Power, potency, domination

We often confuse power with domination, as if wanting one meant wanting the other. By distinguishing them, and by adding a third term, the capacity to act, we can conceive of a form of power that does not turn into domination. This is what I propose to call non-dominating potency, drawing on thinkers, women and men, who have already worked on this question.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand”

In 1857, before an assembly gathered at Canandaigua to commemorate the emancipation of the British West Indies, the former slave Frederick Douglass, who had become one of the great voices of abolitionism, spoke a sentence that would have a long afterlife: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Malcolm X would take it up, and the liberation movements of the twentieth century would make it a rallying cry.

Those who hold power do not share it willingly. Every improvement in the condition of the dominated has been wrested through struggle and collective organisation; no emancipation has ever been handed down by the powerful to those they held beneath them. This thesis, amply borne out by history, is enough to dismiss the illusion that some moral progress among elites might spare the oppressed the need to organise.

What remains to be asked is which power we are speaking of, how it is taken, and whether taking it always leads to reproducing the very domination one was fighting. Three terms that ordinary usage confuses, and that must be told apart, are at stake in these questions: power, potency, domination.

Arendt separates power, domination and violence

The most widespread confusion identifies power with domination. When someone says “I don’t want power,” they usually mean “I don’t want to dominate.” When someone says “power corrupts,” they assume that all power tends by nature toward oppression. This identification has a long history, in the libertarian tradition as well as in certain religious traditions that make humility a renunciation of power.

Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, published in 1970, sharply separates three notions that are often collapsed into one another.

• Power, which she defines as the human capacity to act, and more precisely to act in concert. It arises when people gather to act together, it lasts as long as that gathering lasts, and it vanishes when the group disperses.
• Domination, which is a particular mode of power, the one in which the concerted action of some is exercised against the capacity to act of others.
• Violence, which is something else again, the use of instruments to obtain what can no longer be obtained through voluntary cooperation.

From this comes a formula of Arendt’s that overturns common intuition, according to which violence appears precisely where power is crumbling. Violence does not crown power; it marks its failure.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish in 1975 and then in the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976, shifts the analysis further. Power is not only the capacity to act together; it is a set of relations running through the entire social body. It is not lodged in the state or in a class; it is exercised everywhere, between doctor and patient, teacher and pupil, parent and child, and even in each person’s relation to their own body. This diffusion is not a bleak observation. Foucault stresses the productive character of power, which does not merely repress and forbid but also produces knowledge, subjectivities, pleasures. The apparatus of sexuality he describes did not repress sex; it constituted sex as an object of discourse and a central dimension of modern identity. Not all relations of power, then, are relations of domination. There are relations in which each person keeps room to manœuvre, in which positions can be reversed, in which the game stays open. Domination names the configurations in which that room closes, in which relations harden into stable hierarchies, in which reversal becomes impossible.

It is in this gap between power and domination that the whole political question of emancipation is played out. I do not present this gap as a conclusion one would reach at the end of a demonstration, but as the starting point of work that still has to be done.

In the course of this work I want to propose a third term between power and domination, that of non-dominating potency. One might think the word power is enough, since Arendt already distinguishes it clearly from domination. But in ordinary use power blends too readily into domination, and the conceptual distinction does not hold for long once one stops restating it. So I need a more precise word. And I add to it something the thinkers I draw on rarely address, the work on oneself that renouncing domination demands. It is on this condition, I believe, that the concept becomes concrete and can shed light on how we act. First, though, we must understand where this gap comes from.

Power-over, power-with and power-from-within

In trying to formulate this distinction, I realised it had already been worked out, and better than I knew how to do, by women who had thought it from the experience of the dominated. bell hooks, in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, published in 1984, observes that many women active in the feminist movement long held power to be a negative reality in itself, without distinguishing power as domination and control over others from power as a creative, life-affirming force. This confusion carries a political cost, because it leads some to flee all power, and so to leave the field to those who do not flee it, and others to seize power by embracing its masculine definition, that is, by reproducing the very sexism they were fighting.

It is in Starhawk that I found the formulation closest to what I was groping toward. In Truth or Dare, published in 1987, she distinguishes three figures of power.

• power-over, which is domination and control, and which she traces back to the warlike organisation of societies.
• power-with, the influence acknowledged among equals, close to Arendt’s acting in concert.
• power-from-within, a person’s own potency, their capacity to act and to create, which in Starhawk takes on a spiritual dimension.

This inner potency interests me in particular, because it names a power exercised over no one and yet remaining a power. So I claim no invention of this distinction; I place myself within a lineage, and I draw on Starhawk, who wrote before me.

Potentia and potestas, the two words Latin kept apart

Here again I find that the distinction is ancient, already inscribed in language. Latin philosophy had two words where French, like English, tends to have one.

• Potentia means potency, the concrete capacity to act, what a body or a group can actually do.
• Potestas means instituted power, legitimate authority, the recognised capacity to command.

Spinoza, in his Political Treatise, left unfinished at his death in 1677, grounds his whole political thought in this distinction. A people’s potency, its potentia, comes first; institutions, potestas, are only its organisation, and they are worth only as much as they serve that potency rather than confiscating it. Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and Frédéric Lordon have taken up and extended this reading. Power in Arendt’s sense, the capacity to act together, belongs to potentia; domination belongs to potestas when the latter separates from the potency that founded it and turns against it.

The philosopher Sandra Field, in Potentia, published in 2020, adds a nuance that usefully complicates the picture. A group’s potency carries within it the hierarchies and hostilities that run through that group, so that it is not spontaneously egalitarian and may well produce oligarchy. It is the work of institution that determines whether a group’s potentia stays shared or concentrates in a few hands.

Let me pause for a moment on what I am doing, because it holds for the whole article. What I think I am discovering, the Latin language already separated, Spinoza had thought, Starhawk had written. I claim no novelty. But the fact that something has been said, written, thought does not mean it has been transmitted to us, as though humanity automatically inherited what its thinkers have worked out. I see around me, and within myself, the confusions this distinction might dispel: people who dare not act for fear of dominating, others who dominate while believing they are acting, harm done for want of the words to find one’s bearings. To take up these thoughts again is to bring them up to date in light of the problems, conceptual and human, that are ours today. It is within this lineage that I would place the term I propose further on.

When the former dominated becomes the dominator

There remains the hardest question, the one Douglass raised in saying that power yields nothing on its own. Once we grant that it must be taken, does taking it inevitably lead to reproducing the domination we were fighting?

The history of revolutions gives a often discouraging answer. The classical revolutionary tradition, from 1789 and radicalised by Lenin in 1917, conceived the taking of power as the seizure of the state, the overthrow of the existing power, the capture of the apparatus of coercion, the refounding of institutions. This strategy won real victories, but it also produced reproductions of domination, in which the state conquered by the oppressed became the instrument of a new domination, at times harsher than the one it had brought down.

Frantz Fanon analysed this reversal with a lucidity sharpened by the experience of decolonisation. Born in Martinique, a psychiatrist who became a militant of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian war of independence, he wrote The Wretched of the Earth from within that struggle and in view of the African decolonisations then under way. In this book, published in 1961, the year of his death, he shows how the colonised elite, shaped by the coloniser and steeped in its ways of thinking, tends to occupy the place left vacant by the settler without transforming the relation of domination itself. The national bourgeoisie that takes power at the moment of independence sets up, for its own benefit, a system of exploitation and domination modelled on the one it has just replaced. The dominated who have become dominators merely prolong the conduct of the former coloniser. Yet Fanon does not stop at this observation. He calls for something other than a changing of the guard, for the invention of a new humanity that does not content itself with imitating Europe, and his book closes with the call to “turn over a new leaf” and to set a new human being on its feet. Liberation, for him, is not measured by the seizure of the apparatus but by the capacity not to reproduce the hierarchies of the coloniser.

Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism of 1950, had named the rebound effect of domination on the one who exercises it, what he called the savaging of the coloniser by his own colonial enterprise. Those who presented themselves as the civilisers committed the most barbaric acts: villages burned, populations massacred, heads cut off and displayed, bodies mutilated as a spectacle to terrorise. The accounts of these atrocities are countless, from the Americas to the Congo, and they can be set alongside what Geni Núñez documents on the side of the colonisation of affections. The inversion here is glaring and must be stated, for the savage was not the one the colonial propaganda pointed to. If domination thus degrades the dominator as much as the dominated, then taking power while reproducing domination does not even bring the dominated a genuine victory; it merely extends the harm to one more group.

Clastres’s chief, who does not command

The history of revolutions does not exhaust human experience. Other forms of organisation have sought precisely to prevent the potency to act from crystallising into domination.

Pierre Clastres, in Society Against the State, published in 1974, offers an ethnographic light. He observes that certain stateless societies are organised so as to prevent the emergence of domination. The chief, where one exists, holds no coercive power. He must give more than he receives, speak more than he is listened to, and his very role consists in continually defusing the concentrations of power that might form. These societies act collectively, so they have power in Arendt’s sense, but they have invented mechanisms to keep it from becoming domination.

Several political traditions and several women writers have carried this inquiry further, each in their own way.

• The anarchist tradition, from Proudhon to David Graeber, contests the seizure of the state, which it regards as a trap. The state would be by construction a machine of domination, so that conquering it would amount to reproducing what one is fighting. Real transformation would come laterally, through the building of autonomous powers, cooperatives, communes, associations, which gradually render the state superfluous. Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, published in 2004, shows that this vigilance is no utopia and is practised by many human groups.
• Radical democracy, in Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort or Chantal Mouffe, proposes another path. To take power would be to occupy democratic institutions in order to bring into them the conflicts they were not absorbing, to widen the field of debate, to institute something common out of struggles. Democracy is then not an acquired state but a process of democratisation that stops the moment one stops practising it.
• Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, published in 1973, gives a name to what a potency that does not dominate might be. He calls convivial the society in which tools remain handled by people rather than enslaving them, in which each person keeps the capacity to act without becoming either master or slave. The convivial tool, he writes, is the one that “fosters neither slaves nor masters” and that “enlarges the range of personal action.” Illich explicitly warns against the idea of a group “that would seize power at the moment of crisis.” What he aims at is not the seizure of the apparatus but the extension of autonomy, that is, of the potency to act of people integrated into a collective.
• The world of work has seen, more recently, concrete attempts to redistribute decision-making power. The liberated company, theorised by Isaac Getz and Brian Carney in Freedom, Inc. in 2012, designates an organisation in which most employees are free to take the actions they themselves judge best, without going through a hierarchy of control. Holacracy, formalised by Brian Robertson, goes further by replacing the pyramid with roles held autonomously within circles, according to a written constitution and explicit decision procedures. One recognises here several traits of what I am trying to name: horizontality, transparency of rules, functions rather than statuses. These experiments nonetheless carry an ambivalence that must be stated, for they unfold within the framework of the capitalist firm, and their aim of autonomy can turn into a tool of performance, autonomy then serving to make people work more rather than to emancipate them. Getz himself refuses to see in it a means of improving profitability. Shared potency is never secured by the form of organisation alone; it depends on what is made of it.
• Geni Núñez, in Decolonising Affections (translated into French in 2025), adds a dimension the others leave in shadow. Domination is not exercised only in institutions and the economy; it is exercised in the affections, in the very way one is led to love, to depend, to possess. To decolonise then means recognising interdependence rather than aiming at an autonomy that would depend on nothing and no one. In the Guarani language, she recalls, one does not say that one possesses something but that one is in its company. A potency that does not dominate is also a potency that gives up possessing.

Non-dominating potency

These analyses converge toward an answer to the question Douglass left open, that of the risk of reproducing domination. If the history of revolutions shows that the taking of power spontaneously reproduces domination, the experience of the societies studied by Clastres, of cooperatives, of feminist movements, of Zapatismo, shows that another answer is possible, on condition that we think differently about what we take and how we take it.

I propose to call non-dominating potency that form of power which gives itself the means, through its procedures, its reflexivity, its self-imposed limits, not to turn itself into a machine of domination. The word potency, rather than power, says well the potentia Spinoza spoke of, the capacity to act together, Starhawk’s power-with and power-from-within, as against the potestas that turns into domination.

Four traits distinguish it from dominating seizure.

• Reversibility of positions. Roles are not fixed; the one who speaks today will listen tomorrow, the one who decides this time will be decided for the next. Rotation keeps positions from crystallising.
• Transparency of procedures. The terms of decision are explicit, known to all, and can be changed by those they bind. No zone escapes discussion, which makes the invisible accumulation of power impossible.
• Horizontality of relations. Hierarchies are functional rather than statutory. There are coordinations, competences, responsibilities, but no stable ruling class.
• The limit the group imposes on itself. It gives itself rules that block its own drift, knowing that drift always remains possible. Mistrust of the power one exercises oneself is built into the practice, just as Clastres’s chief builds mistrust of his own function into it.

These traits guarantee nothing. A non-dominating potency may fail, be attacked from outside, decay over time. But they sketch a political orientation distinct from the classical seizure, and they allow the traditions I have evoked to be articulated together. Free thought, as an exercise of individual critique, is its first condition, because without the capacity to think for oneself one recognises neither domination nor its alternatives, as Étienne de La Boétie understood as early as the sixteenth century when he showed, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, that domination holds through our consent. Anarchism brings vigilance over power itself, including when it is the oppressed who exercise it. Radical democracy institutes that vigilance on a large scale. And the decolonial perspective recalls that none of this holds if the affections and the economy go on reproducing domination.

Giving up domination is work on oneself

There is a side of this question that I treat elsewhere and that I want at least to raise here, because without it everything else remains a dead letter. Giving up domination cannot be decreed; it is work on oneself, and hard work. When one confuses power with domination, giving up domination feels like losing everything, all the more so when one enjoys privileges one is not even aware of. One knows what one stands to lose; one does not see what one might gain.

Psychoanalysis helps to understand why this fear is so tenacious. What Lacan calls jouissance, which he distinguishes from pleasure and from desire, is that satisfaction of fullness, of occupying everything, of leaving nothing wanting, and he ties it to the compulsion to repeat, to what turns in circles and, he says, goes against life. Domination belongs to this jouissance of the full, which is a morbid jouissance, on the side of death rather than life. It fills the whole space, it leaves no void, and that is precisely why it freezes and prevents. What is full can take in nothing. Desire, on the contrary, for psychoanalysis presupposes lack, and it is the assumption of a loss, Lacan says, that creates the lack from which desire is instituted. To accept losing, emptying, leaving a hollow, is what reopens circulation, the welcome of the new, the possibility of growing and being transformed.

This potency of the void has been said by artists and philosophers better than psychoanalysis theorises it. The man of theatre Peter Brook opens The Empty Space, published in 1968, with the idea that a bare stage, a space stripped of everything, is enough for an act of theatre to take place, because it is the void that calls forth presence and play. Long before him, Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, gave in chapter 11 three images of the same intuition: it is the empty hub that makes the wheel turn, the hollow of the vessel that makes it useful, the empty space of the house that makes it habitable. He drew from this the formula that usefulness comes from being but use is born of non-being. Without void, no circulation, and without circulation, no life. Domination, by filling everything, suppresses this necessary void.

The fear of losing one’s domination is therefore a fear of the void, and it is a normal fear, structured by what constitutes us as subjects. But it is precisely by consenting to this void, by ceasing to fill everything, that one opens in oneself facets that domination kept closed. To cut into the repetition, rather than reproduce it, is what allows one to move forward, to discover, to emancipate oneself, and to bring to oneself and to others something better than what domination provided. Non-dominating potency has this intimate price, and it has this reward.

Frederick Douglass was right: power is not given, it is taken. But between the taking that reproduces domination and the one that establishes a shared potency, there is a gap that political thought has the means to work on, and that also passes through work on oneself. To take power without dominating is to institute the potency to act rather than confiscate it, and it is to consent not to fill everything, to leave room for what one does not yet possess. It is difficult and it is rare, on the scale of Clastres’s societies, of lasting communes, of collectives that do not freeze over. It is also, I believe, what separates an emancipation that keeps its word from an emancipation that ends up taking the place of what it was fighting.