is a philosopher, management specialist, and professor at the ESCP business school in Paris. His recent books include Postcritical Management Studies: Philosophical Investigations (Springer, 2023) and Erotic Administration (in French, 2023).
Picture © Author’s personal collection
Can you be authentic when coordinating a team? Can benevolence be commanded? Can work be devoid of affect? The philosopher and management specialist Ghislain Deslandes, author of Erotic Administration (in French, 2023), tries to clarify some preconceived notions about management today – and draws on 17th-century thinker Blaise Pascal for support.
Interview by Apolline Guillot.
In your book, you plead for an “eroticisation” of management. What do you mean?
Ghislain Deslandes: We needn’t keep denying it: we all have an emotional relationship with our work. In The Erotic Phenomenon (2003), Jean-Luc Marion reminds us that the first question we ask ourselves in collective spaces, before that of recognition, of performance, is: do people love me? The question of love, of desire, is structuring for us. I’m not talking about sexual desire, but rather, desire in the Platonic sense of the term. In his Banquet, Plato explains that medicine, gymnastics, and agriculture are governed by Eros. Agriculture at the time resembled the work organisations of today: the field required a division of labour, long-term planning, the coordination of actors, etc. Our social behaviours, in general, are marked by a desire for elevation, towards Good and Beauty, they’re marked by the expression of a void which we’re constantly trying to fill, something that management books talk too little about. It is this lack that marks our vulnerability, even – and especially! – at work.
‘As nothing is certain, Pascal pushes us to action, to listen to the resources of the possible’
The philosopher Pascal is very present in your work. What can today’s management,…
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