Organization 2666 Literary Troubling, Undoing and Refusal

Climate – Chaos – Trump – Brexit – Terror: the apocalypse looms large in the Zeitgeist. Could and should this not provide the fulcrum for renewing the imaginative range of organization studies? In this volume, we bring together scholars who have taken Roberto Bolaño’s visionary novel 2666 as a starting point for reflections, provocations, and challenges to established imaginaries. How can we cultivate and develop our attention to the violent organization of the world without reproducing more violence? Contributors to this edited volume take on this challenge as they seek to break through the various blind spots in the discipline of management and organization studies. Bolaño’s work opens up hidden and fantastic dimensions in organization and provides alternative spaces and associations for new and bold organizational thinking. Variously disturbing, self-destructive, and abyssal, these essays reflect “that something that terrifies us all” as Bolaño wrote, “that something that cows and spurs us on”. We call this something Organization 2666.

As if one could provide an introduction to Organization 2666.- Bolaño versus Business Strategy.- Reading as theorizing. A conjecture based on The Savage Detectives’ mode of inquiry.- The key to our century and the mystery at Port-Vendres.- The absent witness: Bolaño’s 2666 as a case of fictional accountability.- Living, reading, and dying in the didactic void: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and organized literature.- Encounters with the undead: Reading the Other(s) in Bolaño’s 2666.- Machismo as a Mode of Organizing.- Bolaño’s Black Smoke: The Revelation of Horror in Organization.