Abstract
While many studies have enlighten several rhetorical and linguistic structures of managerial discourses in organizations, few have analysed from a Lacanian standpoint the impact of these linguistic structures upon the subjectivity of the people concerned. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that many modern management techniques, resulting from the hybrid combination of communication and instrumental rationality paradigms, generate specific recurrent structures of languaging in organizations. These hybrid structures generate what I call here homo managerialis and are similar to the concept of derision as it has been expounded by Denis Vasse in a psychoanalytical context. Derision, in Vasse’s psychoanalytical perspective, is a violent way to address to someone which starts with openness and ends up by closeness. It severs one’s link with desire, confidence in life, makes work a pain, generates false sociability. This similarity between the structure of modern management techniques and derision is demonstrated through the analysis of three archetypal situations. Finally, based upon Vasse’s specific post-Lacanian psychoanalytic anthropology which lends itself to the analysis of derision and from M. Henry’s phenomenology of life, this paper will suggest a new understanding of human being and reason which is the basis for a new understanding of organizing which prevents derision.