Libidinal economy
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Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Jean-François Lyotard |
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| Original title | Économie Libidinale |
| Translator | Iain Hamilton Grant |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Sex, psychoanalysis, economics |
| Published |
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| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 275 (English edition) |
| ISBN | |
Libidinal Economy (French: Économie Libidinale) is a 1974 book by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The work has been compared to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), which, like it, is seen as a key text in the micropolitics of desire. Libidinal Economy has been criticized on numerous grounds, including lack of a moral or political orientation.
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.
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.
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