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Thomas Clment Mercier Kings College London War Studies Department

DERRIDA TODAY 2016

Political Ontology and the Problem of Force


Machiavelli & Derrida Post res perditas

This is the text of a presentation I gave at the international conference


Derrida Today (July 2016, Goldsmiths University, London). This
context explains the oral style of the essay, the lack of footnotes, and its
overall assertive tone. My paper was initially entitled Ipsocracy &
Unconditionality: Thinking Politics and Force Beyond the Power
Principle. This is a work in progress; another version of this text is in
preparation. Please let me know if you have any advice, questions, remarks
or criticisms:
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk
Please do not cite without permission of the author.

ABSTRACT
In this paper, I analyse Derridas notion of ipsocracy, elaborated in Rogues, and
explore its implications concerning the methodology and presuppositions of political
theory as ontology of power. I argue that the ipsocentric character of hermeneutics of
power is one of the most preeminent expressions of metaphysics of presence in their
political expression: ontologies of power betray the complicity between the ontological
and the theologico-political beyond the sole motif of State sovereignty, and beyond the
definition of determined political figures of power. I contend that this complicity is
persistent in contemporary critical theories of democracy, relying as they do on ipseic
representations of the demos, or ipsocratic concepts such as the kratos () of demo-
T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

cracy. Before political figures of sovereignty, ipseity designates the prevalence of the self-
same (power-to-be-self), and signifies the tentative sovereignty of self-presence under
the forms of sovereign kratos, political power, and until an ontology of force.
I trace expressions of this ipsocentric drive from Machiavellis The Prince, to Foucault's
economy of power-knowledge, to Lefort and Balibars re-appraisal of Machiavellian
thought (through an analysis of what they have styled the Machiavellian moment or
the Machiavelli Theorem, also found in Marchart and Abensour). This leads me to
draw out a certain mythology of political realism suggesting an ipso-ontological
representation of justice and reality.
In order to subvert these economies of power, I turn to parasitic figures such as the
Greek Metis () and the Machiavellian fox; these deconstructive figures of ruse
complicate the ipsocratic reading of power-relationality by indicating the autoimmune
co-implication of force and weakness; they suggest the self-differential and self-
deconstructive character of force, prior to its onto-theological enunciation under the
form of power or sovereignty. By retracing the usages of the notion of force in
Derridas writings, I analyse this force without power (Rogues) as the pre-performative
force of the event, and explore the implications of this unconditional othering with
regard to the traditional conceptuality and methodology of political theory.

Let me say two things before I start. First, Ive greatly reduced the scope of my
presentation since the abstract proposal. Ive chosen to focus on the problem
of force in relation to power. I will try to justify this term problem in a
moment. Secondly, I would like to start by explaining briefly why Ive chosen this
topic. These are personal reasons, but I hope theyll be somewhat relatable.
Ive done all my studies in departments of Political Science and International
Relations (IR), in Paris and London in these departments, there tends to be
an unshakable faith in the epistemology and methodology of social sciences.
The interpretative models privileged by these epistemologies usually give a
central role to the notion of power and its underlying conceptual architecture.
Power is, volens nolens, the central concept, and appears in many forms or
declinations depending on where one situates oneself on the political and/or
theoretical spectrum of International Relations Theory declinations such as:
military power, sovereign power, economic power, structural power, symbolic
power, ideological power, and more recent variations: soft power, hard power,
smart power, biopower, coloniality of power, etc.

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

Im invoking this multilayered problematique of power, of the so-called


methodology or conceptuality attached to power, because it will constitute
our secret passage towards Machiavelli. There is indeed a persistent belief, a
somewhat mythical genealogy according to which Machiavelli would be the
seminal forefather of political realism (and power politics) and, therefore, a
distant father of the IR discipline. This allegedly Machiavellian genealogy was
interrogated, if not completely rebutted, by Rob Walker in his great book
Inside/Outside (1993). Ill have more to say about Machiavellis supposed
realism in the course of this presentation. Nonetheless, it is true that power
has been the key concept of International Relations Theory from its very
beginnings, through what was later styled the Realist school, and this for a
specific reason: following a philosophical tradition that is usually traced from
Hobbes to Weber, the disciplines creators postulated the essential anarchism of
the international sphere beyond the borders of the Nation-State the State
being defined as epitomising power itself, full-blown ipseity or ipsocracy,
sovereign monopoly of legitimate violence on a given territory1. The perceived
priority was to understand and formalise inter-state interactions, that is, power-
relations and to take power seriously in order to, hopefully, limit the scale of
warfare in the international arena. In prescriptive terms, this theoretical
stabilisation of power as essentially sovereign and state-national would take the
form, notably, of a promotion of a balance of power. In academic terms, the
belief in the structuring distinction between, on the one hand, the state-national
domain and, on the other hand, international or interstate relations was
precisely what justified the creation of a specific discipline or sub-discipline
dedicated to the international (by contrast to the generality of political theory
or political science which, somewhat paradoxically, remained confined to the
intra-territoriality of the infra-national). The institutionalisation of IR as a
formal discipline was quickly followed by the creation of specialised chairs
(1919: foundation of the first IR professorship, the Woodrow Wilson Chair
at Aberystwyth, University of Wales), and by the institution of Departments

1
I have analysed these notions in my essay Resisting Legitimacy: Weber, Derrida, and the
Fallibility of Sovereign Power published in Global Discourse, 2016.

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

dedicated to IR (in the 1920s: Georgetown, LSE, Geneva, etc.). Such


institutionalisation confirmed and consolidated the legitimacy of the discipline,
but also became the site of a potential critique or self-critique of its underlying
principles a reflexive interrogation on sociological, philosophical and/or
epistemic grounds, concerning the theoretical protocols and socio-political
forces underlying what has come to be called IR or IR theory. These critical
endeavours (usually summarised, problematically, under the umbrella term
Critical IR) sprung from various epistemic backgrounds, such as Marxism,
critical sociology, constructivism, feminist critique, postcolonial studies,
environmental studies, queer theory, etc.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, many of these critical efforts have targeted the
representation of power as centralised and sovereign. In its most salient aspects,
this interrogation drew mainly from Foucaults critical ontology (cf. What is
Enlightenment?), and from his description of power as a mobile, circulative
and productive phenomenon, a strategy without centre (see History of Sexuality
vol. 1). Power doesnt belong: it is first and foremost relational, a notion which
was later reaffirmed in the definition found in The Subject and Power (1982):
power relations are defined as modes of action upon possible action, the action
of others I emphasise the adjective possible: this hermeneutics of power
as essentially relational and strategic supposes an evaluative gaze and
interpretative account of possibilities or potentialities, that is, of a becoming. In
Foucaults work, power remains the word, and the word its concept, even
though he suggests that we try to make it say something different than what its
traditional conceptualisations suggest. This effort of resignification (to speak
like Butler) has taken many forms in Foucaults writings this happened, for
instance, through insisting on thinking power as a productive relation between
immanent forces, or by combining power with other terms, such as power
dispositives, microphysics of power, micro-powers, power-knowledge,
pouvoir-savoir, savoir-pouvoir, governmental power and governmentality,
biopower and biopolitics, etc. The idea, crucial for Foucault, was to avoid a
metaphysics or ontology of power: something [my emphasis] called Power,
with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a

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concentrated or diffused form, does not exist (The Subject and Power).
There is no thing (res, rei) called power although Foucault also claims in the
same text that we may analyse the type of reality [my emphasis: res, realis,
realitas] with which we are dealing as power. The question is that of the
articulation between the thing and theory when it comes to power:
Do we need a theory of power? Since a theory assumes a prior
objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. But this
analytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization. And
this conceptualization implies critical thought a constant checking.2

The irony is that, for the author of Les Mots et les choses, keeping the word power
was not explicitly an issue, as long as one could imprint a new inflection or a
new curve onto the conceptuality and methodology attached to it. However, the
question of the thing, la chose power, remains as a problem. Indeed,
Foucaults ontology of the present or ontology of actuality intends to
provide an analytics of power through an analysis of problematisations (see
notably History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure) and this without making
power an ontological concept. This raises the following question or, one could
say, the archi-problem (Foucault speaks of an archaeology of
problematizations): what is the intrinsic power, the (performative) force of
Foucaults own critical gesture its power-critique or pouvoir-critiquer, be it in
the form of a genealogy or archaeology? What does propel its dunamis and
dynasty? What is the force in/of problematising practices and discourses of
power?

The position of this archi-problem cannot not take a quasi-transcendental


position in relation to what Foucault names an analytics of power3. Such
analytics must suppose, at least provisionally, the self-positing capacity of the

2
Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, trans. Leslie Sawyer, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4
(1982), 778.
3
History of Sexuality, vol. 1: One remains attached to a certain image of power-law, of power-
sovereignty, which was traced out by the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It
is this image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and
sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its
operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a
code.

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analyst, of the critical theorist, positing himself or herself as a critical instance


through speaking about power, by describing power as from the exterior. The
analytics of power works immediately in producing the concomitant narrative of a
certain withdrawal from power, a retreat, as it must de-power itself, so to speak,
by presenting itself as theoretical, neutral and critical in the same gesture as
if, ultimately, power was indeed a thing, an object one may observe,
circumscribe and historicise without always-already participating in it, without
being affected by power-knowledge dispositives, by the theoretical-empirical
protocols and preconditions of observation they suppose or impose, by the
plurality of conflictual forces they express, reinforce, promote or foil. Foucault
would never say that his critique is politically neutral, for sure but the critical
instance must assume this neutrality in its deployment, if only to produce a
discourse of/on truth. As a result, Foucaults resignification of power repeats the
tentative withdrawal of the critical gesture, while making it immediately
contradictory and impossible. This testifies of the self-deconstructive force of the
conceptuality attached to power4.
Im emphasising the motif of withdrawal, retreat, ritratto, because it will return
in my reading of Machiavelli. In its perplexing ambiguity, the withdrawal that
problematisation implies (pro-blma: what is thrown ahead of us, pro-jected in front
of us, like an obstacle, an objection, a protection, a shield, or an excuse) suggests
a necessary separation, perhaps a self-partition within the critical instance,
which complicates the analytics of power as a purely immanent phenomenon.
This ambiguity, this intrinsic instability, is one of the reasons why Ive always
been interested in the notion of power. Im not going to lie: its like an itch, or a
thirst, certainly resulting (I can only assume) from some fever for power, a thirst
for more (than) power, before and beyond power. Clearly, this impulse is not
simply anarchistic: it is anarchistic and archistic all at once, if I may say so. Yes, I
seem to have a problem with power, and I am itching for the possibility of its
deconstruction the possibility, the potency, maybe the power to

4
On this self-deconstructive dimension of Foucaults conceptualisation of power, see my essay
Violence and Resistance Beyond Plemos: Foucault and Derrida Between Power and
Unpower.

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deconstruct power. But the question remains to know what it means to


deconstruct power. Is such thing simply possible? And, if so, why are we still
here, why am I still here, today, supposedly deconstructing power? Will we
ever stop deconstructing power? And when its done, over and done, when all is
supposedly deconstructed, at last, will we perhaps replace this problematic
concept with other notions notions such as potency, might, force or
forces?
At last, perhaps what a powerful move that would be!
At last, perhaps perhaps, because I struggle to imagine a world beyond power
and Foucault would probably agree, to an extent at least, on the
ambivalence of such struggle. Because I do say I struggle, and for two reasons
mainly, two somewhat incompatible and inseparable reasons: 1) First, how
may we fight power without power? As Derrida asks in The Beast and the Sovereign
1 and Rogues, can we seriously give up on a certain sovereign power, and on its
consubstantial reference to ipseic freedom and autonomy, without risking to
give in to the worst political complicities? How may we conceive emancipation
or liberation absolutely, without inscribing them within the economy of power,
that is to say: without thinking them strategically? In Adieu..., Derrida writes:
Ethics enjoins a politics and a law: this dependence and the direction of this
conditional derivation are as irreversible as they are unconditional. 2) The
second motive is perhaps trickier, counterintuitive, but it counts a lot for me. It
is sobering. Because, certainly, we must, and we do, in fact, imagine a world
without power but such world, were it to be achieved and to present itself,
would signify, in the same stroke, the end of all possibility for emancipation. It
would instantiate its own end, the very end of the world, death without phrase.
This might seem counterintuitive, but emancipation requires power, as its
other, as its appeal or appel. And, indeed, if we admit that something like
deconstruction exists, we also have to admit that nothing else than power has
ever been deconstructed. Deconstruction has always taken issue with power,
with the mastering drive of power-knowledge in its ontological form, from
which deconstruction, by necessity, departs; deconstruction works against power,
with power, quite simply because power gives it its resources, its force, its potency

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or dunamis: power provides deconstruction with the appel required for its
propulsion. Deconstruction departs from power; it separates itself from power, but as
such it requires power, within/without. This is the reason why deconstruction is
interminable: there is no deconstructive potency, no puissance of deconstruction
without power. Sobering thought; but it must be thought consequentially,
before and beyond all ontological reductions of power, politics or force that
is, before any theoretical model that would claim to simply designate what
power is, with the force of a present indicative, by delimiting and
distinguishing between notions such as power, force, potency, violence,
resistance, etc.
What does such a precaution imply for any political inquiry presenting itself as
an ontology? What does the thinking of power or force do to ontology be it
(why not?) under the form of an ontology of force, an onto-dynamology?
Lets see.

As I said, I had to reduce the scope of this presentation. Ive decided to focus on
Machiavelli. However, I want to make it clear that I am not speaking as an
expert on Machiavelli not at all. What interests me today is a certain
contemporary reading of Machiavelli, styled radical. Many authors on the Left
have felt the need to return to Machiavelli in order to address contemporary
political questions or problems: lets mention Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito,
Oliver Marchart, Miguel Abensour, tienne Balibar or Filippo Del Lucchese.
The list could go on.
There are of course many differences among these authors; today I will merely
emphasise one common feature in their readings: they see in Machiavellis
oeuvre the basis for what they conceive as a political ontology, a new
ontology. The expression appears in Lefort, Le travail de loeuvre Machiavel. But I
will also mention expressions such as: a non-metaphysical ontology a
realist ontology a political ontology of power an ontology of
potentiality an ontology of being as event a conflictual ontology

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an ontological primacy of the conflict an ontology of politics a


political ontology of force an ontology of productive forces a
political ontology of conflict etc. These are all quotes by one or the other
aforementioned authors. I put them all in the same bag for now, for a reason
which, I hope, will progressively become clear. It has to do with the question of
heritage, genealogy, the power of generation or regeneration (cf. Negri &
Hardt, Empire): in all these radical re-interpretations of Machiavelli, the
paradigm of a conflictual ontology is perceived as a way of regenerating and, in
fact, revitalising political thought and democratic theory by conceptualising
democracy and politics as structurally and intrinsically conflictual. I say
revitalising, because the recourse to the vitality of force, the notion of an
ontology of life as force, of life-force as dunamis, conceived as pure potentiality, is
a major motif in these readings.
Needless to say that these readings have precursors. As already mentioned, the
hypothesis according to which Machiavelli offers an ontology of conflictual forces
already appeared in Claude Leforts Le travail de loeuvre Machiavel, and was also
broached by Gilles Deleuze. In his Preface to Negris first book on Spinoza
(Lanomalie sauvage : puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza), Deleuze brought together
Machiavelli and Spinoza on the premises that they both produced an ontology
of immanence, that is, an ontology of spontaneous potencies (puissances, potentiae)
rather than a transcendental ontology of power (pouvoir, potestas) which would
suppose the negative or dialectical mediation of forces and potencies. This
immanent ontology suggests a representation of politics articulated to an
ontology of force, dunamis, or rather forces (plural) an ontology of dunameis, of
immediately-productive dunameis.
Deleuze also claims that this emphasis on the elemental character of forces
which accounts for productive-forces or forces-of-production (Produktionskrfte)
before law, before their negation or mediation, their mediatisation, concentration
and channelling into power-structures this emphasis, then, may also be
associated with Marx. The main implication, in political terms, of this ontology
would be a certain anti-legalism (anti-juridisme) shared by Machiavelli, Spinoza
and Marx. Such anti-legalism would contrast with political theories of the social

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contract those which posited the transcendence of Sovereign Power and Law
as a negative limit, as an antagonist or repressive mediator between forces or
potencies perceived as chaotic and which must be stabilised, as from above or
from outside:
For Spinoza, forces are inseparable from a spontaneity and productivity that
make possible their development without mediation or their composition. They
are elements of socialization in themselves. Spinoza immediately thinks in
terms of multitudes and not individuals. His entire philosophy is a
philosophy of potentia against potestas. It takes its place in an anti-legalist
tradition that includes Machiavelli and leads to Marx. It is a conception of
ontological constitution or of a physical and dynamic composition that
conflicts with the legal contract. In Spinoza, the ontological perspective of an
immediate production conflicts with any call to a Should-Be, a mediation or
a finality.

I am now leaving Deleuze. This is not a paper on Deleuze. But I am not leaving
these concepts behind as they appear notably, and almost without
modifications, in Espositos own reading of Machiavelli.
In Espositos interpretation, the postulation of ontological immanence is praised
for challenging the traditional primacy or supremacy of theoreticity (here, under
the form of political theory), which posits itself as external to the field of forces
and to the conflict at stake by presupposing its own transcendental position. The
current return (and, indeed, Espositos) to Machiavellian politics would be
justified by the fact that Machiavelli provided a vision of politics as strictly
historical, supposed to challenge the philosophical assumption of a transcendence
in/of theoreticity (through political theory) and politicality (through the
paradigm of sovereignty). According to Esposito, Machiavellis pure
historicism would constitute a realism in its most radical form (cf. Living
Thought). By speaking of politics as a differential of potentialities or potencies,
potenze rather than power, potere Machiavelli would, first, challenge the
opposition between theoria and praxis, and the traditional transcendent
position of theory over praxis. His ontology of immanence would result in
putting conflictual praxis first, as the continuous origin or source of theoria. It
would instantiate a purely empirical-historical-practical account of politics.
Secondly, Machiavelli would offer a representation of politics escaping the
actualisation and stabilisation of potentialities (dunameis) into institutions (for

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instance: under the form of a centralised law and sovereignty), thus challenging
the sovereignty of the State-form such as theorised by Hobbes and other
theorists of the social contract (although Hegel is oddly placed in the genealogy
of contractualists) or under the form of capital (in the manner of orthodox
Marxism).
This dynamic ontology would set Machiavelli apart from the whole tradition of
political philosophy as theory of (State or Sovereign) power, which is named by
Esposito the ontology of actuality. Machiavelli would thus constitute an
exception, one which makes him difficult to assimilate by Western philosophical
tradition except, of course, if we count other thinkers who are also perceived
as exceptions, such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Foucault, sometimes
Marx, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, Deleuze, Nancy, etc.
Similarly, Negri (see In Praise of the Common) speaks of the Machiavelli-Spinoza-
Marx line in which one could also include Nietzsche perhaps, as opposed to
what he calls the Hobbes-Rousseau-Hegel line. Therefore, Machiavelli, the
exception-Machiavelli, would belong to a line, a genealogy (thats also
Negris word), a dynasty of exceptions, in which Negri later includes Foucault.
In this perspective, Machiavelli would be part of a tradition of exceptions, so to
speak unless it be an exceptional tradition? but at this stage, of course, I have
no idea what the term exception might signify or designate.
(Be it said in passing, Foucault himself should be considered as an exception
within this series of exceptions, because he viewed Machiavelli as a theorist of
power and sovereignty, and usually associated him with Hobbes. And, another
example of exception, but this one coming from the other side: Hegel whom
Esposito and Negri consider to be representative of the juridicist tradition of
the State-form the same Hegel, then, loved Machiavelli with passion.)
Of course, my intention is not to settle these genealogical questions or problems.
These preliminary remarks aim to point to a certain ethos in reading here in
reading and re-reading Machiavelli , and particularly to what I would call a
genealogical drive, an urge or a pulsion. For that matter, lets just note for now
that there is a certain irony in the fact that the exception-Machiavelli is

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tentatively reincorporated, today, within another tradition, a sort of self-


proclaimed rogue-tradition an alternative genealogy which also involves,
apparently, a certain ontology or a certain representation of ontology. Can this
onto-genealogical drive account for its own force or potency? for its own
violence?

In order to frame my argument today, I will ask 3 simple questions:


1st question: How may one define the ontological realism of Machiavellis
politics, and how may it lay the ground for a critique or deconstruction of
power?
2nd question: Why using the term ontology, even under the form an ontology
of forces or potencies given the obvious fact that Machiavelli never used the
term? and what is the legitimacy of this denomination?
The 3rd question, perhaps broader, concerns the themes of readability and
heritage: why do we read Machiavelli today? and why do we read him like this?
Why do we read him as an anti-philosophy philosopher? as an anti-theory
theorist? as a purely practical thinker? But where is that thinking coming from?
What is its force, its dynasty?

Now I am going to ask you to pretend that the title of this presentation is not
the pretentious title that I initially chose, the one that you can find in the
conference booklet. Lets imagine that my real title is:

Post res perditas

Post res perditas: the Latin phrase means after the things (res, rei) were/are lost.
It is usually translated as after the disaster, after the catastrophe and, I
would be tempted to say: aprs le dluge.
Machiavelli scribbled these words in 1512 on the cover of a copy of his own
manuscript: A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence.

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This inscription has been interpreted diversely across centuries. The general
acceptation is that it refers, specifically, to the political situation in Florence: the
loss of the Republic, the military defeats so that Machiavelli is writing after
something or some things (res, rei) worthy was/were lost, and the implicit
question would be: can we get it/them back? And, if something can be saved,
preserved, conserved, or found again, what should we do now? Can we bring
the res publica back?
What is to be done?
This relates to the practical dimension of Machiavellis writings. This is
Machiavellis starting point and with him, the incipit of so-called modern
political theory. In a sense, since Machiavelli, modern politics have always-
already been looking backwards, from the start, and they have always-already
come too late. Late before they even began. They are mourning, and they must
repair. For this is where we start: not in media res, but rather post-res a post, a
written postscript, which could be articulated and disarticulated ad libitum in
relation to all the other posts: postmodernity, post-structuralism, post-
foundationalism, post-postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, post-
anarchism, post-humanism, post-capitalism, post-materialism, post-political,
post-war, post-9/11, post-communism, post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic, post-
production, post-doctorate, post-mortem, etc.
Post res perditas: theres also the sense that something was lost for Machiavelli
himself. Something personal. First, as you certainly know, he lost his job and
probably a few self-delusions on the nature of power, of politics. Because, surely,
what has been lost is also the old world, old conceptions of what politics are
made of all the conventions, the ideals, the imaginary I would be tempted
to say the ideological representations or reflections (ideologische Vorstellungen,
Reflexionen, to use, anachronistically, Marx and Engelss words), all that which
used to underlie the practice of politics, such as traditionally described and
reflected in the Mirrors for Princes.
These things are lost: Post res perditas.
Now what can we do? What should we do?

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This sense of loss is what is generally taken to justify Machiavellis new


methodology (Esposito uses this term). Leaving imagination behind, he
turns to what he calls the effectual truth of the thing (this is a quote from
Chapter 15 of The Prince):
Ma, sendo lintento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende, mi parso pi conveniente
andare drieto alla verit effettuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa.
But since my intention is to write something useful for anyone who
understands it, it appears more suitable for me to go directly to the effectual
truth of the thing rather than its imagination.

So, after things (res, rei) were lost post res perditas Machiavelli turns to
another thing (cosa), another reality: a reality of the thing itself. The
effective or effectual truth of the thing (cosa) is substituted for another reality of
the thing, for an old thing which was lost when the old reality itself was lost
post res perditas.
As usual with so-called realisms or new realisms, what we have here is a
swap: a thing for a thing, cosa-pro-cosa or causa-pro-causa, a reality substituted for
another reality, a transaction between realities, between realisms, supposedly in
the name of some super- or hyper-realism. This new realism is what Esposito
calls Machiavellis radical realism. It involves a resolutely partial or partisan
gaze, an intervention into the concrete, the politics of the present, of the
actuality of the present, the living present (Esposito) in which the theorist
takes part, first and foremost, as a practician a practician with his or her own
forces and interests, concretely engaged in what must be understood as a field
of forces.
In Chapter 3 of The Prince, Machiavelli depicts the multiplicity of forces in
conflict in the terms of natural science, as a differential of potencies (potenza,
potenze), intensities, of more or less potent (potente, potenti) physical forces (forze)
opposing or attracting, repelling or absorbing each other, in a quasi-
gravitational description akin to what Foucault described as a microphysics of
power (Discipline and Punish). In this tableau, the body of States, of governments,
of the people, are described as natural or animal bodies, corporeal, healthy or
sick, lifeful or sickly, because they are expressions of life itself: life-forces or life-

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

potencies. We would thus have a pluralist and conflictual ontology of forces and
potentialities, directly opposed to the juridicism expressed by the hegemonic
tradition of political theory. According to Espositos dichotomic representation,
the theorisation of power and law (particularly under the form of sovereignty)
would already constitute an actualisation, a realisation and stabilisation of life-
potencies or potentialities. And through this process of theorisation as
actualisation (and vice-versa), potentialities would be supposedly lost as
potentialities. In contradistinction, Machiavellis radical realism is said to
preserve the potentialities of virtualities as such; it would thus constitute an
antidote against another, lesser realism (realisation as actualisation, interpreted by
Esposito as an idealism a metaphysics).
The ontologisation of potency, dunamis, force of potentiality as such would
oppose the ontology of actuality, energeia or entelechy (understood, in the
classical, proto-Aristotelian sense, as an actualisation of dunamis), which is said to
problematically limit the potentiality of the possibility itself potentiality as
such by inscribing it within a teleology. The absolute immanence of forces,
of conflictual life-forces, would be the infinite source or origin of all political
powers or sovereignties.
According to Esposito, this focus on immanence implies the ontological
connection between origin, life, and change, which could be traced in
Machiavellis articulation between fortune (Fortuna), virtuous force (virt), and
the Occasion that is, a violent or forceful grasping of the infinite becoming
of action (Esposito) which Machiavelli described in the terms of a rape: the
rape of a woman (The Prince: Chapter 25):
Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat
her and force her down.
perch la fortuna donna, et necessario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla et urtarla.

In Espositos reading of Machiavelli, this conception of life as becoming (and its


correlated ontology of force as potency) also supposes a representation of
politics irreducibly connected to an ontology of being and history as evental
the being of the event being described as existing as such, in the present, even
though this presentational event is conceived as intrinsically pluralist and

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conflictual. In Abensours reading of Leforts reading of Machiavelli (this


concatenation exemplifying the generational-dynastic gesture that I mentioned
earlier), this new ontology of being, now conceived as that which happens, as
event (that is, a politics of the present conceived as immediately evental)
supposes an agonistic point of view irreducibly anchored in the field of forces:
It is in the context of this new ontology discovered [by Lefort] in Machiavelli
that savage democracy may be understood. The permanent contestation that
characterizes it in the fields of law and politics is but the effect of this
experience of being, of this conception of being as that which happens, as
event. In other words, permanent contestation, if one consents to think its
true dimension, is not an empirical trait of a democratic regime but is the
perennial unveiling of the experience of being in time, at the center of which
there is a human struggle that takes on historical creation as a whole, or
the complex and endless play of exchange and human struggle. Cf.
Abensour, Savage Democracy and Anarchy
Similarly, Espositos reading of Machiavelli emphasises the dynamics of the
event over the form, of the instant over the duration form and duration
being placed on the side of law and sovereignty (that is, supposedly, on the side
of actuality or energeia, which reinscribe the event within the teleology of an
entelechy, an accomplishment). This onto-dynamology of the event supposes
the presence of the conflict, a conflictual present. Conflictuality is irreducible
because it is what happens, it is the event as such, as it presents itself. The
conflict signifies the plurality of struggling life-forces, potencies or virtualities
which precede and continuously challenge the teleological movement of their
actualisation in the form of mediation, conciliation or resolution: life-forces
continuously threaten from within their stabilisation into the language of power
or sovereignty, or their formalisation into the language of political theory.
As political theorists (but will the term theory survive this development?), we
would or should have to speak for these potent virtualities as such, before and
beyond their reifying actualisation into the language of theory and metaphysics:
this suggests that an ontology of force or forces be stronger, more potent, than a
metaphysics of power and sovereignty.
It is also more urgent. The problem of force, of plural forces, would impose itself
on us as an epistemic and ontological injunction, in both theoretical and

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

practical terms even though, in all rigour, the distinction between theoria and
praxis should not survive the forcefulness of this injunction.

In a certain sense, this attempt at conceptualising potency (potenza, puissance) as


such shows some similarities with Derridas deconstructive reading of power
and sovereignty. In both cases, what we have is a thinking of force, or forces, of
a differentiality of forces which precede and exceed their stabilisation into what
one calls power. In both cases, the alleged adversary is the discourse of power.
However, there is a major difference, one with many implications and
ramifications: according to Derrida, the thinking of force or dunamis cannot and
should not give rise to an ontology and, if taken seriously, it should disrupt
all attempt to build an ontological discourse (see Derridas lecture on Louis
Marin: By Force of Mourning):
Force itself by preceding and thus violating in advance, in some sense, the
possibility of a question concerning it force itself would trouble, disturb,
dislocate the very form of the question what is? the imperturbable what
is? the authority of what is called the ontological question.

Force violates in advance the authority of the ontological question. And in this
violation, this violating force, the violence of a force violante, a violance, so to say,
the question of ontology (be it an ontology of force) finds itself exceeded and
interrupted by another force.
An uncanny force, before and beyond ontology.

I will try to show why and how in two moments, which I divided in a rather
artificial, maybe forceful, manner. The first argument is roughly epistemic; it
concerns the interrelation between praxis and theory, and more generally the
articulation between empiricism and ontology with regard to force. The
second argument is prescriptive or, more precisely, has to do with an intrinsic
prescriptivity seemingly consubstantial with force itself.
1. The first issue, then, concerns the traditional philosophical question of
nominalism. It is an argument made by Derrida in a reading of Foucault on
the subject of power (see Beyond the Power Principle, presented in 1985, and

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

published in English in 2015 in the journal The Undecidable Unconscious).


Schematically, the argument could be summarised as follows: Foucault claims
that his critique of power does not constitute a theory or an ontology of
power, and must be understood as a form of mobile and circulatory
relationality between immanent forces. However, if we admit that forces or
potencies are chiefly characterised by immanence, multiplicity and
heterogeneity, what will allow us to use the same name (be it power, force,
potency, etc.) in order to account for phenomena which are defined, at the
same time, as structurally multiple and heterogeneous, proliferating, instable
and reversible? The inevitably reductive and homogenising power of this gesture,
its simplifying force, must be justified and accounted for. Espositos positing of
the ontological (presentational) continuity of the origin (conceived as continuously and
immediately potential, that is, as instantiating the plurality of life-forces, of life as
always-already conflictual) will not be sufficient to justify this forceful gesture
and to justify and explain the nominalisation of force (and of conflictuality, or
life) as such. In order to produce something like an ontology of forces, one
would need to account for, and to incorporate, the forcefulness of this
ontological production: the force of a substantiation of force, which finds itself
substantivated as a noun, as a substantive, a concept, through the implications
of this ontologising logic. One of these implications is that an ontology of forces
cannot account for the force of its own event which is another way of
suggesting (Machiavellians as we all are) that the theoretical discourse is, indeed,
always-already practical and performative. But it also suggests that force, by
necessity, exceeds its own concept and cannot be stabilised into an ontology.
Force is the other of the conceptual gesture: it is a force of presencing,
sustaining the onto-ipsological discourse and, in the same stroke, signifying an
originary resistance against presencing simply because it signals that presence,
as it results from some originary coup de force, is and remains heterogeneous in its
origin. Heterogeneous, before and beyond being. As such, force remains without
being. Force sans ltre, force of restance or resistance remainder, always-
already differantial and divided, and threatening the ontological position of the
as such: in this perspective, force materialises or actualises (without matter

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

and without act) a force of self-resistance and self-deconstruction in the here-


and-now, exceeding self-presence.
La force sans ltre: this suggests that there is no stabilised being of force, or that
there are only stabilised phenomena of force which also affects being in a so-
called pluralistic or conflictual sense. Force precedes and exceeds the
stabilising capacity or power of ontology and phenomenology (see for instance
Derridas reading of the Hegelian critique of the logic of force, in Force and
Signification), and forcefully recasts its question as such, each time unique and
singular. Such stabilisation is always the result of a certain withdrawal, a retreat
which must, in the same stroke, ignore its own irruptive force. This notion
challenges the belief in a purely practical or immanent ontology; the ontology of
force as praxis cannot ignore (or can only deny) its own retreating move from
the purely empirical realm, that is, its own recourse to a certain withdrawal and
transcendence the teleological distancing of a theoria, an aim, a sight, a vise.
Now, as a matter of fact, and contrary to what Esposito seems to believe,
Machiavelli himself theorised and formalised this movement of retreat, which
he called ritratto: it signifies the necessary withdrawal which allows the
diplomat/strategist to see from afar in order to distinguish, to a certain extent,
between truths and lies, between realities that is, the necessity to extract
oneself from the conflictual field of experience in order to extract information,
to make sense of the world beyond appearances and beyond pure
phenomenality. On this subject, I can only point to Cristina Ions excellent
article: Vivre et crire la politique chez Machiavel: Le paradigme du ritratto5.
Machiavellis ritratto allows the pro-blematisation of politics and history. It implies a
distillation or crystallisation of reality it is a spacing between reality and
itself, between force and itself. And strategy, even the most realist or
empiricist, can only work through a certain distance from reality itself as a
form, and a force, of abstraction. I translate and quote Critsina Ion:
Machiavellis The Prince does not found itself on a brute/raw reality [une ralit
brute], but, rather, on an experience already channelled through a certain

5
Cristina Ion, Vivre et crire la politique chez Machiavel : le paradigme du ritratto, Archives de
Philosophie 2005/3 (Tome 68), pp. 525-44.

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

number of ritratti. Machiavelli undertakes an immense effort to rationalise


politics from a particular perspective, without, however, sacrificing what
precisely provoked this undertaking and makes it endless, that is, the
irreducibility of fortune.

2. This leads me to my second argument, which concerns this idea of brute or


raw reality what are the implications in thinking the reality of force? Is there
a brute reality, like one speaks of brute force? All through his oeuvre, Derrida
was very wary about using the term force, mainly because force is an
obscure notion (I quote Derrida from Negotiations, in Negotiations):
Force is basically a very common name for designating that for which we do
not have a clearly expressible concept in a given philosophical code. In
philosophy, the value of force has always been in representing what resisted
conceptual analysis.

The recourse to force as a concept always runs the risk to result in


obscurantism, or to be turned into an apology of force which is problematic
to say the least. The fact that force resists conceptuality comes with serious
theoretical and political problems. Let me explain: if there are only immanent
potencies before and beyond the transcendentality (or quasi-transcendentality)
of some theoretical gesture, and even in the form of a quasi-transcendentality
within immanence; and if only the force or dynamic of potencies testifies of their
vitality and their healthiness (said vitality and/or healthiness of force thus
becoming the sole indication of political legitimacy), how may we analyse or
appraise political regimes or actions presenting themselves as powerful, forceful,
hypervitalist, healthy, vigorous, etc.? How can we make the difference between
constituent potency and constituted power (Hardt and Negri)? or between
affirmative and repressive biopolitics (Esposito)? If there are only forces or
potencies, the risk is that the description and appraisal of the forces in presence
rely only on the evaluation of the forces own success, and thus on a radical
realism presenting itself as pure empiricism.
But with an important nuance: this also means that the appraisal of forces would
also depend on their capacity or power of enforcement, that is, on their
performative power to enact their own success, to instantiate or to make believe
in this success in other words, it would depend on a force of law which would
promise, and forcefully enact, the laws of its own reading, that is to say, the

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

interpretative models which will retrospectively enforce its legitimacy as power (this
argument is made by Derrida in Force of Law, notably). The risk is to
conflate force and success which would mean that the ontological
validation of a force depends on its own performative power, that is, on the
forceful enactment or a performative success susceptible to consolidate its own
tautological validity for instance through the enforcement of beliefs and
legitimacy.
What does Machiavelli have to say about this uncanny performative power
inseparable from force itself? The question concerns the articulation of beliefs
and force: what does it mean to believe in force? Why and how should we be
made to believe in power and, for instance, in the legitimacy of the Prince? Can
one force someone to believe? And how may we ask these questions in the
context of a realistic ontology of force? The perverse law of this performative
force attached to beliefs may take the shape of a power to make believe, a
successful power to make believe through force, a power to make-know or to
make-knowledge, as Derrida writes in The Beast and the Sovereign. This power
would suppose a faire-savoir or faire-croire, that is to say, the power to perform
and transform what one calls reality be it the reality of a political realism
which would take beliefs, legitimacy, ideology or symbolicity (and their
potential force) seriously. In the chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli claims that
the political leader, the religious leader, the prophet, must make sure not only
that people believe, but also that they keep their faith, their beliefs. Believe it or
not, Machiavelli is here writing about Moses. And he says that, in order to make
sure that people keep faith, it is imperative that the prophet (I quote) make
people believe through the use of force (this is actually a quote please
believe me). The people must be forced to believe, through the use of brute force.
Here, then, Machiavelli makes the massive claim that belief and faith may
indeed be fostered through the use of physical, armed violence but this
statement immediately questions the nature of faith and that of force itself.
Certainly, it is hard to believe that Machiavelli is not being somewhat ironic
here, but I can only believe that he is, and nothing I could say would be in
measure to prove what I believe to be his irony. Machiavelli is, after all,

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

comparing Moses to Savonarola. Nonetheless, if force can make believe, then


there must be force in beliefs as such: force differs from itself through the faith
it potentially fosters, and which potentially brings itself back to force, to the
success or legitimacy of force. Force thus differs from itself through
techniques of legitimation and self-preservation: this is the autoimmunity of
force.
In the chapter 9 of Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Machiavelli goes
further and describes the performative promise of force, a promise which
remains consubstantial with force itself, and with the violent act actually,
with any violent act. Here, it concerns Romulus and the obvious violence of his
actions. Machiavelli writes: the fact [fatto] accuses him, but the effect [effetto]
excuses him. Here is the full quote in English translation:
a prudent orderer of a republic, who has the intent to wish to help not
himself but the common good, not for his own succession but for the
common fatherland, should contrive to have authority alone; nor will a wise
understanding ever reprove anyone for any extraordinary action that he uses
to order a kingdom or constitute a republic. It is very suitable that when the
deed accuses him, the effect excuses him [my emphasis]; and when the effect is good
[...], it will always excuse the deed; for he who is violent to spoil, not he who
is violent to mend, should be reproved [...]

Again, what we have here is a political thought attached to the effect (effetto)
factuality, efficacy, effectivity but now it clearly involves a projection into a
future beyond the present, a promise which signifies a gap between the fact
(fatto) and the effect (effetto). This prophetic-eschatological structure is due to the
fact that force must write itself beyond presence, thus propelling itself towards its
own law to come, its legislation or legitimacy, its future legibility or legend
(to speak like Max Weber), by attempting to produce the law of its future
readings and interpretations: this justification to come would constitute its self-
legitimation as ipseic power. As a result, force cannot present itself as such because
it always-already writes itself in order to present itself, that is, to become
presentable, readable and legible beyond the pure or brute fact of force; the
fact of force thus presupposes the force of its differentiality and iterability
which are the conditions for its legibility, interpretability or intelligibility that
is, also, its representativity, fictionality and spectrality. This archi-logic or archi-

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

dynamic always-already precipitates force into the future to-come: a potency


never exists as such, as pure potency, because it already inscribes itself into a
messianic becoming, a law or justification which promises an effect (effetto), an
excuse or forgiveness to come that is, the promise of its potential success, which
also implies a structural fallibility: teleiopoietic destination or destinerrancy of force,
indissociable from force itself. Force is suspended to beliefs, to the very beliefs
that force attempts to foster. Beliefs that is, also, the fictionality and
phantasmaticity they share with tricks and lies, before and beyond reality.
Of course, in The Prince, the most massive figure of this performative power to
make believe is the Fox, which first appears in Chapter 18. The argument is
well known, and was notably analysed by Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign:
the Prince must act as a man, thus making use of the laws (leggi), but also as an
animal (a beast), thus using force (forza). The Prince must use the one and the
other nature luna e laltra natura human and animal. And this animalistic
(or, rather, bestial: bestia is the word) character of force is immediately divided
between the sheer ferocity of the Lion, and the ruse (astuzia) of the Fox.
(Be it said in passing, the Lion and the Fox constitute the symbol, the sigil, the
seal or blazon of my school in Paris, Sciences Po: which is short for sciences
politiques, politics as science and vice-versa power-knowledge nexus if I
know any. The Lion and the Fox face each other in our coat of arms, ready to
battle or to embrace, made inseparable in this emblazonment:

In the blazon: only animals. No traces of Man and his laws; only Force. The
Lion and the Fox are in cage. The human-half of the Prince does not show
itself, at least not within the blazon: it looks like Man shows himself masked, like

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

the Fox, hiding himself through the making of his own mascot, the political
emblem par excellence, here in a French Grande cole. Our emblem and our
problem: only force, and force only, the same or another. End of parenthesis.)
Problem of force, then. Or, rather, problem of forces: the Lions and the Foxs.
Two forces, or more than two at least two forces in one. But two forces
which do not exactly proceed at the same level; they do not simply face each
other, not in a face-to-face, not in a symmetric duo, duel, confrontation, conflict
or opposition. Force itself, as one, pertains to the beasts (and to the man who
acts as a beast) but force is immediately divided within itself. Ruse is a
force which is not exactly force itself. Force is thus proper as improper, already
divided in its concept. Force is multiple, forces, plural before the One, before
the origin of force and before its own concept. It is differential and
asymmetric before or beyond pluralism. What we have here is not simply a
conjunction or binary such as Espositos insistent reading of Machiavellis figure
of the Centaur would suggest. Bestial force differs from itself not only through
the (affected) bestiality of man, but also through the differantiality of force(s)
within bestiality itself. This differantiality exceeds the chimeric or hybrid
composition of an assemblage or aggregate such as the Centaur.
Whats essential for our subject, here, is that the multiplicity and differentiality
of forces is prior to the ontology or phenomenality of force itself, also because it
is a differentiality internal to the onto-phenomenality of the thing itself, reality,
res rei, or, in other words: another post res perditas.
As a matter of fact, fatto, the figure of the Fox holds together a chain of motifs
running all through The Prince, and which makes it a treaty on fraud (fraude) and
appearing (parere). This direction, which would seem to, at least, complicate
Machiavellis statements on the effectual truth of the thing, suggests a
deceiving phenomenality indissociable from power and force a dissociation,
or dissociative experience, affecting the link between the thing itself and its
phenomenal appearances. Ruse allows a twisting of force that is, of the thing
itself, and this even if one is bent to understand the real thing as pure
immanence, for instance in the form of a conflictual ontology of forces or

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

potencies. The force of this performative foxing, so to say, must precede the
purely empirical phenomenality which accounts for the reality, for the presence of
forces or potencies which challenges the possibility to establish a political
ontology of conflict based on an ontology of forces or on a phenomenology of
violence (for instance, in the sense that Balibar gives to this expression).
Certainly, this originary foxing is a ruse not a subjective ruse, of course,
but a ruse of structure (this is a quote by Derrida, from Negotiations,
although here Derrida is speaking about Nietzsche, not about Machiavelli...).
This structural ruse points to a pervertibility threatening the logic of force from
within, and signifying the differential intercontamination of force and law rather
than their opposition or their logical subordination. For analogous reasons, the
figure of the Fox also suggests a force of weakness or the weakness of force
for instance, that of the poor Lion, tricked by the Fox.

So what is left of the notion of force?


In 1987 (this is Negotiations, again), Derrida declared:
Perhaps, for these very reasons, one should no longer use the word force.
[...] In another context and at another moment, I will no longer use the word
force.

But the fact is that Derrida kept using the language of force until the very end,
until the ultimate interruption using expressions such as performative
force, force of law, force of the event, weak force, force without
power, force without force, etc.
In the thought of the uncanny im-possible, the problem of force returns: the
ultimate paradox is that when Derrida speaks about the improperness of force,
he has no other choice than using the language of force (I quote Derrida from
Nietzsche & the Machine):
The logic of force bows to a law stronger [plus forte] than that of force. The
logic of force reveals within its logic a law that is stronger [plus forte] than this
very logic.

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

Here we see the peculiarity of Derridas representation of potency, puissance,


potentiality or possibility. If there is an originary virtuality and pervertibility
before law but also before force itself, the virtualising force of a dangerous
perhaps before possibility itself, before the ontological or performative
position of force as such (be it conceived as pure dunamis or potentiality), it
does not or should not do away with the problem of force. In a sense, such logic
should exceed the teleological destination of the dunamis/energeia couple and
the prioritisation of this excess of dunamis over energeia, of potency over actuality,
is the structure which underlies contemporary political readings such as Negris,
Espositos and Agambens. However, in Derridas reading of the
potentiality/actuality couple, one cannot think dunamis without actuality or
actualisation. There is no pure potency, at least not in the form of an ontology.
Force, dunamis must always tend to actualise itself for instance in the form of
sovereignty or law, or of the ontological or performative position of power, all
which Derrida calls ipsocentric categories or ipsocracy but this
actualisation must remain impossible as such. Force keeps interrupting the act
through the effect of a differential virtuality or virtualisation, which thrives on
the interruption of the act itself, that is, the fallibility of its presentation. In this
description, power is always-already lost, fallible, because it is preceded by an
originary might or puissance, that is, an unconditional im-power or im-potency:
this puissance is quite as much an im-puissance (H.C. For Life). Nonetheless, force,
in the sense of a differential of forces, thrives from this interruption. Force
becomes more than force through the im-possibility of actualisation, though the
logic of this self-interruption, that is, through the othering force of its own
differentiality. What remains actual, undeniably real, is precisely this
interruption, that of the im-possible. The event which interrupts actualisation is
itself actual and nonvirtualizable: it exists without presence, but here-and-
now, in actuality and not potentiality (Rogues, 84).
Plus de force, and plus de force. In and through the im-possible event, force
becomes more than force, and already no longer simply force. This othering
signifies the supplementarity of force; it is the force of an event without
presence. Force differing from itself.

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T. C. Mercier Political Ontology and the Problem of Force Derrida Today

Derrida thus strives to think the actuality of the im-possible event, which exists in
actuality, but before and beyond its ontologisation actualising, here and now,
the spectral haunting of the im-possible, beyond potentiality and beyond
virtuality. Here, one would have to trace Derridas continuous discussion of
Aristotelian categories of dunamis/energeia something that I am doing, with
comparison to Agambens postulation of a pure potentiality, in a forthcoming
paper. To put it briefly, the notion of this self-interruption demands that we
think together force and energy, potency and power, potentiality and
actualisation. They are indissociable in their heterogeneity. This radical
heterogeneity is precisely what prevents from producing an ontology of force (or
dunamis), in the same manner that an ontology of the act will always be
reductive. But this heterogeneity is also what gives force its dunamis it is the
force of force, which immediately entails that this force is essentially otherly, de-
powering and somewhat weak. Nonetheless, the force of the event remains, in
spite of its weakness, and perhaps paradoxically, irresistible. As such, force
supposes resistance, but not (only) in the (Foucauldian) sense of a conflictuality
of forces although this might always happen but because force resists itself as
another force: it resists its own actualisation, in an (an-)economy which is itself
differantial and generative before and beyond ontology.
This also explains why a theory of force cannot find its grounding in an
ontology of life: because this spectral haunting or self-interruption implies to
think im-possibility before pure potency and before the act itself, it signifies
not only an indissociability of force and weakness, but also a heterogeneous
complicity between life and death, before and beyond ontological
reconstruction it would beckon a force before force, the drive of the drive,
pulsivity itself: that is, my own interruption.

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