To begin with, I wanted to ask you about the starting point of the book, which is composed of very diverse materials. How does it emerge? There is a commitment to present the book as a technology, as a very powerful technology. What do I mean? You post things, people read them quickly through networks. It is all very well, there are many texts to speak in today’s debates. But making
a book is something else, things are collected and reorganized, and you realize how you always engage in the same problems and obsessions, how one text sends you to another and vice versa. The title articulates the book. Materials are read differently.

It is true that there are some main threads in the whole book. I realize what I've been doing over the past few years in a study on desire
and capital crossing. It's not an issue that interests me: it's a problem that causes me harm and harm. The conflict is investigated for oneself.

This research is organized in three lines, those proposed by the book: on the one hand, neoliberal anthropology: what capital does with our desire and how it offends us; on the other hand, the politics of desire: it is necessary to free our desire from capital, to compete with capital in terms of desire, thinking about other more desirable lives; and, finally, when the current instability is a matter of shifting to the right: how can we connect with people today's hand system?

Going back to the title, what is “libidinal capitalism”? In my title I have honoured another book, The Libidinal Economy (1974) by Jean-François
Lyotard: it was for me a kind of obsession, a very impossible, excellent, crazy text. The concept of libidinal capitalism proposes that political analysis, analysis of political economy, geopolitical analysis, be complemented by a libidinal approach, that is, we must ask ourselves what happens to our body, to our desire, to our wounds. We are not just victims of capital: we reproduce it in some way. Because we're chained in capitalist orders: performance, productivity, visibility, competitiveness. What if we thought that social political transformations failed because they were not able to play the libidinal party?

In Kaxilda's presentation, they asked him about grief, specifically about the need to mourn political processes. There could be a dialogue between psychoanalysis and politics, a difficult dialogue, full of misunderstandings. The truth is, even though that conversation is possible, I'm trying.
Freud thinks of grief in growing loss. It separates the mourning from melancholy: the work of mourning opens us back to desire, to life, gives us the ability to love again; if we do not mourn, we remain in melancholy, hooked to the fanciful image of something already existing and that no longer exists; we live together with that loss.

How can you bring grief to politics? My older, leftist militants of the 1970s, who have had
a relationship with me, called it "making a billian." As for the test performed, what power did it have and with what limit was found? So instead of repeating failures, we opened up to new things. Or at least, as the well-known phrase of [Samuel] Beckett says, we open up to "failing otherwise."

I think this memory work is very interesting. The strength of the weak. In the book Akal, 2021) I tried to make the Bilan of the 15-M movement: what power did it have? When did those powers run out? What limit do we collide with? What can we learn from it? On the other hand, it would also be necessary to mourn the revolution so as not to be hooked on the melancholy of non-revolution. Grief is not “passing to something else”, but to internalize some experiences, some lessons.

Is it done today from Bilani? I believe that militias do not do much, but that there is a neoliberal drive to open and close screens. Quick substitutions are
sought. But in this case, Freud tells us, the problem is that only repetition will be achieved.

There is also a tendency to look for an external enemy: the transas, the migrated ones… I think the tendency to victimization is quite widespread. In the approach of victimization, unlike the assumption of responsibility, in the problem in question we become objects, objects that suffer damage and not subjects able to perform actions, subjects involved in the
problem.

It seems to me that the tip of the right is very incipient, and it proposes to broad groups of citizens that current crises, climatic, economic, migratory, are caused by a malignant agent, which are not symptoms that show that we must change our lives. The figure of the victim is a figure of the delegation: the interpretation and solution of what is happening is left in the hands of a strong power, a male power.

What is this like? Freud has a very suggestive text, conclusive and inexhaustible analysis. It is a late text, he is already
ill, he has lost a child in war, the Nazis persecute them: a difficult time in his life. Freud is darker. And he makes a tough claim, in my opinion, "I think many patients don't want to be cured." That is, it is easier to install it in the discomfort, even if it is painful, than to start a process of transformation, a healing process that will suppose a metamorphosis.

Freud has given many explanations on this, but there is one that I find particularly interesting: denial of femininity. The patient does not want to open, does not want to ask or receive help, does not want to initiate such a process, uncontrollable, without guarantees, where he does not know exactly where he is going or what is going to happen.

So, I wonder, at this dangerous crossroads between psychoanalysis and politics, between the intimate and the political, if there is no hope in what Rita Segato, for example, calls in female politics. It would not only be a policy of women carried out by the bodies of women, because there are men with that sensitivity and women with opposite sensitivity, but a policy in which the world is not conceived as an object to dominate, but as a plot in which all of us are involved and all of us are. In female politics: as an openness to the complex animated fabric that sustains us. A change of civilization, an anthropological redefinition almost. There is no macro transformation if there is no production of another humanity. It's an anthropological conflict.

Many of the ideas in the book have reminded me of some authors (Sara Torres, Alicia Valdés…) who dedicate themselves to feminisms, cuir theory, affection theory, etc. Specifically, the idea of “concrete utopias”, quoted by throwing Herbert Marcus, is addressed by José Esteban Muñoz in his book Cruising utopia. Do you know? I've gone to authors of the past, because I know them better, but I think the book can be useful in contacting people who
are now at a similar frequency. I therefore have homework! The idea that Marcus works on utopias has an interesting aspect: for him utopias are not ideal models for the future, which are often understood, but potentialities. Potentiality is here in the present, but at the same time it must be extended. It seems to me a good way of thinking about the time of change: it takes us out of immediacy, from presenteeism on social networks, for example, but it also takes us out of the mere expectation of what is about to come. This is the idea of concrete utopia: a potentiality, integrated in the present and open to the future.

He has recently worked with young people. Could you explain to me what this project is? Through a project from the Reina
Sofía Museum, I worked in two schools. First at the Iturralde Institute in southern Madrid and now at the Julio Pérez Institute in the municipality of Rivas-Vaciamadrid.

For me, it was a total challenge, I'm not used to being with young people and to the same extent it produced pleasure and anguish. I can go quietly to give a lecture to Kaxilarra, even if they criticize me I know what they will say more or less, but to have in front of 30 young people 14 years old… That is the anguish! But gravity means desire: life challenges us.

At first I did a little bit of philosophy, in my own way, pirate philosophy, trying to create a dialogue with the experience of young people, looking for a space to activate their desire. Now I can't keep working in class for time and bureaucracy, and I'm doing a radio show with four 15-year-old girls, a little space to think.

What has this experience brought you? I think there are gaps for what I learn by listening to them… We want to explain to young people what social networks are, what is love in Tinder’s time, what happens to precariousness, to concern, but what if we listen to them? How do they live, how do they name it? At least young people do not seem to me to be
a problem, a threat; listening to them I receive an intelligence, a sensitivity and a novelty that will help us not to age, not to disconnect from the present, to stop giving lectures and to start listening.

But there's no room for developing these kinds of conversations. I fear that the school is not built on a great lack of knowledge of bodies. School doesn't want to know anything
about bodies, about what they can. It seems that the body is not related to learning, that you can teach content that is not of interest to anyone or that you can understand the discomfort of young people without listening to bodies. Knowledge is not received as a gift of congratulations, but awakens from within. It awakens desire. There is no space for young people to be subjects or objects, for young people to be in the center and not passive terminals in the distribution of knowledge; there is no space for the elderly to hear from the young people how they see, feel and think about the world.

With Oier Etxeberria, you worked on a project of attention and neglect. How does attention relate to desire?
Simone Weil said, “If there is desire, there is attention.” It's an interesting displacement. Weil proposes to think about the relationship with desire. When we want something, we're focusing. Therefore, instead of raising complaints and complaints, for lack of attention on the part of young people, we should ask ourselves why it is not possible for schools to awaken the desire of young people. In this case the school would have attention deficit!

If the school were a laboratory for young people to develop their own way of knowledge, and if the teachers were their peers on the way -- to promote that path, to act as an incentive, to pass references -- it would be completely different. The problem is not that technologies distract us, the problem is that there's no desire. In our society there is little desire and many obedience to other orders: performance, productivity, success, fulfillment.

Awakening desire is not that the teacher juggles with bright objects to compete with Tiktoke. That's competing for entertainment. Desire is something else; a process; it is not satisfied with any object, it can have plateaus of suffering; it can be difficult, uncertain, dark, uncomfortable. The school can offer an invitation to invent a singular path of desire.

In the research on care, they looked not only at the school institution, but at the whole society. Today, all institutions kill desire, understanding
desire as the invention of the singular pathway of life itself, and not as the whim of wanting this or other. All institutions are closed in desire; they are bureaucratic, normative, hierarchical. In the institutions everything is done, everything is thought, everything is said. There is no room to do, think or say new things. Wish. And care, as the psychiatrist Jean Oury said, lack of desire makes us sick. We live by desire, we are alive by desire; without desire we become ill, somatized, depressed.

As I said at the beginning, we always stick to the same obsessions. They
are always the same things. And when you look at yourself honestly, you see clearly that you write about your concerns, about what you don't know how to do, about what you perceive as a life problem. It doesn't write about what you master, what you have fixed, what you know. Only bad books come out of it. I write about desire and attention because I don't know what they are, because I have problems with them, because they escape me. Writing is developing something you don't know.