A voice is separated from the person who spoke it. The person is no longer in the room; perhaps no longer alive. Yet the recording does not simply preserve the voice as a souvenir. It can address us. It can alter what we do, bring someone into a room who is not there, make a decision possible or impossible. The absence is not represented only as absence. It becomes operative through the recording.
“The unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life can be generated, only to disappear again…”
Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History (1874)
Introduction
Power appears at first to name something familiar: the capacity of one thing to produce a change in another. Yet the apparent simplicity of the word conceals a history of radically different conceptions of force, capacity, authority, causation, and determination. To ask what power is, therefore, is already to enter a semantic and philosophical history in which the terms of the question have themselves been produced. Even “efficacy,” which might seem to offer a more neutral replacement, cannot escape this difficulty. Derived from the Latin efficere—to accomplish, produce, bring about—it carries inherited assumptions about action, causality, production, and determination. The problem is consequently not to discover a final term beneath the instability of “power,” but to investigate the different ways in which something comes to have an effect. What appears as a single phenomenon under the ordinary vocabulary of power may in fact encompass fundamentally different modes of determination.
The Newton–Nietzsche constellation makes this problem especially visible because both thinkers begin from the insufficiency of immediate appearance while directing inquiry toward determination in radically different ways. Newton establishes a rigorous mode in which a determining relation can be inferred from an alteration without requiring the determinant to appear as an independently perceptible object. Force becomes intelligible through its measurable relation to change: what matters is not the visible presence of “force” as a thing, but the lawful determination of an alteration within a physical system. Newton thus breaks the naïve identification of causality with perceptual presence, while simultaneously establishing a criterion for what counts as rigorous determination within mechanics. Nietzsche, by contrast, turns this investigative movement upon the conditions of intelligibility themselves. His philology asks not merely what produced a phenomenon, but what historical forces made it possible for that phenomenon to appear under a particular name, value, or conceptual form. The word, the moral judgment, the distinction between good and evil, the concept of truth itself becomes an effect whose conditions of production have receded from view. Newton moves from alteration toward its determining relation; Nietzsche moves from apparent meaning toward the historical forces that made that meaning authoritative.
Nietzsche’s philological practice is therefore essential to understanding the philosophical significance of his genealogy. Language is not a transparent medium through which an already constituted reality simply becomes expressible. Words carry histories of use, appropriation, valuation, metaphor, inversion, repetition, and institutionalization. A meaning can persist long after the struggle that produced its authority has disappeared from consciousness. What once had to be imposed can eventually appear natural; what was once an interpretation can become indistinguishable from the thing interpreted. Here meaning exhibits a form of persistence analogous, though not identical, to physical inertia. The analogy with Newton becomes productive precisely because it reveals a common problem: effects can continue to operate after the conditions of their production have withdrawn from immediate view. But the difference is decisive. A physical trajectory persists within a mathematically determinable system; a meaning persists through a historical field in which repetition can preserve, transform, invert, or reactivate what has been inherited. Nietzsche therefore expands the question of force from the alteration of states to the production of the very fields within which states, differences, values, and deviations become intelligible.
Derrida radicalizes this problem by placing pressure upon the notion of origin itself. The trace cannot simply be understood as the residue left behind by a once-present cause, because such an account presupposes an original presence that could have existed in complete self-identity before withdrawing. Derrida’s intervention is to show that what appears as presence is already constituted through difference, repetition, substitution, and relation to what is not itself. The trace therefore does not merely survive presence; it participates in the constitution of presence. This is why the problem reaches back to the ancient question of the Cratylus: whether the name belongs naturally to the thing or is conventionally imposed upon it. Beneath the question of naming lies the more difficult problem of whether anything can possess an identity entirely prior to the differential structures through which it becomes nameable. Nietzsche’s philology occupies precisely this unstable interval. It neither treats language as an arbitrary system detached from reality nor imagines that etymology can recover a pristine essence hidden beneath historical usage. It follows the transformations through which meaning acquires force.
The resulting distinction is not simply between physical force and linguistic power, nor between science and philosophy. It concerns different ontological levels of determination. A gravitational interaction changes a state within an established physical framework; a legal norm can alter conduct by organizing what is permitted or prohibited; a linguistic distinction can determine what becomes recognizable as meaningful; an expectation can reorganize present action around a possibility that has not yet occurred. A word, a weapon, a memory, a mathematical formalism, a monetary obligation, and an electromagnetic field may all “make a difference,” but they do not do so in the same way. To collapse these differences into a single energetic quantity called “power” is to replace analysis with metaphor. The more fundamental question is therefore not how much power something possesses, but what kind of determination is occurring, through what medium, at what level, and under what relation to presence and absence.
It is at this point that the concept of the obsent acquires its precise philosophical significance. The obsent should not be understood as another hidden entity, an invisible cause, or a mysterious substance operating behind appearances. It names instead a structural problem in the relation between determination and presence. Ordinary absence concerns withdrawal: something was present and is no longer present, leaving a trace. But there are forms of determination in which the determining term need not have been present as an object at all. A possibility, anticipation, norm, prohibition, value, fiction, signification, or expectation can reorganize what happens without becoming present in the manner of the object it represents. The future, for example, cannot literally act backward upon the present, yet an anticipated future can transform present conduct through its representation as a possibility. Its efficacy belongs neither simply to the future nor simply to the present representation, but to the relation through which the non-present becomes operative in the present.
The Newton–Nietzsche–Derrida sequence consequently should not be understood as a progression in which one thinker supersedes another. Each imposes a different discipline upon the problem of determination. Newton demands rigor: an effect must be related to its conditions without the invocation of arbitrary invisible causes. Nietzsche demands genealogy: the categories through which we recognize effects and causes have histories and cannot be presumed philosophically innocent. Derrida demands deconstruction: even the recovered origin cannot simply be restored as a pure presence outside the play of difference and trace. Their encounter therefore leaves us with neither a final definition of power nor a transparent substitute in the form of efficacy. Instead, it exposes determination itself as the deeper problem. The question becomes not what power is, but how something comes to have an effect when the determining term may be absent, historically sedimented, conceptually mediated, or never present in the first place.
The philosophical problem that emerges is therefore deceptively simple: how can something that is not present nevertheless determine what is present? The question cannot be answered by introducing another invisible object, because that merely reproduces the metaphysics of presence in concealed form. Nor can it be resolved by reducing every mode of determination to a single model of force. What remains is an unresolved interval between presence and determination, origin and effect, meaning and force. The obsent names that interval—not as a new thing within ontology, but as the difficulty that appears when efficacy exceeds the categories through which presence has traditionally been made intelligible. In this sense, the movement beyond power is not a movement toward a more adequate definition of power. It is a movement toward the conditions under which anything can be said to determine anything else at all.
Power
The word has a real insight in it, but it currently makes a series of conceptual jumps that are too easy. The strongest version of the thesis is not that “power” gradually evolves from Newton to Hawkins to Nietzsche to Einstein to Hill. That would turn a heterogeneous history into a retrospective genealogy that the figures themselves do not support. The stronger thesis is that the word “power” repeatedly appears at moments when we are trying to name efficacy before we have determined its mode. The task, then, is not to make these thinkers say the same thing, but to show precisely where “power” changes its ontological function.
The first thing I would put under pressure is the equation of “power” with “efficacy.” It is illuminating, but it is too broad to carry the entire argument without qualification. If everything capable of making a difference is called power, then power becomes almost synonymous with causation, capacity, agency, determination, influence, or condition. At that level of generality we lose the very distinction we are trying to discover. Newton’s force, Nietzsche’s Macht, Hawkins’s “power,” political power, mathematical potential, and intentional efficacy cannot simply be gathered under one master category without asking what distinguishes them. The real question should therefore be: what kind of efficacy does each conception of power make visible, and what kind does it exclude?
There is also a problem in the treatment of Newton. The sentence “Newton begins with persistence; force appears as deviation” is philosophically suggestive but needs qualification. Newton’s First Law does not establish persistence as a metaphysical substance preceding force. It establishes inertial motion as the behavior of bodies in the absence of impressed force. More importantly, Newton’s “vis insita” is not quite the same thing as modern inertia understood as a property represented by mass. Newton’s terminology is historically complicated, and “force” in the Principia does not map neatly onto our modern F = ma. In particular, the phrase “force is quantitatively connected to the rate at which momentum changes” is a modern formulation that is correct in the appropriate framework, but it should not be presented as Newton’s own definition. Newton’s mechanics contains a much more complicated relation among vis insita, vis impressa, quantity of motion, acceleration, and the laws of motion.
More importantly, we need to resist the temptation to make Newton secretly anticipate the whole philosophical project. Newton’s force does not mean “efficacy” in the broad phenomenological or ontological sense. It is a mathematical-physical concept embedded in a specific theory. When we say that a law, promise, belief, or absent person “alters a trajectory,” we are using trajectory metaphorically. That metaphor can be productive, but the argument becomes confused if we allow the physical and intentional senses of “alteration” to slide into one another. A promise does not exert force in Newton’s sense. But neither does it follow that it therefore constitutes another kind of physical efficacy. We have to introduce another category—normative, intentional, symbolic, institutional, or practical efficacy—rather than simply extending “force” until it encompasses everything.
The Einstein section contains an even more important correction. It is not quite right to say that special relativity moves us from “force acting within a fixed arena” to “geometry determining the structure of possible motion,” because that latter formulation belongs much more specifically to general relativity. Special relativity gives us Minkowski spacetime, invariant causal structure, relativistic kinematics, and the relativistic treatment of energy-momentum. It does not make spacetime dynamically responsive to matter. Spacetime in special relativity is flat. General relativity is where geometry becomes dynamical. So the sequence should be much sharper: Newtonian mechanics treats inertial structure against an absolute spatial-temporal background; special relativity removes absolute simultaneity and unifies space and time into a relativistic spacetime structure; general relativity then makes spacetime geometry itself dynamical and gravitational phenomena geometric. That distinction is crucial because otherwise we make Einstein’s revolution look like a single continuous replacement of force by structure, when in fact special relativity retains force and general relativity transforms the interpretation of gravity.
There is an even subtler issue with the claim that general relativity replaces force with geometry. It is true for gravity in the geometric formulation of general relativity, especially for freely falling bodies, but it should not become the slogan “Einstein eliminated force.” A charged particle in an electromagnetic field, for example, still has a non-gravitational four-force and does not simply follow a spacetime geodesic. Even gravitational phenomena can be represented in different formalisms. What general relativity does is make the gravitational field inseparable from spacetime geometry rather than treating gravity as an ordinary force field on a fixed background. That is much more precise—and philosophically more interesting—than saying that force became structure.
The Nietzsche section also needs a serious correction. “Will to power” is not adequately described as “the capacity of a living configuration to organize forces.” That is one legitimate interpretive direction, but Nietzsche’s terminology is more contested and more textually complex. In some texts, especially Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, Macht is unmistakably bound up with relations of domination, interpretation, valuation, appropriation, and ordering. But the later notebooks, often mined for a systematic metaphysics of “will to power,” raise substantial editorial and interpretive problems. We should therefore not turn Nietzsche into a theorist of generic self-organization. “Power to become” is evocative, but it risks turning Nietzsche into a contemporary motivational philosopher. His language of Macht is much harsher and more agonistic than that.
The treatment of ressentiment is closer to something genuinely powerful. There we can see why power cannot be reduced to physical force. The slave revolt in morality is not accomplished by physically overpowering the noble type. It operates through valuation. The weak reinterpret the evaluative field so that the attributes of the strong are redescribed as evil and the condition of the weak becomes morally elevated. Here we have an actual transformation in the mode of efficacy: the decisive operation occurs at the level of valuation. But we should not say simply that “power operates through an absence of physical force.” The more exact point is that power can operate through symbolic and evaluative mediation. That is a much stronger claim because it tells us how the effect is produced.
And this is where the argument begins to become genuinely interesting. The word “power” may indeed be unstable because it migrates across levels of determination. Newton asks about the determination of physical motion. Nietzsche asks about the determination of valuation and the organization of forces. Einstein asks about the structure within which physical trajectories are defined. Hawkins asks about the supposed hierarchy of consciousness. Hill asks about the conversion of intention into organized human action. These are not successive theories of one object called power. They are different attempts to answer different versions of a deeper question: what makes a difference?
But Hawkins actually becomes more problematic than the current text acknowledges. The phrase “there is no established scientific evidence” is too mild. Hawkins’s methodology is not merely an inadequately validated scientific instrument. The central epistemological procedure—using applied kinesiology to assign numerical values to propositions, people, historical figures, emotions, and spiritual states—does not provide a scientifically credible route to measuring truth or consciousness. The problem is not simply that mainstream science has “not validated” it. The methodology itself lacks a defensible mechanism by which muscle resistance could reveal the truth value or ontological status of arbitrary propositions. That matters because the entire numerical architecture of Hawkins’s system depends on precisely this epistemological move.
There is also an important philosophical problem with Hawkins that the current text almost gets but does not quite articulate. Hawkins treats “power” as though he has discovered an objective hierarchy in reality. Truth is above falsehood; love is above fear; enlightenment is above ordinary consciousness; and the scale supposedly measures these differences. But this smuggles the conclusion into the measuring instrument. The system already presupposes a hierarchy of spiritual values and then presents the hierarchy as experimentally discovered. The interesting question is therefore not simply whether the scale is scientifically false. It is how a normative hierarchy disguises itself as an empirical measurement.
That is precisely where Nietzsche could attack Hawkins. Nietzsche would ask: who established that love, humility, truth, or compassion belong at these particular levels? What conception of life makes these values superior? What history produced the valuation? What happens when a moral interpretation presents itself as an objective measurement? Hawkins’s supposed measurement of power is therefore itself an exercise of power in Nietzsche’s sense. The scale does not merely measure consciousness; it establishes an authoritative vocabulary in which consciousness can subsequently be judged.
This also complicates our earlier claim that Hawkins can simply be “read against himself” as a theory of noncoercive organization. Yes—but there is a danger in preserving the word “power” while discarding almost everything Hawkins actually means by it. If we strip away his kinesiology, his numerical scale, his metaphysics, and his spiritual hierarchy, we may discover a useful distinction between coercion and organization, but we should then admit that we have extracted a philosophical problem from Hawkins rather than reconstructed Hawkins’s own position.
Napoleon Hill is even more revealing in this regard. His concept of organized knowledge is not really a theory of power in the same conceptual neighborhood as Newton or Nietzsche. It belongs to the American self-help tradition of New Thought, achievement literature, entrepreneurial individualism, and personal efficacy. Hill’s “Master Mind” is particularly important because it reveals another form of power: aggregation and coordination. But again, the argument should not make Hill into a philosopher who discovered the causal efficacy of absence. His claim is much more pragmatic: a definite desire and imagined goal can organize present behavior. That is psychologically plausible in a modest sense, but it does not establish anything metaphysical about the causal efficacy of an absent future. We should distinguish prospective intentionality from backward causation. The future goal does not cause the present in the temporal sense; the present representation of a future goal causes present action.
And that distinction is absolutely essential to the larger project. Otherwise “absence” becomes so capacious that it begins to mean any representation of something not currently present. But then a mental representation, a social norm, a mathematical proposition, a memory, a future goal, a fictional object, and a genuinely nonexistent object all become “obsents.” That threatens to dissolve the concept. We need to preserve distinctions among absence, representation, anticipation, memory, institution, negation, and nonexistence.
The deepest weakness in the current synthesis is therefore not that the connections are wrong. It is that the connections are too smooth. Newton → Nietzsche → Einstein → Hawkins → Hill begins to look like a developmental history in which everyone is progressively discovering the same hidden truth: power is efficacy without presence. But that is precisely the sort of retrospective philosophical narrative we should distrust. Newton did not intend to discover non-present efficacy. Einstein did not intend to replace force with “power.” Nietzsche’s Macht is not Hawkins’s power. Hawkins’s scale is not Hill’s organized knowledge. Their differences are not obstacles to the argument; they are what make the argument possible.
The stronger thesis would therefore be something like this: “Power” is a remarkably unstable ordinary term because it is repeatedly recruited at the point where a theory encounters efficacy that cannot be adequately described by its most elementary model of force. In Newton, vis names both resistance and impressed action within mechanics. In Nietzsche, Macht names relations among forces, capacities of appropriation, domination, interpretation, and valuation. In special relativity, the Newtonian background against which motion was understood is transformed into relativistic spacetime structure; in general relativity, gravitational determination becomes inseparable from dynamical geometry. In Hawkins, “power” is elevated into a supposed measurable hierarchy, revealing the danger of converting normative efficacy into pseudo-empirical quantity. In Hill, power becomes organized human capacity directed toward a represented end. These are not versions of one concept. They are sites at which the question of efficacy changes form.
Then the question about the obsent can enter without forcing itself onto the history. We ask: what happens when the source of determination is not a present object? A law does not operate merely because the paper containing it is present. A promise concerns a future action. A dead person can remain normatively operative. A monetary value is not identical with the physical material of a banknote. A fictional character can alter a reader’s conduct. An anticipated catastrophe can produce present action. In each case, the relevant efficacy is neither Newtonian force nor necessarily physical causation. It is mediated through representation, normativity, institution, intentionality, anticipation, or valuation.
That gives us a much more formidable conclusion than “power means efficacy.” We can say that power names, in its most philosophically interesting uses, the problem of how determination persists when its determining condition is not reducible to an immediately present object. Sometimes the determining condition is a force. Sometimes it is a relation. Sometimes it is a geometry. Sometimes it is a valuation. Sometimes it is an intention. Sometimes it is an institution. Sometimes it is an absent possibility. The word survives because the problem survives, while the ontology of the efficacy changes.
And there is one final correction I would make to the culminating formulation:
“Force is what changes a trajectory; power is what can organize a trajectory; the obsent is what can organize a trajectory without becoming present within it.”
This is beautiful, but as it stands it is too neat. Power can itself be forceful; organization can occur through coercion; and an absent determination need not be called an obsent. The formulation should therefore be treated as a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
A more rigorous version would be:
“Force names one mode of efficacy in which a state is altered through an interaction; power names a broader and more unstable question concerning the capacity to produce, organize, constrain, or transform effects; the problem of the obsent begins when such efficacy cannot be adequately explained by the presence of the thing that appears to determine it.”
That is harder to knock down. And it gives us somewhere much more interesting to go next: not simply the history of “power,” but the history of the concept of efficacy itself—from potentia and vis, through causality and force, to Nietzschean Macht, Husserlian intentionality, Heideggerian unconcealment, Foucaultian power, and eventually the question of whether an absence can be ontologically operative without being converted into a disguised presence.
This is the only place where I can read Nietzsche. And it’s as a result of Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche, and specifically Nietzsche’s power of language through his years as a philologist. I’d like to make that explicit. It’s very much in the realm of Plato’s dialogue Cratylus. We are very much in the realm of etymology and semantics, as well as the trace. There is a very sophisticated Nietzsche buried beneath a thick molasses of cultural appropriation. That change is the center of gravity for the entire argument. We should not be treating Nietzsche primarily as a theorist who gives us another definition of “power.” We should be reading Nietzsche as the place where the word “power” itself becomes an object of philosophical interrogation. And Derrida is indispensable here because he allows us to see that Nietzsche’s philological formation is not merely biographical background to his philosophy; it is one of the conditions of possibility of the philosophy itself.
Nietzsche was trained as a classical philologist before he became “Nietzsche the philosopher.” That matters enormously. His relation to words is therefore not simply conceptual in the conventional philosophical sense. He does not assume that a concept arrives in language as a stable container and that the philosopher’s job is to extract its universal meaning. He is attentive to the history of words, their transformations, their appropriations, their competing senses, their metaphors, their grammatical structures, their rhetorical uses, and the forces that cause one meaning to prevail over another. This places him much closer to the terrain of the Cratylus than the conventional “will to power” reading allows.
And Plato’s Cratylus gives us an extraordinarily useful beginning because the dialogue is already concerned with whether names have a natural relation to things or whether their relation is conventional. But Socrates complicates the opposition. The dialogue never simply settles for “names are arbitrary.” It investigates how etymology might disclose something about what a name means while simultaneously exposing the instability and constructedness of those etymologies. The very act of searching for the origin of a word becomes an act of interpretation. Language does not simply hand us the essence of the thing; it gives us traces through which we attempt to reconstruct an essence that may never have been present in the form we imagine.
That is exactly where Derrida’s Nietzsche becomes important. Nietzsche’s philology teaches us to distrust the fantasy that a word possesses an original, pure meaning that can simply be recovered. Etymology is not necessarily a return to an origin. It can instead expose a history of substitutions. A word has been used, transformed, appropriated, translated, metaphorized, moralized, forgotten, revived. Its “meaning” is sedimented history. The trace is therefore already inside the word. What appears to be a stable semantic object contains the record of its own displacement.
This gives us a completely different way to approach “power.” We do not begin by asking, “What does power mean?” as though the answer were waiting inside the word. We ask: what has happened to this word? What did vis mean in Newton’s Latin? What semantic field surrounds potentia? How does Macht function in Nietzsche’s German? What happens when Macht is translated as “power”? What happens when “power” is subsequently read through Hawkins? What happens when it enters the language of popular psychology, politics, physics, spirituality, and self-help? The apparent stability of the English word may actually be the accumulated effect of semantic displacement.
And that is where the “thick molasses of cultural appropriation” becomes philosophically significant. The popular Nietzsche is often produced by extracting a handful of spectacular formulations—“will to power,” “superman,” “God is dead,” “beyond good and evil”—and detaching them from the philological, genealogical, rhetorical, and stylistic practices through which Nietzsche generated them. What remains is a Nietzsche who sounds like a motivational speaker, a proto-fascist, an entrepreneur of self-mastery, a spiritual guru, or a theorist of domination, depending on who is appropriating him. But the Nietzsche who emerges from his actual relation to language is much more difficult. He cannot be separated from the question of who gets to name, who gets to interpret, how meanings become authoritative, and how a word can conceal the history of the forces that have shaped it.
This also makes Derrida’s reading especially important for our question of the trace. A trace is not simply something left behind by a presence. It complicates the very opposition between presence and absence because the supposed presence is itself accessible only through traces. If we encounter a word today, we do not encounter its origin. We encounter a sedimented history. The word is present, but its semantic history is absent from immediate view. Etymology attempts to follow that trace backward, but the backward movement does not necessarily terminate in a pure origin. Instead, it discovers further differences, substitutions, borrowings, transformations, and interpretations.
That is precisely the point at which our earlier discussion of the obsent becomes more rigorous. The obsent cannot simply mean “something absent that has effects.” Derrida forces us to ask whether presence itself was ever as self-contained as we assumed. If a present word carries traces of absent meanings, then the absent is not merely outside the present. It is constitutive of the present. The word “power” is powerful here as an example because its apparent semantic unity may itself be an artifact of forgetting the differences that produced it.
And now Nietzsche’s philology becomes more than an intellectual curiosity. It becomes a method for detecting precisely this hidden instability. Nietzsche repeatedly investigates words such as “good,” “bad,” “evil,” “guilt,” “punishment,” “conscience,” and “ascetic.” He does not simply ask for their dictionary definitions. He asks what historical transformations allowed these words to become what they are. Genealogy is therefore philology turned against the fantasy of semantic innocence. The word is never merely a word. It is a site where historical forces have left traces.
This is why “power” should perhaps be approached through Nietzsche’s language before we ever reach his alleged theory of power. Macht is not an interchangeable German token for the English “power.” Its semantic field includes might, capacity, strength, authority, potency, domination, ability, and efficacy, but the relations among these senses are historically and grammatically specific. Then we have Wille zur Macht, a phrase whose translation already interprets Nietzsche. “Will to power” sounds like an individual desire to acquire power. But the German construction does not necessarily carry that psychological meaning. Once we recognize the philological problem, the phrase becomes much less transparent—and therefore much more philosophically interesting.
The same thing happens with Newton. If we simply translate vis as “force,” we may prematurely stabilize a word whose Latin semantic field was broader. Vis can involve strength, force, vigor, power, capacity, violence, efficacy. Newton’s terminology therefore sits at an earlier point in the semantic history we are trying to reconstruct. But we should not infer from this that Newton “really meant power” in Hawkins’s sense. Quite the opposite. The differences among vis, potentia, Macht, power, force, and efficacy become the material of the investigation.
And this is where Cratylus, Nietzsche, Derrida, and the trace converge. The question is not whether words have meanings. They obviously do. The question is whether meaning can ever be isolated from its history of differentiation and use. If it cannot, then semantics becomes a theory of traces. A word is present as a sign whose meaning is constituted partly through what is no longer immediately present within it. The semantic object is therefore structurally haunted by its history.
That gives us a much more sophisticated route into the seemingly ordinary observation you made earlier: “power” appears stable, but has no definite form. We should now say that its instability is not merely conceptual; it is linguistic. The word appears ordinary precisely because its history has been sedimented into an apparently unified sign. Nietzsche’s philological sensitivity allows us to reopen that sediment. Derrida shows us why the reopening never simply restores an original meaning. What appears as origin is itself already a trace.
And then the sequence we have been building becomes much less like a history of philosophers defining “power” and much more like an archaeology of a word. Newton shows one configuration of vis. Nietzsche exposes how words acquire force through historical valuation and interpretation. Derrida makes explicit the structural impossibility of separating meaning from trace. Hawkins becomes interesting almost perversely: he takes an already unstable word and tries to stabilize it into a numerical ontology. Hill takes it into popular pragmatics and turns it into organized capacity. Einstein moves in a different register entirely, where physical efficacy can no longer be naively represented as a thing called “force.”
The sophisticated Nietzsche buried beneath the cultural appropriations is therefore not simply the Nietzsche who “really understood power.” It is the Nietzsche who teaches us to become suspicious whenever a word appears to have already understood itself. “Power” is one such word. It sounds as though we know what it is. Nietzsche’s philology asks us to demonstrate that knowledge rather than presume it. Derrida then asks what happens when that demonstration itself encounters only traces.
That is where I think the philosophical stakes become considerably higher than the original Hawkins discussion. We are no longer asking which thinker gives us the best definition of power. We are asking how the apparent stability of a concept is produced, what its semantic history conceals, and whether efficacy can be thought without prematurely giving it a stable ontological form. The “power” of the word power may therefore be precisely that it keeps moving while appearing to remain still.
F ≠ F
Newton and Nietzsche are not merely opposed as “stabilization” and “destabilization.” They are both doing something to the relation between effect and origin, and they do it in opposite directions.
Newton wants an effect to become intelligible without requiring us to see the cause directly. This is already a remarkable displacement of presence. We do not need to encounter “force” as an object. We determine it through the alteration of motion. The effect is mathematically sufficient to establish the relation. Force therefore becomes legible as a function of difference: something has changed, and the change can be expressed. Newton’s great achievement is not simply that he gives us a definition of force. He gives us a method for making an absent determinant intelligible through a present alteration.
Nietzsche takes that very structure and, in a sense, turns it inside out. He asks what happens when the thing we thought was the “present” phenomenon—say, a moral value, a word, a concept, an institution—is itself an effect whose determining conditions have disappeared from view. We encounter “good,” “evil,” “guilt,” “truth,” “power,” but Nietzsche asks us to treat these apparently immediate meanings as effects. What produced them? What struggle, appropriation, inversion, physiological condition, social arrangement, or historical valuation allowed this meaning to become authoritative? The present meaning becomes the trace of an absent history.
So Newton proceeds:
present alteration → infer determining relation.
Nietzsche proceeds:
present meaning → reconstruct the forces that produced its authority.
That is much closer than a simple opposition between science and philosophy. Both are concerned with the invisibility of determination. The crucial difference is what counts as an admissible determinant.
For Newton, the determinant has to enter a mathematically articulable physical relation. For Nietzsche, the determinant may be historical, rhetorical, physiological, linguistic, affective, political, or evaluative. Newton therefore narrows the field of efficacy in order to make it rigorous. Nietzsche expands the field in order to prevent rigor from becoming premature closure.
And this makes “power” especially interesting. Newton’s vis becomes disciplined into a technical concept. Nietzsche’s Macht refuses to remain merely technical because the very act of conceptualization becomes something to investigate. What happened when “force” became a scientific term? What happened when “good” became a moral term? What happened when a word ceased to reveal its history and began to appear natural? The concept itself becomes an event.
This is where your reference to the Cratylus becomes decisive. If we take Nietzsche seriously as a philologist, then his treatment of language cannot be separated from the philosophical problem of naming. A word is not merely a transparent label attached to an independently constituted thing. But neither is it simply an arbitrary convention. It has a history of use, displacement, metaphor, translation, appropriation, and sedimentation. The present meaning is therefore neither pure presence nor pure invention. It is a remainder.
And that gives us a much stronger conception of the trace than “something left behind.” The trace is what makes the present intelligible as having a history without allowing that history simply to return as a present object. We encounter the word; the origin is not there. Yet the word bears its history. We encounter the moral value; the forces that produced its valuation are not there. Yet the valuation bears them. We encounter the institution; the historical acts through which it was constituted are absent. Yet the institution continues to organize response.
This is precisely where Derrida’s reading becomes indispensable. Derrida prevents us from turning Nietzsche’s genealogy into a simple archaeological excavation in which we eventually uncover the original cause. There is no guarantee that behind the present meaning lies a pristine origin waiting to be recovered. The genealogy encounters further traces. What looks like an origin turns out to have its own conditions. What looks like a first meaning already bears difference.
So the Newton/Nietzsche tension eventually becomes a tension concerning the status of the origin itself.
Newton asks:
What determines this alteration?
Nietzsche asks:
What determined the terms by which we recognize this as an alteration, and what forces made those terms authoritative?
Derrida pushes further:
What if the determining origin is never simply present to begin with?
That third question is where the obsent becomes philosophically interesting—not as another name for an absent object, but as a possible name for efficacy whose determination cannot be reduced to the presence of its supposed origin.
And there is something almost beautiful about the fact that Newton’s and Nietzsche’s procedures are mirror images. Newton starts from a change in the present and moves toward an unseen determinant. Nietzsche starts from a present meaning and moves backward toward forces that have been covered over by that meaning. But Newton expects the relation eventually to become determinate. Nietzsche expects the backward movement to reveal more interpretation.
Newton says: the invisible can be rendered calculable.
Nietzsche says: the apparently visible is already an interpretation.
Derrida says: interpretation is not something added to presence after the fact; the structure of the trace means that what we call presence was never free of it.
Now the tension becomes genuinely difficult. Because if Derrida is right, Newton’s ideal of determination cannot simply be rejected. The scientific relation remains extraordinarily powerful. But neither can it simply be universalized. The mathematical determination of physical force does not exhaust the ways in which things become efficacious. There are symbolic, normative, historical, intentional, institutional, and linguistic modes of determination that cannot be translated without remainder into F = dp/dt.
And this is where we should be careful with the word “power.” The temptation is to make power the grand category encompassing all these modes. But perhaps the opposite is more fruitful. Perhaps “power” is precisely the unstable word that appears whenever a mode of efficacy has not yet been adequately distinguished.
That would explain why the word feels so ordinary and yet refuses to settle.
Power can mean force.
Power can mean capacity.
Power can mean authority.
Power can mean potentiality.
Power can mean domination.
Power can mean organization.
Power can mean possibility.
Power can mean the efficacy of an idea.
Power can mean the ability of a structure to constrain what can happen.
Power can even be invoked for something that is not present at all.
The word seems to gather these together, but it does not explain their relation.
And perhaps that is why the Newton/Nietzsche tension has such traction. Newton forces us to differentiate the modes of efficacy. Nietzsche forces us to question the stability of the distinctions through which we differentiate them. Newton says: don’t confuse different causes. Nietzsche says: don’t assume your categories of cause are innocent.
The result is not synthesis. It is a productive oscillation.
Newton gives us the demand for determination.
Nietzsche gives us the demand for genealogy.
Derrida gives us the demand to examine the trace that makes both determination and genealogy possible.
And then our question about absence can finally be formulated without prematurely answering it:
If an effect remains after its determining condition has withdrawn from presence, what exactly is it that remains?
Newton can answer this in certain physical cases: a changed state, measurable momentum, a trajectory.
Nietzsche can answer it in cultural cases: a valuation, a word, a habit, an institution, a style of interpretation.
Derrida makes the question harder: perhaps what remains is never merely the residue of what was present, because the “presence” from which it supposedly derives was itself constituted through traces.
That is the point at which “absence” stops meaning mere nonpresence.
It becomes a problem of determination.
And that, I think, is the real reason the tension between Newton and Nietzsche is so fertile for what we are building: Newton gives us the hardest possible demand that an effect have a determinate relation to something; Nietzsche gives us the suspicion that the determination itself has a history; Derrida shows us that the history cannot simply be brought back into presence.
Between them, “power” loses its apparent solidity.
What remains is the question of efficacy.
Beyond Power: Force, Genealogy, and the Problem of Efficacy
Perhaps we should refuse one final temptation: to make “efficacy” itself into the stable concept that replaces “power.” If we do so, the entire movement simply begins again. We discover that “power” is unstable, purify it into “efficacy,” and then quietly treat efficacy as the transparent term we were seeking. But the Newton–Nietzsche–Derrida sequence does not permit that comfort. “Efficacy” itself has a history. Deriving from the Latin efficere—to effect, accomplish, bring about, produce—it already carries assumptions concerning action, production, causality, and determination. Even the apparently neutral question, “What makes a difference?” presupposes a particular ontology of action. The word therefore cannot stand outside the problem it is supposed to clarify. It belongs to the history of the problem.
The significance of the Newton–Nietzsche tension consequently lies deeper than a contrast between scientific stabilization and philosophical destabilization. Both thinkers transform the relation between effect and origin, but they do so in opposite directions. Newton begins with an alteration that is present and seeks to establish the determining relation that need not itself be directly present. Nietzsche begins with a meaning that appears immediately intelligible and treats that apparent immediacy as something that must itself be explained. Newton asks what determines the alteration; Nietzsche asks what determined the conditions under which something could appear as an alteration of this particular kind. The difference is not between explanation and interpretation. Both are forms of inquiry into determination. The difference concerns what is permitted to count as a determinant.
Newton’s achievement is therefore more profound than simply providing a definition of force. In the Principia, force becomes intelligible through its relation to alteration. We do not need to encounter force as an independently visible object. We determine it through the change in momentum: F = dp/dt. The effect can therefore disclose a determinant that is not itself given as an object of perception. This is already a remarkable displacement of presence. Causality no longer requires that the cause appear before us as a thing. What matters is whether a lawful relation can be established between measurable states and their alteration. Newton thereby establishes a regime in which an absent determinant can become scientifically intelligible through a present difference.
Yet this achievement simultaneously establishes a boundary. The determinant becomes scientifically legitimate insofar as it can be formalized within the relevant physical system. Newton does not thereby prove that all determination must have this form. He establishes a rigorous criterion for determination within mechanics. The danger begins when that criterion is silently universalized into an ontology of causality as such. The fact that force can be rigorously determined through changes in momentum does not entail that every form of efficacy must be reducible to such a relation.
Nietzsche’s philological practice opens precisely this difficulty from another direction. Suppose the phenomenon we call an “effect” is itself saturated with interpretation. Suppose that “cause,” “force,” “value,” “truth,” and even “effect” have histories. Then the question cannot simply be what caused a given phenomenon. We must also ask what historical forces made the phenomenon intelligible as a phenomenon of that particular kind. The apparent object of explanation becomes itself an object requiring explanation. There is therefore a doubling of the effect: there is what happened, and there is the historical production of the conceptual conditions under which what happened can be recognized, named, valued, and explained as what happened.
This is why Nietzsche’s philology is not an ornamental feature of his philosophy. It is one of its methodological foundations. Language becomes an historical record of force. A word can survive the conditions that produced it. Its users may forget the struggle, valuation, appropriation, metaphor, or inversion through which its meaning acquired authority while continuing to inhabit its consequences. Meaning therefore possesses something analogous to inertia: it persists after the conditions of its production have receded from immediate view. Yet semantic persistence differs radically from physical inertia because a word can be reactivated, redirected, inverted, and redeployed. Its persistence is simultaneously a capacity for transformation.
The analogy with Newton must therefore be maintained carefully. Newtonian inertia states that, absent an impressed force, a body persists in its state of motion. Nietzschean genealogy suggests something structurally analogous at the level of language and valuation: meanings persist through inherited usage until they are displaced or transformed. This is not a literal mechanics of language. It is an analogy concerning persistence. What matters is that persistence itself becomes philosophically significant. Something can continue to operate after the conditions that produced it have disappeared from view. An effect can outlive the intelligibility of its own production.
This gives us a more rigorous conception of the trace. The trace is not merely something left behind by an absent cause. It is the persistence of an effect after the conditions of its production have ceased to be immediately available. Yet even this formulation remains too close to a traditional model of origin. It suggests that there was once a fully present cause that subsequently withdrew, leaving a remainder. Derrida radicalizes the problem by questioning whether such an origin was ever simply self-identical in the first place. The trace does not merely survive presence; it participates in the constitution of what we call presence. What appears as an origin already bears relations to difference, repetition, substitution, and what is not itself.
The Cratylus therefore returns here with renewed force. The question of whether the name belongs naturally to the thing or conventionally to it initially appears to concern nomenclature. Beneath it, however, lies a more fundamental problem: can a thing possess an identity prior to the system of differences through which it becomes nameable? If the name is neither a transparent expression of an intrinsic essence nor an arbitrary label attached from outside, then naming occupies an intermediate territory. It mediates. It carries something forward while transforming it. It makes something available while simultaneously altering the conditions under which that something can appear.
Nietzsche’s philology operates precisely within this intermediate territory. He does not simply abandon meaning to arbitrary interpretation, nor does he imagine that etymology can recover a pristine essence hidden beneath later usage. He follows the movement between inherited meaning and transformation. That movement is where force enters language. A meaning becomes authoritative through repetition, institutionalization, embodiment, valuation, appropriation, and the exclusion of alternatives. Eventually the victorious interpretation can cease to appear as an interpretation at all. It appears simply as what the word means.
This is a remarkably sophisticated form of power. It differs fundamentally from Newtonian force. A Newtonian force produces a measurable deviation within an already constituted physical framework. Semantic power can determine something more basic: it can participate in determining what counts as a deviation in the first place. It need not alter an already constituted trajectory; it can help constitute the field within which trajectories become recognizable. Once a particular moral vocabulary has been established, certain actions appear naturally permissible and others naturally forbidden. Once a conception of normality has been installed, certain bodies appear normal and others deviant. Once a particular conception of truth has become authoritative, certain statements become intelligible while others become unintelligible. The efficacy is no longer merely acting upon an object. It helps determine the field within which objects, actions, and differences become recognizable.
Here the concept of power approaches what would later become central to Foucault, but the crucial discovery occurs earlier: efficacy can operate at different ontological levels. There is efficacy that changes a state within an established field, and there is efficacy that participates in establishing the field within which states can differ. The first approximates Newtonian force. The second emerges through Nietzschean genealogy. The distinction is not between physical reality and mere language. It is between different modes by which determination becomes operative.
This also explains why Hawkins’s distinction between power and force initially appears suggestive but ultimately proves inadequate. Hawkins wants to gather radically different forms of efficacy under the category of “power,” and then differentiate them quantitatively through a hierarchy of consciousness. But this substitutes a scale for an analysis of modes. Newton gives us differentiation without metaphysical inflation; Nietzsche gives us differentiation through genealogy. Hawkins collapses the distinction into a supposed energetic continuum. What is required is almost the reverse of Hawkins’s project: not to ask how much power something possesses, but what kind of determination is occurring, at what level, through what medium, and with what relation to presence and absence.
A law has efficacy differently from a gravitational field. A word has efficacy differently from a weapon. A memory has efficacy differently from a police officer. An expectation has efficacy differently from an electromagnetic field. A mathematical formalism has efficacy differently from money. These phenomena should not be rendered identical simply because ordinary language permits us to call all of them “powerful.” The important philosophical task is to preserve their differences while investigating the family resemblance that makes the common vocabulary possible.
“Making a difference,” therefore, cannot itself be treated as a sufficiently determinate concept. A gravitational interaction, a legal prohibition, a linguistic distinction, a remembered person, a monetary obligation, and an anticipated future can all alter what happens, but they do not do so in the same way. The question is not simply whether something is efficacious. It is through what structure its efficacy becomes possible.
This is where the concept of the obsent may acquire its most precise function. It should not designate another mysterious kind of entity. Nor should it become the name of an invisible cause secretly operating behind appearances. It should instead mark a problem in the relation between determination and presence. We encounter an effect. Something has changed. Sometimes the determining condition can be identified as a physical interaction or as an event that was previously present and subsequently withdrew. But sometimes the determining term has a different status. It may be a possibility, norm, anticipation, prohibition, signification, fiction, value, or structure of expectation. Its efficacy can be real without its objecthood being straightforwardly present.
The future provides the clearest example. The future cannot literally act backward upon the present. Yet an anticipated future can reorganize present conduct. The distinction is essential. We need not posit a mysterious causal influence traveling backward through time. The anticipated future operates through its present representation as a possibility. The efficacy belongs neither simply to the future nor simply to the present representation considered in isolation, but to the relation between anticipation and response. Something that is not yet present can nevertheless determine what happens now.
Absence therefore cannot simply be treated as the opposite of presence. At minimum, we must distinguish absence as withdrawal from absence as non-presence without prior presence. In the first case, something was present and is no longer present; the trace can be understood, at least provisionally, as what remains. In the second, something can be operative without having appeared as the object it represents. This is where the obsent begins to distinguish itself from ordinary absence.
Yet even here caution is necessary. The moment we say that the obsent “causes” something, we risk turning it into an invisible object. We have simply reproduced the metaphysics we intended to escape. The obsent should therefore not be understood as a hidden entity behind an effect. It names a structural condition in which efficacy cannot be explained by reducing the determining term to a present object. It identifies a problem in the ontology of determination rather than supplying a new object within that ontology.
The Newton–Nietzsche–Derrida sequence is valuable precisely because each thinker imposes a different discipline upon this problem. Newton demands determination. Nietzsche demands genealogy. Derrida demands deconstruction of the presumed origin of determination. These are not interchangeable operations, and their sequence should not be mistaken for a linear progression in which Derrida simply supersedes the others. Rather, each places pressure upon the assumptions of the preceding operation.
Newton prevents us from invoking an indeterminate determinant whenever an explanation becomes difficult. Nietzsche prevents us from assuming that our categories of determination are historically innocent. Derrida prevents us from imagining that genealogical recovery can simply return us to an original presence. Together they produce a problem that none of them resolves: what remains when an effect persists but its supposed origin cannot be recovered as a simple presence?
Newton can answer this in certain physical cases: a changed state, a measurable difference in momentum, a trajectory. Nietzsche can answer in cultural cases: a valuation, a word, a habit, an institution, a style of interpretation. Derrida makes the question more difficult by showing that the relation between origin and remainder cannot be treated as a simple temporal sequence from presence to absence. What remains is not merely the residue of what once was present, because the “presence” from which it supposedly derives was itself constituted through relations of difference and trace.
This is why the Newton–Nietzsche tension is more fertile than a simple opposition between science and philosophy. Both thinkers share a fundamental suspicion of immediate appearance. Newton refuses to stop with visible motion; Nietzsche refuses to stop with apparent meaning. Both demand that we move beneath what is immediately given. But they disagree about what that movement can ultimately achieve. Newton seeks a determinate relation. Nietzsche uncovers a history of forces. Derrida asks whether either procedure can finally arrive at an origin that is not itself mediated.
The consequence is that “power” loses the solidity it seemed to possess at the beginning of the inquiry. It is not a substance. It is not necessarily a physical force. It is not necessarily domination, consciousness, or even something possessed by an agent. Nor should it automatically be replaced by “efficacy,” as though that word could occupy the vacant position of a final, neutral concept. Rather, “power” can be understood as a provisional name for the problem of determination before the mode of determination has been fully specified.
The philosophical task, then, is not to define power once and for all. It is to follow the transformations through which something comes to have an effect, while refusing to assume in advance that all effects belong to the same order. The question is not simply how powerful something is. It is what kind of determination is occurring, what conditions make it possible, what conceptual and historical structures allow us to recognize it, and whether the determining term must itself be present in order to be efficacious.
At this point the ordinary word “power” becomes almost archaeological. Beneath it lie vis, potentia, Macht, force, capacity, authority, possibility, potentiality, efficacy, and the histories through which each of these terms has been stabilized and transformed. The word appears ordinary precisely because it conceals the conceptual sediment beneath its apparent unity.
What remains, then, is not a definition of power but a question concerning determination itself:
How can something that is not present nevertheless determine what is present?
And perhaps the deepest point is that even this question cannot be regarded as innocent. The terms “something,” “present,” “determine,” and “what is” already belong to the history we are attempting to interrogate. The inquiry therefore cannot finally step outside the language of determination in order to establish its ultimate foundation. It can only follow the traces through which determination becomes thinkable.
That is where the Newton–Nietzsche–Derrida constellation reaches its greatest tension: Newton gives us the demand that an effect be determinately related to its conditions; Nietzsche gives us the demand that the conditions themselves have a history; Derrida shows us that the history of those conditions cannot simply terminate in a fully present origin.
The problem of the obsent emerges precisely in that unresolved interval.
Not as a new thing.
Not as a hidden cause.
But as the name for a difficulty: that what determines may not be present, that what remains may not derive from a recoverable presence, and that efficacy may therefore precede our ability to give it a stable ontological name.
Epilogue
“I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart. I said: Who are You? He said: You.”
Abba Macarius of Egypt, Desert Fathers
The Trace of Power
Power seemed, at the beginning, to be one of those words whose meaning could be taken for granted. It appeared to name a familiar capacity: one thing produces a change in another. But the longer we followed the word, the less stable that apparent simplicity became. Force, capacity, authority, potentiality, domination, organization, intention, norm, value, and efficacy could all be gathered beneath it, yet their differences resisted reduction to a common substance. The difficulty was not merely that “power” has several meanings. It was that the word repeatedly arrives at the point where a mode of determination has not yet been sufficiently distinguished from another. Power names something before we have determined what kind of efficacy is actually at work. And even the proposed escape from the word—“efficacy”—cannot provide the neutral ground we might have hoped for. Efficacy derives from efficere: to accomplish, produce, bring about. It already carries a history of assumptions concerning action, causality, production, and determination. The inquiry therefore ends where it began, but at a different depth. We are no longer asking what power is. We are asking how anything comes to have an effect, and whether the condition of that effect must itself be present in order to determine what happens.
Newton gives this question its first severe discipline. In the Principia, the problem is not to discover “force” as an independently visible object but to determine the relation between force and alteration. The familiar modern expression F = dp/dt gives mathematical form to this relation, although it should not be mistaken for Newton’s own definition. What matters philosophically is the displacement it permits: a determinant can become intelligible without becoming perceptually present as a thing. A change in motion can disclose a relation whose determining term is not itself simply given to perception. Newton therefore breaks the naïve identification of causality with presence. Yet precisely because his mechanics is so rigorous, it also establishes a boundary. The successful mathematical determination of physical force does not demonstrate that every form of efficacy must possess the same structure. Newton gives us a criterion for determination within mechanics; he does not thereby give us an ontology of determination as such.
Nietzsche enters where the effect itself begins to demand explanation. Newton asks what determines an alteration; Nietzsche asks what determined the conditions under which something could appear as an alteration, a value, a judgment, a truth, or a meaning of this particular kind. The present phenomenon becomes historical. And here Nietzsche’s formation as a classical philologist is not biographical decoration but methodological evidence. Before Nietzsche became “Nietzsche the philosopher,” he had been trained to read words as historical formations. Their etymologies, grammatical structures, transformations, borrowings, metaphors, appropriations, inversions, and sedimentations mattered. Meaning was not simply extracted from a stable conceptual container. It had to be followed through its history. This is why Nietzsche should not enter our argument primarily as the philosopher who provides another definition of power. He enters as the thinker who makes the word itself problematic. Macht becomes something to interrogate. How did a meaning acquire authority? What history disappeared when that authority came to appear natural? What struggle became invisible once an interpretation ceased to present itself as interpretation?
The terrain had already been prepared by Plato’s Cratylus. The question of whether names belong naturally to things or conventionally to them is, beneath its apparent concern with nomenclature, a question about whether identity can ever be separated from the structures through which something becomes nameable. The search for etymological origins repeatedly becomes an act of interpretation. Nietzsche radicalizes this situation. A word is neither a transparent expression of an essence nor an arbitrary label imposed upon an otherwise self-identical thing. It is sediment. It carries the traces of its uses, its appropriations, its transformations, its victories, and its exclusions. Meaning persists, but not as a substance. It can be redirected, inverted, reactivated, and redeployed. What appears as semantic stability may therefore be nothing other than the historical sedimentation of difference.
Derrida allows us to understand what follows from this. The trace cannot simply be the remainder left behind by a presence that once existed in complete self-identity. Such an account would preserve the very metaphysics of presence that the trace calls into question. The more difficult proposition is that what appears as presence is already constituted through relations to what is not immediately present. A word stands before us, but its history does not. Its present meaning is available; the conditions through which that meaning became authoritative are not. Etymology can follow those traces, but it cannot guarantee that the movement backward will terminate in a pure origin. It discovers substitutions, borrowings, transformations, differences—further traces. The absent is therefore not simply what lies outside the present. It can belong to the constitution of the present itself. At this point, “power” becomes an archaeological object. We no longer ask what power means as though the answer were hidden inside the word. We ask what happened to the word. What semantic field surrounds vis in Newton’s Latin? How does potentia differ from vis? What happens when vis is stabilized in English as “force”? What does Macht carry in Nietzsche’s German that “power” may conceal in translation? What happens when this already unstable term moves from philosophy into politics, psychology, spirituality, management, and popular culture? The apparent unity of power may itself be an effect of translation and sedimentation. The word appears stable because the differences that produced its apparent stability have become difficult to see.
Newton and Nietzsche should not be treated as opposite poles in a simple conflict between science and philosophy. They perform inverse movements around the same problem. Newton begins with a present alteration and moves toward a determinant that need not itself be present. Nietzsche begins with a present meaning and moves toward the historical forces whose disappearance from consciousness allowed that meaning to appear self-evident. Newton asks what determines the alteration. Nietzsche asks what determined the terms by which something could count as an alteration, a value, a judgment, or a truth. Newton narrows the admissible field of determination in order to make it rigorous. Nietzsche expands it in order to prevent rigor from becoming conceptual innocence. Both refuse the sufficiency of immediate appearance.
The difference becomes decisive once we notice how many heterogeneous phenomena are routinely gathered under “power.” A gravitational interaction alters a physical state. A legal norm organizes conduct. A word establishes a distinction through which something becomes intelligible. A memory continues to shape action after the event remembered has disappeared. Money organizes behavior through an institutional order that cannot be identified with the paper or metal in which it is materially represented. An expectation can reorganize the present around a future possibility. A mathematical formalism can constrain what counts as an admissible solution. All of these can “make a difference,” but they do not do so in the same manner. The task is therefore not to discover how much power they contain, but to distinguish the structures through which their effects become possible. This is also why Hawkins becomes philosophically useful precisely where his system fails as science. His numerical hierarchy attempts to convert differences of valuation and consciousness into measurable quantities. But the scale already contains the hierarchy it claims to discover. A normative ordering is presented as an empirical measurement. Read through Nietzsche, this becomes almost an involuntary demonstration of the problem of power itself: the apparatus does not merely measure a hierarchy; it establishes an authoritative vocabulary in which certain states can subsequently be judged higher or lower, truthful or false, enlightened or unenlightened. Its failure therefore exposes something more interesting than the failure of its scientific claims. It exposes the mechanism by which a valuation can acquire the appearance of an objective determination.
Hill reveals another mode. His imagined future, definite desire, organized knowledge, and “Master Mind” do not establish a metaphysics of backward causation. Their significance lies in showing how a represented end can organize present action. The future does not reach backward and exert a force upon the present. The present representation of a possible future reorganizes conduct. This distinction is essential because otherwise absence becomes so expansive that every representation of something non-present is transformed into an “obsent.” Memory, anticipation, fiction, norm, institution, negation, possibility, and nonexistence must remain distinguishable. What unites them is not that they are all the same kind of absent entity, but that they force us to reconsider the relation between presence and efficacy.
Einstein marks yet another transformation, one that should not be assimilated to the others. Special relativity changes the structure within which motion, simultaneity, and causality are understood; general relativity goes further by making spacetime geometry itself dynamical. Gravity, in the geometric formulation of general relativity, is no longer adequately conceived as an ordinary force acting within a fixed background. Yet force does not disappear from physics. Electromagnetic interactions remain describable through four-forces, while freely falling bodies follow geodesics. The significance is subtler: a familiar mode of efficacy can be relocated from an interaction occurring within a fixed framework to the dynamical structure of the framework itself. What determines motion can therefore be a property not merely of what acts within a field, but of the structure that makes the field of possible motion intelligible.
None of these thinkers, then, forms a stage in a progressive discovery of “the true nature of power.” To construct such a history would be to impose precisely the smoothness that the inquiry has learned to distrust. Newton did not anticipate Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not anticipate Einstein. Einstein did not prepare the way for Hawkins. Hawkins and Hill did not complete what Newton and Nietzsche began. Their differences are not imperfections in the genealogy. They are what make genealogy possible. What can legitimately be traced is not the progressive clarification of one concept but the recurring appearance of a problem: the need to name efficacy before its mode has been adequately determined.
This is where the obsent can finally be introduced without becoming an additional metaphysical object. It does not name a hidden entity behind appearances. It does not name an invisible substance. It does not name an absent cause secretly exerting an otherwise inexplicable force. It names a structural difficulty: the possibility that something can be operative without being present in the manner of the object whose presence would ordinarily be expected to explain its efficacy. A possibility, norm, prohibition, expectation, fiction, value, or anticipated future can organize present response without becoming present as the object it concerns. The future does not cause the present from its own nonexistent location in time; the representation of a future possibility can become operative within the present. The efficacy belongs to the relation between anticipation and response.
The obsent therefore cannot simply be defined as “something absent that has effects.” That formulation is too easy. It turns absence into an invisible object and thereby reproduces the metaphysics of presence in concealed form. The obsent is instead the name for a difficulty in the ontology of determination: what happens when the determining condition cannot be reduced to a present object, and when its efficacy nevertheless cannot be denied? It is not another entity alongside the entities already given. It marks the point where our categories of entity, presence, cause, and effect begin to fail to coincide.
Nor should the obsent be confused with the trace. The trace names the persistence and constitutive force of what is no longer—or was never simply—present. The obsent names a more specific problem concerning efficacy: the possibility that determination can operate without the determining term being present as an object at all. Derrida’s importance here is precisely that he prevents us from resolving the difficulty by imagining that behind every trace lies an original presence waiting to be recovered. The trace does not merely preserve the past. It unsettles the very distinction by which presence and absence are separated.
The three thinkers therefore leave us with three disciplines. Newton demands determination: do not invoke an indeterminate cause when a rigorous relation can be established. Nietzsche demands genealogy: do not assume that the categories through which determination becomes intelligible are historically innocent. Derrida demands deconstruction: do not assume that genealogical recovery will eventually deliver a pure origin outside the relations that constituted it. Newton protects explanation from mystification. Nietzsche protects explanation from historical amnesia. Derrida protects genealogy from becoming another mythology of origins. And so even “efficacy” must finally be refused the status of a resting place. We cannot escape an unstable concept by replacing it with a more respectable word and then forgetting that the replacement has its own history. Efficacy already presupposes a vocabulary of accomplishing, producing, bringing about. “Making a difference” is no more innocent. The question already assumes that there is something, that it can differ, that something else can determine the difference, and that determination can be distinguished from its effect. The language of the problem is itself part of the problem.
This returns us, finally, to Nietzsche’s philology. His deepest importance here is not that he discovered the correct theory of power. It is that he taught us to become suspicious whenever a word appears to have already understood itself. Macht is not transparent. Neither is vis. Neither is potentia. Neither is “force.” Neither is “efficacy.” Their apparent intelligibility is historical work. Their meanings have been stabilized through repetition, translation, appropriation, institutionalization, and forgetting. The word is present, but the history that makes its present meaning possible is not. It is precisely this relation between presence and semantic absence that makes the philological question philosophically decisive.
The history of a word is therefore not external to its meaning. It is part of the meaning’s mode of existence. Nietzsche’s genealogy reveals the force concealed within semantic sedimentation: a victorious interpretation can become so thoroughly naturalized that it no longer appears as interpretation. Derrida then shows why the recovery of that history cannot simply restore an original meaning. The origin itself appears as trace. What we find beneath the apparent stability of the word is not a final essence but a history of differences. This is what the inquiry has actually discovered about power: not what it is, but why it so often appears to be something we already understand. The word gathers together heterogeneous modes of determination and allows their differences to disappear beneath a common name. It is useful precisely because it is imprecise. It becomes dangerous when its imprecision is mistaken for ontological unity. What remains after that recognition is not a new definition but a stricter question. A force may alter a state through an interaction. A norm may organize conduct. A concept may establish the field within which something becomes intelligible. A memory may persist as a determinant after its object has disappeared. An expectation may organize the present around what has not yet occurred. An institution may continue to operate after the persons who created it are gone. A word may carry the force of a history whose conditions have receded from view. These are not identical phenomena. Their efficacy cannot be collapsed into a single mechanism. But neither can their common capacity to determine simply be dismissed. The obsent names the unresolved point at which this difference becomes philosophically unavoidable. Not a thing. Not a substance. Not a hidden cause. Not the future acting upon the present. Not the absent masquerading as the present.
Rather, the obsent marks the possibility that determination may exceed presence: that something can enter into the constitution of what happens without appearing as the object we expect a cause to be; that what remains may not be the residue of a recoverable origin; that a meaning can continue to organize a world after the history that produced it has vanished from consciousness; and that the efficacy of what is not present may belong not to some mysterious entity but to the relations through which presence itself is constituted. The question with which we began has therefore become more difficult rather than more settled: How can something that is not present nevertheless determine what is present? There may be no final answer available outside the language in which that question is posed. “Something,” “present,” “determine,” and “what is” already bear the traces of the history we have followed. The task is not to escape that history but to become attentive to it—to the places where an effect exceeds the presence of its supposed cause, where a meaning survives the conditions that produced it, where an anticipation organizes conduct before becoming actual, and where a trace refuses to lead us back to a pure origin.
The inquiry thus does not culminate in the discovery of the obsent. It arrives at the point where the necessity of the concept can be seen without mistaking necessity for ontology. The obsent is not what we have finally found behind the world. It is the name we give to a problem the world repeatedly presents to thought: that efficacy may precede our ability to name its mode; that determination may operate without presence; and that the absence of an object does not necessarily entail the absence of an effect. Perhaps this is the final lesson of the movement from Newton through Nietzsche to Derrida. Newton teaches us that what is not immediately visible can nevertheless be rigorously determined. Nietzsche teaches us that what appears immediately intelligible may itself be the sediment of forces no longer visible. Derrida teaches us that the disappearance of those forces does not permit us to recover a pure origin behind the sediment, because the trace was there before the opposition between presence and absence could be cleanly drawn. What remains, then, is neither power nor its replacement. What remains is the question of efficacy—and the recognition that even this question bears a trace of what it seeks to understand.
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Abba Macarius of Egypt (c. 300–390) was one of the central figures of the early Egyptian desert tradition, and he is especially important if we are thinking about the relationship between absence, presence, longing, and what we have been calling the trace of power.
Macarius was born around 300 in Lower Egypt and eventually became one of the great ascetics of the Egyptian desert. He lived during the period when Christianity was moving from a persecuted minority religion toward an established imperial religion. The Desert Fathers responded to that transformation partly by withdrawing into the Egyptian wilderness. Their “desert” was not simply geographical. It was a deliberate removal from the ordinary structures of social recognition, possession, reputation, and institutional power. The desert became a place in which the Christian sought God precisely by confronting the absence of the things that ordinarily provide stability.
Macarius is traditionally associated with Scetis (Wadi El Natrun), one of the great centers of Egyptian monasticism. He became famous not because he constructed an elaborate philosophical system but because his sayings concern the transformation of perception itself. The aim of the ascetic life was not merely moral improvement. It was purification of the heart so that the human being could become capable of perceiving God. Hence the famous language of the “heart” in the Macarian tradition. The heart is not simply the seat of emotion. It is the interior faculty through which the human being encounters divine reality.
There is an important textual caution concerning the quotation you placed at the beginning of the epilogue:
“I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart. I said: Who are You? He said: You.”
That saying is often attributed online to “Abba Macarius of Egypt,” but the attribution is not secure in that exact form. The Macarian corpus is complicated: there are the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), later collections of homilies attributed to Macarius, and various sayings circulating under his name. We should therefore be careful about presenting that sentence as a securely authenticated quotation from the historical Macarius. The theological language, however, is very much at home in the Egyptian mystical tradition.
And the reason it works so extraordinarily well as the epigraph to your epilogue is not merely that it is “about longing for God.” Something much more structurally interesting is happening.
“Who are You”
The entire movement of the question presupposes absence. God is sought as the one who is not simply given. The seeker asks for the identity of the one who remains beyond immediate possession: Who are You? But the answer does not supply an object. It does not say: “I am this.” Instead, the response collapses the distance between seeker and sought: “You.” The absent God does not become a present object that can be possessed by knowledge. The question itself becomes the site of encounter. That is remarkably close to the problem this epilogue has been pursuing, although we should resist making Macarius into a secret precursor of Derrida or Nietzsche. The connection is structural rather than historical.
The Desert Fathers repeatedly encounter a paradox: God is absent from ordinary perception and yet this absence is not inert. It reorganizes the entire life of the person seeking God. The absent does something. Indeed, the absence becomes operative precisely because the seeker is oriented toward what cannot simply be possessed as an object.
This is where Christian asceticism gives us a particularly powerful example of what you have called the “trace of power.” The monk abandons the visible sources of power—property, status, political authority, social recognition—not in order to become powerless in the ordinary sense, but in order to discover another mode of determination. The invisible becomes determinative. A God who cannot be placed before the senses nevertheless reorganizes the senses, the body, desire, time, speech, labor, memory, and community.
The desert is therefore almost an experimental environment for your question:
How can something that is not present nevertheless determine what is present?
Macarius’s answer would not be “because an absent force acts upon the present.” That would already misunderstand the theological structure. God is not an absent object located somewhere else. Rather, the relation to God constitutes the very orientation through which the present becomes meaningful. Hunger, silence, prayer, temptation, bodily discipline, solitude, charity—all become intelligible in relation to the one who is not possessed as an object. This is also why the Desert Fathers are so preoccupied with longing. Longing is not merely an emotional response to absence. It is a form of organization. The absent beloved organizes the present life of the lover. The object is not present, but the relation is operative. And this gives us a beautiful distinction for the epilogue: absence can be either a privation or an orientation. If someone is absent from a room, their absence may simply mean that they are not there. But if someone is loved, anticipated, remembered, worshiped, feared, or desired, their non-presence can reorganize the entire field of what is present. The absence has become structurally operative.
The Desert Fathers understood this with extraordinary experiential precision long before we had the philosophical vocabulary to describe it.
There is another reason Macarius is particularly interesting. The Egyptian monks did not generally approach God by accumulating information about Him. They approached God through transformation. Knowledge of God meant becoming capable of a different mode of seeing. Thus the “eye of the heart” is crucial. The question is not merely: What object does consciousness intend? The deeper question is: What must consciousness become in order to encounter what it seeks?
That makes the Macarian tradition an interesting counterpoint to Husserl. Husserl asks us to attend rigorously to the structures through which something becomes present to consciousness. Macarius asks what transformation of the perceiver is required when the object sought cannot become an ordinary object of consciousness at all. The theological tradition is therefore not simply describing another object; it is describing a transformation of the subject’s capacity for presence. And this is where the epigraph subtly changes the entire meaning of your epilogue.
Without the quotation, the epilogue ends as a philosophical investigation into determination, presence, absence, trace, genealogy, and efficacy. With the quotation, those concepts acquire a horizon of longing. The “absent” is no longer merely an epistemological or ontological problem. It becomes something toward which a life can be oriented. The trace is no longer merely what remains of an absent origin. It can become what calls. And power is no longer merely what produces an effect. We begin to encounter another possibility: that what determines us most profoundly may be precisely what we cannot possess as an object. That does not prove the theological claim. Nor should it. But it opens the philosophical problem onto a much older human experience than the terminology of “power” suggests. The Desert Fathers were responding to this problem. They went into the desert because they believed that when the ordinary world becomes quiet enough, one discovers that absence is not empty. Something remains. And the question becomes whether what remains is merely a trace of what was present—or whether the trace itself can be the mode through which what cannot become present nevertheless calls us.
your cell will teach you everything.
St. Augustine
“Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations—”
Masnavi
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