Goodwillie calculus and Whitehead products.

We prove that iterated Whitehead products of length ( n + 1) vanish in any value of an n-excisive functor in the sense of Goodwillie. We compare then different notions of homotopy nilpotency, from the Berstein-Ganea definition to the Biedermann-Dwyer one. The latter is strongly related to Goodwillie calculus and we analyze the vanishing of iterated Whitehead products in such objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]