What is pouvoir? Why do we desire to wield it over others? Why do we desire that others wield it over us? What forms do these relations of pouvoir assume in the different spheres of our existence? How far do its effects extend? Are these effects unsurpassable? All these questions, which are being raised again today, were, in a sense, at the very heart of the anthropological problematic of the seventeenth century: they were generally treated under the rubric of a ‘theory of the passions’. It is true that, when it comes to political pouvoir, a totally different type of investigation tended to come to the forefront: that which bears on its juridical foundations (the ‘right of sovereigns’ and ‘duties of subjects’), and in relation to which the analysis of the modalities of its actual exercise (the ‘means of containing the multitude’) seems only a distant relative. To the extent that there too answers were sought on the side of an anthropology, all sorts of aporias followed – as, for example, in the prodigious oeuvre of Hobbes. But Spinoza, for his part, cut the Gordian knot: by identifying, through God, right and fact, he abolished all distance and all conflict between the problematic of legitimacy and that of real functioning; the former was resolved purely and simply in the latter, which nothing could any longer prevent from occupying, at all levels, the totality of the terrain. From this there follows a general theory of pouvoir – of political pouvoir as well as non-political pouvoir, of ‘micro-pouvoirs’ as well as ‘macro-pouvoirs’, of their displacements as well as their interactions – all of which, and this is the least one could say, is far from having lost its interest. We propose to provide only a brief sketch of this theory here.

Pouvoir is the Alienation of Puissance, and a Being's Puissance is the Productivity of its Essence

Pouvoir (potestas) is a derivation, partly real and partly imaginary, of puissance (potentia). Thus we must start with puissance in order to understand pouvoir. Should we therefore start with the puissance of the human being? No doubt, but not the human insofar as it is human, as if some particular privilege radically distinguished it from other beings: the originality of Spinozist ‘anthropology’, if one can call it that for the sake of convenience, lies in having nothing specifically anthropological about it.