"Sometimes confused with poststructuralism, libidinal economy represents an attempt to fuse psychoanalysis with political economy. The phrase derives from Freud’s theory of psychical energy, or 'libido', but is closely linked to the reception of Nietzsche and Freud in France during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Early key texts by George Bataille (1991) and Pierre Klossowski (2017) were followed by a wave of further works during the 1970s, chief among them being Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) and Libidinal Economy (Lyotard 1993). Inspired by the political events of 1968, the thrust of such works was to break down the artificial walls between psychoanalysis and political economy, to reveal inner psychic life and capitalist history as two sides of the same coin, and in so doing, to reveal how capital organises libidinal flows and produces a particular historical configuration of desire.''
Amin Samman & Ronen Palan Systemic Unreason: A Psychic History of States and Corporations in Global Society Vol 37 2023 Issue 3