La Boétie and “Anti-Oedipus”: The mystery of voluntary servitude

The arguments of the Discourse

To understand the importance of the Discourse, let us summarise five of its important points. It is needless to say that they are not exhaustive and should be understood as an invitation to read the whole text.

1) When we ask ourselves why people serve, our intuitive answer is that they are directly or indirectly forced to do so. But, as La Boétie makes it clear at the beginning of the text, the tyrant, being the sole ruler, is just one person, and thus evidently weaker than all those who serve under him. Even when there is a whole ruling class, it is generally in the minority. Thus, getting rid of a tyrant would be the easiest task in the world if the system was merely based on violence. It’d be sufficient to just stop complying: “Resolve no longer to be slaves and you are free! I do not want you to push him or overthrow him, but merely no longer to sustain him and, like a great colossus whose base has been pulled away, you will see him collapse of his own weight and break up”14placeholder (8). Certainly, we have our ready-made responses to this argument; it’s not that easy, it’s too naïve to see it that way etc. But let us hold on to this idea and let ourselves partake in the astonishment of this observation: indeed, if everyone stopped obeying, the whole construct would collapse.

Of course, this does not mean that the threat of violence is merely illusory. In that regard, La Boétie distinguished between servitude and obedience: when a people is conquered, it cannot help but obey, simply to assure its survival. If they disobey, they get slaughtered. Nevertheless, when people obey unwillingly, they only wait for the opportunity to strike: “So if a nation is obliged by war to serve one man, like the city of Athens with the Thirty Tyrants, we should not be surprised that it does serve but be sorry for the incident, or rather be neither surprised nor sorry, but bear the evil patiently and wait for better fortune in the future”15placeholder (3). Looking at the history of slavery in the United States, for example, we can see revolts emerging whenever they were possible, whenever the slaves were organised enough to become stronger than those violently keeping them in their place. Colonised people resist in any way they can. Such systems of obedience, assured by a superior strength of force, cannot be overcome by mere disobedience. It is in fact here that we see the desire for liberty expressed in the clearest way, through passive and active resistance.

Yet, such behaviour of patiently waiting for the opportune moment is not observed in systems of servitude. Those who serve, serve willingly, and they assure with their actions that things remain as they are and shun any attempts at subversion. The question of voluntary servitude cannot be explained by mere threat of violence, even if systems of servitude are usually assured by it indirectly. It is true that if you stop working, you will starve, and if you stop paying rent, you’ll be homeless, and if you protest, you’ll be beat up by cops, but a) if everyone stopped working under current conditions and organised differently, the threat of violence would not suffice to uphold the order, and b) it is not like everyone is patiently waiting to overcome this condition, we rather perpetuate it willingly and brand any discontent as naivety or childishness. Thus, the threat of violence does not explain servitude.

2) Yet, it’d be too simple to conclude that servitude is therefore preferable. La Boétie insists that liberty is more natural than servitude. Before we once again reject him with ready-made answers, let us hear him out. To prove his point, La Boétie evokes the passion with which free peoples defend their liberty, contrary to the serving mercenaries who are trying to subjugate them: “Which ones will we predict victory for, which ones do we think will go to battle more bravely: those who hope to keep their liberty as a reward for their efforts, or those who can expect no other pay for the blows they give or receive than servitude to another?”16placeholder (5). Liberty is always preferred by those who are in the position of defending it. Also, the condition of servitude is imposed from the outside, assured by an external force, which implies that the condition of liberty comes before and is therefore more natural: “It therefore remains that liberty is natural, and by the same token, in my opinion, that we are born not only in possession of our freedom but with the desire [affection] to defend it”17placeholder (9). This “affection” free human beings share with animals, who will defend their liberty with the same passion: “The beasts, God help me, cry out to men, if they do not close their ears, ‘Long live liberty!’ A number of them die as soon as they are captured. Just as a fish leaves life as soon as it leaves the water, so they leave the light and will not outlive their natural freedom.”18placeholder Wherever there is servitude, it is imposed by force and injury, and whoever has tasted freedom will be willing to risk their life to keep it. Thus, nature itself does not pull us towards domination, but rather to the constitution of egalitarian forms of sociability.19placeholder One might interject that nature and preferability don’t necessarily go together; ‘artificial’ comfort might be preferable to ‘savage’ liberty. But what calls the supposed preferability of servitude into question is not that it’s artificial, but that it emerges only when the conditions of choosing have been limited, as we find ourselves already within the conditions of servitude, which we grew up with. If you choose to not go to work tomorrow, you’re not choosing a state of liberty, you’re signing your own testament. The choice of liberty can’t even be made. La Boétie can therefore affirm the preferability of liberty, because those who were at some point in the condition of choosing between servitude and liberty, be it people or animals, always chose the latter. A colonised people will do all that it can to re-establish the conditions of authentic choice.

3) The first argument. And yet, if this preference is ‘natural’, why is it so rarely observed? After all, when presented with the choice between liberty and servitude, those who serve will choose servitude with the same conviction with which the free people will choose liberty. Is it just a question of psychology, of some people preferring liberty, while the character of others is built for servitude? If liberty is more natural, why don’t we naturally tend towards the natural state? It is true that servitude, once established, maintains itself. But this ‘maintenance’ is itself inherently violent. It’s not just that the conditions of choice are never given, but that once servitude is chosen, this choice itself will be perpetuated due to its inner mechanisms. Servitude perpetuates itself, so that it will appear to be preferable. We can get ‘used to’ doing as we’re told: the first mechanism of the perpetuation of servitude is custom.

To understand why those who serve will keep choosing servitude, La Boétie formulates a revolutionary idea: “Nature” is not some eternal and unchangeable essence, it implies the whole complex interaction with the environment, i.e. nurture. When we are born, our nature is merely present in a weak and potential state, like a seed or a sapling, which dies if it isn’t nourished, or, rather, changes depending on how we are nourished:

“We cannot deny that Nature has a great role in pulling us where it wishes and getting us called well- or ill-bred. But it must still be confessed that it has less power over us than does custom; for nature, no matter how good, is lost if it is not sustained, and nurture always fashions us after itself, even though it may be despite Nature. The seeds of good that Nature sows in us are so tiny and slippery that they cannot withstand the slightest clash with opposing nurture. […] Each herb has its properties, its nature and individuality, and yet frost, weather, soil, or the gardener’s hand add or take away much of their quality from them: it is hard to recognize a plant one has seen in one place somewhere else”20placeholder (13-14).

Custom is therefore the first identified mechanism of servitude, but it is not merely illusionary, it becomes second nature, because just like we can be nourished by liberty, we can be nourished by servitude. The base of the argument might be clear enough: if nature is not understood as an immutable essence, if ‘cultivation’ is possible, then our ways of being can be profoundly changed and integrated into a system of servitude. This might then be the prelude to a core idea formulated by Marx several centuries later, that subjectivities are shaped by the socio-economical means of production. Thus, La Boétie offers a profound understanding of ideology: servitude is not merely a deception, and while it does denaturalise us, it still nourishes, educates us: you are what you eat. Our ways of intellectual ‘nourishment’, the things we learn and see, shapes the way we think, the way we perceive the world. Serving thus becomes something reasonable.

Yet, the metaphor of nourishment might throw us off. After all, nourishment is always nourishment – it helps us survive, makes us grow –, and if both liberty and servitude can nourish us, does their distinction not collapse? If we can get used to obeying just as we can get used to choosing on our own, what’s the issue with preferring the former if it presumably suits us better and might give us a bit of comfort? To avoid this collapse, La Boétie must either maintain a qualitative difference between these two kinds of nurture, the ‘natural’ and the ‘denatured’ one, or claim that there is a qualitative difference in the way in which nurture is distributed and acquired in the state of servitude and the state of liberty. La Boétie does not offer us an answer to that point, and we probably shouldn’t read too far into his metaphor of ‘nurture’; the point then is merely to say that custom has such a strong hold over us that we will perceive servitude to be preferable, as our teachers, news, and movies keep ‘feeding’ us the idea that we’re better off than those who are free.

We might nevertheless tentatively distinguish qualitatively between ‘natural’ and ‘denatured’ nourishment. While nourishment is always nourishment, we know that it can be healthy or unhealthy. And just the way unhealthy food makes us weak and lethargic, healthy food makes us grow to our full potential. Being ‘nourished’ by servitude would then be akin to being perpetually fed something like fast-food. While it is still nourishment, it produces a reduction in our being.

For the second option, concerning the possible qualitative distinction between ways of being nourished, we might compare servitude to something like force-feeding, the control over the way in which we receive knowledge and information. While free people decide on their own what they want to learn and what inspires them, systems of servitude establish official channels of communication and learning. In that perspective, ‘denatured’ nourishment is worse because it is perpetuated by force, by avoiding that people ‘taste’ freedom, by making sure that they know nothing beyond what they are ‘fed’. What ‘natural’ nourishment implies is the choice of what you ‘eat’, your sources of knowledge and inspiration; after all, what is liberty if not that? Both options maintain the voluntary nature of custom, while affirming the qualitative difference to liberty: servitude decides on what we eat (‘fast-food’) and on how we receive intellectual nourishment (‘force-feeding’), and thereby leads to a general state of impoverishment. This might be reading too much into the metaphor of nourishment evoked by La Boétie, so let us retain the first argument as being: we keep serving because we are used to do so. We can thus be cultivated for servitude with help of ‘denatured’ nourishment, just like we can cultivate our ‘natural’ sapling of liberty.

4) The second argument. Still, this first method of perpetuating servitude might not suffice. There are always people who resist the power of custom. For that reason, La Boétie adds, the tyrants usually also encourage their own mystification: “Tyrants themselves found it quite strange that men could put up with a man harming them [leur faisant mal]. They really wanted to get religion out in front of them as a bodyguard and, if possible, to borrow some spark of divinity to keep up their evil lifestyle”21placeholder (26). Not only do they ‘nourish’ the people with servitude, they also make them believe in their innate superiority, in the legitimacy of their rule. Religion as the opium of the masses: La Boétie saw clearly how it can be used to keep people obedient, as it becomes a duty and honour to serve a divine being. In that way, ideology is not merely an organisation of knowledge, but also implies the creation of values, whose objectivity is assured by the all-mighty tyrant. Those at the top deserve their place, and all we can do is to be at good service and admire them. Nevertheless, in both these arguments the aspect of ‘voluntariness’ in servitude tends to disappear: both custom and devotion trick people into servitude rather than revealing its doings. The willingness of those who serve is ultimately based on some form of deception. Servitude once again becomes a derived phenomenon, assured externally.

5) It is therefore the third argument which reveals “the source and secret of domination” (30). It is clear, says La Boétie, that even though the tyrant is the sole ruler, his rule is assured by those who surround and protect him. There is a whole organisation of domination where there are enough people who participate, who exploit others while serving themselves: bodyguards, soldiers, policemen, middle-managers. It is true, says La Boétie, that they more often than not find themselves a violent end, as the sympathy of the tyrant is inconsistent. They nevertheless find it preferable to serve as they feel that they themselves profit from it. Not only do they get some material advantages, more than that do they find pleasure in exploiting others: “In sum, whether one gets there by patronage or sub-patronage, the profits of benefits one gains from tyrants, there are almost as many people whom tyranny seems to profit as those for whom liberty would be agreeable”22placeholder (31). Those who serve take pleasure in being themselves little sub-tyrants, motivated by “burning ambition and unusual greed” (ibid.). Here, desire for servitude is not primarily that of one’s own, but rather that of others: “So here are his archers, here are his guards, here are his halberdiers—not that they themselves do not suffer at times from him, but these poor souls, abandoned by God and men, are content to endure ill in order to do ill, not to the one who does it to them, but to those who endure it as they do and can do nothing about it”23placeholder (32). Serving’s not fun, but at least you can go beat up a hippie or a minority. And yet, even though their servitude may be somewhat compensated by sadistic pleasure, such people are caught deeper in servitude than those they subjugate:

“The plowman and the artisan, though they may be enslaved, need not do any more than what they are told; but a tyrant sees the others near him cadging and begging his favor. Not only must they do what he says, but also think of what he wants—and often, to satisfy him, even anticipate his thoughts. It is not enough for them to obey him, they also have to please him, they have to break their backs, torture themselves, work themselves to death on his business; and then they must take pleasure in his pleasures, give up their tastes for his, force their character, shed their own nature; they have to be attentive to his words, his voice, his gestures, and his eyes; they should only have eyes, feet, and hands to look out for his wishes and to discover his thoughts. Is this living happily? Is this what you call living? Is there anything in the world less bearable than this, I am not saying for a stouthearted or a well-born man, but just for one who has some common sense or merely the face of man? What condition is more miserable than living this way, not having anything for oneself, owing one’s well-being, liberty, body, and life to someone else?”24placeholder (32-33).

Thus, while the common people, at the limit, are merely forced to obey, because any attempt at revolt will be met by an unleashed state violence, those who are closer to the tyrant must serve, adopt his point of view and way of thinking, i.e. internalise the rule. As La Boétie shows, such sadism is a poor compensation for a complete effacement of one’s own being. Still, if the misery of this condition is obvious according to La Boétie – and it is –, then why is it still the most efficient tool of domination? Why do people prefer the base pleasure of having people ‘under them’ to the state of equality, if the price they need to pay is their entire individuality, their very being? While being La Boétie’s strongest argument – people serve because they see some profit in it –, the reasons for the desire of power and domination remain a mystery. Moreso, it seems like the phenomenon of voluntary servitude once again slips away from our grip: as servitude is understood as a mere means to assure some relative rule over others, it is not one’s own servitude that is decisive, but that of others.

*

Custom, mystification, interest: the three pillars of voluntary servitude (see Abensour/Gauchet 2002, p. 8). While each one of them reveals the mechanisms in which servitude is maintained voluntarily, it either tends to efface the aspect of ‘voluntary’ or of ‘servitude’. The question is either that of deception or (supposed) rule over others. Yet, the strength of the Discourse is that it reveals the reasons for this failure, the inherently slippery nature of voluntary servitude: because servitude creates and assigns its own reasons and interests, because it ‘nourishes’ us, there is no superior ‘rational discourse’ that can ‘trump’ it, a ‘royal path’ out of it. More than that, we are unwilling to pose the question of our own servitude, because we might assume that we ourselves are free, that ideology only affects others. Blinded by custom and whatever forms of mystification, we perceive servitude as freedom and thus perpetuate the present state of things willingly. And even when we try to escape it, servitude is already so interiorised that it is difficult to avoid that our subversion won’t establish some other form of domination (even if we might imagine ourselves at the top). In that regard, Abensour and Gauchet insist on “the capacity of revolutions to produce new forms of oppression, all the more formidable because they have been forged and shaped in the adventures of freedom.”25placeholder

How can we avoid merely switching one tyrant for another? According to Abensour and Gauchet, the Discourse does not offer a definite reply to the question of voluntary servitude, because it is the questioning itself of the current power structures that is decisive: “A writing in the service of freedom. An oblique writing that carries within it the admission that there is no privileged place from which to think about the political. Rejecting any political project of social control, such writing is, in its very practice, an invitation to freedom, and even more, an endless incitement to historical invention.”26placeholder In asking for answers, we put ourselves in the position of servitude in regard to the text. We await instruction. We want to know what to do. Asking for answers is the rejection of the responsibility to think; but only those can be free who are willing to learn to think on their own.

Nevertheless, La Boétie does not leave us in a state of negativity. The Discourse gives us indications about how to critically evaluate our own situation, the various ways in which ideology shapes us. How are we nurtured to prefer servitude? How are we dazzled to accept the superiority of those who rule over us? How are we implicated in the network of domination, so that we become ‘interested’ in having people ‘under us’? What are the mechanisms that make masochistic and sadistic pleasure desirable? And, in reverse: How could we go about finding other nourishment, one that will help that natural sapling of liberty in us grow? How can we uncover the ways in which social hierarchies and values are maintained to make people believe that some are superior to others? How can we create other bonds with people, other ‘interests’ based not on domination, but on a mutual acknowledgement of liberty? La Boétie invites us to not judge others for their servitude, and assuming that they are merely too dumb or naïve and thus deserve their inferior position, but our own ways of legitimising our own unfreedom, especially where it would suffice for everyone to simply stop obeying. The Discourse invites us to question our own volition to perpetuate the state of domination. What are the reasons for our willingness to be deceived? Even when we are forced to do as we’re told, why are we not patiently awaiting and preparing for the moment in which we can reclaim our liberty? Why do we accept the discourse of austerity so willingly? The Discourse does not give us answers to these questions, but it lets us once again be astonished by the strangeness of this slippery phenomenon, voluntary servitude; it forces us above all to confront this mystery.27placeholder

Libidinal aspects of voluntary servitude

Nevertheless, I have indicated that the concept of libido might expand on La Boétie’s elucidation of the mechanisms of servitude, and reveal not only “how,” but also “why” desire itself can become reactionary. What is it about desire that can turn it into a force of liberation and emancipation, but also of subjugation? What might serve us to tentatively open up this field is the concept of libidinal investment.28placeholder As La Boétie shows, servitude is not mere passivity, it is perpetuated through a repeated investment of energy; servitude is not endured, it is desired. We keep perpetuating our own servitude because we are invested in it. But the origins of this investment remained a mystery to him, because it necessarily remains paradoxical as long as you look at it from the point of consciousness. Whatever the mechanism that perpetuates servitude, when you look at it rationally, it remains an absurdity. Whenever we choose servitude, there is an error in our thinking; we don’t ‘actually’ desire it. The preference for the ‘denatured’ nourishment of servile custom is caused by an impossible choice (as we are already in a state of servitude); mystification is based on the suspension of our critical functions (otherwise, we wouldn’t see other people as inherently superior or inferior to us); interest is based on a confusion, as the price paid for sadistic pleasure is too high: we are forced to give up our whole individuality, our conscience and consciousness. Ultimately, for a rational point of view, voluntary servitude can’t really make sense. The choice of servitude is always made on false premises, because we are somehow tricked, deceived. Or it is based on some crooked rationalisation, some confusion regarding our ‘actual interests’. Custom betrays our interest to grow and become our best selves, mystification betrays our interest to think on our own, the interest to dominate betrays our interest to help each other.

La Boétie understood that political philosophy must above all resolve the question of investment, desire; but for him, this was primarily understood as a conscious process. For this reason, the phenomenon that he revealed remained paradoxical, kept slipping away from his fingers: it is either not really voluntary or not really servitude. It derives from something else. To make sense of voluntary servitude as a primary phenomenon, we need to introduce another element, namely the unconscious. Libidinal investment, as psychoanalysis will introduce it conceptually and practically several centuries after the Discourse, denominates the workings of the unconscious. Libido, crudely speaking, is the energy that we accumulate and use to feel pleasure. It is commonly associated with sexual pleasure, but only because this is the most obvious case in which our primary goal is to feel good.29placeholder But it is obvious that non-sexual intimacy also creates pleasure, just like intellectual activities do. We experience pleasure in many ways and areas, meaning: we are entangled in libidinal relations. These relations are not based on interest, and we know how often our pleasures appear irrational, a strange fancy. You can consciously observe what those pleasures are, but never explain rationally, why they produce pleasure in the first place. The pleasure itself remains a mystery; ultimately, it just ‘feels good’ because it ‘feels good’. Let us therefore try to see if the concept of unconscious libidinal investment can help us escape this tautology.

What is “investment” and in what way does it reveal the mechanisms of the unconscious? If we look at the word and trace it back to the economic domain, we can see that it implies a continuous effort aimed at accumulation; just like invested money is money not spent but put into circulation for long-term growth, libidinal investment indicates not the energy that is spent, but that circulates and grows and therefore ‘invests into’ the stabilisation of certain social habits. This is to say that libidinal investment is itself a source of pleasure, which presupposes the maintenance of a certain order of things, a way of ‘doing things around here’, which feels good as long as it is maintained. We feel good whenever our world makes sense. In other words, we never experience the tautology as such, as it is always embedded into a network of meanings. In that sense, libidinal investment is always a distribution of sense, a determination of values and meanings, as “it is the libidinal investment of these determinations that situates their particular use in desiring-production [la production désirante]” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 100).

This contrasts with a common understanding of pleasure as exclusively spent energy, the ‘dopamine rush’, the model of the orgasm as the moment of a release of tension (instead of, say, the sexual act as a process of intensification).30placeholder Such a concept of pleasure leads to an understanding of libido as an antisocial force, aiming at short-term personal enjoyment.31placeholder It is clear that the release of energy is also a source of pleasure, just like the purchase, as a spending of money, is evidently pleasant – otherwise something like a consumer society would be impossible. Regarding our social libidinal entanglements, it is rather the process of investment of libidinal energy that can help us understand how specific social formations come to be. Our social circuits – the ways we habitually interact with other people – are not merely upheld by ‘interests’, but by the desire to maintain them. Or, rather, it is this desire that distributes and maintains those interests. This structural investment of libidinal energy shapes the ways in which we are able to ‘cash it in’, to transform it into spending energy. After all, tension and release go together, they are linked. The ways we spend our energy in working and consuming – whatever counts as ‘productive’ work or as a ‘worthy’ reward – are defined by the various ways in which we invest into the social structures that keep jobs and consumer products available in the first place. In that sense, we can distinguish two “fundamental notions of the economy of desire—work [travail] and investment” (ibid., 55), the former drawing pleasure from a punctual spending of energy, the latter from its processual augmentation and intensification.

That the double system of spending and investment applies both to money and the libido is no coincidence; our relation to money is itself libidinal. Getting one’s salary feels good, just like paying rent is unpleasant. ‘Line goes up’ on a graph is not just a meme, it is a source of joy. It’s the enjoyment of growth, which is not exclusive to ‘investors’, as collectors can certainly relate to it as well.32placeholder Spending and investing don’t just imply two different forms of pleasure, but also a different relation to time and sociability. The former is fulfilled in a single act, at the end of which that which is had (money or energy) is no longer had, the second implies a duration and a long-term accumulation. In that way, their sources and ‘mechanisms’ of pleasure are different: the former takes pleasure in release, dissolution, the latter in growth and expansion. It is for this reason that ‘spending’ tends to be antisocial – it concerns the relation of my pleasure to my object of pleasure – while ‘investing’ implies not just oneself, but a whole interpersonal system of circulation (of money, values, things). Money is invested into something and must therefore move around in very specific ways, passing through various circuits, because it grows only through such passages, and because the ‘investor’ needs to be assured that the money will come back their way – with the accumulated profit. You can only invest money if you (can) decide not to spend it; but you can’t do that if there’s no ‘market’ to invest in or a labour force to ‘employ’. The same applies to other forms of libidinal investment, as we invest our energy not only into the economic realm, but also the social realm – our friendships, our neighbours, our football clubs –, the political realm – our rights, our politicians –, our possessions – our DVD collection, our homes. All those are sources of pleasure. But equally, we take pleasure in buying things, in window shopping, in ‘spending time’ with our close ones, in venting, in feeling exhausted after an intense workout. Introducing desire into the political discourse therefore means: conceiving the public sphere as a complex network of libidinal spendings and investments.

But here comes the crux of the matter: libidinal investments are above all unconscious. While the investment of money – in the best cases – results from a conscious decision in view of the ‘economic situation’, we are usually unaware of our libidinal investments, and even if we are, they more often than not feel like an overwhelming powerful pull, which can make us perpetuate habits that we know to be harmful. Ultimately, we cannot explain our pleasures. It is only on the basis of unconscious libidinal investment that the question of voluntary servitude – beyond deception or interest – can be posed anew. In view of this libidinal understanding of sociability, Deleuze and Guattari understood the task of “schizoanalysis” to be

“to analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby to show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression […]. All this happens, not in ideology, but well beneath it. An unconscious investment of a fascist or reactionary type can exist alongside a conscious revolutionary investment. Inversely, it can happen—rarely—that a revolutionary investment on the level of desire coexists with a reactionary investment conforming to a conscious interest. In any case conscious and unconscious investments are not of the same type, even when they coincide or are superimposed on each other. We define the reactionary unconscious investment as the investment that conforms to the interest of the dominant class” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 105).

Conscious and unconscious investments interact, but they don’t necessarily overlap. When we are unconsciously investing in our own servitude, we consciously invest in the interests of the ruling class: we ‘vote against our interests’ (the interest of our class). But we seem uncapable to change our conscious investments, and even when we do attain something like class consciousness, we more often than not keep perpetuating the same thinking patterns and therefore fail to act according to our interests. The reason for this is that on the unconscious level, we keep libidinally investing into the structures that perpetuate our servitude. The interest of the dominant class is the domination of the serving class. Voluntary servitude, understood as a reactionary unconscious libidinal investment, which, as we have seen, always implies a certain way of organising the social body, can take off where La Boétie had to reach his limit, as he didn’t have an appropriate concept of the unconscious.

We have seen that the distinction of libidinal work (spending) and libidinal investment corresponds to a distinction between two circulations of money. But we have borrowed the description of the two forms of money circulation and their interaction from its familiar functioning within capitalism. And here’s the thing: within capitalism, the distinction between spending money and investment money is not merely conceptual, it is allocated to different kinds of people. Workers, depending on a salary, receive spending money, and, in order to get spending money, they must spend time and energy working for others; they are limited to the first circuit of money. You spend energy, so that you can spend money. Capitalists, on the other hand, monopolising investment money (the ‘means of production’), see their wealth accumulate by letting their money circulate, which means that they don’t depend on a salary. When you invest money (well), you’ll have more money to invest. This necessarily affects the way the libido is invested within the social body: reduced to spending their energy by working (being employed) and by consuming commodities, the pleasure that dominates among workers is spending pleasure, while the capitalists, enjoying the accumulation of capital, can use their money to invest in other spheres than the economical one: invest into politicians and policies, into football clubs, newspapers, space travel, and take pleasure in the accumulation of influence. Spending money is inherently powerless, because it is instant and circular, investing money is inherently powerful, because it keeps growing. Having access exclusively to spending money means being kept in a state of servitude.

In that sense, what we can observe in capitalism is that the organisation of the flux of money is mapped onto our forms of pleasure, defining the ways in which we are able to spend and invest our libidinal energy. Workers are materially excluded from libidinal investment, which means that they must be content with finding pleasure in spending – in working more, in earning more.33placeholder As their pleasure now depends on access to means of spending energy – a job market, consumer products –, they will invest libidinally into the mechanisms that keep them available. The ubiquity of debt only intensifies this dependence. But in that way, workers invest into the circuits that maintain them within a condition of powerlessness: as long as there are jobs and as long as we can pay our rent, everything is fine. It is not that workers are excluded from libidinal investment, but the means of doing so accessible to them are defined by their material limitation to the flux of spending money. They libidinally invest into the mechanisms that maintain access to spending pleasure and spending pleasure only. You can still invest emotionally into your favourite football club or pop star, but you can materially access this pleasure only by spending on them, by buying memberships or merchandise. What maintains these entities and makes them grow is not your libidinal investment, but the profit that the actual owners of the brands can extract from them.

Invested money is qualitatively different from spent money: once spent, the money is gone, the reward is the object bought to be consumed (in paying rent we ‘consume’ our apartments), while invested money keeps growing, and it is satisfying because it grows. The distinction of two forms of pleasure and two forms of circulation of money is neutral and does not inherently lead to structures of domination; in itself, the spending of libidinal energy does not imply a state of powerlessness. We could imagine a society in which everyone possesses some spending money and some investing money, or one in which the flux of libidinal energy is independent from the flux of money. But in the way our current economic system is organised, the two circuits are separated and put in opposition: if you’re a worker, you’re not a capitalist, if you’re a capitalist, you’re not a worker. A capitalist is not employed; he owns the entity that employs you, because he invests in it. The capitalist class is defined by its significant access to investment money; ‘capital’ is the circulation of invested money. This exclusion from investment money leads to a generalised exclusion from ‘investment pleasure’; the only pleasure salary workers have is to work more to earn the salary that they’ll use to buy things and consume them.

As we cannot materially invest into our communities, we are reduced to emotional investment; when we pay for a membership or buy merchandise, we don’t maintain the club – it’s the investors who do that –, we add to the profit of the owners. We maintain the community indirectly by keeping it profitable. There is nothing at stake in our investment, as we painfully realize when our favourite brand of cereal disappears because it wasn’t profitable enough. We cannot invest into our community, we can only spend on it. But in that way, we perpetuate our dependence on salary money. It is this separation that creates a system of domination, because salary money is inherently powerless, while investment money accumulates power. The question of voluntary servitude becomes more concrete: why are people willing to endure this exclusion from investment money, why are they content with receiving salary money, instead of partaking in the collective growth of ‘the economy’?

The description of the mechanisms maintaining the hierarchical distinction between these two circuits of money in capitalism goes back to Marx and is readopted by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus:

“it is not the same money that goes into the pocket of the wage earner and is entered on the balance sheet of a commercial enterprise. In the one case, there are impotent money signs of exchange value, a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use values, and a one-to-one relation between money and an imposed range of products (‘which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, flows of financing, a system of differential quotients of production that bear witness to a prospective force or to a long-term evaluation, not realizable hic et nunc, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract quantities” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 228).

Once you cash in the stock, it becomes spending money, once it’s spent, it’s gone. But the exclusion from investment money is not merely nefarious because it perpetuates a state of dependence. More than that, the augmentation of capital is itself possible only through an appropriation of the first circuit, that of spending. As Marx shows, profit does not merely appear miraculously within the flux of capital; it is the free (surplus) labour that the workers spend, which is appropriated by the owner. Salary money is necessarily smaller than the value that is produced in the spending of energy (the work done); because the workers don’t receive this surplus, they are forced to spend all that they receive. The actual dependence is not that of the workers on the ‘job creators’, but of the owners who need to sustain a system of exploitation, in which the surplus value created by the workers becomes money that can be invested elsewhere. Equally, surplus value cannot be absorbed – the profit cannot be realised – without a constant spending of money on the side of the workers. There needs to be a certain number of consumers – which is variable and can be the privilege of a sub-section of the working class – that return their money into circulation by spending it. In that sense, the augmentation of capital is possible only through the control of the first circuit, that of spending, in which it is a whole labour force that keeps spending its energy, through production (as employees) and consumption (as consumers). If there was no proletariat to exploit, capital couldn’t grow. Each time investment money passes from one sphere to another, it appropriates a share of the surplus value. The hierarchical separation of the two fluxes of money needs to be maintained, even at the cost of violence (‘police state’).

And yet, there is always the danger that someone will disinvest from the social order and start desiring the liberation from salary money; the fantasy of (very) early retirement. There will always be someone who will try to escape employment, and capitalism is haunted by the dream of easy money – winning the lottery, becoming a homeowner or an influencer, selling drop-shipped fidget spinners or drugs… It’s the dream of ‘making it’, the undying American Dream, incessantly pronounced dead, incessantly returning as a ghostly entity. For capitalism cannot extinguish this dream; the possibility of escaping salary work must be the horizon of ‘social mobility’. There must be some way out, even if it is just for me. Just work harder, and you might make it. And yet, lottery winners will go spend all their money instead of investing it, are they just too dumb? Or are they so used to being reduced to mere spending pleasures, nourished with libidinal spending as their sole source of pleasure, that they’d rather live a moment at its fullest, than to take pleasure in the ‘line going up’?

Still, disinvestment is not automatically subversive or revolutionary. These are dangerous moments, these adventures of desire, as liberated (withdrawn) energy can just as well be reinvested into even more reactionary structures: frustration on the job market can turn into violent misogyny or racism, a sadist pleasure that remains on the level of spending, but invests at the same time into the hierarchical structure that maintain one’s own servitude. Two crude examples: The exclusion of women from the workforce, framed as a chivalrous release from wage dependence, generates a new form of dependency, as men come to derive pleasure from ‘spending on their women,’ while exclusive access to salaried work produces a sense of power rooted in women’s double dispossession: their exclusion from material libidinal investment and from direct access to libidinal spending. Similarly, colonial structures produce a proletariat abroad that is likewise excluded from the pleasures of libidinal spending (‘overexploitation’: forced to work under horrible conditions for a horrible salary), thereby enabling the national workforce a relative liberation from the most exploited forms of labour and granting access to additional commodities and leisure. This liberates some capital to be invested into things like social welfare and culture, which are accessible to all members of the workforce, as long as they carry the right passport.

Such partial disinvestments only reinforce the prevailing hierarchical structures. We can think of more ambivalent examples. In Office Space, we have a wonderful case of libidinal disinvestment, where the protagonist simply ceases to care about what’s happening in the office and invents a scheme to escape the gruel of salary work by reappropriating a tiny part of the company’s investment money; but when his plan proves too successful, he gets scared and reterritorializes on manual labour, which equally depends on a salary. In Falling Down, Michael Douglas’ character disinvests from the daily grind by merely leaving the traffic jam – oh what a relatable scene!34placeholder –, drawing a diagonal line of flight by disappearing into the bushes; but it’s a suicidal line, as he reterritorializes on the nuclear family, the impossible return to which becomes his only goal. While he disinvests from the structure that keeps him in a state of powerlessness, the protagonist’s desire becomes antisocial, violent: the first thing he does is beat up an immigrant. His desire is to return to an America that no longer exists. Disinvestment from the order of oppression doesn’t automatically imply that desire has become ‘revolutionary’, a desire for liberation: instead of seeking to create a new community of fraternity – with the equally disillusioned Duvall character, maybe – the protagonist draws a straight line on the map of L.A., leading to his former family home – and his death, because the past he yearns for no longer exists.

Disinvestment of libido can lead to a mere diversion of a flux of energy, as in Office Space, where the protagonist deterritorializes from office work and reterritorializes on manual labour; it can lead to self-destruction, as in Falling Down, but it can also remain a desire for liberty, a wish to escape salary work, but only on a personal level, the desire to become the exception, as in the more ‘classical’ expressions of the American Dream. But even here, desire for liberty remains reactionary, because by becoming a millionaire, the individual becomes ‘interested’ in keeping things as they are, keeping others from attaining the same goal (Trading Places). This is the structure of the American Dream: the dream of liberation from salary work, but only for oneself, which means that one once again invests into maintaining the current order of things. It might not be necessary to add that such adventures of desire are not necessarily individual, that whole collectives or nations can suddenly disinvest, from the hegemonic liberal order for example, or from the petrol dollar, only to libidinally revive some archaic patriarchal imagery, some ‘promised land’, invest into some autocrat or draw a suicidal line in becoming genocidal…

Libidinal investment can always turn into disinvestment; but, as it’s primarily unconscious, it is not merely a question of choice. It’s not just a question of class consciousness. More often than not, it needs an event, a trigger: a firing, a sickness (Breaking Bad, another great example of a suicidal line of flight), death in the family… But as it is investment that stabilises the circuits, that maintains a certain order of things, it is disinvestment that is the precondition of change.35placeholder Disinvested libidinal energy implies a disjunction from its object or circuit, as for a moment it becomes free flowing, or, rather, a ‘stock’ of energy, the intensity of which can feel uncomfortable. Suddenly, we’re no longer invested in ‘our’ football club, leaving us with a sense of emptiness. We don’t know what to do with our time (the eternal problem of retirees). Libidinal investment is very flexible; it attaches easily to objects, but it detaches just as easily. Fandoms are such volatile constructs, where, while you’re a part of it, you invest heavily, keep the community alive, participate and spend your time on it, but where it can happen that you suddenly no longer feel ‘that much into it,’ where you stop ‘following the content,’ because you have better things to do. Capitalism thrives on the volatility of libidinal investments. Passion is what’s driving us back into the store, into reading the news, caring about what the news tells us, investing emotionally into its stories, creating parasocial relationships, but then disinvesting from them for the next big thing. Disinvestment can force us deeper into the swamp of dependence. It can become revolutionary only where it does not merely switch one object for another but helps us escape the circuit of powerlessness and dependence, makes us desire not a higher salary and more stuff to buy, but the real power that, currently, is in the hands of those who have investment money. The demand cannot merely be for one’s ‘fair share’, to be permitted to also invest some of one’s meagre savings (in hope of a bitcoin situation), but to become capable to materially and libidinally invest into our communities, our shared world.

Back to La Boétie

It seems like we have drifted far away from La Boétie. And yet, the concept of unconscious libidinal investment can help us expand on the three mechanisms of the perpetuation of voluntary servitude distinguished in the Discourse. After all, the salary is not only what ‘nourishes’ us, but also what maintains our ‘devotion’ to brands and ‘job creators’, it creates an ‘interest’ in maintaining the status quo as we become ambitious to ‘have a career’. Custom, mystification, and interest are shaped by the capitalist separation of the two fluxes of money, where one class is maintained in a state of powerlessness and the other accumulates its power. This necessarily modifies the mechanisms of pleasure in all three domains.

Custom creates a normalisation of salary work, which becomes the model of what we consider to be productive work, what counts as ‘work’ in the first place: it is the effort we realize in such a way that we receive a compensation for it, permitting us to obtain things which assure our survival and give us pleasure. Work is understood as spending time and energy, not as the creation of values. Our salary nourishes us and it nourishes us once it’s absorbed in consumption, in the ways we spend it, in correspondence with the effort we put into it to earn it. In that sense, we are also nourished by the things we spend our salary on, not just the consumer goods, but also the ‘contents’ that entertain and school us. We are encouraged to monetize our hobbies, which confines them to spending pleasure. Our customs are limited to this closed circuit; between the ways we spend our energy and the ways we spend what we ‘earn’ in doing so. The pleasure received from such custom is that of libidinal spending. And while the latter is not merely illusory, as the pleasure of finally being able to afford one’s dream car is genuine, it remains limited in as far as it is punctual and circular, and we can’t help but desire the next thing we cannot afford yet. As La Boétie shows, custom, designating the ways we are nourished, can become second nature. But as his critique had to sustain the distinction between natural and artificial (‘denatured’), the problem for him was ideological, ultimately based on deception (false consciousness). For him, the limitation, as we have seen, is imposed in what we are being ‘fed’ (‘fast-food’) and how (‘force-feeding’). The core idea is that of reduction, of an impoverishment of our subjectivities. The concept of unconscious libidinal investment permitted us to cut deeper, as it does not imply the distinction of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ desires, but the ways in which pleasure is organised, the disjunction of the circuits of spending and investing. The limitation to spending pleasure is not problematic in as far as it is ‘artificial’, but in as far as it creates a repression of desire.

What about mystification? The exclusion of the working class from investment money limits it to the circuits of spending, perpetuating a state of powerlessness. As investment money creates growth, it automatically implies a relative accumulation of power to those who have access to it. Mystification makes it that those possessing investment money – having the power to ‘create jobs’ – are assumed to be powerful not because they can afford to invest; they are assumed to be capable of investing because they are inherently powerful. Their possession of investment money is legitimised through some assumed natural superiority. Social hierarchies are assumed to emerge on the basis of meritocracy. They deserve to have capital, because the workers wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. They’d just spend it, instead of investing it. Being excluded from investment money – and thus investment pleasure – is understood as a fatality, a historical necessity, reaffirmed each time a lottery winner squanders his winnings: some benevolent elitism is the best we can do. From here, there’s a direct line to the mystification of brands and celebrities, whose devotion is expressed by spending the little money we can keep for ourselves at the end of the month.

Finally, the reduction to the flux of spending money creates its own interests. It is possible to have a career within the flux of spending money, you can have people ‘under you’ even though you yourself remain employed, dependent on a salary. At least you’re compensated with some material advantages and the pleasure of exploiting others. Unable to invest into our communities, we are enticed to ‘invest into ourselves’, meaning: spend energy to increase the value of our labour force on the market, to become more employable. Just like with La Boétie’s ‘sub-tyrants’, who are forced to adopt the tyrant’s point of view, the higher you climb on the corporate ladder, the more you are forced to interiorise the ways of thinking of the ruling class, agree to lower their taxes, so that they can ‘invest more’, to offer them a ‘competitive job market’ so that they can build factories and offices we can work at. But surely, materially you’re getting very little of this exploitation of others and of yourself, which goes directly to the ‘higher-ups’, the ‘investors’. What you’re getting from it is the pleasure from making your ‘inferiors’ work harder. You’re willing to work overtime to make better results, so that the company that employs you makes a profit and thus keeps you employed.

On all three levels, there is a reduction to spending pleasure. But this still is pleasure and we’re willing to invest our libidinal energy, which we are unable to invest elsewhere, into the perpetuation of the current order of things: go to work, get a salary, buy stuff, repeat. We get addicted to the dopamine rush of getting the salary that we’re going to spend. The mechanisms of voluntary servitude are tied to the ways in which the spending and investment of libidinal energy are organised within an economical system that imposes their separation. Workers are not excluded from libidinal investment, but they are excluded from its material basis, which means that they cannot draw pleasure from the accumulation of their power. Libido is rather invested into the circuit of powerlessness. We invest libidinally into the mechanisms that keep us from gaining access to real power – in our case investment money – and assure at the same time our access to spending energy: as a worker and a consumer. Libidinal investment into one’s own powerlessness assures access to spending pleasure at the cost of exclusion from materially relevant investment pleasure. Rather, our libidinal investments are into the structures that keep the spending pleasures going: what counts is not the object we just bought – we’re always somehow disappointed when the parcel finally arrives – but the next object. As the spending money keeps disappearing, what counts is the next salary. We libidinally invest into keeping the circulations of spending pleasures alive. Sure, everyone hates sitting in traffic. And yet, there are millions of people who will go sit in traffic tomorrow. Sure, they’d be fired if they didn’t. But we might once again interject with La Boétie: all those people sitting in traffic are surely numerically superior to the bosses that force them to go to work. If everyone just quit, you couldn’t just fire everybody. The threat of violence, of hunger and homelessness, is not sufficient. People sit in traffic voluntarily, and we should hold that thought before we interject with our ready-made answers. Why not do like in Falling Down, not just us alone, but everyone at the same time, and try to do things differently?

The Utopia of friendship

What lies beyond this repressive order, the perpetuation of one’s own powerlessness? We have seen that contrary to the Contractualist tradition, confined to the aporia of self-deception or rational preferability, where liberty is either the privilege of a few or a false promise, the Discourse opens up the possibility for a different way of living, in which the desire for liberty becomes the basis of an egalitarian society. For La Boétie, the state of freedom means nourishing oneself not with servitude, but with the belief in the equality of people beyond all mystification that wants us to believe otherwise, in order to create new interests, like mutual growth. Freedom is thereby understood as a form of communal libidinal investment, a way of collectively feeling pleasure by establishing a ‘right’ way of doing things. While in servitude we libidinally invest into the structures that maintain us within obedience; in a state of liberty, we take pleasure not merely in spending energy, but in helping ourselves, our communities, our relationships prosper. The sapling of liberty can grow into a magnificent tree, the trees into a forest. Liberty, then, is not understood as the infantile phantasy of doing as one pleases, but above all as taking responsibility for oneself, one’s decisions, and one’s ways of relating to others. Living in mutual liberty means constituting a common world; it is this responsibility that servitude ultimately delegates to others. Servitude, after all, is responding to others, meaning: not being responsible (“I was just following orders”). La Boétie’s Discourse opens up the possibility of something that lies beyond the state of servitude; liberty, not just exceptionally, but as a social habit, becomes thinkable. For La Boétie this takes the shape of a utopia of friendship. Tyrants and tyrannies, he observes, as powerful and unshakeable as they appear to be, more often than not find a violent end. Why?

“That is certainly because a tyrant never either is loved or himself loves. Friendship is a sacred name, it is a holy thing: it never exists save between morally upright people and stems only from mutual esteem. It is sustained not so much by favors rendered as by proper living. What makes one friend sure of the other is the knowledge he has of his integrity: the guarantees of it he has are his good character, faith, and loyalty. There can be no friendship where there is cruelty, where there is disloyalty, where there is injustice. And it is conspiracy, not company, among evildoers when they assemble. They do not love, but fear, each other; they are not friends, they are accomplices”36placeholder (35-36).

Friendship becomes possible where the conditions of friendship are given. It is not merely a private relation between closed ones; it is a public virtue. Everyone can be friends with the people they like; there is no great mystery in that. Friendship as the foundation of a state of liberty means learning to be friends with people one does not know, or people one knows, but dislikes. The error in excluding friendship from the public realm is due to the association of the latter to institutions; but while institutions regulate our public life, they are not sufficient to constitute it.37placeholder It is friendship that constitutes new egalitarian customs, that negates the inferiority or superiority between people i.e. mystification, that creates an interest in mutual growth. By opposing friendship and tyranny, the Discourse opens up the horizon for new forms of sociability and subjectivity beyond domination.38placeholder

What is necessary for such an egalitarian and emancipated community to become possible? A profound libidinal disinvestment from the current order of things, from the mechanisms that perpetuate powerlessness and servitude. The invention of new forms of pleasure, which are not merely new ways of spending our time, money, and energy, but libidinally invest into new circuits, new forms of sociability. This remains impossible as long as we’re materially excluded from such an activity, if all we have is money we can spend. The possibility of disinvestment is tied to material conditions, but, as material conditions are perpetuated through unconscious libidinal investments, we must be wary of easy solutions. While liberation cannot be simply a question of choice, our efforts can still be oriented towards becoming capable of choosing, investing our energy not to become more employable, but to cultivate a desire of liberty, an “education of desire,”39placeholder which not merely asks for a slightly higher salary, but demands a different way of doing things all together.