Draft:Theory of Encryption of Power

Theory of Encryption of Power (also known as the encryption of power or decryption of power) is a critical theory and decolonial philosophical framework originating in Latin American critical legal and political thought and expanded across political theory, decolonial philosophy, and critical epistemology. The theory was first articulated by philosopher and legal theorist Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo and Colombian political scientist Gabriel Méndez-Hincapié in the essay "The Encrypted Constitution: A New Paradigm of Oppression," published in Critical Legal Thinking.

The framework was subsequently developed by Sanín-Restrepo across key monographs and edited volumes, including Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (2016), Decrypting Power (2018), Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger's Terminology (2020), and Decrypting Time: Grounding Democracy in Becomingness (2027). It has been expanded and engaged by an international collective of scholars, including James R. Martel, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Andityas Matos, and Marinella Machado-Araujo.

The framework critiques how dominant political, legal, economic, and technological systems encode authority to neutralize popular agency while maintaining the facade of liberal democracy. The theory is the conceptual foundation of the Bloomsbury Academic book series Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South.

Conceptual Framework

Key Terminology

The framework relies on specific core distinctions:

• Potestas vs. Potentia: Borrowed from classical political philosophy and Spinoza, potestas refers to centralized, institutionalized power that commands submission through transcendent authority, whereas potentia designates the immanent, horizontal capacity of every being to act, exist, and create possibilities.
• Becomingness (Energeia): The ongoing, unconditioned process of radical contingency and dynamic actuality. Unlike teleological frameworks where political action is judged against predefined models, becomingness asserts that genuine democratic activity exists without prior qualifications.
• The Transcendent Model: Any solid, pre-established construct (such as a modern constitution, national identity, or market logic) that dictates the conditions under which life or political speech is recognized as valid.

Comparative Context: Agamben, Foucault, and TEP

The Theory of Encryption of Power situates itself within modern continental and decolonial political theory by extending and challenging dominant paradigms:

• Beyond Foucault's Biopolitics: While Michel Foucault analyzes biopolitics as the state management and regulation of living bodies through disciplinary mechanisms, TEP argues that late-coloniality operates through an antecedent step: the encryption of beingness itself, wherein life is thinned down to fit transcendent legal models before biopolitical regulation begins.
• Beyond Agamben's Inoperosity: While Giorgio Agamben locates the problem of sovereignty in the state of exception and proposes "inoperosity" (impotence or deactivation) as resistance, TEP rejects passivity. Drawing on Aristotelian energeia, TEP argues that liberation requires the active, unconditioned exercise of immanent potentia rather than retreat into passive potentiality. In "The Case Against Agamben's Impotence" (2019), Sanín-Restrepo argues that Agamben's mistake lies in confusing actuality with Entelecheia, neglecting the liberating potential of Energeia.

Historical Grounding: Colonial Charters and the Monroe Doctrine

The framework illustrates the "fraudulent fusion" of sovereignty and exception through historical legal processes in Latin America. Following independence from Spain, post-independence charters adopted liberal constitutional forms derived from Euro-American models while retaining colonial social and economic hierarchies. Under paradigms such as the Monroe Doctrine, global imperial capital transitioned from overt territorial colonialism to encrypted legal governance. Constitutions in the region simultaneously proclaimed "the people" as the sole sovereign while structurally excluding Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant populations—making those populations the index of the exception (the "hidden people") in whose name state violence was justified.

Encryption, Late-Coloniality, and the Constitutional Idea

The theory asserts that the encryption of power is the most sophisticated form of power as domination (Potestas), emerging intrinsically within late-coloniality and global capitalism. Encryption operates through modern constitutionalism, which functions as an autopoietic oppression machine. Through the artifice of modern constitutions, hierarchies (racial, gendered, national) are codified, the commons are privatized, and capitalism is installed as a universal truth while democracy is destroyed in its own name. As Sanín-Restrepo and Machado-Araujo state, "coloniality exists because it encrypts power."

Power as Potestas vs. Power as Potentia

Drawing from Heraclitus, Aristotle, Spinoza, Deleuze, Fanon, Rancière, and Nancy, the theory posits that "to be is to exercise power." Power is not confined to grand structures like the state or the economy, but is intrinsic to the vitality of every being (potentia):

• Power as Potentia: The unconditioned capacity and potentiality to become something different, belonging horizontally to every being of difference without pre-determined finality, yielding an incalculable and contingent reality.
• Power as Potestas: The operation of absorbing the multiplicity and abundance of life into rigid, uniform structures (potestas) that solidify power, conditioning existence through transcendent qualifications.

Encryption of the Abundance of Life and Transcendent Models

Unlike traditional models that focus solely on linguistic obfuscation, the theory contends that what is encrypted is the fundamental abundance of life—the capacity to create alternate worlds from diverse epistemologies, and the living potentiality of singularities. Encryption occurs when existence (beingness) is thinned down and conditioned to conform to transcendent models (such as modern constitutions, the nation-state, or the free market).

These transcendent models act as simulacra. Diverging from Plato and Deleuze, the theory defines simulacra not as simple false imitations, but as rigid, transcendent models of identity that pose as the sole valid form of power. Under these models, beingness is severed from power, and politics is reduced to an inner split where life is welcomed or excluded based on pre-established qualifications.

The Historical Proof: Sovereignty, Exception, and "The Hidden People"

In late-coloniality, the coupling of liberalism and coloniality merges sovereignty with the state of exception into a singular creature: "the people." This creates a structural fracture within the body politic:

• The People as a Totality (Synecdoche): A false, included subset that functions as a synecdoche (pars pro toto), representing an impossible infinity under the rhetoric of universal human rights and liberal constitutionalism.
• The Hidden People: The marginalized, displaced, and excluded population (such as forced migrants, informal workers, and victims of coloniality) whose systematic exclusion is structurally required to give consistency to the fantasy of the totalized liberal state.

Under this mechanism, the people paradoxically become both the simulated sovereign (in whose name violence and dispossession are carried out) and the exception (the targets of violence and death). In late-coloniality, people are killed in their own name with no legal accountability, serving as the transcendent model of their own destruction.

The Ontological Proof: Energeia, Entelecheia, and the Critique of Agamben

The ontological bracket challenges Western teleology by contrasting two Aristotelian modalities of power:

• Entelecheia (Stratified Actuality): The dominant Western tradition that conceives power as the realization of a pre-determined, transcendent endpoint (telos), establishing rigid qualifications for who counts or is allowed to participate in political speech.
• Energeia (Immanent Becoming): The decolonial restoration of politics as an ongoing, unconditioned process of radical contingency (Becoming). Under this view, genuine democracy is the absence of pre-qualifications to communicate difference, rendering democracy an ontological necessity across all possible political worlds.

In "The Case Against Agamben's Impotence" (2019), the theory specifically critiques Giorgio Agamben's reading of potentiality and sovereignty. Rather than retreating into passive "impotence" (inoperosity) out of fear that actualizing potentia leads to domination, the theory reclaims energeia—actuality as dynamic "being-at-work" without predefined qualifications—grounding liberation in absolute contingency and continuous becoming.

Scholarly Elaborations and Interdisciplinary Applications

The theory of encryption of power has developed into a broader generative methodology across multiple academic fields and serves as the conceptual foundation for the Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South book series published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Key scholarly contributions and expansions include:

• Anarchism, Archism, and Sovereignty (James R. Martel): Political theorist James R. Martel engages the theory of encryption to analyze how sovereign authority relies on "archist" linguistic and legal illusions. In the collective volume Decrypting Sovereignty as Archism (2026), Martel and contributing authors demonstrate how encrypted legal structures produce the illusion of inevitable authority, obscuring the inherent anarchy and constitutive power of the governed.
• Epistemic Decoloniality and Knowledge Production (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni): Decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni engages the theory of encryption in his extensive work on the coloniality of knowledge, power, and internationalism. In works such as Decoloniality in Southern Africa (2020) and Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism (2024), Ndlovu-Gatsheni identifies how imperial and liberal frameworks encrypt power through transcendental models that impose Eurocentric epistemic hierarchies upon the Global South.
• State Liturgies and Democratic Political Theology (Andityas Matos): Legal philosopher Andityas Matos provides a major standalone intervention using the theory of encryption of power. In Decrypting Political Theology (2025), Matos utilizes the framework to dismantle state liturgies, state exceptions, and foundationalist political theology, arguing for a non-authoritarian, democratic approach to political theology that embraces transcendent dimensions without succumbing to structures of domination.
• Critical Legal Theory and State Magic (Oscar Guardiola-Rivera): Critical legal scholar Oscar Guardiola-Rivera engages the "decrypting turn" to analyze the legal and financial mechanisms of global capital. Guardiola-Rivera examines how state power encrypts "public secrets" and legal fictions to conceal structural violence behind cybersecurity, financial derivatives, and development frameworks.
• Secularism and Political Imagination (Nicolás Panotto): Liberation theologian Nicolás Panotto applies the framework in Decrypting Secular Power to expose how secular political institutions conceal underlying colonial and theological codes, offering a decolonial methodology to liberate political imagination in Latin America.
• Decolonial Temporality and Philosophy: Further applications include Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger's Terminology (2020) and Decrypting Time: Grounding Democracy in Becomingness (2027), which utilize the framework to challenge linear Western temporalities and static ontological hierarchies.

Reception and Impact

The theoretical framework and its associated volumes have received engagement from prominent political theorists, philosophers, and critical journals:

• Drucilla Cornell (Rutgers University): Endorsing the collective volume Decrypting Power, Cornell praised the work for addressing core philosophical questions regarding leftist notions of power: "Decrypting Power offers a series of excellent articles on one of the most perplexing concepts that has plagued the left for centuries... Sanín-Restrepo has provided us with a much needed service and we are in his debt."
• Constellations: An International Journal of Democratic and Critical Theory: Reviewing Decolonizing Democracy, the journal characterized it as "a radical and provocative text... and one hopes that Sanín-Restrepo will continue to explore the philosophical vistas unto which it has opened a window."
• Law, Culture & Humanities: A review in Law, Culture & Humanities observed that Sanín-Restrepo "seeks to turn the tables on the operations of power in our world; far from accepting the dominance of the oppressive system of state capitalism due to its very tangible presence, he seeks to point out the tangibility of that which opposes it and which can fight its fire with an immanent fire of its own."
• Alain Brossat (University of Paris VIII): Commenting on Decrypting Time, Brossat called the work a "vital, gripping intervention for late democracy," stating: "In an exemplary instance of serendipity, I realized I had for years been circling around the elusive mechanics of contemporary domination without possessing the exact concept... Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo's work provides that precise, indispensable tool."
• Antonio de Cabo de la Vega (Complutense University of Madrid): Reviewing Sanín-Restrepo's formulation of political ontology, de Cabo de la Vega characterized the work as "a genuine and serious philosophical contribution to the literature on political ontology and radical democratic theory," noting its potential to make a "distinctive and lasting contribution to its field."
• Carlo Galli (University of Bologna): Writing on Andityas Matos's Decrypting Political Theology, Galli praised the volume as an "intelligent and important book" that presents a compelling thesis: "post-structuralist and post-colonial critical thought engages with political theology by seeking a non-authoritarian origin of politics."

See also

• Decoloniality
• Potestas
• Giorgio Agamben
• Radical democracy
• Walter Mignolo