 Libidinal Economy, published three years later, is one he later denounced, but remains an important examination of desire’s place as the driver of the political while also critiquing political and linguistic models of representation. The book is very much a reflection of its era: Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1930–1992) Anti-Oedipus had come out in 1972, arguing against Freudian accounts of repression while offering an immanentist ontology whereby all events had to be accounted for without reference to an outside or be confused with the representations made of them. Lyotard follows Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in arguing that there is no objective science or forms of knowledge that are not based in a desire or what Nietzsche called a will for power, a point that Lyotard will make by looking at the desire or libido behind the so-called scientific works of the later Marx. Libidinal Economy is not an easy read, not least since it does not wish to set itself up as merely another philosophical theory hiding its own desires, with a truth easily representable to others (Libidinal, 244). While Freud largely discussed the libido at the individual level as a form of energy circulating within the body and necessitating societal laws that led to the formation of an internal superego keeping these energies in check, Lyotard greatly extends the idea of the libido to think of political economy as really a libidinal economy. In sum, he looks to any stable formations within society as libidinal fields, whether we are discussing linguistics, economics, or architecture.  For Lyotard, Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle (Eros) provides for this stabilizing effect of the other side of our drives, namely the death drive (Thanatos), which seeks out intensities, whether high or low, that destabilize institutions. These transformations occur through certain techniques (dispositifs, a term important in Foucault’s work of the time) that guide these energies and which are themselves almost precarious formations of energies themselves: the body, works of art, financial systems, texts, theoretical systems, and so forth. The mutations caused by the libidinal economy are events. The libido itself, its energetics, is never representable or containable within any given system; all desires are dissimulated in these institutions, and they are never presentable as they are in themselves. This is quite similar to what Deleuze and Guattari discuss in terms of organisms and and the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus two years earlier, and both texts are often read as encouraging these flows of energy, that is, the creation of the highest intensities, over forms of organization that tamp down these events. For this reason, both books will be critiqued as being irresponsibly anarchist. For Lyotard, structures and institutions tend to totalize and exploit intensities for their own good, and thus lay claim to all proper interpretations of these intensities. But where Deleuze and Guattari differentiate fascistic and liberating forms of desire, Lyotard argues it is impossible to do so. Hence, for example, he will say that capitalism is a liberating form of libidinal economy, since it overthrows all manner of institutions in the name of the accumulation of more and more money. Against Marx, he argues that our innate desires are not alienated in capitalism, but rather that capitalism is another means for the death drive to demolish those entities in its way, such as when capitalist expansion undoes traditional values and previous forms of economics. And just as in capitalism, where it matters not what goods are in circulation as long as there is an accumulation of capital, desires are neutral as to their locale. Indeed, later in interviews he will argue for at least passing through capitalism for those facing economic hardship. “Capitalism”, he will say in 1995, “is the only solution” for the unemployed and dispossessed, and there is “no competition” to capitalism for doing so (“Resisting a Discourse of Mastery”, 182). Only once one has a job, food, and housing, he goes on, can “real resistance appear”.