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 labor’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 fetid 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 center 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 desacralized, 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 crystallize 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 behavior 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 realizing 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 labor, 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 amid 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 labor. 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 civilization, 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 unlivable, 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 rancor, 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 ardor 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 recognized 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 proletarianization through work and constraint has no choice but to die — or to put creative pleasure foremost.

Fundamentally, salable 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 bony 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 civilization.

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 naught. 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 behavior 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 criticize 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 checker-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 proletarianization of the body. Beneath the misery of the laboring 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 proletarianization 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, modeled 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 proletarianize 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 blowout.

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.

Esthetes 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 fulfillment, 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 organization and revive mystic solidarity, severing friendships to follow the honorable course of action. Artists in regression and modernizers of recuperation come from the same piss-pot: Business.

As for nit-picking distinctions by forensic pathologists, what do I care for your carefully-labeled 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 proletarianized.

Work is the opposite of creativity. As human behavior 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 industrialization and the breakdown of the artisan class by the marketing of culture and concretization 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 organization of labor 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, channeling 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 labor 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-defense 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.

Behavior 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 molts through patient labor 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 commercialized 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 ritualized 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 civilization.

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 organizing 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 proletarianize itself.

When emancipation proletarianizes, 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 recognizes 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 proletarianization — 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 behavior 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 labor, 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 civilization 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 center 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, specialization 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 traveling. 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 fulfillment 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 traveling 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, guerrillas 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 civilization 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 organization for everyday life — the factories. More and more unselfconsciously sabotage transforms assembly lines into amusement arcades, changes a warehouse into a free distribution center, the boss and the agitator get greeted with jeers and cat-calls. So who is going to seize the factories to organize 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 generalized move towards diversion [détournment] is to be found in ecologist technology. Not that solar energy, soil regeneration, an end to deep plowing, 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 recognized 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-centered civilization 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.