The book was composed following the ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires".

Alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has been seen as an essential post-May 68 work in a time when theorists in France were radically reinterpreting psychoanalysis, and critics have argued that the book is free of moral or political orientation.

He also introduces ideas of his own, such as a "great ephemeral skin" or "libidinal band," which serves as a surface of reality, harboring signs through which libidinal intensities pass; the "tensor," a nihilist semiotic idea that stands for a sign with no "unitary designation, meaning, or calculable series of such designations or meanings";[3] "great" zeros (which correspond to Lacan's master signifier) and "concentratory" zeros (which correspond to Marx's notion of capital).

"[4] Alongside wildly varying references, Lyotard incorporates the work of Marx (in particular his theory of organic and inorganic bodies), Nietzsche and Saussure in this context of this appropriation of Freudian ideas, as well as the perverse sexuality displayed in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille.

[8] The term "accelerationism" was first coined by professor and author Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative to describe the theoretical trajectory of certain post-structuralist works embracing unorthodox Marxist and counter-Marxist overviews of capitalism, such as Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death.

He writes that the book is less well-known than Derrida's work, and that Dews's critique of it reflects a widespread view of it, that it drew a hostile response from Marxists, and that Lyotard himself was subsequently critical of it.