We must come to take Marx as if he were a writer, an author full of affects, take his text as a madness and not as a theory, we must succeed in pushing aside his theoretical barrier and stroking his beard without contempt and without devotion, no longer the false neutrality which Merleau-Ponty advised in the past for someone who, he said, has now become a classic and must be treated no differently than Hegel or Aristotle - no, stroke his beard as a complex libidinal volume, reawakening his hidden desire and ours along with it. There is no need to criticize Marx, and even if we do criticize him, it must be understood that it is in no way a critique: we have already said and repeated that we laugh at critique, since it is to maintain oneself in the field of the criticized thing and in the dogmatic, indeed paranoiac, relation of knowledge. Marx's desire interests us, not for itself, but inasmuch as it informs the themes of writings which metamorphose into themes of social and political 'practices'. Marx must he introduced, the big fat Marx, and also the little Marx of the Epicurean and Lutheran studies, this entire continent, into the atlas of libidinal cartography - or rather the reverse: to start crossing this strange country with our affections and disaffections, letting our attachments and our deceptions circulate, refining our analysis here, neglecting it there, because we have neither the hope nor the intention of setting up a portrait of the work, of giving an 'interpretation' of it. We do not interpret, we read, and we effect by writings. We have, for a long time, having read Marx, operated by means of practices (since this is the word left us by the Greeks as a disastrous heritage). We say this not to render the libidinal use we make of the Old Man more justifiable or less shameful; rather to situate these 'practices' in the sphere of what rightly belongs to interpretation. A Marxist political practice is an interpretation of a text, just as a social or Christian spiritual practice is the interpretation of a text. So much so that practices are themselves texts, insofar as they are interpretations. And this is precisely what we desire not to do here. We no longer want to correct Marx, to reread him or to read him in the sense that the little Althussarians would like to 'read Capital’: to interpret it according to 'its truth'. We have no plan to be true, to give the truth of Marx, we wonder what there is of the libido in Marx, and 'in Marx' means in his text or in his interpretations, mainly in practices. We will rather treat him as a 'work of art'. We will take some incontestable detail, considered minor, and which in fact it is in regard to the manifest themes of the work; quite certain, however, that it is not so for the libidinal geography of the continent. 
We note even this, libidinal economist friends: we feel almost obliged, as you've just heard, to make some sort of a declaration of intentions, a little solemn, vaguely epistemological (as little as possible, nevertheless, take note), at the shores of this continent. No other continent would extract such declarations from us - although they remain somewhat stupid and certainly useless. We could say that it is through suspicion and intimidation, warned as we are by a militant past of, when laying a hand on Marx, even and indeed especially if it were to screw with him, we are closely watched by the paranoiacs calling themselves Marxist politicians and in general all the Whites of the left. We would therefore prudently warn: it is in this state of mind, this state of heart, this state of body that we approach the Old Man. 
But the libidinal 'truth' of our preamble lies elsewhere. It already states the essential which is this: the Old Man is also a young woman to us, a strange bisexual assemblage. The dispositifs which channel their impulsions into theoretical discourses, and will give rise to organisms of power, the very ones which will harden into the German Party, the Bolsheveck Party, these dispositifs are of course 'compromise-formations', they are so many attempts to stabilize the forces on the libidinal front, mediations - oh how 'alienated', as he loved to say - interposed between the fluxes of desire and the regions into which they travel. This happens not only in certain themes, or at least in certain 'minor' motifs, some of which we will pick out, its position is established first of all in something quite astonishing: the perpetual postponement of finishing work on Capital, a chapter becoming a book, a section a chapter, a paragraph a section, by a process of cancerization of theoretical discourse, by a totally pulsional proliferation of a network of concepts hitherto destined on the contrary to 'finalize', to 'define' and to justify a proletarian politics, hence by the racing of a discursive machinery explicitly, however, laying claim to rationality (theoretical-practi­cal) . Is the non-finito a characteristic of rational theory? We are able to support this, in these post-relative days; but for Marx (and therefore for Engels the impatient!), it must rather have been a bizarre, worrying fact. 
We say that this postponement, which results in the 'Economy' never being completed,1 and in the calculations of Capital, Book 3 being false,2 already demonstrates a whole dispositif, a libidinal monster with the huge fat head of a man full of warrior’s thoughts and petty quarrels, and with the soft body of young amorous Rhenane - a monster which never achieves the realization of its unity, because of this very incapacity, and it is this 'failure' which is marked in the interminable theoretical suspense. What we have here is not exactly the centaur, the master of politicians as Chiron was the master of Achilles; rather, it would be the hermaphrodite, another monster in which femininity and masculinity are indiscernibly exchanged, thereby thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference. But it is exactly this which is in question in the 'Economy', and we maintain, dear comrades, the following thesis: the little girl Marx, offended by the perversity of the polymorphous body of capital, requires a great love; the great prosecutor Karl Marx, assigned the task of the prosecution of the perverts and the 'invention' of a suitable lover (the proletariat), sets himself to study the file of the accused capitalist. 
What happens when the person assigned to the prosecution is as fascinated by the accused as he is scandalized by him? It comes about that the prosecutor sets himself to finding a hundred thousand good reasons to prolong the study of the file, that the enquiry becomes meticulous, always more meticulous, that the lawyer submerged in the British Museum in the microscopic analysis of the aberrations of capital is no longer able to detach himself from it, that the organic unity, that this swarming of perverse fluxes that is supposed to have to produce (dialectically), never stops moving away, escaping him, being put off, and that the submission of petitions is kept waiting interminably. What was happening then throughout the thousands of manuscript pages? The unification of Marx's body, which requires that the polymorphous perversity of capital be put to death for the benefit of the fulfillment of the desire for genital love, is not possible. The prosecutor is unable to deduce the birth of a new and beautiful (in)organic body (similar to that of precapitalist forms) which would be child-socialism, from the pornography of capital­ism. If there is a body of capital, this body is sterile, it engenders nothing: it exceeds the capacity of theoretical discourse as unification. 
' I do not want to be resigned to sending just anything', Marx wrote to Engels who presses him (31 July 1865), prior to having the whole work in his sight. 'Whatever defect they may have, it is to the advantage of my writings that they constitute an artistic whole, and I can only achieve this result in my own way and by never having them printed until I have them before me in their entirety.’ These writings on their own, however, never constitute this visible artistic whole whose model is an (in)organic body, organic insofar as it is a complete and fecund totality, inorganic insofar as it is not biological, but theoretical here (the same unitary model which will be desired and 'recognized' in precapitalist forms or in socialism, this time on the socio-economic plane). 
The young innocent Little Girl Marx says: you sec, I am in love with love, this must stop, this industrial and industrious crap, this is what makes me anxious, I want the return to the (in)organic body; and it has been taken over by the great bearded scholar so that he may establish the thesis that it cannot stop, and so that he may testify, as the counsel to the poor (amongst which is the Little Girl Marx), to his revolutionary conclusions; so that he may perform the obstetrics of capital; and so that he may give, to her, this total body he requires, this child, at least this child of words which would be the anticipated double (the younger child born first) of the child of flesh: of the proletariat, of socialism. But alas, he does not give her this child. She will never have this 'artistic whole' before her, these writings 'in their entirety'. She will have suffering growing before her and in her, because her prosecutor will discover in the course of his research, insofar as it is endless, a strange jouissance: the same 
jouissance that results from the instantiation of the pulsions and their discharge in postponement. The jouissance of infinity. This 'perversity' of knowledge is rightly called (scientific) research, and intensity there is not, as it is in orgasm, 'normal', the intensity of discharge instantiated in a genital couple, but is the intensity of an inhibition, of a putting into reserve, of a postponement and of an investment in means. So much so that the prosecutor charged with obtaining proof of the pornographic ignominy of capital repeats, in his enquiry and even in his preparation and pleading, this same 'Don't come yet' - so to speak - which is simply another modality of  jouissance, which is found in the libidinal dispositif of capital. While, as concerns the content, it is always in search of the lovable body which he-she desires, the form of this research already contains its denial and its impossibility. 
This is why the attention which this body is able to command, and to which it must have the right, provokes the bad temper of the paradoxical defender of the poor. When the refugees from the Commune fled to London and the International was fully preoc­cupied with them, while in short something like the subversive 'reality' of this proletarian-socialist body, supposedly much sought after, comes to explode in the eyes of the world (and, it seems, in the eyes of the author of the 'Address to the Committee of the International' dated 30 May 1871), what docs Marx find to write, on 9 November of that same year, to Danielson, his Russian translator, who is awaiting the corrections to the text of the first chapter? 'It is, without any doubt, quite useless to await a revision of the first chapter, for my time has for some months been so taken up (and on this point there is little hope of improvement in the near future) that I am unable to pursue my theoretical labours any more. It is certain that one fine morning I will put an end to all this, but there are circumstances where one is morally bound to busy oneself with things much less attractive than study and theoretical research. ' Not very attractive, says the equivocal prosecutor, your fine proletarian body, again we catch a glimpse of the infamous prostitution of capital . . . 
But, you say, this suspension of theoretical labour on capital, this is not for one second a pleasure in the sense of a security, an irresponsibility, it is on the contrary the result of a libidinal transaction, it is the price that the young amorous Girl-Marx's desire for the reconciled body is made to pay by the fat-headed Accuser­ Marx with the shattered social body: ah, you dream of the relation of non-domination between men and things, and between men themselves, and between men and women! All right then, show the consistency of the dream, demonstrate that reality too, dreams this dream. That is to say: you also pay, pay in word-products, in articulations, in structured arguments, endlessly. Wasn't this said, in substance, in the peripheries of the work, in 1844: the proletariat is Christ, and his real suffering is the price of his redemption, and this is why it is not enough that a particular wrong is done him, a shopkeeper's wrong, a pathetic limitation of his profit-margin, for example, no, his redemption requires a total suffering, therefore a total wrong, as the proletariat will be for Marx, once and for all, and as Marx will be once and for all for the proletariat required by the desire named Marx: Christ the proletariat, Marx his witness­ martyr? Theoretical discourse being his cross, his torture? 

Footnotes:
1 M. Rubel shows this in his introduction to Volume II of the Pleiade edition of the Oeuvres.