Pouvoir et puissance – Refuser de parvenir: une joie pure/Power and potentiality – To refuse to reach for a goal: a pure joy[1]
Sébastien Charbonnier
lundi matin #487, 09/09/2025
The philosopher Sébastien Charbonnier has just published his remarkable book Pouvoir et puissance (Vrin), in which he raises and explores an absolutely crucial and decisive question: how can we refute power and domination while exercising our power [puissance] to act? We will discuss this with him at the next lundi soir evening event. In the meantime, here is a preview of some excerpts from the book.
Hypothesis: stop relating to [and following] orders
34. “Act without doing/making; work without effort”.[2]
Lao Tzu condensed the perspective of power into this diamond-like precept. This work can be seen as an attempt to unfold the practical consequences implied therein.
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35. Even if potential to act can only be deployed through learning, when faced with problems, I concede that there is a practical solution: to refuse powers – because it pays off [rapportent].
The following objection will probably arise: “Refusing power is condemning oneself to powerlessness!” This would be a terrible misunderstanding, because the rejection of power is a condition for the exercise [expression] of power [potentiality], and, conversely, the exercise [expression] of power [potentiality] is a condition for the rejection of power.
These two propositions therefore imply each other: they are equivalent.
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36. To refuse to attain/to reach for power: to refuse to exercise it, to refuse to be subjected to it. Depending on the situation, one refusal conditions the other, not always in the way one believes.
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37. Potentiality is the objective foundation, because it is relational, of what is best; power relations can only produce what is worst, because they diminish by preventing relationships.
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38. Sartre describes his uncle as follows: “all the right-wing maxims that an old left-wing man taught me through his behaviour.”[3] Understanding what potentiality [puissance] is has the virtue of making it impossible to believe in the label “left-wing” when it comes to lives, decisions and actions that are clearly right-wing.
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39. Let us forget about “mentalities” for a moment: it is no longer a question of changing the players, but of changing the rules of the game.
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40. “The revolutionary tradition is stamped with voluntarism as if it were a congenital defect. […] A revolutionary force of this era will attend instead to the patient growth of its potentiality [puissance]. This question having long been pushed back, behind the antiquated theme of seizing power, we’re relatively unprepared when the moment comes to address it. There’s never a lack of bureaucrats who know exactly what they intend to do with the potentiality of our movements, that is, how they intend to make it a means, a means to their end. But we don’t usually concern ourselves with our potentiality as such.”[4]
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41. We could use the term “empouvoirement” [empowerment] to describe what power relations do when they symmetrically produce the disempowered [empotenté·es] and the disempowering [empotentant·es]. But this is a bit harsh on the English concept of empowerment, the uses of which can be used in a similar way to the perspective of potentiality [puissance] – but not always. Hence this neologism: empotentement – reminiscent of the Latin potestas.[5]
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42. The concept of empowerment risks producing edifying models of subjectivity that are easily assimilated by the discourse of masculine, individualistic and liberal autonomy: becoming an enterprise unto oneself, developing personally, etc. One might also think of the capitalist and ethnocentric fantasy of “microcredit”, touted by Western NGOs as a means of empowerment for women in the Global South.[6]
In fact, the internalising prefix “em-” in the concept of empowerment is likely to perpetuate the substantialist imaginary of possessing potentiality [puissance]. However, this makes no sense: potentiality cannot be an attribute of a person – or a group.
Any idea of development perpetuates the capitalist perspective of accumulation. Thus, self-improvement promotes the idea of a resource as an attribute of the self, a kind of human capital that one should seek to increase – through the acquisition of skills.
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43. The concept of disempowerment, as used in Francis Dupuis-Déri’s pro-feminist analyses[7], is undoubtedly more accurate in describing the joyful escape that constitutes the refusal to succeed as a construction of relations of potentiality: perceiving and letting go of what, in itself, is constituted by the power relations that disempower us [empotentent] – and therefore weaken us.
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44. The concept of disempowerment states that power relations are cumbersome. How can we dispose of them by abandoning our legacies? This is the real challenge of refusing to succeed, for the disempowered [les empotenté·es] that we are.
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45. To clarify the vocabulary. The parts of each person that are disempowered (in each one) occupy positions of power and enjoy the enslavement and exploitation of others; the parts of each person that are empowering (in each one) provide the cognitive, emotional and physical labour that allows the oppressed to enjoy themselves.
In contrast, I find it unfortunate that the dominant/dominated couple suggests that action is on the side of the oppressors and passivity on the side of the workers. The opposite is true.
A politicised syntax would place the past participle on the harmful side of a power relationship: this placement/position allows one to capitalise on a past situation, maintained by the orders of power.
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46. I call orders the imaginary structures that organise (social) power relations with a view to preserving them. Examples include capital, patriarchy, gerontocracy, white supremacy, ableism, heteronormativity, etc.
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47. The “dominated” are so symbolically, but there is also the affective and energetic activation of their minds and bodies: this is what power relations aim for – less concerned with the symbolic effects of orders than with the practical effects they induce. Activity therefore lies with the disempowered [empotentant·es], who provide the energy to bring about enjoyment.
Power relations serve exploitative purposes: if less symbolic, more explicitly coercive means were necessary, it would not be a problem. (See the issue of corporal punishment in education, domestic violence, etc.: all these infra-political moments of calling people to order.
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48. “As a man” is a power relationship. Believing in it can kill, hurt, humiliate, rape, since, from then on, human animals begin to call themselves “men” and claim to be so – this “so” encompasses all the abuses of power. In short, it is terrible that humans believe they are men – because of the authoritarian authorisations that stem from such a belief in their predicated “masculine” substance.
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49. The updating of a power relationship can take abnormal empirical forms – in the statistical sense. bell hooks’ concept of the “patriarchal mother” thus makes it possible to describe situations in which a woman invokes a patriarchal power relationship.[8] This is certainly not about creating symmetry between men and women, but rather about not losing sight of the fact that power relations extend beyond their sole “beneficiaries”.
This is one of the interests of intersectional analysis: to show that domination does not accumulate arithmetically within an individual. It is much more complicated than that – except, once again, when domination does accumulate.[9]
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50. Power/potentiality [puissance] is not an “attribute of the person”: to say so would be to think in an emanatist way, that is, starting from a central, hierarchical Self possessing properties – let us understand the economic metaphors of such a metaphysics of transcendence. This is why it does not really make sense to say that one is “powerful”. This is one of the most, indeed, the most unfortunate use of the concept of empowerment: “acquiring power [puissance]”, as if it were a measurable property – more or less – of the self. This self-satisfaction through positive terminology is more a stigma of the mimetic desire of the disempowered [empotenté·es].
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51. To clarify the vocabulary. If certain classes dominate, it is because they are in command. There are commanding classes, made up of disempowered [empotenté·es] individuals who enjoy a (social) income/rent derived from their (hierarchical) position.[10]
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52. Benjamin Constant contrasts, on the one hand, the freedom of the Ancients, described as a practical “exercise” – referring to the idea of a demanding materiality – and, on the other hand, the freedom of the Moderns, defined as “enjoyment”, giving access to immediate pleasure.[11]
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53. “Disempowering” [Empotentant·es] refers to people who materially support the existence of power relations: they carry out orders that enable the disempowered [empotenté·es] to enjoy their power. Saying this is to describe the material conditions of power, but in no way to hold those who disempower [empotentant·es] responsible or to make them feel guilty. It would be odious to consider that the daughter who remains silent, in order to allow her father to enjoy the silence he demands (“you have no sense of humour, we can’t say anything anymore”[12]), is guilty of his enjoyment – even if she makes it possible by remaining silent.
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54. The logic of power relations is simple: it consists of depriving us of necessity, that is, of disconnecting us from experience – and from paying attention to its effects. To disempower [empotenter] is to (be) prevent(ed) oneself from relating necessarily – even to oneself.
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55. The distinction between potentiality (potentia) and power (potestas) allows Spinoza to express this crucial hypothesis: we do not need the mediation of power relations to compose our potentialities. The potentiality of the multitude is only a different level of individuation from individual potentiality, but it is always in immanence that compositions act. In other words, we do not need a master to come and explain to us how to do things.
By contrast, mainstream philosophical anthropology (Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel) conceives of human beings as incapable of composing their forces (potentia) without mediation: that of power (potestas), precisely. This power-driven conception of the world would have us believe: “1) that forces have an individual or private origin; 2) that they must be socialised in order to generate the appropriate relationships that correspond to them; 3) that there is therefore mediation by a Power (“Potestas”); 4) that the horizon is inseparable from a crisis, a war or an antagonism, for which Power presents itself as the solution, but the “antagonistic solution”.[13]
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56. Pretending to be “indispensable” is typical of the disempowered: “without me, you’re screwed”. Hence this permanent, unbearable intrusion of the orders of power into our lives: power relations are abusive penetrations. They sever our relationship with the world, thus depriving us of the objective, reliable signs we need to guide us through life. Think of all the abuses in education.
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57. There are no orders of power without a collective belief in a substantial presence, which would be “simply there” and have certain properties – without us knowing where and how they come from. What was Object and Subject has already been decreed “for us”, thus depriving us of the ability to construct, by ourselves, the objects and subjects of the world. Power relations thus create a void around us (the Objects-to-be-known-here prevent me from exploring elsewhere) and prepare us for docility (the Subject-that-I-now-appear-to-be prevents me from trying anything else): there are only commandments that delegitimise my experience a priori. Potentiality [what can potentially exist] then can no longer be opposed to words (commands).
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58. Orders of power invoke morality: the injunction of a content (what “must be done”) as an end to be achieved.[14] The organisation of power relations is the permanent creation of the fable of “subjects”, of “selves”, together with the management of their isolation.
The potential to act is deployed through ethics: possible conjunctions by means of a form (how are we going to act together?) whose outcome is unknown. The lines of flight of our potentialities individuate from the collective.
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59. To do/make [faire] is to act/execute oneself with a view to other things – other than the objective effects of my action. To do this, one must have the means to do so.
Demanding “more means” is a slogan of the disempowered [empotenté·es].
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60. A power relationship consists of doing what calls for doing/making what calls for making [à faire faire], in order to attain ends – and requiring that individuals for these ends already have the competence to succeed. Hence the glorification of knowledge, as opposed to learning, in order to be able to exploit those who are (con)formed.
Indeed, the disempowered [empotenté·es] categorise everything: it must be easy to recognise who is needed in any given situation. “Give me a child to educate”; “Give me a woman to seduce”; “Give me a disabled person to integrate”; “Give me a poor person to offer a job to”; “Give me a barbarian to civilise”.
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61. We can internalise the logic of power relations and give ourselves orders. A philosophical tradition has praised this, calling it self-government, self-control, autonomy, etc. However, it does not matter who holds the whip if we retain the essence of these relations.
The definition in the previous fragment can therefore be understood as follows: I relate to myself – having lost the relationships of necessity – whenever I make myself do something in order to achieve ends, and strive to be competent in order to succeed.
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62. Addressing the issue of power relations at the root of education establishes a conceptual solidity that cannot be swayed by the bad faith that affects every individual co-opted into a ruling class. However, without returning to this radical approach, we greatly underestimate the massive amount of mystification and concessions that saturate our everyday practices – as adults, first and foremost.
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63. “You don’t want to do it, but we’re going to do it anyway”: a crystal-clear structure of forgotten consent, which goes far beyond the question of sexual intercourse – or else we would have to extend the concept of rape to many practices of “ordinary violence”.
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64. We are not always very lucid about the ends we set for ourselves. It often happens that a perceived end is, in reality, only a means to another end that we do not really question.
Thus, the appetite for “more power”, this adoration of ends, can begin in childhood: I want good grades in order to move up to the next class, which I hope will lead to obtaining my diploma, which I will obtain in order to get a good job, which I will do in order to earn a comfortable salary, which I will accumulate in order to have purchasing power. The whole of existence is reduced to abstract means that are not desired for their own sake. All that remains is the fantasy of direct access to the ends. (Winning the lottery.)
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65. Getting used to the logic of power relations means first of all submitting to them as powerless individuals: seeing one’s potential to act fixed – perceptual potentialities impeded – and captured – cognitive potentialities directed.
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66. Power relations assign a role and make us believe that, without this role, life will have no meaning. They write the text of practice: “shut up!” and “recite!” are two sides of the same command. Silencing and ventriloquism support each other. Examples: “be beautiful and shut up!”, “say thank you and shut up!”, “go to work and shut up!”, etc.
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67. “By becoming politicised, the activist is looking for a role that puts them above the masses. Whether this ‘above’ takes the form of “avant-gardism” or “educationalism” makes no difference. They are no longer the proletarian who has nothing to lose but their illusions; they have a role to defend.”[15]
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68. A friend told me about the horror of their mother wiping their face with their finger wet with saliva.
The carelessness of gestures of the disempowered [empotenté·es] is the first disorientation we must overcome in order to begin to act. It can be strange the first few times: this tendency of adults to fiddle with children’s bodies, to adjust their clothes, etc.
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69. Disempowered [empotenté·es]: occupying a position that allows one to “make someone do/make” as well as “to do/make it in place of”. “I’m going to make you enjoy it” and “let me bring you pleasure/happiness” are two sides of the same violation. One must go well beyond the sexual meaning of pleasure to grasp the full spectrum of intrusions.
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70. Potentiality realised is acting with our means from where we become an ensemble.
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71. The potential to act is not a “skill”. Harmut Rosa explains: “Skill means the confident mastery of a technique, the act of being able to dispose of something that I have appropriated as my possession.”[16]
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72. “I am expanding somewhat, perhaps too much, on what is then evoked by a gesture in which action prevails over doing/making, where intention predominates, whether conscious or, as they say, unconscious.
What I mean is that action is devoid of intention.
And yet, action does exist, undoubtedly human, and not the residue of some ineptitude.”[17]
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73. “Mourn”: a terrible expression, an injunction aimed at controlling the psyche, sometimes enforced by psychological power, so that everything goes “as planned”, against any emotional outburst, any singular and unpredictable reinvention of our relationships with the dead.
Acting with the dead goes beyond mourning in its authoritarian form.[18]
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74. “No power is self-evident, no power whatsoever is obvious or inevitable, no power, therefore, deserves to be accepted from the outset. There is no intrinsic legitimacy of power.”[19] Michel Foucault is right to insist: power is not an active substance; power exists because there are pre-existing differentiations to which we are related. Among Foucault’s conceptual achievements, we can retain at least these four:
a) The refusal to substantialise “power”: there is no “Power”, but rather power relations that are actualised in situations.
b) The refusal to reduce power to the negative form of prohibition: power is not only repressive (supervisory), it can also be incentivising (benevolent). Power above all needs to be obeyed, but the extraction of docility can be both negative and positive.
c) The rejection of the legal representation of power, identified with the text of the law, whereas power exists primarily in the intertwining of reporting techniques: devices that set out illusory primary and secondary substances – taken as the “pillars of reality”. The real problem is not one of legitimacy, but of the acceptability of such fictions.
d) Power relations form a strategic field since they make human behaviour predictable – through conformation and normalisation. The question of possible tactical resistance is their Achilles heel.
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75. Once we have said that power is not by nature substantial, we have only begun to problematise it: we cannot stop at “power relations” as if we had said everything there is to say. The singular form of “power” is still suspicious: it is not by relegating “power” to a secondary position as a complement to the noun that we have done away with our imaginary-OF-power.
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76. Power is not a substance, certainly: there are only power relations. But I insist: the relationship is not the relation, since there is a relationship when there is a belief in the anteriority of the substances (given) related to each other.
Ultimately, the distinction between power and potency lies in the metaphysical hypothesis of the genesis of “links”, and therefore in the distinction between relationship [rapport] and relation [relation].
The relationship re-connects: it makes us believe in inter-individual links based on substances (primary and secondary) that are prior to it: this is why it relates us to them by presupposing them. The relationship coordinates ontological fictions.
The relation connects: it is primary, as an event; it forms trans-individual links that are encounters that transform us. The relation is a metaphysical reality.
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77. Importance of Spinoza’s nominalism: the Will does not exist, nor does Understanding (not as faculties that would be containers of our desires and ideas)[20], just as Evil or Good do not exist. Not to be fooled by words is not to be fooled by substantialism. We could even speak of nominalism squared: since neither secondary substances are real (Womanhood or Horseness are not realities), nor even primary substances (there is no Self or Substrate forming backround worlds more real than our own in constant becoming).
This radical nominalism deprives power relations of their fuel within the imagination, which consists of feeding us a world of substances – primary and secondary – related to one another.
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78. The orders of power make “concessions”: they deceive us – while cloaking themselves in magnanimity.
“I agree to exploit you a little less in exchange for still being able to exploit you.”
It is a matter of making people believe that the demand stems from something that has been “given”, when in fact the opposite is true: making concessions is a strategy for demanding concessions. This is a fine illustration of the ability to produce effects of obedience out of nothing.
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79. When we complain that children negotiate a lot, we should be particularly concerned that they are imitating the power relations that have been imposed on them.
Negotiation is the amniotic fluid of power structures: making demands acceptable by conceding. Learning non-consent: the disempowered [l’empotenté·e] person makes us believe that he or she is giving in to us in order to make us give in.
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80. Don’t be fooled by false ensembles (abusing the prefix “cum”) that are nothing more than the submission of one form of loneliness to another: they make you give in and call it a “concession”; they want you to talk and call it a “convocation”; they want you to feel in conformity with a desire and they call it “consent”; they want to select you and they call it “competing”; they want to make you reach for a goal/for success and they call it “concurring”; etc.
[1] Translator’s note: Sébastien Charbonnier’s detailed and subtle reflections in his aphoristic essay Pouvoir et puissance presents numerous challenges to the English language translator. Where neologisms are created, we will maintain the French word, with the appropriate clarification in parenthesis where needed. The difficulties however do not limit themselves to neologisms, as the title of the essay makes obvious, with the French words puissance and parvenir. We have striven above all for clarity of meaning, even at the price of unwieldiness and we will usually translate puissance as potentiality. Our work is not meant to be a substitute for or competition against any future “academic” translation. And whatever mistakes we have made are of course entirely of our responsibility and innocent of any desire to misinterpret Charbonnier’s text.
[2] “Agis sans faire ; travaille sans effort”. Lao Tseu, Le Livre de l’immanence de la voie (Tao te king), §63. Translator’s note: There are numerous translations of the Tao Te Ching. As we claim no mastery of the original language, we have sought to synthesis a number of different renderings of the passage, choosing that which most approximates Charbonnier’s own choice of a French translation.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, Gallimard, 1964.
[4] Comité invisible, À nos amis, La Fabrique, 2014, p.236-237.
[5] Borrowing from the English term “empowerment”, Charbonnier’s neologisms empotenté·es, empotentant·es and empotentement will in the end turn the meaning of “empowerment” on its head: to seek power, to hold power, will for Charbonnier be signs of disempowerment, for “power” confines the “potentiality/potency” to be “other” than we are, with others.
[6] See : M. Mies et V. Bennholdt-Thomsen, La Subsistance, La Lenteur, 2022 (1999).
[7] F. Dupuis-Déri, Les Hommes et le féminisme, Textuel, 2023.
[8] bell hooks, La Volonté de changer. Les hommes, la masculinité et l’amour, Éditions Divergences, 2021 [2004].
[9] On the figure of the intersectional “Man”, I refer to a more theoretical archaeological work: Sébastien Charbonnier, “En finir avec l’Homme, recréer autrui”, lundi matin #437, 16 July 2024.
[10] In economics, the excess profits generated by a rentier position can be explained in particular by monopoly power and artificial barriers imposed on others. Imaginary orders play a similar role from a social perspective.
[11] See the masterful interpretation of this paradigm shift in Aurélien Berlan, Terre et liberté, ch.1, La Lenteur, 2021.
[12] On these scenes of family censorship, see Sara Ahmed’s article: “Les rabat-joie féministes” [Feminist killjoys], Cahiers du genre, no. 53, 2012.
[13] G. Deleuze, “Préface à L’Anomalie sauvage” (1982), Deux régimes de fous, Minuit, 2003, p.175.
[14] The typography used here is intended to facilitate comparison with the two definitions of “relations of power” (§60) and “relations of potentialities” (§70).
[15] Le Militantisme, stade suprême de l’aliénation, éditions du Sandre, 2010.
[16] H. Rosa, Résonance. Une sociologie de la relation au monde, La découverte, 2018.
[17] F. Deligny, Les Détours de l’agir ou le moindre geste, L’échappée belle, 1979 ; dans Œuvres, L’Arachnéen, 2007, p.1250.
[18] Voir V. Despret, Au bonheur des morts, La Découverte, 2015.
[19] M. Foucault, « Leçon du 30 janvier 1980 », Du Gouvernement des vivants, Seuil/Gallimard, 2012, p.76.
[20] Spinoza, Éthique, II, 48.
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