Temporalities of the Feeling of Power
Résumé
The concept of “feeling of power” refers to the affective component of all power relationships. Powers become effective by being felt. In this paper, I argue that the feeling of power is a temporal phenomenon. I investigate its dynamics, its modifications through time, and I pay particular attention to the tension between its permanence and its fluctuations. Hence, it becomes an important criterion to question topics such as becoming, time, history and memory. I first show that the feeling of power consists in a process of intensification through the overcoming of a former feeling of powerlessness, both among the personal development of individuals and through the history of communities. Then I analyze how men try to enjoy it permanently and, by doing so, negate its dynamics of intensification through time. Finally, I show how the new conception of time Nietzsche proposed enables a satisfactory combination of all temporal aspects of the feeling of power and a balanced relationship between dynamic processes and firm states, change and consistency, accumulation and rupture.