The visceral imagination: exploring the visceral aspect of the entrepreneurial imagination through Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

Felipe Symmes

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2025, vol. 37, issue 7-8, 933-955

Abstract: Drawing on the entrepreneur-as-poet analogy, I explore the visceral aspect of the entrepreneurial imagination and how this visceral aspect is fuelled. I use a two-pronged method of exploring literary works whose protagonists are poets (such as Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives). The first prong is an aesthetically faithful summary that explores the construct of the visceral imagination through the novel’s open-ended meanings and tacit messages. This reveals the visceral entrepreneurial imagination as the poetic energy unleashed by ‘enfleshedness’ (a connection with the flesh by way of a permeable body that penetrates and is penetrated by the world through radical vulnerability and sensuality), wherein ‘poetic energy’ refers to the fleeting experience of a driving creative force that lies within the flesh. The second prong is a conventional literary analysis that shows how the visceral imagination is fuelled through two threads. I make two contributions to the entrepreneurial imagination discussion: a) a visceral perspective that goes beyond the embodiment lens by highlighting the radical vulnerable and sensual connection entrepreneurs develop towards the world, and b) access to poetic energy as the driving creative force of entrepreneurial ventures, which suggests that entrepreneurs may contribute not only to economic progress but also to beauty.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2025.2465714

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