignant

displeasure in confusing them with the joy of suicide, happiness in

chains, or funeral feasts where death settles the bill, in full, for

turning life on its head.

The imbecilic belief which sees suffering and the trials of life as an

eternal defect is only belief in the eternality of business

civilization. Holding that belief is why you continue merely to survive,

economising on yourself just as the system economises on life, and

putting up with a mean shabby existence in which, everyday, more and

more miserably, the roles of honour, dignity, virtue, sacrifice, merit

and their opposites interact and are exchanged. Your inhibiting reflex

has got you so used to weakening your desire that there is no happiness

which does not also nurse the fear of its being upset, nor success

untroubled by thoughts of a backlash, nor joy which does not run after

its sorrow as if the rain paid insurance on fine weather!

Guilt stems from the fundamental lack of respect in exchange: you never

give up enough of yourself. That is why, everywhere and always, you are

guilty. Guilty for not working, or for working, for being rich, being

poor, having fun, not having fun, not bringing fun with you, for being

successful, or failing to be, for living and for dying. Circumstances,

your age, fashion, the why’s and wherefore’s, everything which tears the

will to live from you in order to set you in power’s perspective,

bounces you from one corner to the next, condemning and acquitting you.

The degree to which the libido is repressed in an era is measureable

against the ravages of plague, the advance of cancer, collective suicide

hysteria, which welcomes wars, massacres, crusades, nationalist, fascist

and stalinesque ideology with open arms. The vast cheerless systems of

thought now breaking up is what is preventing people offering themselves

yet again as a holocaust to the power identified with their death wish;

the suicidal urge has narrowed to the personal level at the service of

work and boredom. As the economic garrotte progressively tightens you

get that taste of death in your mouth — what survival pleasures taste

of: forced enjoyment, obligatory partying, and packaged happiness — the

sort of thing they sell from door to door with the catch-phrase “amuse

yourselves to death”.

Guilt haunts private misery like shame does, forever hungering for the

bitter pleasure of destroying itself. Included in every destiny is the

punishment for not being solvent enough, for not exchanging enough, for

not being able to give up desire. Added to the permanent worry about

paying your dues or not being paid for your trouble, death delivers the

pay-off, a frozen orgasm of the body finally reduced to the completely

rotten commodity. Death and guilt stare out of unavoidable exchange as

if its glance would turn life to stone for escaping ownership by the

economy.

What is astonishing if the development of medicine coincided with that

of the bourgeoisie? It relieves and maintains the punitive value of

illness, in the same way that priests maintained and alleviated

collective guilt. It is only the rituals of sacrifice which have

changed.

If torturers share with doctors the well-earned reputation of knowing

most about the human body, it is because in practice, despite apparently

irreconcilable aims, they both condemn the body by scorning the

pleasures that the body enjoys. Their cult glorifies the vital mechanism

as economic machinery. The body fitted for output is the victim-elect of

a god of profit, and what we have been taught is that none can use it

without tears.

Further, while pleasures turned into work succeed in weakening life to

the benefit of thought, doctors look set to disappear along with priests

since they both take part in economic progress and the making actual of

the commodity. We hardly need mediators when everyone cultivates his

roles and neuroses himself, and, in the pursuit of know-how and

self-awareness, learns to conduct himself ‘autonomously’ as his own

body’s doctor, torturer and economist.

The agony begins as the human is progressively reduced to business

processes, and the will to live grows more anaemic. The vultures of

guilt have never stooped so low, and the gloomy symphony — remember the

repressed pederasty of the gregorian mode and the amorous impotence of

romantic music — has never modulated so morbidly upon the wish to have

done with it, once and for all.

And yet there is another song rising which will make us forget the

guilty refrain and its master-singers. Innocence is like life: you only

learn it in the arms of pleasure.

2. The world upside down reaches its point of possible reversal when

the only way out of proletarianisation through guilt is either death or

the preeminence of the new innocence.

One does not struggle against guilt by feeling guilty about it. What is

not based on accomplishing life is based on the actualisation of bad

conscience. Exchange means striking a fair balance between the duty to

judge and the right to be judged. You condemn class justice as though

all justice did not involve class society. Appealing to fairness is only

a demand for better decisions made by intellectual work, and surrender

to the wisdom of a controlling agency.

Your justice is simply guilt balancing guilt, recognising only guilty

and non-guilty, which interchange as times dictate. So what if a

condemnation is swapped for a no grounds, if on balance it weighs more

one side or another, when the sword obeys power’s flail! You must pay —

that is the universal principle regulating exchange. Pay more or pay

less, it matters little to me. I do not want these subtle calculations

of reciprocal torts, in positive and negative, merits and demerits,

which in the end only express what’s human withering as trade withers.

Judges and judged, what is your place in all this? Stealing, making

love, emancipating oneself and having fun, which were prohibited, are

now obligatory. Guilty yesterday for breaking the ban, here you are

today guilty for not breaking it with enough energy and coherence. A

host of populist bureaucrats is overrunning us claiming to reject

exchange value but making us pay in cash or credit for what they love

and hate, for their generosity and niggardliness, and their lucidity and

stupidity.

Radical talk fills a great need to make up for the misery people live.

Behind revolutionary communiqués, investigative hearings, ridiculous

threats and lessons in virtue, lies so much impotence in pleasure, such

a readiness to tax others for impotence and be themselves exonerated.

Concierges’ gossip, things said at unhappy meals, theory outraged and

complaining, and the splutterings of the spectacle’s philosophers, are

all grist to the mill of guilt. It belongs to whoever makes shame more

shameful by attempting to whiten himself against the surrounding murk. A

crowd of state-less prosecutors hang about waiting to make one good case

from the spare parts of those whose guilt is second-hand. The trains,

streets and cafés are packed and teeming with magistrates looking for

the accused and the guilty in search of their judges. For these people

who have been swilling in fecal guilt since childhood, the great art

consists of remaining afloat in it while shoving those floating nearby

under. That is humanity according to business civilisation.

The hangman you need for the job is never far away. A good friend will

sell you if he is short of a few bob. This is what exchange justice

teaches. The man at your elbow shouting for the end of the State will

turn on you tomorrow because you didn’t shout loud enough; the one who

is struggling to survive will some day taunt you for having survived —

you too. It is in the order of things. I can see one, at the back there,

who’s feeling guilty!

What about junking this feeling of fault? Power’s cynical clear

conscience certainly rejects guilt, with the assurance the will to power

gives. This is the arbitrariness of the tyrant, the “right” of the

strongest to break the laws, the judge’s pretension to judge without

himself being judged. It really is the privilege of the pure commodity

to be paid for without paying itself, to be exchange value without being

use value.

Those declared not guilty sicken me as much as those resigned to it. The

sort of truth which is always true only expresses economic reasoning.

The secret of authority, whatever it be, stems from the inflexible

rigour with which it convinces people of their guilt. Guilty if you fail

to understand some text or speech, some witticism or allusion, or miss

that knowing wink. Crap!

I know what I’m talking about. I have sometimes caught myself at this

imbecilic game, I know how much contempt to set as bait. It is not

difficult to knock someone about if he is already in flight from himself

and needs to measure himself against others. If I catch myself again

setting out to trap you at your weak points, your faults and

renunciations, I know I will only capture that idle excitation which

drives you from servile ignorance to insolent savvy, from the disciple’s

humility to the mortuary of initiation, from contempt for yourself to

contempt for others, and devotion to learning into hate for those who

have learned — for you are never so snotty as when you discover others

enjoying what you do not.

Someone who has made use of terror must choose to continue with it.

Otherwise when he sees those he treated with so much disdain not flinch

but turn on him, he will give himself away. How ridiculous both choices

are! What bleak vistas for the will to power’s little man: what he can

stand least in other people is himself. With his muscles gone rigid with

megalomania, he is a clear case of the corpse speaking plainer than the

living body. From that point on, with all the force of unreality, he has

to ensure that he does not bungle his death if he is to strike a pose

for history. He assigns others to the dustbin he thinks of as hell

because he is so frightened of being relegated there himself.

I have often done the same myself! I now know that I became thoroughly

proletarianised myself even though I vehemently rejected and denounced

it in me and in others. But I feel as bored about guilt and making

oneself feel guilty as about everything paid for and exchanged. Praise

and reproof do not touch those who live through themselves, but those

who exist through the esteem and scorn of others. I have absolutely

nothing more to do with accusations and acquittals, or any other trial

whatsoever. I have no interest in people who still want to play the

righteous judge with me. I deny in advance all power and authority you

might want to credit me with, that later you could use to justify your

activities.

Is there no such thing as innocence? That need not stop us for we will

invent it. You will recognize it in the transient ferocity of free

existence.

3. History on the point of reversing goes through the reversal point

of the individual’s history .

The one thing worse than the worst mistake is the reproach attached to

it. The electrodes of commerce have been planted in every head, but is

knowing it enough to disconnect them? I have little confidence in the

restyling which rejection introduces. As I see it, only pleasure — and

no reason to resist it, the will to live in expansion — finishes with

fear’s reflexes.

Time was when I blamed others for the guilt I felt. Then I kept a

back, souciant of every detail so that one day when I got the chance I

could repay myself for what it had cost me. Patiently I stacked my

revenge in frustration’s deep-freeze, in time-honoured style.

Until I understood that no one comes out entire from such a joyless

pursuit and no one comes out of exchange alive. One gains instead the

instincts of a notary, the foibles of a magistrate and the manners of a

cop; one wriggles about in discomfort trying to find it a pleasure.

Exactly how power wanted it.

I am fed up with that way of doing things. I like to stroke a cat

without worrying about being clawed. I have finished with retaliation,

that compensation paid to the will to live, straight economist

behaviour. At so-called human relations based on nasty transgression and

tight-fisted forgiveness, I laugh. The lawyers for the defence can

bugger off too, with their copy-cat repetition that we are all fallible

with a right to our errors. There is quite enough to do to live in the

present without always having at a moment’s notice to correct the past

in it as well.

If I am not greatly concerned to weigh people up, see how they compare

with others and judge them, it is not from fear of myself being weighed

up, compared and judged, which is what the intellect, with its indelible

streak of guilt likes to suggest. I wish simply to abolish a society in

which people are a priori guilty of wanting to live and condemned

through pleasure to sin, and from which only work can ransom them and

kill them.

My inclination to pleasure keeps me from joining the politeness stakes,

and floundering in contempt and what contempt defers to. Living a little

is enough to strike the court o f reciprocal merit and respective torts

out of my daily existence. My pleasure is above justification,

self-criticism and self-reproach, thank you.

The new innocence is the will to live’s self-defence. All the violence

we have ever experienced has come from exchange. Of intellectuality,

default, separation, repression, of compensatory binge. It is always

fear which drives life to wear itself out in ill-tempered oscillation

between aggression and frustration.

What senseless motive forces us to pay for goods produced by us all for

us all, if it is not the fear of being surprised with our hand in the

till and worked over by laws, punishments and prisons? If you are

frightened of a copper you will stoop to anything.

Stolen goods are not actually free but billed on credit to the anxiety-

and relief-from-anxiety account. They bring no more pleasure than

sighing when frustrated, a revenge to soothe you and make the dominant

system a little more bearable. The State gains almost as much from this

sort of fun as from the Olympiads of the present day at which terrorists

with characteristic defiance declare: ‘Pay up if you want to live, and

pay dearly. We are ready for it to cost our lives.’ Marketing and

exchange in this form is what has permitted trade to survive so long,

precisely by changing its skin.

The ultimate absurdity has been reached now that we even feel guilty

about feeling guilty, when we could on principle get rid of the very

idea of error. It appears in the final analysis that the only fear ever

to haunt us has been the fundamental fear of enjoying ourselves. The

economy is so good at condemning happiness to the wheel of inconstant

fortune that to appropriate it or be robbed of it would seem to break

the wheel. At every throw of the dice of exchange, one loses oneself.

What is not based on the emancipation of pleasure on realising all one’s

long and short-term desires reverts to the terror which always clings to

pleasure like its price stamped in indelible ink.

One grows no more used to fear than to death. No life could dwell in

such abjection. That is why I am careful not to inflict on you all the

anxiety which you manage to impose on me. But do not fool yourselves! I

do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of

supersession, the ferocity of a life which renounces nothing; it is not

the violence which leaps at you because it has been put on a leash and

which jerks back on itself, violence which gnaws its tail in rage like a

dog tied to a chain.

If I am now sure that I will not pick up a weapon out of resentment or

revenge, it is with the calm certainty that I will strike harder and

more accurately if pleasure demands it. Fires of desire burn fiercer

than torches of rage or despair.

The violence of gratuitousness does not economise on itself. If someone

strikes me on my left cheek, I will smack him in the teeth sooner than

offer him my right. Is not my enemy whoever constrains me, threatens me

or makes me feel guilty? I want to live what I specifically am, without

norms and without always watching for someone waiting for me at the

corner of the street. If I kill what represses me, it will be

inadvertently, as I stride out happily, without looking back.

There is more proud savagery in the person whom no pleasure can satisfy

than in one who feels frustrated by everything and barks at the fun

others have. The energy needed for supersession is to be found in the

first, whereas the anger of the second perpetuates the impotence of a

world where nothing changes. Instead of contenting ourselves with

compensatory sprees, which is the suicide’s homage to what is killing

him, we will destroy the old world and offer nothing in its place. No

barrier can stand up to the centred violence of irrepressible gratuity.

Instead of taking advantage of laws framed to exploit us, we gradually

substitute a practical innocence in which all legality is null and void.

The time is near when no one will be presumed to know what the laws are

at all.

We are at the far end of despair today because, having worn out

everything that this society is based on, it is now draining us. We know

that we cannot stop feeling guilt if we are told to without in turn

setting it up as something to feel guilty about. In turning the tables

and reversing perspective, the emancipation of pleasure takes itself as

its only reference, refusing to be quantified, judged, compared to

anything else or trapped. As long as it answers its sole need — to

expand — terror slowly evaporates and laughter succeeds fear.

Bureaucrats and policemen will succumb more to a burst of laughter than

to the bursting of bombs.

I no longer believe in the whip-lash effect of the hidden threat in

happiness, the need to pay a deposit of defeat on love and insurrection.

I try to live according to my desires, neither reining them in nor being

ridden by them. If one wants something intensely enough it will always

come to one. So why repress an apparently unrealisable desire, turn

one’s back on it, stifle it with compensations? Giving ends by breaking

exchange. In that lies the new innocence.

If you really embrace your desires wholeheartedly, how can you not

reverse the very polarity of the old world? Repression’s calculations

will get more and more inaccurate with each succeeding day, for the

force of one’s personal desires is a faceless thing, striking where and

when it wants, and rather than trading punches it carries the advantage

of being absolutely unpredictable.

This commercial society which adapts to terrorism and intellectual

revolution of every kind will not, I maintain, withstand the guerillas

of unlimited pleasure, creators of the new innocence, the people who

could not care less if the kind of death awaiting them is one which the

violence of life has not warned them against.

4. The new innocence ensures that individual emancipation passes

into collective emancipation.

The blaze of intense pleasure will utterly consume intellectual

revolutions and their culpability. The variant forms of jacobinism,

leninism and national-socialism have been only translations of the

terrorist methods of commercial self-destruction. Those same methods

have survived the shattering of collective ideologies and the

individualised terrorism which seeks less and less to discover reasons

and justifications for itself since it is becoming obvious that trade

justifies everything.

The paradoxically-named “statesmen”, who are just the State’s inhuman

clockwork, seem destined to fall to murderers armed with their logic.

However sympathetic their assassins might appear by contrast, they are

but the obverse side of the nationalised heads they topple. Power

certainly counts fewer enemies among those who remain impotent by

struggling against it than among those who have decided unreservedly to

enjoy themselves. Whatever colours it wears, terrorism is just a moment

of the withering of the State in the universal withering of humankind.

If the intellectual conduct of a revolution has always been expressed in

military terms, and this according to an art of inducing men to be more

efficient than they would otherwise have been, so individual terrorism

also maintains the barrack-square mentality. Furthermore, it is not

chance if the set-back experienced by urban guerillas coincides with the

weariness that many feel at every day having to put on the

guilt-inducing armour which puts them on a perpetual war-footing against

themselves.

Life enjoys every right, beginning with the right to destroy whatever

threatens it. If you love you do not punish, you blast any society

condoning punishment. Why put up with a world in which the dialectic of

goods for sale demands that pleasure become pain, caresses rape and

liberty constraint? And how, in pain, through rape, or by constraint,

can we put an end to it?

A wind of innocence is abroad; insistently it murmurs to us to stop

working and be idle, to defenestrate a leader as a joke, to distribute

the stock for love of having things free. If it blew any harder it would

freeze the oppressive senility which labels, not the judge, policeman,

serviceman or killer, but the exuberant life of desire as obscene.

There will be no more tribunals nor solitary confinement, people’s

prisons nor revolutionary prosecutors, model radicalism nor examples to

follow once the feeling of impunity becomes collective and expresses the

attraction that millions of people feel deep down for a society without

punishment to fear, bills to honour, pleasures to pay for, and without

power, frustration, submission, or castration.

All by itself, the new innocence will abolish every form of terror and

terrorism.

Chapter 5. UNIVERSAL SELF-MANAGEMENT MEANS THE FREE REBIRTH OF THE

CHILD REPRESSED IN EACH OF US

1. The old world’s death-struggle is rooted in our childhood

desires.

The economy grabs people’s childhood twice; once in their youth, and

later, in what they repress as adults. If the social development of

life-desires gradually slowed down towards the end of the palaeolithic

era, and the expansion of a sexuality creating the historical conditions

which would favour it was halted, I cannot avoid the impression that the

blockage goes on being reproduced in us from the moment each of us is

born. Beyond genetic modification, the primary demands of food and

movement have always, and still do, express the child’s search for

completely satisfying pleasure, a sure if tentative advance towards the

primacy of every satisfaction. That is what the chopper the family

wields comes down upon, and at that point that it mercilessly trims the

child to a size suitable to take it quicker though its training, from

desire withering to the aging we look forward to and call adulthood.

Childhood, like individuality, was discovered by the bourgeoisie by

chance. The crumbling of the social community, inherent in the

capitalist mode of production, has brought men closer to their concrete

reality. At the same time, it faces them with the old abstraction of the

universal man which still governs them. How can generations of people

assimilated en masse to a series of images refracted through the

becoming of trade not end up gaining some sort of lucidity about

alienation and the world upside-down? We have been held to be,

successively, a Creature of the gods’, a Man, a bourgeois or proletarian

Citizen, and an Individual; is there any among us who does not want to

demand his irreducible singularity, to wish to live on the basis of what

he is?

The last phase of history we have all gone through revives in each of us

the struggle of our first years of existence against economic

repression. “Who are you?” those who control the answers demand, as the

pigeon-holers and master-classifiers. One answer deals with the

question; “I am what I wish to live, and I want to live out my desires

in the unity of all that lives.”

The economy’s exploitation of all that is human uncovers the pleasure

under the successive lies that constitute business verity. Ariadne’s

thread of desire always leads to childhood.

The interest shown by the bourgeoisie from the eighteenth century

onwards for the child as an educable object already contains the more

material interest it testifies to as marketable object to be haggled

over. The cynical exploitation of the new-born child simultaneously

throws light on what trade does and what the function of the family is

when it operates through the years of our youth.

It all takes place as though the child which has suddenly been

discovered at the bottom of the adult was exposing the condition of a

civilisation which knows men as prematurely-aged embryos, only to

itself. The absence of real life leads me back to the centre of a

labyrinth, to the life which persists in me once the bitter taste of

work, duty, compensation, fault and the will to power is exhausted. A

child saved from the tumultuous waves of the past comes with me. His

rebirth is the rebirth of my will to live.

2. Growing older is the process by which desire is proletarianised.

The world on its head will only revert when the choice is simply death

or the rebirth of the child in each of us.

In attempting to fulfil its needs, economics gives us back our

childhood. How can one feel settled in a world where birth is a trauma

not a pleasure? The idea that labour is necessarily unhappy and painful

is gradually disappearing. In place of the old saw about women being

punished in the organ where they had sinned, people are beginning to

think that giving birth can correspond to the pleasure of complete

discharge in a climax of sensory outpouring. Why should intense pleasure

be excluded from the child who leaps out if it is really longed for and

fulfills desire?

Because the child is rarely wanted, and therefore he has to swallow his

wants one by one. Because the way in to life is through the door of

profit and power. Because the family conditions children to the

money-making reflex, beginning with the mother who gives them birth.

All commercial civilisations, without exception, church their women

after they have given birth, no doubt because the basically incestuous

relationship of mother and new-born child brings the diabolical Beast of

untrammelled pleasure into the stable of universal exchange value, and

because the iron laws of economics are eager to set a curse on any

growth of pleasure in the pleasure of giving birth, so as to invert it

at root and, as it were, strike its fundament.

Each of our individual histories begins with the mother who brought us

into the world. The woman who remembers the child she was — the child

she ever is the moment she pleasures — is substituted in commercial

civilisation by the mother, a virtual State official whose task is to

integrate a piece of raw flesh into society.

Mother kills both the woman and the child. She kills the woman-child who

lives in her. She is the commercial blanket power pulls over itself and

under which century by century an hypocritical infanticide is played out

and perpetuated. That is how the built-in bias of playing an eminently

social role turns the act of lying-in into work. Once birth is reduced

to production activity, is it so astonishing to see initial intense

pleasure in a moment repressed, changed to grief, and turned into a

curse?

Work and pleasure are at loggerheads from birth. The instant the

ideology of maternity settles on a pregnant woman, the age-old torment

of religion and culture tightens its screw once more. All the old

notions of transgression and temptation, forbidden pleasures and falls

from grace filter in and freeze the stomach, thighs and womb,

contracting, hardening, fitting the intestinal armour and preventing

both erogenous intensity in the woman and the child from springing out.

Everything in the body toils to barricade the road to freedom which the

birth of a child threatens to blaze across the economic universe. But at

the same time, the utter materiality and abstraction of trade reveals

that alongside confinement-production, which identifies birth with a

becoming which is purely economic, woman can assert her enjoyment and

the child-to-be feels it; they celebrate their common mutation as if, in

the birth of the one, there were reborn the being of desires which has

never altogether hatched in the other. Because women, as less servile

attendants on economic gods, escape profit-grubbing work ambitions more

than men, they are seen by commercial society as the symbol of sexual

life unbridled: debauch, infidelity, trickery; Society’s repressiveness

leads to ingenious ways of enshrouding its sexual exuberance in a nimbus

of clammy fog, the charms of that sex depicted in the colours of horrid

caves and fathomless gulfs from which swarm multitudes of reptiles which

the hero and saint has the job of hacking up. The myths and legends of

centuries, necessarily irradiated by economics, show countless malefic

representations of woman: Eve, Lilith, Pandora, Melusine, chthonic

serpent, Medusa, sorceress, tentacle from he11, as many inversions of

life as partial liberations can now let loose and set a value on the

absurdity of the spectacle.

What we make only digs our graves; so mothers consign their own and

their children’s pleasures to the tomb, as unacceptable to the light of

day, that is, as incompatible with economic reasoning and working hours.

Pleasure is driven back into sexual night, into one’s private abysses

where monsters in the shape of ungovernable outbursts dwell, who rend in

three child, man, and woman, which are but three moments of the

individual united in intense pleasure.

When the child appears and upsets the family circle with his nascent

desires, everyone’s concern is how best to dominate him. In times past

priests would have got hold of him and baptised him, thus cleansing him

of impurity. Family education has retained the enema as a means of

purging the child of his bent for gratuitous pleasure, and he is fed at

regular hours so that the economy of time may better penetrate his skin.

Who cares if baby on his back kicking his legs in the air shows how

happy he is; more to the point is that he swiftly learn meaningful

gestures, movements which appropriate things and profit him. And then

that his little cries and babblings are eliminated to profit the

functional language of supply and demand. What! Thirsty? Grizzle away,

whine, wail and scream, nothing will come through kindness lest they

‘spoil’ you by allowing you to believe you can have fun without

exchanging anything for it.

Psychology granted us fun in sexuality such a short time ago (in the

same way that the Church once granted woman a soul, though she had only

to invent one for herself), the child continues to be nothing in

himself. Unspecified he remains, existing only in the family hierarchy,

however made use of or otherwise represented! As a sign of wealth, as

promise of future profitability, or proof of virility, a conduit for

parental quarrels and reconciliations, as the cement and aggregate of

habit, creativity substitute, possession, as domestic animal, as puppet

or as mattress, the child is exchange value all the way.

What is a child? Nobody knows, for no-one has imagined what a being

which has finally become human could develop into in a society based on

emancipation and the actualisation of desire, on the potential every

individual can fulfil.

Birth, in a world which cannot tolerate it, is that change which

contains all the others. Parents, bitter because they cannot give birth

to themselves, exist to thwart him who will. Civilisation waits between

mother’s thighs like the basket under an inefficient guillotine. Zonked

on tranquilisers, the baby is eventually sent down the rolling mills of

clenched muscles to be torn out by forceps, shocked with cold air and

bright lights, and slapped, to encourage him to breathe the air of

liberty. The child joyfully arrives.

I do not hope the element of risk and upheaval, violence or temporary

vexation inherent in radical change will lose its edge or disappear

altogether. But I do flare up when I see the welcome to life choosing in

the same old way to punish mutation, fetter the human process, and

interrupt the chain reaction of newly-formed pleasures. What good are

techniques of gentle childbirth if the social environment is so weighted

with some old man’s hope that the young one will at least inherit his

share of suffering?

In cutting your umbilical cord, they also give themselves the right to

cut off your wings, balls, guts and clitoris. For your own good. In her

slightest gesture the mother manages to apply the norms of castration

foreseen by the economic system. She does not behave like a unique being

but like an instrument of state or tribal power. Thereafter her role

transfers easily to whoever educates the child. It may be the father,

lover or child itself who covers up for his growing loss of humanity,

but he is bound to identify with the images that like so many distorting

mirrors our society burdens him with.

Scarcely has he escaped from the uterus, and despite the fact that birth

promised to free him, here he is repressed in one matrix after another

not one of which offers him a fraction of the advantages of the first.

After the foetal stage he will never know gratuity again.

Tossed from the family into school, factory into State, from a group of

friends into a political party, he embarks on his career among rulers or

ruled and fluctuates up and down in the lift of social, financial,

ideological and moral promotion. He takes the choice of declaring for

one thing against another for liberty, though he is in fact linking the

two and getting further from himself. The changeless world of exchange

teaches him to learn to survive till he dies.

The death-struggle begins early. Right from the first few days when

love, knowledge and the art of changing the world are sold to him at the

cost of complete submission. There is nothing ambiguous about the

blackmail: You want to go and develop on your own? Then give up hope of

all help and protection! Or do you need tenderness and learning? Give up

your desire for independence!

In buying the means to modify circumstance, the child merely becomes

impotent to transform them in the direction of pleasure. What commercial

society cannot tolerate is that his desires should run on from one

satisfaction to the next, inventing a real life unimaginable in our

dreams. The child therefore submits to the inhuman decanting of

life-force into work-energy, to the law of perpetual exchange to the

practical impossibility of nurturing and increasing his desires. Birth

needs to be recreated at the same time as society.

Education introduces intellectual separation into the body. The domestic

state we call the family turns the child into a little angel whose head

is directed towards the sky, the peaks, the élite, towards thought and

power. The rest of the body with its cyclopean anal eye, is limited and

firmly fixed to the earth, the lower regions and repressed world where

everything drags its feet, grovels or hides.

Every time a woman turns into a mother and rebels at herself the better

to resist the embraces of her child and her own incestuous desire, she

teaches her body to grow numb, stifle what it feels and harden into a

shell. Thought being thus invested with power of decision over the body,

imposes itself as a distinct entity, which reproduces the social

separation between manual and intellectual work. In this way the child

is initiated simultaneously into the curse on sex and into economic

reasoning. For him his body becomes what he has to direct, restrain,

dominate and civilise according to the laws of the power which governs

fecality. His head then patiently teaches inauthenticity, to be ashamed

of desire and to fear intense pleasure, which sends the self into exile

and profits appearance.

You manufacture an infant prodigy in your image and model him upon that

part of trade you have fenced off for yourself. How can you not see that

under the intellectual progress he makes lies a lost Atlantis, ruins of

a sensual intelligence repressed in times gone by? Most of the time, the

child’s understanding that you praise is but his servile adaptation to

the free trade in reward and punishment, promotion and downfall, power

and submission. Ah, what fine perception it reveals to be so quick to

exonerate and avenge, apportion guilt, hit people or fend off their

blows, and which is so fine because everyone shares the same form of

expiation, repressing themselves as creatures who desire in order to

relax as creatures who think!

Where trade on its outer fringes weakens in its aim of appropriating

life, it corners and identifies what is countering it: today we know

that the foetus’s movements in the womb are expressing desires they

satisfy. Far from showing blind behaviour they are waking a kind of

indistinct attentiveness, an understanding of what stirs them up in

their relationship with their mother.

As the child is born and plunges into a wave of sound, touching and

lights, does he not bodily set about exploring the unknown land? Form

his senses of feeling, smell, hearing and sight by recoiling and

expanding again to distinguish what is hostile or pleasant in the

atmosphere and moment?

Each time the child avoids cold, boredom, loneliness and brutality, and

looks for the lap where he can find caresses, his intelligence develops,

progressing as an inseparable part of the body. As it grows it joins in

sharpening the senses on the paths of pleasure.

Although economic reasoning allows him little acumen, the child knows

enough to do what he needs to satisfy his desires. Have adults never

dreamed of perfecting this knowledge? Quite the opposite, they have

turned it on its head by separating it from their sexual instinct and

transforming it into thought foreign to desire, which leaves pleasure

foreign to life.

Intellectual hypertrophy is actually the head rotting because of

commercial evolution. The contrary is true of clear thinking which is

born in the slipstream of the will to live and refined as one pleasure

succeeds another, but dies of abstraction when it inverts in letting off

steam, in being constrained, remaining separate or feeling guilty. The

repressed childhood in each of us demands to be understood afresh if we

are to supersede and actualise it.

As surely as economic power produces intellectuality by depriving

desires of their means of feeling and by turning feeling against desire,

universal self-management will push intellectuality to the end of its

self-destructive course, beyond its old man’s aches and pains and its

puerile booze-ups, until it dissolves and a total sexuality emerges.

You pay for the mistake of being born by turning your back on life. The

child is the most stunted of innocents. The title of an old novel could

serve for his personal story: the child of sin. Theology was not

mistaken when it described birth as a neurotic hell in which the human

animal is born between piss and shit; the god of the intellect becomes

purer the more he disgusts people with the body.

But no one denies, though he sometimes pretends otherwise, the

satisfaction it gives him to piss and shit every day. But this is how,

for the woman in labour, the shame of expelling the child like one

empties oneself of urine and excrement, gives rise to repulsion which

manages to turn the possible agreeableness of birth into a nightmare. If

you are ashamed of yourself then the lack of constraint in pleasure

becomes a liberty to be paid for with a greater sense of shame; this

lesson is knocked into the child in the first hour.

How could the child — responsible for the pains of childbirth, a

cumbersome pregnancy, his mother’s repressed incestuous pleasure, his

parents’ guilty conscience, and for stirring up the couple’s dirty water

— not be educated into guilt by guilt? The hygiene of economic reasoning

demands that he be punished if he cries, dribbles or dirties himself. He

has only to leave his mother’s side and fall over for her to sing out

“look what happens when you go off on your own”, while the family bawls

variations on the theme “it’s your own fault!”

The child learns to hate others and hate himself when his mother teaches

him to forget how to love. Everywhere and always, the taboo on incest

between mother and child forbids the intense pleasure of the foetal

stage being prolonged, free with each other in their feelings after

birth. The source of all affection lies in the initial incestuous

relationship, and repressing it makes it the source of cruelty,

suffocation, appropriation and want.

The more functioning as mother repressed woman as lover, the more the

child becomes the sole object of her resentment. She clutches him to her

breast like some ancient grudge. Should he arouse desire in her by

nibbling her breasts she looks in excuse for an economic prop, poses as

the wet-nurse, separates eating and drinking into two distinct actions

and blithely snaps a single unity of pleasure to accord with the law of

work.

Suppose the child gets excited when his mother is washing him so that

they both feel the first shiverings of pleasure. Her hand will instantly

disown this loving temptation and complete its hygienic labour with

mechanical dryness. None the less, the pleasure does not appear in the

practical gesture. It persists in its opposite form, changed in

direction and charged with anxiety, culpability, aggression. The desire

to caress is turned into a desire to scratch, maul and murder.

When economic reason gets hold of the body, it strips it for work,

untangling what belongs to the feeding and educational machine from what

merits suppression as being in no way remunerative. Caught in the

traumatising see-saw of loving demonstrativeness and hate-inspired

stiffness, the child continues to suffer sweet caresses while

neurotically reprimanded and repressed. His awakening to total sexuality

occurs amid what splits, fragments and inverts it.

Every time a rebuke follows a gentle look and loving signifies

punishment, the child learns that the head is where the body takes

refuge. He learns to situate it at the same height as an obsequious

greeting and the scorn which compensates it. His mastery of himself is

merely his servile submission to every alienation. That is why each of

us, man or woman, is determined sooner or later to act as mother of real

or imaginary children, mother of nastiness by way of compensation,

mother of atonement, and of regiments and political parties, who

reproduces — most of the time as the ridiculous counterfeit of Father —

exactly the same wretched and sentimental, tribal, national, political,

erotic, ideological or revolutionary family. Putting an end to the

maternal function is simply a visible form of the end of work,

constraint, intellectuality and the propensity for guilt.

3. History on the point of being reversed passes through the point

where it reverses in the individual’s history.

Autoanalysis is to psychoanalysis what actualisation by individuals is

to their integration into business. The only childhood I care about is

the one I lived through and which goes on living in me. For nowadays

growing older has taken on the precise sense of progressive integration

into the old world, while returning to childhood signifies the rejection

of increasing proletarianisation. Isn’t where the repression exercised

over the child joins the exploitation of the proletarian the point where

personal and collective history meet?

The confusion long maintained between the ideology of childhood and the

millenarian beliefs of right and left, will be wiped out anyway in the

impudent mortuary of the economy. The naked materiality of business

effectively opens everyone’s eyes, its crude mechanism operates openly,

and each of its movements liberates a part of humanity which it

anticipates recuperating at the following stage, in the contradictory

and permanent progress towards its self-destruction.

If a revolutionary in the nineteenth century needed thirty years to

understand that his projects for liberty held worse things than the

previous repression, three now suffice our contemporary, the man without

quality, so much does every day excessively demonstrate how everything

missing from the total emancipation of our desires works to renew

business.

The return of the child appears in the wake of two moribund ideologies,

feminism and psychoanalysis, two partial demands which were born in the

shadow of proletarian emancipation and whose simple presence denounces

how equally piecemeal both the anarchist movement and the workers’

councils are.

At the occult centre of what the feminists require is the setting free

of woman as lover. This stifles right-away both the matriarchal project

and the amazons launched at the competitive conquest of economic power

cornered by males. Sharing with the producers a contempt for the child’s

low level of productivity, feminists retain their glorious future of

hoping for equality through work, of extending their domestic authority

as ‘mothers’ (with or without a child) to their entire social activity,

of being one day completely the boss, the navvy, the cop, militant or

soldier. A fine objective!

The workers’ movement, feminism and psychoanalysis are characterised by

the same intellectual defect. All three are initially responses to a

desire for authenticity, firmly for life against its falsified forms,

and each separates and inverts into a new oppression, which is the old

one they have updated. Thus psychoanalysis sets off to look for the

child repressed in the adult, but by mistakenly attributing the cause of

such repression to the economy, it soon returns what it fishes back from

life iced over with power and profit as fodder for the economy.

Psychoanalysis thus diffuses and reproduces all the tics of former

alienation. When it shows that thought censors the way desires are

expressed, does it by so doing cease to be also separate thought,

counter-censorship dissimulating the split between body and ‘head’,

emancipation imprisoned in the relationship between master and slave,

liberation caught in the trap of initiator and candidate?

Thanks to psychoanalysis, the transformation of sensual intelligence

into intellectual function reaches its peak of unconscious perfection.

It teaches one to change one’s neurosis, to adapt the unbearable malaise

of private survival into the social norms of universal survival. What a

fine reason for knowing why you hate your father, if you go on working

for a boss!

Regulating in- and outlet valves have long more or less balanced the

pressure from repression and relief from it, but nonetheless one way of

alleviating tension through negative or positive transference becomes

impossible as business humanises by gaining possession of human beings.

Societies highly permeated by business no longer allow people to

compensate for lack of life by lynching, massacring minorities, official

racism, or the glorification and desecration of a leader.

Economist behaviour nowadays prefers self-destruction brotherhoods,

clubs in which the contemptible can practice contempt, societies in

which everyone passes judgement on each other. Psychoanalysis is the

washing powder the purveyors of family dirty linen refuse to do without.

It personalises the exchange system by selling the good conscience of

its afflictions direct to the patient, (and it sells at the just price

of its integration into business society). Its doctrine of health, which

rests upon the ambiguity of desires accepted and negated, in fact

reproduces the morbid relationship of mother and child. A quick

pirouette well adapted to the order of things winds up the balance sheet

of troubles and their remedies: the child-slave kills the maternal

master in that he kills him symbolically by fulfilling the honorary

duties of the consultation! Ite missa est.

There is now a clear choice posited between getting beyond childhood or

letting it rot within us, to live its flowering or to trample on it with

the destructive attitude in extremis which cuts off its nose to spite

its face, and which is the incomplete man to perfection. The

intellectual function, whose shadow has always clouded the consciousness

of intellectual history feels obliged to leave this history to express

itself against the intellect. What was hostile to me deserts and joins

my life-force. Like many others, do I not conspicuously exemplify an

alchemy whose materia prima is within? My desires, caprices, passions,

moods, fantasies, dreams, inhibitions, neuroses, illnesses, plans,

whims, stupidities, errors, genius, what distinguishes me, are these not

precisely the spring from which I wish the river of my life irresistibly

to flow?

Self-analysis follows on the heels of autonomy, marked with the same

resolve and uncertainties. The tighter the corner into which

proletarianisation squeezes life, the more our senses are excited like a

fire in the roof of economic reflexes. We cannot live our pleasure

authentically until all the pleasures trapped and crusted over with

business are free. Clearsightedness is as part of desire as desire is of

specific individual personality. There are already too many strangers in

me without my allowing one more in because he claims he will chase the

others out.

Self-analysis which likes to think of itself as psychoanalysis without

an analyst is just the self’s traditional police-style lecture. If you

subject yourself to someone else’s inspection and swallow the hook of

objective explanation, examine your being the way others see you (the

way you let off steam, where you stand in the pecking order, how you

settle scores), you are giving up the clear-headedness of desires that

know no master. How can a person open up to the healthy pounding of the

will to live if he feels compelled to analyse himself and is terrified

of finding himself, anxious and guilt-ridden and desperate to justify

himself?

I refuse to hide that part of the old world from me that continues to

exist in me and governs through inertia. On the contrary, from this

congealed lump of inhibited and inverted desires I claim to set free the

daemon of marvels who let himself be trapped there. The oppressed world

of intense pleasure is in me as it was in the child I was and which

inseparably I am. What I dissimulate rears its head everywhere I would

not wish to see it. Toying with a bracelet, the ‘migraine’ brought on by

‘bad’ thoughts, sighing over what you could not manage, the tachycardia

of repression speaks the language of the body ambiguous, torn between

desire and all that forbids it, pulled between the pulsations of life

and the literal expression of captivatingly banal phrases: “my stomach

turned over, sick at heart, I had a load on my back, gave myself a

ball-breaker, sick to the back teeth with it...”

What repels me, terrorises or humiliates me, or makes me suffer,

contains what I love and desire, inverted. I restrain myself less when I

explore myself than when I confide in myself The more my curiosity

encounters resistance the more it persuades me to go on. Where the block

is the wall of repression rises. I like to return to where the

suppression is anchored, ferret about and dig using associations,

analogies, fugitive images, dream phantoms. Why should I not go right to

the limit, why content myself with hasty interpretations, transferences,

alibis? Am I not to discover my hidden truths by myself?

With the creative inspiration intense pleasure gives, I want to learn to

hunt out the priest and the flatfoot lurking in the crannies of my head.

For it seems to me that he who is no longer blind to the way his

motility reverses when the will to live converts to death reflex holds

revolution’s absolute weapon.

Once, we worked out how to decipher the book of society. Today, anyone

with a taste for immediate emancipation finds himself faced with having

to decode himself. Pain, analysed until it spits out the pus of guilt,

gradually disappears, showing how tissue scars over, the chest muscles

relax, and the desire whose repression was the cause of the suffering is

liberated. It is the same with every sickness, every somatisation, every

dis-ease.

We have all thought fit until now to treat ourselves with cures worse

than the hurt, because we chose not the will to live as our foundation

but what weakened it. It will not take us long to perceive how the vital

organs interplay and come to avoid what inhibits them, to free them from

the economy and return them unconfined to pleasure. The phrase “Chance

is you happening to yourself” will be applied by us with increasing

accuracy, so that in sifting the parts of life from death stemming from

us and approaching us the fortuitous will occur only in intense

pleasure’s variety.

To turn the world upside-down the right way up is to take the shortest

route between one happiness and the next.

4. Our desires coming to life again herald the birth of a society

which has eventually become human.

Desires aroused in childhood lack the means to alter the world in their

favour. The history of our times offers us the means, but turned against

us. But if we are reborn to ourselves we can turn them on this history.

Sensual relationships are built up in the creation of a radically

different society, and the process is irreversible. There are more

people brandishing childhood’s weapons that they have rediscovered in

themselves than the old world suicides believe. The latter are always

quick to deride the new innocence as a collective folly whose demands

are childish, although with methods very different to the old world’s,

this ‘folly’ has begun to wipe out the world which bores us.

I long for the juncture where the child is no longer the object of

knowledge but the subject of loving passion. To adventure erotically

with children is inseparable from loving oneself and loving life. You

need not doubt that it will spread in defiance of your laws, garbage

which has never conceived of anything but infanticide.

The search for our desires is not archaeology into the past but the

present calling for life. Fairyland, inverted until now in the stories,

will be reborn in a union with childhood. All is permitted, for amid

business truths, nothing is true.

Chapter 6. UNIVERSAL SELF-MANAGEMENT WILL SEE THE END OF INVERTED

PLEASURE

1. We live most of our pleasures under the sign of their fatal

inversion.

Passion itself has grown so feeble that repressed life has almost lost

its self-destructive urge. The pleasures of bygone days were so much

more violent than our own are because, however fucked-up, the will to

live was then much more red-blooded. Excited by the myths surrounding

power and restless in capitalism’s ideological inventions, the will to

power has long been siphoning energy from sexual excitement to turn life

towards hate and death.

The break-up of hierarchy together with the endless pinpricks of

commerce are exhausting in individuals and societies alike that

aggressive energy common to kings and tinpot gods, tribunes, viziers,

war lords, patriotic loyalists and cunning brutes of that kind. These

days the will to power wilts in offices and in the family bosom, in

dormitories, barracks and central committees; we could rejoice if that

power now in the hands of half-wits were not also a half-witted power,

revealing how the will to live itself has become so feeble. If in the

next trade-based society, men stop murdering each other, it will only be

because they are too weak to do so. And why kill yourself when death is

so close and you can merely survive almost as an excuse?

Dreams of apocalypse haunt commercial society’s subconscious. It is only

the idea of sudden destruction which has allowed it to put up with

itself and go on gazing at its reflection growing more and more

gangrenous. Millenarians and suicidal revolutionaries with their

vengeful despair were society’s suppressed bad conscience breaking out

until survivalism spilled its air-conditioned nightmare over us and gave

us slow-motion suicide, itself utterly poisonous as the sheer weight of

things will stifle us anyway.

While acts of criminality and terrorism with their watered-down

look-alikes express the spasm of a morbose will to power, a longing for

the funerary feast which would swallow the whole world sidles into the

waiting room. While we wait pleasure serves to pass the time. Memories

of a life upside-down which occasionally contracts violently and snuffs

us are being replaced by a gentler fatality: epicureanism on the

installment plan, whose every characteristic shoves what is human in us

deeper into the commercial freezer.

I refuse to choose between two kinds of death. My guiding light is life

lived to the full.

When the senses themselves are reduced from biological to economic

organs, the ultimate degradation, pleasures turn up both their inverted

millenarian face and their absolutely irreducible rebellious core which

cannot be recuperated and commercialised. At this point,

proletarianisation collapses behind us. Natural feelings slowly reawake

in us as desire nourishes the organ that feels it. You need neither

guidelines nor laws to enjoy life. Whatever defines or confines it, or

causes it to specialise is precisely what relegates and inverts it:

work, constraint, exchange, separation, guilt.

2. When you tire of survival’s amusements you will want to reverse

perspective.

The eye of power destroys what it gazes on. Education adjusts us to

collineate with the economy. Prodded by work, needled by constraint, our

gaze unravels the thread to the hierarchic labyrinth, learning the

no-entry and no-stopping signs, and taught to tell far off the beacon

lights of authority and profit. The eye mirrors goods for sale .

Consider the desire to reach out and enjoy something: how often is it

inverted into a furious desire to capture and possess? And just as the

fact of possession substitutes for intense pleasure, the laws protecting

private property replace what you are not allowed to have with image

ownership. Seeing is possessing by proxy, greedy to rape and rob. Should

the person wanting an object, get his hands on it, his eyes will be

cheated of pleasure again, which is the price of victories won by the

will to power.

The twin threshold of repression and uncontrollable outburst perceives

no landscape other than life inverted. The wish to catch hold and caress

turns into a taste for capturing, killing, annihilating. When you play

the game, aiming a pretend weapon at the sparrowhawk high in the sky or

at the village emerging from the mists, isn’t your solicitude for

destroying everything you see translated by horribly mutating the desire

to be everywhere into the compulsive need to own everything?

We have borne the evil eye since we first began mummifying humans and

cats, transforming them into dead objects, pieces of property, goods to

sell. They remind us of the curse upon us and provoke us to destroy them

and join them in a common nothingness.

We have only the eyes in our heads left. With our intellect we scan the

labyrinths of inauthentic life. In the old story a child who gazes on

his mother’s sex is struck blind. The stories told in modern education

go one better: by all means stare at your mother’s cunt but don’t enjoy

it. Thought stares and no longer lives in experience.

And that look is also the reflection of a basic failing. Most people

survive, ashamed of being seen, too nervous to be recognised. The

inquisitorial eye can only capture life in its roles and changes of

role, as image, dead flesh thrown on the scales of commercial criteria.

As credulous victims of power’s voodoo, you have no right to sneer from

the pinnacle of your sophistication at so-called primitive men who do

not like having their photograph taken in case their effigy fall into

hostile hands!

The tactile gaze of intense pleasure meets only what is alive in people

and things. What do I care for a glance which is stolen and returned,

which is posed, weighed and sold, which measures and compares, hunts for

distraction, is exchanged? Like the other senses, sight is part of the

universe of feeling born with the infant, which the economy then hacks

to pieces. When pleasure represses itself it is not looking to lively

itself up.

The disturbingly deep gaze of lovers, which you find again in dreams and

wonder (the sun we see doubled in snow-covered landscapes), is indelibly

marked with sensual delirium — how everything will one day be. However

reduced in order to function economically, the eye shies away from the

unvarying vistas of business perspective and scrambles power’s geometry

of high and low, left, right, near, far, length of time, place. When the

eye opens in the insatiable excitement of intense pleasure the occulists

of everyday profitability say the look is vague, distracted, lost; it

certainly is utterly lost on them, as it has no wish to see them and

escapes to where they cannot study it.

It is not the dissolution of the self, nor drugs, nor illumination which

opens the eyelids and lashes prehensile with desire, but the lucidity

recovered by the senses in freedom. The silky look of the jelly-fish

envelops the world through suction, always moving towards feeding itself

with life and to dissolving death. That radiant motion I want to pursue

into sleep, the moment when the body dissolves the landscape into

multiple dreams which we are now learning — and are you aware of it — to

prolong consciously upon waking up.

Bitterness has poked its bones through and split aesthetics’ final skin.

Beauty and ugliness you have never judged except by default. The shadow

of death repels me, only life makes me passionate. Love gives me the

clarity to see people, and things filled with hate and the urge to

consume merge in the same forbidding grey. What I see through the eyes

of pleasure ends up by destroying what profit obliges me to see.

Robbed of sexuality your nose is just an appendage to your lungs, a

physiological forge which gives the body not the fire of life but its

power of output. Contemptuous of work, the aristocratic regime left the

body its natural smells which in the vigour of its passions blended well

with wild scents. Under the rule of the factory, hygiene scrubs all

living matter off the body, and cleanliness and the morbid shame it

engenders deodorises air, armpits and kitchen even as pollution eats

away the earth, the sea and the sky. The body is never done with washing

in the filthy waters of profit.

The sense of smell teaches one to be ashamed of smells. Under the

classificatory system imposed on it by those themselves repressed, the

sense of smell gradually declines as it learns to distinguish between

good and bad smells, those of saintliness and those of sexual pleasure.

In the past, guilt struck at the perfume of desire only when amorously

erectile, but now it attacks anything which looks likely to snarl up the

lungs’ work of creating energy. The sense of smell is shut off to

whatever is not respiratory function. For the less familiar respiration

is with how it breathes in intense pleasure, the more easily it can

renounce the feeling of plenitude, adopt the fitful, jerky rhythm of

effort, and economise on itself.

It is in the family that we learn to paralyse the thoractic cage, to

block the impulses rising from the abdomen. Mastering the self hunches

the torso and controls the affects; the will to power consolidates the

muscular armour. Breathing becomes something done by the head, another

element of the cerebral system. It imposes on the body the survival

cadence of the beast at bay, aware that death is set to catch it with

minimum trouble and no pleasure.

The air in business is stifling. Anxiety is the simplest expression of

this social asphyxiation. Day after day the throat tightens, only

allowing libidinal exhalation to escape in spasmodic mouthfuls. Is not

the child being taught, when his body is on the defensive through throat

and nose ailments, about the act of penetration by power and money which

the family is allowed to perpetrate on him in legal rape?

The old world which is sucking the air out of us is evidently at the

same time the world of pure and dizzying heights. With one hand it opens

up the throat it is strangling with the other. Artificial lungs are

generously put in circulation because of sport, work, gymnastics, cures,

drugs, stimulants, tranquilisers, psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists,

religions, relaxation, tourism. The oppressiveness of the cities is met

with the epic age of the great out-doors, being strangled by society by

the escape from it: the hanged man is granted a double length of rope.

The countryside oxygenates the body before sending it back to rot on the

dung-heaps of the city and in the deserts of boredom. Ecology and

pollution meet in the same lobby after the trial, leftist sweat mixing

with bureaucratic formalin.

The rotten smells which sudden bursts of rage, hatred and contempt bring

on blend well in the polluted atmosphere of business. In this

unbreathable society the law grants us all the consolation that no-one

can stand himself. How the miserable little whiners multiply! While the

power-mad dog howls down all compromise and makes a radical ass of

himself to hear the roar of fame, the frog in the revolutionary stoup

swells with bile, eager to play the bull of theory on the common [’champ

libre’ — french publishers of radical theory] of business. To be allowed

to breathe through the crack of a reputation one has to dance to the

bureaucratic tempo. You look down your nose, incorruptible, virtuous,

but your glory comes from the rubbish dump and your reason in history is

as good as mud. As general of an army of dustbins, you taint everything

you touch with the stench of what has gone dead in you — the smell of

trade clinging to all circles of artistic exorcism.

When you are feeling fine, you feel how free life is. Whatever is alive

always feels good. I dream that all the senses reunite and each organ

evolves endlessly through analogy with the way all satisfaction

operates. As if — the lungs excited by contact with air, being

penetrated by it and expressing it in muscular detumescence through nose

and mouth — it were in a sexual mode which sexualises them all that

smells take me over and emanate from me; as if the functions of the body

now finally diverted to benefit pleasure, gave way to the rhythm of

tension and satisfaction which is how the desires for life progress.

From the child repressed at the age when he learns what secret urges

smell like, when his nose is at the height of fly-buttons and the

bottoms of shorts, we have retained something of the original liberty

which developed our sense of smell. Is there anyone who does not like to

sniff his finger after he has touched his sex, slipped it in his anus or

rubbed his armpit? The idleness of the gesture opens the door to

childish feelings huddled in the depths of us. And do we not long for

this child to be born again in the lover, and adult who in the quick of

passion discovers the charm of natural emanations, called natural

because education has done its very best to denature them!

Few people breathe with the love of self. We should take our cue from

lovers who drink each other’s saliva, lick each other’s sweat, and drop

for drop sip cyprine and sperm. They utterly give up worrying whether

other people think they smell saintly or sulphurous.

If one learned to smell again as an intellectual decision, it would only

renew the age-old castration of the senses. Our sense of smell draws the

map of our sensual wealth on the obverse of the world upside down in

rediscovering so many olfactive experiences repressed or undertaken as

duties. Only dead desires stink, but pleasure in chains can put anybody

off. As against the solemn oaths of interest and feelings under

contract, may smell decide affinities and discord. Being able to feel

for each other and feel at ease with each other will set up the variable

atmospherics of situations even in the assemblies of universal

self-management which are the social expression of our desires.

There is no love where exchange and constraint rule. Now that the two

most ancient taboos in history are shown to be economic in character,

can we finally admit that onanism is, together with incest, the

beginning of all authentic love?

Masturbation has been vilified for the primacy it accords to pleasure,

which prevents woman from metamorphosing into mother and producing

sinners. Bourgeois-bureaucratic ideologies denounce it as the solitary

vice which ruins health, reduces productivity, softens the rigours of

intellectual work and turns you deaf to orders. The prosecution on

behalf of the revolution follows hard on their heels, identifying

onanism with want, isolation, inability to meet people, or at best

low-intensity contacts that can never amount to anything. Definitely the

old mole is working harder than ever!

You reject proof in favour of misery. You jeer at masturbation because

you won’t see in it anything more than a pitiful solitary wank. And all

you see in incest is the occult core of the family, the web of indecent

assault we all know about and suppress wherein each makes his bed, the

shadowy passions caught up in family economics to stir in their relish

of tenderness, their dash of love and ferocity seasoning, into the more

repellent communal brews of nation, group, party, or fraternity. Your

truth is ever the truth of the commodity. Tomorrow, with identical

persuasive conviction, you will trumpet the need for onanism and ritual

coupling with your mother, in just the same way you have always cracked

up the blessings of love in every one of its perverted forms.

Most of the incidents ranging from the silly to the dramatic which go to

make up daily existence are love stories lived against the grain.

Tenderness unspoken chokes in rage. Is it chance that sexually

highly-repressed societies are noted for their predilection for death by

hanging, as though the feminine sexual ring, source of life, were, by

inversion, slipped about the neck and tightened to cause death? Caresses

are stifled endlessly in a monotonous string of states of exhaustion and

melancholy, in shocks, sectarianism, contempt, hate, assaults, murder.

Morality’s repression of paedophilia lies sprawled on vacant lots, young

families whiten with shock at children assaulted and raped. The pleasure

of putting your arms round someone and tangling amourously twists into

the act of possessing a long-coveted object. The voluptuous delectation

of embracing and love-making falls into sado-masochistic sacrifice in

which knife, spike and gun, seduction and one-sided argument let loose

pent-up exasperation at being unable to orgasm. And you get caught in

the same demented zoology whether you come out against hunting,

vivisection, cages and dog-handling schools, or the militants who fight

them.

For humanisation of custom read humanisation of goods-for-sale. Far from

showing a victory for life, the statistics of appeasement graph the

progress of anaemia where a lessening of aggression expresses a lowered

will-to-live pressure in the veins, and the passion for destruction

gently simmers down into a predilection for sexual passion, enshrined

forever for the wrong reasons.

Lucky things! soon love will exist only in your heads, lost everywhere

else. Happy lovers! the day is coming when you will no longer have to

settle the traditional scores set by jealousy, possessiveness and

exchange; but, alas, it will only be because a desexualised society will

have put discussions or ideas or techniques or images between lovers’

warm bodies.

However, the agonised state of passion present does not wake regret for

passion past. Violence will break out as we reach the state of utter

gratuitousness, not as we convulse in survival and slow death. When we

stop looking for what is everywhere in quantity, distrust of our bodies

as source of all pleasure will vanish in the same instant as society’s

disparaging attitude towards the individual.

To love others you must begin by loving yourself. Being touched and

reaching out to touch and caress others is surely the start of any real

communication: real human contact. Love’s reason thumbs its nose at

commodity rationale.

Joy breaks down separation, duty and exchange, and summons a world into

existence through touch and feeling, music and scent. Do you not feel

when you fall in love that you just do not care whether you are loved in

return?

How could I hug or caress you were I waiting for you to touch me first?

And in the tumult of pleasure who knows whose hand excites whose skin,

whose lips, whose sex? Let us put an end to the jacobinism and terrorism

of custom, coherence, standards of beauty and ugliness, these endless

judgements rooted in our inability to enjoy each other. I like you!

Let’s get together. You don’t like me? Plenty of others will have

desires like mine. Why should you take offence and bitch at our lack of

epidermic attraction? What is it makes someone I like better or worse

than thousands of others? I answer for no-one, neither those I love nor

have loved, nor those I do not like. Any society which will not promote

throughout such a simple basis for itself deserves to fall apart under

the complexity of its necroses.

Chance encounters occur when desire is sharp; blunted, chance invites

light, acerbic liaisons and plays at being deeply in love. Out of a

multiplicity of adventures the singular passion which will nourish all

the others surely ought to be born; you only have to want it, not

solicit for it. I will pass up no opportunity to attain my ends,

beginning with revolution.

Economising on life has inoculated the pleasure of eating, drinking and

knowledge with the virus of price. In its economic puritanism the

bourgeoisie declared that we had to eat to live rather than live to eat.

The libertine reaction into which the overt despair of the bureaucracy

leads us in no way alters the profitability of business when it incites

us to live to eat. The previous exhortations to produce are adapted to

the laws of what you can consume at any price.

Necessity taught the nineteenth century proletariat so well to work to

feed themselves that its heirs are easily persuaded to cast out past

misery through greed for fresh. Gorging oneself has become a labour of

compensation and rejection. Lack of desire for life finds compensation

in the race to fill oneself up — you guzzle wine, music, sensation,

images, sex, canned fishballs, news, drugs and knowledge, but ultimately

it remains a way of vomiting yourself up.

Exchange putrefies whatever it touches. Filling the coffers of the bank

and the stomach and swelling with importance through every orifice is

the ‘insatiable being of the absolute’, as revised and corrected by

survival-based society. The taste of plenty transforms into the rage to

possess, while the awareness of only ever possessing things drives

absence of life into everyone. Fear of the void generates a ridiculous

bustle which swallows everyday satisfactions, themselves no more than

the thin dust fallen from orgies long ago and peasant festivals at which

part of the harvest was thrown away, consumed, burned, cast in sacrifice

to the impossible gratuity of it.

We have lost the excessiveness of the banquets of antiquity without

getting rid of their inverted version, without ever rising from the

table of the will to power, without spitting out the bone of contention

between those who eat and those who are eaten. Tell me how eating,

fucking and talking to prove what a man or woman or leader you are

differs from working for a boss. Being surly and thinking the worst

about everything leaves you with only the householder’s greed, guilty

overindulgence and christian dissipation.

Nagging guilt force-feeds most people compensations and packaged

pleasure, so that it seems obvious that excess of passion exhausts and

kills. Bollocks! It is never excess which kills but what opposes excess.

Beginning with guilt.

The undertaker preens himself as he follows the bon-viveur. A hungry

trencherman in the twentieth century enters a restaurant in the same way

as he goes to a brothel, with money, tissue paper, and a tranquiliser in

his pocket. What pleasure you get from a meal where money has waxed the

sauce and soured the wine, is caught in cholesterol and sharpened in

bile, haunted by the spectre of a coronary! Gluttons and gourmets,

exiled from the plate before you, there’s death in the soup!

You pay for your pleasure-panic with disease. Disorders of the organism

stem not from an exuberant life but from the panic-fears it awakens in

spite of ourselves. The dread of happiness exceeds that of despair. Does

it do any good to deny it when everything confirms it? A few passes of

intellectual magic, the standard quackery of commercial abstraction,

does not make it vanish.

How often these days do a bunch of boys and girls go off and enjoy the

ephemeral pleasures of stuffing themselves with bacon soup, a capon or

two, a fish stew, foaming beer, laughter and chilled wine, hugs and

kisses and songs? That is gastronomy, the art of sophisticating peasant

recipes, nature as invented by the economy, the stomach as paid for by

thinkers.

Gastronomics call for both manual labourers and intellectuals. It sports

MacDonald hamburger freaks and bottled-fruit hogs with season tickets to

international chop-joints, as well as up-market baked-bean epicures and

expense-account table props at gloomy boards, who stab sourly with

critical forks. Robbed of their sexuality the pleasurable arts of eating

and drinking lie only skin-deep.

It is exactly the same with knowledge, for intellectual ignorance has

unseated vulgar unconsciousness. As it marches along under the banner of

progress obscurantism changes its skin. Knowing more and more things

takes the place of getting to know one’s desires. Integrating

‘intelligently’ into society, into the exchange system, adapting to the

laws of the will to power, make up for a fathomless lack of self.

Curiosity about this self can only feed on police-style interrogations.

There is nothing human about the commodity system, though it wishes to

discover all it can about humans, the better to bring them to heel. But

its science, proceeding through autopsy and scalpel, discovers only the

inert State of the corpse.

What is freely taken from the store of plenty is always good, always an

asset. To put a price on people and things is to brand them with infamy:

how much longer can we put up with it? Is it not doubly inhuman to feel

impelled to hand over a fortune for a feast of fresh truffles as well as

to run the absurd risk of paying for it with savage pains in the liver?

Too much anxiety and letting off steam dominates even the simplest

celebration. If love of life begins with refusing to pay for it, let us

end up with giving as universal practice. Nothing short of liquidating

the State and eradicating goods for sale will do. And I reckon it will

come about less through the fury of the oppressed than from the

irresistible urge to enjoyment, from pleasure’s tendency to multiply and

not hold back, from dreams and feasting, streets set with a million

tables, a million exotic foods, while palaces and government buildings

are transformed into vast wine cellars, cathedrals metamorphose into

inns and road maps read as the menu.

Fuck it! Scepticism is just the traditional stodge of self-disgust. I

gulp my freedom down in quarts and cordially invite you to burn up any

red-herring doubts you have in high octane sexual excitement.

Nothing is passionately interesting if you are counting the pennies or

feel forced to do it. Only desire teaches us to live. You hear people

all too often weigh their words and pause for you to admire profundity.

Desire, on the other hand, leaves everyone to work out his own way in

silence. Independent of reason, desire is its own light and brings light

to bear on others — quite unlike obligatory transparency, or the

practice of self-criticism, or, worst of all lies, the truth as

represented.

We want to live freely from now on with the knowledge gathered from the

four winds, from the chance reading of wall-newspapers, and in the

abundance of things written and sung, drawn or mimed by individual

creativity finally free. The stolid front of education and information

will break up in irresistible fantasies as creativity’s desires and

affinities get to work dismembering it. I put instability in place of

feeling bloated and hunger for experience in place of possessiveness,

expansiveness in place of self-distrust.

3. Pleasure creates life.

Very gradually we are emerging from the prehistory of desire. Pleasure

as a pretext is like last rites for our alienation, and suicidal forms

of pleasure the last Bastille of the world on its head. Now that we know

prison walls us in everywhere, we can easily see how to blow it up from

inside.

The Great Wall of goods-for-sale runs with cracks as far as it stretches

out beyond life. Each day the crisis-ridden economy multiplies the

number of breaches through which the urge to have the time of our lives

will hurl us and bring the wall tumbling down.

We do not want forced, guilt-ridden pleasures anymore. We want no more

pleasures severed from total sexuality, pleasures cut off from the

omnipresent body of the will to live. Amorous embrace is eternal witness

to life, in it distance and time are abolished, and because of it,

because intense measures push the barriers set up against them steadily

back, because we are returning to the common spring, to the fundamental

unity of life, we hold as absolute certain that making primal utterly

free activity [gratuite] dispenses forever with governing and being

governed, punishing and being punished, violating and being violated,

judging and being judged. In one single movement it abolishes the

dialectics of death which rule over survival.

The pleasure of idleness and persistent application, meeting people and

being alone, music, creation, speaking and remaining silent, laughing,

shitting, coupling, crying, pissing, shouting, caressing, licking,

ejaculating, leaping on someone, and rolling about, tasting, sniffing,

touching, coming together and pulling apart, are not survival pleasures

but the pleasures of life as you like to live it when you do not need

anyone or anything else to complete your happiness. You join with the

whirl of the senses when life is not overcast by premonition of death,

unless it be at last a natural death and so distant that, as in the

heart of ancient trees, it flows from the unconcerned forgetfulness of

existence.

Separation has mostly reduced pleasure to the role of intermediary, as a

vehicle towards something else. When instead of expressing joy in the

body, dance is used to reduce and fascinate a prey, when caresses

subordinate their game to the pre-programmed path of mating, the

diversity of life disintegrates into products available if profitable.

I am not making pleasure into a road to revolution. Nor do I want to

attack the impatience which has given you the excuse for not living, as

though real life began only on the day after the ball. It is time that

pleasure in itself sufficed, for its authenticity, unity and

inexhaustible variety depends solely from the pleasure each of us takes

in creating the life we carry within us.

But why go on contrasting the will to live where at least my destiny can

escape, from what never ceases to rip it up? I root the emancipation of

my pleasures here and now in the serene resolution to have done with

commodity civilisation. I do not need to go on looking for the

revolution. I have got what it takes to find it in doing what it pleases

me most to do. That is the direction I most want to go in.

Throw out mediation, begin your individual autonomy. You cannot accept

substitutes for your desire: it lies at the centre of your subjectivity,

and, in radiating out, dissolves the ancient carapace of character, that

fortress which imprisons you with interiorised repression and diseased

obsessions rather more frequently than it protects you from the enemy

who prowls without. Sometimes it seems to me that only the haunted

spite-ridden part of me attacks me from outside, and that I am quite

capable of dealing with it.

Chapter 7. IF YOU WANT A CLASSLESS SOCIETY FREE YOURSELF

1. The will-to-power is the will-to-live upside-down.

The individual discovered! On the brink of extinction! The individual is

the bourgeoisie’s finest conquest: as inhuman conditions draw to a close

we catch the first glimpse of a real humanity. Flowering into

consciousness in the social euphoria which everywhere succeeded

monolithic regimes, whether tribal, feudal, despotic or monarchic, see

them now, lifted out of the spooky corners of religion and raised to the

misery of the Enlightened Ones, as humble followers of the Triponeme of

Nazareth, the Tenia of Mecca and the Buddhist itch-mite Acarus. They’ve

blown out the fart of God rumbling in their bellies and struck a more

decorous pose, as citizen, producer, thinker, militant, as responsible

prole.

That is how the abstract individual is born: out of the concretisation

of commercialism, swept along by the currents of the time, and

progressively excreted into materialism. With his head squeezed in the

forceps of ideology, the ever-present separation between economics and

life cuts to the bone. The compartmentalisation of his inner world

reproduces the fragmentation of society, and illusions about his power

here lifts him to the heaven of consumer goods. But his increasing

proletarianisation shows him really to be in Hell.

If he asserts his individuality and irreducible subjectivity, it remains

abstraction, the shadow exchange-value casts everywhere. The

‘individual’ of ideology has no substance to draw on except his

inability to live, which does nothing either for the mythological power

of the gods or for the real power of the State.

Most people in the pre-industrial era enjoyed a relative but real

autonomy despite the social abstraction which denied them any. Under the

bureaucratic and bourgeois class, however, we scarcely even have

abstract autonomy which is the autonomous circulation of consumer goods

waxing as life itself wanes.

Work has spread like a running sore all over the world. It has turned us

all into its proletariat, and so everyone roots to become individual

again. But the era of condottieres has passed. The Fascists, along with

Stalin and other strident militants have shot the little men scuffling

in the bottom drawers of their mediocrity for reasons to justify their

identification with a people, a leader, or a cause. The economic reflex

is so strongly developed that ‘Important Matters’ are now, as everyone

knows very well, merely publicity stunts to pass off some State package

deal.

When States function like monopolies and their bosses like shop

assistants at the sales, what price will you give the will to power when

that power is spread between so many million bureaucratic ants, each

with his own ball of dung and each on the heap?

Even as a bauble dangled insolently before people’s impotent nullity, it

still cannot conceal what it has always been: life reduced to

competitive economics. The law of the strongest and fittest ruling the

world has not changed: it has simply evolved, like work, exchange and

guilt, and become intellectualised. If shrewd intelligence is gradually

superseding brute force it still retains the rationale of the strongest,

for it expressed the tyranny of exchange value .

Intellectualism is a lie which strikes the individual whose life it

turns into a series of images and ideas-smoke; and it strikes at

society, whose culture it reduces to system. Avatars of proletarian

emancipation know this running denunciation inside out. For in

sacrificing their autonomy, haven’t the proles paid twice over the odds?

They gave up whatever life they had left to cling harder to their

remnants of power — all those monkey-tricks the will to power has to

offer, such as pater familias, the macho stance, militant hero,

gang-leader. They confused the need to coordinate struggles with the

idea of power, which means that a ruling faction gets to sacrifice

everyone else. Over and over again. Busy choosing heads, the revolution

leaves its body behind at factories and on barricades. Middlemen

continue to operate efficiently at the expense of liberty.

People turn cruel when their will to live turns into will to power. The

arts of enjoyment develop only unalloyed pleasure, whereas power feeds

on the ceaseless frustration of false needs. Which is why cruelty is now

the normal viciousness of the ordinary man.

Under bureaucracy the will to power manifests as string-pulling

rivalries, underhand scheming by committee-men, machiavellism at the

porters’ lodge. In the new commercial societies the mirror, mirror on

the wall shows whizz-kids with a few tricks, fishing in troubled water,

and those with private schemes for survival, everywhere. So dies the

spirit of a civilisation of travelling salesmen who take their wares

wherever their wares take them.

While the petty nastinesses of survival maintain our illusion of living,

the old workers’ movement has collapsed and thrown us back on ourselves

to confront us with a choice: either we fade out into intellectuality

which is only will to power on its last legs, or we strengthen our will

to live, and set pleasure free.

History is responding favourably to this nascent autonomy. It was never

lack of organisation made revolution stumble but the inability of

individuals to kick out any organisation inimical to the life they

wanted to live. Proletarians’ low level of confidence in their ability

to abolish the proletariat is simply the effect of intellectual work:

every day you can watch it eating parts of your life away.

Thinking we can do nothing on our own has delivered us trussed into the

clutches of the old world. But the moment we feel that state power

cannot dam the rising flood of individual pleasures, each individual’s

determination will unite: and the dam will burst.

2. Our choice of society comes from each individual choosing between

death and the unlimited expansion of our desire for life.

Creativity is the basis of generalised self-management and abolishes

work and hierarchy. If you live cut off from yourself and from others

you probably lack all intelligence except commercial consciousness —

what intelligence is for, a factory for capital to work in. But pleasure

unstinted is a continuous link between individuals and the group; it

will put an end to consumer goods, throughout that saturated empire’s

social and corporate existence.

I am beginning hesitantly to throw off the role assigned me by society,

by myself and the machine crushing me. Bosses, the authorities, the

stars of the show and fifty-seven other varieties of ‘leaders of men’

get greeted already with catcalls and laughs. But life is still caught

and trapped in roles if you spit on hierarchy but persist in treating

women as objects, denounce the spectacle but strut for your mates, put

down passivity but nonetheless hide in your neurotic shell. The mobster

who worries endlessly how he might end up a tramp makes power’s daily

charade an unfailing source of laughs. You must have met him,

overwhelmed with work and overproduction, who comes on heavy with you

before you get heavy with him, or makes you feel guilty so that you do

not catch him out and who terrorises lest you should make him tremble.

He is a man condemned to the lyric mode, stuck with greatness and

humility, force and feebleness, success and failure; men like him feel

obliged, quite gratuitously, to prove they are still ‘alive’.

The authority an individual lays claim to corresponds to the number of

humiliations experienced; his taste for power compensates for his

inability to enjoy himself. Anyway, how can you enjoy yourself

patronising people? That is work, every moment guarding against losing

face, in case you lose your life. People like that richly deserve

retirement to the bitter pleasures the old world’s servants are given.

The reward for virtue is disenchantment closing your account with a

flash in the brain — the fleshpots you pay for are not worth it.

The small-time prosecutor you try to suppress jumps up in glee when

brashly you declare that one must be autonomous. Have you not felt yet

that your lack of autonomy, your inability to formulate and do what you

think, is part and parcel with your continuous self-deprecation, with

your self-programming that distorts you with effort, leads you to obey

on command, comply with the needs of earning a living and meeting your

obligations and promises, and respecting the proper channels?

How much easier to widen your vision and let yourself go, beyond caring

what other people might or might not think of you, till you strike the

old world out of your life in the same way as you have undertaken to

hunt it out of its daily existence. When you let passion have its way

you show more lucidity than any lessons on tactics or strategy could.

Here is where you see most clearly that autonomy has nothing in common

with the snobbery that says that you are to the extent that you own; nor

with the sort of individualism which demands alienation like an

inalienable right; with this cuckoo-in-the-nest self, at once greedy and

exclusive, oscillating between megalomania and self-denigration as if

the forces for and against were equal and impotent.

But how irritating never to be able to lay hands on this self, say the

others. Just when you think you have got him convinced, he side-slips.

You cannot catch him, share confidences with him. With a distracted air

he will agree with you, and then change his mind. But then of what

interest are they to me, these shadows posted to catch me out in my

desires, to register my profile, judge me, understand and govern me. But

if what you are doing is satisfying your pleasure, you do not mind what

I think about it. It will not alter your conviction that we do not have

to know each other to recognise a common will.

Intense pleasure in oneself is the basis for universal self-management

and abolishes fault. If the desire to be unhappy, beaten, oppressed,

ruled, humiliated does exist, it is only the inversion of the desire to

live happily, caressed, sovereign and free. Business imperialism is just

the self dilated taken the wrong way and turned against it.

The curse that was drummed into us: “Alone you are powerless, without

society you are nothing” is dead. We no longer agree that solitude is

the same as moral banishment, rejection by the community, a rupture of

the social contract, being the black sheep and the scape-goat. Outside

the Church, political party, family, group and law, clan terrorism has

again loudly declared that there is no salvation; we know that hope

reserved for the flock is from now on less profitable than the

spectacular despair of the excluded, the dissident, the heresiarch and

the solitary.

The real sorrow of solitude, far from the feeling of being alone with

oneself, comes from having to submit to the worst company, the

interiorised presence of others, which is the law of the clan. How can

one feel alone when still haunted by one’s double as citizen, militant,

leader, intellectual, repressed individual? Someone alienated knows

solitude only from the dark side of himself, in the terror of attachment

to what keeps him from intense pleasure. Finding himself exiled from his

own life astonishes him less at first sight than being suddenly severed

from what enslaved him. He had such a strong belief in his separation

that being separated from that too kills him.

Have alienated individuals, strong in their communities of nations,

political parties, armies and class, ever managed to steer history any

better than the lonely idiot, except through the switchpoints of trade?

What is the difference between men in a herd and men on their own if

they are punished by the economy alike? And what does it matter being

barred from a family which condemns one to exile from oneself?

The reversal of perspective opposes solitude by default with a solitude

of abundance, a plenitude of desire, an increase in life and

consciousness of it which is the very spontaneity of autonomy.

Solitude chosen rejects the world of solitude imposed. It teaches me to

live, neither better nor worse than you, but without comparisons. To be

born is to grant oneself the inalienable privilege of realising all

one’s life’s desires. I learn to discover them by myself, to redeem them

from their inverted form, and actualise them. I am learning not to

repress a single one.

The idea that one has to make one’s opinion triumph is the hallmark of

economist conduct. Trade is always pulling the strings of competitive

struggle. But returning to self makes a complete mockery of the

victories gained by appearances. I have nothing to prove, I am no

example to follow and I could not care less for your competition. May

this at least keep from me the malady which threatens autonomy’s first

steps. Keep me from the disenchantment of the man who longs for an

answering echo to his actions and who to the desert protests: “Is there

no one among you intelligent enough to see what I am attempting, only

the ridiculous fury of praise and censure?” For everything will be given

to the one expecting nothing in return.

I wish to make myself proof against what harms me by becoming more and

more aware of what I want. The ivory tower is only a piece on power’s

chess-board. It is not a matter of going back into oneself but of going

towards oneself without looking back. Whatever despair you manage to

drive me to, I refuse to despair of life. Nothing satisfies me, and when

your necessity presents itself as law, I feel only like overthrowing it.

I have too many follies to excite me to be content with wisdom.

Desire lived intensely always materialises, and the wings of time bring

round a day when one’s thinking dissolves in spontaneous action. Not a

thing alive lives alone when resolved to think for itself.

Autonomy bases universal self-management on the harmonisation and

emancipation of individual desires. All power relations involve a

contempt for self, a lack hastily compensated for, the inversion in

which each of us sees himself from the outside.

Separation is to the death reflex what difference is to life. The

greater the affirmation of each existence as an aggregate of specific

desires, the more separation tends to be dissolved. Our era hardly gets

it wrong: while people are reduced to the anonymity of objects and

rigged out in an abstract individuality, we have never heard so much

talk about specificity.

Intellectualised difference is the last separation in a world which has

never tolerated difference when lived authentically. In this world the

roles we assume to live through the day involve such a loss of life,

such repression and so much frustration that the compensatory occasions

to let off steam are compelled to reproduce and renew more and more

rapidly all the old racism of politics, aesthetics, geography, eroticism

and cooking, which, in a succession of fashions, condemn and

rehabilitate jew and black, red man, white man, the good, bad, beautiful

and the ugly, the normal person and the freak. And the self-styled

revolutionaries take good care to escape these classifications by having

their exclusions and adherences, traitors and stars, reprimands,

certificates for radicalism and people’s prisons.

The complementary product opposes the absurd sound and fury of the world

with its characterological humanist tolerance. This is like deciding the

personalities of snails by their shells, the spontaneous admission that

“I’m like that, it can’t be helped”. As if specificity could be confused

with the particularity of character, which is the muscular

straight-jacket developed by repressing desires and a vulgar holdall of

roles.

Now that the history of trade reveals that it is the history of

individual expansion inverted, are we going to recognise the specific

nature of life’s desires and admit that each being is unique and

irreducible by comparison, measurement or definition?

They are still waiting for you to show enough signs of individuality to

be sold and enough uniformity to be saleable; so that, being nothing in

yourself, you may fluctuate according to the vagaries of social supply

and demand.

To live not as character dictates but in the exuberance of desire, what

a terrifying prospect! If you are reckoned pleasant to be with, handsome

and intelligent, do you live better? If opinion pronounces you idiotic,

ugly and disgusting, do you live any worse? In the affirmative case you

do have to worry about other people since you exist through them and

belong to them, and need them to seduce, oppress, obey and flee

yourself. Otherwise, let the prefabricated image of your good or bad

reputation run about and fall to quarrelling. You will no longer need to

lie to yourself when you no longer care what you appear to be, or strike

a pose for the family and for history, or tremble in front of this

reflection which is only your extraneous representation.

Does opinion run prisons and death-squads? When we begin to demolish the

prisons inside us and destroy the killers of super-ego lying in ambush,

the ones outside will fall like the Bastille. You arrive at totality

only by having no more doubts.

I only am what I am by making myself so for my own pleasure. You are in

such a hurry to explain me you want an autopsy. No one is more curious

about me than I am. Perhaps your tender solicitude helps me to see more

clearly, but I am the only person who can let light through the shadows.

Nothing pleases me more than to see people and passions harmonising in

me and around me. I long for affinities which without rupturing link and

separate again in accord with the capricious rhythm of desire, and

which, in the freest possible way, escape the sombre manias of the will

to power. And without the frustration reflex ever sinking its talons

into me out of bitterness because someone I love is not there.

Everyone may keep his likes and dislikes, and what he agrees and

disagrees with, to himself, or they can change them, I do not care, so

long as luxuriance in life holds sway — and not death which sets a

beacon on every separation. And if old inhibitions have formed one or

other of my choices, do not oblige me to lift them. They have filled me

with neither hate nor anxiety nor lack, emotions which your orders and

incitements could well provoke.

Harmony outside an irreducible autonomy is not possible. O my will,

grant me a multitude of desires and the pleasure of realising them all!

And may revolution be ours as surely as it is mine.

3. Autonomy has only one imperative, which is to destroy every other

one. Expansion of the self will foment the international revolution.

Individual realisation knows its limits and recognizes none. Reversing

perspective dissipates the corrosive haze of work and constraint in

everyone. There is nobody who escapes the economic stranglehold through

trickery, cheek or violence, who does not feel inclined to create

himself, give birth to himself, and change his life from day to day.

Creation lived daily as rebirth is simply the impulse to enjoy oneself

gradually untying the straight-jacket of our repressed desires.

Our slightest moments have had death preached at them for so long that

anything connected with preaching — inciting people to live, for a start

— looks like death. I would like to be my own citadel, impregnable but

open to those who increase its strength, and welcoming to the traveller

en route to himself. The castles of autonomy will manage to bring down

the authority of the State in ruins. “Desire’s wild horses will drink

pure water from riverbanks of towns overrun with flowers”.

Universal self-management has no need of agitators, and can do without

those conspirators whom the bureaucrats in power love denouncing

everywhere simply because they see their own tyranny reassuringly

reflected in them. It has no need of party or organisation. As for you

corpses who claim to govern us, your suspicions of mysterious plots are

vain as are your attacks on the instigators of the disorders; you wail

in vain over a violence which only your presence perpetuates. Once

again, the evidence will rub your nose in your impotence. In the street,

on the very doorstep of your misgivings, individuals of the nascent

autonomy are gradually emerging out of the poisoned fog of trade. They

are ready to risk their nothing to gain everything, to strike where you

least expect them, to answer only for themselves; the only mandate they

carry is their subjectivity, and their footsteps are beginning to sound

on the hollow boards of your death-stricken civilisation.

The rotting history of the economy opens into the history of what

individuals can be. The backwardness of life vis-a-vis the will to live

is due to the head still concealing the presence of a new style. I do

not live the reversal of perspective enough, for my impatience causes me

to wait for what is already within me. Why look where there is nothing

for what there is plenty of? Let me be content just to gather what I

like and weave it in to what makes me passionate. For passion has the

eyes of pleasure, it sets everything on fire and reduces to ashes only

what stands in the way of its desires.

I do not wish to deprive myself of anything — I cannot ever have enough.

How could the old world ever satisfy me? In every social disturbance, in

every riot, I get the chance on a much wider scale than my everyday

life, further to smash what is tying freedom down. The life-line travels

through subjective abundance, love without limits, setting fire to

banks, sabotaging the economy, the end of the State and the root and

branch destruction of business relationships.

l want to fight to be human, too human ever to be human enough.

Life’s best defence is utter freedom. Pleasure unstinted is the ultimate

weapon of individual emancipation. It is an irony of history that as

commercial alienation reaches the brink, pleasure is in everyone’s

reach.

No intermediaries, no politicians, no agitators, no doctors, no popular

champions, nor force outside ourselves — we shall mould history in

accord with our desires and set necessity free.

You do not save yourself alone? I was never lost, but if my well-being

depended on others rather than on myself I would quite truthfully never

be saved. If we do not start with individual independence we will not

end with any either. But if we do not agree to achieve it why bleat

support for it in the first place?

Only yesterday we were stuck with suicidal outbreaks of rage, but each

individual’s struggle mutates as it goes through changes of outlook and

perspective. Energy expended in the race for power and profit catches up

with itself and laughs to see such a glut of joblessness, inflation,

economic decay, break-down of authority, revolution managed by those who

know radicalism when they see it. So off goes energy down paths of

enjoyment and immediate gratification.

I do not claim it wins without a fight. Naivity does not mean hoping

that some magistrate, shopkeeper, flatfoot or killer will suddenly

choose to have a good time rather than smash you to make up for his

impotence. Expecting an adder not to bite is scarcely asking the

impossible, but you do not automatically assume it.

Not a day goes by without my feeling aggressive or being provoked to a

fight. Commerce attacks me by forcing me to pay and the bank by forcing

me to count, while laws and authority deny my desires their liberty.

However it is no longer a violent explosion of rage but the steadier

violence by-passing them which will sweep laws, banks and commerce away.

With attractive ease as the most natural thing in the world, our common

desire for autonomy will bring us together to stop paying, working,

following orders, giving up what we want, growing old, feeling shame or

familiarity with fear. We will act instead on the pulse of pleasure, and

live in love and creativity.

Nature knows no other laws than those the economy has credited it with,

full of animal cruelty and scourges of earth and sky. Those laws will be

annulled throughout society as the will to live confronts your death

reflexes and defeats them. The struggle against a hostile nature can now

resolve into the help nature gives your pleasures as a gift, which is

yours and rooted in life. This development of human civilisation is in

fact its highest achievement.

Too bad if the taste for pleasure is a fine source of error. We will

never make as many mistakes as the amount of blood spilled by

intellectuals of past revolutions testifies to and which is etched on

their hearts. I prefer spontaneous mistakes to truth imposed. Rather the

creator feeling his way than the coherence of a leader.

The essential has been said. The important thing is to do it.

8 January 1979.