"He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy" - Critical and dialectical meontology, desire, and the cultishness of organization studies
Stephen Linstead, University of York
This paper takes its title from a line in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, which scathingly satirizes the development of cults ancient and modern. Opening up as it does the aporia between being and non-being, the question of incipience emerges - which for Lyotard was the aesthetic moment. When something is about to happen, objects may become charged with hitherto absent significance in anticipation of messianic deliverance.
Being and non-being merge. But where messianism incorporates non-being into being via becoming, meontology need not do this - and this is the core characteristic of Emmanuel Levinas' critical meontology, which asserts ethics as first philosophy prior to ontology rather than making it a mode of being. In this paper I will engage with the arguments of Martin Kavka (2006) on critical and dialectical meontologies, bringing them into contact with recent developments in the philosophy of desire, and consider whether they have a continuing role to play in interrogating cultishness of the field of management and organization studies.