The Minoritarian Enunciation
François Laruelle
From Au-delà du principe de pouvoir (Paris: Payot, 1978), p.27-39
1) What is a thesis?
Thesis 9: The theses concerning power are themselves material arrangements of powers with theoretical effects, i.e., a technology of philosophical and political thought. This circle between the thesis and its object is not the classical “hermeneutic circle,” but the circle of an utterly radical, non-specular production. Thus understood, the thesis becomes the instrument of a minoritarian thought.
“Theses” can be dogmatic and didactic positions: for a dogmatic and didactic thought. Other uses of them are possible. They are of a great plasticity and indissociable to the effects that they are responsible with producing. Each time, they are material processes of thought that affect their object, material productions with local theoretical effects as much as dogmas or positions, fractional and disseminated political interventions as much as theoretical interventions. In short, theses are in their own way strategic machines, schema, or fractional relations that are abstract in relation to their generic and specific determinations, but that thus have several overdetermined dimensions or references: material, political, theoretical.
Marxism and theology have bequeathed to us a naïve conception of the thesis, one that would be confounded with a postulate, sometimes of faith, sometimes of reason, if not theoretical, at least practice. Perhaps the invention of “power” as the fractional object of a non?dominant[1] politics is a new chance and a new destiny for the technology of the thesis. The thesis in any case suits this “power” much better through its plasticity, its capacity to be demultiplied and invented, than the rigid term “postulate.” It responds to the objective of minoritarian thought, because a theory concerning power is in turn a Relation of Powers in theory: it is valid for the real, effective power but also for the theories of power that are in turn states of political things. Here, this is not to confuse the real order and the thought order, we also distinguish, but without, like Marxism, henceforth passing through generic and specific differences that remain specular: the order of the real and the order of thought are only identical to a near difference, not any difference whatever, not to lack or near exclusion as structuralism wants, but to the near objet (r)[2], in which real power and its theory as the power of thought diverge and overlap each other as perpendicularly.
This is why we must cleave the theses and distinguish the point of view of their political significance or their content and the point of view of their material production. Like the political bodies, or the point of view of their production, i.e., the minoritarian enunciation, they are irreducible to their content of immediately locatable meaning. There is no transparency or adequation between the theory that they “pose” and the theoretical “practice” that they assume: they produce and convey political effects that exceed in extension and in quality the dogmatic content of meaning that they present. The “theory” and the theoretical material “production” are adjoined and disjointed by the objet (r): the origin and the goal of a thesis only forms a circle or are identical with this thesis that only closes the thesis by opening it.
However, within this constituent reference to the objet (r), there is an “adequation” between dominant powers and one dominant thesis, and an “adequation” between minoritarian “powers” and one minoritarian thesis. Dominant theses concerning power (we will state them soon: power is the object of contest and appropriation, it is generic or specific and concentrated within the authority [instance] of the State, etc.) are the self-reflection, the auto-position of forces of the dominant-fascistic type, an image that is itself dominant of certain forms of power, the “ideology” of the Masters who cynically affirm (this is the adequation that they speak of) that their power is eternal and make this affirmation a supplementary instrument of coercion, material in its kind and not at all “ideological.” The traditional categories of political reason form the technology of powers determined by the principal but not unique fascistic tendency, in which they are the point of view “within” theory. As dominant, they are engaged in a process of ab-solution or the auto-position of Mastery, taken in hand by powers of a very diverse institutional order (statist, penal, academic, economic, military) that extend them and make them go to the end of their becoming-autonomous.
The minoritarian point of view, the only one that can carry out the affirmative = revolutionary critique of political reason, interrupts this process, denounces the auto-position of its categories, and prohibits through its resistance becoming a political vision of the world and extended to the whole of Being (or makes Being a whole): the minoritarian perspective denounces any ambition of totality or universality, but in turn uses it as a technology that it “turns” [retourne] against dominant political reason (“onto-theo-politics”). Therefore, we will call, with all reservations, the Power Principle both the “reality” and the “theory” of dominant-fascistic power, and the Beyond of this principle both the “reality” and the “theory” of the objet (r).
2) Dominant Theses and Minoritarian Theses:
Thesis 10: Several differential traits, that without being the objet (r) are nevertheless symptoms of it, can be stated to distinguish the Power Principle and its Beyond, or the dominant-fascistic point of view and the resistant-revolutionary (or minoritarian) point of view.
Let’s assume as admitted (and we’ll soon return to this) the possibility of a minoritarian enunciation of power (as un?power [im?pouvoir]), distinct from its dominant statements. Dominant statements form the whole content of onto-theo-politics, but it is the enunciation that is constitutive (i.e., cleaving or “dis-sident”) of the resistant-revolutionary subject and their statements. It is therefore possible to state the content of meaning, if not that of the objet (r), at least certain of its general traits or symptoms that distinguish a dominant thesis from a minoritarian thesis:
a) [We can distinguish them] depending on a thesis that places “at the origin” of power and as what articulates it as “Relations of Powers” [through] a generic-specific difference or a fractional difference irreducible to any specific formality and even more so generic reason. The subordination of the “Class Struggle” and the contradiction to the element of a Form that is sometimes rational (the old Marxism), sometimes transcendental (Althusser), in the same way that the analytic subordination of the subject to an absence or a lack that is the constitutive Form (the Phallus), is enough to cast the most elaborated avatars of Marxism and psychoanalysis back to the prehistory of the Political Continent and its break: they continue to sometimes subordinate the contradiction, sometimes the differential, and in both cases the productive element of power, to the continuous but indifferentiated element of a Transcendental Form, and therefore belong to what we call the onto-theo-politics of the subject, beside the Prince, the General Will, the Social Contract, as much as the denials of the minoritarian thesis, to which they are despite everything interested, that poses power as being the matter that brings the differential to its highest regime, that allows it to go to the end of what it can do or that makes all of its effects return [rendre] to this technology of difference outside of any reference to a preliminary generality.
b) [We can distinguish them] depending on what it does – or not – with the relation of a power to a subjugated body. [This is] a relation that is 1) fundamental and supra-historical, that exhausts the essence of any possible power; 2) a relation of domination, or whose domination exhausts the essence; a relation marked by negativity, legality and universality on the side of power, marked by the arbitrary and the empirical singularity on the side of the Body considered as a singular case or at best as a species. All power is eternal and repetitive, all power is a power of mastery, all power is an evil: this is the three-headed axiom of modern onto-theo-politics, the denial of un?power as Resistance and dis-sidence, the abstraction that the dominant forces cast back against others to kill their Resistance by killing their hope.
c) [And we can distinguish them] depending on what it assigns to power with the alternative of a destiny that is sometimes finite and sometimes infinite (collapse/indefinite repetition or adaptation) with the production of a new dominant power in the first case; or the destiny of a downfall [déclin]. The “downfall” has not yet found its concept that will distinguish it from a mechanical end like an indefinite repetition, a concept that would assign it the properties of a historical “transfinite” adapted to historical rather than mathematical multiplicities – to the becoming of material processes.
3) What is critique as production?
The critique of reason, the critique of politics, and the critique of political reason have hitherto only known dominant forms marked by the primacy of formality: the formality of negativity or absence and lack, the formality of the law or the external legality of juridical or scientific universals. Whether Marxism proceeded through the technology of contradiction, or the splitting [refente] of the psychological and metaphysical subject proceeded through the technology of the signifier as lack, critique always preceded production, the negative universal of the Class Struggle and castration always preceded the production of Revolution: the Class Struggle, like castration, allows one to assume the Revolution, and castration as the political condition of entry into the history of desire. In short, we have regularly confounded the revolutionary enunciation as production with the produced statements concerning power.
The minoritarian problem is entirely different and is much more than a reversal/overthrow [renversement], being given the subversion of “formalism” that it implies: make critique the effect of a production of history or the consequence of the invention of the powers of resistance, finally make critique a genuine production rather than a reproduction of statements. Political critique has not yet gone to the end of what it can do, it has not yet been conceived according to the three dimensions of an enunciation: as a power, as a material body, and finally as an affect.
Therefore, we do not oppose minoritarian theses to dominant ones: we do not oppose them as their contradiction or, in the structuralist fashion, as their absent or excluded concept. The minoritarian point of view exercises its critique through the sole forms (organizing, formative, and exhibitive forms of dominant forces) of its Active Resistance. For example, we can conserve the concept of “Class Struggle” but on condition, as we’ll see, of determining the Class Struggle through the Active Resistance (the production of fractional powers or un?powers) rather than the inverse. Minoritarian Resistance uses the dominant technology of the “Class Struggle” of the party or the union to make another use of it and “cast-it-back” [re-tourner] from the (r) distance [écart] against its owns dogmatic and fascistic forms, just as it casts psychoanalysis back as the dominant subjugation of the subject and against the universal of castration, the very technology of castration that however changes meaning and destiny in this strategic turning.
Thus, critique becomes positive: it can only lead the Power Principle to its downfall by affirming its positivity and the if not “well-founded” character, at least the “well-produced” character of its avatars. It is from there that the Beyond the Power Principle will come, which can only be articulated by assuring the universality of the Principle itself: as its “Beyond,” rather than as its exception. The critique that does not so far as the affirmation of the “ideological positivity” of dominant theses or what confounds this affirmation with a flat recognition (the servile recognition of universal mastery, in the moderns’ fashion) has no chance of really destroying dominant forces, but at most has the chance of inheriting them and leading them back to their own personification [personne]. The Beyond of the Principle does not go beyond [dépasse] the Principle (the Principle or its forms) towards their contrary, in the old-Marxist fashion, and furthermore not towards their excluded or absent concept, in the neo-Marxist fashion, but towards their internal condition, even beyond the (contradictory) Essence or the (phallic) Form of power. We must expose this Beyond, the objet (r), each time as the immanent, in-formal and in-essential cause of the Power Principle, a cause that is both productive and critical, tracing each time a line of demarcation, not in the way of an extensive and topographical delimitation, but in the way of an intensive and internal de-limitation of dominant theses. Their critique is not done from a “new” conception but from a new “use” of power related to its essence and that (this is its duplicity and heterogeneity) is always also effectuated despite everything in a power of the dominant type, that it “governs” or “causes,” as an unavoidable, “inalienable” minoritarian postulated active within any dominant Relation of Forces.
In this duplicity of the fascistic tendency (the Power Principle) and its Beyond resides the possibility of the critique, the possibility of revolution, and the possibility of the “revolutionary critique” at the same time as the internal possibility of the universal validity of the Principle or the becoming-rule of Mastery, a validity that is in turn the condition so that power of the dominant type is engaged in a process of auto-position or auto-legitimation as the political logos of history (the motor of the contradiction of classes or the phallic motor of castration), namely as this primacy of the statements over the “machinic” enunciation that is the entire history of history.
4) The Three “Beyonds” of the Power Principle
How can the critique of political reason stop being a rhapsody, an empirical inquiry, to become in turn a (historical) principle and draw at once (history itself) all its consequences? The critique of the traditional theories of power was hitherto limited to raising four or five of their “postulates” without systematically proceeding from the Beyond itself of the Power Principle or from the really general syntactic field of un?power, without consequently including this critique within the “general economy” of a revolutionary enunciation.
Nothing is less accidental than this empiricism if we remember that the archeology of power condenses all structures and syntaxes (all technologies) of the process of the political production of Bodies to what it will denounce as solely being a phase, the second phase, among the three that make up the process, a phase that will put an active power and a subjugated Body in relation. We must know that this power/body syntax that contains all the “technologies” described by the “archeology” in its closure nevertheless has no autonomy by itself, that it derives from the syntaxes of the production of strictly speaking power, and that its “absolution” finally is equivalent to once and for all reflecting the laws of the capitalist reproduction of institutional political bodies in that of their production. Hence, the positivist limitation of the critique of power, that should have been a materialist critique (the primacy of production over reproduction) in the project of a “microphysics” of power. Power obviously does not have anything micro- – or macro-physical – the “microphysics of power” as a general theory is a formation of compromise, the positivist mixture produced by the reflection of micro-powers that are specific to Imperialist and Fascistic Capitalism in the really general economy of power that contains all possible critique of Imperialism and the rising Fascism. Related to its meaning or to its essence, power does not contain more minimal unities than it knows of molar unities: it is fractional, irreducibly fractional, and its partiality has nothing to do with microphysical elements otherwise for a politically guided imagination. One power is first exercised upon another power “before” being exercised upon a Body: the archeology of power and its microphysics are abstractions from its “general economy.”
It is from this type of minoritarian generality that the critique of political reason can be carried out into all its dimensions which does not mean without remainder: no systematic critique is global, and no systematic critique can exhaust its object. Rather, it is the systematic character of the critique that will give us the chance of a remainder in which it will draw stimulation [relance] and power [puissance]. This power of a remainder, from one resistance to the critique itself and its dogmatism, a remainder that we can neither call terminable nor “interminable,” is perhaps the resource of a critique that must attack the new conceptions of power born on the terrain of Marxist politics and Freudian politics. These are conceptions that have become subtle, using a delicate and differential technology as soon as they resort to the signifier and signified as forms (the form of expression and the form of content), they perhaps no longer emerge from “postulates” stated empirically by the archeology of power. Replaced in the movement of a general economy, the previous theses that always arrange a form of the Principle and the corresponding form of its Beyond, trace a line of demarcation that has the property and the generality of passing through all the points of the field of bourgeois, Marxist, and Freudian politics, so that one doctrine, whatever it may be, is always situated on one side and the other of this line that divides [partage] it unequally in itself and in its relation to others, between a postulation of mastery and a minoritarian postulation.
The “revolutionary critique” of political reason or the minoritarian enunciation is therefore distributed according to three dimensions, conforming to the possibilities pretraced by the syntaxes of a cycle of mundane power such that “Political Materialism” states them.
The first Beyond contains the very production of the process of production and the reason for which power becomes a Principle to which all authorities [instances], practical or social institutions, are submitted without exception. The first Beyond grounds the critique of political reason as a symptomatology, consisting in for each political body seeking the political agents or fractional organs of power that have produced it and are dominated and hidden by other powers, if not more apparent ones, at least those that have a global and complete form.
The second Beyond contains the reproduction of power and its Principle (displacement and condensation) and poses the conditions of the application of this principle (its universality and its restriction: its specificity) upon social objects and social structures. The Power Principle is thus progressively specified and determined in accordance both with its becoming-real or becoming-fascistic and its becoming-revolutionary. The second Beyond “grounds” the critique of political reason as the typology of the aggregates of powers, under the form of bodies or “formations-of-sovereignty” that are neither institutions, nor states, nor “classes,” nor state apparatuses, but Uni-Lateral Bodies.
The third Beyond contains the consummation of the Relations of Power in a subject defined as minoritarian, a complex subject who will see is the synthesis of the masses and classes defined from a politico-libidinal point of view and from a “last instance” that is no longer economic and contains Relations of Powers rather than “Relations of Production” in the Marxist fashion. The third Beyond “grounds” the critique of political reason as a genealogy, which is the operation of the production of a subject and therefore also the production of the Body that is implied here (rather than a body alone).
To sum up: the first Beyond, the first synthesis forms the equivalent of an aesthetics of power; the second Beyond forms the equivalent of an analytics of power (the internal rules: the displacement or transference that affects the objet (r), the condensation or inclusion that affects the empirical political objects); and the third Beyond forms the equivalent of an economics of power and closes the cycle of its general economy upon the subject. This determination of three “beyonds” exhausts the meaning or essence of power: any politics that is not submitted to them is condemned to exploit this meaning on the dominant mode, denying its minoritarian postulation, and confounding the subjectivization of the subject with the subjugation of the subject. It is from this point of view that Marxist politics and Freudian politics belong to the prehistory of politics beside aristocratic and bourgeois politics.
5) The possibility of a revolutionary enunciation
Thesis 11: The differential characteristics that distinguish the Power Principle and its Beyond, or distinguish a dominant thesis and a minoritarian thesis, can only be stated in their “origin” and their “system” from the minoritarian point of view that thus contains the possibility of Revolution.
The possibility of the Revolution has nothing of a void, unreal or inactual possibility, of a simple “power” [puissance] or a hinter-world. Because we must under this possibilitas in the sense of the libidinal essentia that is productive of power, it is confound with the exposition of syntaxes and their specific matter that forms the Beyond. The criteria of Revolution are “transcendental,” but precisely not a priori: they are immanent to the process of the libidinal production of power, co-belonging to the cycle of power and are, in this sense, as inalienable, equally susceptible to simple denegation, as the Revolution itself.
It goes without saying that by “Revolution” we no longer completely understand the revolution-entity of Marxism that is certainly, with the “State” and some other fetishes, one of the great technologies of the modern subjugation of peoples. We distinguish a “Revolution-process” that responds to the question: how does the Revolution stop being an intra-historical local event, the resolution of particular contradictions, the installation of new forms of the subjugation of the subject – to become a principle or rather a form of the Beyond the Power Principle? By Revolution-process, we understand a potential, a potentialization of Resistance, the immanent libidinal cause of Resistance, and more precisely one of the two processes of investment of political bodies (the second one, the depotentialization of political bodies, is what we call Fascization – not the Fascism-entity, but Fascism as a “machinic” process).
Thus defined as co-extensive to the Libidinal Productive Forces of history, the Revolution is neither an effect of Resistance (the fractional organs of power as such), nor its mechanic or expressive cause. The Revolution maintains a complex relation with Resistance, the same as the complex relation that Fascization as a second material process equally co-extensive with history maintains with forces of the dominant regime. The immanent material cause thus cleaved and duplicitous uses Resistance or Domination as political means to attain its “ends” (potentializing itself in a revolutionary mode, or depotentializing itself in a fascistic mode), and, reciprocally, Resitance and Mastery use revolutionary or fascistic potentials to extend and draw all their consequences to become universal and co-extensive to the Political Continent. This revolutionary potentialization is a material supplement internal to Resistance, without which Resistance – which we cannot abstract as the moderns do to oppose it to the Revolution absurdly and in a primary way – could not attain its political “ends”: the destruction of goals, the last ends and “meaning” of history, or the authorities [instances] that claim to lead the masses. As investments that potentialize political bodies, the Revolution is both immanent and transcendent to Resistance. One cannot, in the way of the Archeology of Power, support the thesis that power invests the bodies without proceeding to a positivist denial of the material cause of power from which one draws a trait that one elsewhere refuses to honor.
The Revolution-process, the Revolution-potential, the Revolution-principle is undoubtedly but one of the three “beyonds” of the Power Principle beside the fractional organs of power (Resistance or the first beyond) and the minoritarian subject (the third beyond). However, it already gives us some indications concerning the possibility of a beyond that would not be an exception to the Principle. Because it is immanent to the process and its general economy, because it is confounded with the exposition of its articulation, the minoritarian point of view (is) the truth of the process of power, its truth, however, to the near objet (r), for the minoritarian subject does not at all dispose of, like consciousness, the point of view adequate to the process of history, and furthermore, like practice, does not dispose of the “correct” [juste] point of view over itself. The minoritarian subject only adjusts or renders adequate from the remainder = Revolutionary-Resistance = the objet (r) that is responsible with making this adequation or this padding [capitonnage] of the course of history a well-founded myth, a well-produced object appearance, that the famous “meaning” of history has never been.
Just as the fractional organs or resistance are in any case the internal political possibility of the powers of domination or mastery, the revolutionary potentials are in any case the internal material possibility of fascistic de-potentialization, the minoritarian subject-masses is in any case the internal economic condition of the subjugated masses or – for it is here the same thing – subjugating classes. Even in the Fascism-process, in the Fascism-horizon that is no longer an intra-historical event, but a principle constitutive of history (and nevertheless subject to destruction from its Beyond: this is not an essence), a rebellious and revolution postulation acts or is made inalienable: with Fascization and more profoundly than it, irreducibly fractional like the libidinal body, and in the conditions to definitively rupture with the dominant forces and the subjugating classes, there is the Revolution as historial, the only one that can bring an end to the fetish of the Marxist” revolution as the denegation of Mastery and the “refusal to know” Fascization, its intensive extent and penetration. Even in the dominant statements concerning power – but every statement is necessarily dominant, onto-theo-political – there is a revolutionary enunciation that cleaves the subject through the Class Struggle (but determined by Resistance, rather than the inverse).
The Beyond of a principle always maintains a strange relation with the principle that needs a beyond. This beyond is in no way in turn a second principle higher than the first and imaginarily redoubling it. The beyond is the “same” principle that is “split,” that is affirmed on the one hand as co-extensive with an empirical field (here politics), governing and ruling it without exception (Revolutions are not exceptions to mastery, but the confirmation of Mastery) and, on the other, as determinant “in the last instance” of this Transcendental and Material Field of power. Mastery and its Beyond maintain a correlation that is the correlation of a necessary objective political appearance and a determinant quasi-cause in the last instance. This objective appearance no longer is worthy of the name ideology and hardly the name of fetishism. Rather, it is a matter of the strategic surface, of the necessary political strategy through which everything passes “determination in the last instance.”
[1] The use of the “?” is endemic to the period of Philosophy I and is drawn from Deleuze’s definition of the being of the non as the being of the problem and the question, rendered as “?being.” See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.64. Readers are also recommended to see Jacob Vangeest’s thesis, “Nietzschean Problematics,” where an analysis between Laruelle, Deleuze, and their respective readings of Nietzsche, is carried out regarding ?being: <https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9745&context=etd> – Trans.
[2] This is a play on Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a, the most other unobtainable object of desire. Here, the (r) in brackets represents Revolution and Resistance as the motors of the theory of Power that Laruelle seeks to conceive as beyond the power principle. – Trans.
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