From Power as Force to Power as Theater: Scenes of Agency in Hegel and Nietzsche

Abstract

Abstract: This article identifies a tension between two opposing conceptualizations of power within contemporary political theory: the vitalist understanding of power as force, friction, and agonism, and the deconstructivist treatment of power as impressionability, imitation, and theatricality. It situates this divergence within Gilles Deleuze’s employment of Nietzsche against the Hegelian dialectics, and proceeds to excavate a latent shadow of theatricality running through both Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective theorizations of power as bondage and as tragedy. This rearticulates the primary operation of power as one that is neither superseded by Reason as in Hegel, nor entirely exhausted by the excesses of materiality over and above identity as in Deleuze’s uptake of the Nietzschean “will-to-power.”