Foucault's intuition that resistance comes first challenges the theses of the cooriginality of power and resistance or the superiority of power over resistance. In order to transform this intuition into the concept of the primacy of resistance, the article uses Deleuze's ontology and in particular the idea of the virtual. According to Deleuze, resistance displays a privileged relation with the virtual, understood as the ontological region animated by all the potentialities that might be or might have been actualised. As such, resistance is presented as a creative and affirmative force, provoking reactions and forcing power to change. Nietzsche's divide between active and reactive forces serves to set up a qualitative distinction between resistance and power. Power relations are therefore understood as the interplay of the creative affirmation of resistance and the subsequent reaction of power. The primacy of resistance allows us to elaborate a dynamic model of power relations whose mechanism evokes Tronti's interpretation of Marxism structured upon the primacy of labour and workers' struggle over capital.

The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchies. We argue that this allows us to conceptualise collective leadership in a postfoundational way that connects a critique of individual and organization-bound leadership to a democratic logic, in particular through Rancière’s analysis of the myth of the murder of the shepherd. This also enables us to study radically disruptive, non-hierarchical and pre-dialogic dimensions of leadership that may destruct as well as construct. Two democratic leadership practices are outlined: contingent acts of leadership and the practice of radical contestation. Our argument is that both practices of democratic leadership can be deployed as radical ruptures and disruptions of organizational orders, beyond dialogue.

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This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad’s intra-active agential ontology and Foucault’s microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power.

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