Klossowski, the immanent repression and the living currency: about one of the basis of the schizoanalytic libidinal economy

Abstract

The present paper explores Pierre Klossowski's contribution to the debate on libidinal economy, which will be followed by Deleuze & Guattari with their schizoanalytic project. It demonstrates the explicit and implicit influence of Klossowski's text in Anti-Oedipus, giving centrality to the ideas of: 1) the indistinction between infrastructure and superstructure, where desire (or what Klossowski calls voluptuous emotion) is inserted into the material economic infrastructure; 2) that repression is an immanent phenomenon to desire itself, in line with the identity between social production and desiring production, mediated by the subject and socially established needs, moving away from the approach that postulated a duality between the spontaneity of desire and external social repression (attributed to the Freudo-Marxist field); and 3) that money or currency are essential elements of the capitalist libidinal economy, as money becomes the universal phantasm that exchanges with any and all voluptuous emotion. The article explains the relationship between Klossowski and Deleuze (& Guattari), as well as the influence of the former on the latter, and demonstrates Klossowski's proposed economy of the “soul”, with the notions of voluptuous emotion, phantasm, simulacrum, and suppôt, and, based on this economy, grounds the idea of immanent repression and living currency as the basis for the surface inscription of desire in the capitalist machine.