Libidinal Economy – Part 1

RELATED TERMS: Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1; Fordism and Post-Fordism; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control

“It is said that the reader of an American magazine was so disturbed by an article on the subject of smoking and cancer that he decided to give up reading.” (Anecdote cited by Tim Harford, 2025)

In the French tradition, Eleanor Kaufman (2007) points out, the synthesis of Marx and Freud reached a heightened pace between the years of 1968 and 1974, above all in the work of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan and Pierre Klossowski. The two most significant texts from this period are often thought to be Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974).

Although Alain Badiou’s early work is deeply critical of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, Kaufman (2007) argues that there is in fact a startlingly lucid nexus of arguments in these writings that can be summarised according to three broad thematics or chiasms: exchange value and use value; human desire and inhuman desire; temporal movement and atemporal inertia. 

Exchange Value and Use Value

The first thematic is the rethinking of the hierarchy of exchange value over use value, with emphasis on the desire structure proper to use value

Exchange value would seem to be something more abstract and more imbued with the complexity of money while use value would seem to refer to a presumably immutable quality of the object or thing in itself. This is particularly important for thinking about ‘designs’ of whatever complexity, from object to system, since one presumption has been that a primary focus of design is utility. Perhaps, or especially, even the notion of affordance remains tinged with utilitarianism.

However, as Jean Baudrillard (1981) writes in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, use value and indeed utility itself is a fetishised social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities.

Thus, following Klossowski, Lyotard (1993: 82) proposes that both use and exchange value should be seen “as signs of intensity, as libidinal values (which are neither useful nor exchangeable), as pulsations of desire, as moments of Eros and death.”

Human and Inhuman Desire

The second thematic is that of a perverse, inhuman or machinic desire that transfuses the human being and transforms a relation of pure exploitation or revolt into something else. In this thematic, the boundaries of the human are explored through the death drive. The importance of this is to recognise that there is a logic of desire, often masochistic, that infuses all submission, and non-submission, to conditions of exploitation.

By way of example, Baudrillard (1981: 204) cites the following incident: “A group occupied and neutralized [a US Department] store by surprise, and then invited the crowd by loudspeaker to help themselves. A symbolic action! And the result? Nobody could figure out what to take – or else they took insignificant items they could easily have filched on any normal shopping day.”

Baudrillard’s point is that any attempt to liberate pure use value fails because use is always bound up in a logic of desire that is more rooted in the “desire of the code” than in the specificity of the object itself.

Lyotard’s (1981: 111) example focuses on the English proletariat, “at what capital, that is to say their labour, has done to their body. You will tell me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always that or die, this is the law of libidinal economy, no, not the law: this is its provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire; … perhaps you believe that “that or die” is an alternative?!  … Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it. The English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.”

The basic insistence that capital conditions and thrives on the very desires that would seem to be at odds with it, and that one cannot think situations of oppression or hegemony without taking these desires into account is a lesson of Lyotard’s libidinal economy, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, Gramsci’s model of hegemony and Fanon’s analysis of colonialism.

The theorists of libidinal economy argue that not to consider economy through the lens of desire, disjuncture and perversion is to fail to understand it. In short, one must attend to the desires that undergird use value and hence capital.

A corollary of attending to the desires that undergird use value and capital is that one must similarly be attuned to desires in the very form and genre of Marxian analysis itself, in short, as Lyotard (1993: 95-154) puts it, “The desire named Marx?”

Lyotard argues that there are at least two Marxes: one who is a severe critic of capital (the Big Bearded Prosecutor Marx) yet unable to dispense with his fascination for it; and the other who is caught in a juvenile state of enrapture with capital (the Little Girl Marx) yet rejects its “prostitution under the name of alienated mediation” Lyotard, 1993: 136).

In this extreme if not obscene fashion, Lyotard raises the important question of the desiring-relation to capital of those who critique it.

What Badiou denounces as a ‘false window’ is precisely the point of entrance that the libidinal economy theorists would take, highlighting above all Lacan’s ‘involuntary’ theory of the party and the Marxists’ ‘unenlightened’ theory of desire.

The point of the libidinal economy analysis is to retain two poles of the equation, such as use value and exchange value, and to observe how the two exchange positions in chiasmic fashion: use takes on the affective currency of exchange, while exchange has a utilitarian dimension.

Badiou’s work from the 1980s and his more recent meditations on Marxism and psychoanalysis represent an extreme departure from the work of the libidinal economy theorists. Badiou maintains the significance of such terms as the party, the workers, the masses, and the subject. By contrast, thinkers such as Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Klossowski are more decisively bent on an overt undermining of these terms. Hence, they are determined to show that precisely where you think there is practice, there is theory; where you think there is the material, there is the ideal; and above all, where you think there is a body, there is also language in a chiasmic and dialectical relation to that body. 

If the libidinal economists seek to foreground the desiring mechanisms that underlie not only capital but their very attempt to write it, Badiou eschews such self-reflexivity.

Novelty-Movement and Radical Inertia

The third thematic is a thought of radical inertia. Badiou’s work is squarely at odds with the project of libidinal economy on multiple counts. Nevertheless, in different ways, both Badiou and the libidinal economy theorists come up against something that might be described as an atemporal force of inertia.

In libidinal economy theory there is clearly a premium on unstoppable libidinal flux and energetic machines. Even so, this thought also pushes towards its opposite: inertia. This can be witnessed in evocations of immobility at the end of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ coming up against the plane of consistency. At these points, there is an elusive yet radical inertia that rests at the limit point of such analyses, one that is not unlike Freud’s death drive. For Kaufman, it is the power of this radical inertia that is the greatest insight of the strain of thought that counts as the theory of the libidinal economic.

It would seem that Marxian thought and psychoanalytic thought are poised to discern in the problem of the new and mobile the simultaneous presence of the old and the immobile. Thinking the joint relation of inertia and stasis beyond simple mobility is, for Eleanor Kaufman, a central concern for our time.

Reference

Baudrillard, J. (1981) For a critique of the political economy of the sign. Translated by C. Levin. Candor, NY: Telos Press.

Harford, T. (2025) The resistant reader. Financial Times, 21 June, Weekend Magazine pp. 7-8

Kaufman, E. (2007) The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the Legacy of Libidinal Economy, Postmodern Culture, 18(1), pp. 1–31.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1993) Libidinal economy. Translated by I. H. Grant. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.