Libidinal Economy

Summary

Lyotard discusses Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and capitalism, and presents the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Jean Baudrillard as "brother" critiques. He maintains that his theories are "synchronized and copolarized" with those of Baudrillard, although he reproaches him "for still believing in a 'truth' which is presumably forgotten or repressed by Marxism."

According to Lyotard, every political economy is libidinal: that intensity has no equivalent in currency does not rid the circuits of capital of the force of libidinal investment. Intensive "exchanges" are ignorant of the constitutive negation of both political economy and natural theology since the libido invests unconditionally.

Scholarly reception

Philosopher Douglas Kellner writes that, like Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), Libidinal Economy is a key text in the micropolitics of desire. Kellner finds it interesting that Lyotard presents the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and that of Baudrillard, as "brother" critiques. It has been suggested that Libidinal Economy is Lyotard's most important early work available in English translation; as of 1993, it was generating increasing interest among critics who have given attention to the work Lyotard produced before becoming interested in postmodernism. Libidinal Economy has also been compared to philosopher Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), and Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), with which it forms part of post-structuralism, a response to the demise of structuralism as a dominant intellectual discourse.

Alan D. Schrift writes that Lyotard's work reflects the passion surrounding the events of May 1968 in France, as well as disappointment with the Marxist response to those events. Anthony Elliott writes that Libidinal Economy has a similar theoretical direction to that of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, though he adds that there are also several significant differences between Deleuze and Guattari on the one hand and Lyotard on the other. Elliott argues that Lyotard's ideas are "deeply problematic" from the standpoint of critical psychoanalytic theory, and involve questionable assumptions about human subjectivity and agency. In his view, Lyotard's "celebration of the energetic component of the unconscious is achieved at the cost of displacing the vital role of representation in psychic life." Elliott also maintains that Lyotard's contention that representation is a local effect of libidinal intensities "erases the fundamental stress upon representation in Freud's interpretation of the self." He concludes that Lyotard's concept of libidinal intensities is "cast so wide as to be effectively fruitless for critical social analysis", endorsing Peter Dews' view that "Lyotard's position is bereft of any moral or political orientation."