ABSTRACT
Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy first appeared in France in 1974, in part as a response to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, published two years earlier. Like Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy is an attempt to wed economic analysis and psychoanalysis, wildly revising and, in Lyotard’s case, reviling Marx and Freud along the way. Unlike Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has had little impact in any field, other than to alienate Lyotard’s Marxist friends, if we are to believe the author himself, who in 1988 reflected: “The readers of this book-thank god there were very few-generally accepted the product as a rhetorical exercise and gave no consideration to the upheaval it required of my soul…. Its rare readers disliked the book, which passed for a piece of shamelessness, immodesty, and provocation” (Lyotard 1988:13-14).
