the organisations fight in order to not disappear, which says something about the intensity with which they sometimes pursue their goals – the hypostasis of the organisations (‘they’) refers in fact, first of all, to the conatus of upper management.

Alfred Müller-Armack, adviser to Ludwig Erhard and the thinker of ordoliberalism (which is the intellectual basis of the EU)

The angle α is the clinamen of the individual conatus, its spontaneous misalignment relative to the ends of the enterprise: α thus expresses the persistent heterogeneity of the conatus relative to the master-desire

commonplace edifying maxims – for example, top bosses who claim to be ‘as demanding of others as of themselves’, thus transmuting the projections of their own desire, made master-desire, into a moral virtue, and expressing in a blind adage of conative egocentricity the wish that others make that desire fully their own.

In terms of both quantitative (share of GDP, financial rate of return) and qualitative capture (mobilisation of employees), neoliberal capitalism tips into the delirium of the unlimited

What the capitalist master-desire in the neoliberal era seeks is nothing less than the liquefaction of labour-power, making the overall size of the workforce into something fluid, reversible, and as easily adjustable as the components of a portfolio of financial assets, with the inevitable effect of creating a world of extreme uncertainty for enlistees.

The passionate temperament of employment, now richer than both the Marxian thesis of naked exploitation and its continuation in the sociology of Fordist consumption implicitly assumed

The desire to find employment should no longer be merely a mediated desire for the goods that wages circuitously permit buying, but an intrinsic desire for the activity for its own sake

But this ‘of our own accord’ merely an actantial indication; it has nothing to say about everything that preceded it.

In each person, the valorisation of things, the spontaneous creative activity of the conatus, is structured under the influence of a set of axiological schemes and already constituted valorisations