L’ Initiation

In an over-decorated hotel in the Paris area, students from post-baccalauréat prep course are preparing for the final stage of business school entrance exams: the individual interview. These three days of intensive training resemble less a learning process than a fitness course that relies as much on the sergeant’s barking as on methods of autosuggestion. Here, initiation changes into its contrary: transmission of a dogma (the lure of gain) and root-and-branch submission (“If you want to sell, then begin by selling yourself!”) If the teachers demand forceful self-assertion from each one, it is only to ensure a better fit into the mould. Here, tomorrow’s “fighters” learn to dispossess themselves to match a corporate profile more closely, to despise in themselves everything that is unlikely to interest a future boss. All managerial discourse bears the seeds of its own critique: by dint of excessive confidence, it eventually lets drop its mask. (Yann Lardeau)