ABSTRACT
The bourgeois world view is not constituted by a simple act of rejection. The cosmic body (fun), with its absolute freedom of metamorphoses, must certainly be renounced in favour of the order of relations we know separately as ‘cosmos’ and ‘psyche’, but this might be said (in some form) of any complex society. The distinctive character of the bourgeois order must be defined additionally in relation to its own past, in relation to the society it has ‘overcome’. This society had in its turn also been built upon the renunciation of fun. Its techniques of repression, however, were quite different, and it is largely in comparison to them that the unique rationality of capitalism becomes evident.
