Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution

The language of money has informed medical, psychological and political theories of sexual desire for at least 300 years. Desire, figured as libidinal energy, represented potential work-power and spending-power and hence a form of personal ‘capital’, an economic resource for both the individual and the collectivity. This book explores how this view of desire – formalised by Freud as ‘the economics of the libido’ – has shaped understandings of a sex-money nexus across disciplines and across genres. It investigates how changing psychological, commercial and political prescriptions for the ‘saving’, ‘investing’ or ‘spending’ of desire have related to developments in economic theory proper. It examines, among other things, the tensions between classical political economy’s ‘producer ethic’ and the ‘consumer ethic’, Keynesianism’s doctrine of economic health through spending rather than saving, communism’s replacement of a market economy with a command economy, and neoliberalism’s faith in the deregulated market as the paradigm of a free society. The book argues that any understanding of ‘the libidinal economy’ must take account of history. It shows that the business of eroticising the economy has a historical reach with thinkers as disparate as Mandeville, Tissot, Fourier, Parent-Duchâtelet, Marx, Freud, Gandhi, Reich, Marcuse and Dichter making contributions; it explores the way discourses of desire have shaped understandings of the sex-money nexus during three centuries of medical, psychological, political and erotic writing on topics ranging from onanism to advertising, psychoanalysis to shopping, prostitution to revolutionary politics.