Hugo Letiche, Jean-Luc Moriceau. Leadership : the madness of the day by Maurice Blanchot. Fictional leaders‎ : heroes, villains and absent friends, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.166 – 181, 2013, 978-1-13-727274-4.

Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day shows that when we have to make sense of experience, we inevitably distance ourselves from the raw, naïve openness of the event. This is something we all know and it is a process that fiction (as well as a great deal of management literature) implicitly tries to deny by evoking a meaningfulness-in-itself that does not properly represent lived processes of relatedness. Drawing on Blanchot, we claim that leadership is an iconic example of this process. Like narrative, leadership is inherently connected to the glorification of accountability, purposefulness and goal-directed orientations. In so far as this is so, leadership is quite mad.