Libidinal Economy () is a 1974 book by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The book was composed following the ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires". Drastically changing his writing style and turning his attention to semiotics, theories of libido, economic history and erotica, he repurposed Freud's idea of libidinal economy as a more complex and fluid concept that he linked to political economy, and proposed multiple ideas in conjunction with it. Alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has been seen as an essential post-May 68 work in a time when theorists in France were radically reinterpreting psychoanalysis, and critics have argued that the book is free of moral or political orientation. Lyotard subsequently abandoned its ideas and views, later describing it as his "evil book" ("livre méchant", literally "nasty book"). Summary Lyotard appropriates various ideas of Freud's, in particular his idea of libidinal economy by which libido flows, like a form of energy, through a structure of drives, while also using his idea of polymorphous perversity and appropriating Jacques Lacan's idea of jouissance to detail how masses of intensities form. He also introduces ideas of his own, such as a "great ephemeral skin" or "libidinal band," which serves as a surface of reality, harboring signs through which libidinal intensities pass; the "tensor," a nihilist semiotic idea that stands for a sign with no "unitary designation, meaning, or calculable series of such designations or meanings"; "great" zeros (which correspond to Lacan's master signifier) and "concentratory" zeros (which correspond to Marx's notion of capital). These ideas are used to discuss relations of force, flow and intensity in philosophy and economics, while mainly asserting that theory, because of its "immobility", has never adequately described or caught up to these relations. Lyotard concludes the book by proposing in a revolutionary manner that thinkers should "stay put, but quietly seize every chance to function as good intensity-conducting bodies." Discussed authors Alongside wildly varying references, Lyotard incorporates the work of Marx (in particular his theory of organic and inorganic bodies), Nietzsche and Saussure in this context of this appropriation of Freudian ideas, as well as the perverse sexuality displayed in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. The economic work of John