[...] As can be expected, agents – both collective and individual – caught up in relations of dependence and placed in situations where they are obliged to defend vital interests – economic survival for enterprises, keeping their jobs for employees – are driven to externalise the bulk of the effort required of them in any way they can, passing on the pressure to all those who depend on them. All of these structural facts – shareholder pressure, competition, labour market deregulation, managerial reforms of the organisation – have the effect of modifying the passionate situation of agents and the intensity with which they fight for their objects of desire. Violence therefore spreads along the chains of dependence within, as well as between, enterprises, freighted by radically raised stakes for all agents as a result of the intensification of ambient pressures, and according to the implacable logic that demands that the violence meted out be proportionate to the violence suffered.

[...] The justifications offered for contemporary transformations in employment practices – from longer work hours (‘it allows stores to open on Sundays’) to competition-enhancing deregulation (‘it lowers prices’) – always contrive to catch agents by ‘the joyful affects’ of consumption, appealing only to the consumer in them. [...] For the mediations that link each person’s wage-labour to his or her objects of consumption are so drawn-out and complex that everything works in favour of this disconnection, and very few make the link between the gains they receive as consumers and the additional burden they bear as employees – and this, crucially, because the consumed objects have been produced by others, who are anonymous and too far away for the yoke of their employment to enter the consumers’ consciousness and echo their own.

Understood as the option to exit an asset market at any moment, an option made possible by the certainty of finding a counterparty (a buyer) and by a volume of activity that assures the absorption of the exit transaction (the sale of titles) by the market without significant price variations, liquidity is a promise of perfect reversibility offered to financial investors. [...] Keynes had already noted the fundamentally anti-social character of liquidity,39 as the refusal of any durable commitment and Desire’s desire to keep all options permanently open – namely, to never have to take the other into consideration. Perfect flexibility – the unilateral affirmation of a desire that engages knowing that it can disengage, that invests with the guarantee of being able to disinvest, and that hires in the knowledge that it can fire (at whim) – is the fantasy of an individualism pushed to its ultimate consequences, the imaginative flight of a whole era.

[...] if the act of giving consent is the authentic expression of a freely self-determined interiority, then consent does not exist. If it is understood as the unconditioned approbation of a subject that proceeds only from itself, then it does not exist, for heteronomy is the condition of all things, including all human things, and no action is such that anyone could claim it entirely as his or hers. [...] The idea of their freedom is merely the effect of a deficient capacity of intellection and the truncation that results from it. Incapable, for obvious reasons, of tracing back the infinite chain of antecedent causes, they record only their volitions and their actions, and take the shortest path, which consists in considering themselves their true source and only origin. [...]

[...]

The question of the authenticity or the ownership of desire vanishes once the subjectivist point of view is abandoned and attention is turned outside, to the infinite concatenation of causes, since it is equally true that, being exogenously determined, none of my desires is of my doing, and that as the very expression of my conative force, each of my desires is indisputably mine. And this is where the idea of consent begins to founder, shipwrecked together with its opposite, alienation. For if to be alienated is to be prevented from proceeding from oneself and to find oneself instead chained to an ‘other than oneself’, then alienation is merely another word for heterodetermination, namely, for passionate servitude, the human condition itself (governed by passive affects). If alienation is determination by the outside, nothing is outside alienation [...]

[...] Was not capital’s claim to a part of the revenues originally justified by its willingness to assume economic risk, with employees abandoning a part of the added value of their labour in exchange for a fixed remuneration, shielded from the vagaries of the market? Yet the new structural conditions endow the capitalist desire with enough strategic latitude that it is able to decline to bear even the weight of cyclicality, pushing the task of adjusting to it onto the class of employees, precisely those who were constitutively exempt from it. [...]

[...] Value and meaning do not reside in things but are produced by the desiring forces that seize them: ‘We neither strive, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.’ This statement certainly exemplifies the unsettling strangeness of Spinozist thought and its power to confound our most solid habits of thought, since, in inverting the connection between desire and value, it ruins any possibility of an objectivism of value. Value is not an intrinsic property of things, to which desire, as mere acknowledgment, must simply conform; conversely, our desire is not a simple effort of orientation in a world of desirables that are objectively already there. [...]

[...] Coercion and consent are forms of the lived experience (respectively sad and joyful) of determination. To be coerced is to have been determined to do something but in a state of sadness. And to consent – to consent to follow, in the sense of the sequor of the obsequium – is to live one’s obedience, but with its intrinsic burden relieved by a joyful affect.

[...] because it is removed from the concrete appreciation of capital, the conatus of financial capital has contact with absolutely nothing beyond the surplus value that flows back to it. It can therefore form no other desire.

This threat of dereliction in the service of a foreign desire, the threat of the expenditure of the power of acting as pure loss – though obviously the ‘loss’ is never pure, if only because at the very least the expenditure brings in a salary – can be countered in the end in a very limited number of ways, in fact in only two. One can admit it to oneself, with the consequence of having to choose between resignation (real life is elsewhere, in the other eight waking hours), or even the depression captured by the expression ‘a life wasted making a living’, and, the antagonistic option, rebellion and struggle (the trade union on the inside, politics on the outside): ‘the greater the sadness, the greater is the part of a man’s power of acting to which it is necessarily opposed.’ Alternatively, unable to face the too painful fact of one’s dereliction, the subject strives to ‘imagine those things that increase or aid one’s power of acting’, thus repelling the spectre of sad dejection with the arms of re-enchantment, namely, by recreating a desire of one’s own, aligned with the master-desire yet distinct from it. This enables the recuperation of an idiosyncratic meaning that can overcome the void of abstract labour; an object-desire is reconstructed under the effect of a meta-desire for living happily, or at least with joy, or at any rate not meaninglessly. Thus re-concretised and newly charged with desirability, albeit through the very effort of the meta-desire for joyful life, abstract labour can be minimally reappropriated. And so we see employees finding an interest, and subsequently satisfaction, in tasks that they would in all probability deem profoundly uninteresting were they freed from material necessity.

Among the many objects of desire [...] one finds not only strategic interests such as seeking promotion, receiving a raise, or beating competitors, but also the pursuit of the joy stemming from being loved by a superior, that is, loved both by a particular individual and by the institution (a great amorous power) through one of its representatives. [...] In any case, the love of the boss-master, in the form of the search for recognition, has its rightful place in the passionate complex of employment as one of the forms of its specific ‘alienation’ – that is, as ‘consent’, since this love is a source of joyous affects. But by the same token it is also a source of co-linearisation, since, by its very nature, the passionate mechanism of the demand for love leads the seeker to do what brings joy to the giver, hence to embrace/anticipate the latter’s desire in order to conform one’s own to it. As lines of dependence are also lines of dependence for recognition, the alignment of the subordinate with the superior, who is already aligned in the same way, is inscribed in the general structure – hierarchical and fractal – of passionate co-linearization.