The Intolerances of Culture: 4 Power — The Intolerance of Reflexive Authority

Power is the mechanism by which intolerances are enforced.

Where politics names undecidability, ethics names remainder, and identity names non-identity, power acts to ensure closure. It is the operational substrate beneath all other relational pressures, the force that transforms possibility into managed actuality.

And it cannot endure reflexivity.

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Reflexive Authority as Threat

Authority becomes reflexive when it recognises itself as enacted rather than given:

• as a contingent imposition,

• as a relation rather than an essence,

• as a cut that stabilises possibility at the cost of remainder.

This awareness is intolerable to power, because reflexivity introduces:

• accountability without external arbitration,

• legitimacy without ontological disguise,

• contingency without immunity.

Power survives only by denying its own contingency.

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The Power Cut

Power enacts the cut that enforces all other intolerances:

• it collapses undecidability into decision,

• it absorbs moral remainder into obedience or justification,

• it fixes identity to contain responsibility,

• it naturalises contingency as necessity.

These cuts are never neutral. They redistribute possibility, concentrate authority, and stabilise relational systems under stress.

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Intolerance as Structural Defense

Reflexive authority threatens the fantasy of stability:

• “I am legitimate because I must be,”

• “I am right because I am above contest,”

• “I act without needing to answer to relational remainder.”

Intolerance here manifests as aggression, defensiveness, and suppression:

• critique is pathologised,

• dissent is delegitimised,

• transparency is avoided,

• accountability is deferred or displaced.

This is not personal weakness. It is structural protection of a fragile cut.

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The Remainder of Power

Every exercise of power leaves relational surplus:

• silenced voices,

• deferred responsibility,

• unseen consequences,

• alternative possibilities foreclosed.

These remainders do not vanish; they resurface as challenge, tension, or disruption, demanding negotiation, resistance, or reform.

Power, to persist, must continually enforce its own limits invisibly.

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Reading Power Relationally

A relational reading does not aim to topple authority. It asks:

• where are cuts being enforced,

• whose possibilities are being constrained,

• how is closure naturalised,

• and what is displaced to sustain the field?

To read power relationally is to expose its operational logic without moralising, to make visible what authority otherwise renders invisible.

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Endurance Without Illusion

Reflexive authority is impossible to sustain indefinitely.

Power maintains itself only by refusing recognition of its enactment.

The intolerances of politics, ethics, and identity cannot persist without this underpinning.

It is the hidden hand that holds the field of constrained possibility together.

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Closing

Power is not an accessory to politics, ethics, or identity.

It is their enabler, their stabiliser, and their suppressor.

Its intolerance of reflexivity marks the moment when relational tension becomes existential:

to see power as enacted is to see possibility itself, and that is what power cannot permit.

To read power relationally is to recognise both the necessity of the cut and the surplus it leaves behind — the remainder that pulses beneath every decision, every ethical claim, every identity, and every historical narrative.