The main stake of domination is distributive. To mix Weber’s language with Spinoza’s, one could say that its object is the distribution of the chances for joy. To put it this way is to point out both how far the spectrum of the joys of employment extends beyond the purely monetary – job titles, recognition, friendly socialising at work – and simultaneously how relatively narrow it is, limited to only those things that employees could in principle strive after in the context of their professional lives, not to mention outside it. The dominant distributive regulation that produces these adjusted desires and convinces the dominated that beyond these limits their ambitions are hopeless therefore requires, lest it degenerate into frustration, a continuous work of enchantment whose purpose is to persuade employees that their humble joys are ‘really’ great joys, in any case perfectly sufficient joys – for them. This work is all the more necessary since it must contend with the excesses of envy that the spectacle of the social world incessantly stokes and the imatatio affectuum that this spectacle never fails to induce: visibly, the great enjoy having certain things, which must therefore be very desirable, thus subject to the imitation of desire. Symbolic violence consists then properly speaking in the production of a double imaginary, the imaginary of fulfilment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convinces them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire. [...]