The inhuman challenge: Writing with dark desire

Adaptations of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophizing on the immanent forces of the unconscious have risen to challenge joyous, affirmative readings of their work by bringing the dark and destructive aspects of desire into focus. We find an innate potentiality within such accounts, as they are themselves spoken by the inhuman within us – the forces which render our subjective intentions obsolete. To supplement more traditional forms of academic expression, we advocate for an affective style of writing that can bring about ‘shocks to thought’ and convey the inhumanity of desire. We see this as an activating form of aesthetic violence that channels dark desiring itself and thereby challenges critical organizational scholarship that seeks to ‘raise awareness’. An inhuman textuality that recognizes our own obscenity in disgust and through repulsion serves to unleash that which is typically unthinkable and unspeakable in organizational research.