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The Book Of Pleasures
Raoul Vaneigem
 
PREFACESTARTING FROM SCRATCH
The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our inhuman history has ever known.It will lift as life dawns. Death stares at our passions and we mute them; we mesh our desires with what is inimical to life; and we base the greater part o f existence on the bloodysearch for profit and power. We have been doing it for centuries and we have had enough.We have had enough of revolutions dyed in blood by intellectuals. Violence too is changingsides.Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market, is the everyday production of misery, a totalitarian industry. It too is in what you call crisis, in fact thedeath spasm of this whole civilisation.The only human thing this society based on commerce has made is the mould cast in parody of itself, which serves to propagate it world-wide. The fragmentation that exchangevalue imposes on life can only tolerate fragmented people, embryos shrivelling in society'sincubators, creatures never to be masters of themselves, but slaves. Once cloaked indivinity, then fleshed in ideology, power is now revealed in its bare bones: Economics. If this carries all the bets, the game from now on must go against us.Is it true that life makes sense because of death? Or that we have energy in order towork? That sooner or later judgement is passed on everything either by gods or men or history? That everyone has to pay in the end? For one reason or another, or even for noreason? Or is it maybe that existence is precious because nobody exists except behind "Imust work" identities? All in all, do authority and money really regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the smell of thyme on a mountainside, since theygovem what they cost? If it is and they do, then the world is upside down, and I want to setit right.Daylight has not yet dawned on real life. But behind all you shadowy figures, it is pushing through, under my very feet. We are all so sick of the whole shebang that we wantto give up dying whilst gesticulating like the living. In the pit of despair the road stops...or climbs. Am I the only one to oppose your society-in which desire turns to rape and the willto live becomes deadly? For me, joy cannot be sold, desire cannot be priced, and I do things because I feel like it, unconstrained by the laws of "scratch-my-back". Even the
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discouragement and lack of confidence drummed in since childhood have lost their power to persuade me otherwise.And do not kid yourselves that the triumph of commerce can conceal its appallingeffects on humanity. For you cannot resist the historical fact of life by processing it simplyinto profit and loss. Collectively, our will to live will smash the supremacy of senileeconomics.Everyone is so bored with the pleasures of survival-pleasures of a world upside-down -that we have to open up and free life's pleasures, that they may spill out everywhere. If wegive them free rein we demolish the current dominant ethic, but it will not be destroyed tillwe let desire rip. Revolution no longer lies in refusing to acquiesce and survive but intaking a delight in oneself that everyone conspires to prohibit, particularly the militants...Yet the weapon we can all use to fight the proletarianisation of body and feeling is pleasureunstinted and unopposed.Most people have lived in opposition to the flow of life. Yet it is becoming obvious thatthis perspective is now being reversed and the architects of topsy-turvy confounded. Itannounces the end of the economic era and introduces universal self-management. You canhear it in people's heartbeats, it is at the heart of present historical conditions: freedom atlast to enjoy so many pleasures. It sabotages the shopkeeper's mentality which paralyses themuscles and grates the nerves and stifles desire in the name of work and duty, compulsion,exchange, guilt, intellectual control and the will to power. By reversing my perspective, Ican distinguish between sound reasoning which ends up killing me, from my desire to live,reasoned or not. Refusing to survive is replaced by affirmation: nothing can satisfy myappetite except more life.People grow so used to fear, to murder, to contempt and hate that they become deaf towhatever in them whispers that maybe they are wrong and their attitude simply reflectswhat they loathe in their own lives. That is why they prefer drugs to suppress their despair -the illusion of instant cure keeps them going. But the canker which devours them remains.Freedom has no worse enemy than these cure-all panaceas which claim to transformsociety. For these veils of exorcist ritual simply serve to smuggle the old world back in.Lawyers for the revolution or sniffers of radical chic, whatever pedigrees these grocershave, they are our adversaries, armour-clad in neurosis, and will bear the full brunt of theviolence of those who live without restraint.I know well the wise men who denigrate survival, having in many ways been one of them. Under the cassock of that high-brow criticism moves the secular arm of far more pemicious inquisitions. But they merely project the disgust they feel at themselves towardsothers.Since the system spreads by destroying its producers and thus by destroying itself, the problem is how to avoid becoming an accessory to trade. Those who whimper in pain,unable to relax enough to enjoy themselves, give up extricating their desires out of themercantile stranglehold, and make money because they cannot make anything else. Such potential suicides are notable for the way they slag the Establishment; but howeveconvinced they seem, they remain its lackeys to be dug back into the social midden. Theyhave grown quite used to suffering because things don't change, and have also grown torespect their neighbours' wish to leave things as they are. You cannot tell apart their funeraldirge from the old world's De Profundis."Love and friendship are just illusions," they whine, snivelling senilities of the recluse.
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