For him, Eros, the life instincts and Thanatos, the death instincts are always entwined and present in desire. Celebration of all and every kind of desire including those fascist desires which Deleuze and Guattari denounce is his main theme. Desire, in its dualistic form, provides intensities of experience and liberation from repressive conditions and brings to fore the creative forces lying submerged within. It is arts and figure that can articulate that disruptive side of desire as well as the affirmative side of life energies. "Disruptive desire is thus most immediately found in art which attacks the existing regime of reason, order and convention. For Lyotard, desire is what Freud calls the "primary processes" (direct, libidinous, unconscious, instinctual processes governed by the pleasure principle) finds direct expression in figures. In addition, art articulates unconscious desire which follows ruses of displacement, condensation, and metaphoric transformation." ( Best and Kellner ).
Discourse, on the other hand, says Lyotard, follows regulations and procedures, what Freud calls "secondary principles" (equivalent to the reality or ego principle) which are deemed to be rational and enslaved by reason. Desire is embedded, he further adds, within discourses circumscribed by "language games". Thus discourse which is rational, conventional and abstract "freezes immobilizes and paralyses the "flow and intensities of desire". .
Deleuze and Guittari commends Lyotard for his championing of the figural element, the Id, the nonsense, the irrational". Language, they acquiesce, is incapable of articulating the so-called figural and sensible elements of the world. Baudrillard's concept of images as "abstract, commodified and divorced from social reality in the form of spectacles or simulations" differs from Lyotard's concept of images as the very figure of intensities of desire, of singularity.