What do chicken farming, forest management, financial flows, university admissions, research, the neural activity of comatose patients, plane crashes, the IMF, and great Chinese temples have in common? On the face of it, not much; there are indeed essential differences between them. A chicken is not a tree, a tree is not a comatose patient, even if we speak of a vegetative state, French research may be comparable for some to a plane on the verge of crashing, but the IMF is not a temple, and the wishes deposited by pilgrims in the great Chinese temples are far more varied than the course choices that French baccalaureate holders are asked to submit on the digital higher education application system “Parcoursup.” And yet all these fields are subject to administrative technologies that have made them strangely comparable. Identical logics intervene in a wide range of settings and contexts, apply to an unimaginable diversity of materials and objects, pushing the limits of formal and calculative rationality, of expertise and expert rule, to an unprecedented point. The problems of administration are not new and date back to antiquity, long before we realized that processing and controlling humans, chickens, neurons, or airplanes could be done with models sharing improbable common characteristics. Numerous works have demonstrated the long history and immensity of the problems to be solved that have confronted administrative rationalities in a range of times and places, taking up cultural, social and political configurations as varied as those of the Bronze Age, Mesopotamia, and China (Cole 2020; McMullen 2018; Oppenheim 1959; Postgate 2013; Robson 1999). But no one seems to have pointed out, despite the diversity of creative solutions devised (devices, techniques, formulas, etc.) and the heterogeneity of the fields administered, the existence and paradoxical permanence of this mysterious force of attraction (and repulsion) that is the subject of this special issue and which we have chosen to call the bureaucratic sublime.