1. In 1972 Jacques Lacan laid down a challenge to philosophy: to think jouissance.

2. The philosophers who have most clearly taken up this challenge have done so in the order of love and politics: Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. In our project it will primarily be a question of politics.

3. However, they do not strike out on virgin territory: contra a simple reading of Lacan’s injunction, there is a longstanding philosophical history of jouissance:
Jouissance as property rights (Adam Smith, Sièyès, Proudhon)
Jouissance as surplus value (Marx)
Jouissance as the state of nature (Hobbes)
The jouissance of the masquerade (Plato)

4. The question remains of whether contemporary philosophers have taken on board the full significance of Lacan’s exploration of jouissance.

5. In Seminar XVII, Lacan states that one of the uneliminable presuppositions of politics is that all discourses deal with jouissance. Psychoanalysis qua science of the unconscious is thus related to the field of the political insofar as we acknowledge that it deals with jouissance.

6. Conversely, what is ideology if not the imposition of a hegemonic jouissance that gives shape to the subject of the unconscious in the form of fantasies?

7. It therefore seems to be the case that a philosophical analysis of jouissance and its political implications is inextricable from a psychoanalytical theory of discourse which is at the same time a theory of ideology.

8. Starting off from the premise that the discourse of the capitalist is 'a particular determination' of the discourse of the master, our project aims at exploring two fundamental questions: What kind of economy of jouissance does the discourse of the capitalist impose? How does Lacanian psychoanalysis help us thinking philosophically its demise?