Chapter 4 : Intense Pleasure Means An End To Guilt And To Every Kind Of Repressive Society

Chapter 4. INTENSE PLEASURE MEANS AN END TO GUILT AND TO EVERY KIND OF REPRESSIVE SOCIETY

1. Life is the unpardonable crime for which trading business exacts perpetual punishment.

What you restrain you always feel guilty about. How can what you exchange be perfect? How can a society based on the reification of life not find the simple fact of being human flawed? Guilt is to the economic organization of life what an insoluble debt is to the balance of payments.

From our ancient belief in divine punishment we have retained the machinery of suggestibility, and if there has been any progress in intellectual work through the slow erosion of that mythical beyond, which business no longer finds useful, there still remains a last prop from ideological theater in the projector and screen which priests used to subjugate crowds. Intellectuality is caught in its own birdlime, guilt-ridden at being an unrepentant cheat.

Birth is the sin for which only death can atone. At the heart of all religions, this sin of origin has been gradually stripped bare by economic imperialism; we can now gaze at its raw flesh: life, which power has not managed to ingest and dissolve, absolutely free unfettered pleasure. All the energy that men are forced to account for is totalized as work energy which has to be paid for until the end of economic time, when our disappearance from the scene will cancel the transaction and annul all outstanding debts.

While the self-destructive business process casts itself as progress to contrast with the barbarism of the past, penal rigors like torture and death sentences glow like contraband. The democratic law condemning them in the name of the rights of man is the same law that profits them by making people pay by installments. The old collective guilt of religious myth and the grand ideologies is as fragmented as society and leaves individuals to deal with it privately as though they had something to feel ashamed about.

This faculty for feeling guilty is the hidden persuader in a world where you pay for everything, where you even owe money on what maims and kills you, where they break your legs and sell you crutches. What woeful repercussions putting up with guilt has; it inhabits us as the intellectual function, as the duty towards incessant exchange, as the interiorized depreciation of the economy. Its oft repeated lessons teach us each day to dig the grave of regrets, with the pleasures that power and profit repress. To turn your back on guilt, or to destroy it only partially, to exorcize it, encourages it to return and encrust more thickly.

Education is founded on fear of pleasure. Nothing is more calculated to extinguish pleasure than your need to produce, be commercially viable, serve some purpose. Any constraint whatsoever, however mild, excites the faint-heart fear of living and free existence. At this point the child’s apprenticeship begins.

Didn’t lies and dares, bullying and fighting, teach us to sharpen our wits and focus our brains? Aside from sensual experience where we each have to learn for ourselves, what pieces of knowledge can you think of which were not forced into you by threats or summons, blackmailing you to be virtuous in your own interest, your future, or your standing? How many poems have you memorized, how many rules absorbed; how many chronologies and theorems, craftily devised to direct you into obeying and giving orders, showing respect and scorn? What erudition, what lofty spirit — paid for at the price of punishment! What was knocked into me under threat remains hostile to me for ever.

Repressed desire is irradiated with terror, and glazes the most peaceable life with fright at every stirring of voluptuous feeling, or passion surging from the stomach as though out of the bowels of the earth, out of one’s mother, out of the forest. Work treats the desires it represses into the night and dreams as evil spells. What is lovable becomes detestable. Life as sin provokes its dreadful outburst everywhere, delivering imagination over to the monsters of unacknowledged longing, the venom of phallic serpents poisons the bushes of these hollow dreams, and from maternal limbo issue ghosts, vampires, vaginal ghouls and castrating dragons which watch over the hell of sex, ever since the elite of the world upside down tricked it out in death’s colors.

Horror, for the economy, is just an ordinary dream. It envelops sexuality and only reveals it to daylight when shorn of its night time damnation. In this way the seductiveness of life mingles with the anguish of feeling it suddenly turn its face towards death. And this is how envy, jealousy, resentment and vengeance manage so easily to push out pleasure.

Count apprenticeship to inverted pleasure among the principal services of the family and school. It guarantees the servility of the illness, of the director’s office, police station, church, jail. It is the smell of agony, the stench of survival.

A society based on the exploitation of life draws its energy from ever-present fear. That fear has started to be shared out democratically to make it bureaucratize “spontaneously”, when it will beat in our hearts like the life pulse itself.

Pain is the product of feeling at fault. The Hebrew myth in which Adam and Eve were playing the game of the snake and the apple, condemned humankind to bear children in sorrow and eat bread by the sweat of their face. The cut-price reality of it now no longer makes anyone laugh; economic tyranny drags the living from their beds every day and whips them as they come down the production lines. No holy shroud can hide from us the wound inflicted on life; everything we touch is spattered with blood from it.

All suffering stems from this primeval aggression cynically presented as the result of a fault we committed. Education’s only aim is to make children remember it, and, since no matter what we do. education marks us for life, the age-old resignation to death as our fate will soon give way to a deserving suicide on an easy conscience; and State bureaucracy will reap an even bigger profit.

But once a radically new society appears, which will ruin the economy and harmonize our desires, I maintain that the only real kind of suffering — the pain of self-destruction and the sorrow of having accepted death — will no longer exist. Instead of inflicting fits of anxiety on yourself, torturing yourself with visions of being abandoned, breaking your arm, having stomach-aches and kidney troubles, asthma or cancer, you need feel only the capricious absence of pleasure, unexpected sorrow, or the false slips made in exhaustion. These versions of sod’s law add their own detours to the population better than legions of helmeted killers. Inside military uniforms there is sometimes a faint spark of life able to beam out through the robot, but the shiver of fear is worse than death, it is the ripple of life draining away. Everywhere power advances, where your prestige saunters, and authority confirms its presence, you can smell the musty odor of angst-ridden pleasures and guilty happiness. You recognize the whiff of the guts as they knot and relax, the specific sweat of hate, and contempt, of examinations and sinuous progress of desire; only the compulsions of power find malignant displeasure in confusing them with the joy of suicide, happiness in chains, or funeral feasts where death settles the bill, in full, for turning life on its head.

The imbecilic belief which sees suffering and the trials of life as an eternal defect is only belief in the eternality of business civilization. Holding that belief is why you continue merely to survive, economizing on yourself just as the system economizes on life, and putting up with a mean shabby existence in which, everyday, more and more miserably, the roles of honor, dignity, virtue, sacrifice, merit and their opposites interact and are exchanged. Your inhibiting reflex has got you so used to weakening your desire that there is no happiness which does not also nurse the fear of its being upset, nor success untroubled by thoughts of a backlash, nor joy which does not run after its sorrow as if the rain paid insurance on fine weather!

Guilt stems from the fundamental lack of respect in exchange: you never give up enough of yourself. That is why, everywhere and always, you are guilty. Guilty for not working, or for working, for being rich, being poor, having fun, not having fun, not bringing fun with you, for being successful, or failing to be, for living and for dying. Circumstances, your age, fashion, the why’s and wherefore’s, everything which tears the will to live from you in order to set you in power’s perspective, bounces you from one corner to the next, condemning and acquitting you.

The degree to which the libido is repressed in an era is measureable against the ravages of plague, the advance of cancer, collective suicide hysteria, which welcomes wars, massacres, crusades, nationalist, fascist and stalinesque ideology with open arms. The vast cheerless systems of thought now breaking up is what is preventing people offering themselves yet again as a holocaust to the power identified with their death wish; the suicidal urge has narrowed to the personal level at the service of work and boredom. As the economic garrote progressively tightens you get that taste of death in your mouth — what survival pleasures taste of: forced enjoyment, obligatory partying, and packaged happiness — the sort of thing they sell from door to door with the catch-phrase “amuse yourselves to death”.

Guilt haunts private misery like shame does, forever hungering for the bitter pleasure of destroying itself. Included in every destiny is the punishment for not being solvent enough, for not exchanging enough, for not being able to give up desire. Added to the permanent worry about paying your dues or not being paid for your trouble, death delivers the pay-off, a frozen orgasm of the body finally reduced to the completely rotten commodity. Death and guilt stare out of unavoidable exchange as if its glance would turn life to stone for escaping ownership by the economy.

What is astonishing if the development of medicine coincided with that of the bourgeoisie? It relieves and maintains the punitive value of illness, in the same way that priests maintained and alleviated collective guilt. It is only the rituals of sacrifice which have changed.

If torturers share with doctors the well-earned reputation of knowing most about the human body, it is because in practice, despite apparently irreconcilable aims, they both condemn the body by scorning the pleasures that the body enjoys. Their cult glorifies the vital mechanism as economic machinery. The body fitted for output is the victim-elect of a god of profit, and what we have been taught is that none can use it without tears.

Further, while pleasures turned into work succeed in weakening life to the benefit of thought, doctors look set to disappear along with priests since they both take part in economic progress and the making actual of the commodity. We hardly need mediators when everyone cultivates his roles and neuroses himself, and, in the pursuit of know-how and self-awareness, learns to conduct himself ‘autonomously’ as his own body’s doctor, torturer and economist.

The agony begins as the human is progressively reduced to business processes, and the will to live grows more anemic. The vultures of guilt have never stooped so low, and the gloomy symphony — remember the repressed pederasty of the gregorian mode and the amorous impotence of romantic music — has never modulated so morbidly upon the wish to have done with it, once and for all.

And yet there is another song rising which will make us forget the guilty refrain and its master-singers. Innocence is like life: you only learn it in the arms of pleasure.

2. The world upside down reaches its point of possible reversal when the only way out of proletarianization through guilt is either death or the preeminence of the new innocence.

One does not struggle against guilt by feeling guilty about it. What is not based on accomplishing life is based on the actualization of bad conscience. Exchange means striking a fair balance between the duty to judge and the right to be judged. You condemn class justice as though all justice did not involve class society. Appealing to fairness is only a demand for better decisions made by intellectual work, and surrender to the wisdom of a controlling agency.

Your justice is simply guilt balancing guilt, recognizing only guilty and non-guilty, which interchange as times dictate. So what if a condemnation is swapped for a no grounds, if on balance it weighs more one side or another, when the sword obeys power’s flail! You must pay — that is the universal principle regulating exchange. Pay more or pay less, it matters little to me. I do not want these subtle calculations of reciprocal torts, in positive and negative, merits and demerits, which in the end only express what’s human withering as trade withers.

Judges and judged, what is your place in all this? Stealing, making love, emancipating oneself and having fun, which were prohibited, are now obligatory. Guilty yesterday for breaking the ban, here you are today guilty for not breaking it with enough energy and coherence. A host of populist bureaucrats is overrunning us claiming to reject exchange value but making us pay in cash or credit for what they love and hate, for their generosity and niggardliness, and their lucidity and stupidity.

Radical talk fills a great need to make up for the misery people live. Behind revolutionary communiqués, investigative hearings, ridiculous threats and lessons in virtue, lies so much impotence in pleasure, such a readiness to tax others for impotence and be themselves exonerated.

Concierges’ gossip, things said at unhappy meals, theory outraged and complaining, and the splutterings of the spectacle’s philosophers, are all grist to the mill of guilt. It belongs to whoever makes shame more shameful by attempting to whiten himself against the surrounding murk. A crowd of state-less prosecutors hang about waiting to make one good case from the spare parts of those whose guilt is secondhand. The trains, streets and cafés are packed and teeming with magistrates looking for the accused and the guilty in search of their judges. For these people who have been swilling in fecal guilt since childhood, the great art consists of remaining afloat in it while shoving those floating nearby under. That is humanity according to business civilization.

The hangman you need for the job is never far away. A good friend will sell you if he is short of a few bob. This is what exchange justice teaches. The man at your elbow shouting for the end of the State will turn on you tomorrow because you didn’t shout loud enough; the one who is struggling to survive will some day taunt you for having survived — you too. It is in the order of things. I can see one, at the back there, who’s feeling guilty!

What about junking this feeling of fault? Power’s cynical clear conscience certainly rejects guilt, with the assurance the will to power gives. This is the arbitrariness of the tyrant, the “right” of the strongest to break the laws, the judge’s pretension to judge without himself being judged. It really is the privilege of the pure commodity to be paid for without paying itself, to be exchange value without being use value.

Those declared not guilty sicken me as much as those resigned to it. The sort of truth which is always true only expresses economic reasoning.

The secret of authority, whatever it be, stems from the inflexible rigor with which it convinces people of their guilt. Guilty if you fail to understand some text or speech, some witticism or allusion, or miss that knowing wink. Crap!

I know what I’m talking about. I have sometimes caught myself at this imbecilic game, I know how much contempt to set as bait. It is not difficult to knock someone about if he is already in flight from himself and needs to measure himself against others. If I catch myself again setting out to trap you at your weak points, your faults and renunciations, I know I will only capture that idle excitation which drives you from servile ignorance to insolent savvy, from the disciple’s humility to the mortuary of initiation, from contempt for yourself to contempt for others, and devotion to learning into hate for those who have learned — for you are never so snotty as when you discover others enjoying what you do not.

Someone who has made use of terror must choose to continue with it. Otherwise when he sees those he treated with so much disdain not flinch but turn on him, he will give himself away. How ridiculous both choices are! What bleak vistas for the will to power’s little man: what he can stand least in other people is himself. With his muscles gone rigid with megalomania, he is a clear case of the corpse speaking plainer than the living body. From that point on, with all the force of unreality, he has to ensure that he does not bungle his death if he is to strike a pose for history. He assigns others to the dustbin he thinks of as hell because he is so frightened of being relegated there himself.

I have often done the same myself! I now know that I became thoroughly proletarianized myself even though I vehemently rejected and denounced it in me and in others. But I feel as bored about guilt and making oneself feel guilty as about everything paid for and exchanged. Praise and reproof do not touch those who live through themselves, but those who exist through the esteem and scorn of others. I have absolutely nothing more to do with accusations and acquittals, or any other trial whatsoever. I have no interest in people who still want to play the righteous judge with me. I deny in advance all power and authority you might want to credit me with, that later you could use to justify your activities.

Is there no such thing as innocence? That need not stop us for we will invent it. You will recognize it in the transient ferocity of free existence.

3. History on the point of reversing goes through the reversal point of the individual’s history .

The one thing worse than the worst mistake is the reproach attached to it. The electrodes of commerce have been planted in every head, but is knowing it enough to disconnect them? I have little confidence in the restyling which rejection introduces. As I see it, only pleasure — and no reason to resist it, the will to live in expansion — finishes with fear’s reflexes.

Time was when I blamed others for the guilt I felt. Then I kept a register of my hates and the scores I had to settle, keeping nothing back, souciant of every detail so that one day when I got the chance I could repay myself for what it had cost me. Patiently I stacked my revenge in frustration’s deep-freeze, in time-honored style.

Until I understood that no one comes out entire from such a joyless pursuit and no one comes out of exchange alive. One gains instead the instincts of a notary, the foibles of a magistrate and the manners of a cop; one wriggles about in discomfort trying to find it a pleasure. Exactly how power wanted it.

I am fed up with that way of doing things. I like to stroke a cat without worrying about being clawed. I have finished with retaliation, that compensation paid to the will to live, straight economist behavior. At so-called human relations based on nasty transgression and tight-fisted forgiveness, I laugh. The lawyers for the defense can bugger off too, with their copy-cat repetition that we are all fallible with a right to our errors. There is quite enough to do to live in the present without always having at a moment’s notice to correct the past in it as well.

If I am not greatly concerned to weigh people up, see how they compare with others and judge them, it is not from fear of myself being weighed up, compared and judged, which is what the intellect, with its indelible streak of guilt likes to suggest. I wish simply to abolish a society in which people are a priori guilty of wanting to live and condemned through pleasure to sin, and from which only work can ransom them and kill them.

My inclination to pleasure keeps me from joining the politeness stakes, and floundering in contempt and what contempt defers to. Living a little is enough to strike the court o f reciprocal merit and respective torts out of my daily existence. My pleasure is above justification, self-criticism and self-reproach, thank you.

The new innocence is the will to live’s self-defense. All the violence we have ever experienced has come from exchange. Of intellectuality, default, separation, repression, of compensatory binge. It is always fear which drives life to wear itself out in ill-tempered oscillation between aggression and frustration.

What senseless motive forces us to pay for goods produced by us all for us all, if it is not the fear of being surprised with our hand in the till and worked over by laws, punishments and prisons? If you are frightened of a copper you will stoop to anything.

Stolen goods are not actually free but billed on credit to the anxiety- and relief-from-anxiety account. They bring no more pleasure than sighing when frustrated, a revenge to soothe you and make the dominant system a little more bearable. The State gains almost as much from this sort of fun as from the Olympiads of the present day at which terrorists with characteristic defiance declare: ‘Pay up if you want to live, and pay dearly. We are ready for it to cost our lives.’ Marketing and exchange in this form is what has permitted trade to survive so long, precisely by changing its skin.

The ultimate absurdity has been reached now that we even feel guilty about feeling guilty, when we could on principle get rid of the very idea of error. It appears in the final analysis that the only fear ever to haunt us has been the fundamental fear of enjoying ourselves. The economy is so good at condemning happiness to the wheel of inconstant fortune that to appropriate it or be robbed of it would seem to break the wheel. At every throw of the dice of exchange, one loses oneself. What is not based on the emancipation of pleasure on realizing all one’s long and short-term desires reverts to the terror which always clings to pleasure like its price stamped in indelible ink.

One grows no more used to fear than to death. No life could dwell in such abjection. That is why I am careful not to inflict on you all the anxiety which you manage to impose on me. But do not fool yourselves! I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life which renounces nothing; it is not the violence which leaps at you because it has been put on a leash and which jerks back on itself, violence which gnaws its tail in rage like a dog tied to a chain.

If I am now sure that I will not pick up a weapon out of resentment or revenge, it is with the calm certainty that I will strike harder and more accurately if pleasure demands it. Fires of desire burn fiercer than torches of rage or despair.

The violence of gratuitousness does not economize on itself. If someone strikes me on my left cheek, I will smack him in the teeth sooner than offer him my right. Is not my enemy whoever constrains me, threatens me or makes me feel guilty? I want to live what I specifically am, without norms and without always watching for someone waiting for me at the corner of the street. If I kill what represses me, it will be inadvertently, as I stride out happily, without looking back.

There is more proud savagery in the person whom no pleasure can satisfy than in one who feels frustrated by everything and barks at the fun others have. The energy needed for supersession is to be found in the first, whereas the anger of the second perpetuates the impotence of a world where nothing changes. Instead of contenting ourselves with compensatory sprees, which is the suicide’s homage to what is killing him, we will destroy the old world and offer nothing in its place. No barrier can stand up to the centered violence of irrepressible gratuity. Instead of taking advantage of laws framed to exploit us, we gradually substitute a practical innocence in which all legality is null and void. The time is near when no one will be presumed to know what the laws are at all.

We are at the far end of despair today because, having worn out everything that this society is based on, it is now draining us. We know that we cannot stop feeling guilt if we are told to without in turn setting it up as something to feel guilty about. In turning the tables and reversing perspective, the emancipation of pleasure takes itself as its only reference, refusing to be quantified, judged, compared to anything else or trapped. As long as it answers its sole need — to expand — terror slowly evaporates and laughter succeeds fear. Bureaucrats and policemen will succumb more to a burst of laughter than to the bursting of bombs.

I no longer believe in the whip-lash effect of the hidden threat in happiness, the need to pay a deposit of defeat on love and insurrection. I try to live according to my desires, neither reining them in nor being ridden by them. If one wants something intensely enough it will always come to one. So why repress an apparently unrealizable desire, turn one’s back on it, stifle it with compensations? Giving ends by breaking exchange. In that lies the new innocence.

If you really embrace your desires wholeheartedly, how can you not reverse the very polarity of the old world? Repression’s calculations will get more and more inaccurate with each succeeding day, for the force of one’s personal desires is a faceless thing, striking where and when it wants, and rather than trading punches it carries the advantage of being absolutely unpredictable.

This commercial society which adapts to terrorism and intellectual revolution of every kind will not, I maintain, withstand the guerrillas of unlimited pleasure, creators of the new innocence, the people who could not care less if the kind of death awaiting them is one which the violence of life has not warned them against.

4. The new innocence ensures that individual emancipation passes into collective emancipation.

The blaze of intense pleasure will utterly consume intellectual revolutions and their culpability. The variant forms of jacobinism, leninism and national-socialism have been only translations of the terrorist methods of commercial self-destruction. Those same methods have survived the shattering of collective ideologies and the individualized terrorism which seeks less and less to discover reasons and justifications for itself since it is becoming obvious that trade justifies everything.

The paradoxically-named “statesmen”, who are just the State’s inhuman clockwork, seem destined to fall to murderers armed with their logic. However sympathetic their assassins might appear by contrast, they are but the obverse side of the nationalized heads they topple. Power certainly counts fewer enemies among those who remain impotent by struggling against it than among those who have decided unreservedly to enjoy themselves. Whatever colors it wears, terrorism is just a moment of the withering of the State in the universal withering of humankind.

If the intellectual conduct of a revolution has always been expressed in military terms, and this according to an art of inducing men to be more efficient than they would otherwise have been, so individual terrorism also maintains the barrack-square mentality. Furthermore, it is not chance if the set-back experienced by urban guerrillas coincides with the weariness that many feel at every day having to put on the guilt-inducing armor which puts them on a perpetual war-footing against themselves.

Life enjoys every right, beginning with the right to destroy whatever threatens it. If you love you do not punish, you blast any society condoning punishment. Why put up with a world in which the dialectic of goods for sale demands that pleasure become pain, caresses rape and liberty constraint? And how, in pain, through rape, or by constraint, can we put an end to it?

A wind of innocence is abroad; insistently it murmurs to us to stop working and be idle, to defenestrate a leader as a joke, to distribute the stock for love of having things free. If it blew any harder it would freeze the oppressive senility which labels, not the judge, policeman, serviceman or killer, but the exuberant life of desire as obscene.

There will be no more tribunals nor solitary confinement, people’s prisons nor revolutionary prosecutors, model radicalism nor examples to follow once the feeling of impunity becomes collective and expresses the attraction that millions of people feel deep down for a society without punishment to fear, bills to honor, pleasures to pay for, and without power, frustration, submission, or castration.

All by itself, the new innocence will abolish every form of terror and terrorism.