Chapter 5. UNIVERSAL SELF-MANAGEMENT MEANS THE FREE REBIRTH OF THE CHILD REPRESSED IN EACH OF US

1. The old world’s death-struggle is rooted in our childhood desires.

The economy grabs people’s childhood twice; once in their youth, and later, in what they repress as adults. If the social development of life-desires gradually slowed down towards the end of the paleolithic era, and the expansion of a sexuality creating the historical conditions which would favor it was halted, I cannot avoid the impression that the blockage goes on being reproduced in us from the moment each of us is born. Beyond genetic modification, the primary demands of food and movement have always, and still do, express the child’s search for completely satisfying pleasure, a sure if tentative advance towards the primacy of every satisfaction. That is what the chopper the family wields comes down upon, and at that point that it mercilessly trims the child to a size suitable to take it quicker though its training, from desire withering to the aging we look forward to and call adulthood.

Childhood, like individuality, was discovered by the bourgeoisie by chance. The crumbling of the social community, inherent in the capitalist mode of production, has brought men closer to their concrete reality. At the same time, it faces them with the old abstraction of the universal man which still governs them. How can generations of people assimilated en masse to a series of images refracted through the becoming of trade not end up gaining some sort of lucidity about alienation and the world upside-down? We have been held to be, successively, a Creature of the gods’, a Man, a bourgeois or proletarian Citizen, and an Individual; is there any among us who does not want to demand his irreducible singularity, to wish to live on the basis of what he is?

The last phase of history we have all gone through revives in each of us the struggle of our first years of existence against economic repression. “Who are you?” those who control the answers demand, as the pigeon-holers and master-classifiers. One answer deals with the question; “I am what I wish to live, and I want to live out my desires in the unity of all that lives.”

The economy’s exploitation of all that is human uncovers the pleasure under the successive lies that constitute business verity. Ariadne’s thread of desire always leads to childhood.

The interest shown by the bourgeoisie from the eighteenth century onwards for the child as an educable object already contains the more material interest it testifies to as marketable object to be haggled over. The cynical exploitation of the new-born child simultaneously throws light on what trade does and what the function of the family is when it operates through the years of our youth.

It all takes place as though the child which has suddenly been discovered at the bottom of the adult was exposing the condition of a civilization which knows men as prematurely-aged embryos, only to itself. The absence of real life leads me back to the center of a labyrinth, to the life which persists in me once the bitter taste of work, duty, compensation, fault and the will to power is exhausted. A child saved from the tumultuous waves of the past comes with me. His rebirth is the rebirth of my will to live.

2. Growing older is the process by which desire is proletarianized. The world on its head will only revert when the choice is simply death or the rebirth of the child in each of us.

In attempting to fulfill its needs, economics gives us back our childhood. How can one feel settled in a world where birth is a trauma not a pleasure? The idea that labor is necessarily unhappy and painful is gradually disappearing. In place of the old saw about women being punished in the organ where they had sinned, people are beginning to think that giving birth can correspond to the pleasure of complete discharge in a climax of sensory outpouring. Why should intense pleasure be excluded from the child who leaps out if it is really longed for and fulfills desire?

Because the child is rarely wanted, and therefore he has to swallow his wants one by one. Because the way in to life is through the door of profit and power. Because the family conditions children to the money-making reflex, beginning with the mother who gives them birth.

All commercial civilizations, without exception, church their women after they have given birth, no doubt because the basically incestuous relationship of mother and new-born child brings the diabolical Beast of untrammeled pleasure into the stable of universal exchange value, and because the iron laws of economics are eager to set a curse on any growth of pleasure in the pleasure of giving birth, so as to invert it at root and, as it were, strike its fundament.

Each of our individual histories begins with the mother who brought us into the world. The woman who remembers the child she was — the child she ever is the moment she pleasures — is substituted in commercial civilization by the mother, a virtual State official whose task is to integrate a piece of raw flesh into society.

Mother kills both the woman and the child. She kills the woman-child who lives in her. She is the commercial blanket power pulls over itself and under which century by century an hypocritical infanticide is played out and perpetuated. That is how the built-in bias of playing an eminently social role turns the act of lying-in into work. Once birth is reduced to production activity, is it so astonishing to see initial intense pleasure in a moment repressed, changed to grief, and turned into a curse?

Work and pleasure are at loggerheads from birth. The instant the ideology of maternity settles on a pregnant woman, the age-old torment of religion and culture tightens its screw once more. All the old notions of transgression and temptation, forbidden pleasures and falls from grace filter in and freeze the stomach, thighs and womb, contracting, hardening, fitting the intestinal armor and preventing both erogenous intensity in the woman and the child from springing out.

Everything in the body toils to barricade the road to freedom which the birth of a child threatens to blaze across the economic universe. But at the same time, the utter materiality and abstraction of trade reveals that alongside confinement-production, which identifies birth with a becoming which is purely economic, woman can assert her enjoyment and the child-to-be feels it; they celebrate their common mutation as if, in the birth of the one, there were reborn the being of desires which has never altogether hatched in the other. Because women, as less servile attendants on economic gods, escape profit-grubbing work ambitions more than men, they are seen by commercial society as the symbol of sexual life unbridled: debauch, infidelity, trickery; Society’s repressiveness leads to ingenious ways of enshrouding its sexual exuberance in a nimbus of clammy fog, the charms of that sex depicted in the colors of horrid caves and fathomless gulfs from which swarm multitudes of reptiles which the hero and saint has the job of hacking up. The myths and legends of centuries, necessarily irradiated by economics, show countless malefic representations of woman: Eve, Lilith, Pandora, Melusine, chthonic serpent, Medusa, sorceress, tentacle from he11, as many inversions of life as partial liberations can now let loose and set a value on the absurdity of the spectacle.

What we make only digs our graves; so mothers consign their own and their children’s pleasures to the tomb, as unacceptable to the light of day, that is, as incompatible with economic reasoning and working hours. Pleasure is driven back into sexual night, into one’s private abysses where monsters in the shape of ungovernable outbursts dwell, who rend in three child, man, and woman, which are but three moments of the individual united in intense pleasure.

When the child appears and upsets the family circle with his nascent desires, everyone’s concern is how best to dominate him. In times past priests would have got hold of him and baptized him, thus cleansing him of impurity. Family education has retained the enema as a means of purging the child of his bent for gratuitous pleasure, and he is fed at regular hours so that the economy of time may better penetrate his skin. Who cares if baby on his back kicking his legs in the air shows how happy he is; more to the point is that he swiftly learn meaningful gestures, movements which appropriate things and profit him. And then that his little cries and babblings are eliminated to profit the functional language of supply and demand. What! Thirsty? Grizzle away, whine, wail and scream, nothing will come through kindness lest they ‘spoil’ you by allowing you to believe you can have fun without exchanging anything for it.

Psychology granted us fun in sexuality such a short time ago (in the same way that the Church once granted woman a soul, though she had only to invent one for herself), the child continues to be nothing in himself. Unspecified he remains, existing only in the family hierarchy, however made use of or otherwise represented! As a sign of wealth, as promise of future profitability, or proof of virility, a conduit for parental quarrels and reconciliations, as the cement and aggregate of habit, creativity substitute, possession, as domestic animal, as puppet or as mattress, the child is exchange value all the way.

What is a child? Nobody knows, for no-one has imagined what a being which has finally become human could develop into in a society based on emancipation and the actualization of desire, on the potential every individual can fulfill.

Birth, in a world which cannot tolerate it, is that change which contains all the others. Parents, bitter because they cannot give birth to themselves, exist to thwart him who will. Civilization waits between mother’s thighs like the basket under an inefficient guillotine. Zonked on tranquilizers, the baby is eventually sent down the rolling mills of clenched muscles to be torn out by forceps, shocked with cold air and bright lights, and slapped, to encourage him to breathe the air of liberty. The child joyfully arrives.

I do not hope the element of risk and upheaval, violence or temporary vexation inherent in radical change will lose its edge or disappear altogether. But I do flare up when I see the welcome to life choosing in the same old way to punish mutation, fetter the human process, and interrupt the chain reaction of newly-formed pleasures. What good are techniques of gentle childbirth if the social environment is so weighted with some old man’s hope that the young one will at least inherit his share of suffering?

In cutting your umbilical cord, they also give themselves the right to cut off your wings, balls, guts and clitoris. For your own good. In her slightest gesture the mother manages to apply the norms of castration foreseen by the economic system. She does not behave like a unique being but like an instrument of state or tribal power. Thereafter her role transfers easily to whoever educates the child. It may be the father, lover or child itself who covers up for his growing loss of humanity, but he is bound to identify with the images that like so many distorting mirrors our society burdens him with.

Scarcely has he escaped from the uterus, and despite the fact that birth promised to free him, here he is repressed in one matrix after another not one of which offers him a fraction of the advantages of the first. After the fetal stage he will never know gratuity again.

Tossed from the family into school, factory into State, from a group of friends into a political party, he embarks on his career among rulers or ruled and fluctuates up and down in the lift of social, financial, ideological and moral promotion. He takes the choice of declaring for one thing against another for liberty, though he is in fact linking the two and getting further from himself. The changeless world of exchange teaches him to learn to survive till he dies.

The death-struggle begins early. Right from the first few days when love, knowledge and the art of changing the world are sold to him at the cost of complete submission. There is nothing ambiguous about the blackmail: You want to go and develop on your own? Then give up hope of all help and protection! Or do you need tenderness and learning? Give up your desire for independence!

In buying the means to modify circumstance, the child merely becomes impotent to transform them in the direction of pleasure. What commercial society cannot tolerate is that his desires should run on from one satisfaction to the next, inventing a real life unimaginable in our dreams. The child therefore submits to the inhuman decanting of life-force into work-energy, to the law of perpetual exchange to the practical impossibility of nurturing and increasing his desires. Birth needs to be recreated at the same time as society.

Education introduces intellectual separation into the body. The domestic state we call the family turns the child into a little angel whose head is directed towards the sky, the peaks, the élite, towards thought and power. The rest of the body with its cyclopean anal eye, is limited and firmly fixed to the earth, the lower regions and repressed world where everything drags its feet, grovels or hides.

Every time a woman turns into a mother and rebels at herself the better to resist the embraces of her child and her own incestuous desire, she teaches her body to grow numb, stifle what it feels and harden into a shell. Thought being thus invested with power of decision over the body, imposes itself as a distinct entity, which reproduces the social separation between manual and intellectual work. In this way the child is initiated simultaneously into the curse on sex and into economic reasoning. For him his body becomes what he has to direct, restrain, dominate and civilize according to the laws of the power which governs fecality. His head then patiently teaches inauthenticity, to be ashamed of desire and to fear intense pleasure, which sends the self into exile and profits appearance.

You manufacture an infant prodigy in your image and model him upon that part of trade you have fenced off for yourself. How can you not see that under the intellectual progress he makes lies a lost Atlantis, ruins of a sensual intelligence repressed in times gone by? Most of the time, the child’s understanding that you praise is but his servile adaptation to the free trade in reward and punishment, promotion and downfall, power and submission. Ah, what fine perception it reveals to be so quick to exonerate and avenge, apportion guilt, hit people or fend off their blows, and which is so fine because everyone shares the same form of expiation, repressing themselves as creatures who desire in order to relax as creatures who think!

Where trade on its outer fringes weakens in its aim of appropriating life, it corners and identifies what is countering it: today we know that the fetus’s movements in the womb are expressing desires they satisfy. Far from showing blind behavior they are waking a kind of indistinct attentiveness, an understanding of what stirs them up in their relationship with their mother.

As the child is born and plunges into a wave of sound, touching and lights, does he not bodily set about exploring the unknown land? Form his senses of feeling, smell, hearing and sight by recoiling and expanding again to distinguish what is hostile or pleasant in the atmosphere and moment?

Each time the child avoids cold, boredom, loneliness and brutality, and looks for the lap where he can find caresses, his intelligence develops, progressing as an inseparable part of the body. As it grows it joins in sharpening the senses on the paths of pleasure.

Although economic reasoning allows him little acumen, the child knows enough to do what he needs to satisfy his desires. Have adults never dreamed of perfecting this knowledge? Quite the opposite, they have turned it on its head by separating it from their sexual instinct and transforming it into thought foreign to desire, which leaves pleasure foreign to life.

Intellectual hypertrophy is actually the head rotting because of commercial evolution. The contrary is true of clear thinking which is born in the slipstream of the will to live and refined as one pleasure succeeds another, but dies of abstraction when it inverts in letting off steam, in being constrained, remaining separate or feeling guilty. The repressed childhood in each of us demands to be understood afresh if we are to supersede and actualize it.

As surely as economic power produces intellectuality by depriving desires of their means of feeling and by turning feeling against desire, universal self-management will push intellectuality to the end of its self-destructive course, beyond its old man’s aches and pains and its puerile booze-ups, until it dissolves and a total sexuality emerges.

You pay for the mistake of being born by turning your back on life. The child is the most stunted of innocents. The title of an old novel could serve for his personal story: the child of sin. Theology was not mistaken when it described birth as a neurotic hell in which the human animal is born between piss and shit; the god of the intellect becomes purer the more he disgusts people with the body.

But no one denies, though he sometimes pretends otherwise, the satisfaction it gives him to piss and shit every day. But this is how, for the woman in labor, the shame of expelling the child like one empties oneself of urine and excrement, gives rise to repulsion which manages to turn the possible agreeableness of birth into a nightmare. If you are ashamed of yourself then the lack of constraint in pleasure becomes a liberty to be paid for with a greater sense of shame; this lesson is knocked into the child in the first hour.

How could the child — responsible for the pains of childbirth, a cumbersome pregnancy, his mother’s repressed incestuous pleasure, his parents’ guilty conscience, and for stirring up the couple’s dirty water — not be educated into guilt by guilt? The hygiene of economic reasoning demands that he be punished if he cries, dribbles or dirties himself. He has only to leave his mother’s side and fall over for her to sing out “look what happens when you go off on your own”, while the family bawls variations on the theme “it’s your own fault!”

The child learns to hate others and hate himself when his mother teaches him to forget how to love. Everywhere and always, the taboo on incest between mother and child forbids the intense pleasure of the fetal stage being prolonged, free with each other in their feelings after birth. The source of all affection lies in the initial incestuous relationship, and repressing it makes it the source of cruelty, suffocation, appropriation and want.

The more functioning as mother repressed woman as lover, the more the child becomes the sole object of her resentment. She clutches him to her breast like some ancient grudge. Should he arouse desire in her by nibbling her breasts she looks in excuse for an economic prop, poses as the wet-nurse, separates eating and drinking into two distinct actions and blithely snaps a single unity of pleasure to accord with the law of work.

Suppose the child gets excited when his mother is washing him so that they both feel the first shiverings of pleasure. Her hand will instantly disown this loving temptation and complete its hygienic labor with mechanical dryness. None the less, the pleasure does not appear in the practical gesture. It persists in its opposite form, changed in direction and charged with anxiety, culpability, aggression. The desire to caress is turned into a desire to scratch, maul and murder.

When economic reason gets hold of the body, it strips it for work, untangling what belongs to the feeding and educational machine from what merits suppression as being in no way remunerative. Caught in the traumatizing see-saw of loving demonstrativeness and hate-inspired stiffness, the child continues to suffer sweet caresses while neurotically reprimanded and repressed. His awakening to total sexuality occurs amid what splits, fragments and inverts it.

Every time a rebuke follows a gentle look and loving signifies punishment, the child learns that the head is where the body takes refuge. He learns to situate it at the same height as an obsequious greeting and the scorn which compensates it. His mastery of himself is merely his servile submission to every alienation. That is why each of us, man or woman, is determined sooner or later to act as mother of real or imaginary children, mother of nastiness by way of compensation, mother of atonement, and of regiments and political parties, who reproduces — most of the time as the ridiculous counterfeit of Father — exactly the same wretched and sentimental, tribal, national, political, erotic, ideological or revolutionary family. Putting an end to the maternal function is simply a visible form of the end of work, constraint, intellectuality and the propensity for guilt.

3. History on the point of being reversed passes through the point where it reverses in the individual’s history.

Autoanalysis is to psychoanalysis what actualization by individuals is to their integration into business. The only childhood I care about is the one I lived through and which goes on living in me. For nowadays growing older has taken on the precise sense of progressive integration into the old world, while returning to childhood signifies the rejection of increasing proletarianization. Isn’t where the repression exercised over the child joins the exploitation of the proletarian the point where personal and collective history meet?

The confusion long maintained between the ideology of childhood and the millenarian beliefs of right and left, will be wiped out anyway in the impudent mortuary of the economy. The naked materiality of business effectively opens everyone’s eyes, its crude mechanism operates openly, and each of its movements liberates a part of humanity which it anticipates recuperating at the following stage, in the contradictory and permanent progress towards its self-destruction.

If a revolutionary in the nineteenth century needed thirty years to understand that his projects for liberty held worse things than the previous repression, three now suffice our contemporary, the man without quality, so much does every day excessively demonstrate how everything missing from the total emancipation of our desires works to renew business.

The return of the child appears in the wake of two moribund ideologies, feminism and psychoanalysis, two partial demands which were born in the shadow of proletarian emancipation and whose simple presence denounces how equally piecemeal both the anarchist movement and the workers’ councils are.

At the occult center of what the feminists require is the setting free of woman as lover. This stifles right-away both the matriarchal project and the amazons launched at the competitive conquest of economic power cornered by males. Sharing with the producers a contempt for the child’s low level of productivity, feminists retain their glorious future of hoping for equality through work, of extending their domestic authority as ‘mothers’ (with or without a child) to their entire social activity, of being one day completely the boss, the navvy, the cop, militant or soldier. A fine objective!

The workers’ movement, feminism and psychoanalysis are characterized by the same intellectual defect. All three are initially responses to a desire for authenticity, firmly for life against its falsified forms, and each separates and inverts into a new oppression, which is the old one they have updated. Thus psychoanalysis sets off to look for the child repressed in the adult, but by mistakenly attributing the cause of such repression to the economy, it soon returns what it fishes back from life iced over with power and profit as fodder for the economy.

Psychoanalysis thus diffuses and reproduces all the tics of former alienation. When it shows that thought censors the way desires are expressed, does it by so doing cease to be also separate thought, counter-censorship dissimulating the split between body and ‘head’, emancipation imprisoned in the relationship between master and slave, liberation caught in the trap of initiator and candidate?

Thanks to psychoanalysis, the transformation of sensual intelligence into intellectual function reaches its peak of unconscious perfection. It teaches one to change one’s neurosis, to adapt the unbearable malaise of private survival into the social norms of universal survival. What a fine reason for knowing why you hate your father, if you go on working for a boss!

Regulating in- and outlet valves have long more or less balanced the pressure from repression and relief from it, but nonetheless one way of alleviating tension through negative or positive transference becomes impossible as business humanizes by gaining possession of human beings. Societies highly permeated by business no longer allow people to compensate for lack of life by lynching, massacring minorities, official racism, or the glorification and desecration of a leader.

Economist behavior nowadays prefers self-destruction brotherhoods, clubs in which the contemptible can practice contempt, societies in which everyone passes judgment on each other. Psychoanalysis is the washing powder the purveyors of family dirty linen refuse to do without. It personalizes the exchange system by selling the good conscience of its afflictions direct to the patient, (and it sells at the just price of its integration into business society). Its doctrine of health, which rests upon the ambiguity of desires accepted and negated, in fact reproduces the morbid relationship of mother and child. A quick pirouette well adapted to the order of things winds up the balance sheet of troubles and their remedies: the child-slave kills the maternal master in that he kills him symbolically by fulfilling the honorary duties of the consultation! Ite missa est.

There is now a clear choice posited between getting beyond childhood or letting it rot within us, to live its flowering or to trample on it with the destructive attitude in extremis which cuts off its nose to spite its face, and which is the incomplete man to perfection. The intellectual function, whose shadow has always clouded the consciousness of intellectual history feels obliged to leave this history to express itself against the intellect. What was hostile to me deserts and joins my life-force. Like many others, do I not conspicuously exemplify an alchemy whose materia prima is within? My desires, caprices, passions, moods, fantasies, dreams, inhibitions, neuroses, illnesses, plans, whims, stupidities, errors, genius, what distinguishes me, are these not precisely the spring from which I wish the river of my life irresistibly to flow?

Self-analysis follows on the heels of autonomy, marked with the same resolve and uncertainties. The tighter the corner into which proletarianization squeezes life, the more our senses are excited like a fire in the roof of economic reflexes. We cannot live our pleasure authentically until all the pleasures trapped and crusted over with business are free. Clearsightedness is as part of desire as desire is of specific individual personality. There are already too many strangers in me without my allowing one more in because he claims he will chase the others out.

Self-analysis which likes to think of itself as psychoanalysis without an analyst is just the self’s traditional police-style lecture. If you subject yourself to someone else’s inspection and swallow the hook of objective explanation, examine your being the way others see you (the way you let off steam, where you stand in the pecking order, how you settle scores), you are giving up the clearheadedness of desires that know no master. How can a person open up to the healthy pounding of the will to live if he feels compelled to analyze himself and is terrified of finding himself, anxious and guilt-ridden and desperate to justify himself?

I refuse to hide that part of the old world from me that continues to exist in me and governs through inertia. On the contrary, from this congealed lump of inhibited and inverted desires I claim to set free the daemon of marvels who let himself be trapped there. The oppressed world of intense pleasure is in me as it was in the child I was and which inseparably I am. What I dissimulate rears its head everywhere I would not wish to see it. Toying with a bracelet, the ‘migraine’ brought on by ‘bad’ thoughts, sighing over what you could not manage, the tachycardia of repression speaks the language of the body ambiguous, torn between desire and all that forbids it, pulled between the pulsations of life and the literal expression of captivatingly banal phrases: “my stomach turned over, sick at heart, I had a load on my back, gave myself a ball-breaker, sick to the back teeth with it...”

What repels me, terrorizes or humiliates me, or makes me suffer, contains what I love and desire, inverted. I restrain myself less when I explore myself than when I confide in myself The more my curiosity encounters resistance the more it persuades me to go on. Where the block is the wall of repression rises. I like to return to where the suppression is anchored, ferret about and dig using associations, analogies, fugitive images, dream phantoms. Why should I not go right to the limit, why content myself with hasty interpretations, transferences, alibis? Am I not to discover my hidden truths by myself?

With the creative inspiration intense pleasure gives, I want to learn to hunt out the priest and the flatfoot lurking in the crannies of my head. For it seems to me that he who is no longer blind to the way his motility reverses when the will to live converts to death reflex holds revolution’s absolute weapon.

Once, we worked out how to decipher the book of society. Today, anyone with a taste for immediate emancipation finds himself faced with having to decode himself. Pain, analyzed until it spits out the pus of guilt, gradually disappears, showing how tissue scars over, the chest muscles relax, and the desire whose repression was the cause of the suffering is liberated. It is the same with every sickness, every somatization, every dis-ease.

We have all thought fit until now to treat ourselves with cures worse than the hurt, because we chose not the will to live as our foundation but what weakened it. It will not take us long to perceive how the vital organs interplay and come to avoid what inhibits them, to free them from the economy and return them unconfined to pleasure. The phrase “Chance is you happening to yourself” will be applied by us with increasing accuracy, so that in sifting the parts of life from death stemming from us and approaching us the fortuitous will occur only in intense pleasure’s variety.

To turn the world upside-down the right way up is to take the shortest route between one happiness and the next.

4. Our desires coming to life again herald the birth of a society which has eventually become human.

Desires aroused in childhood lack the means to alter the world in their favor. The history of our times offers us the means, but turned against us. But if we are reborn to ourselves we can turn them on this history.

Sensual relationships are built up in the creation of a radically different society, and the process is irreversible. There are more people brandishing childhood’s weapons that they have rediscovered in themselves than the old world suicides believe. The latter are always quick to deride the new innocence as a collective folly whose demands are childish, although with methods very different to the old world’s, this ‘folly’ has begun to wipe out the world which bores us.

I long for the juncture where the child is no longer the object of knowledge but the subject of loving passion. To adventure erotically with children is inseparable from loving oneself and loving life. You need not doubt that it will spread in defiance of your laws, garbage which has never conceived of anything but infanticide.

The search for our desires is not archaeology into the past but the present calling for life. Fairyland, inverted until now in the stories, will be reborn in a union with childhood. All is permitted, for amid business truths, nothing is true.