ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to extend Michel Foucault’s ‘care of the self’ project towards an intense sense of care that might be engaged via the libido: a type of care or love that is as extensive as it is intensive. That is, I’m exploring forms of love and lust turned outward. To trace this movement in philosophy is to trace a slide from psychoanalysis and Marxism into poststructuralism, and it is there that the notion of the libido escapes investments in individual bodies and comes to be explored in respect to all drives, all desires. The end-game is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call, to ‘make love with worlds’.They commence this project in their first collaborative text, Anti-Oedipus (1972), where what might habitually have been considered an interior condition of the body is exteriorized, as care well beyond the self. In their account, sexual desire and social desire are two subcategories of libidinal investment. Deleuze and Guattari take what Karl Marx refers to as ‘the direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person’ and extend it to a relation between people and communities, other animals, objects, and geographies: between people and the world itself.
