The Necrotemporality of the Contemporary French Workplace: Death and Time in Alexandre Lacroix’s L ’ Homme qui aimait trop travailler

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The French office novel is unique in emphasizing the irregular and destructive experience of time in corporate life. One of the more distinctive aspects of this genre is its obsession with death and dying. Treating these two obsessions together, this article introduces a new concept, necrotemporality . Necrotemporality is a mode for conveying the urgent ways in which time may be felt as a propulsive, corrosive slide towards annihilation. With this in mind, the article reads Alexandre Lacroix’s L ’ Homme qui aimait trop travailler as a novel that illustrates the entanglements between time and death in contemporary French fiction d’affaires .