Abstract
Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day shows that when we have to make sense of experience, we inevitably distance ourselves from the raw, naïve openness of the event. This is something we all know and it is a process that fiction (as well as a great deal of management literature) implicitly tries to deny by evoking a meaningfulness-in-itself that does not refer to lived processes of relatedness. Based on Blanchot, we go here a step further, claiming that leadership is an iconic exemplar of this process. Like narrative itself, leadership is inherently connected to the glorification of accountability, purposefulness and goal-directed orientations. In so far as this is so, leadership is quite mad.
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© 2013 Jonathan Gosling & Peter Villiers
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Letiche, H., Moriceau, JL. (2013). Leadership: The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot. In: Fictional Leaders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272751_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272751_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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