Every domain of power necessarily generates opposing forces within itself.

Evidence

Wars, like genocides, often aim to rearrange existence, and not merely to create it ex nihilo. Yet, this cannot be the full account of Orientalism; such an account would merely commit the relatively minor sin of reductionism. The grave sin of this account is the elimination of the possibility of an inverse dynamic of power, of a complexity in the central domains that generates, as it has proven to do over millennia, a multiplicity of opposing forces within even the most hegemonic central domains. Domains of power, in their very nature, must encompass force fields that often coordinate both their operations and their thrust in favor of the central paradigms governing a particular order, but they are not born, nor can they be nourished, without opposing force fields. This is no more conceivable or possible than a body in which all the organisms work in unison and toward an undivided balance of health. For if this were to be the case, no organism will ever die. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s conception of power as productive and circulative rather than purely repressive, and to the reader’s earlier grapplings with domination/resistance dynamics in colonial and imperial histories. — connects to: All social objectivity is constituted through power and exclusion.; Radical transformation always requires drawing political frontiers against an adversary. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 533
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a power domain lacking internal opposition is as impossible as a body whose organs all work in perfect unison—if so, nothing would ever die—is a dense, systemic paradox worth sitting with.