Reading a Denier’s Testimony

This chapter of the book reads one person’s testimony: how the acts of someone who denies that others can say no testify in his place. The slaveholder does not take the slave as an end, yet he has to guard against the slave running away and rising up; he has no need to guard against his cattle rising up. To get the Jews into the gas chambers, the Nazis told them these were showers.

The pattern of precautions shows what the denier himself presupposes the other to be. One does not lie to a thing; one does not forbid a thing to read; one does not pass laws against those who might shelter a thing. Each such measure is aimed at a capacity the denier says is not there.

The examples — fugitive-slave laws and passes, the ban on literacy, the lie about the showers, the curved chutes of a slaughterhouse — are the book’s own. Power Theory also used the slaveholder, and reads him differently; the book records the difference rather than smoothing it over.

Five Rungs

Fencing in. What is guarded against is an uncontrollable remainder; livestock too are guarded against this way. The ban on literacy, and indoctrination. What is dealt with is the other’s self, already there or about to take shape. The rung splits: a ban on literacy is an open prohibition — by Value Theory’s division, locking, not colonization; indoctrination, Rights Theory rules a violation.

Fugitive-slave laws and passes. His no can be shouted to a third person and caught; what the institution forbids is precisely the third person’s response. Animals too give alarm calls, and their fellows answer; what this rung reads is not whether there is a signal, but that the no can be heard by a third person as a no, taken up, and that the hearer can stand on his side. Guarding against uprising: the oppressed can know one another and join forces. Luring to death: right up to the killing, his understanding must still be bypassed.

The reading: each rung shows which response his acts draw on — understanding, speaking, finding someone, joining with others; the top rung shows that even the killing has to go around the other’s understanding. It is a rung-by-rung reading, not a gauge of completeness, and what the other can actually do is checked against the facts. So he keeps two sets of books. Power Theory calls the second one “the debt of verification”: “A can never confirm once and for all that B has become a tool. … A must verify again and again.”

A Word for the Other Side

Slaughterhouses use curved chutes to calm the animals; is that not a precaution too? The chute manages sensory cues. The lie about the showers works on understanding, and works only on a being that can believe a sentence. The reading stands. Killing, too, is largely covered: deception, ambush, striking while the victim sleeps all deal with the other’s capacity to say no — and sleep, as Rights Theory puts it, is “a temporary interruption of the bandwidth of exercise and of operation, not an exit.” Outside the ladder lies only an act that draws on no one’s will at all.

The strongest opponent is in the framework’s own writings. Power Theory P1 says that over one whose subject-position has been fully stripped, “the operations performed on it are not power” — as though a denier could keep a single set of books listing a thing. The book reads it so: if that point is ever really reached, the precautions shrink to fencing in, the act no longer aims at his will, and it lies outside the in-domain zero point. Power Theory does not say the point cannot be reached; it says what remains is “only the processing of an object,” while B stays a subject: “Any reading of §VI as SAE permits some humans to be actually reducible to objects is a mis-reading.” Power Theory P6 adds that chiseling power “precisely cannot go that far”: “What it wants is B’s usable subjecthood.”

The book parts from P1 over the whip. P1 reads the slaveholder’s whip as “an 11DD–12DD domestication-operation.” But a whip used to make a person understand an order and carry it out is aimed at his understanding and choice; that is coercion, inside the domain. The disagreement is recorded as it stands. P1 itself adds a line that cuts the same way: whipping a slave to death exerts “the strongest registration pressure” on the other slaves — even the killing is addressed to other people’s wills.

Three Kinds of Self-Enclosure, and a Stamp

The First Critique had recorded, as historically inhabited, “the branch that gathers all value into the self.” The second critique splits it three ways. Theoretical solipsism lays a hand on no one, says nothing, points at no one: outside the zero point, consistent, a branch as usual. Denial-of-no domination says the other cannot refuse while its acts deal with that capacity all along: intelligible, historically lived in, and performatively inconsistent — two sets of books.

Candid domination concedes that the other can say no and simply does not take him as an end. It is consistent, an inhabited branch, and the stamp does not reach it. What the book can say of it is where it stands; that if it locks in someone who can say no, Power Theory reads off what it pays — the one who locks is bound first by the locking, back-binding; and what traces it leaves outside. Of its wrongness the book can say nothing (Essay 12).

The stamp of performative inconsistency is not a verdict of invalidity. The First Critique had refused Kant’s verdict of invalidity — “we do not rule his claim invalid, but register it as another branch, labeled with its condition” — and said of the axiom’s opponents: “people who spoke the denial have really existed; what cannot stand is the position, not the person.” So here: what cannot stand is his one denial. His law, and he himself, are not voided, and no one is given license to dispose of him. The stamp rests on a description of his own acts.

Turning the Check on Old Versions

The same check is turned on the framework’s own earlier versions. Reason Cannot Not says in its first clause that one cannot exit, that to exit is to be degraded; in its fourth it asks “both subjects to expose themselves to the other’s interrogation,” “two interrogable, mutually-calibrating subjects.” On one side stopping is forbidden; on the other it lives by interrogation and adjustment. It also says that “regression is also a form of development” — and then “cannot stop” can be falsified by nothing at all.

The framework has turned such sentences back before. The First Critique: “We once wrote this machine as an inescapable forced cycle.” Methodology 0’s second edition withdrew “therefore negativa cannot not operate.” Paper 4’s second edition says that inferences of the “subject becomes a tool” kind have not yet all been brought under the new reading.

And the First Critique left a warning that applies to critics too: “a diagnosis of an old version applied, without re-examination, to the new” is itself a misdiagnosis. So before turning an old sentence back, the book first checks whether a later version has already changed it. Action Theory had already lowered these sentences; the second critique examines only those that have not yet been changed.