The course took its name from an essay Fisher had previously published in 2012, exploring “the relation of desire to politics in a post-Fordist context”. Taking seriously a much ridiculed comment made by Conservative politician Louise Mensch on British television about the apparent hypocrisy of Occupy protesters in 2010 — protesters who decried capitalism whilst standing in line at Starbucks, tweeting about politics from their iPhones — Fisher argued that Mensch’s position nonetheless warrants a serious response. This was to suggest that, whilst Mensch’s cynicism was superficial, the implications of her critique remained deeply troubling. To what extent is our desire for postcapitalism always-already captured and neutralised by capitalism itself? How are we supposed to combat the “intensification of desire for consumer goods, funded by credit”? Should we even try? For Fisher, the response to this problem cannot be, as Mensch suggests, a reactionary striving for a pre-capitalist primitivism; the “libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism”, he suggests, need “to be met with a counterlibidio, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening”.