Today’s neoliberal policies incite re-masculinization of Academia, by encouraging instrumentalist and self-assertive ways of being and relating. This insight has instigated a renewed attention to the way increased competitiveness and self-promotion depends parasitically upon non-commodified powers such as investment in the maintenance of social bonds and human life powers. Research has also shown that ‘positivist’ epistemic orientations seem to prosper, whereas more interpretative and relational epistemologies are increasingly de-valorized. As such, we are witnessing reduced epistemic diversity. My aim in this paper is to develop enhanced conceptions of the emotional tensions that are stirred up in the encounter between the urge for intensified competitiveness and the non-commodified powers that they depend on. I suggest that this may provide us with better tools to grasp the connection between these psychosocial dynamics and the current rebourgeoning of positivist and expelling of interpretative epistemologies. I combine and develop further the recent re-introduction of a notion of knowledge-seeking as erotic strivings (Lund and Tienari 2018; Bell and Sinclair 2014) and psychoanalytic conceptions that place love and creativity in ‘the potential space’ and depends on a ‘subtle interplay’ between subjective longings and vulnerabilities and external circumstances (Winnicott 1951). Retrieving and further developing this conception with Hans Loewald’s (1981) concept of Eros, allows me to conceptualize how the current governance of research practices and the concomitant anxiety-driven competitiveness incite a self-energizing dynamic that diminishes dialogues or ‘the subtle interplay’. One outcome of this could be a split or alienated Eros, reminiscent of the antagonism between care and passion, described by Lund and Tienari (2018). I argue that this antagonism could be seen both as an effect, and as a driver of the current processes of re-masculinization. In the diminished mental space where human vulnerabilities, anxieties and longings cannot be contained, reflected upon, and savored, those able to handle anxieties through self-assertive positioning – as well as epistemic practices that do not depend on this ‘subtle dialogue’ – will prosper. Another outcome is that we actively use the obstructions of erotic strivings to reimagine academic work. The development of more detailed empirical accounts of the motivational forces that resist and oppose the current instrumentalisation and commodifica-tion of knowledge, is an important first step in this endeavour.

Bell, E. & Sinclair, A (2014): ‘Reclaiming Eroticism in the Academy’, Organization 21(2): 268-280. Loewald, H. (1989): Papers on Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press Lund R. and J. Tienari (2018): Passion, care, and eros in the gendered neoliberal university. Forthcoming, Organization. Winnicott, D. W. (1951/2012). Playing and reality. Routledge.