Pierre Klossowski's Libidinal Economy

Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency, which Michel Foucault called ‘the greatest book of our time’, takes its title from a parody of a classical utopia that appears at the end of the book. Klossowski imagines a phase in industrial production where producers are able to demand objects of sensation, i.e. pleasure, from consumers as a form of payment. These objects would be living beings. Human beings, in other words, would be traded as currency: employers would pay their male workers in women, female workers would be paid in boys, and so on. This is neither prostitution nor slavery, where humans are bought and sold using monetary currency. Rather, it is humans themselves that are used as currency, a living currency, and they can function as currency because they are sources of sensation, emotion and pleasure. Far from being imaginary or ideal, Klossowski insists that this counter-utopia already exists in contemporary capitalism. Our article will describe it, emphasizing the importante that adhering to it can have from a psychic, libidic and social point of view.