Jean-Luc Moriceau. A sacred we still share?. Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, UNIFACS, Salvador de Bahia, Jul 2026, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

As SCOS arrives in Brazil, it seems just as difficult to understand the present world, the one we used to believe in, which now shows so many signs of collapse. In René Girard (2005)’s terminology, mimetic desire (we desire what our peers desire: to publish in the best journals, to be cited, to accumulate metrics) unleashes the worst forms of violence and exclusion. Metrics (impact factor, number of citations) become sacrosanct fetishes, objects of worship that replace the quest for truth or innovation. But this is a sacred void of meaning. One might then ask: Do we, as academics, still feel and share something that transcends our individual interests? Something in which we believe and which we wish to pass on? Is the university still “a sacred nest of alternatives” (as opposed to the ‘there is no alternative’; Kostera, 2024 p.9. She adds (p.8): the university can be made to generate and deliver marketable products…. but, like the forest, it deteriorates and dies if it is regarded only as a unit of production. We draw a series of “affective portraits” (Moriceau, Paes, Guérillot, 2015), drawn from interviews with a range of colleagues—both European and Brazilian—at the beginning or end of their academic careers, exploring their affects, desires, fears and commitments, as well as their imaginations and real-life or fictional stories, in an attempt to trace the affective impetus that underpins certain sacrifices and sanctifications.