The dictatorship of love: A response to “A spiritual reflection on emancipation and accounting” by Pala Molisa

The paper offered by Molisa is an ambitious and hugely stimulating attempt to introduce love more explicitly into critical accounting discourse. His text covers a vast range of disciplines from spirituality, religion, politics and philosophy through to the esoteric world of critical accounting. Numerous readings are therefore possible of his work, as the diversity of the other commentaries in this special issue shows. Our reading of his text is fundamentally a political one, as we see in his wide-ranging synthesis a fairly clear political project. More specifically, approaching Molisa's work from a post-structuralist perspective informed largely by the work of Ernesto Laclau, we infer a problematic politics which, although tantalising us with the allure of emancipation and love, remains couched in a modernist grand narrative which is actually totalising in nature. Emancipatory politics, yes; Molisa's predefined, modernist concept of love, no.