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 19th and the first half of the 20th 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 to