Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy first appeared in France in 1974; Iain Hamilton Grant’s English translation followed in 1993. It belongs to the convulsive aftermath of May 1968, when French thinkers turned against the Marxism and psychoanalysis that had shaped them and tried to think desire, capital, and power together without a tribunal. The book is not a treatise that builds an argument so much as a sustained provocation—part polemic, part prose poem—aimed at everything Lyotard calls “theory,” and it proceeds by fits of style as much as by steps of logic.
“Who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.”
Lyotard’s target is the whole apparatus of critique: the Marxist critique of political economy, the Freudian critique of the unconscious, the semiological critique of the sign. Each of these, he argues, hollows out a safe interior from which a philosopher or analyst can judge the world, and each secretly stabilizes what it claims to expose. Against them he sets a “libidinal economy”—an account of energy, investment, and intensity that refuses the distinction between the economic and the erotic, and refuses above all the position of the critic who stands outside what he criticizes.
The Translator’s Long Sentences and the Glossary Behind Them
The English Libidinal Economy arrives framed by an editorial apparatus that tells us as much about the book’s reception as its contents. Économie libidinale appeared in France in 1974 from Les Éditions de Minuit; Grant’s translation, published by Indiana University Press with the Athlone Press, dates from 1993, aided by a grant from the French Ministry of Culture. The cataloguing data files the work under sex, psychoanalysis, and economics—an accurate triangulation. An epigraph sets the tone: “Who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.” The contents run from Grant’s preface and glossary through an introduction with sections on Lyotard’s provocations and his several selves, then the chapters proper: “The Great Ephemeral Skin,” “The Tensor,” “The Desire Named Marx,” “Trade,” “Capital,” and “Economy of This Writing.”
Grant’s preface confronts what he calls “Lyotard’s Long Sentences.” Should the translator smooth them into comprehensible English, or carry over their rhythms and distortions? He chose fidelity to the original’s momentum, since “the rapid pressure of change” matters more than polish. Lyotard’s prose moves in tempo-rhythmic structures: a sentence swells into an unpunctuated paragraph, then halts in a short burst of relief. Grant invokes Deleuze on Nietzsche’s “masterful siege of the language,” transmitting something uncodifiable—style as politics. Lyotard partly agrees, writing that “our politics is of flight . . . like our style,” and later remarked that the dominance given to writing in the book could only signal how impossible argumentation over contents had become. Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau supplies the model of vertiginous despair, especially where the Nephew conducts “imaginary symphonies,” feigning an entire orchestra. At such breakdowns—”cata-hexes”—the text is driven by the accelerating sweep of the tensor sign. Lyotard’s sentences, Grant concludes, are “intensive rather than extensive.”
The glossary fixes the book’s key terms. Concentriversion is Lyotard’s neologism for centripetal consolidation, a kind of condensation. Dispositif names a disposition to invest, a cathexis subject to economic movement. Incompossibility comes from Leibniz: many worlds are possible but not possible together, and God’s creation of the best world is an economic perfection where less expenditure yields greater perfection—Lyotard exploits the logical violation and the expensive metamorphic economics this implies. Investment translates investissement, Freud’s Besetzung, chosen over “cathexis” because French uses the word indifferently for libidinal and political economy. Jouissance is retained except where “enjoyment” carries the political-legal sense of rights and property. Pouvoir and impouvoir give power and powerlessness; pulsion transliterates Freud’s Trieb rather than the more mechanistic “drive”; puissance and impuissance become “force” and “impotence.”
The Libidinal Band or Skin is neither inside nor outside, comparable to Freud’s primary processes—an analogical presentation of difference independent of representation, identity, signification, reference. It is not descriptively true but a persuasive fiction, more forceful and inventive than prior totalizations of “the real,” accounting for what representational thinking closes off and suggesting a pagan affirmation of singularities running aleatorily through the band. The Bar is an “operator of disintensification”: slowing the displaceability of pulsions, it gives designation and signification, birthing the concept through exclusion and twisting the band into a theatrical volume divided into “this” and “not-this.” As it cools, it accounts for the conceptual frontiers—ideal and real, authentic and alienated, useful and exchangeable, normal and perverse. Yet bar and band are one and the same: rotating furiously, the band; slowing, the theatrical volume. Why it slows is a question peculiar to representational thinking, itself an effect of the cooling bar.
Grant’s introduction reads Besetzung through Freud’s military metaphor: the superego keeps the id in order by installing “a garrison” where insurrection threatens—occupying, counter-investing. Psychoanalysis thus deploys a militarist ethic akin to critique, for which conflict motors its necessity. Kant’s first Critique likens critique’s service to the police, whose business is preventing citizens’ mutual violence.
The Cry, Jealousy, and the Labyrinths of Intensity
The permanent stays silent because it merely repeats itself; the torture victim’s cry, by contrast, is never one cry but opens as many labyrinths. Jealousy, Lyotard argues, should not be framed through exteriority, triangular formations, penis-envy, or homosexual identification. There is a simpler pulsional jealousy belonging to libidinal economy alone, dissimulated within the coded jealousy of novelists, psychologists, and common sense—a coding that ends up in political economy, in mercantilism and imperialism. The jealousy of the cry is the relation of every piece of the libidinal band to the piece desire elects when it finds affinity: a pulsional call, force seizing surrounding energy, “the whistling made by the leap of force” beating onto an area it invents, forming a labyrinth whose centre is ephemeral as a tornado’s eye. The vulva is jealous of the kissed mouth, the mistress of her lover’s book, the man of the young man’s future, the sun of closed shutters. The cry resounding in helplessness is the noise on the band of the incompossibility of several co-present intensities; the ancient gods’ jealousy is Olympus as the great film turning on itself. No intensity exists without cry and labyrinth; infidelity makes both partners cry because bodies haunt surrounding areas, and the body is jealous of the intensities infidelity brings. The insect under five hundred watts flees into a maze; every labyrinth is traced as flight toward an outlet, but there is no outlet—only habituation (depression, inhibition) or a new cry and labyrinth via an encounter nobody masters. “Love is not giving what one does not have; it is having to cry near to areas struck by lightning.” Joy too has its labyrinths, constructive and concentratory, elevation around a supreme addressee—though incredulous, insolent joy is a horizontal laugh without assent. Against the objection that joyful encounter produces permanence: flight is intensity losing itself in expansion, the expanding universe undecidable between terror and joy, emotions polyvalent labyrinths to which semiologists attribute sense only after the event. The text challenges Spinozist and Nietzschean ethics that separate being-more from being-less, action from reaction, dreading a morality and politics reappearing under these dichotomies—sages, militants, tribunals, prisons. Where there is intensity there is a labyrinth; fixing its meaning is the business of consciousnesses and their directors. Not good and bad intensities but intensity or its decompression; meaning hidden in emotion, vertigo in reason: “no morality at all, rather a theatrics; no politics, rather a conspiracy.” The authors refuse to be liberators of desire with fraternities and Fourieresque fantasies, refuse regilding the tragic, which presupposes the great Zero—prison guard of destinies, mute allocutor, Jewish god, or enigmatic Greek oracle. The unfaithful one necessarily betrays what he encounters and encounters what he betrays; joy and terror intermix; not tragedy of destiny nor comedy of character nor drama of totalization but fictive spaces, “Escher’s waterfalls whose point of impact is higher than their source.”
What the Sign Does to Matter
The road to libidinal currency must be forced open. Semioticians hypothesize the thing as sign within communication theory—”what replaces something for someone”—positing the thing as message, medium of coded elements decoded by an addressee possessing the code. The thing is hollowed out, becomes substitute, and this replacement is conceived two ways: Platonism, where the sign screens and calls up what it announces or conceals, or interminable metonymy under exchange, where signification is constituted by signs alone, endlessly deferred, only differences, a great signifier forever absent—Freud’s and Lacan’s great zero keeping terms disjunct, translated into libidinal economy as “Kastrator.” The material is annihilated: where message, no material—Adorno on Schoenberg’s serialism, where material counts only as relation between terms; Boulez on relations between pitches, intensities, timbres, durations. Is this dematerialization equivalent to what capital does to sensibility, an abstraction of the pulsional band into comparable countable parts, or an opportunity for refinement, a cartography conquering new sonorous, chromatic, sculptural, political, erotic, linguistic regions? The text is convinced the latter is right but pursues the effects of mise en signe: material commuted into sign-term, the thing replaced itself another sign—nothing but signs. First consequence: infinite postponement, recurrence as fundamental trait. Second: with the sign begins the search—once for God under metaphorical organization; for moderns glorying in metonymic substitution, the object is the search itself, scientific research seeking locatable, predictable, controllable metamorphoses.
The Trap of Replacement
Lyotard opens his polemic by demanding that the “determinant” and “dominant” stratagems of a deeply logocentric outlook be swept aside—the outlook that imagined the Greeks knew nothing of labour and would learn it later under Roman and English names. He is willing to march on the bastions of alleged economic rationality and of semiology, but he refuses the trap those bastions set at the very moment they fall: the demand to “put something in my place.” What counts is the place of theory, not its contents, and that place must be undone by displacement and flight. It matters little to deny history if one merely substitutes the linear stages of historical materialism or a patchwork of discontinuous formations; it matters little to deny a universal political economy if one simply adds that symbolic exchange’s ambivalence grants rights to desire’s erotic and lethal force. He credits Baudrillard’s early introduction to the article on fetishism with conceding that desire underlies capitalism too—capital is no libidinal nothing, and carries its own effect of nihilation, that of ambivalence. Once this accord between capital and desire is accepted, one is back inside theory and evaluation, back at Baudrillard’s quoted call to move to the level of symbolic exchange and its theory.
Castration, the Great Zero, and the Savage Alibi
Does political economy rest on ignorance of desire? Baudrillard answers: no, on the foreclosure of castration. Lyotard presses—what is this castration, this foreclosure? Is desire marked by castration and organized like Saussure’s negative langue, a game of hide-and-seek with ourselves? This castration, named the great Zero, belongs for Lyotard not to the order of desire (the movement of energy) but to the order of capital in the broadest sense: the theology that capitalizes affects on the instance of the Other, one figure of desire. Baudrillard would be right to say Lyotard’s libidinal economy forecloses castration and therefore desire; Lyotard hardly maintains the opposite. Against the claim that primitive societies have neither mode of production nor production, no dialectic and no unconscious, he answers flatly: there are no primitive societies.
Methodologically, the society of gift and counter-gift plays the role of a lost reference and unfindable alibi in Baudrillard’s critique of capital. He does not mean to speak of nature, yet fails to see that the whole problematic of the gift and symbolic exchange, received from Mauss with or without the diversions of Bataille, Caillois and Lacan, belongs entirely to Western racism and imperialism—still ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized. Baudrillard’s dichotomy between a “good nature” that lets itself be civilized and a “bad nature” that rebels forgets that Western thought, from Plato’s Timaeus—seeking the guardians of Atlantis among the ancient Egyptian “savages”—through Marx, contains the inverted reference of a good rebel nature, good insofar as rebellious, left outside, forgotten, foreclosed. Ethnology in its entirety, Lévi-Strauss’s as much as Jaulin’s, emanates from this phantasy, one case of the representationalization proper to the West and its logophilia. Lyotard will show this in Marx—not to convince, but through a species of pleasure, affection for the young girl Marx is, dreaming of reconciliation and believing it took place in the past, somewhere else, and that she and her lover the proletariat had been deprived of it. Speaking of the archaic labourer, this feminine Marx resonates with Baudrillard forging his myth of symbolic exchange.
The Religious Scenario of Loss
Whoever refuses to recognize that political economy is libidinal reproduces the same phantasy of an externalized region where desire would be sheltered from transcription into production, labour and the law of value—a non-alienated region. Retracing Marx’s movement, even extending it to desire, begins religion all over again; there is something almost tragic when Baudrillard parodies the 1843 statement “For Germany, the critique of religion is substantially over” with “The critique of political economy is substantially over.” In that 1843 text Marx lets show his thoroughly religious love for a lost consubstantiality of men among themselves and with nature; his desire for return, akin to Rousseau’s, weaves the Christian scenario of the proletariat’s martyrdom as a sacrificial episode necessary to final salvation—the class with radical chains, not a class of civil society, the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of total loss redeeming itself by a total redemption of humanity. Lyotard does not say this scenario exists in Baudrillard, only that the same underlying thing is inevitably reproduced: a region not in society, “generations placed or left out of circulation, off limits, by the very development of productive forces”
The Nullifying Unity of the Body
The pulsional body, as Bellmer describes it, invests the vulval lips while lodging “here and there,” never needing to settle in one place; it runs across what it touches without unifying it, consuming instead. Comparison itself already exerts what Lyotard calls “the crushing pressure of unitary order” on pulsions and their singular investments, since to compare is to annihilate the items compared for the sake of unification. The Lydians demonstrate that this unitary order is really a nullifying organization: on the band of the pulsional labyrinth, unity arrives only when each investment is made compatible with another and calculable in proportion to it—comparison and calculation demanding the annihilation, or “possibilization,” of what, as libido, is always invested affirmatively. The unity of the organic body thus depends on a kind of annulment of investments for equilibration; the subject-merchant-citizen is contemporaneous with a negotiation over scraps of the labyrinthine band.
Psychiatry, Paideia, and the Confusion of Profit
Psychiatrists, with the good-humoured naivety of all agents of order, describe the normalizing of the hysteric as clinical repetitive conditioning: the patient must abandon his compulsion but is also forbidden to doubt it—forbidden, that is, to abandon himself to delirium. Neither pulsional nor delirious investment is permitted; he must be led to an “affective zero,” and since this is unbearable, a transference onto the doctor is obtained, opening a possible communication. Education works the same way on the libidinal body: it blocks this and opens that route, provides comparisons, introduces interest where pulsionally there is no consideration of revenue. Freud’s notions of primary and secondary profit from illness—Dora’s cough, the crippled worker’s saving of effort, the injured worker spending begging proceeds like an alcoholic—introduce “the most serious, the most pernicious confusion” into libidinal economy. They thematize Dora’s pulsional labyrinth as if it were managed by a finance minister, a banker, or an unemployed proletarian—entities belonging to political economy and its central zero, existing only as the power to calculate utilities and choose. The acephalia of the great monoface labyrinthine band is suppressed, and a homo oeconomicus is substituted, “a head full of this negative” which one German philosopher dared say does all the work—meaning all the trade.
The Lydians and the Institution of the I
This substitution is exactly what the Lydians require with their prostitution and money: comparisons and ratios over the pulsional body take place by means of money, so the body ceases to be an impossible landscape swept by libidinal influxes, becomes exchangeable piece by piece, centres on its own zero, and can simulate investments to measure them and work out the most profitable combination. With the installation of the zero on the body—obtained at the price of eliminating entire regions—comes the institution of the I, proprietor of the libidinal fields, able to venture into the mercantilist circumference to offer and demand fields and sections of fields. On the Lydian circle everything is marketable; the commodity develops from universality; the I is its procurer.
Vera Schmidt’s Social Body
Children collect flowers. Wolik, three years and three months old, sets down his little boxes; Genja, two years and ten months, approaches to take them; Wolik cries that she has no right, they belong to him. Genja whimpers that she wants the boxes. Schmidt tells Genja it doesn’t make her happy when Wolik won’t lend, and it didn’t make Wolik happy when she wouldn’t lend him her wheelbarrow; next time she should give him what he wants and he will give her what she wants. Wolik, listening, holds out the boxes and offers to lend them; Genja, delighted, takes them and is about to escape when she changes her mind and asks if Wolik wants her wheelbarrow; he rejoices yes. Genja runs to the wheelbarrow, but Wolodja, two years and ten months, has taken it; caught up in her game, she doesn’t fancy giving it up. She ponders, eyebrows knitted, then asks Wolodja if he wants two little boxes; Wolodja agrees and gives the wheelbarrow to Wolik. Everyone is happy: Genja has one little box, Wolodja two, Wolik the wheelbarrow. “And Vera Schmidt has her social body.”
Institutive Prostitution and the Condition of Commutability
The Lydians extend exchangeability to fallow segments and thereby extend perversity: potentially every segment of the sensualist body can, if concentrated, take its place as a “good”—an object convertible according to the “nothing” that is money—on the circle of exchanges, torn from the illusion of natural functioning and prepared for polymorphous perverse use.
Speculation as Nomad Looting
Securities traders, Lyotard argues, repeat the situation of the nomad looter even without sumptuous feasts: conquering a mass of actions provokes their devaluation on completion, just as the cavalier’s conquest of territory implies abandoning it and delaying its exhaustion. Things conquered or looted are already dead and must be rejected quickly; every conquest is a flight forward toward things not yet devalued yet already devalued since about to be seized. The times of the labyrinth ignore one another — “each to its own in matters of fire and ashes.”
The Credit Data of 1929
Loans to brokers came principally from non-banking origins. On 31 December 1924, of $2,230 million lent to brokers, only $550 million did not come from banks; by 31 December 1927 the figures were 4,430 and 1,830; by 31 December 1928, 6,440 and 3,885 — more than half; by 4 October 1929, 8,525 and 6,440, about three-quarters non-bank. As J. Nere shows, non-bank funds come from the working capital of industrial and commercial societies — capital normally invested in reproduction “plays” at being lent at the highest price, exchangeable against securities, liquidable at any moment. It is not enough, then, to speak of evil speculators: a compulsion to speculate affects even capital earmarked for reproduction, and the same men — company heads, presidents of societies — love the postponed and deferred, preferring them to mercantilist pleasures.
Nere’s Unanswered Question
The question posed by the 1929 crisis is not why there was speculation, which has always existed and is a libidinal instantiation accepting no “because,” like industrial capitalism itself. Nere’s real difficulty is the extent of speculation on credit not directly supplied by surplus revenues — how such risky speculation involved so much working capital and compromised normal mechanisms of short-term credit and payments; there is a lack of basic information to answer this.
No Response to Libidinal Displacement
There is no response to the question of a libidinal displacement of inscription: that intensity is instantiated in securities trade rather than in the production of consumable commodities is no more explicable than libido moving from the genital zone to the anus or the ear. Call it regression if it makes you happier; the eroticization of the Stock Market is not explained but noted. Its 1929 proportions permit only affirmation: this is one manner in which force may be intensified in capitalism and on the part of capitalists — though this dispositif could function only in the margins, even at the price, in the “normal” modality, of reproduction and postponement. The example shows we have not begun to describe the libidinal economy of capital; these pages are a minuscule contribution.
Against Ambivalence
Don’t say these pages show ambivalence in credit money — confidence-inspiring versus not, advances versus outside the cycle. What matters is not one investment being both reproductive and speculative, but that two indiscernible instantiations are exposed to intensities, voluptuousness vacillating unpredictably between them. Don’t replace the optimistic dialectic of the one and the pessimistic dialectic of the other with the open secret of ambivalence. Ambivalence is the co-presence of vectors of opposed meanings in one space-time; the duplicity of capitalist credit is the co-presence of tensors in signs and signs in tensors — and signs and tensors do not belong to the same space-time: signs arise from the system in which they are transformable, commutable, translatable, exchangeable; each tensor opens its ephemeral time and labyrinthine evanescent space.
The Jealous Hypothesis of Finitude
The jealous hypothesis of a finite quantity of wealth made by every mercantilism, by all speculation, is constitutive of these labyrinths. Every intensity is a flight to death, to exhaustion, energy spent at the height of its force, exploiting every reserve, destroying every organized body: the nomads of great invasions, Louis XIV, the brokers of 1929. Should signs be exchanged between former and latter, land for transferable stocks, nothing would change regarding the phantasy of such “finitude” and the reality of its cruelty. Signs are not substitutes following sedentary, structuralist habits of thought; they are displaceable masses of energy. The nomad’s horse is only the earth made more mobile. Moving from earth to horse — neither instrument nor weapon but vehicle — from horse to bill of exchange, from this to the call loan, they moved closer to the greatest possible displaceability, toward a time and space less and less “global,” cosmic, more and more libidinal, labyrinthine, ephemeral. Is there a space-time of speculation to be plotted out, a geography and history of the Stock Market?
The Band, the Bar, and the Great Zero
The conceptual machinery Lyotard builds is strange and deliberately so. At the center sits the “libidinal band,” or great ephemeral skin—a surface with neither inside nor outside, on which intensities run and connect without reference to any subject, identity, or meaning. It is not offered as a description of reality but as a persuasive fiction, one that can account for what representational thinking excludes. Against the band stands the “bar,” an operator of disintensification: when the bar slows, the mad circulation of intensities cools, and out of that cooling come the distinctions between “this” and “not-this,” self and world, past and future. The concept, negation, memory, and time itself arrive with the abatement of intensity. Representation is what the band looks like when it stops spinning.
The third term is the “great Zero”—the absent instance, the Other, the God or signifier around which representation organizes its theater. Lyotard treats the Zero not as an illusion to be debunked but as one figure of desire among others; one cannot, he insists, assume a position on the band from which to denounce it. What he does denounce is the religious and philosophical habit of capitalizing all affect on that absent instance, of routing every intensity through the Zero and calling the result meaning, law, or salvation. Augustine is his great example: the Church Father who cannot understand the pagan gods of connection and tries to split intensity into appearance and essence, play and madness, simulacrum and truth—and fails, because the difference will not hold.
Investment, Incompossibility, and the Refusal of Critique
The book’s most portable idea is its reworking of investissement, the French word that serves both Freud’s Besetzung (cathexis) and the fiscal sense of investment. Lyotard exploits the pun relentlessly: there is no libidinal economy separate from political economy, because the same energy is invested in a factory, a theory, a lover, or a revolution. Freud himself, in a passage Lyotard returns to, described the superego installing “a garrison” where insurrection threatens—occupation and counter-investment. Critique does the same, hollowing out an interior where conflicts can be staged as mock combat while the critical philosopher watches from a safe seat. Both psychoanalysis and critique want stabilization; both are, in Lyotard’s terms, theological.
Against this he sets the Leibnizian notion of the “incompossible”: many things are possible, but not possible together. Investments do not replace one another the way a better belief replaces a worse one; they pile up like the ruins of Rome beneath later buildings, blocked together without temporal or spatial order. The unconscious, Lyotard insists, has no capacity for negation—it never relinquishes an investment for a better one. From this follows his ethics, or rather his refusal of ethics: no morality, only a theatrics; no politics, only a conspiracy. The critic’s demand that we renounce the old position for a truer one is itself the gesture to be refused.
Schreber, Klossowski, and the Tensor Sign
The book’s middle chapters put this machinery to work on texts. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness becomes a case study not of paranoia but of the “tensor sign”—a proper name, Flechsig, around which incompossible intensities spin until the name no longer designates a person but an anonymous scrap of the libidinal band. Schreber must become a woman to be impregnated by God; defecation becomes a miracle; the doctor is simultaneously lover, persecutor, and idiot. Freud’s reading, which reduces all of this to transformations of “I love him,” is set aside as an exemplary semiotic operation—one that makes the vertigo legible by killing it. “Flechsig my arse,” Lyotard writes. “Beyond synonymy and homonymy, anonymity.”
Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency supplies the next target. Klossowski imagines the body of a woman functioning directly as money, its libidinal price fixing the value of commodities. Lyotard admires the audacity and dismantles the premise: the moment intensity becomes a currency, even a living one, it has already been neutralized into a sign. Klossowski remains, in Lyotard’s phrase, a nihilist of transgression—still measuring intensity against a lost unity, still secretly Christian. Sade, by contrast, interests Lyotard because his houses of debauchery are political institutions, not economic ones; the debt they discharge is a debt of jouissance owed by every citizen to every other, and the politician who connives with the beast is a Machiavellian figure, not a merchant.
Marx, Baudrillard, and the Desire Named Marx
The book’s longest polemic is aimed at Marx and at Jean Baudrillard, who had accused Lyotard of foreclosing castration and therefore desire. Lyotard cheerfully concedes the charge and turns it around: castration, the great Zero, is not the order of desire but the order of capital in the broadest sense—the theology that capitalizes affects on the instance of the Other. Baudrillard’s “symbolic exchange,” his lost primitive society of the gift, belongs, Lyotard argues, entirely to Western racism and imperialism; it is ethnology’s good savage, slightly libidinalized. There are no primitive societies, he concludes. We are all savages, and all savages are capitalized capitalists.
Marx himself fares no better. The young Marx of 1843, dreaming of a class with radical chains that redeems humanity by its total loss, is a religious lover mourning a lost consubstantiality; the Marx who calls money “the pimp between need and object” is still telling the Christian story of alienation and reconciliation. The fantasy of a happy, self-unified working body is the same fantasy as Baudrillard’s primitive society, and the critique of political economy that rests on it merely begins religion over again.
Madame Edwarda and the Promise of Capital
The book closes on a strange, exultant note. If capital dissolves the primacy of genitality—if money becomes the sole bond and justifies anything—then it also unbinds the partial pulsions, releasing sensuality into senselessness and perhaps madness. Lyotard’s emblem is Madame Edwarda, the prostitute of Bataille’s tale who exposes herself in the street, faints, hates her client, and returns by taxi to a bruising orgasm. This, he says, is what capital promises lovers of organic bodies: not coldness but deregulation, the disjunctive bar turning on itself. Marx recoils; the “Little Girl Marx” inside him invents critique to defend against the fascination. Lyotard chooses the fascination instead. There has never been an organic body, never a nature to be denatured—only the (in)organic body as a representation on capital’s own stage, and the intensities that pass through it.
A Book That Refuses to Be a Theory
Libidinal Economy has aged into a document of a particular moment—the early 1970s, when the grand syntheses of Marx and Freud were being pulled apart by thinkers who had grown up inside them. Its influence runs through the later French turn against critique, and its style, which Grant chose to render with all its long-breath distortions rather than smooth into comprehensible English, remains its argument: momentum and the rapid pressure of change over clarity, intensity over extent. Lyotard would later become famous for very different work, but this book is the record of a philosopher trying to write his way out of philosophy—and, by his own account, succeeding only in producing another theory, another investment, another ruin on the band.
