ABSTRACT
Death, as we have implied in our introductory chapter, inhabits sexuality and organization. It both drives and frustrates desire-it is simultaneously and paradoxically the desired release from desire and the loss against which desire is set. Indeed, in pursuing fulfilment desire actively pursues its own extinction. This inhabitation of death and desire is not simply a pathological variant of the modern imagination but, as Dollimore (1998) argues, a crucial element of the intellectual and imaginative formation of Western culture over 3, 000 years or more. Sievers (1995) has also noted the complicity of organizing with death, organizing being concerned with the punctuation and control of movement, process and change (Chia 1996) to the point at which time might become suspended and the organization itself immortal. Not only are such attempts to stop the clock illusory, but they are only accomplished by activities of division, separation and repression in the name of productivity and progress-activities which are themselves violent. Chia (1996-also see Cooper 1989; Linstead and Grafton Small 1992) has noted with Derrida that the ordering and spacing strategies which produce our sense of organization are themselves linguistic practices-more specifically, practices of writing, of inscribing experience. Language must exclude and repress that which it does not seek to express, and in doing this it does violence to the flow of the process of experience, and creates a residual element which is always outside it, but always present. As Lecercle (1990) puts it, the significance of language lies powerfully in the way in which it inscribes violence into the ways in which we think about and represent experiential reality-into consciousness itself. Violence, then, is woven deeply into both the practice of organizing and our experience of organization, yet it is only rarely acknowledged as such. But for men in particular the experience of violence-ontically the world experienced as ‘violent’-is an even more powerful shaping force on identity Although violence signifies death, it is pressed into the service of desire, making them what they are taught to feel they must be, shaping the world and the Other to their will. Where weakness is encountered as an interiority it is violently suppressed and cast out, resulting in a self-obsession which psychoanalysis would regard as narcissism. Yet those who suffer at the hands of violent narcissists often violently
repress their own emotions towards violence, control, discipline and power, and lose the ability to respond naturally to events around them, social, organizational or erotic. Violence towards others may even be a consequence of such narcissism. While we need to be able to recognize and come to terms with the paradoxes of sexuality and power, death and desire, love and suffering, violent experiences may pervert our ability to do this.
