Central reflections and nilpotency in exact Mal'tsev categories

We study nilpotency in the context of exact Mal'tsev categories taking central extensions as the primitive notion. This yields a nilpotency tower which is analysed from the perspective of Goodwillie's functor calculus. We show in particular that the reflection into the subcategory of $n$-nilpotent objects is the universal endofunctor of degree $n$ if and only if every $n$-nilpotent object is $n$-folded. In the special context of a semi-abelian category, an object is $n$-folded precisely when its Higgins commutator of length $n+1$ vanishes.