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Recently, I was asked for my “certificate of tenure” in order to guarantee that I was indeed a civil servant. I immediately felt a certain desire to cry and die: the anguish was there. Luckily, I was able to recover this ancient document from the XXe century at the cost of surpassing myself of which I am not a little proud.
Because, yes, I have “administrative phobia” : I experience, for example, considerable difficulty in opening a tax courier. This evil was brought to light in 2014 by Thomas Thévenoud, this Secretary of State who resigned nine days after taking office when the list of everything he had neither paid nor declared for years was revealed. From his phobia he made a strength since he filed it as a “verbal mark” with the National Institute of Industrial Property. Which, I say without any meanness, nevertheless requires a little administrative talent.
I am therefore on the lookout for all possible strategies to confront the beast. When I discovered that a book by Ghislain Deslandes was called Administration erotica (Presses universitaires de France, 2023, 224 pages, 17 euros), I immediately wanted to read it. I was not so naive as to imagine that the erotic in question would turn into eroticism. I quickly understood that it would not be the torrid adventures of a framework of the family allowance fund and an employee of Urssaf (an organization supporting employers and entrepreneurs) who, in the embrace, would scream form names. So much the better, by the way. I was not specifically looking to read a quixotic work such as “Un parapheur pour Paméla”. I just wanted to heal.
Rehabilitate desire
So it was with some trepidation that I leafed through the book. Even if I didn’t expect to come across Jacquie and Michel, I was nevertheless somewhat surprised to find authors like Blaise Pascal, Saint Augustin, Nicéphore Niépce or Paul de Tarse.
The book describes how management lost sight of the ends in favor of the means, thus causing massive resignations, suffering at work and a loss of meaning. The author calls for getting out of this deadly techno spiral, to reconnect with the affects and needs of the actors. He thus enjoins to rehabilitate, in an ethical requirement, the desire of the Greek divinity Eros. Not that ofAn Apollo for bossby Clare Connely (Harlequin, 2021), but one which, in its least carnal sense, concerns the desire for elevation, the aspiration for happiness, creativity, the quest for beauty and life.
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