This text was partly presented at the conference The Factory of Enjoyment, Surplus value and Surplus pleasure held in Naples last May. I’ve tried to deepen the reflection.
What to make of this part of the World that seeks in Pleasure to kill the other part of itself ? Its aim is indeed to eradicate everything that stands in the way of its dream of power and profit; but on what grounds stands this production/factory of pleasure that impose onto others to survive only?
In this curious coupling of factory and enjoyment, is not the latter part of a work of destruction? When the bombs fall on Gaza and Israeli politicians claim that the Palestinians are mere animals, aren’t they wallowing in a desire constructed on obscene, dehumanizing words of immeasurable vulgarity? The death count, the genocide offered by the Israeli state to the rest of the world, can’t function as a cathartic time, since it ultimately traps many of its followers in the fantasy of an object of desire which, once the crime has been committed, throws them into irreparable loss? Nothing will be possible afterwards. The Israeli State revealed in broad daylight, with this genocide, right before our eyes, with our silences in front of the first 15.000 deaths, the idealization of a lying truth. Lie and pleasure.
The victims, mostly of Jewish culture and/or descendants of the genocide that was the moment Europe wallowed in the performative conviction that some Europeans had to be eliminated, have become, since 1948, the executioners of a people who always lived on the land of Palestine, just as, today, have become those who helped perpetrate this genocide, refusing to action a number of political levers in the international community. It wasn’t until almost 35,000 Palestinians were killed that some States recovered a piece of their dignity.
Yes, it is in this blind spot, organized by several States, that Palestine finds itself, its people designated as the common enemy fabricated by the con men of racist white Euro-centric democracy, it is in this spot that the factory of mortal pleasure is played out. Death as an end in itself; death we impose on those who protest; death as governance. The death of the Other for democracy. It is of this pleasure that we must talk. Finding pleasure in death, most precisely, finding pleasure in the imposition of death on a designated people, on a broad scale, systematically, isn’t it simply imposing death on ourselves and mostly, in the end, deprive ourselves of desire on the Other. It is an endless self-damnation to be its own executioner and satisfy its desire not with the Other but against the Other. Isn’t it thus condemning ourselves to wander on lands that don’t belong to you and being constantly our own keeper, all the while losing the eternal victim status so easy to weaponize to submit those who would contest you.
In this guilt instituted as policy and as means of regulating power struggle in lieu of International Law, there is, also, a part of pleasure to push in the corner all those who challenge those illegal occupation policies, apartheid, sociocide, ethnocide and genocide, wielding, as a motto, the crime committed onto some Europeans by fellow Europeans. But it doesn’t change anything, yesterday’s victims have become the executioners of Palestinians by pretending to stand up against barbary in this part of the world – but here as well, there is a lot to think about the factory of words acting as element of this pleasure. We enjoy and revel at will in those concepts in which we wallow as soon as crimes are committed, the given reasons are caricatures of humanity and cause our humanity to fall in the bloody mud of what’s left in the streets of Gaza or in the West Bank after tanks and missiles have accomplished their mission leaving those who contemplate the Palestinian bodies mingling with the rubble ecstatic. After this who will believe you?
The group at the head of the Israeli State is reminiscent of the groups of friends in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film “La grande bouffe”, in which it’s not the relationship with food or the body that is questioned, but the obscenity of the bourgeoisie, which is losing its sense of proportion. It is this State that is questioned, its relationship to the world and specifically to this world wallowing in the vulgarity of thought, wallowing in its decadent and pernicious whiteness.
In this factory of mortal pleasure, it’s not Hamas that needs to be questioned, but a state that has lost all sense of proportion to the point of forgetting that it helped to create Hamas, aided in this work by the North Americans and the Qataris, and who, after enjoying its good blow to the Palestinian Authority, is now organizing the genocide of Palestinians in an orgy that it imagines to be “saving” on October 7, the genocide of Palestinians, without forgetting that this pleasure will only cease when the plan for the definitive expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank is completed. Let’s not forget the will of Israel to expel Palestinains from Gaza, in the wake of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation in October 2023, towards the Egyptian Sinaï, in view of making it a substitute homeland for Palestine! Isn’t this deportation plan encysted since the first Nakba in 1948 also part of this factory of pleasure? This State applies to those it illegaly occupies the same project that the international community, barely rebuilt after World War II, imagined for Europeans of Jewish culture, no matter the feasibility and its consequences.
A solution had to be found to get rid of the growing problem of European anti-Semitism, even if it meant creating a fictitious state. Europeans have done everything in their power to ensure that Europeans of Jewish culture be extirpated from Europe; now the Israeli State, in its turn, is doing everything in its power to extirpate any Palestinian presence from countries on the periphery of the Israeli State. And Europeans, and Westerners in general, beware, if they oppose such a plan. The haunting reminder of what they have done to their brethren of Jewish culture will be an additional element to their pleasure. It will come as a pleasurable antiphon.
Doesn’t pleasure also derive its energy from applying the same treatment to those you oppose as you have suffered? Pleasure in revenge. A vengeance that former victims and their allies never cease to revel in. Is there even an end to this vengeance? What’s the next step, so that the enjoyment of pleasure endures and remains in a state of permanent tension?
This factory of pleasure is built on death instincts, and what those who organize this factory refuse to understand is that they are staging their own death, so much so that hatred fueled by fear of the Other is consubstantial with the system of domination they defend and claim to impose on the whole world. Certainly, they don’t like the Other, but above all they fear them. For them, the best solution is to make an enemy, whether from within or without, as this offers them a permanent climax to their pleasure, with the justification of putting the enemy to death.
Those who kill, pillage, steal, mutilate and expel must finally understand that the normalization of their way of life is a matter of absolute urgency. We’ve never wanted that kind of pleasure, their pleasure, even less now than before. We want to enjoy the discovery of the Other, in the Love of the Other, but this can only happen through a rupture in the absolute disorder of the relationship of truth to the Other, not in the pleasure of the institutionalized lie since a pope decided to undertake the Christianization of the godless world, well before 1492.
A question remains: how does this factory of pleasure come to reverberate among the damned, who reproduce this race to mortifying pleasure as a model for the production of surplus value in pleasure? In Haiti, gangs instrumentalized by successive presidents, particularly since the arrival of the Duvalliers, instrumentalized by the United States and the Core Group, including France, instrumentalized by drug traffickers, now claim to play a political role at the heart of Haitian society; the fact remains, however, that in this factory of pleasure, they are playing against themselves, and even more against the Other themselves; their desire for pleasure is such that it seems to be satisfied only by the pleasure of death and imposed terror.
Double pleasure for the dominant, who impose their diktat by instrumentalizing those they consider to be non-Beings, and who see their paradigm of domination irrigate the ranks of the dominated when the latter reproduce the same schemas in order to obtain their share of pleasure, even though this share is exercised against their brothers in the history of resistance and emancipation. Their only desire is to benefit from a fantasized pleasure that has always eluded them, and of which they have never ceased to dream.
In this factory of pleasure, there is also a surplus value that bathes in the blood of the non-Beings, the racialized, the voiceless and the disenfranchised, and feasts on it to the point of bursting its own belly, given the number of crimes committed. The sole aim of those who take part in this work of mass destruction is to escape justice, another field of production of a nameless pleasure: the factory of impunity.
But let’s not give in to demobilization, their orgiastic time is coming to an end; it’s up to us to wake up and resist in order to build the world of You, where we can touch the Other, as Frantz Fanon points out; the paradigm of their pleasurable colonial death shall be abolished; we can no longer content ourselves, as this model imposes upon us, with pretending to replace vice with virtue. We know that their virtue, like their vice, only serves their apparatus of domination: to kill, to mutilate, to exclude, to expel. To genocide.
If we are to think about the factory of pleasure from the here and now, then we need to think about it in terms of total rupture and resistance, both political and solidarity-based, in a collective aspiration for decolonial transformation, disalienation and emancipation, without ever attaching the word “end” to it. This requires an effort on ourselves, for ourselves and not against ourselves.