Five invitations, five displacements

The subject was burning, and I had no credentials to address it: I was neither a specialist in religion, nor a police officer, nor a diplomat. Delga had gathered twenty-five authors from incompatible backgrounds without imposing on any of them either a theoretical framework or a conclusion — a method that exposes the coordinator to the risk that his book may escape him, and one that presupposes a rare form of trust, whose scarcity I only now measure.

I set out to understand the act itself; I ended up writing about the loss of meaning. Terrorism appeared to me not so much as the cause of a detonation as its symptom — the fruit of a prolonged destabilisation, in a society whose power exists to produce meaning and which has renounced that function. This question — what becomes of a collective whose power no longer produces meaning? — I have found again intact, years later, in infinitely more peaceful organisations.

When Delga suggested I write on white-collar crime, I was an organisational consultant among lawyers, prosecutors, police officers and tax specialists. That is his way: bringing together disciplines that never speak to each other and leaving each contributor free to frame the subject as they see fit.

Starting from the white-collar offender, I ended up describing not a guilty man but a position — that of power within the corporation, whose social standing is both its most precious asset and the very condition of possible fraud; and whose survival requires shielding it from scrutiny. Lightening the rules, discouraging oversight, obstructing independent information, silencing whistleblowers. The assigned subject thus turned out to be that of opacity as a condition of operation — and a question that has never left me since: what becomes of an organisation when what really counts can no longer be said or counted?

Here Delga brings together physicians, philosophers, jurists and caregivers around an object our era prefers to delegate to specialists. I agreed on one tacit condition: to add nothing to the sterile debate between the mysticism of the tunnel of light and the scientism that promises to unravel its mechanism any day now.

This text is a tribute to Paul Diel. I take the account seriously as an account — that is, as a production of the mind in its natural mode of expression, symbolic language. The structural permanence of these testimonies, across cultures and eras that nothing else connects, forbids treating them as clinical anecdotes. This detour through death taught me what I would not have found elsewhere: that a discourse deserves to be heard in its own language, not translated by default into the one that suits the observer. I have not ceased, since then, to apply this rule to work.

This one first made me smile. What business had an organisational consultant in a volume on libertinage and the policing of morals? Then I realised the question was exactly mine, shifted one notch: who decides what is permitted, in the name of which values, and what does a society reveal through what it claims to regulate in its members?

The word that matters is the first: theatre. Eighteenth-century libertinage was not a matter of the bedroom but a stage — with its roles, its codes, its spectators, and stakes of power that had little to do with pleasure. What I gained there has fed all my work since: a social scene reads on two levels, what is literally played out and what is played out for something else. One understands a corporate meeting no better than a libertine supper if one stops at the first level.

I write alongside Victor Waknine and Henri Fraisse, among some sixty researchers, practitioners, trade unionists and entrepreneurs — with no common manifesto or imposed doctrine, and with convictions that sometimes diverge sharply.

I defend a thesis whose severity I know: to this day, the law of the Republic places the enterprise outside the democratic field. Not by accident, but through a striking historical continuity — the Allarde decrees and the Le Chapelier law of 1791 dissolved the guilds, prohibited solidarity among employees and instituted the subordinate contract at the very moment liberty was proclaimed; the Third Republic, after the Commune, chose to frame demands rather than share power. Two centuries later, the board of directors still represents only shareholders. I had to write this text to state that the legal framework of the enterprise is itself the problem, not the setting of the problem.