Chapter 6. UNIVERSAL SELF-MANAGEMENT WILL SEE THE END OF INVERTED PLEASURE

1. We live most of our pleasures under the sign of their fatal inversion.

Passion itself has grown so feeble that repressed life has almost lost its self-destructive urge. The pleasures of bygone days were so much more violent than our own are because, however fucked-up, the will to live was then much more red-blooded. Excited by the myths surrounding power and restless in capitalism’s ideological inventions, the will to power has long been siphoning energy from sexual excitement to turn life towards hate and death.

The breakup of hierarchy together with the endless pinpricks of commerce are exhausting in individuals and societies alike that aggressive energy common to kings and tinpot gods, tribunes, viziers, war lords, patriotic loyalists and cunning brutes of that kind. These days the will to power wilts in offices and in the family bosom, in dormitories, barracks and central committees; we could rejoice if that power now in the hands of half-wits were not also a half-witted power, revealing how the will to live itself has become so feeble. If in the next trade-based society, men stop murdering each other, it will only be because they are too weak to do so. And why kill yourself when death is so close and you can merely survive almost as an excuse?

Dreams of apocalypse haunt commercial society’s subconscious. It is only the idea of sudden destruction which has allowed it to put up with itself and go on gazing at its reflection growing more and more gangrenous. Millenarians and suicidal revolutionaries with their vengeful despair were society’s suppressed bad conscience breaking out until survivalism spilled its air-conditioned nightmare over us and gave us slow-motion suicide, itself utterly poisonous as the sheer weight of things will stifle us anyway.

While acts of criminality and terrorism with their watered-down look-alikes express the spasm of a morbose will to power, a longing for the funerary feast which would swallow the whole world sidles into the waiting room. While we wait pleasure serves to pass the time. Memories of a life upside-down which occasionally contracts violently and snuffs us are being replaced by a gentler fatality: epicureanism on the installment plan, whose every characteristic shoves what is human in us deeper into the commercial freezer.

I refuse to choose between two kinds of death. My guiding light is life lived to the full.

When the senses themselves are reduced from biological to economic organs, the ultimate degradation, pleasures turn up both their inverted millenarian face and their absolutely irreducible rebellious core which cannot be recuperated and commercialized. At this point, proletarianization collapses behind us. Natural feelings slowly reawake in us as desire nourishes the organ that feels it. You need neither guidelines nor laws to enjoy life. Whatever defines or confines it, or causes it to specialize is precisely what relegates and inverts it: work, constraint, exchange, separation, guilt.

2. When you tire of survival’s amusements you will want to reverse perspective.

The eye of power destroys what it gazes on. Education adjusts us to collineate with the economy. Prodded by work, needled by constraint, our gaze unravels the thread to the hierarchic labyrinth, learning the no-entry and no-stopping signs, and taught to tell far off the beacon lights of authority and profit. The eye mirrors goods for sale .

Consider the desire to reach out and enjoy something: how often is it inverted into a furious desire to capture and possess? And just as the fact of possession substitutes for intense pleasure, the laws protecting private property replace what you are not allowed to have with image ownership. Seeing is possessing by proxy, greedy to rape and rob. Should the person wanting an object, get his hands on it, his eyes will be cheated of pleasure again, which is the price of victories won by the will to power.

The twin threshold of repression and uncontrollable outburst perceives no landscape other than life inverted. The wish to catch hold and caress turns into a taste for capturing, killing, annihilating. When you play the game, aiming a pretend weapon at the sparrowhawk high in the sky or at the village emerging from the mists, isn’t your solicitude for destroying everything you see translated by horribly mutating the desire to be everywhere into the compulsive need to own everything?

We have borne the evil eye since we first began mummifying humans and cats, transforming them into dead objects, pieces of property, goods to sell. They remind us of the curse upon us and provoke us to destroy them and join them in a common nothingness.

We have only the eyes in our heads left. With our intellect we scan the labyrinths of inauthentic life. In the old story a child who gazes on his mother’s sex is struck blind. The stories told in modern education go one better: by all means stare at your mother’s cunt but don’t enjoy it. Thought stares and no longer lives in experience.

And that look is also the reflection of a basic failing. Most people survive, ashamed of being seen, too nervous to be recognized. The inquisitorial eye can only capture life in its roles and changes of role, as image, dead flesh thrown on the scales of commercial criteria. As credulous victims of power’s voodoo, you have no right to sneer from the pinnacle of your sophistication at so-called primitive men who do not like having their photograph taken in case their effigy fall into hostile hands!

The tactile gaze of intense pleasure meets only what is alive in people and things. What do I care for a glance which is stolen and returned, which is posed, weighed and sold, which measures and compares, hunts for distraction, is exchanged? Like the other senses, sight is part of the universe of feeling born with the infant, which the economy then hacks to pieces. When pleasure represses itself it is not looking to lively itself up.

The disturbingly deep gaze of lovers, which you find again in dreams and wonder (the sun we see doubled in snow-covered landscapes), is indelibly marked with sensual delirium — how everything will one day be. However reduced in order to function economically, the eye shies away from the unvarying vistas of business perspective and scrambles power’s geometry of high and low, left, right, near, far, length of time, place. When the eye opens in the insatiable excitement of intense pleasure the occulists of everyday profitability say the look is vague, distracted, lost; it certainly is utterly lost on them, as it has no wish to see them and escapes to where they cannot study it.

It is not the dissolution of the self, nor drugs, nor illumination which opens the eyelids and lashes prehensile with desire, but the lucidity recovered by the senses in freedom. The silky look of the jelly-fish envelops the world through suction, always moving towards feeding itself with life and to dissolving death. That radiant motion I want to pursue into sleep, the moment when the body dissolves the landscape into multiple dreams which we are now learning — and are you aware of it — to prolong consciously upon waking up.

Bitterness has poked its bones through and split esthetics’ final skin. Beauty and ugliness you have never judged except by default. The shadow of death repels me, only life makes me passionate. Love gives me the clarity to see people, and things filled with hate and the urge to consume merge in the same forbidding gray. What I see through the eyes of pleasure ends up by destroying what profit obliges me to see.

Robbed of sexuality your nose is just an appendage to your lungs, a physiological forge which gives the body not the fire of life but its power of output. Contemptuous of work, the aristocratic regime left the body its natural smells which in the vigor of its passions blended well with wild scents. Under the rule of the factory, hygiene scrubs all living matter off the body, and cleanliness and the morbid shame it engenders deodorizes air, armpits and kitchen even as pollution eats away the earth, the sea and the sky. The body is never done with washing in the filthy waters of profit.

The sense of smell teaches one to be ashamed of smells. Under the classificatory system imposed on it by those themselves repressed, the sense of smell gradually declines as it learns to distinguish between good and bad smells, those of saintliness and those of sexual pleasure. In the past, guilt struck at the perfume of desire only when amorously erectile, but now it attacks anything which looks likely to snarl up the lungs’ work of creating energy. The sense of smell is shut off to whatever is not respiratory function. For the less familiar respiration is with how it breathes in intense pleasure, the more easily it can renounce the feeling of plenitude, adopt the fitful, jerky rhythm of effort, and economize on itself.

It is in the family that we learn to paralyze the thoractic cage, to block the impulses rising from the abdomen. Mastering the self hunches the torso and controls the affects; the will to power consolidates the muscular armor. Breathing becomes something done by the head, another element of the cerebral system. It imposes on the body the survival cadence of the beast at bay, aware that death is set to catch it with minimum trouble and no pleasure.

The air in business is stifling. Anxiety is the simplest expression of this social asphyxiation. Day after day the throat tightens, only allowing libidinal exhalation to escape in spasmodic mouthfuls. Is not the child being taught, when his body is on the defensive through throat and nose ailments, about the act of penetration by power and money which the family is allowed to perpetrate on him in legal rape?

The old world which is sucking the air out of us is evidently at the same time the world of pure and dizzying heights. With one hand it opens up the throat it is strangling with the other. Artificial lungs are generously put in circulation because of sport, work, gymnastics, cures, drugs, stimulants, tranquilizers, psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, religions, relaxation, tourism. The oppressiveness of the cities is met with the epic age of the great out-doors, being strangled by society by the escape from it: the hanged man is granted a double length of rope. The countryside oxygenates the body before sending it back to rot on the dung-heaps of the city and in the deserts of boredom. Ecology and pollution meet in the same lobby after the trial, leftist sweat mixing with bureaucratic formalin.

The rotten smells which sudden bursts of rage, hatred and contempt bring on blend well in the polluted atmosphere of business. In this unbreathable society the law grants us all the consolation that no-one can stand himself. How the miserable little whiners multiply! While the power-mad dog howls down all compromise and makes a radical ass of himself to hear the roar of fame, the frog in the revolutionary stoup swells with bile, eager to play the bull of theory on the common [’champ libre’ — french publishers of radical theory] of business. To be allowed to breathe through the crack of a reputation one has to dance to the bureaucratic tempo. You look down your nose, incorruptible, virtuous, but your glory comes from the rubbish dump and your reason in history is as good as mud. As general of an army of dustbins, you taint everything you touch with the stench of what has gone dead in you — the smell of trade clinging to all circles of artistic exorcism.

When you are feeling fine, you feel how free life is. Whatever is alive always feels good. I dream that all the senses reunite and each organ evolves endlessly through analogy with the way all satisfaction operates. As if — the lungs excited by contact with air, being penetrated by it and expressing it in muscular detumescence through nose and mouth — it were in a sexual mode which sexualizes them all that smells take me over and emanate from me; as if the functions of the body now finally diverted to benefit pleasure, gave way to the rhythm of tension and satisfaction which is how the desires for life progress.

From the child repressed at the age when he learns what secret urges smell like, when his nose is at the height of fly-buttons and the bottoms of shorts, we have retained something of the original liberty which developed our sense of smell. Is there anyone who does not like to sniff his finger after he has touched his sex, slipped it in his anus or rubbed his armpit? The idleness of the gesture opens the door to childish feelings huddled in the depths of us. And do we not long for this child to be born again in the lover, and adult who in the quick of passion discovers the charm of natural emanations, called natural because education has done its very best to denature them!

Few people breathe with the love of self. We should take our cue from lovers who drink each other’s saliva, lick each other’s sweat, and drop for drop sip cyprine and sperm. They utterly give up worrying whether other people think they smell saintly or sulfurous.

If one learned to smell again as an intellectual decision, it would only renew the age-old castration of the senses. Our sense of smell draws the map of our sensual wealth on the obverse of the world upside down in rediscovering so many olfactive experiences repressed or undertaken as duties. Only dead desires stink, but pleasure in chains can put anybody off. As against the solemn oaths of interest and feelings under contract, may smell decide affinities and discord. Being able to feel for each other and feel at ease with each other will set up the variable atmospherics of situations even in the assemblies of universal self-management which are the social expression of our desires.

There is no love where exchange and constraint rule. Now that the two most ancient taboos in history are shown to be economic in character, can we finally admit that onanism is, together with incest, the beginning of all authentic love?

Masturbation has been vilified for the primacy it accords to pleasure, which prevents woman from metamorphosing into mother and producing sinners. Bourgeois-bureaucratic ideologies denounce it as the solitary vise which ruins health, reduces productivity, softens the rigors of intellectual work and turns you deaf to orders. The prosecution on behalf of the revolution follows hard on their heels, identifying onanism with want, isolation, inability to meet people, or at best low-intensity contacts that can never amount to anything. Definitely the old mole is working harder than ever!

You reject proof in favor of misery. You jeer at masturbation because you won’t see in it anything more than a pitiful solitary wank. And all you see in incest is the occult core of the family, the web of indecent assault we all know about and suppress wherein each makes his bed, the shadowy passions caught up in family economics to stir in their relish of tenderness, their dash of love and ferocity seasoning, into the more repellent communal brews of nation, group, party, or fraternity. Your truth is ever the truth of the commodity. Tomorrow, with identical persuasive conviction, you will trumpet the need for onanism and ritual coupling with your mother, in just the same way you have always cracked up the blessings of love in every one of its perverted forms.

Most of the incidents ranging from the silly to the dramatic which go to make up daily existence are love stories lived against the grain. Tenderness unspoken chokes in rage. Is it chance that sexually highly-repressed societies are noted for their predilection for death by hanging, as though the feminine sexual ring, source of life, were, by inversion, slipped about the neck and tightened to cause death? Caresses are stifled endlessly in a monotonous string of states of exhaustion and melancholy, in shocks, sectarianism, contempt, hate, assaults, murder. Morality’s repression of pedophilia lies sprawled on vacant lots, young families whiten with shock at children assaulted and raped. The pleasure of putting your arms round someone and tangling amourously twists into the act of possessing a long-coveted object. The voluptuous delectation of embracing and love-making falls into sado-masochistic sacrifice in which knife, spike and gun, seduction and one-sided argument let loose pent-up exasperation at being unable to orgasm. And you get caught in the same demented zoology whether you come out against hunting, vivisection, cages and dog-handling schools, or the militants who fight them.

For humanization of custom read humanization of goods-for-sale. Far from showing a victory for life, the statistics of appeasement graph the progress of anemia where a lessening of aggression expresses a lowered will-to-live pressure in the veins, and the passion for destruction gently simmers down into a predilection for sexual passion, enshrined forever for the wrong reasons.

Lucky things! soon love will exist only in your heads, lost everywhere else. Happy lovers! the day is coming when you will no longer have to settle the traditional scores set by jealousy, possessiveness and exchange; but, alas, it will only be because a desexualized society will have put discussions or ideas or techniques or images between lovers’ warm bodies.

However, the agonized state of passion present does not wake regret for passion past. Violence will break out as we reach the state of utter gratuitousness, not as we convulse in survival and slow death. When we stop looking for what is everywhere in quantity, distrust of our bodies as source of all pleasure will vanish in the same instant as society’s disparaging attitude towards the individual.

To love others you must begin by loving yourself. Being touched and reaching out to touch and caress others is surely the start of any real communication: real human contact. Love’s reason thumbs its nose at commodity rationale.

Joy breaks down separation, duty and exchange, and summons a world into existence through touch and feeling, music and scent. Do you not feel when you fall in love that you just do not care whether you are loved in return?

How could I hug or caress you were I waiting for you to touch me first? And in the tumult of pleasure who knows whose hand excites whose skin, whose lips, whose sex? Let us put an end to the jacobinism and terrorism of custom, coherence, standards of beauty and ugliness, these endless judgments rooted in our inability to enjoy each other. I like you! Let’s get together. You don’t like me? Plenty of others will have desires like mine. Why should you take offense and bitch at our lack of epidermic attraction? What is it makes someone I like better or worse than thousands of others? I answer for no-one, neither those I love nor have loved, nor those I do not like. Any society which will not promote throughout such a simple basis for itself deserves to fall apart under the complexity of its necroses.

Chance encounters occur when desire is sharp; blunted, chance invites light, acerbic liaisons and plays at being deeply in love. Out of a multiplicity of adventures the singular passion which will nourish all the others surely ought to be born; you only have to want it, not solicit for it. I will pass up no opportunity to attain my ends, beginning with revolution.

Economizing on life has inoculated the pleasure of eating, drinking and knowledge with the virus of price. In its economic puritanism the bourgeoisie declared that we had to eat to live rather than live to eat. The libertine reaction into which the overt despair of the bureaucracy leads us in no way alters the profitability of business when it incites us to live to eat. The previous exhortations to produce are adapted to the laws of what you can consume at any price.

Necessity taught the nineteenth century proletariat so well to work to feed themselves that its heirs are easily persuaded to cast out past misery through greed for fresh. Gorging oneself has become a labor of compensation and rejection. Lack of desire for life finds compensation in the race to fill oneself up — you guzzle wine, music, sensation, images, sex, canned fishballs, news, drugs and knowledge, but ultimately it remains a way of vomiting yourself up.

Exchange putrefies whatever it touches. Filling the coffers of the bank and the stomach and swelling with importance through every orifice is the ‘insatiable being of the absolute’, as revised and corrected by survival-based society. The taste of plenty transforms into the rage to possess, while the awareness of only ever possessing things drives absence of life into everyone. Fear of the void generates a ridiculous bustle which swallows everyday satisfactions, themselves no more than the thin dust fallen from orgies long ago and peasant festivals at which part of the harvest was thrown away, consumed, burned, cast in sacrifice to the impossible gratuity of it.

We have lost the excessiveness of the banquets of antiquity without getting rid of their inverted version, without ever rising from the table of the will to power, without spitting out the bone of contention between those who eat and those who are eaten. Tell me how eating, fucking and talking to prove what a man or woman or leader you are differs from working for a boss. Being surly and thinking the worst about everything leaves you with only the householder’s greed, guilty overindulgence and christian dissipation.

Nagging guilt force-feeds most people compensations and packaged pleasure, so that it seems obvious that excess of passion exhausts and kills. Bollix! It is never excess which kills but what opposes excess. Beginning with guilt.

The undertaker preens himself as he follows the bon-viveur. A hungry trencherman in the twentieth century enters a restaurant in the same way as he goes to a brothel, with money, tissue paper, and a tranquilizer in his pocket. What pleasure you get from a meal where money has waxed the sauce and soured the wine, is caught in cholesterol and sharpened in bile, haunted by the specter of a coronary! Gluttons and gourmets, exiled from the plate before you, there’s death in the soup!

You pay for your pleasure-panic with disease. Disorders of the organism stem not from an exuberant life but from the panic-fears it awakens in spite of ourselves. The dread of happiness exceeds that of despair. Does it do any good to deny it when everything confirms it? A few passes of intellectual magic, the standard quackery of commercial abstraction, does not make it vanish.

How often these days do a bunch of boys and girls go off and enjoy the ephemeral pleasures of stuffing themselves with bacon soup, a capon or two, a fish stew, foaming beer, laughter and chilled wine, hugs and kisses and songs? That is gastronomy, the art of sophisticating peasant recipes, nature as invented by the economy, the stomach as paid for by thinkers.

Gastronomics call for both manual laborers and intellectuals. It sports MacDonald hamburger freaks and bottled-fruit hogs with season tickets to international chop-joints, as well as upmarket baked-bean epicures and expense-account table props at gloomy boards, who stab sourly with critical forks. Robbed of their sexuality the pleasurable arts of eating and drinking lie only skin-deep.

It is exactly the same with knowledge, for intellectual ignorance has unseated vulgar unconsciousness. As it marches along under the banner of progress obscurantism changes its skin. Knowing more and more things takes the place of getting to know one’s desires. Integrating ‘intelligently’ into society, into the exchange system, adapting to the laws of the will to power, make up for a fathomless lack of self. Curiosity about this self can only feed on police-style interrogations. There is nothing human about the commodity system, though it wishes to discover all it can about humans, the better to bring them to heel. But its science, proceeding through autopsy and scalpel, discovers only the inert State of the corpse.

What is freely taken from the store of plenty is always good, always an asset. To put a price on people and things is to brand them with infamy: how much longer can we put up with it? Is it not doubly inhuman to feel impelled to hand over a fortune for a feast of fresh truffles as well as to run the absurd risk of paying for it with savage pains in the liver? Too much anxiety and letting off steam dominates even the simplest celebration. If love of life begins with refusing to pay for it, let us end up with giving as universal practice. Nothing short of liquidating the State and eradicating goods for sale will do. And I reckon it will come about less through the fury of the oppressed than from the irresistible urge to enjoyment, from pleasure’s tendency to multiply and not hold back, from dreams and feasting, streets set with a million tables, a million exotic foods, while palaces and government buildings are transformed into vast wine cellars, cathedrals metamorphose into inns and road maps read as the menu.

Fuck it! Skepticism is just the traditional stodge of self-disgust. I gulp my freedom down in quarts and cordially invite you to burn up any red-herring doubts you have in high octane sexual excitement.

Nothing is passionately interesting if you are counting the pennies or feel forced to do it. Only desire teaches us to live. You hear people all too often weigh their words and pause for you to admire profundity. Desire, on the other hand, leaves everyone to work out his own way in silence. Independent of reason, desire is its own light and brings light to bear on others — quite unlike obligatory transparency, or the practice of self-criticism, or, worst of all lies, the truth as represented.

We want to live freely from now on with the knowledge gathered from the four winds, from the chance reading of wall-newspapers, and in the abundance of things written and sung, drawn or mimed by individual creativity finally free. The stolid front of education and information will break up in irresistible fantasies as creativity’s desires and affinities get to work dismembering it. I put instability in place of feeling bloated and hunger for experience in place of possessiveness, expansiveness in place of self-distrust.

3. Pleasure creates life.

Very gradually we are emerging from the prehistory of desire. Pleasure as a pretext is like last rites for our alienation, and suicidal forms of pleasure the last Bastille of the world on its head. Now that we know prison walls us in everywhere, we can easily see how to blow it up from inside.

The Great Wall of goods-for-sale runs with cracks as far as it stretches out beyond life. Each day the crisis-ridden economy multiplies the number of breaches through which the urge to have the time of our lives will hurl us and bring the wall tumbling down.

We do not want forced, guilt-ridden pleasures anymore. We want no more pleasures severed from total sexuality, pleasures cut off from the omnipresent body of the will to live. Amorous embrace is eternal witness to life, in it distance and time are abolished, and because of it, because intense measures push the barriers set up against them steadily back, because we are returning to the common spring, to the fundamental unity of life, we hold as absolute certain that making primal utterly free activity [gratuite] dispenses forever with governing and being governed, punishing and being punished, violating and being violated, judging and being judged. In one single movement it abolishes the dialectics of death which rule over survival.

The pleasure of idleness and persistent application, meeting people and being alone, music, creation, speaking and remaining silent, laughing, shitting, coupling, crying, pissing, shouting, caressing, licking, ejaculating, leaping on someone, and rolling about, tasting, sniffing, touching, coming together and pulling apart, are not survival pleasures but the pleasures of life as you like to live it when you do not need anyone or anything else to complete your happiness. You join with the whirl of the senses when life is not overcast by premonition of death, unless it be at last a natural death and so distant that, as in the heart of ancient trees, it flows from the unconcerned forgetfulness of existence.

Separation has mostly reduced pleasure to the role of intermediary, as a vehicle towards something else. When instead of expressing joy in the body, dance is used to reduce and fascinate a prey, when caresses subordinate their game to the preprogramed path of mating, the diversity of life disintegrates into products available if profitable.

I am not making pleasure into a road to revolution. Nor do I want to attack the impatience which has given you the excuse for not living, as though real life began only on the day after the ball. It is time that pleasure in itself sufficed, for its authenticity, unity and inexhaustible variety depends solely from the pleasure each of us takes in creating the life we carry within us.

But why go on contrasting the will to live where at least my destiny can escape, from what never ceases to rip it up? I root the emancipation of my pleasures here and now in the serene resolution to have done with commodity civilization. I do not need to go on looking for the revolution. I have got what it takes to find it in doing what it pleases me most to do. That is the direction I most want to go in.

Throw out mediation, begin your individual autonomy. You cannot accept substitutes for your desire: it lies at the center of your subjectivity, and, in radiating out, dissolves the ancient carapace of character, that fortress which imprisons you with interiorized repression and diseased obsessions rather more frequently than it protects you from the enemy who prowls without. Sometimes it seems to me that only the haunted spite-ridden part of me attacks me from outside, and that I am quite capable of dealing with it.