Desire belongs to the imaginary, while pleasure belongs to the real.

Capitalism, and the increasingly ferocious and accelerated networks of semio-capitalism, are the mobilization of desire and the infinite interdiction of pleasure. An economy of accumulation pushes you to desire, but it denies you pleasure, and above all denies you time for pleasure, because all your time must be spent on competing, on accumulating, and thus on desiring, virtually and endlessly.

The fanaticism of the absence of limits persecutes the Christian mystic but also the apologists of neoliberalism. Our ‘no-limits’ fanaticism, that originates in Marinetti’s futurism and ends in bio-technological trans-humanism, promotes aggression, violence, exploitation, and war. This raises the question of the relation between desire and death that Freud had already posed in his own way.



Read full essay here