Preface. STARTING FROM SCRATCH

The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our inhuman history has ever known. It will lift as life dawns. Death stares at our passions and we mute them; we mesh our desires with what is inimical to life; and we base the greater part o f existence on the bloody search for profit and power. We have been doing it for centuries and we have had enough. We have had enough of revolutions dyed in blood by intellectuals. Violence too is changing sides.

Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market, is the everyday production of misery, a totalitarian industry. It too is in what you call crisis, in fact the death spasm of this whole civilization.

The only human thing this society based on commerce has made is the mold cast in parody of itself, which serves to propagate it world-wide. The fragmentation that exchange value imposes on life can only tolerate fragmented people, embryos shriveling in society’s incubators, creatures never to be masters of themselves, but slaves. Once cloaked in divinity, then fleshed in ideology, power is now revealed in its bare bones: Economics. If this carries all the bets, the game from now on must go against us.

Is it true that life makes sense because of death? Or that we have energy in order to work? That sooner or later judgment is passed on everything either by gods or men or history? That everyone has to pay in the end? For one reason or another, or even for no reason? Or is it maybe that existence is precious because nobody exists except behind “I must work” identities? All in all, do authority and money really regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the smell of thyme on a mountainside, since they govem what they cost? If it is and they do, then the world is upside down, and I want to set it right.

Daylight has not yet dawned on real life. But behind all you shadowy figures, it is pushing through, under my very feet. We are all so sick of the whole shebang that we want to give up dying whilst gesticulating like the living. In the pit of despair the road stops...or climbs. Am I the only one to oppose your society-in which desire turns to rape and the will to live becomes deadly? For me, joy cannot be sold, desire cannot be priced, and I do things because I feel like it, unconstrained by the laws of “scratch-my-back”. Even the discouragement and lack of confidence drummed in since childhood have lost their power to persuade me otherwise.

And do not kid yourselves that the triumph of commerce can conceal its appalling effects on humanity. For you cannot resist the historical fact of life by processing it simply into profit and loss. Collectively, our will to live will smash the supremacy of senile economics.

Everyone is so bored with the pleasures of survival-pleasures of a world upside-down — that we have to open up and free life’s pleasures, that they may spill out everywhere. If we give them free rein we demolish the current dominant ethic, but it will not be destroyed till we let desire rip. Revolution no longer lies in refusing to acquiesce and survive but in taking a delight in oneself that everyone conspires to prohibit, particularly the militants... Yet the weapon we can all use to fight the proletarianization of body and feeling is pleasure unstinted and unopposed.

Most people have lived in opposition to the flow of life. Yet it is becoming obvious that this perspective is now being reversed and the architects of topsy-turvy confounded. It announces the end of the economic era and introduces universal self-management. You can hear it in people’s heartbeats, it is at the heart of present historical conditions: freedom at last to enjoy so many pleasures. It sabotages the shopkeeper’s mentality which paralyzes the muscles and grates the nerves and stifles desire in the name of work and duty, compulsion, exchange, guilt, intellectual control and the will to power. By reversing my perspective, I can distinguish between sound reasoning which ends up killing me, from my desire to live, reasoned or not. Refusing to survive is replaced by affirmation: nothing can satisfy my appetite except more life.

People grow so used to fear, to murder, to contempt and hate that they become deaf to whatever in them whispers that maybe they are wrong and their attitude simply reflects what they loathe in their own lives. That is why they prefer drugs to suppress their despair — the illusion of instant cure keeps them going. But the canker which devours them remains.

Freedom has no worse enemy than these cure-all panaceas which claim to transform society. For these veils of exorcist ritual simply serve to smuggle the old world back in. Lawyers for the revolution or sniffers of radical chic, whatever pedigrees these grocers have, they are our adversaries, armor-clad in neurosis, and will bear the full brunt of the violence of those who live without restraint.

I know well the wise men who denigrate survival, having in many ways been one of them. Under the cassock of that high-brow criticism moves the secular arm of far more pemicious inquisitions. But they merely project the disgust they feel at themselves towards others.

Since the system spreads by destroying its producers and thus by destroying itself, the problem is how to avoid becoming an accessory to trade. Those who whimper in pain, unable to relax enough to enjoy themselves, give up extricating their desires out of the mercantile stranglehold, and make money because they cannot make anything else. Such potential suicides are notable for the way they slag the Establishment; but however convinced they seem, they remain its lackeys to be dug back into the social midden. They have grown quite used to suffering because things don’t change, and have also grown to respect their neighbors’ wish to leave things as they are. You cannot tell apart their funeral dirge from the old world’s De Profundis.

“Love and friendship are just illusions,” they whine, sniveling senilities of the recluse. No doubt that is why we pay them so much attention, these ossified landowners and disillusioned civil servants. Decay ennobles.

Toilers for order, toilers for chaos, for inhibition or psychic lib., the auto-destructive process of trade programs the curriculum vitae of inexistence. Death grabs and you stumble from life, wom out with keeping the books and balance-sheets of daily misery, or with strutting your stuff like a ham politician because of the wonderful way you are managing to die.

Though you loathe power you revere it nonetheless, for from it you have borrowed that arrogant attitude of rejection which endorses all your contemptible acts. But life mocks those even with the most wonderful theories. Only from pleasures is born audacity and laughter, which rings out at orders and laws and limits; it will fall upon all who still judge, repress, calculate and govern, with the innocence of a child.

While intellectuals devise ingenious methods of slipping through the keyhole, those with a world of desires to achieve are breaking down the door, an act of particularly gross behavior for those fastidious mechanics in social engineering who think they see light at the end of the tunnel. But it is life itself seeking fulfillment. The increasing abstraction of the commercial process has turned our heads into the last place left to hide; but even there all that remains is the shadow of power in a tower of skulls. The scars of age, source of so much nostalgic reminiscence, are the wounds of self-renunciation, pleasure mutilated and bled to death by a mania for appearances, a need to dominate, and the will to power.

Your truths have little but the bitterness which has sown them, their edge honed on generations who learned to accept things only if accompanied by kicks, cuffs and mortification. But all arguments cut both ways and set up their own repression. What is knowledge worth when it is founded on the tacit postulate that oneself is one’s own worst enemy?

An influential person quickly discovers that though he controls others he has no real existence for them. Should he hope to safeguard this phantom self “for the good of his fellow-men”, he loses and deceives himself as well as his public. That is why I do not intend to try to convince you: I do not care to add scorn to whatever contempt you already have for others. However rapt your attention to the various messengers of self-destruction, whom I am sure will repay your attention with interest, I prefer, rather offhandedly, to wait until sooner or later you grow deaf to everything that does not increase your pleasure.

It is much more the lack of fun which batters us than over-abundance and indulgence. Let the dead bury the living dead. My well-being does not dine upon virtue and certainly not upon revolutionary virtue. I feast upon what is alive and kicking. Dead truths are venomous, as all who give up their desires discover.

What’s a book worth which does not say more than all the others? What returns each man to himself is written with the taste of plenty, not under the scourge of directives. The ‘Book of Pleasures’ is bound to be tainted with the life of intellectualism, separate thought which rules over the body and oppresses it. But the lie that we each carry can be dissolved only by doing exactly what we want to do, without qualm or hesitation. May your desires wipe out whatever lies remain here, and efface the grand inquisitor from your brain.

In all beings, in all things, in all creation, I take what pleases and leave the rest. Keep away, serious critics! This is not for you. Why should you put up with me if you cannot stand yourselves? I don’t give a toss what you think of this book; so what you do with it is up to you. I have nothing to exchange. If you know all this and better, go to it!

Whoever learns to love himself is beyond the plots and spells of shame and guilt and the fear of loving; and knows too, that despite my errors I do not veer an inch from my desire to create a society based upon the individual will to live, by globally subverting the society which has stood everything on its head.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am? To enjoy myself in such a way that never again do I get bogged down in other people’s misery. If these righteous citizens knew what dynamite they humped about every step of the way.... Humility’s tatters and megalomania’s trumpery have between them successfully persuaded the sober how insignificant they are; look at them, they are so graceless, and their eyes are dead to what’s left of life beyond affective blocks and compensatory binges. Who will shatter the rock that for millenia has sat upon individual autonomy? For so long now learning to live has meant learning to die.

“When I come to make a wheel,” said the wheelright. “I can’t go at it slowly, or it will turn out weak and uncertain. Whereas if I go hard at it, it’ll be firm but grossly proportioned. But if I take it steadily, at my own speed and so that it feels right, it will turn out just as I wish. You can’t explain the feel for it in words.” The words here begin where my lived experience falls silent. If you take these words so they ‘feel right’, I get a chance to mesh with every person’s experience and go forward with it. Only the individual will to live can make the Book of Pleasures what it is to me, an urge to have fun that nothing and no-one outside myself has imposed on me.

I like the Viennese humourist’s quip: “There are a lot of people who’d love to hit me, and many who’d like to chat with me for an hour. They are generally the same people.” Cut me or lionize me, it’s a joke either way! But I can’t shield myself from the feeling that whoever represses himself, refusing his own desires and turning towards death, adds a shackle to my emancipation I could well do without .

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it. When you decide to treat yourself as your only point of reference you will cease to be trapped by name-dropping — yours or mine — or by deferring to other people’s opinions, or by the particular way they see things. And you will cease to link yourself to the people whose everpresent memories of having taken part in a movement in history still prevent them from deriving any personal benefit from the experience.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives. We waste so much energy in living vicariously, it is really hard work, when it would be enough, if you love yourself, to apply this energy to the achievement and development of the incomplete being, the child within. I wish to reach the anonymity of desire and be carried away on the flood.

In endlessly denaturing what still seemed natural, the history of trade has reached a point where either we perish with it or recreate nature and humanity completely afresh. Beyond the inversion in which death battens on life, life leaps up, and swiftly sketches society where pleasure comes of its own accord.

At any one moment, my ‘me’ is to be found tightly tangled in the detritus of what oppresses me; heated debate erupts in the attempt to disentangle the twisted filaments and liberate utterly the sexual impulse as the breath that gives life perpetually. It ought never to be stifled. That’s why enjoying yourself also presages the end of work and holding back, exchange, intellectuality, guilt, and the will to power. I see no justification — except economic — for suffering, separation, orders, payments, reproaches or power. My struggle for autonomy is that of the proletarian against his growing proletarianization, of the individual against the omnipresent dictatorship of goods for sale, the commodity. Life erupting has kicked a breach in your death-oriented civilization.

Will you now accuse me of being overly subjective? Probably you will; but take care, because one day your own subjectivity may tap you on the shoulder and remind you of the life which you are most lamentably losing. Over your realism my naivety has one incomparable advantage: it is brimming over with most amusing monsters, in contrast to what you call planning and foresight which accustoms you to live with a distrust for pleasure which reaches back thousands of years.

Individuals are being born again and I am glad, glad as at spring burgeoning again in the earth. Were I alone in feeling it, the entertaining folly of having desired to conquer death by liberating all desires from it would remain.