The 1970s

The 1970s, especially their midpoint, mark a shift in the book from the emancipatory expectations associated with 1968 toward attempts to reach the Real directly. This turn takes several forms, including political violence, extreme forms of pleasure, and inward spiritual experience; a 1974 Italian comedy offers a deliberately comic version of the same problem, making human pleasure a resource to be organized and extracted.

The Mid-Decade Turning Point

The book locates the turn toward pure, autistic Jouissance at a precise historical juncture: the mid-1970s, after the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential. In this account, the issue is not simply that radical aspirations disappeared. Rather, the available response increasingly took the form of a direct and forceful passage toward the Real, instead of continued engagement with concrete sociopolitical conditions.

That diagnosis complicates any simple division between politically authentic pleasure and pleasure supplied by the market. The drive toward extreme experience could present itself as resistance, yet its retreat from social relations left it close to forms of enjoyment that isolate the subject. The period is therefore framed as a crisis in which the pursuit of liberation could veer away from collective political work.

Three Routes Toward the Real

The book identifies three principal expressions of this mid-1970s turn. One was the search for extreme forms of sexual Jouissance. A second was Leftist political terrorism, represented by the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. Their wager, as the book describes it, was that when the masses were immersed in capitalist ideological sleep, ordinary ideological critique could no longer awaken them; direct violence against the existing order would have to do so.

A third route sought an inner encounter with the Real through Oriental mysticism. These paths differ sharply in their practices and political claims, but the analysis groups them by their shared movement away from concrete sociopolitical engagement and toward direct contact with the Real. That common structure is the period's central contradiction: a desire to break through ideological mediation can also withdraw from the social field in which political change must take place.

A 1974 Comedy of Managed Pleasure

The period's concern with pleasure and energy receives a satirical counterpart in Conviene far bene l’amore (1974), directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. Its imagined future faces an energy shortage, prompting the young scientist Doctor Nobile to recall Wilhelm Reich and discover that the human body releases substantial energy during sex only when the couple are not in love. The premise turns intimacy into an instrument of public survival and treats love, rather than sex, as the obstacle to energy production.

In the film's comic social order, the Church reverses its position: love becomes sinful, while sex is permitted on condition that it serves the energy supply and excludes love. Couples are required to perform this duty twice weekly in large collective halls under a supervisor's direction. The arrangement converts private pleasure into regulated labor, making the supposed solution to scarcity an institutional system for managing Jouissance.

The book draws a parallel between this premise and The Matrix: both make the politics of Jouissance central to the organization of social life. The 1974 comedy thus anchors the decade's theoretical problem in a concrete satirical image. Pleasure may be pursued as a private escape or mobilized as a collective resource, but neither form is outside power merely because it promises intensity or liberation.