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 organization. In the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th centuries commercial imperialism was based on two main preoccupations: technical development and the conquest of markets. When State capitalism appeared, an omnipresent economic organization 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 judgment, organizes 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 organize 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 colonization it consolidates its conquest of the provinces of life with the diligence acquired in its exploitative phase. The more its organizational needs take shape, the more its abstraction becomes tangible.

While consumable products are progressively humanized 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.

Intellectualized 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 labor. 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 labor (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 armory. 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 practiced 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 labor, 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 exorcizes 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 proletarianizes 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 recognized), as a foreign intrusion: the mind which governs the manual labor 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 proletarianization 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 proletarianization 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 modeled on the commodity system. It translates into power mechanisms the abstract organization 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 intellectualized, 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, organizes, 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 kindhearted 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 combating 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, organizers, bureaucrats and leaders, and workers, laborers, 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 proletarianized 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 organizes and imposes it. The proletarians have thus acquired the preferential right unanimously to reject leaders. But the managerial principle reemerges 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 modeled 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 characterize 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 symbolizes 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 sulfurous 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 industrialization 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 prized 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 modernized 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 candor 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 actualization 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 defense 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 paralyzes 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 unraveled.

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 terrorizes 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 recognized 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 fulfill 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 theater. Affectation and mannerisms, muscular spasms, a jutting lip, the military stare, hard features and a studied voice, are so many doors slammed on life’s desires, so many running nooses slipped tight round pleasure, and so many mad outbursts to come contained in humble bowing and scraping, flabbiness, listlessness and the frenetic urge to destroy oneself. You might think one moment of true happiness enough to blow this insubstantial haze away.

We have pressed so far into despair that there is nothing left in front of us but the climb back to life. Do you not feel that, increasingly, pleasure is shaking free from being dictated to by money or the head? It is ages since sexuality winked at you out of a pun, the fantasies contained in a look, in resonances or homophonies. Counting-rhymes and landscapes, indescribable signs and messages are the threaded pearls of eroticism repressed. There is nothing which does not pair and embrace; but on the screen of repression you only get to see the licentious insinuations of the puritan and the unhappy salaciousness of frustrated love.

Initially, I like to believe, intelligence was a hand and a tool for desires, to light the haphazard pursuit of their satisfaction. The paths of sensory shrewdness have been interfered with and effaced by the commercial routes of work and profit. The instinctive and rudimentary practice of the first ages has, along with the tool which sprang from its own creativeness, undergone an accompanying evolution the transformation of men into masters and slaves to match the economic recuperation of instruments invented in the play of desires.

So one sees the family mutilate the impressionable intelligence of the child to set it to work, education and production. Reflect! says the will to power’s mirror to the child. Be reasonable! teaches economic reason. Where’s your head? fusses the intellect as it takes control of the body. Sensual lucidity, which grows out of the awakening of the first desires, is torn from global sexuality and passes into the service of universal exchange, where it becomes intellectuality repressing, directing and inverting the impulses of life.

What you call intelligence, a measurable and testable product judged by its yield, I can only perceive as passion repressed, brought to heel and made to produce. The intelligence born of the self-satisfaction of desire, cares not a hoot for that kind. If it is true that everyone is as stupid as what he represses — for there is no other sort of stupidity — then intellectuality is really and truly stupidity committed by a sensitive, sensual, sensory intelligence.

Putting intense pleasure first prepares for the end of separate thought. The intellectual function works, while the intelligence of desire creates. All the lucidity I wish for is born of the quest for pleasure, in refining the thorn into the rose, in gardening sexual luxuriance into an order of satisfactions beyond number. I care nothing for books and learned dissertation, the art and ornament of the spirit. What do knowledge, curiosity, science, and awareness matter to me if they do not deepen the intensity of my pleasure, liberate my passions or feed my will to live?

Each time groups form through thinking in a similar way rather than because the desires they set about harmonize, business society does not have to lift a finger to recuperate what these groups think up. However at ease ideas may be in every head, they never leave power’s orbit. But they rot what they contact and only intense pleasure can uproot and destroy them, by going beyond them.

From now on the intellectual function perishes through over-nourishment. In the extreme abstraction which has laid hold of pleasure, the point of reversal is reached when the only language I aim to have always with me is that of intense pleasure, as if I had one of those wines which need to breathe and develop before being drunk.

Inverting the order of priorities, I wish to place the work of thought in fee to what it has so long treated as frivolous, as merest nothings. A dream, a fugitive memory, an impression, momentary luck, a kiss driving me wild — those are what I wish to grasp with all the clearheadedness they contain. In this I keep to the heart of my personal history, and it is there I am aware of setting about what is now historically possible: the elimination of the State and of its omnipresent separate thought.

There is an alchemy at which every one feels himself to be mysteriously adept, and whose imperatives science has veiled. It seeks a light none can dim to counter deadly radiation by business — irradiation by life!

How can one understand reason in the presence of pleasure? The aerial of desire picks up only what it wants to. Finding pleasure everywhere interests me too passionately to halt at words attempting to pin me down, to define, judge, inflate or whittle me down in accordance with the variable lights of power in office and their ability to replace themselves. He who goes his way seeking all the amusements you cannot price quickly learns to avoid traps, slipping away without difficulty from “you must” and “you can’t” which otherwise would injure him daily with a thousand running sores. It is not the voluntarism of rejection which leads to a game like this but the epidermal sensitivity of “I’d like”, “I love”, “I like it”, “I do not like”, “I would really like”, which is the music of the self’s opulence, the very impulse of the will to live, the whirlpool of desire into which are carried word for word measurement, judgment, comparison, evaluation, exchange.

The few societies in which trade is rudimentary have kept a livelier imprint of sensual intelligence. In such places hands heal, looks hypnotize, a softly spoken word unlocks rivers, a desire overturns laws held immutable, signs charm animals and plants. Who is talking about supernatural abilities? It is simply a matter of an approach to nature, but one which “seduces” rather than, as do industrious spirits, reduces it to an object of work.

The civilized body agonizes, galvanized and sucked into a factory of muscles and nerves and effort, sport, productive capacity, asepsis, esthetics, shame and torture, neurosis, and sado-medical experiment. Nonetheless its double language is always putting out the contradictory message of life and death. Anxiety, fear and oppression weigh upon and contrast the thoractic cage, so that the heart like a bird inside it, smashes against the bars and shatters, falls, and ceases to quiver. On the contrary, the way happiness breathes, the way passion surges, our hearts have the whole body to disport in and can be heard throughout. The imprisoned heart is heard through a stethoscope and belongs to the doctor. The passionate heart fills all space with life and rings like an organ playing to fantastic echoes. The same applies to every organ of the body.

We know that hands which smooth away pain, which create and caress, play and excite one to intense pleasure, will soon prevail over those reduced to manipulating commodities; and also we know that intelligence is going to cease to identify with the intellectual function. If the brain only operates at a third of its capacity, is not that precisely because it works, because it has been cut off from the body and made to join the head? Allow it to adapt to mounting desire and unite with the sexual impulse, and we would be unable to refrain from the impression that we are in the process of creating the superior intelligence of our animal nature.

4. The end of the State and the end of intellectuality are one and the same.

Sensual intelligence will bring about the classless society. How can we get rid of leaders if we do not drop the intellectual function, work’s permanent representative loose in our heads? Any rejection not based on our will to live is simply another refusal of life. We treat people and things the wrong way so habitually they usually reach us only to attack and kill us. Life is what fills me with passion, not its murderous abstraction.

A sudden shift of perspective and I see the attraction in some rock, or in someone’s face, the feeling in the air, in the landscape, in a book or a sonata, in a basil sauce. Why persistently treat the world in a disembodied, hostile, uncaring way when the allure of possible pleasures has the privilege of throwing trade out because it is so defective?

The profitability of people and things, and the false contemplative freedom which goes with it, is opposed by the life in rock and plant and people slowly coming together, which power knows nothing of. When it eventually shakes loose, the economy and its client states will disappear; instead, a society will arise in which technical riches serve a wealth of individual desires. This is the collective struggle which commerce and its cripples refuse to see being drawn up against them.

The new sensibility heralds a radically different world, for sensual intelligence brings about the definitive end of work with all its separations. True spontaneity is your desires in search of freedom: it will dissolve the age-old nightmare of economics and trading civilization, with its banks, prisons, barracks, factories and deadly boredom. Soon we will construct our houses, bring back street life, and set winding paths though a nature reconciled to man. We will have fetal areas, adventure zones, houses which are inspired, others that move, other times where age has no meaning and reality no limits. We will invent micro-climates to vary according to mood, and forget the era when scientific bureaucracy was refining its weapons of metereological destruction and ridiculing us as utopians. For spontaneity is innocence and can undo the past which is so horribly with us, where everything which kills is possible and everything which stimulates life is treated as mad.