Thinking Antagonism

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Thinking Antagonism
Political Ontology after Laclau

Oliver Marchart

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Contents

List of Abbreviations vii

Introduction: What is Antagonism? 1

1. ‘What’s Going on with Being?’: Laclau and the
Return of Political Ontology 8

Part I Thinking the Political

2. Marx on the Beach: An Intellectual History of
Antagonism 37
3. Beyond the ‘War Hypothesis’: Polemology in
Foucault, Stiegler and Loraux 63

Part II Thinking Politics

4. The Restless Nature of the Social: On the
Micro-Conflictuality of Everyday Life 87
5. Politics and the Popular: Protest and Culture in
Laclau’s Theory of Populism 109
6. On Minimal Politics: Conditions of Acting Politically 129

Part III Politicising Thought

7. The Final Name of Being: Thinking as Reflective
Intervention 157

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Thinking Antagonism

8. Being as Acting: The Primacy of Politics and the

Politics of Thought 181
Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics of
Intellectual Engagement 206

Notes 218
Bibliography 241
Index 255

vi

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Abbreviations

E Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), London: Verso, 1996.

HSS Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics,
London: Verso, 1985.
NR Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our
Time, London: Verso, 1990.
PR Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005.
RFS Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society,
London: Verso, 2014.

vii

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Introduction: What is Antagonism?

Every thinker, as Heidegger used to say, follows the line of a single

thought. What he forgot to mention was that no thought belongs to
a single thinker. Ideas are not born from the depths of a self-enclosed
mind. They always come from somewhere else, from a place ‘out
there’: an intellectual tradition, an academic teacher, a school of
thought, a social movement, an academic or non-academic discus-
sion, a reading that turned out decisive, or simply an inspirational
moment in a conversation. Intellectual work, rather than being
a solitary endeavour, is a collaborative one. If there is originality
in intellectual work, it is originality without determinable origin.
For this reason, ideas are never the property of an individual. It is
impossible to ‘own’ an idea – which is but an ideological fantasy
rooted in the capitalist system of property ownership. Ideas can only
be disowned – in a movement described in this book as one of self-
implication – as they emerge from, and return to, an a-subjective,
collective effort that cuts across temporal and geographical barriers.
One of these ideas bears the name ‘antagonism’.
This concept, which rings the bell of conflictuality but is not
equivalent to conventional notions of ‘conflict’, ‘struggle’ or ‘war’,
has an extended history. Antagonism is the name that was given
to the phenomenon of social negativity in the tradition of German
Idealism, Early Romanticism and Marxism. It was carried for-
ward by the Heideggerian Hegelians of the first half of the twenti-
eth century, among them Kojève, Sartre and Lacan. This concept
was born from a collective inquiry that reaches back more than
two hundred years, but it was in the work of Ernesto Laclau, ini-
tially in his path-breaking book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(HSS), co-written with Chantal Mouffe, that ‘antagonism’ found

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Thinking Antagonism

a contemporary systematic treatment. When the book appeared in

1985, it was immediately realised by Slavoj Žižek that this concep-
tion constitutes ‘the most radical breakthrough in modern social
theory’ (Žižek 1990: 249).
Laclau, who passed away in April 2014, was one of the major
theoretical voices on the Left. Born into a radical-liberal family
in Buenos Aires in 1935, Laclau turned to Peronism as a univer-
sity student. He became a militant of the Socialist Party and the
Peronist student movement and later became a member of the
leadership of the Socialist Party of the National Left, founded in
1962 by Jorge Ramos, and the editor of the party’s weekly Lucha
Obrera. Laclau was deeply immersed in the political struggles
of Argentinian politics of the 1960s. Shortly after having been
appointed professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, he
was sacked, together with many other leftist university teachers,
by the junta of General Onganía. In 1969 he therefore accepted
an invitation to Oxford by Eric Hobsbawm, from where he
moved to the Department of Government at the University of
Essex in 1973. During his time in Essex, he founded the Centre
for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences and
an immensely successful MA and PhD programme in ‘Ideology
and Discourse Analysis’. For many years, this programme would
constitute the gravitational centre of an expanded international
network of former students and collaborators known today as the
‘Essex School’ (Townshend 2003).
Laclau’s academic work, which stands in the tradition of Louis
Althusser’s structural Marxism and Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony
theory, is influential in many areas of inquiry, from the theory
of populism to International Relations, from political discourse
analysis to rhetorics, from Cultural Studies and art theory to
critical geography.1 This book is not the place to elaborate on
these many areas of influence (I will touch upon Laclau’s work
in relation to critical geography in Chapter 5, to Birmingham
Cultural Studies in Chapter 6 and to populism in Chapter 7).
What is rarely seen, however, is that his influential work is organ-
ised around a key philosophical problematic that can be identified
as Laclau’s question – as formulated by Laclau himself:

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Introduction

I am not asking myself what are the actually existing antagonisms in

society, but something more fundamental: What is an antagonism?
What type of relations between social forces does it presuppose?
This is a question usually overlooked in the sociological literature,
which usually concentrates on actual ‘conflicts’, ‘confrontations’
and ‘struggles’, but which does not pose the question about the
ontological nature of these categories. It is, however, on this nature
that we must focus if we want to advance on the theoretical front.
(Laclau 2014: 102)

My proposal, in this book, on how ‘to advance on the theoretical

front’ will be to not only concentrate, with Laclau, on the question
of ‘What is an antagonism?’, i.e. what is a conflictual relation and
what are the laws that govern this relation? – but to ask the more
fundamental question: What is antagonism? My main reason for
doing so is that Laclau’s notion of antagonism can serve as a cor-
nerstone for a post-foundational ontology of the political. Such an
ontology – the science, not simply of politics, but of the political
nature of social being as such – is implicitly present in Laclau, but
not fully elaborated. In the above quote, Laclau employed the term
‘antagonism’ to indicate the ‘ontological nature’ of actual conflicts,
struggles and confrontations. Laclau’s question is a question as to
the very being of empirical conflicts. But he did not inquire into
the ontological nature of antagonism itself. What is antagonism?
What is its theoretical status? How to intellectually approach a
phenomenon that appears to indicate a constitutive negativity – a
paradoxical blockade or incommensurability – at the ground of all
social being? What, if anything, can be said about such an oddity?
In fact, questions like these were posed – in different guises – by a
countless number of philosophers, writers and theorists from Kant
via Marx to Laclau. The question of antagonism is the question
of modernity. It attests to our modern condition, to a time, that
is, when social and intellectual foundations, previously considered
unalterable, started to appear fungible, contingent and contest-
able. It is with the notion of antagonism that the precarious nature
of the social bond comes into view as such. And it is via this notion
that we should approach the much-discussed ‘ontological turn’ in
contemporary political theory.

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Thinking Antagonism

Laclau can be of enormous help in our endeavour to revisit

and revive the intellectual tradition of ‘thinking antagonism’. In
the preface to his posthumous book The Rhetorical Foundations
of Society (RFS) he had announced his intention to present his
own political ontology at a future stage (RFS 1). Tragically, his
sudden death means that his ontology will remain a torso. But the
elements are there to be reconstructed and integrated into a post-
foundational ontology of the political that will be systematic and
broad enough to accommodate other sources of post-foundational
political thought – including Foucault, Deleuze, Negri or Balibar.2
However, are we not engaging, it might be asked, in a futile exer-
cise of abstract speculation? Should we not content ourselves with
better manageable questions as to the laws and types of empirical
conflict? Is it at all possible to approach the phenomenon of social
negativity head-on? Well, it is certainly not possible as long as
we adhere to the protocols of mainstream social science or aca-
demic philosophy. Antagonism – understood as a name for the
intrinsically political nature of social being – is not an empirically
given or scientifically determinable object of political reality (in
the sense in which ‘ontic’ conflicts are). It is that which under-
mines the very positivity of ‘positive facts’. For this reason, an
ontological notion of antagonism escapes the grasp of positive
science. For mainstream social scientists, averse to anything that
smacks of thinking, there can be no political ontology; nothing
could bring them to think beyond the bounds of their objectivist
horizon – which is why Heidegger famously claimed that ‘science
does not think’ (Heidegger 1968: 8). Our inquiry, on the other
hand, will be directed at this very instance, antagonism, which
does not exist within the world of ordinary objects, but nonethe-
less insists, by way of radical negation, from outside this world,
thus imposing itself on thought. Thinking antagonism, hence, is
an active response to something that forces itself to be thought:
the antagonistic nature of society, encountered both in political
struggles and in a myriad of micro-conflicts in our daily life.
In this regard, antagonism eo ipso cannot be a matter of scien-
tific inquiry. It can only be a matter of thinking3 – which is not of
the order of philosophy either. Thinking has never fully succumbed
to the disciplinary procedures of the academy. The encounter with

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Introduction

antagonism – with an ontological condition that can be inferred

from our life-world experience of conflict and contingency – may
take place everywhere: in daily life as much as in the academy. The
practice of thinking antagonism, for this reason, is both ‘above’
and ‘beneath’ academic philosophy – in the sense in which Claude
Lefort once described his own ambivalent identity (as a politi-
cal theorist to whom the role of a ‘philosopher’ was attributed)
with the medieval formula: major et minor se ipso (Lefort 2000:
239) – a formula that could be applied to Laclau as well. Think-
ing means to position oneself in an eccentric place that is both
above and beneath oneself as a ‘philosopher’, to involve oneself
in a practice that is both more and less than philosophising. It is
‘above’ (or ‘beyond’) philosophy because, as Heidegger insisted,
by thinking we destruct the realm of occidental metaphysics and,
in this regard, have to abandon the traditional academic discipline
of philosophy. And it is ‘below’ the latter because thinking has no
particular institutional location and is, as initially mentioned, a
collective, if not political, activity.
For this reason, this book is as much concerned with thinking
as it is with antagonism. The words in the title constitute the two
foci of an ellipse. Equal weight must be given to ‘antagonism’ and
‘thinking’. And yet, it is undeniable that both sides remain intrin-
sically connected: antagonism is a matter of thinking (there is no
other way of approaching antagonism) as much as thinking is a
matter of antagonism (it brings conflict to theory and only gets
started when touched by the external force of antagonism). Hence,
our aim in the course of this investigation must be to compress, as
much as possible, the two foci of the ellipse, thereby producing a
circle. What motivates this aim is my conviction that the question
of ‘thinking’ and the question of ‘antagonism’ should be treated
on their own terms, but, at the same time, cannot be tackled sepa-
rately. It will thus be demonstrated that the ‘question of being’
and the ‘question of thinking’ – in Heidegger’s famous rendering:
‘What is called thinking?’ – are two questions that cannot be sepa-
rated and, at the end of our inquiry, should even be fused into a
third one – the perennial question of politics: ‘What is to be done?’
Obviously, the latter problem – vanishing point of the previous
two – cannot be solved by way of concrete political recipes. What

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‘is to be done’ in a given politico-historical conjuncture can only

be determined within that conjuncture – it cannot be derived from
ontology. To concede this is not to imply that nothing could be said
about concrete political issues; yet this would require a different
project that, with regard to our current post-democratic condition,
is outlined in an accompanying volume entitled Post-Foundational
Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom, Equality, Solidarity
(Marchart forthcoming). So, for our present purpose of ontologi-
cal reasoning, the question of ‘What is to be done?’ (to which, in
that other project, my reply is: ‘Reclaim democracy!’) should be
rephrased: ‘What does it mean to act?’, i.e. ‘What is the nature
of political action?’ – a question that, while appertaining to the
field of political ontology, simultaneously flags out the exit point
where, eventually, we will have to abandon our engagement with
ontology and engage with politics. As I hope to demonstrate in the
course of this investigation: thinking the political and politicising
thought are but two complementary sides of a single operation:
thinking antagonism.
* * *
The ontology of antagonism was discussed, contested and
advanced collectively, as many other ideas were, within a group
of people affiliated with, or sympathetic to the Essex School men-
tioned above. Many ideas presented in Thinking Antagonism have
profited greatly from more than two decades of discussions with
close friends and companions in a conversational network that
spans around the globe. Ernesto Laclau’s unexpected death in
2014 left an enormous gap in this network. It goes without saying
that this book is deeply indebted to him and, of course, to Chan-
tal Mouffe. My gratitude extends to all with whom I have had the
pleasure of debating the issues touched upon in this book. They
are too many to name here, so I restrict myself to at least mention-
ing some: Aristotelis Agridopoulos, Niels Akerstrom Andersen,
Benjamin Arditi, Leonor Arfuch, Sebastián Barros, Paula Biglieri,
Paul Bowman, Cornelia Bruell, Luciana Cadahia, Tamara Caraus,
Gustavo Castagnola, Philipp Casula, Julia Chryssostalis, Simon
Critchley, Lincoln Dahlberg, Daniel de Mendonça, Mark Deven-
ney, Lisa Disch, Torben Bech Dyrberg, Alan Finleyson, Javier

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Introduction

Franzé, Charlotte Fridolfsson, Dilip Gaonkar, Jeremy Gilbert,

Jason Glynos, Allan Dreyer Hansen, Eva Herschinger, Andreas
Hetzel, David Howarth, Giorgos Katsembekis, Seongcheol Kim,
Friederike Landau, Juan Pablo Lichtmajer, Shu-fen Lin, Felicitas
Macgilchrist, James Martin, Tomas Marttila, Samuele Mazzolini,
Aysem Mert, Jean-Claude Monot, Kate Nash, Martin Nonhoff,
Aletta Norval, Martin Oppelt, Vassilios Paipais, Emilia Palonen,
David Payne, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Luisa Ortiz Pérez, Rado
Riha, Drehli Robnik, Nikolai Roskamm, Benjamin Christoph
Seyd, Urs Stäheli, Yannis Stavrakakis, Nora Sternfeld, Jelica
Sumic-Riha, Rahel Süß, Meghan Sutherland, Paulina Tambakaki,
Davide Tarizzo, Mathias Thaler, Lasse Thomassen, Jeremy Valen-
tine, Mathijs van de Sande and Linda Zerilli.

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1 ‘What’s Going on with Being?’: Laclau
and the Return of Political Ontology

Decapitating Hydra: The Ontological Turn

Thinking Antagonism is an exercise in political ontology. It partic-

ipates in the current ‘ontological turn’, i.e. ‘the ubiquitous return
of the question of being in the field of political thought today’
(Bosteels 2011: 42).1 In opposition to the quantitative mainstream
of the social sciences, theorists associated with this turn inquire
into the fundamental ontological presuppositions that inform
political research and theory. The endeavour is not as extravagant
as it may appear. Presuppositions about the nature of social being
are implied by any kind of research – sometimes openly, but most
often silently. Any political interpretation, as William Connolly
convincingly argued, invokes a set of ontological assumptions
about the very nature of the social bond: ‘every interpretation of
political events, no matter how deeply it is sunk in a specific his-
torical context or how high the pile of data upon which it sits,
contains an ontopolitical dimension’ (Connolly 1995: 1). In a
more radical sense, which will be at the centre of our investiga-
tion, social analysis warrants ‘ontopolitical interpretations’, not of
particular social phenomena, but of the nature of social being in
general: of being-qua-being. All ‘ontopolitical interpretations’ can
thus be referred back to a very simple question which, in the lan-
guage of ordinary life, was framed by Gianni Vattimo as follows:
‘what’s going on with Being?’ (Vattimo 2011: 28).
In daring to pose such a question, today’s political ontologies
represent a shift away from the hitherto dominant paradigm of epis-
temology.2 Some would go as far as denouncing epistemology – the

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‘What’s Going on with Being?’

science concerned with the conditions of possibility of true knowl-

edge – as the ‘the Hydra’, as Charles Taylor once put it, ‘whose
serpentine heads wreak havoc throughout the intellectual culture of
modernity – in science, in criticism, in ethics, in political thinking,
almost anywhere you look’ (Taylor 1995: vii). According to Taylor,
it would be a mistake to think ‘that we can get to the bottom of what
knowledge is, without drawing on our never-fully-articulable under-
standing of human life and experience’ (vii–viii). In a similar vein,
Connolly (1995) criticised mainstream social science for seeking a
neutral method which, in actual fact, is not attainable for human,
that is, social and historical beings. Taylor and Connolly are in illus-
trious company. In his Collège de France lecture course published
under the title The Government of Self and Others, Michel Foucault
famously observed that, from Kant’s three Critiques to today’s ana-
lytic philosophy, the mainstream of philosophical inquiry proceeds
as an analytic of truth: a quest for the conditions of possibility of
true knowledge. However, beginning with Kant’s engagement with
the question of Aufklärung and the historical event of the French
Revolution a counter-tendency took root:

This other critical tradition does not pose the question of the condi-
tions of possibility of a true knowledge; it asks the question: What
is present reality? What is the present field of our experiences? What
is the present field of possible experiences? Here it is not a question
of the analytic of truth but involves what could be called an ontol-
ogy of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an
ontology of ourselves. (Foucault 2011: 20–1)

As presented here, ontology serves as an antidote to the domi-

nant paradigm of epistemology. This turn to the ontological was
in fact prepared by Heidegger.3 For it was Heidegger, more than
any other thinker, who initiated a shift from questions regarding
being-qua-understanding to questions regarding being-qua-being.4
This shift is feasible only if the disembodied position of an outer-
worldly calculating mind, entirely detached from the affairs under
analysis, is abandoned. As soon as we start implicating ourselves
in the process of interrogation – by asserting the locatedness of our
own vantage point – we abandon our search for the conditions
of true knowledge and begin interrogating our own conditions.

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Thinking Antagonism

The Foucauldian question ‘What is present reality?’ (Foucault

2011: 20) not only leads to an ‘ontology of the present’, but also
leads, as Foucault adds, to ‘an ontology of ourselves’ (21). Sein
and Dasein, to speak Heideggerese, stand in a relation of revers-
ibility. ‘What’s going on with Being?’ is just another way of asking:
‘What’s going on with us?’
Evidently, the wager in political ontology is that something
political is going on with us. More than that, it will be argued in
this book that the social world is based on political grounds. This
would imply that we will not get by with an ontology of politics,
i.e. a regional ontology of political being (about the nature of social
actors, institutions, functions, etc.). It is thus imperative to termi-
nologically distinguish between political ontologies that refer to the
nature of all things political (for example, the nature of political
institutions, organisations, functions, actions or actors) and ontol-
ogies of the political the scope of which is much broader. In the
latter case, ‘the political’ refers to the nature or constitution of all
things social (including, of course, those things that are convention-
ally labelled as ‘political’). If political ontologies, as defined above,
are by their nature ‘regional ontologies’ – they are concerned with
phenomena typically classified as political (in a broad or narrow
sense of politics) – an ontology of the political, however, would be
concerned with the being of the social world as such, i.e. the politi-
cality of all social being.
The ontology of the political to be proposed in this book places a
bet on the political nature of social being-qua-being. This will be not
only an intellectual bet, but, more than that, a political one in itself.
Our interrogation, therefore, must be conducted in a political mode.
Rather than constituting a quest for true knowledge, untainted by
the political, ontological questioning becomes a way of implicating
ourselves in the field of actuality. It results in an ontology of our-
selves as political beings. And, vice versa, any ontology of ourselves,
given the reversibility of Sein and Dasein, may refer us back to an
ontological questioning of the political. In this sense, thinking, more
than being an ‘existential’ act, is a political one.5 What we need to
envisage, and what this book is about, is a self-implicated form of
thinking in the ontologico-political register.

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‘What’s Going on with Being?’

It is precisely because any attempt at thinking the political

nature of social being remains implicated in the domain of the
political that the typical accusations of epistemologists are so
misplaced. There is absolutely no need to succumb to Haberma-
sian-style blackmailing and the infamous charge of ‘performative
self-contradiction’: How can you know, a staunch epistemolo-
gist might ask, that the nature of all being is political? Are you
not operating yourself, when claiming true knowledge about the
nature of the social world, as a closet epistemologist? And, by
asserting the political nature of all things social, are you not impli-
cating yourself – a social being – in your claim? Hence, are you not
making a political rather than a scientific claim? An unapologetic
answer in the affirmative should be given to charges of this kind.
Of course, political ontology cannot claim exemption from the
political. Once it is granted that the latter overlaps with the realm
of social being in general, nobody can purport to adopt a trans-
political vantage point. Unavoidably, there is always a political
dimension to claims of political ontology. But there is nothing to
be regretted here. Political ontology, as I said, is not a quest for
true knowledge. It is a political endeavour, engaged in politicising
the ways in which we envisage the social world in general. This
is what I will propose to call thinking: implicating oneself in the
matter of one’s thought. The charge of ‘performative contradic-
tion’ should thus be redirected against the epistemologists.6 For
Heidegger, as Lee Braver puts it:
[K]nowing is not basic but ‘founded upon Being-in-the-world’.
Theorizing can only take place on the basis of years of more practi-
cal interactions with equipment and others, making skeptical ques-
tions about their reality a kind of performative contradiction. Our
immersion in them is a condition for the possibility of questioning
their reality; our ability to ask the question contains the answer.
(Braver 2012: 130)

For the same reason of self-implication, criticism from the Left

regarding an alleged danger of depoliticisation is equally mis-
placed. As was suspected by Susan Buck-Morss (2013: 57), the
move from everyday politics to political ontology is a ‘one-way

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street’ never leading back to political practice. While this ver-

dict was delivered ex cathedra and with little argumentation,
others have engaged in a more thorough examination of politi-
cal ontologies, criticising their ‘social weightlessness’ (i.e. an
insensitivity towards social suffering) (McNay 2014) or the
‘negative aura’ conferred upon political processes labelled, by
political ontologists, as ‘merely positivist, sociologist, empiri-
cist, or ontic’ (Bosteels 2011: 68). In most cases, ontologists are
confronted with allegations of excessive abstraction at the cost
of sociological concretion and political engagement. I do not
believe, however, that political ontologies proceed by devaluing
ordinary politics or by ignoring forms of social subordination.
On the contrary, their aim, in the majority of cases, is to rejuve-
nate political practice in order to open up spaces for, precisely,
challenging patterns of subordination. In this spirit, their attack
is not directed against ‘ordinary politics’ per se, but against a
post-conflictual politics that seeks to divest ‘politics’ of any-
thing political. What is more, by redirecting attention to the,
ultimately, conflictual nature of social being-qua-being – that
is, of all things social – an ontology of the political compels us
to develop a comprehensive political perspective on the social.
Not in the sense of assuming that everything is political in terms
of politics, but in the sense that all social affairs are political
in terms of being grounded, to greater or lesser degree, by the
political, that is to say: through instances of conflict, power,
subordination, oppression, exclusion and decision as much as,
of course, resistance, opposition, confrontation, association or
consensus-building. These are all political modalities that struc-
ture our social world; and political ontologies, in their variety,
tend to highlight one modality or another.7 The perspectival
shift towards political ontology, when radicalised into what I
call an ontology of the political, will thus allow to generalise
what feminists, in the 1970s, have diagnosed with regard to the
personal and the private: that what appears unpolitical on the
surface may, in fact, have deeply political roots. Sensitised by
such an ontology, social analysis will be prompted to search for
modes of the political in the most unexpected places.

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‘What’s Going on with Being?’

Politics and the Political

To claim that our interrogation will be conducted in a political

mode is also to say that it must be conducted with a view to the
political rather than politics in a narrow sense. At stake is not
simply, or not only, a form of critique that remains engaged in
‘current affairs’ of political urgency, but one that, beyond the pres-
ent moment, dares to reflect upon the political conditions of pos-
sibility of social being. The key to any ontology of the political,
hence, lies in the differentiation, introduced by numerous authors,
between ‘ordinary’ ontic politics and an ontological notion of the
political (as appertaining to the entire field of the social rather than
a particular field or practice). This differentiation does not imply a
hierarchy where the political would be an elevated term and politi-
cal practice is devalued. There is nothing intrinsically bad about
a politics in the mode of the ‘ordinary’; on the contrary, without
politics it would make no sense to speak about the political. But
without a notion of the political, as differentiated from politics,
political ontology would also be impossible.
Conceptually, the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’
(or la politique and le politique) can be traced back, in the French
context, to Paul Ricœur’s article of 1956, ‘The Political Paradox’, and
forcefully re-emerged in the 1980s when many philosophers – among
them Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Jacob
Rogozinski, Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar – were invited by
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to give lectures at
the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political and discuss
what the initiators referred to as the ‘retreat of the political’ (Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy 1983). From that historical moment on, what
in Post-Foundational Political Thought, my previous monograph on
the intellectual paradigm of left Heideggerianism (Marchart 2007a),
I have called the political difference came to be canonised as a basic
conceptual differentiation in political thought. As the emergence and
genealogy of the political difference, from Schmitt and Arendt to
contemporary French thought, was presented there, I will not renar-
rate the same story. I would still like to emphasise that in the recent
ontological turn in political thought the concepts of ‘politics’ and

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‘the political’ are silently modelled upon the later Heidegger’s notion
of an ontico-ontological difference: the difference between ontic
beings and ontological Being. Metaphysics has always been the quest
for an ontological instance that could serve as a ground for all ‘ordi-
nary’ ontic beings – no matter whether this ground was called logos,
substance, subject or God – without taking into account what Hei-
degger called the ‘grounding question’: the question as to the nature
of this difference as difference. The task of thinking (die Sache des
Denkens), for Heidegger, is to pass to this grounding question and
engage, not with a new metaphysical ground, but with the never-
ending play of differencing between the side of the ontic and the side
of the ontological. As we will constantly return to the ontological
difference (as well as to the task of thinking), I will postpone its fur-
ther discussion. But it is important to understand that the political
difference was not simply mapped onto the Heideggerian ontological
difference. It would be disingenuous to believe that the theoretical
innovation of the political difference was motivated by a desire to
pretentiously imitate philosophical discourse. Quite the contrary is
true: philosophical discourse was effectively politicised. Ontological
and political difference converge as soon as the ontological regis-
ter of being-qua-being is identified with the political and, vice versa,
conventional politics is perceived as simply an ‘ontic’ way of actu-
alising the political. The entire social realm, the realm of being-qua-
being, is thus perceived in the light of the political, which in turn has
to be differentiated from politics.
Such cross-fading between the ontological and the political
registers, which lies at the heart of recent political thought on
the Heideggerian Left, does not appear from nowhere. It attests
to an ontopolitical need.8 My suspicion is that the political dif-
ference – the conceptual differentiation between politics and the
political – emerged out of a historical conjuncture where it was
increasingly realised that neither can our social world be based on
a firm ground or ultimate principle, nor is it entirely without any
ground or principle (as we are not living in a vacuum) – rather,
it is based on what Judith Butler calls ‘contingent foundations’
(Butler 1992). These foundations will always be plural, they will
only be established temporarily, they can be reversed, and they

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have to be established against conflicting foundational attempts

– which is why it makes sense to describe theories that register
the contingent and yet necessary nature of social foundations as
post-foundational rather than simply anti-foundational. ‘Contin-
gency’, as the technical term for the fundamental absence of an
ultimate foundation, does not imply that societies are able to make
do without any foundations, principles or norms. It is only to say
that none of these norms can claim to have super-temporal valid-
ity or would transcend the world of social relations. Every norm,
ground or principle can always be displaced, potentially at least,
by conflicting norms, grounds and principles. It is clear that a con-
ventional notion of politics – as, for instance, a functional social
system among others – would be too narrow to account for this
process of contingent, temporary, conflictual and plural grounding
of all social relations. This explains why the political difference
was introduced. It was felt we would need a broader concept, a
concept of the political, in order to account for the more, indeed,
fundamental function of reinstituting a world whose grounds had
become fungible.
So, the process of grounding cannot be halted even if it is agreed
that all grounds are contingent, contested and temporary. If for
Heidegger the ontological never appears as such, if it always recedes
and still chiasmatically intertwines with the ontic, this is because
the differential play between the ontological (the ‘ground’) and the
ontic (what is grounded) never stops. The ground, for Heidegger,
‘grounds as a-byss’ (Heidegger 1994: 29). Don’t we have to assume
an analogous relation between the political and politics? Isn’t the
political, understood as the grounding or instituting moment of the
social, constantly in search of its ontic actualisation via politics?
Isn’t politics, on the other side, necessarily ‘touched’ by the politi-
cal, without ever fully merging with it (because in the latter case a
firm ground would be reached – the political would be turned into
a metaphysical ‘Ground’ – and the political difference would dis-
solve)? I hope that the heuristic value of what at this preliminary
stage of the argument must appear as abstract speculation can be
convincingly elaborated in the course of our investigation. But it is
easy to anticipate a particular line of criticism. Even those inclined

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to agree on the differential nature of politics and the political may

ask what playing around with abstract concepts can tell us about
social reality.9 Later on I will expand on what was said about the
intrinsic relation between political ontology and the ‘ontology of
ourselves’ and the perspectival shift it engenders with regard to the
ubiquitous conflicts surrounding us in our daily lives. For now I
would like to emphasise that no unbridgeable gap exists between
apparently abstract thought and more empirically oriented politi-
cal theory – which will become clear when we now turn to the
work of Ernesto Laclau and his conception of antagonism.

The Laclauian Legacy

Antagonism, as a name for ‘the political’, is not only the corner-

stone of Laclau’s political ontology (which, as we will see presently,
should be extended into an ontology of the political), it is also the
hidden organising principle behind his ground-breaking theory of
populism, his reworking, with Chantal Mouffe, of the intellectual
tradition of Marxism, and his rearticulation of the Gramscian con-
cept of hegemony within the framework of discourse theory and
rhetoric. By combining the intellectual resources of post-structural-
ism with other philosophical approaches, such as phenomenology,
Laclau opened the way for the development of a post-foundational
ontology of the political. Each one of these mutually interconnected
dimensions of his work constitutes a significant achievement in its
own right. Taken together, they constitute what I would consider
Laclau’s legacy.
The first dimension is, evidently, his theory of populism. His first
book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism,
Populism (Laclau 1977), brought Laclau immediate recognition
as the foremost Marxist theorist of populism. Nearly thirty years
later, his book On Populist Reason (PR) came to huge fame in Latin
America during the time of neo-populist governments in Venezuela,
Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador. On the scholarly level, the later
book grew out of Laclau’s dissatisfaction with mainstream sociologi-
cal perspectives on the phenomenon. These mainstream perspectives
are characterised by what one could describe as their ‘ochlophobia’.

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Populist mobilisation of ‘the people’ is seen as an irrational or devi-

ant phenomenon, an aberration from the normal functioning of poli-
tics. In a bold move, Laclau pushed the theory of populism into the
centre of political reasoning. The role usually assigned to populism
was inverted and populism turned from an aberrant phenomenon
at the margins of the social into the central feature of the political.
Populism, Laclau claimed, was now to be considered ‘the royal road
to understanding something about the ontological constitution of
the political as such’ (PR 67). This is because the antagonistic con-
struction of the political space – the latter’s simplification around the
core antagonism of ‘the people’ against those who ignore popular
demands (the power bloc, ‘the elite’, ‘la casta’) – is not only a feature
of populist mobilisation. Antagonisation, envisaged as the construc-
tion of heteroclite demands into a chain of equivalence vis-à-vis a
‘negative outside’, is, as we will see, the very condition of all political
action. Populism, thus, is not a particular form of politics among
other forms. Populism encapsulates political rationality and, as will
be shown in the course of our investigation, directs our view both
towards the political (in the sense of antagonism) and to a general
logic of politics.
This ‘logic’, for Laclau, comes under the generic name of
hegemony. And here we encounter the second advance pre-
sented by his work. By revisiting the Marxist tradition, Laclau
and Mouffe, in their landmark study Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy of 1985, managed to transform the very presuppositions
of the Marxian problematic. Far from simply refuting Marxism,
they followed a double strategy. On the one side they aimed at
deconstructing the essentialist assumptions of orthodox Marx-
ism: its class reductionism and economic determinism. On the
other side they strengthened and brought to new life Antonio
Gramsci’s category of hegemony, which turned out to be the key
tool for undermining the deterministic assumptions of more tra-
ditional variants of Marxism (see Gramsci 1971). Hegemony,
for Gramsci, is attained as soon as a corporate class, by unit-
ing disparate social forces, has managed to universalise its own
objectives, thus establishing a new common sense or worldview
that transcends the particularity of that corporate class. In such
a hegemonic relation the dominating role of a particular social

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force is naturalised by way of consensus and unforced consent.

Translated by Laclau into the lexicon of the ontological dif-
ference, this means that an ontic being has assumed an onto-
logical role: ‘Certain contents are invested with the function of
representing the absent fullness of the community’ (RFS 121).
In Emancipation(s) (E), a collection of Laclau’s essays that was
published in 1996, hegemony came to denote the general ‘logic’
of politics: a particular actor takes up the role of incarnating the
universality of a given community, a universality that nonetheless
remains unachievable.
But Laclau was not satisfied with a theory of politics. The con-
cept of hegemony also came to denote the way in which, in one or
the other way, all social relations are politically impregnated, if not
instituted. With regard to this instituting function of hegemony,
our conventional notion of politics would be far too narrow. For
this reason, Laclau tends to speak about ‘the political’ when refer-
ring to the way in which the social is instituted and given form by
forces struggling to construct a particular hegemonic formation.
As the political cannot be derived from any underlying reality –
such as, for instance, the economic laws of motion that govern the
relations of production – Laclau tends to insist on the ‘primacy of
the political’ with regard to the social. We will return to Laclau’s
theory of hegemony in more details. May it suffice to mention that
an operation similar to the one observed in the case of populism
is in place: Laclau’s intellectual intervention is aimed at the onto-
logical ground of the social. The theoretical dignity restored to
the categories of populism and of hegemony is an ontological dig-
nity. These categories are not merely ‘ontic’ tools of social analysis
(which they also are), but shed light on the mystery of the very
institution of our social world: the nature of social being eo ipso.
Thirdly, this profound transformation of the Marxist prob-
lematic emerged from Laclau’s serious engagement with post-
structuralist and Heideggerian thought, which was applied to the
field of politics and further developed into a qualitative method
of political discourse analysis. In Hegemony and Socialist Strat-
egy, deconstruction and Lacanianism were, for the first time in
social theory, extensively employed as tools for political analysis.

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In his later work Laclau would continue to reconceptualise many

traditional notions of political thought from a post-structuralist
vantage point, including the concepts of power, order, represen-
tation, universality/particularity, community, ideology, eman-
cipation and, of course, the categories of politics, the political,
society and the social. For Laclau, however, post-structuralism
never was an article of faith. It was a resource that could provide
theoretical tools as much as Gramscianism or phenomenology
could. It was thus necessary to non-dogmatically combine these
tools into conceptual ‘war machines’, as Deleuze would have put
it. Laclau, quite similar to Deleuze, was not invested in theoris-
ing by resentment, i.e. criticising someone else’s theory for the
sake of indulging in the narcissism of minor differences, or of
triumphing in an intellectual competition. Whenever he appro-
priated and reassembled conceptual tools of different origins,
and whenever he criticised other theorists, it was dictated by
the subject under discussion. As Laclau made clear, for instance,
deconstruction – in order to be of use for political analysis – is
in need of being complemented by a theory of hegemony. If the
deconstructive operation consists in laying open the moment of
ultimate undecidability inherent to any structure, hegemony pro-
vides us with a theory of the decision taken on such undecidable
terrain (E 66–83).
Hence, with Laclau’s work, post-structuralism encountered a
decisively political turn. But again, I would like to direct attention
to the fact that there was an ontic and an ontological component to
this displacement. On the one hand, integrating post-structuralism
into hegemony theory allowed Laclau to develop a discourse analyt-
ical framework that made it possible to engage in concrete projects
of political analysis – as demonstrated by many empirical studies
that came out of the Essex School (for example, Norval 1996; How-
arth et al. 2000; Stavrakakis 2004; Howarth and Torfing 2005;
Marchart 2013b; Stavrakakis 2014). On the other hand, the entire
project of discourse analysis was premised upon an ‘ontological’
notion of discursivity – a notion that went far beyond a linguistic
concept. The very being of the social world is, for Laclau, discursive.
Not in the sense of speech or writing, of course, but in the sense of

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being ordered (in whatever medium, ‘material’ institutions included)

along the two axes of equivalence and difference, which involves a
notion of antagonism. Despite heavy criticism Laclau never aban-
doned this position. The title of his last, posthumous book, The
Rhetorical Foundations of Society, points towards this ontological
dimension of discursivity. The goal of rhetoric, in Laclau’s view, is
not simply to describe linguistic tropes or figures of speech; it is to
describe the way in which social identity is constructed. Rhetoric is
a way to capture the grounding principles of the social.

Laclau’s Concept of Antagonism

Which leads me to Laclau’s fourth and most decisive theoreti-

cal contribution: his conception of antagonism. The theory of
antagonism was developed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(HSS 93–148) and later synthesised by Laclau in New Reflections
(NR 3–85) and in a series of articles (E 36–46; RFS 101–25).
Let us see what, in a nutshell, the argument is. According to
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of the structuralist school of
linguistics and theoretical starting point for Laclau, the mean-
ing of a given sign does not follow from the latter’s relation to
a referent outside language. Meaning emerges from within lan-
guage; and language is conceived as a system of differences.10 For
meaning effects to arise, a minimal degree of systematisation is
necessary, as otherwise differences would disperse and no coher-
ent meaning effect could arise. We would be living in a psychotic
universe. But how to bring about systematisation? Laclau argues
that a system demands a limit, and a limit demands negation. For
differences to assume a certain degree of systematicity, they must
be brought into a relation of equivalence, which can only be sta-
bilised vis-à-vis a common outside that cannot simply be another
difference (as in this case it would not constitute a true outside
but would be internal to a system of differences). The outside
must be of a radically different nature: different, that is, from all
internal differences. And this it can only be as a non-differential
instance of radical negativity – named antagonism by Laclau:

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[I]f the systematicity of the system is a direct result of the exclusionary

limit, it is only that exclusion that grounds the system as such. [. . .]
The condition, of course, for this operation to be possible is that what
is beyond the frontier of exclusion is reduced to pure negativity – that
is to the pure threat that what is beyond poses to the system (consti-
tuting it that way). (E 38)

Negating the differential nature of a given system is the very pre-

condition for its systematicity and, thus, for meaning to arise. Let
us take the simplistic example of an alliance of political forces all of
which have their own differential demands of, for instance, afford-
able housing, gender equality or the protection of the environment.
There is no common ground intrinsic to all these demands. They
are of an entirely differential nature. Every demand, before it enters
a process of systematisation, constitutes a positive difference with
a particular content. If a chain of equivalence is to be established,
simply adding another positive difference would not do the trick.
Their equivalence can only be established if a negative outside –
defined as the political ‘elite’, ‘neoliberalism’ or the like – comes
to serve as a common denominator. Not in the sense of a positive
reference point, but as something that, in an entirely negative way,
threatens the very positivity of every difference from outside. All
forces in this alliance feel that their respective identity is blocked
by an outside threat which, at the same time, serves as a negative
reference point to their chain of equivalence. Hence, the only thing
they have in common is something entirely negative.
Again, and as Laclau repeatedly insists, this logic – which
describes the basic functioning of signification – is not restricted
to political meaning nor is it restricted to linguistic meaning in a
narrow sense. In fact, it covers all signifying systems, including, for
instance, social and cultural ones such as the ‘language’ of fashion
as described by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1990). All social order, to
the extent that it is symbolically structured (and if it is not, it is not
an order), is oriented to some degree towards such a radical out-
side. Every effect of meaning relies, if only to a minimal degree, on
some form of antagonisation. This is because signification, as was
established above, is in need of a certain degree of systematicity; and
every system – by virtue of being one – is in need of a limit and, thus,

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a constitutive outside. From here we have to conclude: if antago-

nism is our name for the political, and if antagonism is necessary for
the temporary stabilisation of meaning as such, then all meaning is,
at its root, political.
I will repeatedly return to this point as it lies at the basis of my
argument for an ontology of the political, but let me just add that
we should not be fooled by what Stuart Hall once called the ‘lin-
guistic metaphor’ (Hall 1996b: 271) in social theory. No doubt,
the linguistic turn in which Laclau’s approach was still very much
rooted has exhausted itself and we may ask how, given the recent
turn towards materialist and realist ontologies, the passage from
Laclau’s theory of meaning to an ontological kind of theorising
can be envisaged. How to move beyond the linguistic turn without
pretending, naïvely so, to have found immediate access to ‘real-
ity’? I consider this to be a pseudo problem. Laclau’s arguments
retain their validity when transposed from the linguistic field
to the field of a general ontology. Laclau himself was very clear
about this: hegemonic articulation does not take place ‘just at the
level of words and images: it is also sedimented in practices and
institutions’. Discourse, for that matter, ‘is never merely a verbal
operation but is embedded in material practices which can acquire
institutional fixity’ (PR 106). Hegemony is very much ingrained
into the ‘matter’ of our social world.
Let me return to what is a second, complementary side to the
institutive function of antagonism. As a threatening outside to a
given order, antagonism institutes that order, but also prevents it
from totalising itself. Antagonism grounds a given system of differ-
ences only by simultaneously undermining the differential nature
of all the elements of the system, by subverting their ‘positive’ con-
tent and making them interchangeable:

[A]ntagonism and exclusion are constitutive of all identity. Without

the limits through which a (non-dialectical) negativity is constructed,
we would have an indefinite dispersion of differences whose absence
of systematic limits would make any differential identity impossible.
But this very function of constituting differential identities through
antagonistic limits is what, at the same time, destabilizes and sub-
verts those differences, it makes them all equivalent to each other,

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interchangeable with each other as far as the limit is concerned. [. . .]

The system is what is required for the differential identities to be
constituted, but the only thing – exclusion – which can constitute the
system and thus makes possible those identities, is also what subverts
them. (E 52–3)

The term ‘antagonism’ denotes this double-sided moment: the

moment of original institution as well as the moment of original
destitution of social order. It has an ontological – or, as Derrida
(1994) would have said, ‘hauntological’ – character.11 I suggest
that it is here, in his political ontology, where Laclau’s decisive
achievement has to be located. Society is instituted politically,
and being instituted politically means being instituted through
the labour of the negative, i.e. antagonism. Since ontology is the
science of being-qua-being, we can designate this assertion as
ontological in the sense of constituting a claim about the antago-
nistic nature of social being as such, not merely about the nature
of political affairs in the narrow sense of politics as a particu-
lar sphere or form of action. If taken seriously, this ontology
will lead to a dramatic change in perspective. The social world
starts to appear in a strongly political light. As a consequence,
Laclau’s theory of antagonism can redirect our attention to the
fundamentally contested, conflictual and dislocated nature of all
things social.
All other dimensions of Laclau’s thought, I submit, coalesce
around this ontological notion of the political. Take the case
of populism. Why does populism constitute the ‘royal road’ to
understanding the political? Because populism is not simply a
form of politics among others. In encapsulating political ratio-
nality tout court, it enables us to catch a glimpse of the nature of
the political. Populism is the clearest expression of the logic of
antagonism, which, in turn, is the defining feature of the political.
Similarly, the radical implications of Laclau’s theory of significa-
tion are largely ignored. If they were fully accepted, however, we
would have to recognise that the being of institutions, organisa-
tions, subjectivities and the like is constructed, linguistically or
not, through the play between difference and equivalence, medi-
ated by antagonism.

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Towards an Ontology of the Political

Admittedly, such a radical political ontology is hard to digest and,

therefore, tends to encounter resistance and denial. Laclau himself
shrank back from the dramatic consequences of his thought. While
knowing that the ontological framing of the concepts of antago-
nism and the political had the potential of shedding light on the
institution of our social world and on the nature of social being eo
ipso, he retreated from the idea that antagonism is of ontological
primacy by introducing a further notion: dislocation (NR 39–51).
‘Dislocation’ – roughly equivalent to the Lacanian Real as that
which disturbs the laws of the Symbolic (of language or society),
but, just like the Lacanian Real, without political resonance – is
supposed to be located on an even deeper ontological level. The
ontological value of antagonism was thus reduced to a particular
discursive response to a more prior dislocation. It was reduced to
a political way of constructing a given source of dislocation as a
political ‘enemy’. Laclau described his shift from antagonism to
dislocation as follows:

When Chantal Mouffe and I wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,

we were still arguing that the moment of the dislocation of social
relations, the moment which constitutes the limit of the objectivity
of social relations is given by antagonism. Later on I came to think
that this was not enough because constructing a social dislocation –
an antagonism – is already a discursive response. You construct the
Other who dislocates your identity as an enemy, but there are alterna-
tive forms. For instance, people can say that this is the expression of
the wrath of God, that this is an expression of our sins and we have
to prepare for the day of atonement. So, there is already a discursive
organization in constructing somebody as an enemy which involves
a whole technology of power in the mobilization of the oppressed.
That is why in New Reflections I have insisted on the primary char-
acter of dislocation rather than antagonism. (Laclau 1999: 137)

I was never convinced by this shift to dislocation as something more

primary than the political. Laclau had retreated from the ‘radical
breakthrough’ achieved with his initial conception of antagonism
in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Now, antagonism was given

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a narrow political meaning: the construction of an enemy. How-

ever, if my reading of Laclau’s general theory of signification is
correct, then antagonism is involved in the construction of every
meaning system, not only of political discourses that construct
their outside as ‘the enemy’. Indeed, according to Laclau’s theory
of signification, if taken seriously, antagonism must be made the
ultimate source of social dislocation, as every system is not only
instituted, but will also be destituted by a threatening outside. But,
even if it is conceded that there can be non-social sources of dis-
location – such as natural catastrophes – their effects are always
immediately inscribed into social or political frames of reference
which, indeed, involve ‘a whole technology of power’. Disloca-
tion, no matter where it issues from, always occurs within a prior
horizon of being: the social. Examples given by Laclau for seem-
ingly non-antagonistic social practices prove to be far from being
not political. To construct, for instance, a volcanic eruption or an
earthquake as an expression of our sins and the wrath of God may
be different from attributing it to a political enemy, but it does
involve a technology of power, the Catholic Church for instance,
which is politically instituted. At no point one can experience a
dislocation that is not immediately reframed via the instance of
antagonism. Whatever occurs in our social world, it has to pass
through the medium of antagonism.
I would therefore resist attempts to reduce antagonism to a
particular sub-species of non-political phenomena.12 But even if
we return to the model of signification elaborated in Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, what I propose to call an ontology of the
political should not be conflated with this model. What Laclau
seeks to explain is a political logic – or should we say: a politi-
cal onto-logic – understood as a theory of the symbolic laws of
difference and equivalence, of metaphor and metonymy, of the
particular and the universal.13 Indeed, the logic is premised on
antagonism as a necessary function of an outside threat, but there
is little engagement with the question of antagonism per se. This
‘logic’, by virtue of being a logic, does not allow to think antago-
nism. In fact, the split between his political ontology (or onto-
logic) and what remains a merely implicit ontology of the political
pervades Laclau’s entire work. It may appear negligible at first

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sight. But the picture is blurred by Laclau himself who employs

the same term – ‘the political’ – for both the ‘logic’ of hegemony
and the instituting/destituting ‘event’ of antagonism and radical
negativity, or, in Lacanian parlance, for both the laws of the Sym-
bolic and a political ontology of the Real. The latter constitutes
a ‘hauntological’ instance, a purely negative outside of the social,
which is certainly necessary for establishing any symbolic order,
but should not be conflated with a particular chain of equiva-
lence established in a particular ‘ontic’ struggle.14 In Heideggerian
terms: the play between ground and abyss, through which antag-
onism is unconcealed, is located beyond the functioning of any
determinable ‘logics’.15 The play between ground and abyss is not
a hegemonic ‘operation’ (RFS 121), as it is described by Laclau;
it is the temporal unfolding of being-as-difference. And the only
equivalent of this Heideggerian notion can be found, within hege-
mony theory, in the very instance of negativity inscribed into the
play of political difference. To claim, along Heideggerian lines,
that antagonism ‘grounds as a-byss’, means saying that the social
can only be grounded in the absence of a metaphysical founda-
tion. And it is this absence, supplemented by antagonistic strug-
gles for refoundation, that needs to be made a matter of thought.
Without doubt Laclau, as a post-foundationalist, would have
agreed on the abyssal nature of any ground.16 After all, it was his
firm theoretical conviction that social identities are instituted, and
undermined, by their constitutive outside. What I wanted to point
out, though, was that his onto-logics of hegemonic politics does
not strictly coincide with an ontology of the political. The logics
of equivalence and difference, the empty signifier, the rhetorical
figures of metaphor, metonymy or catachresis – all these techni-
cal categories to be found in Laclau’s work are premised on, but
not equivalent to a radical moment of negativity which makes
itself felt in the differential play between the ontological and the
ontic, the political and politics. Let us therefore recapitulate what
differentiates the Laclauian project from our attempt at thinking
antagonism: it is the fine line between these two kinds of ontology
– one comprising the symbolic logic of equivalence and difference
according to which all social order is structured, the other engaging
with the very instance of antagonism presupposed by the former.

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The Stakes Involved in Thinking Antagonism

I am well aware that debating problems of ontology will not nec-

essarily be considered an affair of political urgency and militant
engagement. But Laclau’s life, in fact, attests to the contrary. It
attests to what is called in this investigation a self-implicated form
of thinking: a way of thinking the political on political terms, i.e.
politically. Evidently, political thought – to the extent to which
it is to be considered a political practice in itself – cannot take
place exclusively within the academic discipline of philosophy.
It will have to be practised beyond philosophy. If topographical
metaphors are allowed, we could say that thinking is both ‘above’
and ‘beneath’ philosophy as an academic discipline. It is ‘above’,
because it cannot be subordinated to the procedures of academic
philosophy, let alone ‘objective science’, without producing anom-
alies. By running against what is incommensurable to thought, i.e.
antagonism, thinking exceeds philosophy. And it is ‘beneath’ phi-
losophy, because at the same time thinking assumes the status of a
political intervention: if the political is supposed to be thought in
a political way, then the aim of thinking is to politicise philosophy
and academic life.
Laclau himself may serve as an exemplum. Laclau, it seems, did
not conceive of himself as a philosopher and remained silent with
regard to the status of his theory (there is no Laclauian discours
de la méthode) or the question of thinking. On one of the rare
occasions when he did speak about the disciplinary affiliation of
his theory, he expressed a certain scepticism with regard to ‘politi-
cal philosophy’, a label that ‘would assume the unity of an object
of reflection, which is precisely what is in question’ (NR 69); and
once he remarked that he was writing ‘as a political theorist rather
than a philosopher in the strict sense of the term’ (Laclau 1996b:
47). We can thus assume that Laclau sought to differentiate his
own project – which is exclusively concerned with questions of
politics and political theory – from the practice of doing philoso-
phy in any disciplinary sense. His reluctance to present himself
as a philosopher, let alone a political philosopher, might surprise
given frequent references to Heidegger, Husserl, Gadamer and the
later Wittgenstein. But Laclau, indeed, is not a philosopher in the

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‘strict sense of the term’ for a very clear reason: his thinking passes
through the realm of politics. In terms of practical experience it
is Laclau’s involvement with Argentinian populism and with the
New Social Movements of the 1970s and 1980s that constitutes
the background of his thinking:

That’s the reason why I didn’t have to wait to read post-structuralist

texts to understand what a ‘hinge’, ‘hymen’, ‘floating signifier’ or the
‘metaphysics of presence’ were: I’d already learnt this through my
practical experience as a political activist in Buenos Aires. So when
today I read Of Grammatology, S/Z, or the Écrits of Lacan, the
examples which always spring to mind are not from philosophical
or literary texts; they are from a discussion in an Argentinian trade
union, a clash of opposing slogans at a demonstration, or a debate
during a party congress. (NR 200)

It was the political experience of debates and demonstrations that

taught Laclau his ‘first lesson in hegemony’ (NR 200). Antonio
Gramsci’s work later provided him with the means to translate
this experience into a coherent framework of political theory and
analysis – which, in turn, served as a theoretical base for his sub-
sequent engagement in a project of radical and plural democracy
(in HSS 149–94) and his public support for the ‘pink wave’ of
Latin American left-wing populism and the Kirchner governments.
Unsurprisingly, Laclau held that the separation between political
theory and political practice ‘is largely an artificial operation’ since
‘theoretico-political categories do not only exist in books but are
also part of discourses actually informing institutions and social
operations’ (Laclau 1994: 2). Hence, it is important to notice that
for Laclau, contrary to what some of his critics claim when they
accuse him of formalism or excessive abstraction, the practice of
theorising is far from being disconnected from practical politics.
On the contrary, Laclau’s practice brings together academic learn-
ing and political militancy.
In fact, this ‘identity of the opposites’ is what characterises
Laclau’s thought more than anything else (I will return to this
point in the Conclusion). Yet, make no mistake, this is not to
say that Laclau would be carried away with a political mission.
Thinking evaporates when entirely merged with politics. Rather

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than following the outworn model of the ‘engaged intellectual’,

Laclau in his own involvement with politics remained, at the
bottom of his heart, a political militant rather than a university
professor who would make his opinions publicly known from
time to time. Conversely, although his theoretical endeavour was
clearly motivated by political concerns, it stood on its own and
was at the same time detached from concerns of political urgency.
While his aim, on the theoretical plane, was to develop a coher-
ent and systematic theory – what I have described as his political
‘onto-logic’ – it is also clear that this theory sprang from politi-
cal intuitions. To generalise the point: thinking, on the one hand,
means to implicate oneself in the force-field of a social world
criss-crossed by antagonisms; and, on the other hand, it means
to follow, as consistently as possible, a theoretical path leading to
the point where philosophical certainties collapse.
Hence, practical stakes are involved in a post-foundational
ontology of the political. At stake is the very way in which the
social world is imagined – practically as much as theoretically.
Do we consider our world to be built on irrevocable principles,
necessary functional processes, rational calculations of interest,
prophetic tasks, holy books, anthropological constants, genetic
predispositions, economic laws – or, do we think of our world as
being built on contingent political acts of institution, which must
always be renewed, can be constantly questioned and are there-
fore essentially contested? Evidently, our answer will have prac-
tical implications. The world is full of fundamentalist reactions
to the absence of first principles and final grounds – a poten-
tially frustrating absence that is oftentimes greeted with resent-
ment and aggression. As much as epistemic foundationalism is a
defence reaction against the absence of a final ground of knowl-
edge, political fundamentalism is a defence reaction against the
absence of a final ground of being, against what we have named
antagonism: the contingent as much as conflictual nature of all
social facts. Foundationalists as well as fundamentalists seek to
ignore, deny or disavow the conflicts and contingencies that con-
stitute the very ‘matter’ of our world. To think antagonism is to
remain attentive, not only to moments of political upheaval and
social crisis, but also to the subcutaneous restlessness of social

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life, the unevenness of social relations, the micro-conflicts that

incessantly unfold around us. The ontology of the political, as
defended in this book, is an attempt at giving expression, in theo-
retical terms, to the politicality of social life. It has nothing to
do with the outmoded idea of ontology as the science of a stable
ground of being. Antagonism is a name for the essentially unsta-
ble and disputed nature of the social. It names, in Heideggerian
vocabulary, an abyss that only finds a transitory form of presence
in the interplay between a ground and what is grounded.

Plan of the Book

The following chapters, all of which take as a starting point the

notion of antagonism, have as their aim to expand – in a variety of
ways and fields of inquiry – on Laclau’s ‘primacy of the political’
thesis, i.e. the idea of an ontological primacy of the political vis-à-
vis the social. It is claimed, by radicalising Laclau’s central intuition,
that antagonism – perhaps the only truly political name of ‘the polit-
ical’ – assumes the function of a groundless ground of social being.
If this is the case, antagonism has to be allocated its rightful place
as the key concept of social and political thought. As Slavoj Žižek
clearly perceived after the publication of Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, the real achievement of the book resides in the concept of
antagonism as a tool for social analysis, yet this breakthrough was
‘of such a novelty that it was usually not even perceived in most
responses to Hegemony’ (Žižek 1990: 249). It is fair to say that,
at that time, it may not have been perceived by Laclau and Mouffe
themselves. And even today, as the Laclauian project is much better
known and understood than in 1985, the immense importance of
the concept of antagonism is still not fully realised within the field
of social theory. I would not want to speculate as to the deeper
reasons for such neglect; but as Žižek recognised, the concept of
antagonism points to a ‘traumatic impossibility’ at the centre of the
social, a ‘fissure which cannot be symbolized’ (249) – and the social
sciences, given their deep-seated objectivism, are hardly prepared to
cope with an ontology of social trauma. Thinking Antagonism is a
response to that traumatic impossibility. The chapters that follow

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are meant to illustrate the philosophical as well as political fecun-

dity of that response.
Now, the reference to ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ remains a
game of empty phrases as long as we do not succeed in fleshing
out the political difference in a convincing fashion. Therefore, an
ontological account of the political-qua-antagonism will be devel-
oped first (Part I) and, subsequently, we will attend to an ‘ontic’
theory of politics compatible with this ontology (Part II), followed
by an ‘application’ of our theory of politics to the question of
thinking (Part III).
Chapter 2 will provide the reader with a historical genealogy
of the concept of antagonism from the Kantian antinomies via
the Hegelian labour of the negative and the Marxian antagonism
between means and relations of production to the twentieth-century
fusion of Hegel and Marx with Heidegger. While Laclau’s theory of
antagonism is reminiscent of the Marxian bet on the class struggle at
the ground of social being, a close examination reveals that Marx’s
notion of ‘antagonism’ is not reducible to the struggle between
classes (it is Marx’s term for the very incommensurability between
the forces and the relations of production which, by virtue of being
a radical ontological discrepancy, serves as the actual motor of
history). Antagonism, I will suggest, denotes an insurmountable
blockage of society, an instance of radical negativity that simulta-
neously forces and precludes the closure of social differences into
a totality. There is room for concrete conflicts – antagonisms in
the plural – only because of a primary ontological instability that
prevents society from coinciding with itself, thus provoking never-
ending conflict around partial closure and foundation. Antagonism,
hence, is not to be confused with ontic struggles.
For the same reason, a Marxist notion of conflictuality has noth-
ing to do with a ‘war-like’ conception of politics. The point is clari-
fied in Chapter 3 by way of a comparison between the ontology of
antagonism and three polemological alternatives that employ meta-
phors of warfare to portray an all-pervasive struggle: (a) Michel
Foucault’s genealogical alternative where an eternal ‘battle’ assumes
ontological value; (b) the eristic alternative of Bernard Stiegler, for
whom the Greek agon, as rule-governed competition, is preferable
to antagonism; and (c) the stasiological alternative of Nicole Loraux,

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Thinking Antagonism

who develops a theory of stasis (or civil war) as the constitutive/

destitutive principle of the polis. A warning will be issued against
polemological ontologies and their dualistic interpretation of ‘strug-
gle’. The social, it was said, is not defined by struggles between
objectively given parties, but by a fundamental blockade named
antagonism. It would thus be misguided to imagine the social
world either in terms of a single unity (i.e. society as a self-sufficient
totality) or in terms of a warring duality. Society should rather be
conceived, in Adorno’s words, as an ‘antagonistic totality’, or, as
proposed by Laclau, in terms of ‘failed unicity’.
While the chapters of Part I are concerned with the ontological
dimension of the political, the chapters of Part II turn around poli-
tics (and the social world of institutions and identities) as the ontic
side of the political difference. What is clear, is that the notion of
antagonism does not simply refer to rare moments of revolution-
ary rupture when, in Chairman Mao’s words, One divides into
Two. Antagonism, as referring to social being-qua-being, is deeply
ingrained in the finest capillaries of everyday life. Its micrological
effects, as demonstrated in Chapter 4, can be experienced every-
where: in the workplace, in the family, in our interactions with
individuals and institutions. There is no utopia unscathed by rela-
tions of subordination and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, or
the unequal distribution of economic and symbolic capital. This is
what Laclau calls the unevenness of the social. The cause of this
unevenness is, in the last instance, political – it is the political.
Every single social asymmetry can be traced back to a moment
of political institution in which historically available alternatives
were initially suppressed and then forgotten. But, to coin a phrase,
where there is power, there is resistance. While total inclusion is
impossible, and lines of exclusion will always be encountered, it is
contestable where these lines run.17 There would simply be no need
for defence if there were no attacks. Ergo: politics is ineradicable.
While the ontology of the political has effects on our notion
of even the most minor, humble and private acts – which, it will
be argued, are an expression of the political, but the political
in another ‘mode’: the mode of the social – the fashionable title
‘micro-politics’ would be a misnomer. What can reasonably called
‘politics’ refers us to those moments in which conflicts are fought

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‘What’s Going on with Being?’

out collectively and in the open (not in hidden, subcutaneous and

individual ways). Politics, it will be argued, reveals antagonism in
the form of protestation. To sustain this hypothesis, Laclau’s per-
haps most famous contribution to political thought – his theory
of populism – will be discussed and contrasted with Birmingham
Cultural Studies in Chapter 5. The claim will be defended that all
politics is protest politics – the reason being that political articula-
tion, as Laclau has shown, consists on the most elementary level
in the construction of a chain of equivalence between different
political demands (the demand, for Laclau, is the minimal unit
of politics) vis-à-vis a radically negative outside force serving as a
common denominator. To raise a demand, though, is to protest. It
is to demonstrate the contingent nature of the given, the fact that
things could be different.18 Ergo: politics, at the moment of incep-
tion, equals protestation.
In Chapter 6 we will continue our voyage to the ‘zero point’
of politics. What I call ‘minimal politics’ is an attempt at reducing
political action to its minimal conditions. What are the conditions
to be met in order for us to reasonably speak about politics? The
notion of minimal politics is directed both against defenders of
‘micro-politics’ (which in our view is not politics) and the tradi-
tional idea of ‘grand politics’, i.e. the politics of ‘grand’ historical
actors (great individuals, parties, classes, peoples). Minimal poli-
tics, on the other hand, is ‘macro-politics’, but it is ‘macro-politics’
to a, perhaps, minimal degree. The conditions we will determine:
collectivity (all politics is collective), organisation (all politics is
organised), strategy (politics has to overcome obstacles and must
therefore proceed strategically), conflictuality (politics will unfold
along particular lines of conflict), partisanship (political actors will
have to position themselves on one or the other side of such a
line of conflict) and ‘becoming-major’ (politics is geared towards
constructing a symbolic majority) – all these conditions must be
met, if only to the most minimal degree. The argument is aimed
at establishing a realist, practicable and entirely un-heroic idea of
politics that would still be compatible with an ontology of the
political. Even the smallest collective, I propose, can act politically
if it acts in a somewhat organised, strategic, conflictual and parti-
san way with a view to becoming hegemonic.

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After having navigated through both the ontological and the

ontic side of the political difference, the chapters of Part III will
be concerned with the question of ‘thinking’. Based on our previ-
ous observation that philosophy and politics are inseparably inter-
twined in Laclau’s work, what we call thinking, far from being an
exclusively academic exercise, should be envisaged as a practice of
reflective intervention by which politics is folded back onto philo-
sophical terrain. As will be explained in Chapter 7, thinking, by
politically implicating the thinker in what is to be thought, to a
large part exceeds the metaphysical tradition of the vita contem-
plativa (as much as it exceeds, of course, current philosophising in
the disciplinary academic sense). The task of thinking is to bend
conflict into philosophy in order to reactivate the doxa, the canon
and institutional procedures of the academy and to make visible
their contested and contingent nature – as will be exemplified with
Antonio Negri’s reading of Descartes and Étienne Balibar’s reading
of Spinoza. The seemingly outdated discipline of ‘ontology’ may
thus be rejuvenated as a placeholder for the political within the
field of philosophy.
In Chapter 8 the necessity of bringing together Hegel and Hei-
degger, radical negativity and ontological difference is once more
underlined. But an ‘activist turn’ is proposed with regard to the
notion of being. As Reiner Schürmann reminded us: being, for
Heidegger, is acting – but it is a rather passive form of acting. It
is only with a Hegelian notion of radical negativity that political
acting can be defined along more activist lines as the negation of
the given. As a consequence, thinking, if it is to be political, must
consist in the negation of the given (the doxa, the canon, the pro-
cedures). Not in a nihilistic sense, however. By negating the given,
thinking, at the same time, means affirming the politicality of the
world. Thinking, in this regard, is affirmative. It is a way of occu-
pying the world in the mode of politics by actively engaging with
conflict and contingency. Thinking antagonism, in other words, is
an attempt at activating antagonism. Our ontology of the political
will turn out to be based on a politics of ontology.

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Part I
Thinking the Political

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5816_Marchart.indd 36 28/06/18 4:16 PM
2 Marx on the Beach: An Intellectual
History of Antagonism

‘The Final Law of Being’

In August 1880 Karl Marx received a visitor in Ramsgate, the Eng-

lish seaside resort where Marx and his family spent their summer
vacation: John Swinton, a reporter for the New York based jour-
nal The Sun. Surprisingly, in the article where Swinton presents his
account of the meeting he has little to say about political issues.
Perhaps he was all too overawed and humbled by his meeting
with the famous revolutionary. Instead, Swinton reports impres-
sions from Marx’s family life in the form of a domestic tale. A key
moment in this narrative is his depiction of a family picnic on the
beach and of the events that followed. As the evening dawned,
the male members of the Marx family went on a promenade walk
with their visitor. After an hour of chatting Swinton worked up
the courage to pose a question which, he thought, could only be
answered by a ‘sage’ like Marx – a question regarding the very
ground of being:

Over the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and the ages,
over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind
one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would
seek answer from this sage. Going down to the depth of language, and
rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I inter-
rogated the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words, ‘What
is?’ And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment
while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude
upon the beach. ‘What is?’ I had inquired, to which, in deep and solemn
tone, he replied: ‘Struggle!’ (Marx [1880] 1985: 443)

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Thinking Antagonism

This, of course, is an entirely apocryphal Marx. We do not know

with certainty whether Marx, on this summer evening in 1880,
responded to the inquiry regarding the ground of being with
the word ‘Struggle!’. Nonetheless, the Swinton text is remark-
able. It draws its importance from indicating to us the shape of
a Marxian ontology, that is a Marxist theory of being-as-being
(rather than the conventional Marxist anthropology of being-as-
labour). In all likelihood Swinton knew about the importance
of his report. The entire narrative of the article is clearly geared
towards the ontological question. The ultimate target point of
Swinton’s superficial interview with Marx (whose replies are
only reported indirectly) and the picturesque portrayal of his
picnic with the Marx family is the only word by Marx that is
relayed to us as a direct quote: ‘Struggle!’. It brings the text to a
close. Struggle, the ‘final law of being’, remains virtually the final
word in this curious report – it could well be Marx’s final word
on ontology.
This single word, possibly uttered at the seaside of an English
resort, confronts us with a fissure or seam where the most extreme
margin of the Marxian œuvre – a single apocryphal word – is
folded back onto its centre. The marginalia provides us with a
glimpse of the conflictual ontology at the heart of Marxism. In
the eyes of a Marxist (a Marxist of the ‘Ramsgate School’, as it
were), all social being is determined by class struggle. The onto-
logical character of class struggle is well illustrated by Swinton.
In his idyllic scene our view glides over a landscape with children
playing and adults strolling along the shore. This is certainly not a
scene of smoking chimneys and workers’ demonstrations. If class
struggle defines all social being, then it occurs not only in the form
of labour strikes and barricade fighting. It also occurs in the –
apparently – most idyllic situations of social life. There is no place
in society untouched by class struggle – neither the parliament nor
the bathing beach, neither the factory nor the museum, neither the
sweatshop nor the university. Whoever looks at a painting through
the filter of the conflictual ontology of Marxism sees class strug-
gle. Whoever listens to news on the radio listens to class struggle.
Whoever visits a university lecture course pays a visit to the

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Marx on the Beach

class struggle. Ramblers on the shore promenade class struggle.

Children on the beach play class struggle.
For those who do not want to listen and do not want to see,
such a claim is absurd. But it is just a realistic picture of the social.
The studies of Pierre Bourdieu and his school, for instance, prove
beyond doubt that the distribution of economic, but also of sym-
bolic and cultural capital, contributes to reproducing class divi-
sions – and these divisions are deeply inscribed into every individual
in the form of habitus, bodily hexis, and colouring of speech. It
may well be that the lines of class division appear more fluid and
less obvious today than they did in the nineteenth century but this
does not mean that class struggle has come to a standstill. From
a Marxist perspective not only the contestation of social divi-
sions but even their reproduction is class struggle. Subcutaneous
forms of class struggle contribute to reproducing the conditions
of exploitation as much as the distribution of symbolic capital.
Society reproduces itself in and through class struggle. This is the
Marxist wager formulated in the Communist Manifesto where
Marx and Engels speak about a hidden civil war raging within
society. If their claim is taken seriously, we have to accept that
struggles rage even when everything appears quiet and peaceful,
as, from a Marxist perspective, the denial of class struggle is very
much part of class struggle.
There is one aspect of this account, however, that should
make us pause. The answer reported was not class struggle –
it was struggle. Why has ‘class’ disappeared? Did Marx, in a
weak moment after a bottle of wine, give in to the temptation of
mythologising class struggle into a natural law, a Heraclitean war
at the heart of all things? Did Swinton suppress ‘class’ because
it sounded too radical? Or, perhaps, it was a simple misread-
ing of Marx along the lines of Social Darwinism?1 Whatever the
answer is, freed from the determinate attribute of ‘class’, struggle
assumes an even more important role. Provided it is located at
the level of the very being of society (and not the being of nature),
the marginalia may guide us to the core not only of the Marxist
problematic, but also of the problematic of a post-foundational
theory of the political.

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The Post-Marxist Wager: Laclau’s Theoretical Revolution

Indeed, a post-foundational reconstruction of Marxism cannot

take as a starting point what generations of orthodox Marxists
have presented as the imaginary centre of Marx’s œuvre – the eco-
nomic theory proposed in Capital. In opposition to the orthodox
view, I have proposed reconstructing the Marxist ontology from
the outermost margin of Marx’s œuvre: the apocryphal word
‘Struggle!’ For what appears as a lapsus by either Marx or Swin-
ton – the disappearance of the attribute ‘class’ – serves as an entry
point to a Marxism freed from economic determinism. On the the-
oretical plane a post-foundational Marxism has to be informed by
our contemporary experience and will be based on an ontology of
the political rather than a set of economic formulas from the nine-
teenth century.2 This, at the same time, means that the conventional
theory of class struggle has to be elevated to a more sophisticated
level, which is only possible if the concept of struggle is detached
from the determining attribute of class (or any other determining
attribute) – an operation which, in turn, necessitates a thorough
retheorisation of ‘struggle’. What we are looking for is a concept of
social struggle that is firmly located beyond all forms of (a) techno-
logical or economic determinism; (b) positivistic objectivism, as in
bourgeois conflict sociology; or (c) ‘bellicism’, as in the polemical
models of the political in Schmitt or Foucault.3
The post-Marxist conception of antagonism, proposed by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their seminal Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy (HSS) and further developed by Laclau
(in NR, E and RFS), is the only serious contender for this role.
It is one of the main conceptual innovations in social thought
of the last decades. This is not to say that, as post-Marxists,
Laclau and Mouffe simply abandoned the Marxist legacy. On the
contrary, among all post-foundational thinkers of the political
Ernesto Laclau is the one most loyal to the conflictual ontology
of Marxism. In what follows, I first delineate Laclau’s genealogy
of his concept of antagonism. I then propose a slightly heterodox
reading of the theoretical sources of the concept thus relativising
Laclau’s anti-Hegelianism. This will allow us to bring together,

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in the concept of antagonism, a Heideggerian notion of radical

difference with a Hegelian notion of radical negativity.
Where should we start with our theoretical genealogy of the
concept of antagonism? Let us first consider how this revolution-
ary epistemic object entered the philosophical stage on Laclau’s
own account before providing an alternative account of its intel-
lectual history. As a close reader of the founder of structuralist
Marxism, Louis Althusser, Laclau was convinced – as Althusser
was – that the Hegelian baggage, which weighed heavily on Marx-
ist theory, had to be left behind.4 But Laclau had also encountered,
and accepted for some time, a critique of Hegelian Marxism that
preceded Althusser and his school: the Italian debate of the 1950s
and 1960s around the nature of social contradictions and antag-
onisms. In this debate, the Hegelian ‘logical’ account of social
struggle, symptomatic of the mainstream of Italian Marxism at
the time, was criticised by Galvano Della Volpe and his school.
Their declared goal was to reconcile Marxism with modern sci-
ence (Della Volpe 1956). To achieve this, the abstruse idea of a
‘dialectical’ constitution of social or physical reality had to be dis-
carded. Hegelian Marxists, in Della Volpe’s critique, had diluted
the materiality of actual conflicts into dialectics and, thus, into
logics. The conflicting relation between labour and capital should
not be mistaken as a logical or dialectical contradiction; rather,
it was to be assimilated to a form of contradiction described by
Kant as real opposition (Realrepugnanz), first in his pre-critical
work and later in his remarks on the amphiboly of the concepts
of reflection in his first critique (Kant [1781] 1983: 285–306
[A 260–92]). The model of real opposition had to replace, in the
view of the Della Volpians, the model of dialectical contradiction.
So, where do we locate the difference between these two models?
While every pole of a dialectical contradiction A : Non-A can only
constitute itself qua negation of its opposite pole, in the case of
a real opposition A : B both poles collide, but nonetheless have
their independent, positive existence (as in the case of two collid-
ing physical objects).
Translated into the Marxist problematic, this meant that, for
the Della Volpe school the relation between labour and capital had

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to be understood as real opposition, not as dialectical contradic-

tion. The move was not meant to deny the antagonistic charac-
ter of society, but to demystify antagonism in order to integrate
it into a more ‘scientific’ theory. This required, in turn, that the
social had to be cleansed of all negativity (present, but gentrified
in Hegelian approaches), which led to the return of social objectiv-
ism. For if social conflicts are real oppositions, no radical form of
negativity is imaginable, and in this case antagonisms could only
emerge between positively given objects of reality.5 Laclau eventu-
ally became highly critical of Della Volpian scientism. He came to
realise that there is nothing antagonistic in the collision between
two objects (two vehicles, for instance). It remains a mystery ‘how
a theory of the specificity of social antagonisms can be grounded
upon the mere opposition to logical contradiction that it shared
by a clash between two social forces and a collision between two
stones’ (HSS 123). However, the concept of dialectical contra-
diction does not fare better as it runs into the same objectivist
impasse. What is assumed in both cases is a relation between real
objects as ‘full identities’:

In the case of contradiction, it is because A is fully A that being-not-A

is a contradiction – and therefore an impossibility. In the case of real
opposition, it is because A is also fully A that its relation with B pro-
duces an objectively determinable effect. (HSS 124–5)

So, Hegelian ‘logicism’ does not evade the charge of objectivism.

We have to consider the possibility that a radical concept of antag-
onism has nothing to do with either logical contradiction or real
opposition.
As is clear from this discussion, Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical
intervention aims at the disruption of the objectivist problematic in
the social sciences. They not only deny that antagonism describes an
objective relationship between already existing entities; they even
claim that it is, precisely, the effect of antagonism which makes
every presumably objective identity unachievable. In this sense, as
I will argue, antagonism assumes the ontological – or, à la Derrida
(Derrida 1994), hauntological – function of a (negative) ground of
society. Let us consider their example of a farmer who is expelled

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from his land by the land-owner. The relation between both agents
is antagonistic. But it is not antagonistic because of their ‘objec-
tive’ social identities as either farmer or land-owner. Antagonism
shows itself in the fact that the farmer is hindered by his antagonist
from developing a self-enclosed identity. The ‘objective being’ of
the land-owner becomes a symbol of the ‘non-being’ of the farmer:
‘the presence of the “Other” prevents me from being totally myself.
The relation arises not from full totalities but from the impossi-
bility of their constitution’ (HSS 125). The example once more
illustrates that both real opposition and logical contradiction will
not get us any further in our attempt at describing the working of
antagonism: they are objective relations, while ‘antagonism consti-
tutes the limits of every objectivity, which is revealed as partial and
precarious objectification’ (HSS 125). Antagonism introduces an
ineradicable moment of negativity into social positivity.

Marx’s Hidden Theory of the Incommensurable

To envisage antagonism as the limit of all objectivity brings the

concept in close proximity to Lacan’s notion of the Real, as that
instance which escapes and subverts the register of the Symbolic,
i.e. of language and social institution. After the publication of
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Slavoj Žižek immediately recog-
nised the analogy between antagonism and the Lacanian register
of the Real (Žižek 1990). Laclau reacted to Žižek’s intervention by
specifying his concept of antagonism and differentiating it from
what he termed dislocation – an ontologically more radical phe-
nomenon which appears to become Laclau’s now depoliticised
version of the Lacanian Real. I have already registered serious
concerns about this distinction between antagonism and disloca-
tion – which in my view tends to domesticate the radical nature of
antagonism by turning the latter into a variant of an even deeper
ground untouched by the political. Let me focus here on the phil-
osophical genealogy of the idea of antagonism as a moment of
pure negativity which undermines any attempt at establishing an
objective and self-identical social whole. The decisive question is
the following: should we seek to trace back this radical notion of

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antagonism in intellectual history to Marx’s concept of class strug-

gle, as Laclau occasionally does (with the proviso that struggle
should be detached from actors which are exclusively determined
economically)? Or, is there another, more structural concept in
Marx that cannot be reduced to any form of empirical struggle
but serves, similar to the Lacanian Real (but with a political twist),
as a name for a fundamental incommensurability at the ground of
the social? Is there a name in Marx for the self-discrepancy of the
social that sets struggles into motion in the first place? If so, then
the passages where Marx speaks about class struggle might not be
the most promising place to begin.
My claim is that such a fundamental notion of social negativ-
ity is, in fact, hidden where it is most obvious: the actual fore-
runner of a post-foundational notion of antagonism is no other
concept than, surprisingly, Marx’s concept of antagonism. Why
should this be a surprise? To understand it, one has to remind
oneself of the fact that Marx, as a rule, does not employ the
term ‘class struggle’ (Klassenkampf) as a synonym for antago-
nism. These two things easily get mixed up in the reception of
his work. Laclau too when speaking about ‘class antagonism’
tends to obliterate the distinction.6 Yet, a precise structural func-
tion is reserved by Marx for antagonism. In most cases the term
does not refer to a duality (a real opposition) between objective
forces; rather, it indicates a fundamental incommensurability.
The point of the matter is that not every contradiction has to be
antagonistic, as not every contradiction involves such fundamen-
tal incommensurability (for instance, the contradiction between
use value and exchange value is not antagonistic, as both sides
of this pair can very well be fused within a single commodity).
Without doubt, the most important case of an antagonism in
Marx is that between the material forces of production and the
relations of production as described in the preface to his Critique
of Political Economy (Marx 1961).
Curiously, this appears in the very passage which has always
been read as the apogee of Marx’s economic determinism. As Marx
explains in this famous text, it is the economic base which deter-
mines the politico-juridico-ideological superstructure. Although
the picture is slightly more complex, since the economic base is, in

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turn, socially produced, it nonetheless appears to serve as a stable

foundation for the rest of society. The conventional architectonic
metaphor of the building – with its base and superstructure – is
typical for foundationalist discourse since at least Descartes. This
model can hardly be made congruent with the idea of a univer-
salised struggle as proposed by the apocryphal Marx on the beach,
as struggle, in the economistic model, is confined to the political
superstructure. It is thus degraded to a mere epiphenomenon and
stops being a feature of social being as such. However, the other
side of the picture is that something else takes over the ontological
function, thus serving as the actual motor of social change.
This function is taken up by what at first sight appears as a
purely economic contradiction unfolding, with the certainty of
a natural law, in the predestined direction of capitalism’s self-
abolition. This fundamental contradiction is operative within
a given mode of production (such as feudalism or capitalism)
between, on the one hand, the productive forces, most importantly
the technological means of production, and, on the other, the social
relations of production (especially concerning the ownership of the
means of production). According to the standard reading, at some
point in the course of their development the productive forces, due
to technological progress, will break up the established framework
of the relations of production – an idea which must have appeared
as self-evident in the nineteenth century when belief in techno-
logical and social progress was still unbroken.7 Now, in light of
this standard reading, which is also Laclau’s reading, the passage
appears as a straightforward case of economic and technological
determinism where agents of social struggle are made into pup-
pets of a higher structural necessity. At first sight Marx’s operation
appears unambiguous: the ubiquitous spook of struggles is derived
from a solid economic ground.8 Struggles, it seems, are caused and
their direction is determined by laws of motion that unfold with the
certainty of natural laws. The moment in Ramsgate, when Marx
was haunted by a struggle that cannot be confined to any level of the
social, that threatens to break out and spill over on its own terms,
is forgotten. If the apocryphal Marx were to start a debate with
the orthodox Marx, it would turn out that a generalised notion of
struggle cannot be integrated into this model, or so it seems.

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There is, however, another and radically heterodox way to read

the passage. Observed from a slightly different angle, it turns out
that Marx’s solution, meant to provide history with a foundation,
can only work by presupposing an even deeper-reaching instabil-
ity. The economy can only play the role of a causal ground of
historical development because of a fundamental contradiction,
within the economic base, between forces of production and rela-
tions of production. History is driven forward, if this is considered
carefully, not simply by the irresistible progress of the technologi-
cal means of production. Nor is history decelerated by the rela-
tions of production. Rather, it is the mere discrepancy between
these two dimensions – their incommensurability (reminiscent of
what Lyotard has described as ‘the incommensurable’) – which
leads to explosive jumps from one mode of production to another.
Social change, in other words, is founded upon antagonism. But
what a strange foundation this is: a foundation that consists of
nothing other than a mere incommensurability. ‘Social being’ – the
economic base – does not provide class struggles with a positive
ground, but, in turn, is grounded on an entirely negative instance.
Hence, in the reading proposed, social change is instigated not by
a positive, ontic instance but by an ontological discrepancy with-
out any content of its own. The economic base turns out to be
grounded on an abyss.
Evidently, Marx could not leave it at this point. Once more he
had to ground this abyss upon a new, positive ground. This is the
actual reason why Marx has to give a determinate direction to the
driving force of antagonism. The contingent ground of the social
has to be chained to laws of historical necessity for otherwise there
would be no guarantee that the proletariat eventually emerges
as the victorious class. It is clear that this operation is Hegelian
through and through. Already in Hegel contradictions are meant
to propel a process whose stages are entirely predetermined (they
could not progress in any different order), resulting in the final syn-
thesis of the totality of the system. This totality cannot be put into
question by a particular contradiction. There is no contradiction
that, at the end of all days, would not be resolved. That theoretical
constructs like these are extremely precarious is demonstrated by
the fact that a simple chirurgical intervention suffices to make them

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collapse. For what happens if the thin band which, in Marx, con-
nects antagonism to a metaphysics of history is cut through? What
if antagonism was not chained any more to the higher principles
of teleological necessity? Our elevation to the state of grace of a
peaceful and liberated society would be rendered impossible. But
then, the benefit would be that antagonism is set free to stand on
its own. Unrooted from a deeper and more solid ground, it would
become its own ungroundable ‘ground’. In this case, though, we
will be winding up with Heidegger rather than Marx – or, with a
Heideggerianised Marx. For it was Heidegger who, in the course of
his tireless destruction of Western metaphysics, insisted that there is
no ground of the ground and that, therefore, ‘the ground grounds
as a-byss’ (Heidegger 1994: 29).

The Historical Sources of Laclau’s Concept of Antagonism

Marx’s foundationalism it seems is historically untenable. His

forecasts are disproven by historical reality, even as some die-hard
Marxists may still be waiting for the collapse of capitalism and the
emergence of the proletariat as a universal class. The history of late
Marxism and post-Marxism – from Adorno via Althusser to Laclau
and Mouffe – is a history of emancipation from Marxist founda-
tionalism (a history not always, but often, inspired by a more real-
istic picture of politics). This history is characterised by recurrent
attempts at disarticulating negativity from the logic of teleological
necessity. More and more space was granted to Hegel’s ‘labour of
the negative’ (Hegel [1807] 1999: 18). Step by step, the term ‘antag-
onism’ was rebuilt from a figure of necessity into its opposite: a
figure of contingency. At the end of this trajectory, where we stand
today, antagonism does not point to a deeper economic objectivity
any more. It has become a synonym for the incommensurable: the
ungroundable ground of social negativity. This does not mean, in
terms of a mere anti-foundationalism, that all grounds have van-
ished into thin air. While the economic ontology of orthodox Marx-
ism is largely defunct today, there is still space for its conflictual
hauntology. What I propose to describe as the post-foundational
turn within the Marxist trajectory results in a conceptualisation of

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antagonism as a name for the very ‘being’ of society and history; a

‘being’, however, which confronts us with the impossibility of the
foundationalist Being or being-as-Ground. This turn was premised
on a critical examination of the Hegelian roots of negativity by,
among others, Adorno and Althusser. In a comparable, but non-
Marxist sense, this critique of Hegel’s notion of negativity was in
fact anticipated by Heidegger who had accused Hegelian philoso-
phy of ignoring the questionable (das Fragwürdige) of negativity,
thereby defusing the latter and incorporating it. According to Hei-
degger (2009: 24), Hegel did not take negativity as serious as he
should have (a charge that, as we will see in Chapter 8, could be
turned against Heidegger himself). Post-Marxist critiques of later
years echoed this accusation. Nonetheless, the conception of nega-
tivity – transmitted via Hegel and Marx – remained an indispens-
able element of late Marxism and post-Marxism.
We have now to determine where this short reflection on the
theoretical history of antagonism leaves us with respect to Laclau’s
notion of antagonism. If Marx, who started as a left Hegelian,
moved on and beyond Hegel, something similar must be said
about Laclau. Indubitably, Laclau would have dismissed all Hege-
lianism, as he vociferously did in a debate with Žižek when he
recommended that we ‘forget Hegel’ (PR 148). But it is important
to understand that this verdict only applies to the Hegelian logic
of teleological necessity. It does not apply to the Hegelian labour
of the negative. The latter is needed, more than ever perhaps, in
order to differentiate the ontological dimension of antagonism
from the (neo)liberal idea of conflict as rule-governed competi-
tion. The latter, historically prefigured in the Greek agon, reduces
antagonism to ‘ontic’ conflict (see Chapter 3), an idea which also
dominates conflict sociology and even Bourdieuian field theory.
What makes the situation even more complicated is the frequent
confusion, in the literature, between antagonism and class strug-
gle. Against received wisdom, I have insisted that, in Marx, social
change is prompted by a hauntological incommensurability as the
very ground of society. The name for this incommensurability is
not class struggle which is of an entirely ontic nature. The name is
antagonism, which marks an insurmountable blockage that makes
it impossible for the social to coincide with itself.

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For the record of intellectual history it should be noted that,

as a figure of radical negativity, this notion of antagonism is nei-
ther originally Marxian nor is it originally Hegelian. If one were
to determine the precise historical location of its invention, one
would have to trace it back to Kant. Curiously, and this might
come as another surprise, the source in Kant is not the place where
the term ‘antagonism’ literally appears. In his Idea for a Univer-
sal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, ‘antagonism’ – des-
ignating the famous ‘unsocial sociability’ of man – does not go
beyond the liberal idea of conflict-as-competition. In order to find
the source of the radical concept of antagonism, one would have
to turn to Kant’s discussion of the antinomies of reason in his Cri-
tique of Pure Reason. It is this discussion which inspired the young
Hegel of the Jena period to develop his idea of dialectical contra-
diction. In other words, the prototypes of today’s radical notion
of antagonism, including Laclau’s notion of antagonism, are the
Kantian antinomies. Their prototypical role is arguably most obvi-
ous with regard to the mathematical antinomies, the discussion of
which forestalls today’s debate as to the (im)possibility of a social
whole. The discussion was framed by Kant in terms of the more
traditional question as to whether propositions on a cosmological
whole were possible. Kant refutes the endeavour of so-called ratio-
nal cosmology, a sub-discipline of traditional metaphysics, the goal
of which was to synthesise all phenomena that can be experienced
into an integral totality (of the world). As Kant explained, any
attempt of reason to come up with such an unconditional instance
will produce an antinomy. Kant sets out to show that reason, by
itself and with necessity, will produce the metaphysical thesis of an
absolute unity of the world. This does not prove anything, how-
ever, as with equal justification the antithesis can be formulated.
While we cannot escape the metaphysical exigency, Kant’s discus-
sion of the antinomies destroyed our certainties with respect to the
existence of a first beginning, a totality of the world, causality on
the basis of freedom, and a necessary being.
This, at least, was how Kant’s discussion was received by his
contemporaries. In their eyes, he had proven the self-defeating
nature of any search for a first principle. He had deprived meta-
physical foundationalism of a solid ground.9 One should not forget

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that the Critique of Pure Reason led to all sorts of individual ‘Kant
crises’ and nervous breakdowns among his contemporaries – Hein-
rich Heine was one of the most prominent victims. Hegel was still
in accordance with this common appraisal of Kant as the Alleszer-
malmer who has ‘scrunched everything’. In Hegel’s eyes Kant’s
teaching on the antinomies of reason provoked the breakdown of
traditional metaphysics. But Kant, for Hegel, did not go far enough.
He restricted himself to proving the antinomic structure of the four
categories (quantity, quality, relation and modality). In Hegel, on
the other hand, every category of his system consists of two anti-
nomic sides. More than that, every side of an antinomy – thesis as
well as antithesis – already contains within itself its counterpart,
that is, the opposite. An internal diremption is at the basis of every
single concept, driving a concept to transgress itself. The radicality
of this principle is, however, subordinated to Hegel’s philosophy of
identity, his teleological necessitarianism, as every single stage in the
self-development of the system is always already determined from
the perspective of finality of the fully developed system (it therefore
can only be reconstructed ex post by the philosopher, which, at the
same time, explains why for Hegel a system can only be a seam-
less totality). Yet, the whole process that leads to this totality is not
based on a positive ground, but instead on the antinomic labour of
the negative.
Historically, this idea of a radical incommensurability spread
from Kant to Early Romanticism and German Idealism. Not only
Hegel, but also Fichte, Hölderlin, Schlegel, Novalis, and many
others developed their own versions of contradiction, paradox, or
antinomy (Arndt 2009). They collectively forged a modern idea of
radical negativity, or incommensurability, which was later politi-
cised by the young Hegelians and continues to secretly inform
today’s notion of antagonism. Historically, they reacted to the dis-
solution of a final ground, something that could not be ignored
in a world where state bureaucracy increasingly gained power,
the social field became differentiated into functional systems, the
pauperisation of ever larger sections of the population could not
be ignored, and the French Revolution had shown a way out of
political regimes that claimed to be based on transcendent grounds
of legitimation. The experience of fragmentation and division was

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now elevated into an object of theoretical reflection. At the same

time, though, all the paradoxical tropes of negativity, invented by
philosophers and poets with unbelievable ingenuity, were increas-
ingly dissolved into tropes of reconciliation, identity and systema-
ticity. The radical moment of negativity – which pointed back to
the experience of the ultimate ungroundability of the social – had
to be recaptivated philosophically. At the end-point of this course
the ‘struggle of the opposites’ was subjected by Marxism to ‘objec-
tive laws of development’. The hauntological figures of conflict
were turned into figures of necessity – which, in turn, explains
why late Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, by disassociating
themselves from the postulate of teleological necessity, came to lib-
erate the notion of antagonism, freeing the latter from the chains
of economic objectivity and turning it, once more, into a synonym
for the ungroundable ground of negativity.

A Short History of Nothing

It is not until the first half of the twentieth century that we can
witness a recovery of the radical moment of negativity. Initially,
however, the latter did not so much re-emerge within the field of
Marxism, as negativity was reinserted into the field of a newly
established ontology. With the Kantian antinomies of reason, the
dominant paradigm of epistemology had encountered its limits.
Now, these limits, it seems, reappeared as an intrinsic element of
epistemology’s great, and largely forgotten, rival paradigm: ontol-
ogy. For this reason, the introduction of Hegel and Heidegger into
French philosophy in the 1930s was to a significant degree directed
against the dominance of Cartesian rationalism, which in France
had assumed the role of a quasi-official state doctrine (Roth 1988;
Janicaud 2001). However, ontology did not re-emerge in full glory,
as a return to the pre-critical, ‘pre-modern’ stable ground of being.
By the time of its return, the category of being had turned into
something intrinsically precarious, something haunted by the spec-
tre of its own absent ground. For this reason, today’s ontology
cannot any longer be understood in terms of, to use Heidegger’s
words, traditional onto-theology, in which the role of being was

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to provide us with a stable ground. Again, this move of reviving,

and at the same time post-foundationally subverting, the tradi-
tional discipline of ontology was prepared to a significant extent
by Heidegger’s work. He pointed out that the onto-ontological
difference – the relation of ontic beings to their ontological being-
ness (the realm of being-qua-being) – has always been interrogated
in the history of metaphysical thought. The central question for
Platonism, for instance, was how ontic beings relate to their ‘idea’
(the answer was: through some sort of mythical participation of
methexis). Or, in the medieval Aristotelian framework, it was the
relation between essence and existence which was at the centre of
reasoning. As long as the metaphysical framework remained oper-
ative, the ontological side of the difference was always supposed to
deliver an explanation for the very beingness of beings. What was
forgotten, though, is what Heidegger calls the ‘grounding ques-
tion’: What about the difference between the ontic and the onto-
logical as difference? In the radical Heideggerian understanding of
difference-as-difference (Heidegger 1957), being cannot be located
on one or the other side of the difference, but unfolds through the
never-ending play between the ontological and the ontic. Hence,
being in the most radical sense – or, as Heidegger anachronisti-
cally writes to signal this differential dimension, beyng (Seyn) –
should be understood as the play which simultaneously unites and
separates the ontic and the ontological (the realm of beings and
the very beingness of these beings), thus introducing an irresolv-
able difference into being that amounts to a constitutive deferral
of every stable ground of being.
But, while this aspect of Heidegger’s work turned out to be for-
mative for later philosophies of difference (of which Jacques Der-
rida and the early Gilles Deleuze may well be the most prominent
proponents), what was of immediate importance as a source for
subsequent theorisations of negativity was the early Heidegger’s
notion of finitude which lent itself to a Hegelian reading. Accord-
ing to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Heidegger 1953), the Dasein
of man is intrinsically temporal because it is finite: the being of
Dasein is being-towards-death. Although death cannot be expe-
rienced directly (we can only witness the death of others, but not
our own), it still makes itself felt within our life as an absence,

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which has a very real presence. Finite being is thus held out in a
Nothing that is not at all neutral or indifferent. For if Nothing,
as Heidegger puts it, ‘were only something indifferently negative,
how could we understand, for example, horror and terror before
the Nothing and nihilation’ (Heidegger 1998: 45)?
It was during the perhaps single most important academic event
of the twentieth century that the Heideggerian notion of finitude
was folded back into Hegelian dialectics, thus producing an ‘anthro-
pological’ theory of negativity, lack and desire that should prove to
be the starting point for subsequent political ontologies. Alexandre
Kojève’s seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, held at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939 and vis-
ited by, among others, Bataille, Queneau, Aron, Breton, Merleau-
Ponty, Hyppolite, Éric Weil and Lacan (even Hannah Arendt paid
the seminar an occasional visit), was silently devoted to the Heideg-
gerianisation of Hegel (Kojève 1980). Hegel is celebrated by Kojève
for having introduced into ontology the fundamental category of
negativity, yet by assimilating that category to the Heideggerian
notion of finitude, Kojève proposes an ‘existential’ or anthropolog-
ical version of Hegelian dialectics, whose field of application is now
entirely restricted to the realm of human affairs, thus excluding
the realm of nature. As a result, Kojève can define negation as the
constructive act by which man, under the sign of his own finitude
(or death), freely creates history. To define negativity in terms of a
free and creative form of human action allows Kojève to simulta-
neously abandon the more contemplative approach of Heidegger
and radicalise the Hegelian idea of historicity (the Kojèvian idea of
action will be taken up in Chapter 8). In Hegel’s dialectics between
lord and bondsman, Kojève detects a fundamental antagonism at
the heart of history. Lord and bondsman are bound together by
their negatory struggle for recognition. Initially, the lord is not the
one who is more powerful but the one who is prepared to accept
his finitude and risk his life in the struggle for recognition – thus
forcing the bondsman to recognise him as lord. However, forced
recognition can never be full recognition. Full recognition can
only be achieved if it is mutual, which would imply the ultimate
‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) or dissolution of negativity, and the final
resolution of struggle. But, if the struggle for recognition functions

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as the motor of history, then the achievement of a state of universal

and reciprocal recognition of all individuals would be tantamount
to the end of history. As is well known, Kojève was more than
happy to draw that conclusion.
To presume such final sublation and reconciliation of historical
struggle does not fit easily with the Heideggerian trend of Kojève’s
argument. In Heidegger, as already mentioned, ‘finitude’ should in
no way be confused with the ‘end’ of our life, because our own
death can never be reached as such (we cannot experience our own
death, only our own dying). No wonder that subsequent ontologies
would insist on the irresolvability of negation. Jean-Paul Sartre was
one of the first who in this respect would take up and radicalise
the Kojèvian model. It is in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Sartre
1956) that the traditional ontological question regarding being-
qua-being is most explicitly reworked into a theory of being-qua-
lack-of-being. Like Kojève, Sartre starts from a clear-cut separation
between the subjective realm of consciousness or being-for-itself
(être-pour-soi) and the objective realm of natural being-in-itself
(être-en-soi). While the latter is a sphere of pure positivity and
plenitude, the former, that is conscious human being, is permeated
by nothing: it always is what it isn’t, and it isn’t what it is. Since
consciousness necessarily means consciousness of something, it is
always incomplete and in need of an outside object. Now, insofar
as being-for-itself is characterised by such irresolvable lack-of-being
(manque-à-être), the conscious subject can never entirely overlap
with the realm of objective being, nor can it ever overlap with itself.
This lack of self-identity lies at the very core of subjectivity and,
according to Sartre, has to be fully accepted. An imaginary future
totality towards which consciousness may project itself is unreach-
able; the for-itself will never become in-itself-for-itself, no ground
of being will ever be attained. In this way, lack-of-being turns into a
source of human freedom; not least because the for-itself, equipped
with the power of negation, is able to disengage from the realm of
causal and determinate being. For this reason, negativity has to be
understood, not as a nihilistic, but as a productive category – and
in Chapter 8 we will see that political acting, which consists in the
negation of the given, is an equally productive category: it is the
‘source’ of social being.10

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Differentialised Negativity, or, the Highest Point of

Heideggerian Marxism

In political thought, Laclau is arguably the most sophisticated heir

to the tradition of left Heideggerianism. By articulating negativity
with difference Laclau managed to deeply politicise the Heidegge-
rian notion of the ontological difference. In doing so, he brought
the two forces of Hegelian negativity and Heideggerian difference
to converge. In this precise sense Laclau’s post-Marxism can be
described as the highest point of Heideggerian Marxism. Let us,
therefore, continue our trajectory and see how Laclau’s own com-
bination of the ontological difference with a moment of radical
negativity significantly expands on twentieth-century left Heideg-
gerianism (for the latter see Wolin 2001; Janicaud 2001). The
picture, however, is complicated. On numerous occasions where
Laclau resorts to a Heideggerian notion of the ontological differ-
ence the latter is employed in a merely heuristic, if not metaphysi-
cal, fashion along the lines of a simple form/content distinction. A
hegemonic relation is frequently described in terms of a particular
ontic ‘content’ (a particular hegemonic project) taking over the
ontological task of incarnating the universal form (Laclau 2000a:
58). With regard to a mere form/content distinction, Laclau’s the-
ory remains within the ambit of occidental metaphysics, while the
Heideggerian notion of difference-as-difference refers to a much
more radical play of ‘differencing’ far remote from any Platonic
methexis of the ontic in the ontological.
On the other hand, though, Laclau makes clear that ‘no ontic
content can ultimately monopolize the ontological function’ (71).
No particular ontic order will ever succeed in fully hegemonising
the very ontological principle of ordering, no particular hegemonic
project will manage to fully incarnate the place of universality.
Any kind of methexis is bound to fail. And it is bound to fail
because of a primordial lack or negativity. As Laclau explained in
an interview:

If we had a dialogical situation in which we reached, at least as a

regulative idea, a point in which between the ontic and the ontologi-
cal dimensions there would be no difference, in which there would be

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a complete overlapping, then in that case there would be nothing to

hegemonize because this absent fullness of the community could be
given by one and only one political content. (Laclau 1999: 135)

But, if the fullness of any ontic being, including the fullness of

social agents and of society at large, ‘is unreachable, this split in
the identity of political agents is an absolutely constitutive “onto-
logical difference” – in a sense not entirely unrelated to Heidegger’s
use of the expression’ (E 61). This is clearly a post-foundational
way of framing the ontological difference beyond any metaphysi-
cal form/content distinction. The play between the ontological and
the ontic (the ground and what is grounded), precisely because
it cannot be arrested, points to what Heidegger would have por-
trayed as the a-byss of the (non-)ground (Heidegger 1994). And
it is this notion of difference-as-difference (supported by a notion
of lack or negativity) that secretly underpins Laclau’s otherwise
‘metaphysical’ use of the ontological difference. If the latter use is
part of his political ontology (his ‘onto-logic’ of the functioning of
hegemony), the former may pave the way for a post-metaphysical
ontology of the political.
Unfortunately, there are only a few places in Laclau’s work
where he sets out to directly engage with this fundamental dimen-
sion of the political eo ipso. The only extensive discussion can be
found in an article jointly written with Lilian Zac, in which social
negativity is explicitly discussed in terms of the onto-ontological
difference. This article, largely neglected among Laclau scholars,
can serve as a key to clarifying the relation between radical nega-
tivity and ontological difference that, otherwise, remains obscure
in Laclau’s work.11 In their article, Laclau and Zac differentiate
between, on the one hand, ontic nothingness as the source of par-
ticular beings that – within a given historical epoch – are absent but
could very well be present under different conditions, and on the
other, ontological nothingness, which they describe with reference
to Reiner Schürmann’s work as the ‘pull towards absence that per-
meates presence to its very heart’ (Schürmann 1990: 141). Now, if
we want to conceptualise the difference between beings and being,
what is required is a ‘passage’ through ontological nothingness
(Laclau and Zac 1994: 29), for the latter is the ‘very condition of

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access to Being’ (30). Radical negativity, in other words, must not

be conceptualised in the form of mere indifference: the ‘nothing’
Laclau speaks of – a ‘nothing’ which simultaneously relates and
subverts the field of positive differences – has a very real presence
comparable to Heidegger’s notion of ‘horror and terror before the
Nothing and nihilation’ (Heidegger 1998: 45).
It is clear that this idea of a radical ‘nothingness’ touches at
Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of antagonism. In Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy they affirm ‘that certain discursive forms, through
equivalence, annul all positivity of the object and give real existence
to negativity as such’. What makes full presence impossible – the
‘impossibility of the real – negativity’ – ‘has attained a form of
presence’ (HSS 129). The constitutive outside of a given system of
beings, even as it does not exist on the level of beings as one more
being, very much insists in that it subverts ontic being through
a process of absencing/presencing. If we managed to completely
erase ontological nothingness, we would destroy the very fabric of
the social, thus producing something of the order of a Parmenidean
One, a closed totality of the social, a state of pure identity and pres-
ence: a state of pure Being. So, that the ontological and the ontic
are ‘irremediably split’ has two consequences:
[T]he first is that the ontic can never be closed in itself; the second,
that the ontological can only show itself through the ontic. The same
movement creating the split, condemns its two sides (as in all splits)
into mutual dependence. Being cannot inhabit a ‘beyond’ all actual
beings, because in that case, it would only be one more being. Being
shows itself in the entities as that which they are lacking and as that
which derives from their ontological status as mere possibility. Being
and nothingness, presence and absence, are the mutually required
terms of a ground constitutively split by difference. (Laclau and Zac
1994: 30)

As emphasised in this passage, the split between the ontic and the
ontological must be radical, otherwise it would be internal to the
ontic. Or, in terms of Laclauian discourse theory: it would be part
of a system of differences as simply one more difference. To call
the ontic and the ontological ‘irremediably split’, as Laclau and
Zac do, means exactly this: that the radical difference between the

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ontic and the ontological is necessary for a differentiated world

of beings to exist. And yet, a world of positive and self-sufficient
differences (without any degree of equivalence) is rendered impos-
sible by the very same instance – radical negativity – which makes
it possible. Obviously, the latter cannot be directly approached
in conceptual terms, nor cannot it be empirically nailed down –
which is why we assume, in this investigation, that it can only
be thought by way of keeping attention to that which manifests
itself in moments of conflict and contingency within the field of
the ontic. Precisely because ‘nothing’ is not mere indifference but
insists as an absent presence, it can only show itself within the
realm of beings through their failure to fully constitute ‘the system
as pure Being’ (E 39). This revelatory moment of antagonism sets
in when gaps, breakdowns and interruptions are experienced on
the ontic level of beings. The dislocatory event is thus accompanied
by an effect of unconcealment: the ontological dimension, which
cannot show itself directly, presents itself as lack in the ontic level:
‘It is this effect of unconcealment that splits the opposing forces
between their “ontic” contents and the character of mere possibil-
ity – that is, inception, pure Being – of those contents’ (Laclau and
Zac 1994: 30). Thinking is an attempt at remaining attentive to
these effects of unconcealment.

Flirting with Nothingness

As was to be expected, Laclau’s conception of radical negativity

was met with fierce criticism. Fred Dallmayr, in an early critique
of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, perceived in it a prime exam-
ple of what he termed ‘[f]lirtation with nothingness’ (Dallmayr
1988: 45). He did not ignore that, for Laclau and Mouffe, inside
and outside of a signifying system, that is, the ontic and ontologi-
cal, are completely imbricated, for otherwise the system would be
either totally open or totally closed. But the point of the matter is
that we cannot have radical difference without radical negativity.
What Dallmayr sees as a deficiency in Laclau and Mouffe’s argu-
ment – their insistence on the radical, negatory character of the
outside – is actually an indispensable part of it. Only under the

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proviso that the system’s outside assumes the role of an antagonis-

tic limit vis-à-vis the inside can we speak about an outside at all
and, hence, about a fundamental play of difference between inside
and outside. A ‘passage through negativity’ (NR 213) – which is
nothing other than the passage through antagonism – is required
in order to account for relative and always hybridised systema-
ticity. Otherwise, a mere differencing between the ontic and the
ontological would result in nothing other than a self-identical
mess without antagonism: the night in which all cows are grey. If
there are systemic cracks through which the light shines in, these
cracks are the result of radical negativity. Popularised accounts of
postmodernism that present meaning in terms of an unrestrained
pluralism or a happy-go-lucky play of signification tend to obfus-
cate the instance of radical negativity (which is, strictly speak-
ing, beyond the realm of meaning, language or sense). This is the
gulf separating Laclau from those who tend to celebrate hybrid-
ity or ‘third spaces’. From the perspective of Laclauian political
ontology social ‘being’ is not unitary, nor is antagonism premised
on the duality or the plurality of conflicting parties. Rather, antag-
onism, as we will see, is nothing other than a name for the failed
unicity of being: the failure of the social to ever reach a state of
self-same unicity.
This is a far cry from what Dallmayr suspects to be ‘a Sartrean
kind of antithesis’ between being and nothingness (Dallmayr 1988:
45). A state of full being can never be reached – which is why we
never encounter an entirely systematic system, or, for that mat-
ter, an entirely structured structure, a fully instituted institution, a
totally organised organisation, a completely self-identical identity,
or, in philosophical terms, a fully existent being, i.e. a being whose
essence is its existence – all of which would amount to a state of
pure positivity. Nor will we ever encounter, on the other hand, a
state of pure negativity (such as a psychotic war of all against all).
For what Laclau says about social being – that it cannot be reached
as such – must also be said about this very outside: it is inaccessible
as outside. In Laclau and Mouffe’s approach, being and nothing-
ness, therefore, do not stand in a relation of antithesis. In fact,
Laclau’s theory of signification implies that complete closure of a
signifying system is as unachievable as complete openness of that

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system. This must not prevent us from relating to ‘nothingness’ in

an, indeed, flirtatious manner by ‘waving’ at something which can
only show itself indirectly, in the dislocation of the ontic order of
beings – a dislocation effectuated by the labour of the negative.
This is the reason why the latter is not hypostasised to a black hole
or antithesis to being. Laclau and Mouffe do not adhere to any
form of ‘negative ontology’, let alone ‘negative theology’ – which
would just be a mirror image of metaphysical foundationalism:
To assert, as we have, the constitutive nature of antagonism does
not therefore mean referring all objectivity back to a negativity that
would replace the metaphysics of presence in its role as an absolute
ground, since that negativity is only conceivable within such a very
framework. (NR 27)

In other words, negativity must not be conceived in terms of a

mystical abyss that would only be the mirror image of an equally
mystical ground of total presence. An ontology of antagonism,
when conceived post-foundationally, will have to envisage nega-
tivity through the lens of difference and vice versa.
So, what Dallmayr takes for flirtation with nothingness is in
fact an attempt at thinking antagonism – but perhaps, why not, in
a flirtatious manner, as antagonism is both radically inaccessible
and yet always present to the extent to which no ontic being exists
in the social world that would not be distorted in some ways by
an outside force of negativity. Thinking means to follow the traces
of distortion with obstinate rigour. It is not about ‘discovering’ the
final ‘law’ of being – as antagonism is not a law in any meaningful
sense. It is what lies at the ground of, and makes operative, the
laws that can account for the production of concrete antagonisms
(in the plural). These laws were discussed by Laclau, at different
stages of his work, under the title of discourse, hegemony or rheto-
ric. They describe, in the restricted sense of a political ontology,
the working of politics12 – which must not be confused with the
political: antagonism. The latter has more to do with the Heideg-
gerian and post-Heideggerian category of the ‘event’ or, as said
before, with all the paradoxical figures of negativity developed in
the post-Kantian tradition of German Idealism and the philosophi-
cal thought of Early Romanticism. We can experience it in our

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daily life, and, on a politico-theoretical plane, we can try to think

antagonism.

Laclau’s Question

Thinking antagonism involves, as explained in the previous chap-

ter, a moment of self-implication. Thus, a process of thinking is
in place whenever we actively follow the traces of conflicts and
dislocations encountered in the social realm, whenever we decide
to respond to the experience of antagonism by inferring, extrapo-
lating and working out the consequences of our encounter. This
is not to argue against Laclau’s insights into the political logic of
social being – which remain perfectly valid. My critique is meant
to push further these insights onto the philosophical terrain of
an ontology of the political which would be slightly more – and
slightly less – than a political ontology. This will require us to
remain faithful to what could be called Laclau’s question ‘What
is an antagonism?’ (Laclau 2014: 102) – only that my proposal
on how ‘to advance on the theoretical front’ was to ask the more
fundamental question: What is antagonism? Once again the
political difference – as the difference between politics and the
political – may help to grasp the different dimensions of antago-
nism. If Laclau’s question is aiming at the political ‘onto-logic’
of hegemony, discourse and rhetorics, and if the social sciences
tend to restrain the concept of antagonism to the ontic dimen-
sion of empirical struggles, the question ‘What is antagonism?’
aims, precisely, at the differentiating play between politics and
the political – a grounding play which, at the same time, remains
abyssal. Rather than being a logics of social articulation, antago-
nism, by virtue of being involved in the moment of social institu-
tion and being presupposed by the symbolic logic of hegemony,
should be conceived of as an all-pervasive dimension of the social,
a continuous movement of de- and re-grounding or what, in a
more Deleuzian vein, one may want to describe as a process of
becoming – which is also the reason, by the way, why there is no
incompatibility between an ontology of negativity or lack and an
ontology of abundance or excess.13

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I am well aware of the potential dangers of this approach.

Asking, in such Heideggerian mode, about antagonism-as-being
rather than the functioning of an antagonism must not distract
our attention from the ‘ontic’ level of political struggles and con-
frontations. However, I do not consider this a real danger. Quite
the contrary, the ontology of the political may direct our view to
the ubiquitous emergence of conflicts at any time and any place. In
this respect, such Heideggerianism of the political remains firmly
located within the Marxist tradition. Precisely because, as will
become clearer in the course of the subsequent chapter, it is not
chained any more to a polemological notion of ‘class war’ or other
‘objective’ conflicts, the ontological ground of antagonism will
have to realise itself ontically in the form of concrete social strug-
gles. The Marxian notion of antagonism – understood correctly
as a radical incommensurability at the heart of the social – turns
out to be immensely productive for social analysis. The Marxist
wager is, and has always been, that history is a perpetual process
of struggles. In our daily life we are unaware of most of these
struggles, as most struggles are rendered invisible within a given
hegemonic formation. Yet it is highly unlikely that any regime will
ever succeed in suppressing even the remotest memories of strug-
gle. There is always the danger, in the eyes of any regime, that
struggles pass from a ‘latent’ to a ‘manifest’ stage. And, given such
danger, even phases of apparent tranquillity will be perturbed by
a certain restlessness: by the background noise of struggles. These
struggles originate from an absent source of radical negativity –
antagonism – which impedes the pacification of society into a state
of harmony and closure.

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3 Beyond the ‘War Hypothesis’: Polemology
in Foucault, Stiegler and Loraux

Thinking Polemos?

In the previous chapter we traced back the Marxian name for being
– ‘Struggle!’ – to its roots in German Idealism: radical negativity.
The latter was described in terms of a fundamental blockade, an
unsurpassable incommensurability at the ground of society. It is
evident that such a notion of antagonism is much more demanding
than any conventional idea of social conflicts. Antagonism cannot
be absorbed into the image of two opposing camps as would be
typical for conflicts of war or class struggle. This new notion of
antagonism, hence, differs from any empiricist or objectivist set-
ting of conflicts between social groups, as would be typical for
bourgeois conflict sociology. It is far away from any kind of social
objectivism. As a figure of the incommensurable, to repeat what
was established in the previous chapter, antagonism must not be
confused with, in Kantian terms, a ‘real opposition’ between two
objectively given opponents – the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat,
the Romans vs the Carthaginians, the Confederates vs the Union-
ists, or any other binarism of that order. As a name for the absence
of any final ground of the social, antagonism is not conflict, it is
that which engenders conflicts (and their preliminary pacification),
for the impossibility of total closure will forever engender disputes
about partial closure. The advantage of such an ontological con-
ception, as opposed to a purely ontic one, is clear. It allows us
to affirm the foundational nature of social conflictuality without
falling into the trap of a violent ‘bellicism’ by either envisaging
the political according to the Schmittian friend–enemy criterion

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(if friend and enemy are understood as objective terms) or by pre-

suming a perpetual war of all against all. Antagonism, as a figure
of the incommensurable, opens a perspective onto the deeply con-
flictual structure of the social, but is not in itself identical with
‘ontic’ disputes, wars and struggles.
To call attention to this fact, I have proposed to differentiate
between political ontology (or ‘onto-logic’) and the ontology of
the political. If the former is aimed at the, ultimately, political laws
of constitution of politics or social institution (described by Laclau
under the rubric of discourse, hegemony or rhetoric), the latter
is an exercise in thinking the political as the ontological instance
grounding these laws. In the intellectual tradition that spans
from the Kantian antinomies via German Idealism and Marxism
to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism, one of the names for the
political in the latter sense is antagonism. In this tradition, think-
ing the political means thinking antagonism. Yet, no doubt, there
are other contenders for the role of the political, and there are
alternative names for an ontological instance of all-pervasive con-
flictuality. Before we continue on our journey of thinking antago-
nism – a route that will take us back to a closer engagement with
politics in Parts II and III – it is advisable to revisit some of these
alternatives. This will not only allow for a clearer picture of the
ontology of antagonism, but will also demonstrate its advantage
over approaches that tend to conflate the ontological with the
ontic, the political with politics.
In this chapter, the ontology of antagonism will be compared
with rival ontologies, which I categorise as the genealogical, the
eristic and the stasiological alternatives. As it is impossible to paint
a comprehensive panorama within the limited space of this book,
I will focus on a single proponent respectively. After critically
discussing the genealogical ontology of Michel Foucault, I pres-
ent the eristic ontology of Bernard Stiegler and then continue to
the stasiological ontology of Nicole Loraux. All three approaches
represent what, from our perspective, constitutes a particular mis-
understanding of the conflictual nature of social being, a certain
reification of antagonism, i.e. a diminution of the latter to one or
the other kind of ‘real opposition’. They also rest upon a fantasy
of bellicism: the phantasmatic idea that a war is raging at the

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ground of society.1 This ongoing war, or polemos, is stylised by

Foucault in his genealogical phase into a subcutaneous, eternal
‘battle’ (Chevallier 2004). For Stiegler, who is presented as an
exponent of agonistic theories of politics, this everlasting polemos
has to be legally tamed into eris or civic strife; while in the model
reconstructed from ancient Greek sources by Loraux, the logic of
external war is, as it were, folded back into the city in moments
of stasis or ‘civil war’ when society is split into two oppositional
halves and all efforts at domesticating conflict fail. To the extent
to which all three alternatives are oriented towards war as the an-
archic principle of social relation, all three could be described as
polemological.
Thinking antagonism, however, means thinking beyond the
‘war hypothesis’. As will become apparent from the discussion,
taking the imaginary of war as a reference point produces theo-
retical and practical effects which differ greatly from those pro-
duced by the ontology of antagonism. Let me, for heuristical
reasons, illustrate the matter in Lacanian terms: polemological
approaches will ultimately remain locked in the register of the
Imaginary, in the binarism of a mirror game between friends and
enemies, thus bypassing, if not completely ignoring, the regis-
ters of the Symbolic (the ‘logic’ of equivalence and difference
as described by Laclau, i.e. political onto-logic) and of the Real
(the ontological moment of radical negativity). As long as our
approach remains confined to the imaginary register, we will not
be able to either touch a more scientific base or start envisaging
a process of thinking what remains beyond the realm of either
science or fantasy. The originality of the Laclauian conception
of antagonism becomes all the more impressive when compared
with these polemological alternatives.

The Genealogical Alternative: Foucault’s Ontology of War

Michel Foucault’s work as a genealogist is arguably the most

prominent example for a polemological approach.2 Similar to a
post-foundational ontologist of the political, the genealogist is
opposed to foundationalist metaphysics. The genealogist sees what

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the metaphysician, by searching for a stable ground of order, can-

not perceive. Where the latter sees eternal truths, the former sees a
throng of ancient errors. Where the latter sees necessary laws and
universal principles, the former sees the play of chance. Where the
latter would presume the most sublime values, the former seeks to
trace back these values to their base, ordinary and perhaps farcical
origins. To make metaphysical foundations crumble, the genealo-
gist has to follow the accidental turns of history with a view to
clarify the historical conditions of possibility of truth. What then
comes to light through the cracks in these foundations are violent
collisions. On the ground of society there is a battle raging on.
When you say power, you have to say power struggle. The idea is
already present in the later stages of Foucault’s so-called archaeo-
logical phase but comes to the fore with Discipline and Punish and
his subsequent plans to write a genealogical history of the disci-
plinary institution of the military. In terms of empirical investiga-
tion, the latter project remained unrealised, yet Foucault further
investigated into the methodological – and, I would claim, secretly
ontological – principle of genealogy. The latter can be condensed in
what he calls the Nietzschean and also Clausewitzian hypothesis:
‘Power is war, the continuation of war by other means’ (Foucault
2003: 15). By inverting Clausewitz’s famous proposition Foucault
arrives at a conception of politics as the continuation of war by
other means. For some years Foucault seems to be fascinated by
the possibility of analysing power through the lenses of polemol-
ogy. All power struggles, according to this hypothesis, have to be
analysed as episodes of a displaced and latent battle that contin-
ues raging subcutaneously. Power, thus, becomes a metonymy of
warfare, a function of an all-pervasive polemos. ‘The struggle is
everywhere’, as Foucault puts it – inadvertently echoing the Marx
of Ramsgate – when describing his aim of bringing to the fore ‘this
perpetual agitation’ (in Fontana and Bertani 2003: 280).
It is evident, though, that by framing the question along these
lines, the self-declared nominalist Foucault comes to make onto-
logical claims about the (polemical) nature of the social eo ipso.
As he cannot allow himself, at this stage, any form of ontological
reasoning, he pursues the only way out available to a genealogist:

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he sets out to ‘genealogise’ Nietzsche’s hypothesis, that is, to recon-

struct a genealogy of genealogy. His lecture course held at the
Collège de France in the years 1975–6 under the title ‘Society Must
Be Defended’ was explicitly devoted to testing the ‘war hypothesis’,
which is said to have three implications. The initial meaning of it is
that politics ‘sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces
manifested in war’ (Foucault 2003: 16). A particular relation of
forces, emerging from an initial, but largely forgotten historical
battle, is constantly reproduced during a peacetime ‘silent war’.
It is reinscribed, as Foucault points out, ‘in institutions, economic
inequalities, language, and even the bodies of the individuals’ (16).
Secondly, while the balance of forces shifts and is modified during
this process, the political struggles that modify and condense the
relation of forces into a political system should also be seen as a
continuation of war: ‘We are always writing the history of the
same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its
institutions’ (16). And finally, the hypothesis implies that the out-
come of struggle cannot be adjudicated by law or political author-
ity. It can only be decided in a ‘trial by strength in which weapons
are the final judges’ (16). If the perpetual battle had an end (by
way of a final battle), not only war, but any exercise of power
would be suspended.
Now, that a genealogy of genealogy is a perfectly circular enter-
prise does not seem to be a matter of concern for Foucault. When
asking, ‘Who saw war just beneath the surface of peace; who
sought in the noise and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, the
principle that allows us to understand order, the State, its institu-
tions, and its history?’ (47), it does not seem to cross his mind that
it was him, Foucault, who had started from precisely this question.
Foucault cannot allow himself to openly draw ontological conclu-
sions; so, instead of explicating his self-implication in the question
– which would have forced him to rephrase it along the lines of
our starting question: ‘What’s going on with Being?’ – he seeks to
reconstruct the war hypothesis historically.3 Anyway, he arrives
at a startling result. That politics is the continuation of war is a
hypothesis that precedes Clausewitz – and it was Clausewitz who
inverted the prior hypothesis. In the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries, a ‘historico-political discourse’ had emerged in which

such a binary model of society was proposed. In a key passage of
his lectures, the main features of this discourse are described by
Foucault as follows:

War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its
cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have
to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a
coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront
runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and
it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is
no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s
adversary. (Foucault 2003: 50–1)

This new discourse is fiercely opposed to the ‘philosophical-

juridical discourse’ of law, contract and monarchical sovereignty,
understood as principles of social unity. Sovereignty, in the eyes
of politico-historical thinkers, results from violent usurpation or
conquest. It follows that there are always two historical narra-
tives: the history of the victors and the history of the vanquished.
Despite, or because of, its binary format, this discourse proves
surprisingly flexible by changing ideological sides repeatedly. It
emerges in the politics of the Levellers and Puritans of revolution-
ary England in the 1630s. Half a century later, oppositional aris-
tocracy under Louis XIV makes use of it against the jurists and
magistrates of the court. In the 1820s, Augustin Thierry interprets
the French Revolution along the lines of this historico-political
discourse. Revolutionary practice, theory and history-writing
always aim, as Foucault stresses, at reactivating a subcutaneous
war. Their aim is to discover ‘beneath the forms of justice that
have been instituted, the order that has been imposed, the for-
gotten past of real struggles, actual victories, and defeats which
may have been disguised but which remain profoundly inscribed’
(Foucault 2003: 56). Explaining social and political norms from
below, rather than from above, ‘means explaining them in terms
of what is most confused, most obscure, most disorderly and most
subject to chance’ (54). It is not human rationality or higher laws
that govern history:

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[It] is the confusion of violence, passions, hatreds, rages, resentments,

and bitterness; and it is the obscurity of contingencies and all the
minor incidents that bring about defeats and ensure victories. This
discourse is essentially asking the elliptical god of battles to explain
the long days of order, labor, peace, and justice. Fury is being asked to
explain calm and order. (Foucault 2003: 54)

Only, the order of fragile rationality, that appears to arch over the
battle zone, makes us believe that the clash of arms has ceased.
Clearly, Foucault’s own genealogical project has to be located
within this genealogy. Only this explains why his historical account,
in many passages of these lectures, tends to turn into a paean of
praise. Foucault concedes his own fascination at the beginning of
his lecture of 28 January. However, in the course of his lectures
it becomes increasingly clear that the historico-political discourse
eventually proves indefensible as the polemological binarism was
biologised in the nineteenth century and the constitutive function
of war re-envisaged in medical and biological terms. The ‘war
hypothesis’ was reframed by social Darwinists as a struggle for sur-
vival, which implies a fundamental conversion of the logic of con-
flictuality. A social binarism turns into a biological monism. There
are not two ‘races’ any more (in the pre-biological sense of national
groups such as Franks vs Gauls) that face each other, but a single
‘race’ is differentiated into an ‘over’- and a ‘sub’-race. The latter
threatens to infect and decompose the social organism as a whole.
Society has to be defended, that is, cleansed from everything that
is perceived as heterogeneous to its totality. With his genealogy of
state racism at the end of his lectures, Foucault has manoeuvred his
genealogical project into an impasse. If the war hypothesis converts
itself into racism, it can impossibly be retained as a methodological
principle for further research. The genealogy of genealogy has led
to the dissolution of genealogy (as polemology).4 Not without good
reason. To conceive of social conflictuality in terms of war is politi-
cally problematic and intellectually misleading. I would describe
this fantasy on the verge of a sociological bellicism as pseudo-
radical. It is pseudo-radical not only because it involves phantas-
matic violence, but, more than that, because it does not go to the
ontological roots of social conflictuality. It stops short of being

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truly radical. For what would be encountered on the very ground

of social conflicts if not antagonism? Or, to paraphrase Heidegger,
the ground of conflict – antagonism – is nothing conflictual.
Nonetheless, it is hard to ignore a certain vicinity to a post-
Marxist perspective. Foucault, similar to Laclau, starts from a cri-
tique of the Marxist theory of power, including political power, as
merely a function of the economy. And, like Laclau, he becomes
increasingly interested in detaching struggle from economic
denominators such as class. As he pointed out in an interview, the
Marxist tradition does not provide us with a theory of struggle:

What I find striking in the majority – if not of Marx’s texts then those
of the Marxists (except perhaps Trotsky) – is the way they pass over in
silence what is understood by struggle when one talks of class struggle.
What does struggle mean here? Is it a dialectical confrontation? An
economic battle? A war? Is civil society riven by class struggle to be
seen as a war continued by other means? (Foucault 1980: 208)

Here, again, the inverted Clausewitz makes an appearance as a

potential solution to the riddle of social conflictuality. As Foucault
came to realise at the end of his genealogical trajectory, polemol-
ogy was the historical source of the Marxist theory of class strug-
gle. The latter emerged as a sideline of the idea of biological ‘race
war’. Marx himself conceded that he had found the idea of class
struggle in the work of Thierry. In turn, the idea of class struggle
– or, more adequately, ‘class war’ – could, thus, be modulated in
a racist direction. In orthodox Marxism, nonetheless, this danger
was relatively low as long as ‘class’ was determined in strictly
economic terms. Yet in other cases, especially in anarchism, Blan-
quism and the Parisian Commune, a racist tendency took hold
when attempts were made to construct the enemy in mythical and
essentialist terms. This conclusion to Foucault’s genealogy of the
war hypothesis is not without a certain inadvertent irony. Wasn’t
it Foucault himself who had experimented with the dissociation
of struggle from class? Is every non-economistic conflict theory in
danger of becoming complicit with state racism? This would be
a far-fetched argument for someone as critical of Marxist econo-
mism as Foucault. But Foucault, by clinging to his objectivist the-
oretical framework, cannot find a way out of this dilemma. While

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his (self-)criticism of a war-like conception of social conflictual-

ity is accurate, he cannot allow himself to deobjectivise struggle.
What, from a post-foundational perspective, would be the only
alternative – an ontology of antagonism – is simply not on the
agenda for a self-declared nominalist. Eventually, Foucault feels
forced to abandon his genealogical project of historico-political
research rather than complementing it with an ontological dimen-
sion: the dimension of the political.

The Eristic Alternative: Stiegler’s Ontology of Strife

Bernard Stiegler’s work stands in a line with the work of other

post-foundational an-archists such as Jacques Rancière, to whom
Stiegler often refers in his more political writings, or Miguel
Abensour and Reiner Schürmann. Yet with Stiegler, a quite dif-
ferent light is shed on the debates in post-foundational thought
as Stiegler has devoted his work to the philosophical refounda-
tion of the question of technics or technicity. The absence of an
ultimate ground for action, or in Heidegger’s terms: the intertwin-
ing between ground and abyss, is reconceptualised in terms of
an originary technicity premised upon what Stiegler defines as an
originary de-fault of all origin. The reason for this de-fault lies in
the existential structure of human Dasein. The human being, for
Stiegler, is what in philosophical anthropology would be called
an uncomplete creature or Mängelwesen (Gehlen [1940] 2016).
The mortal is marked by an original flaw, lack or handicap ‘for
which he has need of prostheses to supplement this original flaw,
or more exactly to defer (and differ from) it [le différer]’ (Stiegler
2003: 156). If the mortal is a being by de-fault, or in more tech-
nical Heideggerian terms: if the existential structure of Dasein
or ‘being-there’ is, at its most fundamental level, a ‘being-in-de-
fault’ or a ‘being-through-de-fault’ (on the premise that Dasein
is necessarily characterised by Endlichkeit or finitude), then the
only thing such a founding myth founds is the very absence of an
ultimate foundation, named by Stiegler ‘the originary de-fault of
origin’ (Stiegler 1998: 199). Before this fault, before the lack of
origin, ‘nothing had happened’ (189) – which is, of course, why

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it is originary. For this reason, we would be completely misled to

assume a positive origin which, after having existed at some point
in the past, fell apart and became unreachable.5
And yet, even though this de-fault of origin is in itself origi-
nary, its status is not purely negative since the absence of founda-
tion calls for ‘positive’ supplements. Precisely because both origin
and end are always deferred and an ultimate ground will never
be reached, the latter will have to be supplemented, and these
supplements are conceived by Stiegler in terms of technical pros-
theses. Technics, as ‘elementary supplementarity’, is nothing but
‘(the relation to) time (différance)’ (183), i.e. the supplementary
relation towards the endless deferral of ground and origin. By
applying Reiner Schürmann’s term to this idea, we can conclude
that the ‘anarchy principle’ (le principe d’anarchie) has found a
new name: technicity. This is where the originality of Stiegler’s
account lies: in his reformulation of ontological an-archism in
terms of an originary techne or technicity.6
Once again, the post-foundational nature of such a claim comes
to light: if every episteme is already tainted by techne, then phi-
losophers will search in vain for an epistemic ground or a foun-
dational truth for their activities. There is no episteme that would
not, from the start onwards, be technical to some extent. And this
claim can be expanded by adding that there is no language, no
discourse, which is not already, in and by itself, deeply technical,
i.e. rhetorical, given that no ultimate ground will ever be avail-
able for discourse to once and for all fix the flow of meaning. As
one would expect, such a claim must have consequences for our
thinking of politics as a particular art, skill, or techne. In fact,
a striking parallel between Stiegler’s rehabilitation of the rhetori-
cal and Laclau’s rhetoricised political ontology can be determined.
Stiegler’s claim that politics is to be understood as a particular
techne can find support from an Essex School perspective. Yet
there is also a significant difference. In Stiegler’s view, particular
techniques, including rhetorics and the art of politics, have to be
differentiated from a more general or ontological technicity, not,
as in Laclau, from an ontological politicality. As a result, it could
be argued, not only the dimension of the political or antagonism
is pushed out of focus (not completely though; we will return to

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this aspect in a moment), but also politics is attributed a derivative

status with respect to technicity.7 By granting technicity the role of
an originary supplement to the de-fault of origin (i.e. the absence
of an ultimate ground), the fundamental status of antagonism, as
so often before in political thought, is once more disavowed. With
the same move by which our attention is directed to the philosoph-
ical ‘forgetting’ of technicity, our attention is drawn away from
the political. From a Laclauian perspective, however, ‘the political’
is not simply a name for the rhetorical techne of strategic action
but designates a primordial antagonism without which no space
for strategic action would arise to begin with. In other words,
while the conflictual dimension of politics is taken into account by
Stiegler, it remains restricted to the ontic level. This will become
all the more evident when we now turn to Stiegler’s conception of
conflictuality.
In Stiegler’s account, the artefact that comes to supplement
Dasein’s originary de-fault of origin ‘brings disorder (eris, pol-
emos). Consequently mortals fight each other and destroy them-
selves’ (Stiegler 2003: 156). Mortals are forced into a fundamental
war against themselves by their originary ‘protheticity’, by the fact
that every technology may be turned into a weapon (Stiegler 2004:
35). Politics is an attempt at pacifying this general war induced,
in the last instance, by the technologically supplemented absence
of origin. But how is political pacification possible? Given the nec-
essary character of technological supplements, politics will have
nothing to rely on except, again, technological supplements. It is
what Stiegler calls ‘mnemotechnics’ which serves as a precondi-
tion for all political pacification. The mnemotechnics of scripture
allows for the literal fixation of the law, thus providing the material
means for the pacification – by way of institutionalised memorisa-
tion – of politics (80). And yet, it appears that for Stiegler a state of
fundamental conflictuality, of ‘war’, cannot be overcome entirely.
Even though war can be pacified with the help of mnemotechnics,
every pacificatory effort will at some point run aground. Hence,
politics will remain ‘the agora of a struggle, an agonistic, an eristic,
an art of dispute. In times of peace as in times of war, polemos, of
which eris is the civil or policed version, is the law of all things:
the law of becoming’ (36). Consequently, politics can be defined

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as the pacification of war by means of a judicial (and eventually

mnemotechnical) affirmation of a we that nevertheless retains a
polemical relation towards itself.

From Polemos to Stasis: A Short Detour via eris

Do we have to conclude that Stiegler does have a notion of fun-

damental antagonism (tamed ontically or agonistically by means
of law and ‘mnemotechnics’)? For two reasons this is not the
case: firstly, because polemos cannot be considered fundamental
as long as it remains derivative of a more originary technicity
or ‘prostheticity’. And secondly, what Stiegler describes as pol-
emos does not capture the double-sided nature of the political,
understood as antagonism. The latter involves both a moment
of grounding and of degrounding. To explicate this point we
will have to turn towards a third term – stasis – whose rele-
vance is openly denied by Stiegler. As the French political theo-
rist Étienne Tassin has pointed out, as others have before him,
one has to clearly differentiate between war or polemos in the
sense of an external conflict between city states, and a form of
conflict internal to the City (Tassin 2003). The latter form is
identified in Greek as stasis – a name for civil war. Despite the
fact that in the passages where Tassin develops his theory of
stasis he relies on some passages in Plato’s Republic, in actual
fact he positions himself in the tradition of Machiavelli and of
Claude Lefort for whom the City is based on an irreconcilable
internal strife (Lefort 2012). Tassin is taken to charge by Stiegler
for mixing up the concept of stasis with that of eris – the Greek
goddess of civic discord – as only the latter implies, according to
Stiegler, that diverse interpretations of law will be accepted – a
diversity of discord which is precisely what Plato aims at expel-
ling from the City (Stiegler 2004: 117, 190–2). Here, Stiegler, by
expelling the ontological dimension of antagonism (presented in
the ancient guise of stasis) from the City, falls into the same trap
as most agonistic theorists of politics. As Chantal Mouffe has
argued, antagonism tends to be neglected by theorists of ago-
nism like Hannah Arendt, William Connolly or Bonnie Honig

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(Mouffe 2013: 9–15). Stiegler’s eristic version of agonism does

not fare much better. But, as Mouffe sustains, it ‘is only when
division and antagonism are recognized as being ineradicable
that it is possible to think in a properly political way’ (14).
We can therefore conclude that Stiegler’s ‘conflictual’ notion
of politics remains inconsequential as long as even the remote
possibility of stasis – or antagonism – is expelled from the inner
life of the City. Contrary to what he assumes, the intrinsic and
inseparable link between the ontic dimension of politics and the
ontological of the political is cut off by such a move. Yet there
is no politics that would not have to pass through or reactivate
the dimension of the political, no agonism that would not work
according to the logic of antagonism, no community without
potential stasis, i.e. without a certain degree of internal polemos
with its double-edged logic of unification/division. What is more,
to expel the aspect of stasis from politics also means that radical
political action – for instance, in terms of populist mobilisations
or in the form of revolution (which is but a particular version
of civil war) – is deemed impossible. Of course, the degree of
diversity, plurality, or singularity within a given community is
certainly reduced, if we return to Laclau, by the construction
of chains of equivalence. Yet to reduce the play of differences is
the only possibility for us to arrive at a politics that will not be
entirely absorbed by the differential structure of social institution
and administration – of, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a ‘police’
distribution of the sensible. Stiegler is not prepared to live politi-
cally with this unificatory function of antagonism, even though
he considers eris a vital ingredient of political life. And while his
emphasis on the rhetorical, that is, strategical dimension of the
art of politics is a timely and more than welcome contribution
to political thought, his denegation of the fundamental status
of the political in the form of antagonism produces a series of
depoliticising effects within his discourse. One of these effects
is the disappearance of radical politics (be it in the populist or
in the revolutionary register), instead of which one finds, in his
more political texts, appeals to regulate the media or to protect
and reform educational institutions in order for citizens to learn
to take ‘care’ of themselves and others, or to regulate eris with a

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sense of Aristotelian philia or love and friendship among citizens

(Stiegler 2010).
Stiegler’s moralistic proposals of an eristic governmentality
seem to be rooted in his ontology of technicity. Not that a particu-
lar ontology would imply, in the deterministic sense, a particular
form of politics or analysis. But the possibilities of thinking and
acting politically are hampered, to say the least, if orientation is
sought in a depoliticised ontology. By turning technicity into the
an-archic principle of being-as-being, we may easily be seduced
to analyse the empirical realm of ontic beings in ‘technological’
rather than political terms. And consequently, we may be seduced
into seeking solutions by merely submitting our proposals to the
administrative sectors of the state rather than reactivating more
antagonistic forms of politics and shifting the hegemonic field of
forces. This argument does not amount to a wholesale refutation
of Stiegler’s philosophy. He is certainly right to claim that politics
is always technical – in the sense of strategy – but we need to add
that political strategies are employed with the aim of attaining a
goal through the construction of a particular ‘we’, through giv-
ing a certain degree of unity to a collective.8 It is therefore not a
merely academic question, an eccentric philosophical family quar-
rel among post-foundationalists, whether ontological primacy is
granted to technics or the political. This decision will influence
the way in which we think about and act upon our social word.
For this political reason, and not because there is a third and firm
rational ground to rest our decision upon, the political should be
posited as the an-archic principle of being, and politics as the nec-
essary supplement to the originary de-fault of origin.
We can thus conclude that, from a perspective rooted in the
Machiavellian tradition, Stiegler is half right and half wrong. On
the one hand, there is a necessity for politics as a techne (as agonis-
tics) because there is no arche. The endless deferral of an ultimate
ground, the originary de-fault of origin, will necessarily lead to
political attempts at partial grounding, at establishing less than
ultimate principles. Some grounds, some principles will have to be
established through strategic means. On the other hand, though,
the very absence of an ultimate ground or origin – the an-archic
nature of being – can be said to be an effect of the political if by the

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latter we understand, pace Laclau, antagonism as the condition of

possibility and impossibility of society. Even though Stiegler is fully
justified in claiming that politics, in its strategic mode, can only be
conceived in terms of technicity, it cannot be technicity that supple-
ments the absence of an ultimate ground. For whatever assumes,
at least partially, the function of an origin or principle will have to
be instituted antagonistically (against other principles); and to be
instituted antagonistically means to lose the function of an origin
or principle. It means to be in de-fault by principle: the principle
of the political. What is more, Stiegler’s defence of eris against
stasis does not pay sufficient tribute to the paradoxical nature of
the latter term. Nicole Loraux, as we will now see, pointed out that
the Greek concept of stasis does not refer to the struggle between
some among multiple factions (all of them composing the eristic
unity of a polis, as Stiegler sustains), but refers to a binary discord
which does not add up to a complementary harmony. The Greek
concept of stasis remains fundamentally ambiguous, if not para-
doxical, in signifying two contradictory moments: the agitational
movement of insurrection on the one hand (of, in modern terms,
‘revolution’), and, on the other, the ‘static’ moment in which inimi-
cal forces confront each other in a frozen and immotile state of
paralysis. It is this coincidence of oppositional determinations – a
paradoxical bond of conflict that simultaneously constitutes and
threatens to undermine community – that comes closest to a mod-
ern ontology of antagonism.

The Stasiological Alternative: Loraux’s Ontology of Civil War

The science of stasis, or civil war, is the variant of polemology

that comes, perhaps, closest to an ontology of antagonism. We
can call this science, with a term introduced by Giorgio Agam-
ben (Agamben 2015), stasiology. Of course, class struggle or
the ‘race war’ imagined in the politico-historical tradition can
be readily subsumed under the category of civil war. However,
stasis, the Greek term for civil war, has somewhat paradoxical
implications that may allow to see in stasis a predecessor of the
‘hauntological’ concept of antagonism. Let us see in what respect

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the term anticipates a concept of the political that would direct

our view to the ground and abyss of the social. Our key wit-
ness is Nicole Loraux – a collaborator of Jean-Pierre Vernant,
who belonged to the circle around the Paris Centre de Recherche
Comparée sur les Sociétés Anciennes – who has written what is
arguably the philosophically most viable study of the concept of
stasis. She expanded the historico-anthropological approach of
the school most significantly with a series of feminist studies on
the culture of ancient Athens. Her magnum opus on the divided
city – the cité divisée – is dedicated to the Greek, and in par-
ticular the Athenian, idea of civil war (Loraux 2006). We should
not, however, limit ourselves to reading Loraux’s work as that
of an ancient historian. It is a genuine work of political theory,
as Loraux in fact presents a contemporary theory of the politi-
cal via the medium of historical anthropology. For this purpose,
she employs the difference between the terms of ‘politics’ and of
‘the political’, using the first term for political routine work, i.e.
the ontic side of the political difference, while the second term
denotes its ontological side: a fundamentally conflictual nature
of the polis (155).
With regard to this idea of the political, Greek politics certainly
does not appear to be tolerant of conflict. Quite the opposite is, in
fact, true: the politics of the polis, as Loraux discerned, followed
a basic dictate of consent and served ideas of a closed society. The
hegemonic discourse of the polis was Platonic in the sense that
Plato’s politeia aimed to bring together all citizens into a commu-
nal whole. The ties of political society must, as Loraux stresses, be
woven tightly. The politics of the polis was driven by the constant
fear that these ties could break, and the polis be afflicted by the
spectre of civil war:

It is necessary to knot, bind, weave, and regulate civil peace each and
every day because the threat of a tear always looms: the slightest loos-
ening of the knot, the tiniest split in the fabric, and the rift dividing
the city gapes open. This would be the end of the One, the breakup,
the return to multiplicity – in short, a catastrophe. In order to ban-
ish the very thought of it, the bond of community must be made ever
tighter, so that no disagreement (diaphora) may arise and so that no
hate and stasis can slip through. (Loraux 2006: 94)

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Beyond the agonistic façade of public competition there looms the

rule of forced consensus. The Greeks felt unease at any failure
to achieve unanimity in their assemblies. Majority decisions were
accepted, but they never lost their touch of the illegitimate. The
principle of the political – antagonism – was therefore not out
in the open, but can best be reconstructed only at the hands of
the negative impression it left in the political discourse. That is
Loraux’s very goal in her description of a political that is evacu-
ated from itself:
[I]n claiming that the political is evacuated from itself, I am construct-
ing an ideality of the political that would be the missing link in existing
analyses. Conflict is this missing link, this hidden dimension, which I
tend, if not to identify with the political as a whole, at least to see as
indispensable to any thought about its workings. (Loraux 2006: 52)

Loraux locates that negative impression which is able to reveal the

political in the Greek polis in the bugbear of civil war – stasis. From
the Greek point of view, stasis, the struggle of the City with itself,
can only result in utter self-laceration. Civil war turns the closest
relatives and best friends into antagonised strangers. The internal
war vaults the walls of houses, cuts through family ties and shat-
ters the barrier between the public space of politics and the private
sphere of oikos, relinquishing any possibility of reconciliation at a
later date. In this bugbear of warring stasis, as drawn up by Plato
among others, we can recognise a polemological understanding
of antagonism: a war against an (internal) enemy to be destroyed.
Nonetheless, some aspects of this war could suggest that a proto-
Laclauian variant of antagonism did indeed exist in ancient Greece,
namely where ‘the spectre of stasis takes the terrifying form of a
curse’ (Loraux 2006: 40). This ‘hauntological’ figure goes beyond
the image of an empirical inner-city polemos insofar as it brings into
being a paradoxical conception of universal conflict. As Loraux
explains, stasis is a word that entails an inner juxtaposition. On
the one hand, it connotes standstill and an uprightness degenerated
into rigor. In the semantic field of politics, it can therefore denote
the position taken by a party or faction. On the other hand, stasis is
used as a synonym of the Greek term kinêsis: motion. This meaning
leads us to the political concept of uprising and civil war. Together,

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the word therefore transports the inner juxtaposition of a static

motion. Stasis has always been kinêsis stasimos: motion in stand-
still. What induced the Greeks see movements of political uprising
as being nothing but standstill? What made them consider con-
vulsion and paralysis as synonymous? Loraux suggests that, in a
moment of stasis, the unity of the polis can be experienced through
its very division, because the division is one into two juxtaposing
halves of the same polis. Yet, paradoxically, this ‘unity in division’
is precisely what arrests the motion of conflict: ‘civil war is stasis
inasmuch as the clash between two equal halves of the city erects
(just like a stele) conflict in the meson’ (106). Thereby, the civil war
draws up a front ‘that introduces into the city the paradoxical unity
that characterizes the simultaneous insurrection of two halves of a
whole’ (108).
English has a term that approximates the notion of motion in
standstill: the standoff. Countless Hollywood films are set in this
empty space-time, in which neither of the sides will step into action
– the entrenched hostage-taker on the one side, the police lying in
wait on the other. In situations like these, suspension creates sus-
pense. The passage to action is delayed, but remains latently pres-
ent as a looming threat (the building being stormed, the entrenched
person attempting to break out). The situation threatens to esca-
late. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, in her brilliant study Theorizing the
Standoff, investigated a whole series of such situations, of which
the uprising of the Davidian sect in the Texan town of Waco is
probably the most well known. According to Wagner-Pacifici’s defi-
nition, standoffs are ‘situations of mutual and symmetrical threat,
wherein the central parties face each other, literally and figura-
tively, across some key divide’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2000: 7); finding,
in her perspective from the field of cultural anthropology, that
social life is usually defined by an attempt to avoid standoff situ-
ations. It nevertheless remains true that ‘there’s something of the
standoff lurking, contingently, behind every social situation’ (6).
The concentrated accumulation of conflicts creates the danger that
rule-led social processes degenerate into a kind of self-blockade.
Although this is in fact an infrequent occurrence, the possibility
of a standoff remains in attendance at all times. Or, speaking with
Loraux: stasis continues to lurk in the background even at times of

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apparent social harmony. At the same time, and this constitutes the
punchline of Wagner-Pacifici’s research, in moments of standoff we
become aware of the contingency of rule-led processes. The stand-
off allows us to experience Contingency in Action (the subtitle of
her book). The concept of the standoff is – just like that of stasis – a
contingency concept.

‘Failed Unicity’, or, the Co-Originality of Contingency

and Conflict

Stasis, standoff, antagonism – these terms point, in their most fun-

damental dimension, to what could be described as the quasi-tran-
scendental condition of society: the co-originality of contingency
and conflict. Whenever social securities are undermined, we come
to experience the fundamental contingency – the absence of an
ultimate ground – of the social. As far as the social cannot remain
without any foundation (or could only remain so within an anti-,
not within a post-foundational framework), conflicts over the pro-
visional refoundation of a dislocated ground immediately set in
and, conversely, make all the more apparent the very contingency
of social affairs. If antagonism, as was argued in the previous
chapters, is the name that was given to the phenomenon of social
negativity in the tradition of German Idealism, Early Romanticism
and Marxism, we can now see why it was in this historical period,
described by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck as Sattel-
zeit (a watershed period between 1750 and 1850), that the experi-
ence of social negativity gained ground and began to universalise
itself (Koselleck 1972). That all social being is both contingent and
conflictually established (or can be challenged through conflict)
came to be the typical experience of modernity. Due to a series
of interlocking historical developments, through which everything
that was solid melted into thin air, social conditions were no lon-
ger considered necessary or irrevocable. Contingency and conflict,
emerging from the same source, became what one would call the
reflective determination of the social in its totality: where every
social fact can be experienced as contingent, conflicts are bound
to arise over its redesign; in turn, where every social fact can be

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changed by way of conflict, it is possible to experience its essen-

tial contingency. This reflective determination of all social facts as
necessarily contingent and necessarily conflictual allowed for the
development of a post-foundational political ontology according
to which the absence of a final ground generates disputes over the
partial refoundation of the social. Therefore, at the end of a long
intellectual development, the notion of antagonism emerges as a fit
name for the doubly reflective determination of conflict and con-
tingency. Antagonism, as we can now define it, is the single name
for the double experience of conflict and contingency in modernity.
It is the key word of an ontology of the political that corresponds
to our modern experience of ubiquitous conflict and contingency.
Where does this leave us with regard to (pre-modern) polemo-
logical alternatives? It is evident that the genealogical alternative
of the ‘war hypothesis’ is ultimately indefensible. Antagonism,
ontologically understood, must not be confused with an actual,
if only subcutaneous, war between friends and enemies. Also the
eristic alternative is modelled upon a war-like image of society,
only that moments of polemos and of stasis have to be expelled
from the city. Thereby, eristic theorists not only, as Mouffe has
criticised, exclude the very ontological dimension of antagonism
(leaving us with the ontic level of eris or agonism and the insti-
tutional procedures for domesticating antagonism), they also
deprive us of a political explanation – in the sense of the political
– of how a certain degree of unity of the City is established and, in
the same stroke, subverted. In this respect, the stasiological alter-
native seems to have a clear advantage over other polemological
approaches. The ground on which society rests, and cannot rest,
is torn apart by an irresolvable tension between unity and divi-
sion, movement and standstill, agitation and paralysis: two oppo-
sitional features bound together by one and the same logic. Thus,
the Greek concept of stasis proves to be at least relatable to a mod-
ern theorisation of antagonism.9 What is certainly comparable is
the idea that stasis encroaches from the polis of citizens onto the
entire city, and thereby is a form of conflict that touches upon and
at the same time questions the social totality, i.e.: society. Stasis, in
its ‘paradoxical’ dimension of a ‘bond of conflict’, emerges as the
dangerous flip-side of society as a whole.

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However, there remains an important difference.10 The modern

notion of antagonism goes beyond this antique notion because of
its radical hauntological dimension of a negativity that is no longer
expressed by way of the paralysing clash of two objectively given
parties (which suggests an ultimately ‘ontic’ understanding of con-
flict), but in the very breakdown of any form of unicity. The antago-
nism that is revealed and hidden in the game of political difference
is not only beyond the One, it is even beyond the Two. In the case
of stasis, the unity of the City is thought and experienced in terms of
duality – this is exactly the paradox detected by Loraux. Yet, Laclau’s
understanding of antagonism-as-Real diverges from any dualistic
understanding of conflict. Given the ‘grounding role’ he attributes
to negativity, he cannot, Laclau insisted, ‘assert the unicity of Being’
(Laclau 2004: 324), but neither can he assert pluralistic ontologies
or, for instance, Badiou’s ontology of the multiple:
For me the starting point – once accepted that what is is not the One
– is not multiplicity but failed unicity. This means that the ontological
task for me is different than for Badiou: it consists in finding in every
identity the traces of its contingency – i.e. the presence (in a way to be
specified) of something different from itself. (Laclau 2004: 325)

In as far as the traces of contingency are also traces of conflict, the

ontological task – to bring out the consequences of the Laclauian
approach – is to identify the traces of antagonism in any social fact
under analysis.
But let us not ignore that the same argument must apply to
society as the totality of all social facts. A post-foundational
approach cannot simply abandon this notion without turning into
some postmodern, anti-foundational ‘anything goes’ approach to
the social. Society, from our perspective, must not be dissolved
into a number of monadic individuals or some sort of social plu-
ralism, as liberals would propose; nor is an ontology of multiplic-
ity – in the sense, for instance, of Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’
– helpful in determining the political logic of unification. There
can be no politics without the construction of chains of equiva-
lence, and, consequently, a world of pure multiplicity would be a
world devoid of politics. For this reason, we have to hold on to
a notion of society as totality, even as society cannot be closed

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into a full totality. It should now be clear why, as Laclau claimed,

the only form of social unicity that can be reached, and must be
pursued, is failed unicity. Society will always remain an impos-
sible (and yet necessary) object because the social world can only
be totalised through the instance of an incommensurable outside
which, through radical negation, constitutes and, simultaneously,
subverts social order (see also NR 89–92; for an extensive engage-
ment with society as an impossible, and yet necessary, object see
Marchart 2013a). If the radical nature of negativity is taken seri-
ously, then the social world is grounded on the partition between
society itself and its outside, which can only be experienced in
the negative. This is to say that the totality of social being, which
by way of convention is entitled ‘society’, is instituted at the very
moment at which it is negated, and thereby remains marked by
the inherently external threat it is exposed to. To borrow a techni-
cal term from Jean-Luc Nancy: antagonism, as an outside which
makes itself felt from within all social being, stands to society in a
relation of transimmanence. And, if the principle of its grounding
is identical to that of its degrounding, society will never be fully
foundable, but neither can it remain entirely unfounded, which
is precisely the reason why the play between the two sides of the
political difference, politics and the political, will not come to
rest. We will now turn towards the side of politics.

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Part II
Thinking Politics

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4 The Restless Nature of the Social: On the
Micro-Conflictuality of Everyday Life

Traits of the Political

One cannot get around the unbridgeable chasm between science

and thinking. ‘Science does not think’ – Heidegger’s infamous
verdict was meant to be intentionally shocking. But it was not
intended as an outright attack against the sciences (Heidegger
1968: 8). While the social sciences provide us with important
tools for describing and understanding our social world, they also
tend to avoid thinking – which has to do with their ‘ontopolitical’
interpretation of the world. Even as social scientists may consider
themselves defenders of positive knowledge, the baggage of meta-
physics weighs heavily on their shoulders. The main remainder of
metaphysical thinking within the social sciences is social objectiv-
ism: the metaphysical assumption of ‘social facts’ as objectively
given. In his theory of populism, as we will see in the next chap-
ter, Laclau was highly critical of group-sociological approaches
that would presuppose the pre-existence of social actors. He was
equally critical of approaches that would disperse political agency
in the functional processes of society. Any attempt at anchoring
social phenomena in a prior and grounding ‘objectivity’ (an objec-
tive agent, social structures, functional imperatives, economic
laws, etc.) can be called metaphysical. Is there a post-foundational
alternative imaginable? What can be said with certainty is that
social constructionism – which is considered the main contender
to objectivism – would not fare much better. A simple construc-
tionism à la Berger and Luckmann, for instance, amounts to no

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more than an anti-foundationalist mirror image of social objectiv-

ism. What we have to account for when – correctly – assuming
the constructed nature of social facts are the limits of construction
(Stavrakakis 1999: 66–7). We have to account for that remainder
of negativity which cannot be constructed but, in turn, operates as
the source and limit of all construction.1
We will now start exploring some of the implications of the
ontological approach elaborated so far. In Part I, I have concen-
trated on the ontological side of the political difference. Questions
regarding its ontic side – the side of politics and of the social –
have largely been neglected and still require sufficient theorisa-
tion. Otherwise it could appear as if the conceptual innovation
of the political had displaced its complementary partner, politics.
This imbalance has to be corrected by increasingly shifting focus
towards the realm of political and social practices and institu-
tions. If the political difference is taken seriously as difference, this
‘ontic side’, inextricably intertwined with the political, must not
be ignored. What we call thinking requires a constant effort to
acknowledge the play of political difference and the persistence of
social negativity. It requires us to follow the traits of the political
as they lead through social theory, but, as a rule, remain neglected
and disavowed. Thinking means to confront these traits and to
awaken objectivists from their dogmatic slumber.
In the present chapter, the Laclauian model of the social will
be expounded via Edmund Husserl’s early critique of scientific
objectivism. Not only was Husserl’s critique path-breaking,
it also provides Laclau the conceptual means to differentiate
between the two modes of social ‘sedimentation’ and political
‘reactivation’ – which, I propose, should be interpreted as two
modes or aggregate states of a single ontological force. In other
words, the social and the political have to be seen as different
(if not self-differencing) aspects of one and the same phenomenon:
antagonism.2 By following the inner logic of Laclau’s thought,
his political ontology can thus be pushed to the point where it
turns into an ontology of the political: a theory about the politi-
cal nature of all things social. Being-in-the-World, as was argued
from a left-Heideggerian perspective, should be understood as
being-in-the-political.

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Such a shift in perspective will allow us to extend our previous

critique of polemological models of the political by proposing a
more sophisticated way of affirming the ubiquitous nature of social
conflictuality. There is no secret war raging ‘under the surface’ of
an apparently pacified social formation. A post-foundational notion
of ground would anyway sit uncomfortably with any metaphysics
of depth. There is nothing to be discovered deep down ‘under’ the
surface. In this regard, the social is only surface. Antagonism will
always be right there, in front of our eyes, on the surface of every
social institution, of every social identity, of everything that presents
itself as social fact. Being transimmanent to the social, antagonism
makes this ‘surface’ tremble from within. It does not make much
difference, at the ontological level, whether we think of institutions,
groups, organisations, functional systems, structures, interactions,
classes or identities. Antagonism is what undermines their very
objectivity. Such a claim, of course, instigates a fundamental altera-
tion of our image of the social world. We are now forced to bring
into view the contingencies and conflicts that are at the basis of
the apparently most stable social formations. Not only have these
formations emerged from conflicts, from which they could just as
well have emerged in different forms. Exposed as they are to the
withdrawal of their own foundations, they are never fully institu-
tionalisable. Day by day they must be stabilised and reproduced
anew – which would be expendable if they were not battled over.
As simple as this consideration is, as far-reaching its consequences
are. On an empirical level, and precisely because the ubiquitous
traces of antagonism – the traits of conflict and contingency in every
social identity – are not mysteriously hidden, but are only forgot-
ten, ignored or negated, these traces can be recovered and empiri-
cally studied. The micrological approach proposed in this chapter is
meant to direct our attention to the traits that are blindingly obvi-
ous. And if, on a theoretical level, a political task can be attributed
to the ontology of the political, then it will be that of thwarting the
appearance of apparent stability and helping the restless motions
of the social – and thereby antagonism – to become visible. This is
the task of thinking antagonism: to reactivate the sedimented rou-
tines of philosophy and the social sciences. It is an attempt to make
science think.

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Husserl’s Critique of Objectivism: Institution and

Reactivation of the Social

Before developing our argument as to the restless nature of the

social we have to make a brief detour via Husserl. There are good
reasons for this detour. Hegemony theory, as developed within the
Essex School paradigm, has as one of its most central theoreti-
cal goals the development of a non-objectivist conceptualisation
of the social. Apart from the philosophical resources of post-ana-
lytic philosophy and post-structuralism, it therein draws on the
phenomenological tradition. As Laclau relies in his critique of
objectivism on Husserl’s Crisis (see Husserl 1962), first published
in 1936 as Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie, we have to revisit for a moment
the Husserlian critique of objectivism. According to Husserl, all
modern positive science is dominated by the idea of objectivity
as originally developed in the natural sciences. Their objectivism
is traced back by Husserl to its original institution (Urstiftung)
by Galileo, by which nature came to be mathematically idealised.
But such mathematisation and, eventually, technicisation of the
natural sciences came at a price. As long as only the mathemati-
cally idealised entities were taken for real, it was ignored that even
the ancient discipline of geometry did possess a foundation in the
sensual realm of the life-world. Objectivism started by taking ‘for
true being what is method’ (Husserl 1962: 52), while the most
important questions of mankind were banished from the scientific
realm: the doxa appertaining to the life-world was devaluated by
scientific episteme.3
This critique of modern objectivism turned out to be fruitful for
Laclau, who develops a notion of the social which relies on aspects
of Husserl’s theory of the life-world. In particular, Laclau relies
on the Husserlian distinction between original institution/reactiva-
tion and sedimentation in science, only the latter is associated by
Laclau with the realm of the social and the former is determined
as the moment of the political:
For Husserl the practice of any scientific discipline entails a routiniza-
tion in which the results of previous scientific investigation tend to
be taken for granted and reduced to a simple manipulation, with the

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result that the original intuition which gave rise to them is completely
forgotten. At the end of his life, Husserl saw the crisis of European
science as the consequence of a growing separation between the ossi-
fied practice of the sciences and the vital primary terrain in which the
original or constitutive intuitions of those sciences were rooted. The
task of transcendental phenomenology consisted of recovering those
original institutions. Husserl called the routinization and forgetting of
origins ‘sedimentation’, and the recovery of the ‘constitutive’ activity
of thought ‘reactivation’. (NR 34)

Thus, Laclau proposes to think of the social as the terrain of sedi-

mented practices. These practices – no matter whether they man-
ifest themselves in rituals, in cultural identities or in functionally
predetermined rules and institutions – gain objectivity because
they can be anticipated on the basis of their repetitive nature.
What constitutes an institution is the high degree to which opera-
tional sequences are sedimented. The life-world examples used
by Laclau are telling: the post being delivered every morning,
buying a cinema ticket, having dinner at a restaurant, going to a
concert. In all these cases it can be anticipated, to a large degree,
what is going to happen. Even though sedimented practices like
these may allow for some degree of variation, we will still expect
the postman to deliver the post, we will expect the concert to
take place in accordance with the schedule, and we will expect
to be served in the restaurant where we have reserved a table. All
this might, under particular circumstances, very well not hap-
pen, yet the social would be an unliveable place without such
institutionalised sequences with little variance and a high degree
of predictability. This is what constitutes the sedimented layers
of social objectivity.
This conception of the social as a space of sedimented prac-
tices has to be qualified in two respects. First, all social sediments
can be traced back to the moment of an ‘original institution’ or
Urstiftung – herein Laclau follows the Husserlian terminology.
The original institution assumes a grounding function by repress-
ing alternatives that were equally available at the moment of insti-
tution. For this reason, every sedimented practice is based on a
moment of exclusion which, in the course of the sedimentation,
sinks into oblivion:

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Insofar as an act of institution has been successful, a ‘forgetting of

the origins’ tends to occur; the system of possible alternatives tends to
vanish and the traces of the original contingency to fade. In this way,
the instituted tends to assume the form of a mere objective presence.
This is the moment of sedimentation. It is important to realize that
this fading entails a concealment. If objectivity is based on exclusion,
the traces of that exclusion will always be somehow present. What
happens is that the sedimentation can be so complete [. . .] that the
contingent nature of that influence, its original dimension of power,
do not prove immediately visible. Objectivity is thus constituted
merely as presence. (NR 34)

Since every sedimented layer of the social came into the world
through an original moment of exclusion, social objectivity could
have been constructed differently. In other words, social sedimen-
tations are contingent, because they could have been instituted in
a dissimilar form.4 It is through processes of sedimentation that
the contingent, historical and power-ridden nature of the origi-
nal institution falls into oblivion. What is more, we not only tend
to forget the concrete historical alternatives once available, we
also forget the aspect of radical negativity at the ground of all
social relations: their antagonistic character, as expressed by the
unavoidable struggle raging over the question as to which alterna-
tive should in a given moment be ruled out.
Nonetheless, the moment of radical negativity attached to the
original institution cannot be completely erased from the field of
sedimentations. Social positivity will always be tainted by traces
of original negativity – traces of contingency, historicity, power
and conflictuality – since total sedimentation would be a logical
impossibility. A world consisting of repetitive practices without
any room for deviations would be a self-propelled machinery, a
perpetuum mobile, not a social world. No institution can be total.5
This leads us to the second qualification of the above-said. For
as long as a trace of original negativity remains, latently at least,
within the sphere of social objectivity, it will always be possible
to remind ourselves of it. This, according to the Laclauian lexi-
con, constitutes the moment of ‘the political’, when the contin-
gent, ungrounded nature of social objectivity becomes fully visible

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(NR 35). Laclau’s term for this is reactivation. For Husserl, it was
the philosophers’ obligation – as ‘functionaries of mankind’ – to
return to the moment of original institution and its variations
within later institutions and reactivate them by questioning their
sedimented forms (Husserl 1962: 72). What is to be reactivated
for Laclau is not so much the original instituting moment as such.
We do not have access to the concrete historical alternatives once
available but now gone forever. What can be reactivated only is
the contingent and antagonistic character of social sedimenta-
tions, the groundless nature of the social through newly emerging
antagonisms: ‘Reactivation does not therefore consist of returning
to the original situation, but merely of rediscovering, through the
emergence of new antagonisms, the contingent nature of so-called
“objectivity”’ (NR 34–5). And, for Laclau, it is not so much a mat-
ter of philosophical insight that would allow us to reactivate for-
gotten origins. It is a matter of politics. Only on the basis of newly
emerging antagonisms can we become conscious of the original
range of available alternatives: ‘this rediscovery can reactivate the
historical understanding of the original acts of institution insofar
as stagnant forms that were simply considered as objectivity and
taken for granted are now revealed as contingent and project that
contingency to the “origins” themselves’ (NR 35). It is through the
collision of antagonistic forces that we become aware of the con-
tingent nature of sedimented routines. Only then do we become
conscious of the fact that things could be different – historically, at
present, and in the future.

Time, Space and Human Geography

This argument has the potential to change the way we imagine

temporality and space. Laclau argues that in order to anticipate an
event within a given routine sequence the temporality of the event
has to be reduced. All practices that can be predicted because of
their repetitive structure are by nature spatial. To the extent to
which differences are articulated into a relational structure they
can undergo a cartographic mapping. For instance, sedimented

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routines within a given institution can be ‘spatialised’ into an insti-

tutional organogram. If differences were to remain in an entirely
unstructured state, they would be subject to a continuous flow.
In such a psychotic universe we would be buried under an ava-
lanche of the unexpected. But as soon as they are fixated spatially,
they enter a process of sedimentation. Social objectivity emerges
from the synchronisation of differences into relational structures.
What Laclau calls ‘space’ is precisely the outcome of differences
arranged into a relational whole: ‘As we know, spatiality means
coexistence within a structure that establishes the positive nature
of all its terms’ (NR 69). Every form of relationality produces
space. It follows that social objectivity is by nature spatial.
Conversely, the same approach leaves us with a completely
reshuffled conception of temporality. If any ‘repetition that is gov-
erned by a structural law of successions is space’, then the relation
of successive temporal moments or any cyclical representation of
time – such as, for instance, the Polybian anakyklosis of regime
forms – would also be spatial (NR 41–2). As said, sedimentation
emerges from the repetition of an original moment of institution;
and repetition creates space. However, Laclau, an attentive reader
of Derrida, is very well aware of the fact that mere repetition of the
identical is quite simply impossible (Derrida 1988).6 Laclau aims at
this idea with his conception of dislocation – a term that refers to
the Latin locus, and thus to a place within a topographical struc-
ture that has been pushed ‘out of place’. Seen from the perspective
of the sedimented structures of the social, dislocation is perceived
as an event that cannot be integrated into the horizon of expec-
tations: it is something we did not expect and which therefore
threatens the sedimented routines and processes of social institu-
tions. To the extent that the social in its sedimented state is spa-
tial, this event must be ontologically different from space – which
leads Laclau to his definition of dislocation as the true form of
temporality. Only an event which is of essentially temporal nature
will be able to dislocate the spatial arrangements of the social.
Conversely, the temporal aspect of the event will get eliminated
to the extent to which it is inscribed into the repetitive processes
of sedimentation. Laclau exemplifies this point with the fort/da

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game Freud (1999: 12–13) observed with a little child who aimed
to get to grips with the absence of his mother through inventing
a repetitive game for himself. In this way repetition allowed the
child to inscribe absence into the space of presence (Laclau 1990:
41).7 The social can thus be defined as a relationally articulated
spatial structure whose original institution resulted from an act of
radical negativity (i.e. antagonism) which later became forgotten,
but in any moment can be reactivated through the experience of
dislocation, i.e. time.
This theory was met with fierce criticism by human geogra-
phers.8 In particular, Laclau was charged by Doreen Massey with
holding onto an outmoded notion of space. In the 1960s and
1970s, as Massey recounts, spatial theories in human geography
underwent the same constructivist turn that other social sciences
had experienced. The canonical slogan of the time was that space
had to be conceived as socially constructed. It is not an unchang-
ing substance or foundation on which society rests; rather, the
specific structure of space is taken to be the result of social, eco-
nomic and political processes – a perspective nicely captured by
Timothy Luke: ‘[s]pace does not exist as such; it too must be fab-
ricated continuously in the production and reproduction of soci-
ety’ (Luke 1996: 120). However, from the 1980s onwards, this
approach was radicalised to the point of nearly being inverted.
Not only is space now seen as socially constructed, the general
understanding is, inversely, that the social sphere is also spatially
constructed. It is now claimed, according to Massey, that the
spatial institution of the social sphere affects the way in which
society works, as the latter will continuously be transformed
through processes of spatialisation. While in the earlier account
space was still conceptualised as an entirely passive entity, i.e. as
the outcome of processes of social construction, in today’s view it
is space itself which assumes the role of a social agent. As Massey
claims in For Space (Massey 2005), space must be envisaged as
something open, multiple, and heterogeneous by nature; not only
is it constantly being made and remade, there is also a certain
disruptive quality to it. Only in a second step is this disrupting
and constantly changing force of space tamed and ossified, for

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instance, through mappings and other forms of representation.

Laclau is taken to task by Massey for remaining within the first
paradigm, thus misconstruing space as a static realm – the rea-
son being that Laclau allegedly positions the category of space in
binary opposition vis-à-vis the category of time, thereby repro-
ducing an old philosophical narrative according to which it is
temporality that plays the part of agency, not space.

The Social as a Mode of the Political

This critique would be entirely justified if only Laclau held such

a dualistic view. To assume so means to ignore the inner logic of
his argument. Of course, given Laclau’s definition of dislocation
as temporal, it may seem at first sight that Massey was correct in
her criticism of Laclau’s ‘passive’ conception of space. But what if
space and time were not conceived as binary opposites by Laclau?
In fact, their relation is much more complex and I am prepared
to defend the following interpretation of Laclau’s spatial theory:
contrary to the simplistic picture of a binarism of space/time,
passivity/activity, or closedness/openness, we have to come to an
understanding of time and space as entirely intertwined, as indeed
the same thing in a different mode. And what, exactly, is it that can
appear in the two different modes of time and space? I have hinted
at it already. I submit that it is precisely what we have sought to
think all along as antagonism. Certainly, Laclau himself does not
go that far in his spatial theory, yet I would claim that it follows
from his assumptions if we are prepared to work out their radical
consequences. For if antagonism lies at the very moment of origi-
nal institution of sedimented social practices, then it cannot be the
opposite of the latter. As their instituting moment it remains pres-
ent in a state of oblivion and, as Laclau showed, can be reactivated
at any time. For this reason, the social is antagonistic by nature.
Indeed, ‘the social’ is but a name for antagonism in a ‘sleeping
mode’. On an experiential level we become conscious of this fact
whenever antagonisms are reactivated. In other words, there exists
no dichotomy between sedimentation and institution/reactivation,
between social construction and political dislocation, between

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space and time. Every attempt at constructing and reconstructing

the social will necessarily produce effects of dislocation – because
in any case it will to some extent have to rely on the articulation
of antagonistic frontiers.9
How could it be otherwise – given the underlying Heideg-
gerianism of Laclau’s theory? Radical negativity, it was claimed
in Chapter 2, is always mediated through difference. It never
appears as such, but only within the ontic field of the social. The
impression of a simple dualism between space and time is evi-
dently false.10 Space and time, the social and the political, are not
two separate spheres. We have to think of them as two modes
of one and the same instance: antagonism, through which the
spatial and the temporal, in their respective degree of spatialisa-
tion/temporalisation, are modulated. In terms of what seems to
function as a ‘time/space modulator’, antagonism not only (de)
grounds sedimented social routines and institutions but, what is
more, presents itself in the illusory shape of (seemingly) pacified
and frozen social relations.
This idea is less eccentric than it may seem. We must not forget
that, from a Marxist perspective, what appears as the absence of
class struggle is but a particular stage of class struggle (indicat-
ing the hegemonic dominance of the bourgeoisie). Similarly, what
in the eyes of a Marxist of the ‘Ramsgate School’ appears as the
absence of the political is merely a particular mode of the politi-
cal: the mode of socially sedimented antagonism – but nonetheless
antagonism. The political, to be sure, is not the opposite of the
social. But neither is the social simply the product, effect or out-
come of an instituting moment that later became entirely separated
from its initial ground. Massey is right, it would be misguided to
conceive of the social in metaphysical terms as a pre-given pas-
sive ‘matter’ that was actively formed by the political. But she is
only right because there is not much difference between the social
and the political – except their difference as difference. The social,
I have proposed, has to be envisaged as nothing other than the
political in an instituted mode.11 It is the political itself perceived
– i.e. experienced – from a different angle. This, perhaps, counter-
intuitive claim directly ensues, without being developed by Laclau
himself, from his ‘primacy of the political’ thesis:

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Any advance in the understanding of present-day social struggles

depends on inverting the relations of priority which the last century
and a half’s social thought had established between the social and the
political. This tendency had been characterized, in general terms, by
what we may term the systematic absorption of the political by the
social. The political became either a superstructure, or a regional sec-
tor of the social, dominated and explained according to the objective
laws of the latter. Nowadays, we have started to move in the opposite
direction: towards a growing understanding of the eminently political
character of any social identity. To use Husserlian terminology: if the
social is established through the sedimentation of the political, through
the ‘forgetting of origins’, the reactivation of the original meaning of
the social consists in showing its political essence. (NR 160)

If the passage is read attentively, it becomes evident that the politi-

cal, rather than being simply the opposite of the social (in the sense
of a metaphysical dualism), is what grounds and ungrounds social
relations. But this function does not issue from the transcendent
position of an unmoved mover. If there is such a thing as a ‘political
essence’ of the social, then the political, given that every social phe-
nomenon is subject to a constant play between ground and abyss,
must be conceived as transimmanent to the social. Differentialised
negativity is transimmanent negativity; the radical outside of a
given identity only makes itself felt within this identity.

Zooming into the Micrological, or, How to Make

Science Think

It could be argued that such a conception of antagonism remains

abstract philosophy and cannot possibly be translated into empiri-
cal research. I do not think so. The ontology of the political
may provide us with an outlook that should influence empirical
research. As soon as the essentially antagonistic nature of social
space is taken seriously, any given social topography starts to
appear in a strongly political light, and one will have to study
the contingent, historical and power-ridden moments of its origi-
nary institution. What is more, our view will shift towards the
dislocatory struggles that are constantly taking place around the

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shaping and reshaping of the social. In this sense, the category of

antagonism – in its two modes of the social and the political (i.e.
in terms of a constant play between the instituted and the insti-
tuting side of radical negativity) – may prove to be as much of
philosophical as of analytical value. Furthermore, it will produce
something of the order of an ‘estrangement effect’ with regard to
social life. In empirical research we must always ask: How can
the political nature of a given social fact be reactivated? How can
a sense of the contingency and conflictuality of what appears as
solid and unalterable be recovered? In other words, how can we,
in our research practice, think antagonism? The ontology of the
political, as I propose to conceive it, thus initiates a change in per-
ception that reaches down to the micrological level of the social.
It has effects on our notion of even the most humble and private
routine acts. These acts too have to be conceived as an expression
of the political, but the political in another ‘mode’: the mode of the
social. This understanding constitutes a fundamental shift in our
view of the social world.
Perceived through the lens of our ontology, relations of power
and force appear to permeate the entire social world. To this day,
most social scientists will seethe at such a statement. If everything
is political, runs the counter-argument, then nothing is political.
This counter-argument misses the ontological status of the con-
cept of the political. Of course, not everything is political in the
sense of the social subsystem of politics. However, there is no
social relationship that is not at the same time also a relationship
of conflict, power and exclusion. This insight emerges not only
from Laclau’s thoughts, of course. Foucault too sees a presence of
the political, even if he does not call it by this name, creeping even
into the smallest crevices of the social. He speaks of thousandfold
minor conflicts between the sexes, between parents and children,
between those who are imputed to have knowledge and the oth-
ers. The social therefore presents itself as a large swarm of tactical
micro-actions. In this, Foucault argued ontologically – even if that
is hardly reconcilable with the declared positivism and nominal-
ism of his approach. Countless places in Foucault’s writings imply,
as we have seen, the primacy of the struggle. In Discipline and
Punish, the microphysics of power is based on the model of an

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everlasting battle (Foucault 1977: 308; Chevallier 2004). For the

historico-political discourse, which Foucault himself philandered
with for a while, war is posited as a condition for the existence of
society. At the basis of might: the fight.
Obviously, from the viewpoint of the post-foundational ontol-
ogy, as it has been advanced here, this fundamental struggle does
not go by the name of ‘war’ or ‘battle’, as in the genealogical
Foucault, but by the name ‘antagonism’. Foucault’s polemology
reveals itself to constitute a short-circuit, an inadmissible ‘ontisa-
tion’ of antagonism. Foucault will not permit himself to leap from
his polemology to an ontological condition of antagonism (which
has nothing to do, as I have argued, with the warring relation-
ship between friend and foe). He is hindered both by his blanket
rejection of the negativistic tradition of Hegel and Marx and by
his own nominalism, sometimes bordering on social objectivism,
which prevents him from differentiating between an ontic and an
ontological dimension of the social. Yet, in its consequences, his
suggestion is not so far removed from the ‘Ramsgate School’. From
Marx’s point of view, class struggle institutionally settles not only
in factories, but in all institutional sediments. The police, the law,
the family, the opera, the social security, the church, the university,
the football club – all of that is class struggle. The only differ-
ence is that from a post-Marxist perspective, all of these institu-
tions consist not only of the struggle between ‘classes’ but equally
importantly also of the struggles for the equality of the genders or
the inclusion or exclusion of migrants, etc. The removal of social
struggles from the main agent of class leads to a far-reaching politi-
cisation of social structures.

Against Micro-Politics: The Absolute Restlessness of

the Negative

There is one aspect to be adopted from Foucault, however: the

sense for the micrological, which Marxists tend to miss (excep-
tions like Adorno, Bloch and Benjamin are a confirmation of the
rule). Laclau also largely lacks a micrological sensorium. What is
required is a sense for the most minimal restlessness in the social,

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the most minute conflicts and contingencies. Those who have such
a sense see the social begin to flicker before their very eyes, hear
it buzz in their ears and feel it wobble underneath their feet. The
hauntological work of the present-absent instance of antagonism
can be recognised by the high-frequency oscillation of conditions
that, up to this point, had been considered stable. The social begins
to oscillate as soon as it is touched by antagonism. It oscillates
when radical negativity is set in motion by the play of difference.
This phenomenon is still far removed from politics in the stricter
sense (even from what we will call minimal politics). It does not
matter whether we find ourselves on the beach with Marx, out-
side the asylums and prisons with Foucault or at the museum with
Bourdieu – there is always some struggle to watch, which will cast
unease over even the greatest idyll. The political expresses itself,
after all, not only in the large upheavals but also in the secret con-
flictuality of daily life – the minor and barely visible tectonic shifts
of social sediments.
The conventional term of ‘micro-politics’ is, as will be argued
in the subsequent chapters, a misnomer, for what we are dealing
with at this micrological level of social vibrations, effectuated by
antagonism, has nothing to do yet with ‘politics’ in any mean-
ingful sense. It is the most minimal form of appearance of the
political. And as the hauntological labour of the negative cannot
easily be entered on a micro/macro scale, one should perhaps
abandon the qualification ‘micro’ altogether or only retain it for
heuristic reasons. From the vantage point of this ‘hauntology’ of
the political, it would be wrong to order antagonisms by their
size. If the distortion of the relational space of the social is a phe-
nomenic form of appearance of antagonism, then the question of
scale is not important. Antagonism, as an ontological concept,
is beyond the scalable. Its modulations reach from revolution to
the fight over housework, from the general strike to skiving off.12
Antagonism – as opposed to ontic politics – cannot be grasped
by a sociological differentiation into micro and macro. It is not
quantifiable; it is merely possible to experience its intensity – or
more precisely: experience it as intensity.
This differential play of negativity, as it occurs throughout the
social on diverse levels of intensity, is nicely captured by Hegel’s

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notion of ‘the absolute restlessness of becoming’ (Hegel [1813]

1999: 384). This phrase, when read with and against Hegel, is able
to appropriately capture the flickering nature of social phenom-
ena. Adorno had recognised in what he called the non-identical
the very ‘restlessness’ of identity, ‘that Hegel calls becoming: it
shudders within itself’ (Adorno 1975: 160). In a significant study,
Jean-Luc Nancy (2002) pointed out in particular the micrologi-
cal dimension of this restlessness, which is nothing other than the
‘restlessness of the negative’.13 Thus, Hegel is portrayed by Nancy
as a post-foundationalist:

The Hegelian ground is neither fundament nor foundation, neither

groundwork nor substrate. It is the depth in which one is submerged,
into which one sinks and goes to the bottom. More precisely, this
ground founds only to the extent that it sinks in itself: for founda-
tion should be a hollowing out. Thus thought is not grasped in its
depth without being such a hollowing out. Still further: this hol-
lowing neither attains nor brings to light a secure groundwork. It
hollows out the point of passage, and the point itself is such a hol-
lowing out: work of the negative, but right at the surface. (Nancy
2002: 15)

Following this reading of Hegel, the labour of the negative would

be the labour of splitting identity or, rather, differentiating it from
itself, thus undermining every first principle and every firm ground,
but by doing so enabling, even necessitating, further regrounding.
The Marxian idea of antagonism as a social blockade between the
forces and the relations of production is then, from this point of
view, but an imaginary exaggeration of those upheavals that grasp
every order, no matter how well grounded, always and every-
where, in all degrees of intensity. The model to think negativity is
not, then, the grand revolutionary breach, but the minute, hardly
perceptible oscillation of social relationships: this latter is the
norm, and a revolution is merely an occasional peak of amplitude.
The term Nancy uses for this hardly perceptible work of the nega-
tive is trembling: ‘Negativity makes all determinateness tremble,
all being-all-to-itself: it injects with a shudder and an unsettling
agitation’ (Nancy 2002: 45). What appears stable – the sediments

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of the social – in actual fact trembles. It is the force of antagonism,

which – in the phenomenic appearance of absolute restlessness –
drives the unstoppable process of constitution and destitution of
the social. The post-Marxist ontology of radical negativity would
then prove to be, because of its Hegelian inheritance, a hauntol-
ogy of micro-conflictuality: of an antagonism that does not always
make the petrified conditions dance, but always tremble.

Towards an Affectology of Antagonism

Every society experiences moments when forgotten struggles, ren-

dered unthinkable by a given hegemonic formation, make them-
selves felt in whatever displaced way. As soon as the social ground
under our feet starts trembling, we tremble with it. What Nancy,
via Hegel, calls ‘trembling’ is what, in the Laclauian lexicon, is
called dislocation. It is important to understand, however, that a
political conception of dislocation is not simply deconstructive.
Laclau does not just provide us with another term for the endless
deferral of différance. For Laclau dislocation, in its political mode,
retains an intrinsic connection to antagonism: ‘every identity is
dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies
that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same
time’ (NR 39). What this quote makes clear once again – a conclu-
sion largely disavowed by Laclau himself – is that antagonism is
primary with regard to dislocation as the latter clearly derives from
the antagonistic outside to a given identity. This is also where our
ontology of the political departs from a simple political ontology.
Precisely because the instance of antagonism is effective only as a
threat to social practices, it also dislocates the order of the social,
and dislocation therefore must be seen as a function of antagoni-
sation, not the other way around. Any social order emerges from
a necessary passage through radical negativity. But this passage
will, by necessity, make the social tremble. The problem, from an
epistemological perspective, is: How can we know this? But the
question is ill-posed. Of course, we cannot ‘know’ it in the sense of
positive knowledge gained by way of, say, statistically measuring

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the degree of dislocation of a given order. That would obviously

be nonsensical. Yet we haven’t made the detour through phenom-
enology without good reason. In our everyday life we do know
about the trembling of the social – not through conscious cogni-
tion, but in an experiential way.
So, even if we cannot gather positive knowledge about the
ontological register of antagonism, we do experience its disloca-
tory effects within the ontic world of being that surrounds us. As a
rule, experiences of this kind are made pre-consciously. In fact, we
encounter the effects of antagonism every day in our experiences
of subordination, exploitation, exclusion or precarisation, but also
of withdrawal, stubborn subversion and silent resistance. In any
pre-, or rather: proto-political confrontation – with the boss, with
the police, with the family – we can experience, without necessarily
being consciously aware of it, that the structure of our life-world
is grounded on and modified by struggles. Such an encounter with
the very limits of the social – whether it takes place in micro-
conflicts or in the sedimented institutional guise of, for example,
the glass ceilings we encounter on our professional trajectory or
the manifold forms of structural exclusion – can manifest itself
in a number of affects. These include resentment, jealousy, panic,
anger, fear, aggression, resignation, despair, pride, arrogance, stub-
bornness, defiance, excitement, and so on. A doctrine of affects of
the political – a political affectology – has, as far as I am aware,
not yet been written: attempts to do so within the tradition of
social phenomenology have had only limited success.14 A combi-
nation of the resources provided by the late Foucault, the Spinozist
tradition of political theory (for a Spinozist theory of politics as
ars affectandi see Lordon 2016, 2013) and post-Marxism could,
however, serve as a starting point, but is certainly beyond the reach
of the present investigation.
Let us merely note that antagonism is experienced in the affec-
tive shocks we feel as a result of us, as it were, hitting the limit of
the social. Such an encounter with the instance of radical negativ-
ity manifests itself in a multitude of bodily affects of all kinds.
Even with ears and eyes most firmly shut, the body will register the
repercussion and produce an effect of pre-conscious self-reflection.
Something of the order of an affective ‘self’ emerges whenever the

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effects of antagonism inscribe themselves into the perceiving body

regardless of whether experiences are made consciously or not.
The self we are talking of here is not the subject of a lack, mean-
ing the gap in the social which Lacanian social theories speak of
and, in Laclau, depicts a structural condition for the development
of new social and political identities (we will return to this kind of
subject in Chapter 6). It also has little to do with a process of polit-
ical identification as outlined by Laclau, or even with technologies
of governmental self-subjectivisation or antique practices of the
self as described by Foucault. In this sense, it is utterly a-subjective.
When a self interiorises itself, it does so because it is inflected
by antagonism15 – the ‘outside’ of the social which, from a post-
Marxist perspective, is constantly folded into the social. The social
space of relations and sedimentations institutes itself only in the
constant folds of inside and outside, i.e. in the infinitesimal inter-
leaving of totality and negativity. In other words, the social texture
consists of the oscillation between society, as an impossible totality
or ‘failed unicity’, and antagonism as that which both unites and
dislocates the social.
An affectology of the self not only would have to cope with the
topological model of the fold (the affective folding inwards of the
self; see Deleuze 1992), but must also be able to phenomenologi-
cally capture the micrological flickering and trembling of the self.
Hegel’s famous ‘absolute restlessness of becoming’ was translated
by Nancy into the micrological, and we in turn must translate
Nancy into the political. From the perspective of an ontology of
the political, if the latter is to explain our very being-in-the-World
as a being-in-the-political, it is the real and a-subjective force of
antagonism, which – in the form of an absolute restlessness of
becoming – drives the unstoppable process of constitution and
destitution of the social as much as the folding of its limits into a
self. Such a hauntology of antagonism would explain not only the
flickering and eerie appearance of a social space peopled by ghosts
of struggles past and present. It would also explain our own trem-
bling as soon as we are touched by antagonism and experience the
eeriness of this space ourselves. Because ‘[t]he self has its unity in
trembling of itself’ (Nancy 2002: 44), in the passive action of an
‘act of being affected’:

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The self trembles at being touched, awakened, roused; it trembles as

much at the feeling of its fragility as in the desire for its freedom. Its
emotion is its own, and its trembling is a trembling of itself because it
is thus that it comes to itself – thus that it comes and it goes away, that
it comes in the same way as it goes: trembling. (Nancy 2002: 44)16

The Trembling Mob

Antagonism sends out shock waves that capture every single body,
albeit with differing force. It is certainly true that the limits of
the social are not always experienced in the form of open pro-
test and revolt, but sometimes they are. Let us therefore not for-
get, amid the political affectology of the self, the older meaning
of restless motion: turmoil and insurgence. Social ‘movements’
carry it in their name until now. In French, the Latin word for
movement, motus, is still there in émeute, meaning insurgence
or popular uprising; it is also there in the German Meute and
Meuterei (Sardinha 2010: 124–5), in the ‘mutiny’; and it is there in
the ‘mob’ (from Latin mobile). On the ontological plane of affec-
tology, ‘a mob’ is just any movement of intensified and synchro-
nised trembling. An ontology of the political must retain a sense
of such collective restlessness. For what needs to be explained is
not only the enfolding of antagonism into the social, but also the
unfolding of the social into an antagonism. By unfolding, I mean
nothing other than the politicisation of a social situation. Here,
political and social movements appear as catalysts. They bring to
light struggles that are subdued or subconsciously taking place in
the course of daily life – for example, between the sexes, between
the classes, between majorities and minorities – and make it pos-
sible to transform them into politics. Contingency and conflictual-
ity are thus experienced at the hands of the struggles brought to
light by social movements. The same is true for the self. When the
outside of society – antagonism – is folded into our bodies in the
form of the self, then it can also be unfolded back into the social by
way of politics. That presupposes, of course, the collectivisation of
those shocks and affects which hit every singular body. Typically,
this happens in protest. Protests do not emerge from discursive

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calls in the vein of ‘Time for Outrage!’ Affects, in contrast to mere

political emotions, cannot be motivated by discursive interpella-
tion (Massumi 2015). After all, they are caused by nothing but the
encounter with antagonism, which – as an instance of a society’s
outside – does not belong to the register of the Symbolic.17 It does
not matter how many calls are published for a mass of bodies to
join a demonstration – and the medium of the street protest is,
after all, the human body (Butler 2015) – the mere issue of a call
will not suffice. The absent cause of the protest is not the call, but
the eruption of an antagonism, which cannot be voluntaristically
forced nor verbally conjured up.
Of course, affects can collectivise in a range of forms. They
can cause an amalgamation into a single fascist collective body or
into marauding gangs. They can also compact in the ‘multitude’
of agglomerated individuals or in liberal-democratic protest com-
munities. There is just as little to be said of the size of protests. A
hunger strike of the few can be as important a form of protest as
a demonstration by hundreds of thousands (see Chapter 8). In all
cases, however, collectivisation means the linking and reinforce-
ment of singular affects. The amplitude of the ‘trembling’ of indi-
viduals is heightened and synchronised into a movement – a mob.
For this effect of reinforcement to occur, the mutual affectation
of the protesting bodies is vital. That is one of the reasons why
(unlike a putsch or a coup d’état) upheavals, revolts and revolu-
tions – all these fluctuating movements on the undulating surface
of the social – take place in the public sphere and presuppose the
physical co-presence of protesting bodies.18
An order’s ability for consent and consensus – and every hege-
monic order is discursive and somatic at the same time – shatters
not least due to the antagonised bodies of its subjects. Of course,
the conditions need to be given. Hegemony needs to have been lost
already, even if nobody noticed. Only then can insurrections and
revolutions – one may think of the fall of the Iron Curtain or the
Arab Spring – gather support and attract the masses. The extent
to which a hegemonic formation is already fractured (or is reform-
ing itself) cannot, however, be predetermined by scientific means.
Of course, to the surprise of those who may want to accuse us of
presenting an over-politicised metaphysics of antagonism, it must

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be said that, even though the ontological instance of antagonism

escapes scientific measurement, the micro-conflicts of everyday
life can indeed be studied empirically with the methods of, for
instance, ethno-methodology or conversation analysis; and so can
social movements be empirically studied. It is even possible, as we
will see in the following chapter, to lay out the ‘onto-logic’ of polit-
ical mobilisation. But the test is the protest. The ontology of the
political, which has here been developed, is not meant to provide
a scientific foundation for political practice. It is meant to pro-
vide a political basis. It therefore places a bet on the unstoppable
movement of the social, which is put into motion by its own out-
side – an outside that appears in a manner of prism-like diffusion:
the flickering of antagonism. We will now leave the microphysics
of the political behind and turn to Laclau’s theory of populism.
Because it is in his theory of populism where we can find a general
theory of protestation.

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5 Politics and the Popular: Protest and
Culture in Laclau’s Theory of Populism

The Political Ontology of Peronism

Every theory that purports to explain a general field of phenom-

ena will nevertheless pass through a particular historical experi-
ence. In the case of Ernesto Laclau’s political ontology, it is the
Argentinian experience of Peronism which forms the background
against which Laclau’s whole thinking of the political, including
his theorisation of antagonism and of populism, emerged. As an
activist of the Argentinian Socialist Party and the Peronist student
movement, and later as a member of the political leadership of the
Socialist Party of the National Left, Laclau was deeply involved
in the Peronist struggle. Therefore, it should not come as sur-
prise that with his hugely influential book On Populist Reason,
published in 2005, Laclau took up theoretically the question of
populism, thus returning full circle, after nearly thirty years, to
his first book-length publication Politics and Ideology in Marxist
Theory (Laclau 1977) with which he had introduced himself as
one of the foremost theorists of populism. Yet, On Populist Rea-
son is not simply a book on populism if by the latter we under-
stand a more or less marginal political phenomenon; rather, the
logic of populism, unravelled by Laclau, holds the key to any cor-
rect understanding of politics as such. The Kantian allusion of his
title, ‘On Populist Reason’, seems to be hinting at the wider theo-
retical implications of populism. In fact, it can be assumed, given
the hidden Kantianism of his title, that what Laclau sets out to
develop is not simply an empirical account of current or historical

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populist movements, but a quasi-transcendental inquiry into the

conditions of possibility of populism and, as he holds in his first
sentence, of ‘the nature and logics of the formation of collective
identities’ at large (PR 9). For this reason, Laclau’s book on popu-
lism can be expected to provide important insights for the study
not only of populism, but of politics in general, particularly of
protest politics.1 Seen from this perspective, On Populist Reason
has to be read as a contribution to a political and cultural theory
of mobilisation, not only to the study of populism in the narrow
sense. As the ‘royal road’ to an understanding of politics at large,
the discussion of populism – or the logic of populist articulation
– will allow me, after having expanded on the previous chap-
ter’s discussion of social sedimentation and institutionalisation,
to make good on the promise to shift focus towards the ontic side
of the political difference: the side of politics.
If the social, as we have seen, is defined as the field of sedi-
mented differences, then Laclau goes a significant step beyond
the Saussurian notion of differences by assuming the fundamen-
tal ‘brokenness’ of that sphere. From Laclau’s post-foundational
perspective, the groundless nature of every socio-cultural identity
implies that no identity will ever be fully enclosed in itself due to
the effects of antagonism. For the same reason, a potential space
for politics opens up right at the heart of the social: politics can
thus be understood as the constant – yet ultimately unsuccessful
– attempt at regrounding an identity fundamentally characterised
by lack, dislocation and incompleteness. It is at this ‘ontological’
level of Laclau’s theory where the need for political articulation is
explained as a necessary precondition of society. But, how exactly,
on the ontic level, do we have to imagine the reactivation of the
social by the political through politics? Laclau’s theory of popu-
lism could hold the key to a better understanding of the function-
ing of the political process of reactivation. I submit, taking as my
starting point the Laclauian theory of political articulation, that
any politics in the strict sense of the term (i.e. any practice that is
touched by the political) will have to undergo a moment of pro-
testation. Politics, at the moment of reactivation when social sedi-
mentations are dislocated by the political, is, in its essence, protest
politics. In a first step I will substantiate this claim by exploring the

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Laclauian conceptions of political articulation and of its minimal

unit, the demand. In a second step I will turn to theories of micro-
politics, especially in the Birmingham Cultural Studies tradition,
which will prepare the terrain for an alternative theory of minimal
politics that will be presented in the subsequent chapter.

The Demand: The Elementary Unit of Politics

Laclau’s theory of populism helps to shed light not only on all

forms of populist mobilisation, but also on the very logic through
which the social becomes dis- and re-articulated by politics. So let
us consider the precise meaning of the concept of ‘articulation’
– a key term in Laclau’s ‘onto-logic’ of hegemony and of post-
foundational discourse analysis (Marttila 2015).2 According to
Stuart Hall’s famous analogy, articulation can be compared to the
English notion of an ‘articulated lorry’, where ‘the front (cab) and
back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one
another’ (Hall 1996a: 141). What is stressed by Hall is the contin-
gent nature of any articulated unity, as his aim is to break with any
form of class essentialism or economic reductionism that would
derive the unity of a political subject from the subject’s position
within the relations of production.3 However, Stuart Hall’s anal-
ogy of the articulated lorry might be misleading as it does not
exclude the possibility of imagining an articulated unity of ele-
ments that exist in advance of their articulation (in the same way
in which the cab and the trailer already exist as cab and as trailer
and only later may or may not get articulated into a lorry). When
we speak about discourse, or the discursive unity of any cultural-
political identity or subject, the case is different because every
element we encounter will always already be the outcome of an
articulatory process. And, what is even more important, the nature
of the articulated elements will be significantly altered in the pro-
cess of their articulation. The reason for this is easily understood:
if a cultural-political identity is the result of the linking up of dif-
ferent elements, then the identity of these elements will not remain
unaltered by the process of articulation. By entering a political
alliance, for instance, everyone will have to adjust his or her own

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identity to some degree if the alliance is to be upheld. The politi-

cal identity of the members of an alliance will thus be modified.
They will not be able to encapsulate themselves within a purely
particularistic state of ‘interest politics’ – in what Gramsci would
have called the corporative stage – but will have to broaden their
political outlook in order to accommodate some of the demands
and ideas of their allies.
So, one of the most radical implications of a Laclauian theory
of articulation is easily overlooked if one starts with a model of
prefabricated ‘trucks’ and ‘lorries’. Given the premises of this
theory, the identity of a social agent or subject, be it the agent’s
cultural identity or political identity, can only be the result and
not the source of an articulatory effort. Discourse is a process
without a voluntarist subject pulling the strings behind the artic-
ulation process.4 This argument puts into question the whole
notion of group as the starting point of analysis. Laclau makes
it sufficiently clear that to start with the group in an analysis of
populism would be deeply flawed because, in this case, a funda-
mental reality beyond or before the process of discursive articu-
lation is assumed. So we are confronted, right from the outset of
any analysis, with a paradigmatic decision:

A first decision has to be taken. What is our minimal unit of analysis

going to be? Everything turns around the answer to this question. We
can decide to take as our minimal unit the group as such, in which
case we are going to see populism as the ideology or the type of mobi-
lization of an already constituted group – that is, as the expression
(the epiphenomenon) of a social reality different from itself; or we can
see populism as one way of constituting the very unity of the group.
(PR 72–3)

The alternative is clear: in the first case, the group will be the start-
ing point of the analysis, in the second the group will be the out-
come of a process of discursive articulation; and it goes without
saying that Laclau opts for the second alternative which is the only
one consistent with a post-foundational approach in discourse
theory. It is through the discursive articulation of protest that the
identity of the protesters is articulated in the first place. Yet this
account still leaves unanswered the question as to the minimal unit

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of political discourse. If it is not the group, what is it? Here, Laclau

provided in his later work on populism what must be considered
one of the most significant advances since Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy. What he proposes to do is ‘to split the unity of the group
into smaller unities’ that he calls demands, while, conversely, the
unity of the group turns out to be ‘the result of an articulation of
demands’ (PR 9). In order to better understand this concept of
demand as the minimal unit of analysis, a more extensive quota-
tion from Laclau’s book is in order – a passage crucial for any
analysis not only of populism in the narrow sense but also of all
forms of protest discourse:
So what are these smaller units from which our analysis has to start?
Our guiding thread will be the category of ‘demand’ as the elemen-
tary form in the building up of the social link. The word ‘demand’ is
ambiguous in English: it has, on the one hand, the meaning of request
and, on the other, the more active meaning of imposing a request – a
claim – on somebody else (as in ‘demanding an explanation’). (Laclau
2005b: 35)

Having laid out this distinction between (weak) request and (strong)
demand, Laclau proceeds with the following example:

[A] group of people living in a certain neighbourhood want a bus

route introduced to transport them from their places of residence
to the area in which most of them work. Let us suppose that they
approach the city hall with that request and the request is satisfied.
We have here the following set of structural features: 1) a social need
adopts the form of a request – i.e. it is not satisfied through self-
management but through the appeal to another instance which has
the power of decision; 2) the very fact that a request takes place shows
that the decisory power of the higher instance is not put into question
at all – so we are fully within our first meaning of the term demand;
3) the demand is a punctual demand, closed in itself – it is not the tip
of an iceberg or the symbol of a large variety of unformulated social
demands. If we put these three features together we can formulate
the following important conclusion: requests of this type, in which
demands are punctual or individually satisfied, do not construct any
chasm or frontier within the social. On the contrary, social actors are
accepting, as a non-verbalised assumption of the whole process, the
legitimacy of each of its instances: nobody puts into question either

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the right to present the requests or the right of the decisory instance
to take the decision. [. . .] They presuppose that there is no social
division and that any legitimate demand can be satisfied in a non-
antagonistic, administrative way. (Laclau 2005b: 36)

Let me briefly comment on this first part of the example given by

Laclau. We are still at a stage here where a certain claim (in this case
for public transportation) does not yet truly amount to a demand
in the strong sense of the term, but remains at the level of request.
In this respect, we are stuck in the second stage of a three-stage
process: Step (1) consists in some social need emerging out of the
dislocation of a certain social or cultural identity (the identity of a,
say, neighbourhood is put into question to some degree and due to
the emerging lack of identity a certain need to fill the lack emerges).
(2) A request is made to an outside power, the City Hall for instance,
considered to be a legitimate instance for appeals of this kind. This
is the stage of request. Whether we move to stage (3), the stage of
demand in the strict sense, depends on whether the request will be
met by the City Hall or not. If it is met, it is most likely that every-
thing ends here until another lack is experienced, so that the request
will not be transformed into a demand. But what if the request can-
not be accommodated by the higher instance? As Laclau explains:

Let us suppose that the request is rejected. A situation of social frus-

tration will, no doubt, derive from the decision. But if it is only one
demand that is not satisfied, that will not alter the situation substan-
tially. If, however, for whatever reason, the variety of demands that do
not find satisfaction is very large, that multiple frustration will trigger
social logics of an entirely different kind. If, for instance, the group
of people in that area who have been frustrated in their request for
better transportation find that their neighbours are equally unsatisfied
in their claims at the levels of security, water supply, housing, school-
ing, and so on, some kind of solidarity will arise between them all: all
will share the fact that their demands remain unsatisfied. That is, the
demands share a negative dimension beyond their positive differential
nature. (Laclau 2005b: 36–7)

These reflections are crucial for a full understanding of the moment

of protestation at the ground of all reactivatory politics. A trans-
formation has to take place of a frustrated pre-political request

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into a political demand. This demand might, under the right cir-
cumstances, link up with other unsatisfied demands. And what all
these demands will have in common is not a common substance; in
fact, they do not necessarily have to have anything in common at
the level of their claims’ positive content. And still, they will have
to have ‘something’ in common, even as this ‘something’ must be
of an entirely negative nature: it is that outside instance which
is considered to be responsible for the shared feeling of frustra-
tion. Now, as I said before, in order for an alliance between these
demands to be established, they will have to be linked up some-
how: and here the logic of hegemonic articulation enters the pic-
ture. As such, the diverse demands for transportation, schooling,
etc. constitute a set of differences where every differential posi-
tion has a positive content. In the moment of articulation, these
differences have to be arranged or articulated into a relation of
equivalence. Consequently, the logic of equivalence is defined by
Laclau as:

[O]ne in which all the demands, in spite of their differential character,

tend to re-aggregate themselves, forming what we will call an equival-
ential chain. This means that each individual demand is constitutively
split: on the one hand it is its own particularised self; on the other it
points, through equivalential links, to the totality of other demands.
(Laclau 2005b: 37)

Such a chain of equivalence is only effectuated vis-à-vis a com-

mon negative outside, a moment of pure negativity to which the
antagonistic relation of equivalence gives expression. And in order
to express, or rather, represent the totality of a chain (the unity of
the protest movement), a common element will have to be estab-
lished, a particular demand – defined by Laclau as an empty signi-
fier – will therefore take up the role of universal representation.
Yet this demand will be torn apart as well. On the one hand, it will
retain some of its particular aspects (it will be one element in the
chain); on the other hand, it will have to incarnate the whole of
the chain. Let us think of the slogan ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ at the
time of the South African apartheid. On the one hand, the slogan
did have a concrete aim and content: releasing Nelson Mandela
from jail. On the other hand, the slogan was meant to signify a

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much wider demand: the abolition of apartheid as such, and thus,

a whole system change within South Africa. What served as an
empty signifier keeping together anti-apartheid mobilisation was,
at the very end of the day, the name ‘Nelson Mandela’, an empty
signifier par excellence (E 36–46).

‘Going Macro’: Birmingham Cultural Studies and

the Essex School

Populism may be the ‘royal road’ to a better understanding of the

functioning of what we have called Laclau’s political onto-logic,
but, as we have seen, every traveller on this road will have to pass
through an experience of negativity and antagonism. Therefore,
to fully comprehend the logic of articulation it is important to
once more highlight the necessary passage through negativity: in
order to mutually link up in an equivalential chain entirely dis-
parate elements have to experience a common threat. As Laclau
has clarified already in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and in
Emancipation(s), the experience of such a moment of negativ-
ity, as a common outside, is a necessary precondition if differen-
tial ‘positive’ elements are to be articulated into a wider chain of
equivalence. With this strong notion of antagonism (and equiva-
lence) Laclau departs from the Saussurian model: ‘Saussurian dif-
ferences still presuppose a continuous space within which they
are, as such, constituted. A notion of constitutive antagonism, of a
radical frontier, requires, on the contrary, a broken space’ (PR 85).
The Laclauian discursive space is broken because the seemingly
harmonious continuity of the social will be dislocated ab initio by
a lack of ground and an initial experience of that lack. That is to
say, the fullness of the social is not simply lacking – the fullness
is experienced, especially in moments of crisis and dislocation, as
lacking. This experience of an absent fullness, an experience which
emerges due to a gap that opens within the whole way of life of a
dislocated social or cultural identity, may produce a request and,
if not met, a demand, directed at an outside instance, to bridge
that gap. This is what I would call the moment of protest, and

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what Laclau calls the construction of a ‘people’ from a plurality of

subject positions:

So from the very beginning we are confronted with a dichotomic

division between unfulfilled social demands, on the one hand, and
an unresponsive power, on the other. Here we begin to see why the
plebs sees itself as the populus, the part as the whole: since the full-
ness of community is merely the imaginary reverse of a situation
lived as deficient being, those who are responsible for this cannot
be a legitimate part of the community; the chasm between them is
irretrievable. (PR 86)

At this point, two implications of the aforesaid have to be under-

lined. Firstly, while politics, at the moment when a social request is
transformed into a political demand, always involves a dimension
of protestation, demands constitute what we can now designate
as the elementary units of protest and, concurrently, the minimal
units of political articulation. The universe of politics, at the very
instance when the social is touched by the political, is a universe of
articulated demands. And secondly, the process of their hegemonic
articulation confronts us with what I am tempted to call the logi-
cal stage of ‘going macro’. A part of the social (a ‘plebs’) presents
itself as the whole (a ‘populus’) by way of integrating an increasing
number of demands and representing the totality of these demands
vis-à-vis a common though negative outside.
By now turning, for the rest of this chapter and the subsequent
chapter, to this second implication we immediately have to add
that, of course, no automatism exists for a process of ‘going macro’
to start in the first place – this is simply a conjunctural matter of
articulation. While a signifier like ‘worker’, as Laclau comments,
‘can, in certain discursive configurations, exhaust itself in a par-
ticularistic, sectional meaning’, in other discursive configurations,
like in the Peronist case, ‘it can become the name par excellence
of the “people”’ (PR 87). The mere dislocation of a given identity
does not provide sufficient reason for a process of ‘going macro’ to
be instigated. There will have to be an accumulation of frustrated
requests as well as an articulation of those isolated requests into
connected demands. Needless to say, no part will ever be able to

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incarnate the whole once and for all. The universal horizon to be
incarnated by a particular social force will have to accommodate
competing forces struggling over the hegemonic function of incar-
nating the whole. As a result, the hegemonic process will never
come to a halt and a process of ‘going macro’ might very well be
followed by the reverse process of losing hegemonic amplitude, i.e.
of ‘going micro’. Chains of articulated demands can disintegrate
and the degree of antagonisation may decrease due to a more dif-
ferential reading principle of a situation gaining ground against
the equivalential one. For instance, some of the neighbourhood
demands for housing, schooling, etc. could be met by the local
council which will have a disarticulatory effect on their equival-
ential relation vis-à-vis the remaining demands. In this case, many
unfulfilled demands will return to the stage of request, or might
even be experienced again as simple social needs without being
articulated at all. Other demands might change sides and become
articulated with political forces and discourses of completely dif-
ferent, perhaps opposite provenance. This is what happened in the
case of current right-wing forms of populism where demagogues of
the political right effectively managed to integrate leftist demands
for social security and the defence of the welfare state into their
xenophobic discourse.
It should by now be clear why Laclau’s account of populism
– combined with his earlier theorisations of discourse and hege-
mony – presents an important contribution to the field not only
of discourse theory and political science but also of anthropol-
ogy, (micro-)sociology and Cultural Studies. From a political
perspective, most approaches in these disciplines are barely able
to describe in a satisfactory way the precise nature and logic of
processes of ‘going macro’. While they are well equipped theo-
retically and methodologically to analyse micro-political forms of
subordination and resistance, they exhibit a certain degree of neg-
ligence regarding macro-political formations, and, what is more,
they do not provide any account of the missing link between the
micro- and the macro-level of politics, between a ‘politics of cul-
ture’ and the ‘politics of politics’. Yet Laclau’s theory of the pas-
sage from need to request and, eventually, to demand can help to
delineate the traces of this missing link. As soon as translated into

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the categorial framework of these approaches, Laclau’s theory of

populism can provide us with a frame of explanation that allows
us to think the passage from the social to politics in a more pre-
cise way. Since there is no space here to elaborate on all aspects
in detail – although many arguments can easily be extrapolated
from the above-said – I will restrict myself to a couple of remarks
regarding possible lines of mutual translation between the Essex
School paradigm of post-foundational discourse theory and the
Birmingham paradigm of Cultural Studies.
In fact, the Birmingham School, whose most distinguished pro-
ponent was Stuart Hall, shares many family resemblances with the
Essex School approach. This is hardly surprising given the reliance
of both paradigms on Gramscian hegemony theory. Nonetheless,
Cultural Studies practitioners have shown a certain reluctance to
enter the field of political research.5 And there is a clear reason
for this reluctance. Cultural Studies had to establish themselves
precisely by drawing a clear line of demarcation vis-à-vis a more
traditional understanding of politics in order to enlarge the space
of the political beyond the political system and include the micro-
political sphere of the cultural and the everyday. In a movement
reminiscent of the famous feminist slogan, Cultural Studies set out
to prove that ‘the cultural is political’. The legacy of Gramsci’s
hegemony theory proved to be of great help in politicising, at
the micro-end of the scale, the sphere of everyday life (‘common
sense’) and culture, yet, concomitantly, the same movement tended
to occlude the macro-political side of any hegemonic project
(McRobbie 1994: 51). So, while a certain vicinity to Laclau was
sometimes acknowledged, many Cultural Studies practitioners
deliberately abstained from engaging with a Gramscian-informed
study of politics in the perhaps conventional, but no less important
sense of the term, thus reconfirming a breach between the politi-
cal micro- and the macro-level that Cultural Studies initially had
set out to deconstruct. Early Subcultural Studies in the Birming-
ham tradition may serve as an analogous example for the deliber-
ate evasion of the macro-political. As is well known, subcultures,
according to this classical approach, do not challenge hegemony
directly and openly but rather obliquely, through style and rituals
(Hall and Jefferson 1975). While such resistance may be called a

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form of cultural protest, to the extent that it is articulated through

style, it cannot reasonably be called political protest in the macro-
sense of the term as it lacks any spelled-out political agenda and
does not raise any explicit political demands. In other words, in
cases of ‘oblique’ protest, where it remains largely unclear who
protests against what and why in the first place, the link to macro-
politics remains necessarily severed. No wonder that Dick Heb-
dige’s Subculture (Hebdige 1987), locus classicus of the so-called
‘resistance through style’ paradigm, displayed a symptomatic aver-
sion to explicit forms of political protest, an aversion expressed
by the author’s eagerness to distinguish subcultures from ‘counter
culture’ – by which Hebdige understood ‘the amalgam of “alterna-
tive” middle-class youth cultures – the hippies, the flower children,
the yippies – which grew out of the 60s, and came to prominence
during the period 1967–70’ (148). These macro-political forms
of youth-cultural action were not only discarded as middle class,
the whole discussion of counter-cultural, i.e. political strategies of
protest, was even relegated by Hebdige to a footnote whereby the
discussion of the macro-political became, literally, marginalised.
Neither our understanding of the ‘politics of culture’, nor our
understanding of the ‘politics of politics’ will be enhanced by an
approach that relegates to the margins the macro-political side of
protest, displaying no interest whatsoever in the very passage from
the micro- to the macro-political. At the same time, and despite the
unquestionable influence Laclau’s early theorisation of populism
and articulation exerted on Cultural Studies, Laclau found him-
self at the margins of a Cultural Studies doxa increasingly evolv-
ing in the form of readers and introductory volumes (Slack 1996:
120). Far from being coincidental, such partial neglect seems to
result from a deep-running discomfort in macro-politics. This is
all the more regrettable as the macro-political option remained
open all the time with Stuart Hall’s work on populism, for one
should not forget that Hall’s thoroughly Gramscian and, indeed,
Laclauian answer to Thatcherite authoritarian populism consisted
in his appeal to construct a counter-hegemonic project – a popu-
list project from the Left – against the Thatcherite power bloc. As
Hall reminds us: ‘The only way of genuinely contesting a hege-
monic form of politics is to develop a counter-hegemonic strategy’

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(Hall 1988: 11). And while the scale of such a strategy certainly
should not be restricted to politics in the narrow sense, the counter-
hegemonic strategy nevertheless will have to be played out on the
macro-political field, rather than being constrained to the – most
likely entirely disparate – tactics of everyday life resistance. Only
by way of macro-political, i.e. strategic forms of reaggregation,
will micro-political tactics add up to a counter-hegemonic project.
And the name for this aggregational logic – of the transformation
of dispersed tactics into more coherent strategies, of micro-political
resistance into macro-political protest, of the subordinate into the
hegemonic, and, eventually of the particular into the universal – is,
precisely, populism.
It is for this reason that populism became the shibboleth for
Cultural Studies as a political project.6 The notion of populism
marks a crossing-point where a decision has to be taken either
to disavow populism (and thus to by and large ignore the macro-
political), or fully to flesh out a theory of populism for the sake
of Cultural Studies’ larger political aims. The second road was
taken by Stuart Hall, who took an interest in political populism
– an interest not widely shared by those who chose the first road
– with the aim of contributing theoretically and analytically to
the construction of a socialist (counter-)hegemony. Yet in many
quarters of the field of Cultural Studies populism was, together
with Laclau’s name, relegated to the footnotes of Cultural Studies’
collective memory.7

When Subordination Becomes Oppression

As we have seen, there was a time when the main ambition of

approaches located in the fields of feminism, micro-sociology and
Cultural Studies was to blur the line between the social, in particu-
lar the cultural, and the political, between subcultural resistance
‘at a level beneath the consciousness of the individual members of
a spectacular subculture’ (Hebdige 1987: 195) and self-conscious
counter-cultural or political action, that is to say, between the micro-
and the macro-aspects of politics. And it certainly was necessary at
that time to direct our attention towards the latent political aspects

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of popular culture. Yet even at the heroic high-point of this para-

digm it made no sense to do away completely with the line between
micro and macro and to ignore the moment when the socially or
culturally latent becomes politically explicit. The problem was that,
as a rule, no account could be given of the passage from the cultural
to politics as long as one was caught in the heroic myths of micro-
political resistance. Thus, one stopped at an analysis, which is of
course necessary but not sufficient, of sedimented micro-political
common sense (what Gramsci would have called senso comune)
instead of studying the political moment of the latter’s reactivation.
What is needed today is an analysis of the passage between culture
and macro-politics, that is, an analysis of the process of ‘becoming
macro’, because it is via this process that popular common sense is
recoded politically (as progressive, conservative, reactionary, resis-
tant, or revolutionary).
As we have also seen, Laclau’s political onto-logic, as expressed
inter alia in his theory of populism, offers not only an explanation
of social sedimentation, but, first and foremost, a theory of the
passage from the micro-political level of sedimented social rou-
tines to the macro-political of politics proper. This is the moment
of political reactivation when ‘unpolitical’ subcultures turn into
politicised counter-cultures, or when, to name another field where
the study of micro-politics was blooming for many years, Media
Studies, presumably always already ‘active audiences’ become
macro-politically active eventually, thus starting to function as
citizens rather than purportedly active consumers. This moment,
the moment when the political in the strict sense enters the scene,
is clearly visible in the conversion of what Laclau and Mouffe call
relations of subordination (which are socio-cultural) into relations
of oppression (which are political in the strict sense):

We shall understand by a relation of subordination that in which an

agent is subjected to the decisions of another – an employee with
respect to an employer, for example, or in certain forms of family
organization the woman with respect to the man, and so on. We shall
call relations of oppression, in contrast, those relations of subordina-
tion which have transformed themselves into sites of antagonisms.
(HSS 153–4)

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It is important to understand that the representation of relations

of subordination within the social field as well as within popu-
lar culture – for example, stereotypes of women in subordinated
gender positions in TV programmes – can only be studied as an
indicator of latent antagonisation, that is to say, sedimented antag-
onisms. While they do have political roots, it would not be correct
to describe such relations as antagonistic in the strict sense. For:

[A] relation of subordination establishes, simply, a set of differential

positions between social agents, and we already know that a system
of differences which constructs each social identity as positivity not
only cannot be antagonistic, but would bring about the ideal condi-
tions for the elimination of all antagonisms – we would be faced
with a sutured social space, from which every equivalence would be
excluded. (HSS 154)

In other words, a social system which could be described as a

‘sutured’, closed and self-contained system of differences would
not be able to establish any antagonistic, that is, macro-political
relation in which differences will be united against a common
enemy into a chain of equivalence. Under these conditions – with-
out any politics proper – one actually would encounter the social
or cultural in a ‘pure’ state: sedimented forms of traditions, rites,
stereotypes, clichés in a purely repetitive and differential form. It is
worth quoting Laclau and Mouffe at length on this point:

It is only to the extent that the positive differential character of the

subordinated subject position is subverted that the antagonism can
emerge. ‘Serf’, ‘slave’, and so on, do not designate in themselves antag-
onistic positions; it is only in terms of a different discursive formation,
such as ‘the rights inherent to every human being’, that the differential
positivity of these categories can be subverted and the subordination
constructed as oppression. This means that there is no relation of
oppression without the presence of a discursive ‘exterior’ from which
the discourse of subordination can be interrupted. (HSS 154)

Let us take the example of racist constructions of cultural identity.

Nothing in these racist representations automatically triggers a civic
rights movement, nothing automatically leads to the politicisation of

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sedimented micro-frontiers within popular culture into political pro-

test. What has to be assumed is an additional category if we want to
account for the moment of reactivation where the sedimented racist
practices suddenly come to be perceived as relations of oppression
that have to be confronted. The role of such an additional category
can be played, for instance, by human rights discourses which might
turn out to be the universalising means to effectively establish a chain
of equivalence around certain relations of subordination. But in a
more radical sense it is, of course, antagonism itself which comes
from the outside – since it is not itself an element of a differential
system of subordination but, rather, the event by which this very
system is restructured into an equivalential chain. And it is through
this struggle – the event of the political breaking into the field of
the socio-cultural – that cultural relations of subordination are ret-
roactively revealed as political relations of oppression. So if we are
prepared to follow Laclau and Mouffe, we have to conclude that the
passage from relations of subordination to relations of oppression is
a passage from the social (the field of micro-politics) to politics (the
field of macro-politics) ‘mediated’ by the emergence of a third term:
the political in the form of antagonism. Insofar as the political can
emerge in any social and cultural area – that is, insofar as all rela-
tions of subordination can potentially be experienced as relations
of oppression – it must be distinguished from politics in the narrow
sense; hence the constitutive difference between the political and the
field of politics, a difference which for most practitioners of micro-
sociology or Cultural Studies does not play a major role.8 Let us for
a moment return to the Cultural Studies approach.
The distance between Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony theory
and Cultural Studies can be measured precisely with the yard-stick
of the political difference. By focusing on micro-politics and by
leaving to political scientists the study of the moment of politici-
sation, Cultural Studies became – to a large degree – the study of
political frontiers in their sedimented form and not in their reacti-
vated form. This point is sometimes conceded by Cultural Studies
practitioners, for instance in the recognition by John Fiske that
Laclau’s ‘concern is primarily with the radical and the macropo-
litical, whereas I believe popular culture to be most effective in
the progressive and the micropolitical’ (Fiske 1991: 159). Fiske

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assumes that one must not expect the links between popular cul-
ture and politics, or between the tactic and the strategic, ‘to be
direct or immediate – rather, we must expect them to be diffuse,
deferred, and not necessarily entailed at all’ (165). While this might
be correct from the viewpoint of a student of micro-political forms
of resistance, and while Fiske agrees that the ‘forging of produc-
tive links between the resistant tactics of the everyday and action
at the strategic level is one of the most important and neglected
tasks of the left’ (162), it does not really explain how the popular
gets linked to macro-politics, how indirect forms of action turn
into direct forms. What is missing is a clear determination of the
nature of the link between the ‘micropolitics of everyday life and
the macropolitics of organized action’ (161).

On the Road to Political Subjectivation

In this chapter, we have presented antagonism as an answer to

the question as to what links the micro-politics of everyday life
to the macro-politics of organised action. Antagonism serves as
the missing link through which micro-political tactics (a form
of ‘pre-political politics’ which, without doubt, happens all the
time at the level of everyday practices even though one should
resist the temptation to call it ‘politics’) develop into macro-
political strategies. However, this answer is not yet entirely sat-
isfactory. Not because, presented in terms of the Laclauian logic
of difference and equivalence, it was too abstract, but simply
because antagonism, as we said, comes from the ontological
outside as an event in the radical sense, that is to say, as a dis-
turbance and dislocation of sedimented socio-cultural patterns.
This outside, though, is only an outside when looked at from
within the spheres of culture, the social or politics. Nonethe-
less, an antagonistic chain of equivalence – for example, in the
form of an alliance between differential positions – is something
which has to be actively constructed and organised within the
‘ontic’ sphere of politics. Therefore, the ontological account,
precisely because it must be valid for all societies, does not per
se explain particular instances of political mobilisation within

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concrete historico-political contexts. A certain grievance, a par-

ticular social need will be experienced on the basis of a disloca-
tory event that can have multiple sources (from local sources
like the construction of a motorway to more general sources, for
instance the effects ascribed to economic globalisation). As long
as those social needs will be negotiated differentially – as long
as they can be mapped onto traditional meaning patterns of a
certain cultural formation – nothing happens in terms of macro-
political mobilisation. Only when those needs are turned into
requests directed at an outside instance, and only when these
requests will be frustrated and reaggregate into an equivalential
series of demands, does a process of ‘going macro’ set in. Let us,
in few words, recapitulate and specify the argument.
Antagonism, from the ontic perspective of politics, is the name
for the passage – a passage through negativity and equivalence –
through which social needs and isolated requests turn into politi-
cal demands in a moment of protest. To the extent to which such
a category of antagonism has to be distinguished from conflicts in
the field of macro-politics in the conventional sense, it can emerge
within any social system, not only the political system, and every
social practice can thus be turned into a political practice. This
is the reason why it is advisable to conceptually distinguish, as
we consistently do, politics in the sense of macro-politics from
the political as the category designating the experience and logic
of antagonism.9 To take into account, pace Laclau, the necessary
passage through antagonism will finally also put us in a better
position to explain the process of political subjectivation. Identi-
ties in the field of culture will as such be constituted by subject
positions (HSS 114–22), that is to say, they will be constructed
through their relational positioning within a field of differences.
In other words, their socio-cultural forms of subjectivation will
– partly at least – be stabilised through repetitive, or iterative,
ritualistic practices (Butler 1997). Political subjectivation, how-
ever, will be premised on the emergence of the radically different
register of equivalence. It is in the moment of antagonism, articu-
lated by way of the equivalential linking of previously dispersed
demands and practices, that socio-cultural subject positions turn
into political agents.

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If these aspects are taken into account in their entirety, we must

conclude that there is no unbridgeable ontological chasm between
macro-political discourses, as studied by the Essex School of dis-
course analysis, and cultural practices as studied, for instance, in
a Cultural Studies tradition. The difference between macro- and
micro-politics is, ontologically speaking, a difference in the mode
of being: a difference between the sedimented and the activated
mode of the political. While the focus within the Essex School par-
adigm so far was on the construction of larger hegemonic forma-
tions, many analyses in the Cultural Studies trajectory were mostly
concerned with micro-political forms of resistance. However, what
was missing so far was a clear and distinct account of how ‘the
popular’ in the cultural sense gets linked to populism in a political
sense, how, to put it differently once again, indirect forms of action
turn into forms of direct action. What was missing was a clear
theoretical determination of the nature of the link between the
‘micropolitics of everyday life and the macropolitics of organized
action’. In this chapter I have presented the concept of antagonism
as an answer to this problem. It was identified as the key category
indicating the moment at which cultural practices, in their process
of ‘going macro’, pass through the experience of negativity. Pro-
test, from this perspective, is nothing other than a name for the
moment when subject positions assume agency as they experience
negativity and antagonisation. By themselves, without this passage
through negativity, the tactics of everyday life will never add up
to a broader strategy, nor will social needs and requests ever be
turned into political demands.10
Not all roads lead to Rome, and not all paths lead to politics.
A notion of antagonism is indispensable if we wish to account for
this process. The moment in which our social or cultural identi-
ties are – potentially – politicised is the moment in which we run
up against antagonism. This moment was framed most succinctly
by Jerry Rubin’s famous definition of the yippie (the political ver-
sion of the hippie): a yippie was a hippie, Rubin said, who had
been hit on the head by a policeman. I am tempted to think that,
at an ontological level, this encounter is precisely what creates a
political epiphany, a moment in which unconscious subject posi-
tions are converted to politically self-conscious subjects. It is the

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moment when the experience of antagonism is given voice in the

language of protest. And yet, shifting back to the ontic side of the
political difference, we must not forget that in politics, more than
anywhere else, the principle counts: ex nihilo nihil fit. A ‘collec-
tive will’, as Gramsci would have insisted, has to be organised.
A newly emerging political force and project does not come from
nowhere (even if an event in some sense does). Thus, one question
remains to be answered regarding the nature of the line between
the micro- and the macro-political. Does this line, we have to ask,
belong to the side of micro-politics of everyday life or do we have
to think of it as part of macro-politics? In other words, can the
link between the micro- and the macro-sphere be forged by micro-
political tactics or is it to be forged by macro-political strategy?
Without denying the political importance of culture or social loca-
tion, from the perspective of hegemony theory it seems obvious
where the emphasis must lie: if we do not believe in the revolu-
tionary spontaneity of the masses, we have to assume that the link
between the micro-political and the macro-political is primarily
to be established macro-politically, that is, through protestation.
This is what I will call Minimal Politics.

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6 On Minimal Politics: Conditions of
Acting Politically

Minima Politica

What happens, as Jerry Rubin quipped, when a Hippie, hit by a

policeman’s truncheon, turns into a Yippie? A transubstantiation
of a particular kind can be witnessed: the emergence of a political
agent from the sedimented routines of the social in a moment of
protestation. In Laclau’s theory of populism, this was characterised
as the moment when a social request transforms into a political
demand. While, for Laclau, populism serves as the quintessential
case of political mobilisation, I have tried to substantiate a more
general claim: that the transition from request to demand involves
a moment of protestation to be found in all political mobilisation.
Politics, when traced back to its ‘degree zero’ of reactivation, is
always protest politics. Whatever else might be called politics – in
everyday language or in political science – is merely a sedimented
social practice (a practice of governance, for instance) that remains
untouched by the reactivating moment of the political. Spaces for
politics, in a strict sense, only open when the instituting ground of
social sedimentations is reactivated by antagonism and the social
world is suddenly perceived as contingent and conflictual. In such
a moment of dislocation, dispersed social differences become avail-
able for political articulation, but only if they are turned against
what they are not: against an instance of radical negativity that is
presented as the ultimate source of their frustration.1 Laclau was
right in claiming that, politically, this involves the transformation
of a frustrated request into a more widespread political demand:

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into an empty signifier that holds together an equivalential chain.

And because politics, in the moment of reactivation, turns against
– and is activated by – a radical outside, all politics is protest.
Let us attempt, on this premise, to establish some further con-
ditions of political action – in the very prosaic sense of politics.
Keeping our previous critique of micro-politics in mind, we will
ask: What does a process of ‘going macro’ in actual fact imply on
the ontic level of ordinary politics? We must proceed with care,
however; it would not do to simply make a checklist of an arbi-
trary choice of conditions, similar to an Aristotelian catalogue
of categories. There is a problem facing the establishment of a
plausible notion of politics – a problem which follows from the
very nature of the political difference as difference. On the one
hand, the sought-after criteria must be appropriate to the ‘ontic’
domain of politics: they must draw a realistic image of politics.
They must be firmly rooted in the Machiavellian Moment, which
is also the Gramscian Moment. On the other hand, however, they
must cohere to a certain degree with the ontological dimension of
the political: they must be compatible with the ontology of antago-
nism. Therefore, the conditions of political action can be envis-
aged from an ontic as well as an ontological point of view. On
the one hand, all political acting is ontically limited by historical
conditions, institutional constraints and the opacity and power-
ridden unevenness of the social. On the other hand, there are con-
ditions of possibility of politics that issue from the ontology of
antagonism. These, now, must be systematised and calibrated with
the empirical conditions that are faced by political action. Only
then will there emerge a notion of politics that is both empirically
meaningful and ontologically plausible.
The following will thus inquire after these minimal condi-
tions of politics. It is our aim in this chapter to establish a cri-
teriology of political minima. Doing so will require the mind
game of ‘minimising’ politics to the point where it stops being
politics and starts disappearing into the micro-social, into the
trembling world, in Laclau’s sense, of differences (see our discus-
sion in Chapter 4). Our guiding questions will be: What might
politics look like just before it disappears beyond the horizon
and is no longer describable as politics? What are those forms

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On Minimal Politics

of action that we would describe as just about still political?

Or, more briefly: What is minimal politics? In the course of this
experiment, some categories that were only touched upon at the
end of the previous chapter, but are central to any discussion of
politics, including action, agency and the subject of politics, will
be further elucidated.

Beyond ‘Grand Politics’ and ‘Micro-Politics’

Let me state at the outset that there are political stakes riding on
the reformulation of the problem in terms of minimal politics.
Our intention is to rehabilitate those forms of political actions
that are too often denied a political status, and which are fre-
quently said to be too inefficient (because they did not have an
effect), or too small (because they did not cross the mass media’s
horizon of perception), or too corrupt (because part of them rests
in the institutions of the state, or indeed because they entered into
deals with ‘the enemy’). Although the truth of such accusations
can only be assessed in concreto for each individual case, we can
nevertheless state that these accusations largely adhere to a his-
torically outmoded notion of politics. They hardly do justice to
modern-day social movements, which act on the basis of mobile
and growing associations and in doing so do not measure the
success of their efforts at political mobilisation in the mere num-
ber of demonstration participants or the simple breadth of mass
media reports. They look for and create different kinds of public
presence. They have recourse to highly diverse forms of political
action that usually take place on a small scale, quite like the more
traditional forms such as vigils or neighbourhood councils, but
which are also not centrally concerned with issues of size anyway.
In a way, they fly underneath the radar of traditional perspectives
on politics (see Marchart 2013b).
In the traditional perspective, the fantasy of ‘grand politics’
dominates, whether that is taken to mean the politics of grand col-
lective actors (parties, trade unions, state institutions) or those of
‘grand’ individuals. On the Marxist Left, the grandness of the agent
was a result of the global, historical mission of a universal class. All

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action was guided by a political act that itself had to be of sufficient

magnitude to guarantee a total breach with the past. The classical
left-wing idea of grand politics culminates in the notion of the revo-
lution. The revolution of the whole of society, however, is only pos-
sible when (a) society is imagined as a totality and (b) the universal
subject is equipped with a metaphysical guarantee of omnipotence
in order to achieve the total breach with the past. The phantasmatic
character of this notion is obvious. Yet, the notion of the ‘grand’
individual that is apparent in particular on the political Right is no
less phantasmatic, assuming, as it does, that the mere deeds of an
individual – from Bismarck to Trump – can elicit political upheaval.
Social movements are rarely bothered by such fantasies, even as
they are regularly charged with producing no palpable or lasting
effects. However, political mobilisation cannot so easily be judged
with regard to efficiency and inefficiency, effect or lack thereof.
Protests can, for instance, assume the function of exemplarity (see,
for example, Ferrara 2008), even when they themselves have next
to no effect and tend to gravitate towards the zero degree of poli-
tics. A political activity’s impact as an example is not affected by the
criterion of ‘size’ by numbers. A given action serves as an example
as soon as it is interpreted in the public eye as a reference to more
far-reaching political front lines.
The same cannot be said for those practices that are usually
subsumed under the somewhat misleading term of ‘micro-politics’.
I have already touched on these in the previous chapter at the hands
of my critique of Cultural Studies. Such micro-political practices –
having been lauded, among others, by Michel de Certeau (1988)
– have to be clearly differentiated from practices of minimal poli-
tics. That does not make it entirely wrong to speak of micro-politics
on some occasions. When feminism issued the battle cry that the
personal is political, it quite rightly spotlighted the sphere of daily
life and the balance of power and subordination that is negotiated
therein. We cannot deny what Antonio Gramsci has pointed out:
that consent and consensus, meaning hegemony, need to be organ-
ised in the realm of everyday culture and common sense (Gramsci’s
senso comune), that the validity of social identity patterns are in
fact negotiated in that very realm (Gramsci 1971). It may therefore

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On Minimal Politics

have made sense in the 1970s and 1980s to oppose a foreshortened

notion of macro-politics and emphasise the subversive dimension
of apparently a-political social practices. However, there was a ten-
dency to over-stretch the argument. Félix Guattari, who, together
with Gilles Deleuze, is possibly the main philosopher of micro-
politics, presumed to claim that even a two-year-old child partici-
pated in practices of resistance. Describing a toddler’s behaviour
with the term ‘micropolitics’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2007: 78) emp-
ties this notion of political meaning. Although the theories of micro-
politics therefore set an important impulse, they did tend to for their
part displace the macro-political dimension from their point of view.
In the absence of a convincing set of criteria, everything eventually
becomes politics.
Laclau’s differentiation between the social and the political, on
the other hand, leads to other conclusions. The idea that social
practices originate in an original founding moment that has later
been forgotten – the moment of the political – does not necessar-
ily imply that they mount up to politics. In Chapter 4, Laclau’s
categories were interpreted to mean that the social – the field of
sedimented, unquestioned rituals and institutions – is nothing but
the political in the sleeping mode, ready to be reactivated at any
moment. Those social practices that are usually considered ‘poli-
tics’, because they are ritualised, rule-guided and institutionalised
in the shape of the political system, belong to the register of the
social. But what about those political practices that break with the
well-rehearsed rules of conventional politics, which do not merge
into the institutional shell of the political system, reactivating as
they do the contingent nature of the social by reactivating antago-
nism? They should not strictly speaking be considered part of the
register of the social, but are in fact participating in the moment of
the political. They can be subsumed neither by the ‘politics’ of the
political system nor by micro-politics.2
Let us juxtapose Guattari’s example of an infant’s ‘micro-
politics’ with an activity that, minimal as it may be, very much
can be regarded as political.3 During the Paris May of 1968,
it would often happen, as reported by Claude Lefort, ‘that a
professor was confronted by his students in the lecture hall. It was

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demanded of him that he justify his teachings, the rules in place,

the form of the lectures and the examinations; or an unknown
person would interrupt in order to ask the attendees to join an
assembly or an improvised demonstration’ (Lefort 2008b: 273).
Immediately, the differences between this behaviour and the
‘micro-politics’ of toddlers are apparent. The students did not
act individually nor, in contrast to their own self-description,
spontaneously: they acted collectively, in concert and with a par-
ticular purpose. It was their aim to convince those assembled
in the lecture hall to join a political demonstration, to bring
the street into the university and the university onto the street.
They were looking for an articulation with a wider, collective
project; they activated a political antagonism, which emanated
right through the lecture hall. Finally, they demanded that the
sedimented institutional routines (‘teaching’, ‘rules’, ‘form’) be
justified, thereby revealing the contingency of the institution and
shifting the social into the mode of the political. Lefort stressed
that such situations were minor events, but that May 1968 was
in fact an assembly from such minor events: ‘It is such minor
facts in great numbers that denote the essential character of May
1968 and that are in danger of being forgotten over the memory
of the great, explicitly political discussion and the street fighting’
(Lefort 2008b: 273).
How are we able to define the political character of these and
similar moments, thereby to delineate them from micro-politics on
the one hand and systemic politics on the other? Which criteria can
we use to establish which practices can still sensibly be described
as politics and which cannot? It is apparent that these criteria can-
not simply be inferred from the nominal definition of the political:
we must set off from the phenomenic domain of real politics. It is
equally clear that criteria cannot simply be read off empirical prac-
tices; that would merely result in a list of impressions, unguided
by any conception of the political. Therefore I suggest carving out
the minimal conditions of political action, as limited as this action
may be in its scope and aims. For this purpose, let the boundary
point of politics be a guide: that point that marks the least possible
extent of politics, its just-about – or presque rien – the point of
minimal politics.

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On Minimal Politics

Becoming-Major

Let us begin with a very simple aspect, nicely illustrated by Lefort’s

account, that cannot be subtracted from political action: politics
tends to maximise the number of participants. Assemblies of pro-
testers representing a demand that can be universalised entail
within them the tendency to become more. In the Paris May of
1968, the final goal of this trend was the general strike. The politi-
cal demonstrations of students and workers, in contrast to sectar-
ian manifestations, were not organised with the aim of keeping to
oneself. However, it was established above that numerical size is
not a relevant criterion, since a small demonstration can also serve
as a political example. We must therefore go beyond a merely
numerical understanding of becoming more. Ultimately, such poli-
tics are about the construction of a majority, encapsulating not the
numerical majority of the population, but the symbolic one: it is
about becoming-major. This needs to be stressed not least because
the tendency of becoming-major is certainly controversial within
social movements as well as in theories that are in close proximity
to movements. Deleuze, together with Guattari, even formulated
an influential micro-political concept that suggests the opposite:
becoming-minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). For Deleuze, a
minority – women, people of colour, Jews, etc. – is not in itself
a minority, it needs to become minor. This, he says, will affect
in turn the members of the majority, who are now also exposed
to becoming-minor. For Deleuze, any becoming, regardless of the
number of people affected by it, can therefore always occur only
in the direction of the minoritarian.
The Deleuzian concept of becoming-minor speaks for a con-
stant process of degrounding, instead of one of grounding. This
is an anti-foundationalist perspective on politics. From our post-
foundational perspective, a process of grounding would require
an attempt at self-majorisation, which Deleuze had declared to
be impossible. Therefore, Deleuze’s concept of becoming-minor
draws near to a politics without politics. The genuine political
movement, given the background of the Machiavellian Moment,
where Laclau still positions himself as well, runs in the oppo-
site direction. It aims for the establishment of a ‘collective will’

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(Gramsci) – which is of course never achievable in its entirety –

i.e. an alliance of social powers. Agents who want to live up to
this demand will have to expose themselves to a process not of
becoming-minor, but of becoming hegemonic.
Laclau (E 20–35) rephrased this aspect of Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony into his own dialectic of universality and particularity:
every particular demand must, if it wants to become politically
effective, present itself as being ‘more universal’ than its actual
contents imply. Any given particularism can hegemonise the social
field only on the basis of an excess of universality. At the same
time, if there is no ultimate ground for society, the universality that
is aspired to cannot in fact have a content in its own right. This,
from a post-foundational perspective, does not, however, make
the dimension of universality gratuitous quite yet: if it were, we
would live in a world of diverging monads or in a state of war of
all against all. The place of universality can only be incarnated
passingly by a particularism; but no particularism is equal to the
task, as it would otherwise turn into a foundation of universality.
Nevertheless, every political project is condemned to take up this
impossible challenge if it wants to enforce its demands. Remember
Laclau’s standard example of the Polish trade union movement
Solidarność (PR 81). While it initially articulated the particularis-
tic demands of the Gdansk dock workers on the one hand, all sorts
of further oppositional demands were then, on the other hand,
bundled into it. It therefore eventually acquired the universal func-
tion of incarnating opposition against the regime as such.
Political action has to assume the mutual entanglement of par-
ticularity and universality. This argument supports our first mini-
mal condition of politics: in order to be reasonably describable
as political, a particular project has to possess the tendency to
becoming-major, even if it will never be able to achieve the status
of full universality (i.e. of absolute sovereignty), nor possibly even
of comprehensive majority and dominance. Political movement
only exists when it is directed towards expansion of its own pro-
ject. An agent who aims for the opposite, meaning a particularistic
project of self-minorisation, and eventually of self-ghettoisation,
would effect a standstill in the movement towards universality and
thereby induce the project’s resignation from politics.

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On Minimal Politics

There is no implication here about the extent or size of a hege-

monic project. The only condition that was named was that mini-
mal politics must achieve a movement towards the majoritarian.
This should also do away with one potential misunderstanding.
Minimal does not mean: as little politics as possible. In fact, it
means the exact opposite: as much politics as possible, even if it
is little (given the circumstances). Practices of minimal politics do
not aim for minimisation but maximisation of politics. It may,
from the perspective of ‘grand politics’, appear to be minimal and
ineffective. Indeed, a demonstration, for example, of a handful of
people in front of a deportation prison will rarely have an immedi-
ate effect on the state’s deportation practices. Yet such a demon-
stration is no less politics – that is to say, not less politics – than
are protests of a national or even global dimension. If we apply
the criterion of universalisation, then no practice is too poor, no
action too ineffective, no small gaggle of demonstrators too few
for politics, since nothing can be attained without those minimal,
everyday actions, from which molecules the hegemonic struggles
are assembled.

Acting and the Act

Having resolved this minimal criterion, we must turn to establish-

ing a more precise definition of two terms that have until now
been used quite innocently. What do we categorially take politi-
cal action to mean, and what kind of agent is behind this action?
In other words, how can we establish the minimal conditions of
action and agency? These questions impose themselves out of the
circumstance that, obviously, the post-foundational approach ini-
tially implies the obsolescence of the categories of agent or sub-
ject and of action. Following Heidegger, we no longer assume the
presence of a subject of volition to be at the basis of certain polit-
ical actions. That would constitute a case of subject metaphys-
ics. Sociological objectivism, which grants the status of agents to
social groups, also offers no alternative to metaphysics (it is only
a variant of metaphysics), as long as it claims that the existence of
these groups precedes their political formation. Post-structuralists

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typically propose as a solution that political agents (groups, par-

ties, movements, etc.) ought to be considered not a ground but a
retroactive effect of political action. Action thereby gains primacy
over the agent. Even as I tend to accept this view, several questions
remain to be answered: if the agent is subordinate to the action,
how can the very occurrence at all of political action be explained,
since the metaphysical subject of volition must be discounted as
the source of action? There is a direct political component to this
question: Why does it appear in the course of political action to
still be necessary for the actors to imagine themselves as subjects
of their action? Obviously, nobody would engage in politics whilst
lacking any trust at all in their own agency. Would this post-struc-
turalist thesis of the agent as a mere effect of a-subjective actions
not, then, turn out to be extremely quixotic? Finally: Which ontic
as well as ontological conditions have to be met by political action
for an ‘agency effect’ to emerge at all? Let us first sound out this
final question, before we then return to the relationship of the cat-
egories of subject and agent.
In some post-foundational theories, we can discern a difference
that is analogous to the political difference between politics and
the political, but is rarely systematised: the difference between act-
ing and act (see Marchart 2007b). It is particularly apparent where
the act is summoned at the cost of activity, i.e. as a repression
of profane political action. Slavoj Žižek, for example, submitted
an ontology of the political act (inspired by Badiou’s concept of
the event), which gives a striking demonstration of the dangerous
consequences of purified politics. According to Žižek, an act in the
radical sense aims for an ‘impossible’ intervention, which changes
the reality principle of a given situation, meaning the parameters
of what is possible. While we can follow Žižek up to this point,
his conclusions appear quite implausible against the backdrop
of ordinary politics. Indeed, they are even highly problematic. A
‘true’ act, finds Žižek, has no support in the symbolic order that
precedes it. It touches on the unsymbolisable Real and is of utterly
groundless nature. Žižek’s ideal type of such an act is exempli-
fied by Lenin’s allegedly lone decision to risk a second, Bolshevik
revolution:

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With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s’autorise que d’

elle-même: we should venture the revolutionary act not covered by
the big Other – the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for
the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. (Žižek 2002: 8)

This adventurist model of leaping into an abyss is unacceptable

from a post-foundational point of view. The abyss can no more
be approached directly than the ground. What is called for is the
development of tools for a theory of action that do consider the
ontological register of the act, but do not imagine it as if it were to
be realised in a vacuum. This hits upon the very boundary between
a Gramscian approach and an approach in line with Žižek. For we
always act on a terrain criss-crossed by antagonisms and unevenly
formed by sedimented institutions. For this sort of action Gramsci
found the metaphor of a ‘war of position’. With this metaphor, he
recalls the convoluted trench systems on the battlefields of the First
World War. Like these, the civil societies of the developed states
in the West are made up of a very complex, yet resistant structure
of interlaced institutions that are being contested. By introducing
this notion, Gramsci let go of the classical idea of sovereign power
long before Foucault did. Gramsci saw power in the developed
societies not located in a given state apparatus (such as the gov-
ernment), nor in any place of society: he recognised that it is dis-
tributed throughout the entire civil society. Accordingly, it is not
enough to storm the Winter Palace and take over power, as in the
model of the revolutionary ‘war of movement’; the achievement of
hegemony must be preceded by a long ‘war of position’. As in the
trenches of the First World War, the shifts that are achieved along
the front line are but minimal and slow. The precise location of
the front line is perhaps not even always apparent. In a trench war,
Gramsci reminds us:

[I]t would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed

to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in
fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment
of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves
confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. (Gramsci
1971: 235)

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In that same way, hegemonic territorial gains are always embat-

tled, potentially short-lived, and in danger of being reversed by
inimical forces. Politics takes place in such an obfuscated trench
system. Hegemony, in Gramsci’s eyes, is a molecular process, in
which ideological molecules are successively combined into larger
formations.
The molecular nature of politics undermines every revolution-
ary Manichaeanism. The ontological level of the act and the ontic
level of acting remain interlocked. It is precisely because of this
necessary link between the ontic and the ontological, politics and
the political, action and act, that a pure act – as a ‘leap’ from the
realm of the conditioned – is simply not performable. It is only due
to the inextricable relationship that exists between the politico-his-
torical situation within which we act and the ontological condition
of the political, that action is at all possible. Otherwise we would
find ourselves in a rational choice universe of pure calculability,
or in Žižek’s vacuous universe of ‘the act’. In either case, potential
action – the strategic play with the unforeseen under hegemoni-
cally limited conditions – is no longer possible. Political action
therefore means: calculation with that which cannot be calculated
– the groundless – but still never without premise, and always
under the conditions of a concrete, as political scientists would put
it, ‘opportunity structure’, i.e. in the presence of partial grounds.

Strategy, Organisation, Collectivity

These same considerations suggest at least three further minimal

conditions of political action: strategy, organisation and collectiv-
ity. There can be no politics without strategy, because the option
of a pure act of decision, relieving us of strategic considerations,
is precluded by a realistic model of politics. Every act, it was said,
no matter how radical, can only be realised in the form of concrete
political actions. It thus can only be realised under particular social
as well as historical conditions and in direct competition with other
political projects. To think otherwise would amount to political
megalomania. However, that also implies that action can only sen-
sibly be considered political if it is not limited to ad hoc piecemeal

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activities. Political action proceeds, to pick up on Michel de Cer-

teau’s differentiation, not so much tactically as strategically. More
precisely: a micro-political tactic of everyday life, if it is to meet the
criteria of minimal politics, must be embedded in broader or more
long-term strategies. It must be connectible with a hegemonic proj-
ect. Otherwise it would go up in smoke without a trace.
The development of more long-term strategies will only work
out for a political project to the extent to which it is organised.
Political action therefore unfolds in the form of at least a minimal
organisation. Machiavelli ascribed this function to the Prince, who
was to organise the unity of Italian states. Gramsci considered this
figure of the Prince to be a creation of concrete imagination with
the purpose of organising the collective will of the people (Gramsci
1971: 125–33). It was therefore, he said, the task of a modern
Prince – for Gramsci this was the Communist Party of Italy, whose
co-founder he was – to organise the unity of the working class
and eventually the construction of a new hegemonic alliance.
Our claim that the link between micro-politics and macro-politics
can only be constructed from a macro-political standpoint might
become less controversial if we consider for a moment Gramsci’s
own conception of politics. The point is simply that any coun-
ter-hegemony, any new political will, has to be incorporated and
organised by a modern Prince that takes up the task of founding a
new social order by way of constructing a popular will. Gramsci
himself explains the function of the modern Prince – the party – as
follows:
The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and
organiser of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means
creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-
popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total
form of modern civilisation. (Gramsci 1971: 132–3)

Both tasks of the modern Prince turn out to be two aspects of

the same operation: the party’s task is both moral and intellec-
tual reform and the construction of a collective will. One does not
fully understand the Gramscian notion of hegemony as long as one
restricts hegemony to micro-political questions of culture rather
than taking into account the macro-political function of cultural

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reorganisation (‘intellectual and moral reform’) and the construc-

tion of what today we would call a political project (the ‘collective
will’). Nowadays, of course, the party form is not the only form
of political organisation available; but in order to organise, syn-
thesise and give a direction to otherwise entirely dispersed micro-
political struggles, there must be some formational agent, some
institutional nodal-point on the macro-political level. In the post-
foundational variant of hegemony theory, as developed by Laclau
and Mouffe, organisation – and therefore political action – in the
end means nothing but the articulation of heterogeneous elements
into a chain of equivalence. Only once this condition is at least
rudimentarily fulfilled can we speak of politics.
This does not yet say anything about the size or power of a
given political organisation. The minimal condition of being
organised is fulfilled even by the smallest links, the most mod-
est forms of political organisation, not only by mass parties. This
obviously touches on fundamental questions regarding the sta-
tus of the agent. Post-foundationally, it was said, the agent can
no longer be defined as the ground or source of political action,
because that would imply a metaphysical subject of volition. How,
then, do actions come into being? Or, to paraphrase Heidegger
who paraphrased Aristotle: Why is there action rather than no
action? This question can only be answered after first pointing out
a further minimal criterion of political action: politics always and
exclusively brings forth collective agents, even if the impression
may arise that it is supported by individuals (such as individual
activists). The agent emerges from the action as collectivity. This
is the reason why Gramsci spoke of hegemonic politics as the con-
struction of a ‘collective will’. Already the ‘Condottiere’ conjured
up by Machiavelli, in his Il Principe, as the unifier of Italy must
not be confused with the real prince Lorenzo de’ Medici, who is
invoked by Machiavelli in the epilogue and the dedication of Il
Principe. Lorenzo is but the ‘anthropomorphous’ symbol of the
collective will (Gramsci 1971: 125). That which Laclau calls ‘the
name of the leader’ (PR 100) in his theory of populism is simply
such an anthropomorphous symbol. We can conclude, therefore,
that the collectivity of the agent, quite like the desired majority of
a political project, is in the end of symbolic and not empiric-social

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nature. Collectivity as a unifying symbol is a product of a political

process of organisation, not its source. And it could not be other-
wise. To the extent to which every politics must be concerned with
the problem of inclusion/exclusion and with the question of ‘where
to draw the line’ (Marchart 2002), to which it must undergo the
experience of antagonism, every politics is collective. Not because,
as Lenin was convinced, there is no politics without the masses (by
which he actually understood class politics), but because there is
no politics within a pure field of differences, that is, without some
degree of antagonisation. Which also explains why, contrary to
the liberal view, a politics of the individual does not exist. The
elementary unit of political agency is not the individual, it is the
collective agent.
We have thus arrived at a definition of political action as the
strategic organisation of a collective agent. Having excluded, on a
more general philosophical level, this agent as a primordial source
of action, there remains the question of what does in fact set off
political action. The political ontology of antagonism is hard
put to make do without psychoanalytical support at this point.
Referring to Lacan, Laclau, in his work after HSS, also assumes
a constitutive lack at the heart of each identity and therefore the
Freudian notion of Ichspaltung. In Lacan’s notion of the subject,
the subject is understood – in juxtaposition to the metaphysical
notion of a self-sustaining subject of volition – as the very consti-
tutive lack of substance: as a subject-of-lack. Phrased in the ter-
minology of political post-foundationalism, this category of the
subject is but a metaphor of the absent ground, which, by virtue of
being absent, is experienced as lack.

The Subject of the As If

As was already indicated in Chapter 2 in our short historical out-

line of social negativity, Lacan’s own model of the subject was
based on an ontology of negativity. For Lacan, it is on the prem-
ise of the subject’s lack-of-being – and ‘subject’ in Lacan is just
the very name for that lack – that a dialectics of desire is set in
motion. This dialectics is itself indebted not only to Sartre’s notion

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of a lack-of-being, but also to Alexandre Kojève’s dialectics of re-

cognition. For Kojève, man’s desire (Begierde in Hegel) is always
another desire: it is the desire for recognition by the other and,
hence, for the desire of a desire (i.e. the desire of the other) around
which the struggle for recognition turns. In short: the motor of
history is fuelled by nothing else than desire for an other desire.
However, for Kojève, this other desire is a purely negative term
since the desire one desires does not really ‘exist’, at least not in
the way objects of the natural world can be said to exist, nor does
it have any specific content. If it existed, and if we could be certain
of it, we would not need to desire it. Desire is therefore defined
by Kojève as the ‘“manifest” presence of the absence of a reality’
(Kojève 1980: 225).4 Lacan, for his part, radicalises these insights
by speaking about desire as being le désir de l’Autre, the symbolic
desire of the Other.5 Here, ‘the Other’ designates the symbolic
order – language or society – as the instance by which the sub-
ject (and the subject’s desire) is addressed. Depending on the con-
text, this Lacanian phrase can be read in a variety of ways: it can
mean that man’s desire is desire for the Other – starting with the
(m)other – or, that man desires what the Other desires, or, that man
always desires something other (always something else). In any
case man’s desire is not to be found within the subject – which is
lack – but originates from the outside world of language and soci-
ety. The subject remains eccentric vis-à-vis itself. On the imaginary
level, desire is positivised within an object promising to fill up the
subject’s lack-of-being. This objet petit a serves as a positive incar-
nation of what is absent. And, since the subject of desire is pure
lack, what is absent can only be pure presence: jouissance, a pre-
symbolic, real enjoyment that was lost when the subject entered
into the symbolic order. With his formula of fantasy – designating
the attempt at re-establishing an imaginary fullness – Lacan places
the divided subject of the symbolic order (the subject of lack) in a
relation to the objet petit a as an element that necessarily escapes
the grasp of the subject and still serves as the (absent) cause of his
or her desire for being.
It is already discernible how this psychoanalytical model can
be translated into the ontology of the political and eventually will
explain the why of action. According to Laclau (1994), political

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On Minimal Politics

identity can only exist because identifications have occurred; and

identifications take place because of the need to fill an original
lack. The ontological nature of this claim should not be missed:
‘An important consequence of this distinction between identity
and identification is that it introduces a constitutive split in all
social identity’ (Laclau 1994: 3). The psychoanalytical notion of
the subject therefore turns out to be fundamental to the develop-
ment of Laclau’s political ontology. In his book dedicated to the
category of the subject, Slavoj Žižek even went as far as declaring
the subject in his subtitle to be the ‘absent centre of political ontol-
ogy’ (Žižek 1999). There, Žižek identified the subject with the two
aspects of grounding and degrounding: the gap within the positive
ontological order (the subject of lack) and, once again, the act,
which fills this gap and founds the ontological order (subject of
decision). Any ontology that is founded on such an act, he stated,
is political. Basically, this depiction is not incompatible with the
arguments proposed here so far, but the aspect of ordinary poli-
tics is entirely ignored by Žižek. As we have seen, there is a basic
issue with Žižek’s notion of the act, which once again appears here
in the guise of the subject. The subject-of-the-act lacks an ‘ontic’
counterpart – an agent – provided that every form of ontological
institution must be ontically mediated via action and agency.
In order to bring back the ontic level of the agent, this ontology
of the subject needs to be modified. How do agents imagine them-
selves in the moment of their action? It should be evident that they
do not perceive themselves as a subject-of-lack, but rather under-
stand themselves as autonomous subjects of their own will. They
act as if they were the source and ground of their own action, as if
they had instigated their action themselves. In our political every-
day imagination, we appear unable to consider anything other
than ourselves to be the source of our ability to act. We therefore
act in an as if mode – a mode that has received attention from
thinkers spanning from Kant via Sartre to Derrida and Rancière,
but the theoretical history of which is yet to be written. In fact, a
minimal degree of such self-misperception is required in order for
us to act at all in the first place. From the perspective of politics,
it is therefore not the irremovable lack that motivates the agent
into action, but the imaginary notion that we can overcome the

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lack (without this fantasy, the result would not be political activ-
ity but passive nihilism). That means, simply, that a metaphysical
moment in the stricter sense cannot be removed from the notion of
politics. Political action presupposes the ‘will-to-will’ – Gramsci’s
collective will of a political project – which Heidegger quite rightly
criticised in Nietzsche as a remnant of metaphysics. However, poli-
tics, even in a post-foundational mode, cannot make do without
such a remnant of a certain will-to-foundation. The subject of the
as if can only act on the basis of the transcendental illusion that it
does have foundational power, and is therefore able to will its own
will – and, as Heidegger put it, this ‘will-to-will, i.e. willing is: to
will yourself’ (Heidegger 1961: 33).
To be clear, it does not make much difference whether, phil-
osophically speaking, human actors are in actual fact equipped
with a faculty of volition, or whether this is just a counter-factual
assumption. We are not into brain research. The capacity to act
(and be activated) is simply a working assumption without which
it would make little sense to speak about political acting in the
first place. Yet, this assumption should not be hypostasised into
a voluntarist ideology. The political cannot be brought to life by
an act of pure will. It would be a mistake to assume that we can
construct a political situation in the same way in which a car or
a house can be constructed. It is a well-known fact of experience
that the successful organisation of, for instance, a street manifesta-
tion is far from being a matter of pure will. Those who believe in
pure voluntarism will most likely end up standing alone at a street
corner. Something additional has to happen. A political situation
cannot simply be constructed, it must also be encountered: there
is a political situation – there is in the very sense of Heidegger’s
es gibt, or the il y a of the French Heideggerians, understood as
shorthand for an a-subjective event or Ereignis. A political situa-
tion emerges from the event of the political – an event which, by
virtue of being one, cannot be constructed through an act of will.
If a political situation is encountered, then because it is brought
about not ‘by us’, it is brought about by the a-subjective force of
the political, the most appropriate name for which is antagonism.
Where we originally rejected the fantasies of the omnipotence
of ‘grand politics’, it now turns out that this fantasy is essential, in

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reduced form, even for minimal politics.6 Every form of agency –

and therefore every politics – is based inescapably on a minimum
of megalomania; in the best of all cases on regulated megalomania.
Translated into Lacanian terminology: political action demands
some form of fantasy, where a subject – by way of a metaphysi-
cal, and thus illusory, act of willing – turns itself into the object
of its own desire. Or, in Nietzschean terms: political subjectivisa-
tion aims to overcome the lack in the will-to-will. In this way, the
subject assumes an agency which is not its due but without which
political action would be impossible. In this regard, political action
is an entirely circular affair: a dialectic between a constitutive lack
and the illusory will to overcome it. Hence, ironically, Melville’s
literary figure Bartleby is the incarnation of anti-politics per se.
I say ironically, because Bartleby, who rejects all calls to action
with the famous sentence ‘I would prefer not to’ until he starves
to death in jail, has become an icon to theoreticians like, among
others, Giorgio Agamben, Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri because of this very attitude of refusal. But,
with his figure, Melville had in fact created the very counterpart
to Machiavelli’s and Gramsci’s figures of the Prince as the organ-
iser of a collective will. Bartleby is the incarnation of anti-politics
because he prefers not to affirm his will. After all, ‘the growth of a
nothingness of the will’, as Deleuze (1997: 70) would put it, is the
very opposite of the political will-to-will. Bartleby embodies the
anti-political side of politics: he incorporates the self-dissolution in
the minoritarian, the abandonment of every strategic option, the
absence of all organisation and, eventually, regressive individuali-
sation in the form of passive nihilism. He has abandoned the will
to become majoritarian, to act strategically, to organise and to
construct a collectivity.

Splitting the Objective: Antagonism

Becoming-major, strategy, organisation and collectivity are minimal

criteria of politics that have so far been discussed. A recourse to
psychoanalysis demonstrated that we act as agents as if we were the
ground for our actions, while in fact our actions are only possible

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because of the lack of a Ground (a lack named, in the field of acting,

‘subject’). In order to explain, then, why action takes place at all and
not rather not, we had to resort to shifting from the ontic examina-
tion of the domain of politics to the ontological level and to recur
on an ontology of lack. The category of the subject is located on this
ontological level, not that of politics. This explains why the subject
of lack can never appear as such in the world of agents: nobody has
ever seen such a ‘subject’ other than in those very moments when
political agents break apart and political actions go amiss. In such
instances, the subject starts to be voiced by way of Freudian slips –
indeed, every attempt to overcome the lack will in the end be spoiled
by blunders.
This is wonderfully illustrated in one of the most infamous
instances of self-outfoxing in recent history, which resulted in the
immediate fall of the Berlin wall. On 9 November 1989, the SED
politburo member Günter Schabowski read out a note in the course
of a live transmission: it would in future be possible to apply for
visas for the purpose of private travel abroad without fulfilling
the conditions that had hitherto been in place. Schabowski was
obviously not quite aware of what he was announcing, and, hav-
ing lost track entirely – in fact, having lost all purchase in any
form of higher authority – he found himself in a position where
he was forced to more specifically explain the note. Eventually,
he stuttered in response to the question when this directive was
to come into power: ‘In my knowledge, that will . . . that is now,
immediately.’ This became the news item ‘GDR opens its borders’,
which was taken literally by the citizens who rushed to the border
posts and began to tear down the wall. While the adjustment of
the travel conditions had been a last-ditch attempt by the polit-
buro to keep a handle on the dynamic of the situation, Schabows-
ki’s slip of the tongue achieved the opposite: the dam had broken
and proof had been delivered that it was not possible to steer the
dynamic of the situation. Although Schabowski’s blunder appears
to have been entirely individual, it was in fact entirely collective in
its causes and effects. It was the ‘objective situation’, namely the
weakness of the state and managing elite of the GDR vis-à-vis an
increasingly antagonistic population that prevailed in this instance
and began to speak itself through the mouth of a high official of

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the state who no longer knew how to keep to established rules of

engagement and normal political processes. More generally put:
the antagonism that split the country constituted the ‘objective
condition’ of a situation in which the subject was able to grab
a brief appearance among the agents of politics – in the shape
of blunders. Schabowski allowed the subject use his name for a
brief moment, but it was not Schabowski speaking. What spoke
through Schabowski was the lack of a foundation in the ‘objective
conditions’, a lack that had been reactivated by the emergence of
antagonism, i.e. the political.
Two consequences can be drawn from this example. The first
concerns the ontological register. The example seems to suggest
that there is a correlation on the ontological level between the
category of the subject and that of antagonism. The contingent
and antagonistic nature of social objectivity somehow correlates
with the absence of a subjective ground (with the subject of lack).
Put in Lacanian terms: it is not only the subject that is split, but
also the great Other, i.e. society (Stavrakakis 1999). But are these
two categories – the subject and antagonism – co-original? Or
can one term claim ontological priority? Laclau seems to sug-
gest the subject (as lack) is in fact primordial. As he puts it in an
interview:
But antagonism is only possible because the subject already is that
‘lack of being’ you refer to. As you know, the incorporation of the
individual into the symbolic order occurs through identifications. The
individual is not simply an identity within the structure but is trans-
formed by it into a subject, and this requires acts of identification.
It is because the subject is that ‘lack of being’, which demands and
prevents suture, that antagonism is possible. (NR 211)

In this passage, antagonism becomes an effect of a primordial

lack (and we have already criticised Laclau for granting ontologi-
cal priority to the a-political category of dislocation rather than
antagonism). This, however, would compel us to formulate a
psychoanalytic ontology – an ontology of the subject rather than
antagonism. An ontology of the political, on the other side, would
suggest that it is the subject that results from the antagonistic
structure of all identity and all social meaning.

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This is not an exalted chicken-or-egg question. It makes a prac-

tical difference, in terms of what we look for in empirical analy-
sis, whether one starts with an ontology of the political or with
anthropology or psychoanalysis. But also, if we want to be consis-
tent in our ontological approach, antagonism must be considered
prior to the subject. It can be conceded that we can only achieve
identity qua identification because the subject is lack; yet this lack
of subject simply results from the incompleteness of the symbolic
order. Lack, another word for dislocation, exists because society is
blocked by a fundamental antagonism. Perceived from this angle
of an ontology of the political (rather than from the point of view
of psychoanalysis), antagonism logically precedes the subject.
There is a lack in the structure – a lack we call subject – because
of the labour of the negative. If antagonism describes on the one
hand the logic of politics, which consists of the articulation of dif-
ferences into a chain of equivalence against a negating outside,
it refers on the other hand to that instance of radical negativity
which hinders the social to close itself into the totality of society.
In the first sense I proposed to speak of Laclau’s political ontology
(his onto-logic of politics in an enlarged sense), in the second sense
we have to develop the implications of a more radical ontology of
the political.
But what are the consequences, in the ontic register, for our the-
ory of minimal politics? The notion of antagonism, more fittingly
than any other, can direct our attention to two further, indispens-
able minimal conditions of politics: conflictuality, of course, and
implied therein: partisanship. The social is laden with conflict on
the ontic plane, because society cannot be concluded into a total-
ity – the ontological name for which is antagonism. Any political
activity that is aimed at maximisation is eventually bound to fail,
since it will never be able to gain power over the whole. And for
this reason, every activity in an open field is always but one of
many. A political project is likely to collide with other projects
at any time, and these in turn are also facing a plethora of obsta-
cles. This implies, beyond the need for strategy discussed above,
the positionedness of each agent: an agent will always be located
at a determined – and yet changeable – position within the ‘war
of position’ among conflictually intersecting projects. An agent

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therein necessarily comes to be placed on one or the other side

of a concrete antagonism. This aspect of always being positioned
implies partisanship. Even in a plural field of antagonisms, there
is – from the perspective of the antagonists – no neutral position:
tertium non datur. Whether we accept it or not, as agents we are
party to many struggles.

Politics on Doves’ Feet

It was stated at the outset that this exploration of the minimal

conditions of political action was not intended to result in an
arbitrary list in the style of an Aristotelian catalogue of catego-
ries. The ontic criteria of politics must remain theoretically com-
patible with the notion of the political employed. Even further:
without wanting to claim that it is possible to logically and neces-
sarily deduce a given notion of the political from a given notion
of politics (or vice versa), ontic and ontological categories must
enter a game of reciprocal definition that has an inner conclusive-
ness against the background of the respective other level.7 In the
Machiavellian moment of the political, which Laclau is a part of,
political action takes place within a confusing terrain of relations
of conflict, power and exclusion. The hypostasising of political
action into an actus purus – a leap into the ultimate vortex of ‘the
act’ – would lead away from the Machiavellian moment (as much
as the monadological or pointillist dissolution of politics into an
endless multitude of singularities would lead us astray).
Further, I pleaded for the support of a notion of the political
that counteracts any potential depoliticisation and befits the under-
standing of politics in the Machiavellian mode. In a nutshell, the
post-foundational model of politics, guided by Laclau and by the
left-Heideggerian principle of political difference – as difference
between ontic politics and the ontology of the political – emerges
as follows: the social world is, according to the ontological defini-
tion, prevented from closure by a fundamental antagonism (in turn
creating a subjective lack). Because of this openness, it brings forth
ontic conflicts and struggles – meaning a plurality of antagonisms –
which demand a partial closure of the social into a totality, which

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cannot, however, be finally achieved. The absence of an ultimate

ground identified by the notion of antagonism produces attempts
at partial foundation: antagonisms.8
What form might those social struggles for a temporary founda-
tion of the social take? Let us recapitulate the ‘ontic’ implications
of our ontology of antagonism. The condition of conflictuality
already referred to the fact that any practice under the auspices
of the political – antagonism – will involve taking a position and
therein showing partisanship. It will always have to place an us
against a them (see Mouffe 2000). Now it is possible to demon-
strate that the other minimal conditions – becoming-major, strat-
egy, organisation and collectivity – can also be referenced to each
other as well as to the category of antagonism: a political project
must, in order to achieve partial regrounding of the social, have a
tendency to generalise and majoritise its own position. In order to
do so, it will have to overcome obstacles. These obstacles are on
the one hand the institutionalised conditions of power and exclu-
sion that will certainly be encountered within the social, and on
the other hand a multiplicity of competing projects of reground-
ing. The different layers of sedimented foundations on the one
hand and the ‘war of position’ of hegemonic struggles on the other
create obstacles that have to be dealt with strategically. For strat-
egy not to degenerate into an individual tactic of micro-politics,
which would in the end not be sufficient to achieve the majorisa-
tion of a political project, a minimal form of organisation must be
found. This organisation does not at all need to take the form of a
traditional party, although it does presuppose a certain degree of
partisanship: without a negatory outside – without an antagonistic
opposite – there would be no motivation for an organised unity.
Eventually, a political project that is to be organised in a strategic-
antagonistic manner will result in a collective will as described by
Gramsci. Political conflicts not only are collective, they first of all
produce collectives. That closes the circle with the first minimal
condition of becoming-major.
The categories mentioned above are minimal conditions also
in the sense that they only need to be fulfilled in minimal doses –
which is, of course, mostly the case when one speaks of necessary
conditions. In this case, however, there is a purpose to underlining

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the minimal character. The fantasy of grand politics as well as the

reduction of politics into systemic macro-politics are to be juxta-
posed by a notion of politics that allows the political nature of even
the smallest and apparently most ineffective actions to be illumi-
nated. Even the most minor forms of acting, the most minute collec-
tive, the most vanishing demonstrations, the most paltry strategies,
the worst organisation, even the apparently most individual activi-
ties may be called politics as long as they appear in conjunction with
somewhat wider movements and alliances, as long as they dislodge
the embedded rituals of a hegemonic formation and as long as they
recall the original political moment of foundation, and thereby the
contingency of the social.
Acting, in other words, becomes political as soon as it is mobil-
ised by antagonism. If this is the case, actions articulate, that is,
organise themselves into a political collective will of whatever
kind. Every political activism is preceded by an encounter with
the political, with the activating force of antagonism. That is why
political agents are not the metaphysical subjects of their activ-
ism (even as they necessarily mistake themselves as the Ground of
their own actions) but themselves are activated by the political. No
social conflict can be voluntaristically enforced. And yet: we acti-
vate the political in our activism to the same degree to which we
are activated by the political by acting as if we were subjects of our
own will. The name for this paradoxical undertaking is politics. As
little as it is possible to enforce an antagonism, we still create the
potential for its appearance as soon as we actively intervene in the
play of the world – which certainly is not a rare occurrence, nor
does it always happen on a scale of grandiosity.
Therefore, anti-hegemonic shifts even of the smallest order
are never pointless, as long as they cause the dominant forma-
tion to have to work on tightening its hegemony. Beyond that,
nobody can predict where minor shifts might accumulate to
become greater faults in the hegemonic order and, in the words of
Lefort, create a ‘breach’ in the dominant structure of institutions
and cause cracks in the order of legitimacy: ‘Only a breach?’,
Lefort said with reference to May 1968 in France, ‘maybe . . . .
But the trace of the breach will remain, even once the veil has
been rewoven’ (Lefort 2008a: 52). These traces remain not least

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because of the exemplarity of political action. While the general

strike and the occupations did not smash the structure of soci-
ety, they have shown, Lefort holds, the contingency of a political
model otherwise considered invulnerable. The political, even in
its smallest possible dosage, is therefore everywhere. However,
this everywhere, it must be pointed out, is a very strange place
that nobody has ever seen. The presence of the political as the
ontological moment of the foundation of society can, as I have
tried to demonstrate, only be accessed from the experience of the
absence of a firm ground, meaning from our experience of the
incompleteness of the social. Nobody has ever come across ‘the
political’ in all its purity at any other place than in the breaches,
gaps and cracks of the social, which are filled, stretched or closed
by – politics. Insofar as this happens constantly, it also happens
on the smallest scale. Taking up a metaphor by Nietzsche, who
was not only the philosopher of megalomania, but also the phi-
losopher of dance and effortless facility: it is the minimal actions
that bring on the storm, for ‘Thoughts that come on doves’ feet
guide the world’ (Nietzsche 1999: 189).

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Part III
Politicising Thought

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5816_Marchart.indd 156 28/06/18 4:16 PM
7 The Final Name of Being: Thinking
as Reflective Intervention

Taking Laclau beyond Laclau

In Parts I and II of our investigation I have consistently distin-

guished between two versions of political ontology. In the case of
the ‘onto-logics’ of politics – which, in Laclau, is called hegemony
and comprises a general theory of signification – the concept of
antagonism has a particular function in any process of signification:
it allows for the articulation of differences into a chain of equiva-
lence by providing them with a common negative outside. While
Laclau describes, with great intellectual clarity and elegance, the
laws of discourse and hegemony, he was hesitant to draw the onto-
logical consequences. But these consequences are quite obvious. If
his discourse theory amounts to a political theory of signification,
rather than just a theory of political signification, then antagonism
is involved, to some degree, in the stabilisation (and dislocation)
of any meaning – no matter whether political or social. And if,
as Laclau presumes (NR 100–3), all social being is discursively
structured, then, given his theory of signification, antagonism
must assume ontological status with regard to all social being. But
we do not need to engage with Laclau’s theory of discourse in
order to arrive at this conclusion. Analogous consequences can
be drawn from Laclau’s theory of sedimentation and reactivation
as presented in Chapter 4. If all things social are instituted politi-
cally (i.e. by the political), and if the moments of institution con-
tinue reverberating throughout the instituted – by making social
institutions ‘tremble’ – no social being will remain untouched by

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antagonism.1 As soon as this point is accepted, we are forced to

move beyond Laclau’s political ‘onto-logic’. We have to turn our
view towards an ontology of the political. The latter exceeds any
theory concerned with the symbolic laws of discourse or political
articulation. What will be at stake is the political nature of social
being eo ipso. We have thus to approach, as far as it is possible,
antagonism as antagonism, the ground as ground. But is that a
feasible undertaking? In order to answer this question we need to
reflect on the status of ontology as ontology – that is to say, we
have to determine the very status of thinking.
Laclau will be of little help in addressing such meta-theoretical
questions. He rarely expressed concern over the status of his theory
or the methodology of his approach. Like many other left Heideg-
gerians, he shared Heidegger’s aversion to anything that smacks of
epistemology. In the two remaining chapters of our investigation,
I would like to demonstrate that it is possible to account for the
status of our theoretical endeavour without having to engage in
any kind of epistemological reasoning. We will not plant a new
head onto the multi-headed Hydra of epistemology. Instead, I will
propose an alternative form of self-reflection that is firmly located
in the ontological register. Such a political form of self-reflection
has little in common with the kind of reasoning taken for granted
in traditions of scientific and philosophical rationalism. Rather, it
means to accept the wager of thinking, that is, of ‘reasoning’ in a
non-epistemological mode: a mode of political ontology. Contrary
to what can be expected in the Western metaphysical tradition, this
kind of ‘thinking’ is not predominantly a matter of cognition, nor
is it concerned with what can be ‘known’ with certainty. Think-
ing is something we do. But, what exactly are we doing when we
think? My response – which will also give me the opportunity
of weaving together many of the threads delineated in previous
chapters – will bring us back, full circle, to ontic politics. For, to
determine the role and status of political thought – as a practice of
thinking ‘the political’ politically – we have to pass through poli-
tics. In other words, we have to politicise thought.
So, how to move beyond the dominant horizon of epistemology?
As stated in Chapter 1, Heidegger’s great lesson was to shift the

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terrain of interrogation from questions regarding being-qua-

understanding to those regarding being-qua-being. In the earlier
Heidegger, this meant that we had to accept that whatever we
know will arise from our being-in-the-world. This does not pre-
clude theoretical reflection, but we have to be very clear about
the meaning of reflection in an ontological sense: to reflect means
to implicate ourselves in our being-in-the-world, thereby accept-
ing that we are always already fully implicated. Herein lies the
Heideggerian significance of Foucault’s enigmatic phrase of an
‘ontology of ourselves’. It should not only be understood in the
trivial sense of Zeitkritik. What Foucault calls a critical ‘ontology
of actuality’, an ontological account of our present condition, has
to pass through ‘ourselves’. Thinking, I contend, is reflective in
the sense of creating a flection, of folding ourselves back into the
matter of our thought and of unfolding thought into an ‘ontology
of ourselves’. Thinking is a material practice. It is part of, and con-
cerned with, the matter of our social world.
As soon as we pass Heidegger by granting primary status to
the political, the above claim requires two specifications. First,
the world in which we implicate ourselves is a world formed and
deformed by antagonism. We implicate ourselves in an embattled
place. Thinking, for this reason, is far from being a purely medita-
tive practice, a vacuous activity presented by the later Heidegger
as ‘passivity’. By way of thinking we actualise the political rather
than merely meditating on its concept. Nor can there be thinking
‘pure and simple’, self-sufficient and without any object matter. We
always think something; even though, in the case of an ontology
of the political, this something is not an ontic object among other
objects of potential research, but something that escapes empirical
measurement: a radical negativity that becomes tangible only in
a play of difference-as-difference. We have called this instance of
differential negativity antagonism. And second, we can implicate
ourselves in this embattled world because it is a place we already
occupy.2 We are always already thrown into a conflict zone, struck
by exclusion, power and unevenness, a zone that very much resem-
bles Gramsci’s description of civil society as ‘a powerful system of
fortresses and earthworks’ (Gramsci 1971: 238). And it is by way

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of thinking the inescapable facticity of this politically instituted

space that we learn to embrace the political. Embracing not in
the sense of amor fati, but in the sense of amor facti: of accepting
antagonism as a factum politicum. It might be asked: Why should
one learn to embrace something inescapable? The answer is sim-
ple: Because everyone believes it to be escapable. Most of the time
people tend to deny, repress or disavow the antagonistic nature
of the world they live in. But as we start thinking antagonism we
begin to actively occupy what, up to that point, we had passively
inhabited. In this regard, thinking is a practice of affirming, and
thereby enacting the political.3 More than a cognitive reflection, it
is a reflective intervention.

A Political Theory of Naming

A reflective intervention, by arousing dormant conflicts, will pro-

duce effects of reactivation. Thinking, as defined here, reactivates
the sedimented routines in which ideas are conventionally embed-
ded. These routines are institutionalised into scientific disciplines,
academic habits and accepted rules of reasoning, and they repro-
duce and certify the sedimented layers of canonical knowledge.
With regard to its potential to dislocate and reassemble these
routines and sedimented layers, a reflective intervention into the
realm of discipline and doxa is a form of acting, rather than mere
reasoning or meditating. A variety of strategies might be applied.
The most powerful form of acting, as we will see, is naming. To
understand this, we have to first take note of the fact that ‘antago-
nism’, from the point of thinking, is not, or not predominantly,
a concept. Antagonism is a name. In the political ontology that
I tried to develop in previous chapters, antagonism served as our
name for being, that is, for the never-ending play between institu-
tion and dislocation, ground and abyss of the social. This claim
is not as far-fetched as it may sound. As Alain Badiou, à propos
Deleuze’s suggestion of ‘life’ as a name of being, argued: ‘assign-
ing the name of being is a crucial decision’ for it ‘expresses the
very nature of thought’ (Badiou 2000: 193). I agree, but would
add that assigning the name of being is not a purely intellectual

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and intra-philosophical affair. To name being, rather, involves an

investment which, in turn, cannot rely on any ultimate ground of
justification.4 But it is precisely because such justificatory ground
is not available that it has to be supplemented in a political move.
In this political sense, it is the name that provides a supplementary
ground; the name becomes, as Laclau put it, the ground of the
thing. Therefore, Badiou is only partially right: assigning the name
of being is a crucial decision indeed, but it is a political decision.
It does express the very nature of thought – but not only its philo-
sophical nature: it attests to the political nature of thought as a
practice of naming. Contrary to what Badiou believes, the nature
of thought is political.
Laclau’s theory of naming, especially his distinction between
concept and name, will help to elucidate this claim. In his book on
populism, he turned to the debate between descriptivists and anti-
descriptivists in analytic philosophy. Descriptivists (like Bertrand
Russell) argue that proper names are related to their objects by
way of descriptive features. Laclau gives the example of ‘George
W. Bush’ as an abbreviated description of ‘the US President who
invaded Iraq’ (PR 101). The anti-descriptivists, spearheaded by
Saul Kripke, argue against this idea, since even if in another world
Bush had not invaded Iraq, the name ‘Bush’ would still apply to
him. Kripke famously argued in Naming and Necessity that names
(and this holds not only for proper names but also for common
names such as ‘gold’) are rigid designators that refer to one and
the same object in all possible worlds (Kripke 1980). They desig-
nate their object not through descriptions but through an initial
and founding act of ‘primal baptism’. While this solution is more
convincing than the descriptivist solution, it encounters problems
of its own. According to Žižek (1989: 89–97), anti-descriptivists
cannot provide an answer to the problem of what makes the object
of rigid designation identical to itself in all possible worlds and
beyond all descriptive changes. The Lacanian solution, proposed
by Žižek, is that this ‘X’ which guarantees the identity of the object
in all counterfactual situations is nothing else than ‘the retroactive
effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which sup-
ports the identity of the object’ (95). Laclau basically concurs: the
identity of any object is not ‘expressed’ by a given name, but is the

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retroactive result of the very process of naming. Naming, hence,

becomes productive in a new sense because it is not restricted any
more to the moment of pure designation, as in Kripke’s primal
baptism, but it must be performed.
The practice of naming, and this is why Laclau’s theory is
helpful, consists in the emptying of a concept. Naming is con-
ceptualised best along the lines of the logic of the empty signifier,
elaborated by Laclau in an earlier paper (E 36–46). The emptying
of the signifier is a direct result of the equivalential extension of
demands for which the empty signifier functions as a nodal point
that represents the chain in its entirety. To reiterate one of Laclau’s
preferred examples, the name ‘Solidarność’ initially functioned
as a signifier for particular demands in the particular situation
of dockers in Gdansk. Had it signified a certain demand of these
workers only, this demand could have been accommodated by the
institutional setting of the Polish system, it could have been inte-
grated into a system of differences. To the extent that it connected
with other demands by other discontented sectors of society, how-
ever, a chain of equivalence was built which the system could not
handle any more in a differential manner. From the perspective
of this chain of equivalence the communist system functioned as
the antagonistic other which, in purely negative terms, served as
the ground for the equivalential linking of the most diverse anti-
systemic demands. ‘Solidarność’ then turned from the slogan of a
local group of workers into a name for opposition as such. At the
same time, though, it had to be emptied of its specific content in
order to function as a name for a much wider counter-hegemonic
equivalential chain. It turned into an empty signifier increasingly
devoid of particular signifieds.
The logic of the empty signifier, as it evolved in Laclau’s work
into a general theory of naming, bears radical implications for the
way we envisage political action. While for objectivists the ‘group’
is an entity that pre-exists the process of naming, in Laclau’s post-
foundational approach a social agent only exists to the extent that
it is named: ‘the identity and unity of the object results from the
very operation of naming’ (PR 104). Politics does not give expres-
sion to pre-given interests or pre-established identities, but is to be
understood as the very process by which a group assumes its name.

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Hegemony theory is thus reformulated by Laclau as a theory of

naming: if the identity of a given social group cannot be derived
from a stable ground (from the position within the relations of pro-
duction, for instance), it can only be the result of a process of hege-
monic articulation. The group will be held together by the name
that emerged from this process. The name, consequently, ‘does not
express the unity of the group, but becomes its ground’ (PR 231).
One can see how, compared with the Lacanian logic of the signifier
as presented by Žižek, a political twist is given to the operation of
naming. Politics is all about the hegemonic struggle over the expan-
sion of a chain of equivalence at the expense of the field of ‘positive’
differences, and concomitantly over the emptying of the signifier.
The primal baptism of a political agent (such as Solidarność), by
which this agent comes into existence, results from a hegemonic
intervention. Naming, in this regard, is the quintessential political
activity. Naming is grounding.

Naming Being

There is no reason why Laclau’s argument should exclusively

apply to names in the field of politics. If our assumption is correct
that Laclau’s theory of signification is to be granted the status of
a general theory that provides us with the laws of meaning pro-
duction tout court, then the operation of naming may occur in
meaning formations other than political discourse – scientific and
philosophical discourses included. The latter discourses, however,
pride themselves on their conceptual nature. And here the dis-
tinction between name and concept is key. Any conceptual order
is predominantly structured according to the logic of difference:
a particular content is assigned to a concept by way of the dif-
ferential positioning of the latter vis-à-vis other concepts. Take,
for example, a system of definitions: ideally, every single defined
item has to be sufficiently differentiated vis-à-vis all other items
of the system. An item whose content overlaps with the content
of another item would be poorly defined because the entire order
functions according to the logic of difference and not equivalence.
Theories tend to be in general constructed along the differential

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axis of signification. A philosophical system is considered well

built when every single concept is assigned an exclusive content,
so that conceptual confusion and redundancy can be avoided.
Similarly, a scientific approach to ‘politics’ will either proceed
nominalistically and via definitions, as typically in Max Weber,
or by presenting a cluster of empirically derived descriptive fea-
tures and locating these features within a classificatory system.
Applied to the study of politics, this means that a social science
approach would always seek to insert the phenomenon of politics
into a conceptual order of differences. Both philosophy and the
social sciences, even where the latter conceive of themselves as
‘empirical’, are predominantly located on the conceptual axis.5
Moving on to political ontology, we have to ask whether or
not the same holds for an ontology of the political. Is it a con-
ceptual system? Is ‘the political’ a concept? Certainly, a conven-
tional notion of ‘politics’, as distinguishable from other social
practices, falls into the order of the conceptual. This remains the
case even if we enlarge the concept of politics in the direction of
minimal politics: a set of criteria, applicable to any moment of
political protestation, allow politics, in even its minimal form,
to be distinguished from other social practices (and in partic-
ular from what is deceivably called ‘micro-politics’, which, in
our view, has nothing to do with politics). But ‘the political’? In
many accounts, most famously in Carl Schmitt’s The Concept
of the Political (Schmitt 1963), it operates as a concept, as is to
be expected from the book title. For Schmitt, the term is meant
to provide a distinctive criterion, the friend/enemy distinction,
that allows discriminating between, on the one side, the political
and, on the other, the economic, the religious, the artistic, and
so on, each of which is defined by its own distinctive criterion.
With Laclau, however, the political can be given a more radical
interpretation. If Laclau’s thesis of the primacy of the political
is accepted, the term comes to denote the instituting moment of
the social and, therefore, is nothing less than the foundation of
all other social distinctions, criteria or categories. It is not delim-
itable, it does not refer to a particular region within the social
topography or to a criterion that could be distinguished from
other social criteria – not on the same ontological plane, by all

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means. From an ontological perspective, even its counterpart, the

social, overlaps with the political. As was argued in Chapter 5
on the basis of Laclau’s primacy of the political thesis, the social
is nothing other than the political itself in a sedimented mode.
Hence, ‘the political’ cannot be of the order of positive concep-
tual differences.
A similar mistake would be to assume that the political could
be clearly distinguished from politics. As I have repeatedly
insisted, the political difference should not be mistaken for a par-
ticular ontic distinction. Rather, an interminable play makes the
political appear (in moments of politics) and disappear (by way of
sedimentation) within the field of positive social differences; and
this play cannot be conceptually grasped. The analogy, if it is an
analogy, with Heidegger’s onto-ontological difference is striking.
Heidegger’s ‘beyng’ – the evental play of difference-as-difference
– does not amount to a concept that could be nailed down by a
definition or a host of descriptive features. As a self-unfolding
process it escapes conceptualisation so that Heidegger, again and
again, attempts to approach the play of difference through many
avenues: as aletheia, as ab-ground, as the event of enowning, as
clearing, as presencing, as the fourfold, the giving (Es gibt) or
simply as being, which all are, at best, variations on the same
theme. These are equivalent ways of encircling something which
escapes conceptualisation and, therefore, can only be approached
by way of thinking. I have criticised the later Heidegger for the
Zen-like vacuity of his notion of being as well as for the amor-
phous shape of what he calls ‘thinking’. In political ontology, if
it is truly political, thinking must not be envisaged as the medita-
tion of something ineffable. One has to avoid the trap of total
vacuity, without falling into the converse trap of reifying being
into an ontic entity. In the first case we would leave the realm of
thinking in the direction of mysticism, in the second we abandon
thinking for the sake of empiricism. What we are looking for is
a political kind of vacuity that avoids the symmetric traps of the
mystical and the empirical – which is why a political theory of
naming proves to be essential. While the play of grounding and
degrounding cannot be, in the strict sense, conceptualised, it can
nevertheless be named.

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The reason is evident, given Laclau’s theory of naming. If the

conceptual order functions differentially, the nominal order works
on the basis of equivalence: a name emerges as a nodal point around
which differences are structured into an equivalential chain. A name
takes over the task of representing the totality of this chain without
expressing ‘any conceptual unity that precedes it’ (PR 108). No
conceptual correlate exists to which the name could refer. There
is no particular signified that would be attached to the signifier.6
This may sound like a rather Heideggerian kind of vacuity, but in
political ontology, equivalence is based on antagonism: on a radical
negativity against which the unity of the chain can be established.
That a name does not signify anything particular does not imply,
therefore, that it signifies an indifferent Zenish ‘nothing’. What it
does signify is the unity of all differences that are brought into a
relation of equivalence. And if this unity is signifiable only in oppo-
sition to an outside that is experienced as threatening and dislocat-
ing, a name will always bear the mark of negativity. ‘Solidarność’,
to take up the previous example, signifies unity only to the extent
to which it signifies opposition to a hostile political system. With-
out radical negativity no equivalential unity could be established to
begin with. A name, by signifying equivalence, will at the same time
signify antagonism. Any true name, to be precise, will – by implica-
tion – be a name of antagonism. It will not only serve as an empty
signifier for a given chain of equivalence, it will also point us, if
only implicitly, to the instance of antagonism as the very source of
institution/dislocation of that chain.7
What I want to propose now may seem like a rather sim-
ple operation: to make explicit, to turn inside out, what is the
implicit nature of all names. If antagonism is the ultimate refer-
ent of any name, political ontology needs to name antagonism.
If, as demonstrated, any act of primal baptism points to an
ontological instance of radical negativity, then the act of primal
baptism peculiar to an ontology of the political consists in nam-
ing this instance. This task might not be as easy to achieve as it
seems, for it obviously involves a non-theoretical, yet reflective
intervention into theory. It cannot be purely theoretical, scientific
or philosophical, given that theories are predominantly ordered
conceptually, that is, along the differential axis. Since naming

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always involves equivalence, the conceptual character of theory

will thus be disturbed, and it will be all the more disturbed as,
for an ontology of the political, ‘antagonism’ is supposed to
name the very ground and abyss of all ontic being. As repeatedly
argued, antagonism names the being of all social beings both in
their sedimented and their reactivated state, both in spatial and
in temporal form. As a name for social being eo ipso, it of course
creates an extremely expanded chain of equivalence.8 And yet, the
name ‘antagonism’ is not just a simple ‘X’, an entirely emptied
signifier. It bears traces of a concept (a signified) that can be fol-
lowed back to a school of thought and a network of intellectual
debate; it is even applied as an analytical tool in many studies
in the framework of post-foundational discourse theory. Select-
ing ‘antagonism’, rather than any other term, is therefore not an
arbitrary choice, as it results from a naming operation rooted in
a social and political context. What is more, the term ‘antago-
nism’ suggests itself for its historical dimension: it is within a
particular tradition of left-Hegelianism and Marxism that our
move assumes verisimilitude. Assigning the name of antagonism,
thus, does not come down to an act of decisionism, for the name
may, or may not, assume plausibility within a particular politico-
theoretical context and tradition. For someone working in an
entirely different paradigm – say, a rational choice theorist – it
does not make sense at all. But then again, ‘rational choice’ does
not fare any better from the perspective of political ontology.

Laclau: Populism as a Name for Politics

Thinking, we have seen, does not unfold within a transparent

medium of cognition, as ‘ideas’ presumably do; instead, it inter-
venes from a place outside the cognitional order of an isolated
mind. We now have to discuss the implications such a kind of
intervention may produce for the field of philosophy. To recapitu-
late: while political theories, as a rule, content themselves with
proposing a concept of politics (mostly a depoliticised concept of
politics), political ontology has to propose a name for the political.
This involves an operation of naming which, in turn, can only be

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political by nature. But can it be purely political? The answer is

certainly ‘no’. If fully politicised, a given political ontology would
turn into a party manifesto, with its philosophical or theoretical
value close to zero. In the Soviet Union, cohorts of academic ide-
ologists worked relentlessly to achieve the ideal of a fully politi-
cised philosophy called dialectical materialism. I have no intention
of recommending the model. I am not proposing that antagonism
is a name and a name only. Undeniably, it is also a concept, and
we have tried to retrace the conceptual evolution of this concept
from the Kantian antinomies via Hegel and Marx to Laclau. Con-
currently, political ontologies do not only belong to the nominal
order; to the extent to which they are theories with some degree
of conceptual consistency and internal differentiation they also
belong to the conceptual order. For this reason, I have proposed
to envisage the practice of thinking in terms of intervention, and
not of imperialism. While being a political intervention into the
conceptual order, thinking should not deteriorate into mere slo-
ganeering (which would be even worse than being reduced to
a purely intellectual pastime). Thinking has, as we will see in
the next chapter, political attributes (the attributes of minimal
politics), but is not exhausted by politics.
What I want to defend is the following: it is because of its
political force that thinking can intervene in the field of theory,
the latter being understood as an intrinsically uneven and partially
opaque terrain of differences. By the creation of a name, a concep-
tual order is both disturbed and reassembled. Naming reactivates
the sedimented order of definitions, classifications and concep-
tual hierarchies specific to a given philosophy, a philosophical
paradigm, an intellectual tradition or an accepted canon of ideas.
Naming brings conflict to concepts. It rouses dormant antago-
nisms and brings to light the forgotten partisanship of certain the-
ories, their exclusion of alternatives and the lines of conflict that
cut across the borders between the world of theory and the world
of politics. Only by creating a flection, by inflecting ourselves as
political agents into the, supposedly, depoliticised fields of sci-
ence and philosophy, can we begin to accept that we are already
implicated, that the borders between the theoretical and the politi-
cal field are already criss-crossed by multifarious antagonisms,

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and that there is no politically neutral point of observation (the

great fantasy of the epistemologists). This can be exemplified with
Laclau’s own reflective intervention in mainstream political science
theories of populism. On Populist Reason, the book where he pres-
ents his theory of naming, is based on a scandalous claim that has
troubled many reviewers: populism, for Laclau, is not a particular
form of politics among others. Rather, by encapsulating political
rationality tout court, it should be identified as the quintessential
form of politics.
It did not go unnoticed that, with this claim, the very distinc-
tion between politics and populism was abolished (Stavrakakis
2004). Laclau himself anticipated the critique in the preface to
his book: ‘One consequence of this intervention is that the refer-
ent of “populism” becomes blurred, because many phenomena
which were not traditionally considered populist come under that
umbrella in our analysis’ (PR xi). Interestingly, Laclau uses the
term ‘intervention’ and, given what was said before, it is clear
that he is engaged in an equivalential operation of naming. Popu-
lism becomes the Laclauian name for politics because the latter,
for Laclau, is about constructing a frontier between us and them,
which also is the essence of the former: articulating a chain of
equivalence among the people versus the elite. What he does not
say, because he does not bother reflecting on the status of his
theory, is that his own operation proceeds along the same lines of
equivalence by proposing populism as a name that comprehends
all other forms of politics. He justifies the curious move by point-
ing out ‘that the referent of “populism” in social analysis has
always been ambiguous and vague’, and that his attempt ‘has not
been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the oppo-
site: to show that populism has no referential unity because it is
ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic
whose effects cut across many phenomena’ (PR xi). What this
explanation lacks, even as the equivalential nature of the term is
asserted, is the recognition of the fact that Laclau himself engages
in a naming operation. But this is exactly, I would argue, where
the political edge of Laclau’s intervention has to be located: by
way of rebaptising politics, Laclau moves populism, a formerly
denigrated phenomenon of political mobilisation, from a marginal

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place into the limelight. He inverts the terms of debate by trans-

posing a concept from the register of difference (the conceptual
order) to the register of equivalence (the nominal order), in that
way contributing not only to the theorisation of politics but also
to the politicisation of theory.9
Laclau’s theory of populism, by elevating a concept that – just
as the corresponding concept of ‘the people’ – used to be marginal
and denigrated, to the status of a name, contributes to the effective
politicisation of mainstream political theory and science. It brings
into view the customary disavowal of the political in mainstream
political science. Laclau’s operation is an example of what I call a
reflective intervention, or simply inflection: a practice of thinking
by which actual politics is folded into theory. The political motiva-
tion of Laclau’s intervention is patently obvious. Who else would
dare to make populism the centre of political thought if not a life-
long Peronist who, apart from being an academic theorist of popu-
lism, was at the same time a public advocate of Kirchnerism and
other variants of progressive populism? Not surprisingly, On Pop-
ulist Reason, a supposedly highly ‘abstract’ work of theory, was
hailed in Latin America as a timely comment – and a philosophi-
cal endorsement – of the ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning populist gov-
ernments. If thinking, as a practice of inflection, means to redirect
political antagonisms towards the conceptual order, thus making
them cut through the sedimented layers of what Thomas Kuhn
called ‘normal science’, then Laclau’s inflection resulted in nothing
less than a political reversal of the fundamental terms of the aca-
demic debate on populism.

Why Ontology?

The preceding discussion may help explain why we hold onto the
name ‘ontology’. Let me clarify why an apparently overcome philo-
sophical discipline should be retained. As explained in Chapter 1,
modern philosophy has turned into a quest for the conditions of
understanding, bypassing all questions concerning the nature of
being.10 Why, then, hold onto such an apparently outdated enter-
prise? Not for reasons of philosophical nostalgia, to be sure, but

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in order to maintain its radical potential. ‘Ontology’ is a name for

the nominal order – the order of equivalence – in philosophy. For
what is of interest from an ontological point of view is not this or
that sub-species of beings, but the being of all beings. This remains
true even for a post-foundational ontology in which the ultimately
abyssal nature of all grounds is affirmed, and by which traditional
ontology is both transformed and politicised.
In the first place, it is transformed because ontology is not to
be conceived any more as the quest for a stable ground of being;
instead, it is turned into what Derrida has so appropriately called
‘hauntology’: the spectral presence of a ground that remains
absent, but exerts an uncanny presence in moments of conflict
and contingency. The name ‘ontology’ can thus be retained as a
post-foundational name for the science of the foundation, not of
one ontic region of social being or another, but of the institut-
ing ground, and destructive abyss, of being as such. What is still
‘ontological’ about this science is its universal scope: the reference
to being-qua-being. And it could not be otherwise. If we were to
grant merely regional validity to a post-foundational ontology, we
would leave the possibility of at least one foundation somewhere
that could quite rightly lay a claim to ultimate grounding. But this
would bring us back to the foundationalist stance we had excluded
ex hypothesi. A post-foundational ontology will thus retain the
traditional status of a metaphysica generalis or first philosophy,
except that its metaphysical claims with regard to an ultimate
foundation are seriously weakened.
Secondly, it is politicised because ontology, if retained, will only
make sense as political ontology – or, to be more precise, as an
ontology of the political. And again it is easy to see why. If an ulti-
mate ground is not available, and if on the other hand a universe
devoid of all grounds would be an unliveable, psychotic place, then
the absent ground has to be substituted. Evidently, metaphysical
replacements – be they God, Reason, the laws of the Market, or
the human Genome – are unpersuasive from a post-foundational
perspective. But persuasive or not, whatever comes to serve as
a substitute for the absent ground will emerge from a political
struggle. In the last instance, all these fraudulent grounds result
from a political act of institution: no God without the hegemonic

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power of the church; no Reason without the struggle of bour-

geois enlightenment; no blind Market forces without the forces
of their blind ideologists; and no believe in the determining role
of the human Genome without the life sciences being made the
authoritative model of social explanation. Grounds emerge from
hegemonic paradigm shifts. For instance: while social phenomena
were authoritatively explained, for the most part of the twentieth
century, by sociologists, they are now explained by economists,
biologists and brain researchers. This would not have been possi-
ble without large-scale shifts within the hegemonic formation. So,
to lay a ground means to exclude equally available alternatives,
which in turn requires the power to do so. On the other hand, we
cannot not invest in the grounding game. Ignoring the necessity
of at least some foundation would catapult us out of the realm of
the political, leaving behind the illusory image of an entirely paci-
fied and harmonious society – a dream world for fundamentalists.
Grounding is necessary as a political activity. And what comes to
replace the Ground, from the viewpoint of a post-foundational
ontology, is the political as the grounding/degrounding moment of
all social grounds. Ontology, for this reason, can only be retained
as an ontology of the political.
How, then, to determine the philosophical status of this
ontology? On the basis of the previous points, I see only one
possibility: by way of self-implication, which also means self-
application. To be congruent, ontology, if it is to retain its uni-
versal scope, must be self-applicable. After the outer-worldly
standpoint of epistemology has been abandoned, ontological
claims do not issue any longer from a place located beyond the
realm of their application. Whatever is ontologically claimed
about the entirety of ontic beings must also apply to ontology
itself. Think again of Laclau’s theory of signification. By virtue
of describing (like any other theory of language) the laws of
meaning production in general, his theory must also be appli-
cable to itself – provided that it is meaningful. Similarly, a theory
of hegemony à la Laclau, in which hegemony is seen as perme-
ating the entire field of the social, should itself be understood
as constituting a hegemonic move within the social field of

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theory. And, consequently, to develop an ontology of the politi-

cal necessitates a political move within ontology. What may
sound scandalous for epistemologists is only consequential for
political ontologists. Provided the latter cannot – and do not
want to – arrogate a God’s-eye view, political ontology must be
considered a social discourse like any other and therefore has
to be founded, like any other, on a political act of institution. It
must therefore also be possible to, as it were, self-apply politi-
cal ontology to the field where it is formulated, philosophy, by
reactivating the latter’s political grounds of institution and by
undermining its sedimented structures.11
However, caution is advisable, for ‘undermining’ does not
amount to ‘overthrowing’. From what was said one could be
tempted to draw the conclusion, as Laclau seems to do, that trans-
ferring the primacy to politics simultaneously evokes the very end
of philosophy: ‘Once undecidability has reached the ground itself
[. . .] the realm of philosophy comes to an end and the realm of
politics begins’ (E 123). But is the disappearance of philosophy the
only logical alternative? Not necessarily. The quote could also be
read as implying that the realm of philosophy, once grounds have
turned shaky, will become politicised without simply disappearing. I
thus consider it hardly constructive to frame ‘the end of philosophy’
and ‘the beginning of politics’ as two successive, mutually exclusive
historical stages. From a post-foundational perspective, that idea
of leaving behind the terrain of metaphysics is but the last fantasy
of metaphysics. The aim should not be to overcome metaphysical
philosophy – for ‘overcoming’ is, as Heidegger showed, but another
trope of metaphysical foundation – but rather to politically subvert
the metaphysical terrain on which we all stand. Instead of dealing
with two successive phases – previously philosophy, now politics
– we are faced with a contested political front line that cuts across
the borders of philosophy. This front line needs to be retraced. My
argument, for the remaining parts of this chapter, is that the task
of thinking – as a reflective intervention – consists in twisting front
lines, so that political antagonisms bend into the field of philosophy.
Where this succeeds, philosophical grounds will be reactivated, and
it will become apparent that they have always been political.

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The Political History of Ontology: Negri’s Descartes

Such a practice of reflective intervention may appear ambitious;

yet, and perhaps surprisingly, it is not without precedence. In the
materialist tradition of intellectual history a number of treatments
have been able to highlight the manifold intersections of philoso-
phy and politics (Goldmann 2013; Macpherson 1962; Meiksins
Wood 2012; Wood 1983). Let us briefly consult two of the most
important studies. We turn to them because they can provide proof
of the fact that ontology, in the traditional metaphysical sense of
the term, was always already deeply political – perhaps, it was
political ontology without ontologists conceding it.
In his books on Descartes and Spinoza, Antonio Negri showed
that the historical crisis of traditional metaphysical ontologies – a
crisis that would lead to the dominance of epistemology – was ulti-
mately a political crisis, a crisis of the hegemonic formation (Negri
1991, 2004, 2007). Negri provides a largely convincing descrip-
tion of how Descartes’ philosophy was inscribed into the political
battles of its time. The ingenuity of Descartes’ strategic move con-
sisted in the idea of reinventing an ontological prima philosophia
on epistemological terms. As is well known, Descartes’ attempt
was to grant the ego cogito the status of an ultimate grounding
or fundamentum inconcussum. But this was, already in Descartes’
time, a ‘metaphysical accident’. It was not compatible, in its own
time, with the dominant academic understanding, which was the
scientific philosophy of mechanism. And yet this apparent step
backwards into metaphysics proved to be an important point
of departure for the further development of philosophy. How is
this to be explained? Negri submits that Descartes advanced his
metaphysics at a moment in history when the ‘original defeat’ of
the early bourgeoisie had to be processed. Following the defeat
of the sixteenth-century humanist revolution, the bourgeoisie was
in isolation, separated from the sphere of political power that it
had sought to attain. In an unstable alliance with absolutism it
remained caught between feudal nobility on the one side and the
revolts of the multitude on the other. While accepting the impos-
sibility of a political alternative to absolutism, the bourgeoisie
insisted on at least having social hegemony (Negri 2007: 199).

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So, according to Negri, Cartesian metaphysics is still far removed

from the triumphalist sense of victory that imbues the bourgeois
rationalism of later centuries. It is shaped by an awareness of the
defeat suffered by Renaissance humanism as well as the isola-
tion of the early bourgeoisie. The separation of the ego from the
world, as is autobiographically laid bare in the first part of the
Discours as well as the first Meditation, sums up the inner erosion
of humanism. However, in the course of the second meditation,
the anti-foundationalist temptation of radical scepticism is trans-
formed into a positive demand for reconstructing the relationship
with the world. In order to ensure that not all foundations are
undermined in this process, at least one firm principle is required.
The solution is well known: the notion of a regrounding of man
himself – in the shape of a thinking ego – makes it possible even for
an isolated subject to reattain objective being via self-grounding.
In metaphysical terms that is: the being (the essence) needs only
itself in order to attain existence.12
According to Negri, the historical condition for Cartesian
metaphysics lies in the separation between the sphere of bour-
geois autonomy (civil society) and the repressive apparatus of the
state which thwarts the political rise of the bourgeoisie. Descartes’
solution within the field of philosophy: the (bourgeois) subject’s
isolation from the world is turned into a positive and becomes a
source of its autonomy, which in turn forms the basis for a future
reconstruction of the world and hence the retroactive overcom-
ing of isolation. Yet this does not suffice for Descartes. He alters
the perception of the crisis by developing what could be described
as the hegemonic project of Cartesianism. For this purpose, he
must – that is the essence of the politics of Cartesian ontology
– intervene in the complex array of alternatives at his disposal.
He must go beyond the positions of the subversive libertins, the
long-established Aristotelians and the mechanists and their alli-
ance with absolutism. Although Descartes’ alternative project sub-
scribes to a mechanist demand for a methodically founded ‘new
physics’, it does not fully merge with mechanism. Where it is based
in the ontological foundation of a self-aware, autonomous subject,
it exhibits a politico-metaphysical surplus that turns out to be the
only explanation for its enormous historico-political significance

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until the time of the French Revolution. Hence, Cartesianism

amounts to a political ontology, even as Descartes has not written
a political theory, and quite independently of his rather conven-
tional moral-theoretical emissions.
Important, from our perspective, is the conclusion drawn by
Negri in the current postface to the English edition. He argues that
every author’s ontology includes the seeds of such an ‘implicit polit-
ical dispositif’ (318), which defines its historical efficiencies and
also its connectivity for future generations. Negri explicitly notes
‘that every metaphysics is in some way a political ontology – as
has been clearly demonstrated by Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx
(and, subsequently, has been the basis for the broad philosophi-
cal consensus that runs from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida)’
(317). This insight goes beyond the findings of, for instance, the
Cambridge School of intellectual history, which considers political
theories to be polemical interventions into the ideological conflicts
of their time. While this is certainly the case, it must be stated that
it does not hold true only for works of political theory, but indeed
also for the apparently a-political works of metaphysics.

Unfolding Philosophy: Balibar’s Spinoza and beyond

Next to Antonio Negri (1991, 2004), Étienne Balibar also elabo-

rated on the indivisible relationship of political battles and philo-
sophical ontology. In a study on Spinoza’s philosophy, Balibar went
one step further than Negri by no longer exclusively tying the polit-
ical battles of an era to the category of class. This allows him to
be historically more specific. In his study on Spinoza and Politics,
Balibar is able to root Spinoza’s philosophy in the immediate politi-
cal battles and structures of alliance in which it had intervened on
the side of the Republican party.13 But also on the side of philos-
ophy, Balibar argues, it is necessary to expand the investigation
beyond Spinoza’s works of political theory in order to understand
his intervention. Only once the fundamental separation between
the Ethics, meaning Spinoza’s ontology, the Tractatus Politicus and
the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is removed, would it be possible
to recognise Spinoza’s understanding of ‘ethics’ as a name for the

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reciprocal relationship between philosophy and politics. Although

there are manifold differences between the three œuvres, they do
have one thing in common: they are all simultaneously philosophi-
cal and political investigations:
[Spinoza’s] work is not divided into a metaphysics (or an ontology) on
the one hand and a politics or an ethics, which are seen as ‘secondary’
applications of ‘first’ philosophy, on the other. From the very beginning,
his metaphysics is a philosophy of praxis, of activity; and his politics is
a philosophy, for it constitutes the field of experience in which human
nature acts and strives to achieve liberation. (Balibar 2008a: 102)

In Spinoza’s work, philosophy and politics are in a relationship of

mutual implication. This is why his philosophical study of politi-
cal problems never constituted a distraction from his metaphysical
examinations. Quite the opposite: these problems enabled Spinoza
to trace the true interests and problems of philosophy, and vice
versa:

By posing specifically philosophical problems, Spinoza is not choos-

ing to approach his political concerns by an indirect route, he is not
transposing them from their proper place and recasting them in a
‘metapolitical’ medium. He deals in philosophical terms because only
philosophy can give him means to know exactly [. . .] the power rela-
tions and the particular interests that are at stake in politics. For only
thus can he know them by their causes. (Balibar 2008a: 4)

Balibar and Negri agree that even the most abstract metaphysics
in Spinoza’s works is inseparably related to politics. Negri’s stud-
ies have shown that any metaphysics, at least implicitly, becomes
a political ontology to the extent to which it is moulded by a given
‘hegemonic dispositif’. The question to be aimed at Balibar, how-
ever, is whether this reciprocal relationship between ontology and
politics describes only the works of Spinoza or whether we ought
in fact to suspect that it is inherent in the production of philoso-
phy itself. If the thesis remains limited to Spinoza, there is a danger
that Spinoza will be celebrated as an exception among thinkers
(a quite traditional tendency that can still be found in Negri,
Deleuze and others). What might happen, however, if we remove
this limitation? It will turn out that the most abstract works of

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ontology are always already implicated in a hegemonic forma-

tion (as political instruments, not by merely reflecting political
developments), and that they might have been political ontologies
all along. The entire history of philosophy would then have to be
researched with regard to its onto-political implications. This, of
course, would be beyond the scope of our project.14 Our short
digression into the history of philosophy was simply intended to
illustrate the unbreakable relationship between (a) ontology as a
metaphysical science of foundation, and (b) political battles in the
context of a hegemonic struggle, a Gramscian ‘war of position’,
i.e. integral politics. Intellectual history in the materialist tradi-
tion has confirmed our suspicion that the ontological, in actual
fact, is none other than the political in a metaphysically recoded
form, even where metaphysical categories do not necessarily fol-
low the semantics of politics. The Cartesian ego as the metaphysi-
cal fundamentum inconcussum, for instance, is a deeply political
category, or rather: a name formulated in the context of a hege-
monic project.
With regard to historiography we can conclude that an exam-
ination of any ontology must take into account the strategic
positioning of this ontology within the hegemonic formation of
its time. How, in a given historical conjuncture, metaphysical
signifiers were articulated with political struggles can only be
examined historically. The ‘history of Being’ must be unfolded
historically; but not, to be sure, in Heideggerian fashion by pro-
nouncing urbi et orbi an ‘epochal’ history of Being.15 It has to
be closely studied how apparently static metaphysical points of
reference (i.e. philosophical ‘grounds’ that appear transhistori-
cal), through their insertion into a constantly shifting terrain of
hegemonic power struggles, receive a certain political spin, how
they will always assume historico-political meaning. What is at
stake is the reconnaissance of that ‘trench system’ of political
fronts which transverses the field of philosophy at all points.
While the materialist tradition of Antonio Negri or, from a dif-
ferent perspective, Ellen Meiksins Wood remains a valuable
source of inspiration, their analyses are nonetheless hampered
by their focus on class as the exclusive category of reference. On

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the other side, analyses in the Cambridge School tradition have

focused on philosophers’ connection to political discourse in a
narrow sense, without developing a broader Gramscian view on
politics. It would take a historically oriented discourse analysis
along the lines of an Essex School approach in order to develop a
non-deterministic and multi-dimensional perspective on politico-
philosophical formations.
Such an approach has not been developed yet, but should it
be considered a worthwhile research programme for the future,
it cannot be envisaged as an exclusively historiographic project.
It would have to be compatible with the political ontology elabo-
rated so far. Observing philosophical discourses with the detached
gaze of a historian afraid of committing the worst crime possible,
the crime of prolepsis, i.e. anachronism, will not allow for a politi-
cal attitude of self-implication. Being-in-the-world means being-
in-history – a place, and time, we always already inhabit. But in
order to implicate ourselves in history (through a process that we
have called thinking), history must be reactivated. As Laclau once
remarked about the ‘radical historicity’ of social sediments:
[T]he being of objects is . . . historical in that it is socially constructed
and structured by systems of meaning. To understand something his-
torically is to refer it back to its contingent conditions of emergence.
Far from seeking an objective meaning in history, it is a question of
deconstructing all meaning and tracing it back to its original facticity.
(NR 36)

Taking into account what has been elaborated so far in this book
– is it at all conceivable that such a goal could ever be achieved
by way of a purely intellectual activity? The original facticity
of which Laclau speaks was identified by us as the instance of
antagonism. And, as I have argued, a dormant antagonism can
only be reactivated by antagonism. What is needed, thus, is a
political activity of folding antagonism back into philosophy,
of reactivating the historical instance of the political, and of
unfolding the political substrate of the philosophical. Politicis-
ing philosophy – in both its diachronic and synchronic dimen-
sions – proves possible because philosophy is and has always

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been political. But, to make a Nietzschean point, in order

to ‘become who we are’ we have to make an effort to occupy
the place we already inhabit. With a view to philosophy, what
will get us to this place (where we are) is thinking, understood
as a practice of reflective intervention – of inflecting antago-
nism and reactivating the political. Such a practice is not quite
philosophical in itself. It is ‘more’ than philosophy because it
involves the thinking of radical negativity and difference-as-
difference; and it is ‘less’ than philosophy because it involves pol-
itics. We will now turn to the political conditions of this practice:
the politics of thinking.

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8 Being as Acting: The Primacy of Politics
and the Politics of Thought

Being – Thinking – Acting

Our detour into the history of philosophy yielded the following

conclusion: the line between philosophy and politics is drawn
politically. For this reason, it will never be possible to clearly sep-
arate the former from the latter. Philosophy remains manifoldly
traversed by political struggles. At this point of the argument,
the two Heideggerian questions that have guided us converge and
transform themselves into an utterly un-Heideggerian one.
Heidegger’s ‘question of being’ – in Vattimo’s profanised ren-
dering: ‘What’s going on with Being?’ – initiated our inquiry; and
from the beginning our intuition was that something political – the
political, to be precise – is going on. As soon as it is decided to
approach the being question via the instance of the political, i.e.
antagonism, instruments and methods of empirical research will
prove insufficient. For what is under investigation is an ontological
notion, and ontological notions cannot be measured by empiri-
cal means. When confronting the instance of antagonism, which
points us to the abyss and ground of the social, audacity is needed
in order to ‘think’ where ‘science does not think’. Yet ‘thinking’
must not be confused with intra-philosophical procedures of con-
cept formation. By virtue of being a name, antagonism – our name
for being – must not be squeezed in the Procrustean bed of the
institutional discipline of philosophy. Antagonism is to be thought.
Therefore, a further question ensued: ‘What is called thinking?’
Once more, Heidegger loomed large in our response. Thinking,
provided it is not – or not merely – envisaged in terms of cognition,

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is a way of actively occupying what is given to us, of refounding

the place where we find ourselves. In other words, thinking, as
finding, is founding. This is not without consequences. For what
is given to us is, in the last resort, the political. And founding, i.e.
the activity of laying penultimate grounds in the absence of an ulti-
mate one, is a matter of politics in an enlarged sense of the term.
Hence, if we want to inhabit the social world as a political world,
that is to say: if we are to affirm the essential politicality of our
world, we are required to engage in the practice of politics. Not
in the narrow sense of ‘party politics’, of course, but in the sense
of what I have called minimal politics. The political can only be
affirmed by way of an organised, collective, strategic, partisan and
majority-oriented conflictual practice.
It is in this latter sense that the two Heideggerian questions con-
verge in an entirely un-Heideggerian one. To approach the ‘being
question’ as a political one means posing the perennial question
of politics: ‘What is to be done?’ The matter has to be considered
carefully, though. Political ontology cannot tell us what to do in a
particular politico-historical situation; it cannot provide us with
concrete political recipes. It would be a non sequitur to derive a
particular political injunction from what is ontologically given. For
this reason, as was explained in the Introduction, the question to be
posed within the framework of an ontological investigation is not
‘What to do?’, but ‘How to act?’, or, more generally, ‘What does it
mean to act?’ Thinking, it will be argued in this chapter, is a form
of acting, as much as being is a form of acting. In order to under-
stand the, at one and the same time, affirmative and critical edge of
thinking, we first have to come to terms with the fact that, by way
of thinking, we occupy the world in the mode of politics. Thinking
is an active effort towards affirming the politicality of the world.

The Anarchy Principle

To assert that being, as much as thinking, is acting is to reverse

the order of priority between the ontic and the ontological, poli-
tics and the political. So far I have insisted on the primacy of the
ontological side of the political, while ordinary political actions

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were located on the ontic side of the political difference. How-

ever, if the political difference is envisaged as difference, the play
between the ontic and the ontological cannot be stopped and
the two instances may very well change places. What, then, if
we decided to revert our perspective? What if we were to think
politics not as a derivative function of the political, but, rather,
as a practical a priori of the latter? What, to be more precise, if
the political did not exist as such (other than in its aggregate state
of sedimented social routines), except when brought to life by
politics? The order of priority between politics and the political
would be reversed. Primacy would have to be granted to politics
rather than the political.1 Perceived from this angle, it is not the
ontological instance of antagonism that takes on the function
of ground – it is the ontic practice of politics in its grounding
capacity.
The claim is not so far removed from our Heideggerian start-
ing point. Heidegger, as Reiner Schürmann observed, transformed
the metaphysical quest for grounds by understanding ‘any ground
as grounding – as a verb –, not a noun’ (Schürmann 1990: 90).
Rather than imagining ‘ground’ in terms of a solid base we have
to think of it as an activity. It was Schürmann’s enormous achieve-
ment in his landmark study on Being and Acting to point out
Heidegger’s inversion of the age-old hierarchy between Being and
acting.2 Such an inversion, of course, only makes sense in a post-
foundational framework where ‘ground’ has become questionable.
When Schürmann – who, together with Miguel Abensour, Bernard
Stiegler and Jacques Rancière, belongs to the an-archic current in
contemporary post-foundational thought – advocated a paradoxi-
cal ‘anarchy principle’ (his book was originally entitled Le Principe
d’anarchie), he did not refer to an anarchistic programme of action.
He referred to the quasi-transcendental structure of being. An-archy
designates the withering away of ‘the rule always to seek a first
from which the world becomes intelligible and masterable, the rule
of scire per causas, of establishing “principles” for thinking and
doing’ (Schürmann 1990: 6). Schürmann’s important point was that
the withering away of first principles will in turn assume the para-
doxical function of a principle: the principle of the withering away
of principles. The paradox of an ‘anarchy principle’, as Schürmann

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continues, is dazzling, ‘because in two words it points within and

beyond the closure of metaphysics, thus exhibiting the boundary
line of that closure itself’ (6). At this boundary line, which marks
the end of metaphysical foundationalism, the perennial question of
politics re-emerges: ‘What happens to the question, What is to be
done? at the end of metaphysics?’ (231).
Schürmann’s answer is clear. As the age of metaphysics draws
to a close, action is set free from ultimate principles and, thus,
proves to be an-archic on principle (4). Yet, there is a correspond-
ing implication that remains to be carved out: if all principles
are, as it was claimed, action-based, it follows that action in turn
becomes the new principle of the withering away of principles. On
the grounds of the absence of ultimate grounds, acting becomes
the grounding instance of social being. And we can now begin to
see why being may in itself be of ‘active’ nature.3 Once having lost
its status as a solid foundation, all being is grounded on acting, i.e.
on the primordial activity of grounding which, in turn, cannot be
grounded. Translated into our theory of political difference: the
hauntological ground/abyss of social being has to actualise itself
in the practical form of ontic politics. And at this point we must
part company with Schürmann and Heidegger, who shy away
from a truly political notion of acting. What they defend is a form
of acting bereft of all activism. Indeed, what they defend is noth-
ing other than a higher form of passivism, of an utterly passive
activity. In the pastoral scenery sketched by the later Heidegger,
man, the guardian of Being, is supposed to remain passively active;
that is to say, man acts by retaining a passive attitude towards the
unfolding play of being.
It hardly needs to be pointed out that such a notion of passive
activity comes at a heavy price: the depoliticisation of acting. The
political nature of being is repudiated in the very moment in which
it is affirmed. Schürmann’s search for an ‘other politics’ (243) is a
search for a politics bereft of politics: a way of acting ‘other than
“being effective”’ or strategic (84). Any kind of strategic and effec-
tive action would be dismissed by Heidegger as well as Schürmann
as metaphysical. And if, for Schürmann, actions are supposed to
turn into ‘a groundless play without why’ (243), this might be an
apt portrayal of the hauntological nature of the political, but it

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does not capture the ontic nature of politics. Is there any kind of
politics, other than an entirely depoliticised one, that would ever
amount to a ‘play without why’? A politics that does not involve
strategic reasoning or seek to achieve particular goals would be
hardly imaginable as politics.
If we now move to the Heideggerian notion of thinking, what
has been said about acting must also apply to thinking. While the
latter is convincingly portrayed by Heidegger as a practical activity
embedded ‘in-the-world’, the kind of action attributed to thinking
is described in rather peculiar terms ‘of “authentic temporality”,
of “releasement”, of “dwelling” in language, or of “letting things
come to presence in their world”’ (7). These are the Heideggerian
tropes of passive activity. Thinking, from this perspective, involves
a strong inclination towards passivism so typical for a metaphysi-
cal tradition where thinking has always been associated with med-
itative contemplation as far as possible detached from political
involvement.4 A characteristically Heideggerian attitude towards
acting, as well as thinking, would thus be to ‘wait and see’ what
is going to unfold as the ‘happening’ of being. The Heideggerian
rendering of the event of being is reminiscent of Allan Kaprow’s
Zen-inspired definition of (artistic) happenings as ‘events that, put
simply, happen’ (Kaprow 2003: 16); and a similarly tautological
definition of thinking is provided in Heidegger’s famous ‘Letter on
“Humanism”’:
Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues
from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such
action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest
because it concerns the relation of being to humans. But all working
or effecting lies in being and is directed towards beings. Thinking, in
contrast, lets itself be claimed by being so that it can say the truth of
being. Thinking accomplishes this letting. (Heidegger 1999: 239)

It is easy to once more detect an anti-political sentiment behind

these lines. As the event of being simply ‘happens’, thinking
has to ‘let itself be claimed by being’. Any kind of intervention,
any attempt at activating antagonism would be detrimental to
thinking. In an earlier book I have criticised the Heideggerian
notion that ‘thinking acts insofar as it thinks’ for constituting a

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typical case of philosophism detached from the world of politi-

cal action (Marchart 2007a: 170–1). One should thus be
prepared to reverse the terms: thinking acts only insofar as
it acts. Rather than depoliticising thought by presenting it as
‘active’ eo ipso (while at the same time claiming that true activ-
ity consists in remaining passive), our notion of thinking should
be forthrightly politicised.

Acting as the Negation of the Given

Because of their elevated ontological pre-assumptions Heidegger

and Schürmann are ill-equipped to develop a truly political notion
of thinking. They are confined to a ‘higher-order’ passivism
because they adhere to an equally ‘higher-order’ idea of thinking.
Yet, as I suggested by taking Laclau as an exemplum, thinking
occurs both above and below the philosophical: it is both more
and less than philosophy. If I have concentrated in Chapter 2
on what in the Heideggerian tradition of thinking escapes the
disciplinary grasp of philosophical procedures (the thinking of
difference-as-difference, which amounts to ‘more’ than disciplin-
ary philosophy), in the present chapter we concentrate on what
is ‘less’ than purely philosophical: thinking as a way of doing
politics. As is well known, practical politics did not belong to
Heidegger’s agenda as a thinker. The deplorable episode of his
Freiburg rectorate attests to his rather quixotic ideas about prac-
tical politics. And while his later retreat from any kind of politi-
cal engagement is sometimes interpreted as a sign of frustration,
in my view the reasons for this retreat go deeper. There is an
anti-political bias in Heidegger’s thinking that may derive from
his philosophical, rather than political, pre-assumptions. With
Heidegger’s insistence on an ontology of difference-as-difference
at the expense of an ontology of negativity the world of politics
is removed from view. It is true, Heidegger knows about the ter-
ror before the ‘nothing’ and annihilation, but the negative is not
given any productive function in a conception of ‘ontic’ action.
He criticised Hegel for retaining a notion of negativity that was
not sufficiently radical (which is the case indeed, given Hegel’s

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logicism), but did not provide us with a better alternative. Instead,

he reverted to a Zen-like passivism devoid of all negativity.5
To develop a more realistic picture of political acting the Hege-
lian tradition has to be taken on board. As explained in Chapter 2,
today’s radical notion of antagonism has its historical roots in
Hegel’s ‘labour of the negative’. A post-foundational ontology of dif-
ference has to be supplemented by an ontology of radical negativ-
ity, the latter of which must inform our notion of ontic politics. A
form of acting that exhausts itself in the Derridean play of différance,
in an endless postponement of its political goals, could hardly be
called political. Politics begins with negation. From an ontological
perspective, this would of course imply the ‘evental’ emergence of
an antagonism; yet, from the perspective of ontic practices, which
is at the centre of this chapter, negation has to be brought about.
Negativity, in other words, is not simply ‘out there’ as a cosmic
principle or an objective feature of the world. Negativity is to be
produced by our actions. Therefore, when trying to invert the order
of priority between the ontological and the ontic, one has to insist
on negativity as an ontic practice – for the ontological instance of
antagonism will only emerge when activated by our worldly actions.
There is antagonism because politics – as much as political think-
ing – proceeds through negation. In order to fully account for this
reversible, or circular, relation between politics and the political,
Heidegger should be supplemented with Hegel and the left-Hegelian
tradition. In fact, the intuition that ‘being is acting’ is inherent to
the whole tradition of radical negativity that runs from Hegel via
Marx to Laclau. Nobody had a clearer idea of the activist nature
of being than Alexandre Kojève who inaugurated an entire series of
twentieth-century ontologies of negativity. In his celebrated lectures
on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève – certainly inspired by
Heidegger (and Marx), but long before Schürmann – insisted on a
conception of being-as-acting through negation:

Man is not a Being that is: he is a Nothingness that nihilates through

the negation of Being. Now, the negation of Being is Action. That
is why Hegel says ‘the true being of man is his action.’ Not to act,
therefore, is not to be as a truly human being; it is to be as Sein, as
given, natural being. Hence, it is to fall into decay, to become brutish;

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and this metaphysical truth is revealed to Man through the phenom-

enon of boredom: the Man who – like a thing, like an animal, like an
angel – remains identical to himself, does not negate, does not negate
himself – i.e. does not act, is bored. And only Man can be bored.
(Kojève 1980: 54)

This is one of the key passages in Kojève’s lecture series and, in my

view, of twentieth-century philosophy. Unfortunately, there is no
space to develop an in-depth interpretation here. But let me indi-
cate some of the most important aspects. Kojève has been charged
with ‘anthropologising’ Hegel and Heidegger, yet what is called
‘Man’ in this passage is devoid of any positive human essence. The
human being is non-identical with herself. If any kind of being is to
emerge from this non-identity, it can only be grounded on human
actions. And all action, in turn, is devoid of a positive essence too,
as to act simply means to negate being (which includes the being of
man who, otherwise, would remain self-identical and reduced to
a thing or animal). As Kojève continues explaining: ‘In fact, Man
can be satisfied only by action. Now, to act is to transform what
is real. And to transform what is real is to negate the given’ (54).
The end of action, if achievable, would mean the end of negation,
which would lead to the end of politics – and, for Kojève, the end
of history – and, from there, right into a post-political world of
boredom and self-identical animality. In two steps Kojève presents
us with an activist anthropology – or rather: an ontology of active
Being. First, antagonism – especially the Hegelian antagonism
between lord and bondsman – is brought down to the worldly
ground of action. And second, action – the negative essence of
human being – is defined by Kojève as the negation of the given.
What does this short excursus into twentieth-century Hegelian-
ism tell us about the nature of thinking? It would be a mistake
to assume, with Heidegger, that thinking acts insofar as it thinks.
As our excursus has shown: thinking acts insofar as it negates the
given. To think is to provoke the academic powers that be (and,
perhaps, many other powers). Not in an individualistic, childish
way of self-indulgent provocation; but in a more coherently politi-
cal manner which, by itself, is ‘less’ than academic. Disciplinary
philosophy, as one of many layers of ‘the given’, is thus negated

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from below. This place below the sedimented institutional layers

of the academy differs from the one portrayed in an extraordinary
essay by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten as the ‘undercommons’,
i.e. the underground maroon communities of underpaid adjunct
lecturers, mentorless graduate students, isolated Marxist aca-
demics, students whose visas expired, and so on – who nonethe-
less continue working academically in unregulated and seemingly
unprofessional ways (see Harney and Moten 2013). They are not
simply academic drop-outs. According to Harney and Moten, these
maroons refuse refusal and resist resistance to academic profession-
alisation; i.e. their aim is not to negate the given, but to continue
working below the radar of the given. In this sense, however, they
do not ‘act’. While I would not wish to ignore the subversive and
potentially productive dimension of such an ‘undercommon’ aca-
demic practice of what they call ‘study’ – reading and discussing
together as a persistent yet ‘fugitive’ practice – I very much doubt
that a micro-political practice in the academic catacombs will, as
such, achieve much politically. The ‘undercommons’ remain, from
a Laclauian perspective, in a stage of eternally frustrated request,
rather than moving on to the stage of demand. By avoiding direct
politicisation, they, in Harney and Moten’s terminology, ‘study’,
but they do not necessarily ‘think’ in the sense of negating the given.
It was already determined what ‘to negate the given’ implies for
the field of politics. In Chapter 5 it was claimed that true politics,
which according to Laclau consists in reactivating the sedimented
routines of the social, is essentially protest politics. If a particular
request can be easily integrated into a (differentially structured)
institutional arrangement, there will be no need for politics. Only
if the request is frustrated by its institutional addressee, may it turn
into what Laclau defines as a demand. Only then, in a moment
of protestation (when a chain of equivalence is built in opposi-
tion to the forces of bureaucracy, for instance), can we speak of
political action in the strict sense of the term. To be sure, the step
from request to demand can be a very small one. Thinking-as-
acting, it was said, activates antagonism through negation. But
this can occur, if it occurs, on a minor scale and to a barely visible
degree of politicisation. Instead of putting our political cards on a
micro-politics of study – which, it is agreed, might be important in

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preparing for a future event of politicisation – I would propose to

better engage in a minimal politics of thinking.

The Minimal Politics of Thinking

Thinking, if it is to be political, must accord to the minimal condi-

tions of politics. What are these minimal conditions? In Chapter 6,
it was argued (a) that all politics is a collective enterprise; (b) that
a political collectivity – in contrast to a multitude dispersing in all
directions – has to be organised; (c) that in aiming at a particular
goal one has to proceed strategically in order to overcome obsta-
cles; (d) that there are obstacles because there are adversaries, i.e.
because all politics is conflictual; (e) that conflict implies partisan-
ship; and (f) that, in order not to dissolve itself in mere sectarian-
ism, any collective, organised, conflictual and partisan strategy has
to be geared to becoming majoritarian, that is, hegemonic. I have
spoken about minimal conditions because it is perfectly possible
that these conditions, in a given situation, are met to only the most
minimal degree. Nothing is said, thereby, about the size or nature
of a collective or an organisation (it could be a tightly organised
party, it could also be a social movement with a rather low degree
of organisation). Nothing is said about the way in which conflicts
and partisanship are enacted (peacefully or violently, agonistically
or revolutionarily). And nothing is said about the effectiveness of
a particular strategy or the actual chances of gaining hegemony.
Even if confronted with the tiniest collective, the poorest organisa-
tion, the worst strategy, the most insignificant conflict, the most
hesitant partisanship and the bleakest chances of becoming-major
– we can rightly speak about political action as long as these con-
ditions are met. Politics is not a matter of scale, it is a matter of
kind. And, for the same reason, it is not restricted to a particular
locus in the social topography (such as the political system) but
can emerge wherever these minimal conditions are met – even in
philosophy.
How, then, does thinking ‘act’, that is, how does the practice
of thinking transform into a political practice? In the same way
in which any other practice mutates into politics – by turning

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collective, organised, strategic, conflictual, partisan and majority-

oriented. Thinking is political if it coheres with the minimal con-
ditions of politics – not necessarily to a spectacular extent, but to
some extent. Hence, thinking must be practised collectively, has
to overcome obstacles, must involve itself in conflicts, take sides
and organise with a strategic view to achieving politico-intellectual
hegemony. Again, a politics of thinking does not require the organ-
isational form of a party politburo; in most cases it is organised
in the form of a loosely connected network of scholars, in some
cases in the form of a more tightly connected academic school. It
will have to proceed strategically, as obstacles must be overcome:
an outdated canon has to be reshuffled, the gatekeepers of ‘normal
science’ have to be outmanoeuvred, institutional procedures and
policies have to be attacked, reformed or put to different use. This,
in turn, will necessarily encounter hostility, produce resentment,
and, if successful, redraw the lines of exclusion and subordina-
tion. Note that in a hidden, sanctimonious way, this is what goes
on all the time anyway, as everyone knows who has ever experi-
enced life in academia. Yet, one has to understand that philosophy
– or any other academic discipline for that matter – is inscribed
into broader hegemonic formations and traversed by larger lines
of conflict. Even the small-minded machinations typical for intra-
academic petty politics are inscribed into extra-academic power
relations (thus relying on extra-academic resources which can be
mobilised when it appears promising). The difference between
this kind of petty politics and what I have proposed in terms of
‘thinking-as-acting’ is simply the following: thinking, as a reflec-
tive intervention, consists in an effort to affirm the politicality of a
world – including the academic world – which, of course, is always
already political. Thinking is an effort to actively occupy what,
otherwise, we would merely inhabit.
No doubt, such an effort implies a massive paradigm shift
regarding the way intellectual work is envisaged. One has to move
from a conception of the traditional intellectual to what Gramsci
called the ‘organic intellectual’. The latter term, for Gramsci, does
not so much refer to a particular social group, but, rather, defines
a certain function: the function of organising a collective will.
For Gramsci, labour union activists or the militants of a political

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party are, in this regard, organic intellectuals. What they organise

is, in the final instance, the collective subject that is supposed to
bring about a new hegemonic formation (or, if they are organic
intellectuals of the ruling classes, they seek to foster an existing
hegemonic formation). Most academics located in the discipline
of philosophy will certainly conceive of themselves as traditional
intellectuals. However, in the eyes of Gramsci, everyone is an intel-
lectual, for everyone is equipped with intellectual capacities, even
if only a few people have the social function of a traditional intel-
lectual. Concordantly, all of us in our daily actions either stabilise
or subvert a given hegemonic formation – but not all of us have the
function of organic intellectuals. A reflective intervention in the
field of philosophy will thus result in a change within our forms
of subjectivation. Traditional intellectuals, who tend to cultivate
their self-image of the isolated mind, turn into organisers of a new
collective will. And they will do so by way of self-implication:
of implicating themselves into their being-in-the-world in terms
of their being-in-the-political, i.e. by inflecting, or folding back,
an external antagonism into the field of theory. The task, as was
argued in the previous chapter, of a reflective intervention consists
of bending political lines of conflict into the field of theory in order
to reactivate what is taken for granted: the canon, the procedures,
the rules of reasoning, the terms of publication, the institutional
hierarchies, etc.
It may be helpful to briefly compare our proposition of think-
ing as reflective intervention with Althusser’s more orthodox claim
‘that philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field
of theory’ (Althusser 1976: 27). Class struggle, for Althusser,
can take three forms: an economic, a political and a theoretical
form, the latter being the most concentrated one. With a view to
Lenin’s depiction of politics as a concentrated form of econom-
ics, Althusser describes philosophy as ‘the theoretical concentrate
of politics’ (38) – which includes seemingly apolitical variants of
philosophical speculation:

Even speculative ideologies, even philosophies which content them-

selves with ‘interpreting the world’, are in fact active and practical:
their (hidden) goal is to act on the world, on all the social practices,

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on their domains and their ‘hierarchy’ – even if only in order to ‘place

them under a spell’, to sanctify or modify them, in order to preserve
or reform ‘the existing state of things’ against social, political and
ideological revolutions or the ideological repercussions of the great
scientific discoveries. ‘Speculative’ philosophies have a political inter-
est in making believe that they are disinterested or that they are only
‘moral’, and not really practical and political: this in order to gain
their practical ends, in the shadow of the ruling power which they
support with their arguments. (Althusser 1976: 57)

Philosophy works like a burning-glass through which the ‘light rays’

of politics are bundled and condensed into theoretical forms and
shapes. Conversely, by virtue of being a form of class struggle in
itself, philosophy produces political effects. The rays of politics are
reflected back onto the world of social and political practice. We
are furthest away from the idea of the thinker as a ‘guardian’ of
the happening of being, but neither can philosophy be reduced to
a scientific sub-discipline. In contradistinction to the sciences, it is
not the practical goal of philosophy to produce knowledge, nor is
philosophy organised around particular objects. Instead of having
scientific objects, philosophy has political stakes in a ‘strategical and
tactical war’ to be waged ‘against the adversary’s theoretical forces’
(Althusser 2017: 160). Althusser does not hesitate to describe the
terrain of philosophies given in a particular historical period as a
theoretical battlefield – Kant’s famous Kampfplatz of metaphysics –
on which an eternal struggle is fought out and where philosophical
concepts serve as ‘weapons in the class struggle in the field of the-
ory’ (Althusser 1976: 38). Althusser’s idea is Leninist, yet it is also
inspired by the Gramscian conception of a ‘war of position’ that
silently rages within the institutional trench system of civil society.
This becomes evident from the lines where the terrain of philosophy
is described by Althusser:

[A]n irregular, uneven battlefield, scarred with the trenches of old

combats, bristling with abandoned fortifications that have been occu-
pied and reoccupied time and again, studded with the names of places
where the fighting was particularly fierce, and forever exposed to the
resurgence of fresh battalions that can loom up out of the past and
join the new forces on the march. (Althusser 2017: 160)

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The main difference with regard to our own approach to thinking

as a way of activating antagonism should be obvious: antagonism
must not be confused with, or reduced to, class struggle. Antago-
nism is not rooted in the firm base of the economy, nor are there
two, and only two, fundamental classes. This means that the prole-
tariat cannot possibly be the privileged political (or philosophical)
agent that – ‘always under the leadership of its party’ (Althusser
1976: 38) – struggles in the field of theory. When Althusser speaks
of politics, he always refers to class politics. Such an understand-
ing – because of its dualistic nature – is prone to a polemological
ontology and potentially captivated by the fantasy of grand poli-
tics. Consequently, philosophy, for Althusser, turns into an eternal
battle between the two grand paradigms of idealism and materi-
alism, i.e. the philosophy of the bourgeoisie and the philosophy
of the proletariat.6 Consider, on the other side, the ontology of
antagonism as proposed here: if, on the ontological level, antag-
onism has little to do with a dualistic friend/enemy distinction
but, instead, refers to a fundamental blockade that issues from
an incommensurably negative instance, then a plethora of highly
diverse concrete antagonisms will be unleashed. Conflicts will
multiply, as will agents, strategies, organisations and parties. The
Gramscian metaphor of a ‘war of position’ is helpful in pointing
us to the complex and uneven nature of the social – or philosophi-
cal – terrain shaped by political action. But, when employed by
Althusser, it is hardly congruent with the Manichaean design of his
theory. The philosophical terrain is complex because it is always
already criss-crossed by a multiplicity of antagonisms. Thinking is
the practice of bending one or more of these antagonisms – which
on the face of it appear external to philosophy – into the field of
thought, thus contributing to perhaps only minute shifts within a
given hegemonic formation.

Acting and Antagonism: The Circular Nature of Agency

Philosophy, for Althusser, is the condensate of politics – which, con-

versely, is the condensate of economics. What may initially appear
as a politicising move turns out to be rooted in an economism of

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‘the last instance’. But what if the idea of economic determination

in the last instance – or any other ultimate foundation – is abol-
ished? Evidently, a hauntology of the political would necessitate
a different, post-foundational conception of action and agency –
one by which action is not reduced to class struggle but remains
‘an-archic’. For the last parts of this chapter, the task will be to
reconnect this ontic view on action with our general ontology of
antagonism. This is not a trivial task, given the reversible, if not
circular, nature of the ontic and the ontological, of politics and the
political. We cannot avoid moving back and forth between these
two registers if we are to escape the symmetrical impasses of
Heideggerian passivism on the one hand and an activism for activ-
ism’s sake on the other. Adhering to the former would result in
political paralysis; following the latter, by exclusively focusing on
the ontic register of political action and agency, would lead us right
into the trap of political voluntarism. The dilemma is obvious.
Acting, it was said, proceeds by activating antagonism. However,
antagonism, as an outside instance of radical negation, cannot be
activated by sheer will.
Instead of bypassing the dilemma, I propose to hold onto these
two apparently contradictory claims: (a) In order to act politically,
antagonism must be activated. Politics, in other words, is the ontic
business of activating the political. (b) From an ontological per-
spective, however, antagonism – a constitutive blockade that is
experienced as an event – cannot be activated. It may emerge at
any point in the social fabric, yet cannot be ‘forced’ into the open.
Moreover, no self-identical source of action exists as a ‘ground of
the ground’ from where antagonism could be forced to emerge.
In other words, there is no willing subject that could serve as the
foundation for our actions. But, how to activate what cannot be
activated? And who is the ‘subject’ supposed to activate what
escapes activation? Facing this conundrum, the only answer con-
gruent with the post-foundational framework of political differ-
ence is the following: political agents act as if they could activate
antagonism.
In Chapter 6 I have described the idea of the volitional subject
of politics as an impossible, yet necessary metaphysical fiction.
Political actors cannot but think of themselves as the ‘subject’

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of their actions, for otherwise they would not start acting in the
first place. While we are not the source of our actions, we must
attribute to ourselves the capacity to act unless we want to remain
passive bystanders.7 What is more, political agency results from
an encounter with antagonism while, at the same time, an agent is
supposed to act antagonistically, i.e. to negate the given. So, rather
than being the source of their actions, political agents emerge
from this circular process. In a manner not entirely dissimilar
to Kojèvian dialectics, a given social identity (a social group, for
instance, defined by its differential location in the social topog-
raphy), is activated into becoming a political agent by a purely
negative instance of dislocation, and, by starting to negate the
given in turn, comes to emerge as a political actor –an actor who
may very well pronounce: I am because I negate – and I negate
because my being is negated.8
Politics, therefore, is a truly circular affair. As political agents
we are activated by antagonism in the very moment we encounter
conflict and contingency; and yet, our task as political agents is to
activate antagonism in the first place. From this follows a political
imperative: act as if you could activate what activates you. Rather
than ‘acting’ in the mode of Heidegger’s passive activity, one has
to shift to a mode of active passivity. Acting amounts to no more
than putting a wager on the emergence of antagonism within the
field of ontic social practices. By virtue of being an attempt, and
no more than that, it may easily fail. And yet, antagonism – as
the truly activating force – must be activated. There is no other
possibility for antagonism to emerge as it does not, in any sub-
stantial sense, pre-exist its activation by ontic practice (to be pre-
cise, antagonism does not exist other than in its aggregate state
of social sedimentation; see Chapter 4). As was explained earlier,
antagonism as an instance of radical negativity, far from constitut-
ing something of the order of a natural force somewhere out there,
detached from our practice, is always politically produced. What
from an ontological perspective is the name for an insurmountable
blockade of society – a mere incommensurability that cannot be
constructed – is constructed, from an ontic perspective, through
a particular practice: the negation of the given. No doubt, there
could always emerge the problem that, put trivially, ‘the given’

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does not bother very much. The dominant powers may be too
strong, hegemony too deeply entrenched for a particular politics
to succeed in reactivating sedimented antagonisms. Be that as it
may, a dormant antagonism does not awake from its slumber by
itself. Its awakening must be provoked – without any guarantee
of success. Politics, by way of protestation, is about provoking
antagonism. With regard to the latter, the political agent acts as
agent provocateur. This agent provocateur is Kojève’s ‘Man’ – that
‘Nothingness that nihilates through the negation of Being’.
We have now arrived at the point where the identical argu-
ment can be applied to our conception of thinking. As a way of
acting politically, thinking must be conceived along the same lines
as acting. While it is not, or not necessarily, a condensed form of
class struggle, as Althusser would have it, it certainly compels us
to engage in an open effort towards repoliticising sedimented con-
flicts in the field of theory – which obviously implies that thinking
accords to exactly the same minimal criteria as any other kind of
politics (it must be envisaged as a collective, organised, strategic,
partisan and conflictual endeavour aimed at attaining intellectual
and, in the last instance, political hegemony). Furthermore, think-
ing, I have insisted, should be seen as a mode of political agency
that begins to unfold by way of activating antagonism. It is thus
drawn into the same virtuous circle as any other kind of politics.
Thinking needs to be activated by antagonism, which, in turn,
needs to be activated by thinking. This reversible relation between
thinking and antagonism – tentatively expressed by the title of this
book: Thinking Antagonism – bears radical consequences with
regard to the subject of thinking. It is certainly not an individual.
What we call a ‘thinker’ is, in its essence, a group or collective that
is partially working in the field of philosophy (or, above and below
the field of philosophy). This assumption runs counter to received
opinion with regard to thinking. It nonetheless follows from
what was previously established: it is the agent (in the form of an
organised collectivity) that results from acting – rather than acting
emanating from an agent. Similarly, what is called a ‘thinker’ by
convention, far from being an individual, emerges from hegemonic
struggles by way of tendentially organised, collective strategic and
partisan activities.

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To provide an example (others could be added ad libitum): the

philosopher known under the proper name Spinoza did not work
in solitude, as is regularly insinuated by those propagating the
romantic image of the secluded genius. As mentioned in the pre-
vious chapter, Spinoza was politically allied with the Republican
party of his time. In the philosophical field he did not act in isola-
tion either. He was part of a European-wide republic of letters,
and, what is even more important, belonged to a clandestine polit-
ico-philosophical local network whose members espoused views
that could appear even more politically radical than Spinoza’s.
His philosophy teacher Franciscus van den Enden – sometimes
described as a proto-Spinoza – developed, under the influence of
Machiavelli’s Discorsi, the idea of a free and egalitarian demo-
cratic republic which he sought to realise in Normandy by stir-
ring up revolt with the help of French émigrés. He was captured
by the French and executed in the Bastille (Israel 2002: 180–4).
In the Netherlands, Spinoza’s close intellectual circle – the first
clandestine ‘sect’ of Radical Enlightenment – had been led by Van
den Enden and his brightest pupil Spinoza. With regard to the
members of this group, and those closely affiliated, it is nearly
impossible to disentangle the political aim of a free and demo-
cratic republic from philosophical innovation (atheism, substance
monism and rationalism). As even a superficial glance at this case
proves, the prevalent tendency to focus on the individual thinker
in both left- and right-wing accounts of Spinoza is entirely mis-
placed historically. There is no such thing as solitary thinking. It
is impossible to disentangle, in a process of thinking, the political
and the collective from the cognitive and the individual. And this
implies that cognition, or what is commonly understood by it, is
actually inscribed into strategic attempts towards constructing a
hegemonic project.

Affirming Affirmation

Let us summarise what has been established in the course of this

final chapter. Political thinking has little to do with what is typi-
cally understood by cognition, nor should it be approached from

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the viewpoint of epistemology. The practice of thinking does not

primarily turn around problems of correct understanding or the
apprehension of truth. As a political practice the final aim of
thinking is to activate antagonism, to bend lines of conflict into
the field of the philosophical, thereby dislocating and reactivat-
ing philosophical doxa and procedures – an aim that can only be
achieved by way of contributing to the hegemonic construction
of what Gramsci called a ‘collective will’. Let us draw the conclu-
sions. If, indeed, the aim of political thinking is to construct a
collective will, we find ourselves compelled to once more change
perspective. To act politically, i.e. to negate the given, requires the
capacity to act – a capacity an agent does not possess a priori (to
assume otherwise would mean adhering to the metaphysics of the
Subject). The passage from passivity to activism is premised upon
an experience of dislocation and frustration, but more is needed
for a demand to be raised and the given to be negated. The capac-
ity to act has to be asserted by the agent – even as no such capac-
ity exists or precedes the action. Consequently, an agent, we saw,
has to act as if it were equipped with the capacity to act. Let me
expand on the metaphysical implications of such a mode of action.
As was argued in Chapter 6, political action presupposes a
quasi-metaphysical ‘will-to-will’ as a will-to-foundation. The
agent acts as if it were a volitional Subject in command of its will,
and, in order to do so, must will its own will, for ‘willing is: to
will yourself’ (Heidegger 1961: 33). The circularity is unavoidable
if we are to move from a foundationalist to a post-foundational
theory of acting. When ultimate grounds dissipate, political sub-
jects must pull themselves up their bootstraps. But the point does
require two specifications. First, from a political perspective, this
‘will’ that has to be willed does not pertain to an individual. It can
only belong to a collective agent – which is why Gramsci speaks
of a ‘collective will’. Therefore, the capacity-to-will flows from the
collective nature of the agent; it results from the force of politically
being-in-common, and of organising with a view to attaining hege-
mony. If individuals or aggregate members of a hegemonic project
are also equipped with a capacity to will, this is only because they
participate in a collective faculty of volition. They are capacitated
to act by the power radiating from a hegemonic project. Should

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this power wane, their capacity to act will also be debilitated. And,
secondly, we should not make the mistake of imagining this will-
to-will to be a destructive force. In order to negate the given, I
said, an agent has to affirm capacities that it does not possess. In
a moment of self-assertion one’s will-to-act has to be affirmed,
for otherwise we would remain in a state of coach-potato ‘passive
nihilism’. Becoming active, in other words, is premised upon the
affirmation of our capacity to act, that is, our will-to-will. To act –
and, therefore, to negate – means to affirm affirmation.
The latter insight, counter-intuitive as it appears, finds support
in what arguably was one of Gilles Deleuze’s greatest achieve-
ments, his early interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy (Deleuze
1986). Deleuze points out that in Nietzsche ‘[b]ecoming-active is
affirming and affirmative’ (68). This might seem to blatantly con-
tradict our definition of acting as the negation of the given. And
Deleuze himself rejects any compromise between Nietzsche and
Hegel (195). However, pure affirmation, as presented in Nietzsche,
does involve negation. Only in simple affirmation – in the ‘Ye-a’ of
the ass, the pack animal that bears the burden of the given – is the
given accepted as it is:

Nietzsche’s argument can be summarised as follows: the yes which

does not know how to say no (the yes of the ass) is a caricature
of affirmation. This is precisely because it says yes to everything
which is no, because it puts up with nihilism it continues to serve
the power of denying – which is like a demon whose every burden it
carries. The Dionysian yes, on the contrary, knows how to say no: it
is pure affirmation, it has conquered nihilism and divested negation
of all autonomous power. But it has done this because it has placed
the negative at the service of the powers of affirming. To affirm is
to create, not to bear, put up with or accept. (Deleuze 1986: 185–6)

To affirm the given with the simple ‘yes’ of the ass is to affirm the
nihilistic condition of the world. It is to make peace with those
relations of exclusion, oppression and subordination that to a
large extent define the given. The ass is a burden-carrying creature
devoid of political agency. A single ‘yes’ is therefore not sufficient:
‘two affirmations are necessary to turn the whole of negation into
a mode of affirming’ (Deleuze 1986: 180). Acting means to affirm

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affirmation. Political agency, therefore, must not be confused

with either passivism (what Nietzsche called ‘passive nihilism’)
or destruction for destruction’s sake (as in cases of adventurism
or blind insurrectionism). True political activity begins when, in
Deleuze’s words, ‘the will to nothingness is converted and crosses
over to the side of affirmation’, when it begins to relate ‘to a power
of affirming’ (174), when it becomes a will-to-will. Affirmation
is needed because, as it was argued, an agent must assert itself as
the Subject of its actions – that is to say, it has to metaphysically
affirm its capacity to negate as a capacity to will (if only in the as
if mode). But, what is more, affirmation is necessary because ‘to
negate the given’ only makes sense when put in the service of the
creation of a positive project – a project that has the potential for
recruiting widespread consent and for ‘becoming-major’. In this
latter sense, ‘to affirm is to create’ would mean that we must bring
to life, as Gramsci put it with reference to Machiavelli, a ‘Modern
Prince’, or perhaps, as Stephen Gill added, a ‘Postmodern Prince’
(Gill 2000). By affirming our own will-to-act we also affirm this
project of collective will formation.
There are good reasons for turning towards a theory of double
affirmation. In recent years, especially in the an-archic current of
post-foundational political thought, adventurist and insurrection-
ist theories – best exemplified by the manifesto entitled The Coming
Insurrection (The Invisible Committee 2009) – have gained attrac-
tion. The insurrectionary paradigm is premised upon a rather one-
dimensional notion of attacking ‘the State’ or ‘the police order’ – as
if the State existed as homogeneous bloc that could be frontally
attacked by maverick grouplets. Miguel Abensour’s more sophisti-
cated notion of a ‘wild democracy’ pitted ‘against the State’ bears
traces of the same misconception (Abensour 2011); and even the
Rancièrean famous ‘disagreement’ of a ‘part of no part’ appears
to be modelled upon a binary logic of insurrection: ‘Whoever has
no part – the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern
proletariat – cannot in fact have any part other than all or nothing’
(Rancière 1999: 9). Subjecting politics to a logic of ‘all or nothing’
means to relegate political action – which, in reality, unfolds on a
complex terrain criss-crossed by a multiplicity of antagonisms – to
the realm of the imaginary. We are given a blunt choice by these

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authors: passivity or insurrection. No space is left, in this frame-

work, for any positive political programme that could provide us
with a starting point for constructing a new hegemony. Yet, the
creation of a new collective will is precisely what is needed today,
at a historical conjuncture when neoliberal hegemony crumbles
and the political vacuum grows. We are not living through a revo-
lutionary situation, though, that would warrant a politics of ‘all
or nothing’; what we experience, rather, is the increasing disloca-
tion of the hegemonic formation in most Western countries. In a
historical situation like this, the political task consists in bringing
to life a ‘New Prince’, that is, in affirming affirmation.
Such a project is not furthered by insurrectionary fantasies, nor
is it furthered by the empty phraseology of a metaphysical ‘idea
of communism’ (Badiou 2010) or the invocation of a pseudo-
Leninist avant-garde party (Dean 2012). Approaches like these
have exhausted themselves – for practical reasons, because a new
hegemon can only result from what the militants of Nuit Debout in
France called ‘la convergence des luttes’: the convergence of actually
existing struggles; as well as for theoretical reasons, as in politics the
given cannot be negated in toto. In order to attack the totality of
what is given one would have to find an Archimedean point beyond
this totality. Without a point that could provide us with an ulti-
mate foundation for our actions it is impossible to negate abstract
totalities such as ‘the system’, ‘the State’, ‘capitalism’, ‘patriarchy’,
and so on. The very idea of a monolithic system of oppression is
phantasmatic, as is the attempt at attacking that system head-on.
Negation, therefore, can only mean determinate negation, i.e. the
negation of something concretely given rather than merely imagined
as all-powerful totality.9 The same is to be said about affirmation.
It only makes sense as determinate affirmation: the creation of an
actually existing project and collective will.

Thinking Democracy

One of the main tasks of political thinking is to recognise the seeds

of such a hegemonic project and identify a toehold in social reality
from where it could evolve. Therein lies the practical meaning of

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affirmation. Whoever seeks to engage in counter-hegemonic poli-

tics will have to say ‘yes’ to saying ‘yes’, and political thought must
contribute to organising a new hegemon that will take up the task
of reconstructing social reality. The moment of political negation,
which is a moment of protestation against the given, should thus
be envisaged, not as a nihilistic refusal of totalities such as ‘the
State’, ‘the police’, or ‘the system’, but as an affirmative refusal
by which something determinate is negated in the name of a proj-
ect worth affirmation. By negating the given through affirmation,
the possibilities inherent in the given are revealed in a way not
unrelated to what Niklas Kompridis calls ‘critique as a possibility-
disclosing practice’ (Kompridis 2011). To be sure, a moment of
negation is unavoidable if we are to develop a ‘sense of possibil-
ity’ (the Möglichkeitssinn described by the Austrian writer Robert
Musil in The Man Without Qualities). The ultimately groundless,
that is, contingent and contested nature of what appears to be
given must be demonstrated, and can only be demonstrated by
weakening, challenging and undermining the fortifications of a
given hegemonic formation. It has to be demonstrated through
negation that sedimented social routines are, by nature, possi-
bility-foreclosing-practices. By leading us back to the moment of
their institution, when some possibilities were foreclosed and oth-
ers actualised, political action blows a breach into unquestioned
actuality. But it does not proceed from an Archimedean point
beyond, or any ground deep underneath, the actual. It makes new
possibilities emerge, not by proposing abstract utopias, but by
throwing the actual against the actual, hoping that an antagonism
may emerge and the contingency of what is given will be demon-
strated – together with the potentiality of what could be given. In
fact, there is no option other than throwing the actual against the
actual, for nothing else exists. In politics, as everywhere else, one
always finds oneself in a given situation: a world of actuality – and
if no ground exists that would transcend the actual world, the only
option is to turn the actual against itself.
So, where to find the toehold for a future hegemonic project?
The answer, of course, can only be given by a concrete analysis
of present circumstances – by what Foucault called an ‘ontology
of actuality’. This is not the place to advance such an analysis

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(see, instead, Marchart 2013b). Yet, on a more general level of

political theorising the following hypothesis can be advanced: in
a situation where nominal ‘democracy’ has turned into an unsur-
passable horizon for most regimes on the planet, with the notable
exception of Arab theocracies, an outright attack against democ-
racy (in the name, for instance, of a purely hypothetical com-
munism) would be ill-advised. Democracy, while employed in
mainstream political discourse as an empty signifier, is not a self-
sufficient entity. The range of meaning of the term is not exhausted
by mainstream discourse, no more than the range of democratic
practices is exhausted by institutions of liberal democracy. The
democratic horizon constantly undergoes internal shifts and reart-
iculations. In recent years, ‘actually existing’ liberal democracy
came under pressure from neo-authoritarian political parties with,
in most cases, a hidden neoliberal agenda, but formally located
within the democratic horizon. On the other end of the ideologi-
cal scale, social movements and, sporadically, left-wing populist
parties have emerged with an agenda of defending, if not deepen-
ing, democratic rights. These actors can be defined as radically
democratic in a double sense: internally, they tend to experiment
with democratic procedures, rather than adhering to a hierarchi-
cal and quasi-military model of party organisation; with regard to
their political demands, they show characteristics of democratisa-
tion movements: they aim at the ‘democratisation of democracy’,
described by Étienne Balibar as ‘the name of a struggle, a conver-
gence of struggles’ for democratisation. And, as Balibar insists,
‘[i]n a crucial sense, democracy is never something that you have,
that you can claim to possess (therefore “bring” or “confer”); it
is only something that you collectively create or recreate’ (Balibar
2008b: 526).
These radical movements understood that ‘democracy’ is not
simply the cover-up for a bourgeois conspiracy. Democracy, rather,
is ‘a permanent struggle for its own democratisation and against
its own reversal into oligarchy and monopoly of power’ (528).
Precisely because it is not a homogeneous and self-sufficient entity,
democracy can be turned against itself with the aim of deepen-
ing the democratic revolution. This task involves the construc-
tion of a democratic will-to-democracy which, in turn, can only

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be founded in democratic action. Democracy, as an ontic regime,

does not follow with necessity from any ontology of the political,
but it can be affirmed, created, and recreated by way of politics.
To do so, one has to throw democracy against democracy. The
democratic horizon has to be expanded and democratic principles
rejuvenated. The theoretical contours of such a project of radi-
cal democracy are presented in an accompanying volume entitled
Post-Foundational Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom,
Equality, Solidarity (Marchart, forthcoming) and cannot be delin-
eated here – for reasons of space, but mainly because they do not
fall under the jurisdiction of political ontology. It would be a non
sequitur to make the project of radical democracy the subject mat-
ter of an ontology of the political; and yet, a theory of radical
democracy can in fact become a matter of reflective intervention.
For, to inflect ourselves into the matter of our thought is to enter
the realm of the actual by allying theory with politics – which can,
and should, be done in the name of ‘democratising democracy’.
Cracking points will be produced in the liberal-democratic façade
when democracy is brought to collide with itself. Possibilities
might be disclosed that are latently present, but effectively fore-
closed by the institutional routines of liberal-democratic regimes
and liberal-democratic thought. To engage liberal democracy by
way of affirmative refusal is to assert a democratic will. It means
saying ‘no’ – by saying ‘yes’ to saying ‘yes’.

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Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics
of Intellectual Engagement

The ontology of the political, as proposed in this book, has

brought us to the following conclusion: being-in-the-world
is, in fact, equivalent to being-in-the-political. The world we
inhabit is formed by antagonism. The hegemonic structures of
this world are as contingent as they are contested – and antago-
nism is the name that was proposed for the co-original con-
dition of conflict and contingency. There is no need to engage
in a detailed description of the phenomenic forms of the ‘play
between ground and abyss’: the evental play through which
antagonism shows itself in the reactivating moments of (micro-)
rupture, in the myriad forms in which the uneven nature of
social relations becomes apparent and micro-conflicts of every-
day life emerge. These moments in which we experience, most
of the time pre-consciously, subordination and oppression, rage
and indignation, humiliation and pride, are ubiquitous. To phe-
nomenologically describe these moments was not our aim in this
book. Political ontology must pass from the descriptive level to
a quasi-transcendental stage of developing the ‘logic’ of politi-
cal conflict and social sedimentation. This passage led us, in a
Laclauian vein, to the symbolic laws of difference and equiva-
lence – or metonymy and metaphor – and their relation towards
an instance of radical negativity: it led us, hence, to Laclau’s
description of the ‘onto-logics’ of antagonism. And yet, our aim
was to advance the argument beyond this stage of explaining the
symbolic functioning of antagonism. In Laclau’s model, antago-
nism is a precondition for establishing frontiers within political

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discourses. But, as I have demonstrated, antagonism is indis-

pensable for the production of any kind of meaning and, onto-
logically speaking, of any kind of social being. Everything social
assumes its ‘being’ – i.e. a determinable identity – by way of
delimitation vis-à-vis what it is not: a radically negative outside
by which the identity of any kind of social being is, at one and
the same time, stabilised and dislocated. Antagonism, therefore,
points us to the ground of being.
We intuitively know this from the force-field of micro-conflicts
and micro-contingencies that is our daily life. Being-in-the-world
means being caught in a limbo, in the inter-play between ground
and abyss, which announces itself through the pre-conscious expe-
rience of what I tried to describe, pace Hegel and Nancy, as the
‘absolute restlessness’ of the social. Antagonism is experienced, in
its social mode, as the ‘trembling’ of social sediments, of institu-
tionalised routines, of cultural, sexual or class identities. We all are
immersed in the micro-conflictual turbulences that do and undo
social sedimentations. One has to understand that the source of
these turbulences is nothing other than the labour of the negative,
antagonism, resulting in constant, but jolty, oscillations between
its instituting and its dislocating side.1 Not only is it repressed
by hegemonic forces; we, as social beings formed and deformed
by hegemony, are complicit in repressing the experience of the
political. In Part III we have seen that there are two diametrically
opposed ways of engaging with the politicality of the world.
The first option, to the extent to which it is an option, con-
sists in neglecting, actively denying or unconsciously disavowing
the antagonistic character of social life. No doubt, life would be
impossible to lead if we were to constantly focus on its antagonis-
tic nature. This, however, does not absolve us from thinking antag-
onism. Political theory and political philosophy, in their liberal
mainstream variants, can best be described as an elaborate attempt
at evading the traumatising fact of ultimate groundlessness and,
hence, the grounding role of the political. Given the academic
hegemony of liberal approaches, any theory underlining the fun-
damental dimension of social conflictuality (without reducing the
latter to some sort of liberal ‘competition’) will immediately face

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Thinking Antagonism

the charge of ignoring ‘consensus’, ‘rational deliberation’, ‘func-

tional imperatives’ or ‘institutional path-dependencies’. Agreed,
all this may have regional validity, and it can be legitimate in some
instances to focus on consensus, deliberation, function or institu-
tionalisation. At the same time, it should be made clear: these are
only multifarious ways of coping – consensually, rationally, func-
tionally, institutionally – with the abyssal character of the social
and the necessity of its political refoundation. Otherwise, the lib-
eral approach would merely attest to what in psychoanalysis is
called a ‘defence reaction’ – which is not only intellectually dishon-
est; it could also be politically dangerous. Ignoring the struggles
that form our social world will not prevent them from raging on.
More than that, those who ignore a conflict of which they are part
have already been defeated. A victorious force tends to retrospec-
tively obliterate all traces of its struggle for hegemony. And yet,
no victory is ever total, no oblivion definitive. Struggles will con-
tinue drawing a trace through social order, as peaceful as the latter
may appear on the surface. The social will remain subjected to the
labour of the negative whose effects are constantly suppressed and
relegated to the political unconscious while, from time to time,
re-emerging unexpectedly. As a consequence, society experiences
moments when repressed conflicts, rendered unthinkable within
a given hegemonic formation, make themselves felt in whatever
displaced way. Every society, in other words, undergoes the expe-
rience of the uncanny. To grant ontological status to antagonism
means to remain attentive to the memory traces of past and pres-
ent struggles that continue haunting the hegemonic narratives of
order and tranquillity. Thinking antagonism, therefore, has little
to do with abstract speculation. It is about facing a brute factum
politicum.
Which brings us to the second option. Instead of taking ref-
uge in denial and resistance, the ontological nature of antagonism
must be affirmed, and, as we have seen, can only be affirmed polit-
ically, i.e. by way of political action (the mode of which, in the
intellectual field, is ‘thinking’). I have therefore proposed in the
previous chapter a political imperative: act as if you could activate
what activates you! In order to act politically we have to ‘activate

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Conclusion

ourselves’ (we have to affirm a hypothetical will-to-will that, in

actuality, we do not possess). But, political acting is only conceiv-
able because we are always already activated, if only – most of the
time – on a microscopic level, by antagonism. So we are caught
in a virtuous circle: that which brings us to life as political actors,
antagonism, will have to be brought to life by our actions. It has
to be provoked, by way of politics, if the contingent as well as con-
flictual nature of the social, otherwise hidden under social routines
and institutions, is to be made apparent. To think antagonism, in
the political sense of thinking, is to provoke antagonism – and, in
turn, to allow oneself to be provoked by antagonism. I have used
the term ‘reflective intervention’ for such a – collective, organised,
strategic, contentious and partisan – practice of thinking by which
actual politics is folded into theory. From this follows what one
could call an imperative of thinking as a political, rather than
individual or cognitive practice: think as if your thinking could
activate that by which it is activated! It is not in our hands, as indi-
viduals who mistake themselves as subjects of volition, to activate
thinking. And yet, only by mistaking ourselves as subjects of voli-
tion and affirming our will-to-will can we even hope to provoke
antagonisms to emerge.
However, I would like to add a word of warning against any
adventurist interpretation of political thinking. What must be
affirmed in a process of reflective intervention is volition, not volun-
tarism. Let us remember the famous Gramscian motto: ‘pessimism
of the intellect, optimism of the will’, which is often given an all
too trivial interpretation. The quote is mostly taken to mean that,
no matter how depressing the political situation, one still has to act
against the odds. Yet, the meaning of the Gramscian motto is not
exhausted by this standard interpretation. It is certainly true that
no political action will be successful without a certain ‘optimism of
the will’, or, pace Nietzsche, a ‘will-to-will’. But, on the other side,
without a clear and disillusioned analysis of the political conjunc-
ture, that optimism will remain unguided. It will degenerate into
pure voluntarism or decisionism without any strategic direction.
Therefore, the ‘pessimism of the intellect’, far from expressing a
version of leftist melancholia in the face of overwhelming forces of

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reaction, has a very precise function. The phrase accentuates the

need for intellectual realism in politics. An ‘intellectual pessimist’
is not a leftist academic who suffers from depression, but someone
engaged in a sober analysis, someone resisting the temptation of
wishful self-deception. Intellectual work, in this respect, is oriented
towards what Machiavelli called la verità effettuale della cosa; and
only a good dose of ‘pessimism of the intellect’ can prevent us from
falling prey to wishful thinking, naïve voluntarism or dogmatic
self-righteousness.
If we are to avoid these dangers, it is important to recognise
the ethical injunction hidden in the Gramscian motto. In order
to abstain, as much as it is possible, from wishful or dogmatic
thinking one has to cultivate an ethics of intellectual engagement.
This is the reason that what we have termed ‘reflective inter-
vention’ must not be confounded with political adventurism in
the field of philosophy. And, in order to resist the temptation
of either adventurism or dogmatism, a rather outdated virtue is
required: intellectual rigour. As Laclau and Mouffe made clear
when replying to an orthodox Marxist shortly after the publica-
tion of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: dogmatism constitutes
an obstacle to developing the socialist project. It is impossible
to reconceive a hegemonic project without sober analysis and
theoretical rigour:

As participating actors in the history of our time, if we are actually

to assume an interventionist role and not to do so blindly, we must
attempt to wrest as much light as possible from the struggles in which
we participate and from the changes which are taking place before
our eyes. Thus, it is again necessary to temper ‘the arms of critique’.
The historical reality whereof the socialist project is reformulated
today is very different from the one of only a few decades ago, and we
will carry out our obligations as socialists and intellectuals only if we
are fully conscious of the changes and persist in the effort of extract-
ing their consequences at the level of theory. (NR 97)

Laclau and Mouffe then continue by proposing as a rule for intel-

lectual work the personal motto ascribed to Leonardo: ‘obsti-
nate rigour’. This kind of intellectual tenacity ‘leaves no space

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Conclusion

for complacent sleights of hand that seek only to safeguard an

obsolete orthodoxy’ (NR 97). Interestingly, Laclau returns to
Leonardo and the motive of ‘obstinate rigour’ twenty years later
in the concluding pages of On Populist Reason:

There is an ethical imperative in intellectual work, which Leonardo

called ‘obstinate rigour’. It means, in practical terms – and especially
when one is dealing with political matters, which are always highly
charged with emotion – that one has to resist several temptations.
They can be condensed into a single formula: never succumb to the
terrorism of words. (PR 249)

This ‘terrorism of words’ makes itself felt whenever analysis is

replaced by moral condemnation (as in the case of a moralistic
critique of fascism devoid of explanatory value), or, conversely, by
dogmatic fetishisation:

On the Left, terms such as ‘class struggle’, ‘determination in the last

instance by the economy’ or ‘centrality of the working class’ function
– or functioned until recently – as emotionally charged fetishes, the
meanings of which were increasingly less clear, although their discur-
sive appeal could not be diminished. (PR 250)

For Laclau, the ‘politico-intellectual task’ is therefore to think

through, as consistently as possible, today’s conditions of political
action, including the phenomenon of populism; and in order to
live up to this task – which, for Laclau, ‘is necessarily collective’
(PR 250) – we will have to abandon all moralistic or dogmatic
attitudes.
Let us draw the lessons from Laclau’s attack against orthodoxy.
Intellectual rigour is the opposite of dogmatism. Indeed, dogma-
tism is a sign of intellectual sloppiness – only those are in need of
a dogma, who do not dare to engage in thinking. In a process of
thinking – and precisely when thinking, affected by antagonism,
is geared towards political effectivity – one must not let oneself
be carried away by faulty reasoning, dogmatic slumbers, age-old
wisdom, commonsensical banalities, taken-for-granted ideologi-
cal assumptions, incontestable ‘positive facts’, pseudo-political

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Thinking Antagonism

delusions or moralistic indignation. There is an ethics of intel-

lectual work which, for political rather than moral reasons, con-
sists in the relentless questioning of whatever may offer itself as
an ultimate foundation – no matter whether the latter appears in
the guise of a moral, traditional, ideological, commonsensical or
‘positive’ ground. To paraphrase Laclau: never succumb to the
terrorism of Grounds. And the only thing that will keep us alert
and, hopefully, prevent us from giving in to such terrorism, is
‘obstinate rigour’.
One more thing needs to be stressed, though: the same rigour
involved in intellectual work must also serve as a principle guid-
ing political action. To clarify this point it may be worthwhile
to revisit Leonardo’s motto. As a matter of fact, it is not entirely
clear whether, for Leonardo, the phrase merely referred to his
own ‘work ethics’ as a meticulous artist and pioneering natural
scientist. The motto, written as ‘hostinato rigore’ in characteristic
mirror writing, belongs to an emblem designed by Leonardo in
1508 or 1509, the pictorial part of which presents a plough draw-
ing a furrow. Renaissance and Baroque emblems are meant to
remain deliberately complex, if not partially obscure, in order to
leave ample room for contemplation. The meaning of Leonardo’s
emblem becomes clearer when compared with another emblem
on the same sheet. This second emblem shows a compass directed
at a star (while being placed on a revolving water wheel) and
accompanied by the motto ‘destinato rigore’. Leonardo appar-
ently means to transmit the message that, in focusing on a partic-
ular destination, we must not revolve or deviate from our course.
This message, however, has little to do with artistic or scientific
rigour. A clear political meaning is hidden in the drawing, for
three miniscule fleurs-de-lis are placed within the star, thus turn-
ing the latter into a symbol of the French king, Louis XII, for
whom Leonardo was working as a court artist at the time of the
drawings. No doubt, it would be easy to detect a message of sub-
servience in line with the opportunism of a court artist hired to
glorify the king. Taking into account the polysemic dimension of
Renaissance emblems, however, the drawing may also be under-
stood as an emblematic representation of political virtue. The

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Conclusion

motto ‘destinato rigore’ would then imply that a political cause

must be followed unwaveringly – no less than any intellectual
cause. When ploughing a furrow in the intellectual landscape, or
when pursuing a political goal, we must not waver in our course,
no matter how furiously the wheel of fortune is turning.
So, the same kind of rigour is requested, Leonardo seems to
imply, by intellectual and by political work: the virtue of not devi-
ating from one’s course, in other words, of not abandoning the
very cause of one’s actions. Obviously, an ethical imperative is
involved in such a kind of tenacity. Thinking is to remain faith-
ful – or act as if one could remain faithful – to the political source
of activation: antagonism. To affirm the politicality of the world
is to remain faithful to the experience of conflict and contingency
by which one was activated. Why insist on this? Because there are
always, as mentioned, other options: neglect, denial, disavowal.
But, as political actors, we are activated by antagonism, and we
only retain our status as actors as long as we reactivate antago-
nism – which, in politics, manifests itself in the ontic form of a
particular cause and struggle. This is rarely a matter of ideological
dogmatism or party discipline. On the contrary, political steadi-
ness can easily lead oneself to oppose party discipline, as much
as intellectual stringency can lead oneself to counter ideological
dogmatism. In their response to their orthodox critics, Laclau and
Mouffe, by claiming for themselves the ethical principle of obsti-
nate rigour, refuted the charge of having abandoned the intellec-
tual tradition of Marxism or the political project of socialism. The
charge was laughable anyway. Their orthodox critics, while por-
traying Laclau and Mouffe as traitors and renegades, were unable
to recognise the utter absurdity of their own position. To defend
sclerotic dogmas and sectarian projects is, in fact, the opposite of
politico-intellectual rigour. It is as sign of intellectual sloppiness
and political faintheartedness.
Perhaps it is exactly his ethics of obstinate rigour that lies at the
core of Laclau’s work and life as academic intellectual and political
militant. Rather than fusing the political with the philosophical in
a lukewarm compromise (which could easily result, for instance,
in some kind of engaged journalism without theoretical value), he

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Thinking Antagonism

was unwavering on both fronts. And, perhaps, there is no feasible

alternative. Whoever seeks to inflect politics into theory, and to
remain rigorous politically as well as academically, must accom-
plish the coincidence of opposites. To explain the point, I should
be allowed a few concluding remarks on a personal note.
When I co-edited with Simon Critchley Laclau: A Critical
Reader (Critchley and Marchart 2004), we ventured the idea of
using for the cover a photograph of the bombed editorial office
of Lucha Obrera. Laclau, in his youth, was chief editor of Lucha
Obrera, and putting the bombed office on the cover would have
emphasised that an apparently abstract theory, sometimes charged
with formalism, emerged from rather material struggles. To our
surprise Laclau was strictly against it. Instead, he opted for his
alma mater, that is, for the beautiful façade of Buenos Aires Uni-
versity as a cover photograph. We agreed but I remember that I
found it awkward to have a baroque façade on the reader. Not
because this was the exact opposite to an image of violent political
struggle, but his choice, I gathered, set a riddle for most readers.
The deeper meaning of a baroque façade on the cover must have
appeared as mysterious to them as it appeared to me.
Reflecting on this episode, I came to understand why Laclau
chose this photo. It seems that, for him, Buenos Aires University
must have been a place of a peculiar coincidentia oppositorum
between academic learning and political militancy. Let me put
it this way: to everyone who knew him, there were two sides
of Laclau, two personae. On the one side, there was the per-
sona of the militant, the singer of revolutionary songs who had
dozens of Italian partisan songs in his repertoire and would ask
his multinational crowd of University of Essex PhD students in
our regular gatherings at a local pizzeria to collectively sing the
‘Internationale’ in our native tongue. This persona stood in obvi-
ous contrast, if not opposition, to academic customs, yet it was
entirely congruent with his self-image as a life-long partisan of
the left wing of Peronism and his support, in more recent years,
for the Kirchner governments. As he said in one of his last televi-
sion interviews, he had never been an academic intellectual in a
conventional sense as he had never stopped being a militant.

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Conclusion

However, notwithstanding the persona of the militant, and in

contradiction to what he claimed in the interview, there was the
persona of the scholar, someone predominantly interested in the
development of a coherently argued system of political thought.
This was where readers of Laclau could, in fact, experience a
contradiction. Consider the apparent paradox that the most
ardent defender of populism was, in his theoretical and pedagog-
ical work, as remote from any populistic attitude as is possible.
There was no sophistry to his lectures, nor was there anything
self-congratulatory, as is typical for ‘famous’ academics. It would
not have crossed his mind for a second to compromise on the
rigour of the argument for the sake of presenting it with more
bravado or to produce artificial effects in order to get the mes-
sage across. No rhetorical device would distract from the course
of reasoning. Although he theorised the ‘rhetorical foundations
of society’, as the title of his last and posthumous book goes, his
goal was to reduce, as much as possible, the rhetorical founda-
tions of his theory.
Of course, he knew that ultimately this goal was impossible
to reach. In New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,
the book where he presents his theory à l’ordre de raison, he
confesses that a more geometrico presentation of his arguments
runs counter to everything he believes about language (NR 5).
Yet, by presenting his thought in the clearest possible way, rather
than garnishing it with a plethora of stories and jokes, he made
his theory all the more intelligible to his audiences. No obscu-
rantism, no unnecessary detours, no distractions, no trickery
allowed. This intellectual attitude was driven by a deep desire for
consistency, and was scholarly in almost a medieval sense. His
crystal-clear and ‘logical’ style gave the impression of a decon-
structive version of negative dialectics, brought into the argu-
mentative form of scholastic reasoning. No wonder, given this
medieval style of reasoning – and I mean this as a compliment
– that his preferred theoretical instrument was Occam’s razor.
Cutting away everything arbitrary, he achieved an unheard-of
degree of theoretical condensation. One of his key articles, ‘The
Impossibility of Society’ (NR 89–92), is four pages long.

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Thinking Antagonism

To return to my observation concerning the two personae of

Ernesto Laclau, it is worth insisting that the philosophical advances
achieved by ‘Laclau the scholar’ were not disconnected from the
political interests of ‘Laclau the militant’. Laclau was uncompro-
mising on both fronts. Part of his charisma as a teacher and lecturer
came from the paradox that within one and the same person the
two personae of the militant and the scholar were clearly distinct,
but at the same time were identical. Not that he had to bring them
into balance or to compromise; both were total, and he was both
of them in one. He was totally immersed in politics, and totally
immersed in theory. There was nothing ‘hegemonic’ to the relation
between these two sides, no unstable equilibrium to be established
between partiality and universality. He was at once totally partial
and totally universal, at once a ‘political animal’, as they say, and
a scholar of quasi-medieval stature. Maybe this was not only a
personal attitude. Maybe it was characteristic of Laclau’s genera-
tion of radical intellectuals on the Left, even though he brought
it to its apogee. Another member of this generation, Stuart Hall,
who passed away only weeks before Laclau, once described the
practice of theorising as a way of ‘wrestling with the angels’. For
this generation, to wrestle with the angels of theory and to wrestle
with the beasts of politics was one and the same thing.
This double-sided totality, I assume, explains Laclau’s choice
of the cover photograph for the critical reader. For Laclau, the
university was not simply a place to engage in occasional politi-
cal fights. The university was an entirely political arena, and,
at the same time, it was a refuge entirely devoted to scholar-
ship. Therefore, the baroque façade of his alma mater must
have appeared to him as a symbol of the scholarly as much as
a symbol of political militancy. He felt no need to demonstrate
his own involvement in violent political struggles by putting his
bombed editorial office on the cover. It was his old university
that, for Laclau, symbolised the identity of the scholarly and the
militant. To unite the opposites and forge a politico-intellectual
identity, while accepting their respective specificity and opposite
nature, should be the – perhaps paradoxical – aim of thinking as
reflective intervention. The virtue of obstinate rigour can serve as

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Conclusion

a common denominator and ethical bracket around the scholarly

and the militant. It will prevent us from capitulating to wish-
ful thinking, ideological dogmatism or a naïve moralism. And
it will keep our thinking focused on the ever-changing effects of
negativity, the multifarious forms of antagonism encountered in
political and social reality.

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Notes

Introduction

1. See Torfing (1999); Marttila (2015); Deutsche (1998); Bowman

(2007); Roskamm (2017); Marchart (2018); for an overview see
Critchley and Marchart (2004) as well as Marchart (2017).
2. For a first attempt see Marchart (2007a, 2013a).
3. Obviously, in our attempt to elucidate the antagonistic nature of the
social world, we do not wish to embark on a mystical quest for the
ineffable in the style of a negative theology; nor do we plan to inves-
tigate – as some object ontologists and speculative realists might
do – into the grounds of physical matter in a vain attempt at spec-
ulatively exhuming natural philosophy as an academic discipline
(it would be bizarre to claim to have insight, in a Faustian fashion,
into the inner secrets of the natural universe). Political ontology
is all about social being, and there is nothing ineffable about the
social. Thinking is of an order entirely different from mystical or
cosmological speculation (no matter whether the latter speculation
is dressed up as ‘materialist’ or not).

Chapter 1

1. For the ontological turn in political theory see White (2000);

Strathausen (2009); Paipais (2016); Mihai et al. (2017). For an over-
view on the much discussed ontological turn in anthropology see
Holbraad and Pedersen (2017). Social ontology in the analytic tra-
dition will not be our concern in this book, even though important
philosophical positions have evolved in this tradition (Searle 2010);
for a discussion of social ontologies in the tradition of sociological
thought see Marchart (2013a).

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Notes

2. Needless to say, today’s political ontologies, in their attempt

to answer this basic question, vary greatly in aim and outlook.
Stephen K. White, who was one of the first to observe the ontological
turn in political thought, enlists, next to Connolly, George Kateb,
Charles Taylor and Judith Butler among those who cultivate an
interest in ontopolitical interpretation. Yet, the number of theorists
is significantly larger. Today we are confronted with ontologies of
‘lack’ (Žižek 1999; Stavrakakis 2007), of ‘the void’ (Badiou 2007;
Prozorov 2014), or, alternatively, of ‘becoming’ (Bennett 2010;
Connolly 2011), of ‘abundance’ (Tønder and Thomassen 2005),
of ‘the multitude’ (Negri 2002), of ‘com-pearance’ or ‘being-with’
(Nancy 2000), of ‘potentiality’ (Agamben 1999, 2015) or histori-
cal ‘actuality’ (Vattimo 2011). Whereas, for instance, ontological
questioning has led Antonio Negri to the never-ending workings
of ‘the multitude’ as the constitutive force of social being (Negri
2002), for Slavoj Žižek it is the subject that constitutes ‘the absent
centre of political ontology’ (Žižek 1999). Intellectual inspirations
are no less variable. While Negri’s ontology of the multitude, for
instance, is informed by Spinoza, Marx and Deleuze, Žižek relies
on Hegel and Lacan.
3. Historically, the term ‘ontology’, designating the science of being
in general, appears for the first time at the beginning of the sev-
enteenth century and is eventually granted the status of a meta-
physica generalis in German ‘school philosophy’ by Christian
Wolff, thereby assuming the role of a prima philosophia vis-à-vis
the other metaphysical disciplines of the time, such as cosmology,
psychology and theology. Simultaneously, in a process that started
with Descartes (a more complex case, as we will see) and culmi-
nated in the work of Berkeley, Kant and their heirs, ontology as
a discipline was increasingly displaced by modern epistemology.
Foucault’s reference to the Kant of ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ com-
plicates the picture by detecting an internal counter-tendency at
work in at least some epistemologists.
4. Taylor follows Heidegger in putting most of the blame on Descartes
who had initiated the landslide ‘epistemological turn’ that let the
Hydra out of her cage. The Heideggerianism of what I will call the
left-Heideggerian branch of post-foundational political thought is
most obvious in the case of Jean-Luc Nancy’s social ontology of
‘being-with’ or in Gianni Vattimo’s defence of a ‘weak ontology’ in
the tradition of Heideggerian fundamental ontology (Nancy 2000;
Vattimo 2003). Heideggerian inclinations are also present, although

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Thinking Antagonism

less obvious, where theorists – such as Roberto Esposito (2013; see

also Bosteels 2011) – have recourse to Michel Foucault’s idea of
historical ontology.
5. Therein lies what I would consider the true significance of Foucault’s
famous notion of an ‘ontology of ourselves’. When thinking politi-
cally, as we will see in Part III, we implicate ourselves in the matter
of our thought, since the process of self-implication, to the extent to
which it is political, is a collective and, to some degree, organised
process.
6. Connolly makes a similar point against the epistemological doxa
of the social sciences: ‘There is a particular presumption – let us
call it the primacy of epistemology – that unites most American
social scientists, shielding them from this debate. To give primacy
to epistemology is to think either that you have access to criteria
of knowledge that leave the realm of ontology behind or that your
epistemology provides neutral test procedures through which to
pose and resolve every ontological question. [. . .] The primacy of
epistemology turns out itself, of course, to embody a contestable
social ontology. The empiricist version, for instance, treats human
beings as subjects or agents of knowledge; it treats things as inde-
pendent objects susceptible to representation; it treats language
as primarily a medium of representation, or, at least, a medium in
which the designative dimension of concepts can be disconnected
rigorously from the contexts of rhetoric/action/evaluation in which
they originate’ (Connolly 1995: 5–6).
7. Consequently, thinking, to the extent to which it is implicated in
the field of political ontology, passes through these instances. Think-
ing is a self-affirmative enactment of conflict, power, subordination,
oppression, exclusion, decision, resistance, opposition, confronta-
tion, association or consensus-building. I will tackle this, perhaps,
counter-intuitive notion of thinking in Part III.
8. If Heidegger’s claim was that metaphysical thought has always dif-
ferentiated between beings and being, yet this difference has never
come into view as difference, then similarly, we have to say that
in contemporary political thought there is frequent use made of
the political difference but until recently it was rarely asked what
we have to make of this difference as difference. Thinkers such as
Badiou, Rancière, Mouffe, Laclau, Nancy or Esposito may make
diverse, if not opposing, use of it (sometimes shifting the normative
emphasis from the political to politics), but they all consider the

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difference to be of importance. In other words, they felt an ontopo-

litical need to introduce it.
9. And if it does, they may also ask, what follows from the political
difference? Not much, I agree, as long as we abstain from develop-
ing a clearer picture of what we mean by politics and the political.
But let us put on the record, if only in passing, that no particular
political effect can be deduced from the political difference – which
otherwise would serve as a determining Ground (which was pre-
cluded ex hypothesi). For this reason, the term ‘leftist ontology’
(Strathausen 2009), it has to be said, is a misnomer. As such, ontol-
ogy, the science of being-qua-being, is neither leftist nor rightist
– unless we are prepared to nonsensically ascribe to social being a
particular political orientation. This is why a generic term such as
‘political ontology’ (or, in our case, ‘ontology of the political’) is
preferable.
10. To give a simplistic example: the term ‘sister’ has no intrinsic substance
and only assumes meaning within a system of differences, that is, in
relation to terms such as ‘brother’, ‘father’ and ‘mother’.
11. ‘Hauntological’ in the sense of the spectral presence of a ground
which remains absent, or as Derrida put it: ‘To haunt does not mean
to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very
construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the con-
cepts of being and time. This is what we would be calling here a
hauntology’ (Derrida 1994: 161).
12. For a reading of Laclau that goes the opposite way by disengaging
ontological negativity from the political see Hansen (2014).
13. This (onto-)logic – which underlies discourse theory in the Essex
School tradition – was most systematically explained and expanded
into an explanatory approach for the social sciences by Jason Glynos
and David Howarth with their ‘logics approach’ (Glynos and Howarth
2007). Laclau defended his own use of the term ‘logic’ in an exchange
with Butler and Žižek (see Laclau 2000b: 283–4).
14. In the latter sense, Laclau indeed tends to speak about ‘social antag-
onisms’ (in the plural) rather than antagonism in the singular. The
tension between Laclau’s two ontologies can be clearly perceived
in his last book. In a review, John Kraniauskas has rightly high-
lighted that, apart from the chapter on ‘Articulation and the Limits
of Metaphor’, in which Laclau presents his ‘rhetorised’ political
ontology, there is another essay which counts among the volume’s
most important contributions. It is this last major text of Laclau’s,

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entitled ‘Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics’, with which he

delivers a renewed theory of antagonism. He does so, as Krani-
auskas observes, ‘through a brief reflection on Heidegger’s notion
of “ontological difference”, seeking – so as to fold it back into
his version of hegemony – to think through how the gap between
Being and beings may be bridged as an anti-foundational founda-
tion’ (Kraniauskas 2014: 30). This constitutes ‘a new departure
for Laclau’, as Kraniauskas underlines, even though it ‘remains
only slightly developed as a feature of a possible political ontol-
ogy’ (30). The crux is that Laclau did not have time to develop his
intuitions any further.
15. For instance, assimilating, as Laclau regularly does, the ontological
with the universal and the ontic with the particular, means to remain
within the ambit of a metaphysical form/content distinction, as will
be demonstrated in the subsequent chapter.
16. He, in fact, did so explicitly: ‘In other words, the distortion – par-
tial fixation – is the only means of representing that which is con-
stitutively non-representable. This – in words of Marchart – is the
location of the distinction between “anti-foundationalism” and “post-
foundationalism”. “Anti-foundationalism” would be the pure and
simple absence of a ground, which could only be expressed through
a proliferation of ontic identities. “Post-foundationalism” means
something different: the ground does not disappear, but is penetrated
by a dimension of absence or contingency that renders impossible
any reduction of the ontological to the ontic’ (RFS 119–20).
17. As, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu has shown, a great deal of effort
is required by the better-off to defend their stock of cultural capital
against aspiring factions. There is nothing innocent about cultural
taste: taste is a weapon that helps to keep symbolic distance, to
defend one’s own position in society.
18. Or to demonstrate, in the case of conservative protest, that
change is not necessary – which also amounts to a demonstration
of contingency.

Chapter 2

1. Something points in this last direction, for, in concluding, Swinton

adds a very last sentence to Marx’s oracle: ‘At first it seemed as
though I had heard the echo of despair; but, peradventure, it was

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Notes

the law of life.’ With this comment, struggle is retrospectively biol-

ogised. It would have never occurred to Marx himself to declare
struggle to be the ‘law of life’. Class struggle, for Marx, is the law
of all social being before it is pacified into harmonious communism.
As one knows from the Communist Manifesto, the history of hith-
erto existing societies is the history of class struggles. This does not
leave room for interpreting class struggle along the lines of natural
philosophy or Social Darwinism.
2. Which is something entirely different from disregarding the economy,
it must be said. Quite the contrary, a meaningful empirical economic
analysis – for instance, in the tradition of the French ‘regulation
school’ – can only begin once economic determinism is discarded and
‘political economy’ is seen as the discipline of studying, precisely, the
political forces that shape the economy.
3. The latter problem of ‘bellicism’ will be addressed in the subsequent
chapter.
4. Certainly, with Hegel’s idea of contradiction, negativity – the main
‘ingredient’ of Laclau’s later notion of antagonism – had to be
granted a central role; yet in Hegel, as I will discuss presently, nega-
tivity was domesticated and subjected to his pan-logism, which led
Laclau, in a still Althusserian vein, to resolutely disband Hegel.
5. This also means, as we will see, that from a post-foundational
perspective the whole notion of a negative ground of the social,
to which Laclau’s later theory of antagonism gravitates, becomes
inconceivable.
6. See as one of the passages where struggle is equivocated with antag-
onism Laclau (2014: 123).
7. This belief was copy-pasted in today’s version of technological pro-
gressivism, the philosophically meagre, but largely popular school
of ‘accelerationism’. Of course, the idea that technological prog-
ress instigates social progress is as wrong today as it was in the
nineteenth century.
8. As ‘classes’, the identity of the agents of struggle is determined by
their position within the process of production.
9. Of course, Kant himself did not hold on to the radical consequences
of his own theory of antinomies, but sought to rationally and mor-
ally dissolve them.
10. The same can be said about Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic notion
of a subject-of-lack that results from Lacan’s combination of Freud-
ianism with Kojèvian dialectics and the Sartrean manque-à-être.

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11. It will also provide us with a vocabulary that will help to trans-
late Laclau’s concern with signification and discourse, still very
much located in the linguistic turn, into the language of social
ontology.
12. Not in the narrow sense of the political system, to be sure, but in an
integral sense of ‘hegemonic efforts’ which involve and spread over
all areas of the social. Political ontology, hence, aims at explaining
the political logic behind the construction of all social beings. The
‘political’, here, refers to what, on a different occasion, I have called
‘integral politics’ (see Marchart 2013b: 195) – in analogy to what
Gramsci calls the ‘integral State’ as the sum total of political society
(the State in the conventional sense) and civil society. Integral poli-
tics can be understood as the sum total of political action, including,
as we will see, the most minimal forms of politics, wherever in the
social topography such action occurs.
13. As William Connolly observed, ‘what is figured from one perspec-
tive as a lack of fullness can also be figured as the abundance over
identity that keeps desire moving’ (Connolly 1995: 55). A similar
point was made by Laclau: ‘I do not see “lack” and “excess” as two
opposite categories, so that asserting the priority of one would nec-
essarily exclude the other, but as being two necessary moments of a
unique ontological condition. It is because there is lack, conceived
as deficient being, that excess becomes possible. An immanent full-
ness, without any internal rents, would make both lack and excess
redundant’ (Laclau 2005c: 256).

Chapter 3

1. It should not be ignored, though, that in the Marxist tradition belli-

cism is also at work wherever the Marxist conception of class struggle
is misconceived in terms of ‘class war’.
2. In this respect he stands in a lineage leading back, not to Marx,
but to Max Weber, the other great polemologist in social thought
(see Marchart 2013a: 231–62).
3. We have to bypass the complex question of Foucault’s secret Heideg-
gerianism. Generally speaking, the difference between Heidegger’s
and Foucault’s ontologies, according to Hubert Dreyfus, lies in the
fact that, for Heidegger, humans stand in a receptive, some would
say passive, relation to being’s self-disclosure, while for Foucault,

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Notes

‘the background practices reveal, as they do for Nietzsche, a con-

stantly shifting struggle’ with which one has to actively engage
(Dreyfus 2003: 50). While this description is quite accurate,
Dreyfus appears to downplay the key role the ontological notions
of struggle and polemos play for Heidegger (for an overview see
Fried 2000).
4. This dissolution of genealogy, in its polemological variant, is the
effect of a certain degree of self-criticism on Foucault’s part, even as
it is certainly true that Foucault had always formulated his polemol-
ogy in hypothetical terms.
5. Rather, he insists, ‘there will have been nothing at the origin but the
fault, a fault that is nothing but the de-fault of origin or the origin as
de-fault [le défaut d’origine ou l’origine comme défaut]. There will
have been no appearance except through disappearance. Everything
will have taken place at the same time, in the same step’ (Stiegler
1998: 188). What else is this, we may ask, if not a reformulation of
the Heideggerian notion of ‘ground’: a ground, that is, which at the
very same time is constituted as an abyss and only constitutes itself
in its grounding and ungrounding as the very play between ground
and abyss.
6. In the history of metaphysics, this scandal of technicity will then be
interpreted in terms of a ‘fall into technics’ (Stiegler 1998: 96), fol-
lowed by the search for or recollection of an original ‘im-mediacy’
(108), a harmonious state untainted by technicity – a state of nature,
in Rousseau for instance, in which man, as an entirely self-sufficient
being, would do without prostheses, while ‘technics is what leads
us down the road to decay in depriving us of our originary power’
(115). Yet our condition is one ‘in which nothing is any longer imme-
diately at hand, where everything is found mediated and instrumen-
talized, technicized, unbalanced’ (133).
7. Some passages in Stiegler’s account foster this impression. When it is
claimed, for instance, that the ‘art of the political’ is ‘directly ensu-
ing from the technical’ (Stiegler 1998: 188), he seems to argue for
a derivative and subordinated role for politics, or even the politi-
cal. And when it is held that ‘techne [as writing] gives rise to the
polis’ (205), the techne of politics may be considered secondary with
respect to the techne of writing. Of course, a very intimate rela-
tion is retained between politics and techne, but ontological prior-
ity is granted to technics, to the detriment of politics: before the
Epimethean fault, the mortals, as he puts it, ‘do not yet possess the

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Thinking Antagonism

art of the political, called for by their de-fault of origin, and arising
from their technicity’ (192–3).
8. Stiegler cannot explain convincingly the logic by which a given ‘we’,
a political collectivity, is constructed. His reference to Simondon’s
concept of individuation, which always involves both the individ-
ual and the collective, does not do the trick. Without a notion of
antagonism we cannot fully explain how a ‘we’ is delineated (and
subverted) vis-à-vis other ‘we’s. It can thus be suspected that there
is no concept of politics in Simondon either (for a discussion of this
question see Toscano 2004).
9. If this is the case, will it not disprove our claim that a concept of
antagonism – as the single name for the twofold experience of con-
flict and contingency – could only be elaborated in modernity? There
is no contradiction here, as long as it is taken into account that, if we
are to really speak of quasi-transcendental definitions, experiences
of conflict and contingency cannot be limited to modern societies
alone. Social being as such is contingent (society could always be
ordered differently, or even – the threat of Hobbesian civil war –
not ordered at all). And it is, at the same time, always pervaded by
conflicts. Society, and not only modern society, therefore rests on the
ground and abyss of antagonism. Modern society is, however, dif-
ferent from other societies in that all (not only some) social facts are
experienced as being alterable by way of conflict.
10. Apart from the obvious difference that for the Greeks stasis occurred
in moments of exception, while, from an ontological point of view,
antagonism lies at the ground of all social being at all times.

Chapter 4

1. This remainder, which we call antagonism, is what Heidegger would

have described as ‘most thought-provoking’ (1968: 17). To be clear,
what is thought-provoking is not empty ‘Being’ at its most ineffable,
as Heidegger himself was tempted to portray it. There is nothing
mystical to antagonism as the ontological ‘ab-ground’ of all social
beings. Antagonism can easily be inferred from the fact that we can
change the world by negating the given – an experience which, at
the very same time, makes us encounter, in occasionally brutal ways,
the very limits of constructability. To claim that an ultimate ground
is not obtainable is another way of saying that the social can be

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Notes

reconstructed in principle; but it also recalls that constructions will

eventually crumble, for all our provisional foundations have to be
built on a receding abyss.
2. As soon as the radical character of antagonism is acknowledged,
many household concepts of social theory – such as ideas about
‘public space’ – will have to be reconceived from the ground up (see
Marchart 2018).
3. This process implied that relativity and subjectivity, as rooted in
the life-world, were also devaluated in the course of objectivism
increasingly gaining hegemony. Husserl claims that the history of
modern philosophy is marked by a constitutive tension between the
two conflicting currents of objectivism and transcendentalism. By
transcendentalism Husserl understands a process of returning to
the last source and ground of all cognition: pre-scientific subjectiv-
ity. Priority should not be granted to the being of the world, but to
subjectivity as the instance which, in all scientific and pre-scientific
modes, gives meaning to the world (Weltgeltung). A non-objectiv-
ist, i.e., transcendentalist approach to the world would then have
to take the inward road towards a subject who unfolds herself onto
the world. Such approach can be traced back historically to the
instituting moment of Descartes who not only invented modern
objectivist rationalism (as it presents itself in the dualism of res
cogitans and res extensa), but also modern transcendentalism with
his idea of the ego cogito as the fundamentum inconcussum of all
cognition. This ego cogito, actually and more primordially an ego
dubito (‘I doubt therefore I am’), turns out to be a distant fore-
runner of the phenomenological epoche and Husserl’s project of a
transcendental ‘egology’. For this reason, Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy does not entirely succeed in abandoning the foundationalist
terrain of modern metaphysics. Despite his critique of objectiv-
ist foundationalism, Husserl does not manage to deconstruct the
other side of the foundationalist double-current: subjectivism. Of
course, our line of reasoning has moved away from Husserl’s cri-
tique of objectivism in so far as it is not any longer concerned
with rehabilitating the instance of transcendental subjectivity as
opposed to objectivist scientism. From a discourse theoretical per-
spective, what disappears together with the idea of social objectiv-
ity is the possibility of an egological alternative to objectivism as it
was defended by Husserl and his pupils in social phenomenology,
such as Alfred Schütz.

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4. It should be added, however, that it is not every logical alternative

that is excluded in the moment of original institution; it is the set of
historically available and actually articulated alternatives: ‘rejected
alternatives do not mean everything that is logically possible, but
those alternatives which were in fact attempted, which thus repre-
sented antagonistic alternatives’ (NR 34).
5. This at the same time implies that every ‘original’ institution will
necessarily be somewhat less than original, as it will occur within
a context of already sedimented practices. Just as the moment of
the last instance, for Louis Althusser, never arrives, for Laclau noth-
ing can be traced back to a primordial ‘original institution’. Every
first institution has already begun as a secondary institution, or, to
put it in Husserl’s terminology: every ‘absolute original institution’
(absolute Urstiftung) presents itself to us as a ‘relative original insti-
tution’ (relative Urstiftung) (Husserl 1993: 421). This implies that
the so-called original institution will never serve as a firm ground of
the social, it can never be reached as such, and is only present in its
effects: the sedimented layers of the social.
6. Within the field of the discursive – the order of differences – there
will never be a return of exactly the same differential position, since
every iteration, as Derrida puts it, will be characterised by aberra-
tions and displacements of the very element iterated.
7. At the end of the day it is, of course, impossible to fully spatialise
time: in such a case the social would be ossified into a self-enclosed
totality; everything would be reduced to pure repetition, all social
practices would be fully institutionalised, leaving no room for varia-
tion or innovation. The dimension of temporality would have dis-
appeared. If it is impossible to overcome temporality completely,
if the event cannot be fully spatialised, the plausibility of the idea
of fully established social structures or institutions starts to vanish.
With these considerations we return full circle to Husserl’s critique
of objectivism. An entirely objectivised social space would simply
amount to a space governed by repetitive practices only; as Laclau
puts it: ‘If society had an ultimate objectivity, then social practices,
even the most innovative ones, would essentially be repetitive: they
would only be the explication or reiteration of something that was
there from the beginning’ (NR 183–4).
8. See Massey (1992); Howarth (1993); Reid (1994); Miles (1997);
Marchart (2014). See also Glasze (2007, 2009); Glasze and Mattissek
(2009); Stavrakakis (2008); Roskamm (2017).

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Notes

9. This seems to be exactly what follows for spatial theory from an

ontology of antagonism: a given spatial topography does not man-
age to fully constitute itself as space because it is traversed by its
antagonistic limits and therefore will always be dislocated. Thus,
temporality will be a necessary outcome of any process of building a
particular social topography – simply because the very construction
of such topography relies on the construction of a limit which can
only be drawn in a more or less antagonistic fashion as it relies on
an outside of pure negativity.
10. How did this impression come about? Laclau himself was not
entirely clear on the topic, which might partly account for the
misunderstanding. Take the following passage. Social relations, in
Laclau’s words, ‘are constituted by the very distinction between the
social and the political’. And he continues by saying that ‘[t]he dis-
tinction between the social and the political is thus ontologically
constitutive of social relations’ (NR 35; as to the difference between
politics, the political and police see also Dikeç 2005, 2007; and more
critically with respect to Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of the political
Featherstone 2008). As a matter of fact, the term ‘distinction’ is a
misnomer given the Heideggerian underpinnings of his theory. It is
obvious that Laclau wants to stress that there can be no complete
overlapping between the social and the political. However, in terms
of the ontological difference the grounding question does not aim at
the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (which would
be the classical metaphysical way of framing the ontological differ-
ence) but at their difference as difference. So while it is correct to
claim that on the one hand there can clearly be no total overlapping
between the social and the political, on the other hand, there is con-
stant intertwining. Some of the misunderstandings of earlier debates
between critical geography and discourse theory, I suppose, had to
do with the fact that these philosophical underpinnings of discourse
theory have not been recognised.
11. In this respect, our ontology of the political, i.e. of antagonism, has
little to do with what is often called ‘social ontologies’ (think of
Bruno Latour’s actant-rhizome ontology or the ‘ontological turn’ in
anthropology). If anything, it is an ontology of the social conceived
as political.
12. Nor will the moment of the political be a singularly rare event (as
in the case of revolutions), but it will happen constantly in different
degrees. As we are never entirely oblivious to the antagonistic nature

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Thinking Antagonism

of our life-world, space is always to some degree already dislocated

(temporalised). Space is constantly ‘on the move’, every topography
is constantly done and undone, as Massey rightly claims.
13. Of course, let this be said from the outset, Nancy’s reading of Hegel
is not a faithful interpretation, but rather a kind of wishful misread-
ing. It gives us a Hegelianism that is utterly cleared of Hegel’s pan-
logism. This Hegelianism on the one hand takes a philological route
that is far too simple, but on the other hand, it at least creates an
image of what a micrological theory of radical negativity might look
like today.
14. Philosophical phenomenology has addressed politics and the politi-
cal with more intensity. Compare, for example, Marc Richir’s large-
scale attempt, in particular the concluding part on the ‘abyss of
political foundation’ (Richir 1991: 437–81).
15. Even though antagonism, in the mode of a virtuous circle, is pro-
duced ‘ontically’ by way of political practice, as defined in Chapter
8 as the negation of the given.
16. Again, in this insistence on an a-subjective force of antagonism,
the post-foundational ontology of the political follows Heidegger’s
rejection of epistemology. After all, such ontology is not looking for
an epistemological or even cognitivistic interpretation of negativity.
It is not looking for the endless rehearsal of classical epistemological
questions, neither does it want to pass the issues on to brain research
(as if it were possible to locate a region of the brain that is respon-
sible for antagonistic negation). Negativity is not the way in which
our brain perceives the world, it is the way in which the society con-
structs and destructs itself. We are therefore not playing a language
game of epistemology or, more currently, cognition science, but of
ontology.
17. Hence, for example, the feeling of outrage and the affect of outrage
are miles apart.
18. How else could we explain the strange phenomenon that despite the
electronic media of communication, we still occupy physical spaces?
That even political systems can collapse, only because a few bodies
assembled on a public space or stormed a government building? If
the media of communication play a role in such places, then they do
so not least because they can pass on the affects of the bodies at the
location to those bodies that are at their TV or computer screens.
They make it possible for the enthusiasm of the protesters to infect
quite physically an audience that is spatially removed. However, an
assembly on location remains indispensable.

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Notes

Chapter 5
1. It thereby refers the reader back to Laclau’s theory of New Social
Movements developed together with Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy. Even as at first sight, the connection between
Laclau’s work on populist movements and Laclau and Mouffe’s discus-
sion of New Social Movements may not be obvious, Latin-American
populism always had more to do with what in the 1970s and 1980s
came to be called New Social Movements – defined by their strong
reliance on cultural factors in the process of political identity-building
(Melucci 1989; Touraine 1981) – than with the traditional party poli-
tics of exclusively class-based movements.
2. This concept is considered the key term, not only in post-foundational
discourse theory, but also in Cultural Studies where it has a history
that reaches back to the late 1970s (see Slack 1996). It should be
added that, despite some earlier reservations, in the later work of
Stuart Hall (1997) the concept of the cultural tends to become co-
extensive with the concept of the discursive in Laclau’s sense, which
is not that surprising since the cultural has often been defined, in the
Birmingham tradition, as that dimension of the social where social
meaning is produced, reproduced, altered and challenged.
3. It is understandable, given the background of Cultural Studies’
emancipation from orthodox versions of Marxist determinism, that
exactly the contingent nature of cultural identities was emphasised
by one of the main proponents of British Cultural Studies.
4. There is nothing particularly post-structuralist to this insight (which
is one of the reasons why it is preferable to use the broader qualifier
post-foundational). Already in Antonio Gramsci’s initial formulation
of hegemony theory, Gramsci is aware of this fact – without being
a post-structuralist, obviously. When he speaks about hegemony as
the construction of what he calls a ‘political will’ or ‘common or
collective will’, Gramsci does not take this political will – which is
absolutely indispensable for any hegemonic project – to be the source
of a hegemonic effort; rather, the political will is precisely what has
to be constructed, it is the desired outcome of the articulation of a
hegemonic project.
5. Despite Cultural Studies’ self-understanding as a political project
and despite an eminently political research focus on culture, Cultural
Studies has not yet managed to develop a fully convincing theory of
political protest. In fact, apart from a handful of studies (compare
Hall 1988; Hall et al. 1978; Grossberg 1992) which have assumed

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Thinking Antagonism

quasi-canonical status in the field, it would be hard to register any

significant wider engagement with macro-political questions – that
is, with questions concerning political mobilisation and the construc-
tion of hegemonic formations on a larger scale. There have been
some exceptions to the rule which, however, have not yet managed
to establish a wider dialogue between Cultural Studies and political
science (see particularly Street 1997; Finlayson and Martin 1997;
Dean 2000; Bowman 2007).
6. It goes without saying that populism here is understood in the political
sense of Laclau, not in the critical sense given to ‘cultural populism’ by
McGuigan (1992).
7. Interestingly, the denigration of populism went hand in hand with
a forgetting of one of the founding moments for the history of
Cultural Studies: Peronism. It is not without justification that the
Latin-Americanist Jon Beasley-Murray (1998: 191) speaks about
‘the secret (unheralded, unofficial) history of cultural studies’,
which ‘necessarily passes through the figures of Juan and Evita
Perón and the thirty-year political movement they inaugurated’
(193). In his symptomatological reading, which, as I see it, sup-
ports our previous argument as to the secret disavowal of populism
in much of Cultural Studies, he argues that ‘the cultural stud-
ies tradition has been elaborated around a populist anxiety that
is at times repressed, at times more or less expressed but hardly
theorised: that cultural studies’ development and expansion has
coincided with – and is both symptom and reaction to – an era
of populism in Britain and the United States’ (197). And, as he
continues, ‘[m]apping the secret history of cultural studies via this
detour through Laclau, Latin America, and Peronism does more
than add merely a more nuanced and less parochially Anglophone
element to the founding fictions of cultural studies; it also restores
to cultural studies its full political investment in social theory and
questions of strategy and organization’ (199).
8. One can suspect that their negligence regarding the difference
between politics and the political – which is of categorical and not
only gradual nature – has to do with their allegiance to a certain
objectivism that is hard to eradicate in the social sciences.
9. From the perspective of a theory of social protest, a potentially fruit-
ful further differentiation issues from Laclau’s distinction – analo-
gous to the concepts of request and demand respectively – between
democratic demand and popular demand. While the former tends
towards a logic of difference, the latter mainly functions according

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Notes

to a logic of equivalence. Hence, ‘[t]he first can be accommodated

within an expanding hegemonic formation; the second presents a
challenge to the hegemonic formation as such’ (PR 82). Along the
same lines it becomes possible for the study of protest movements
to differentiate between forms of tendentially ‘democratic protest’
and those of tendentially ‘popular protest’ where the former exhibit
a low degree of antagonisation due to the defence of merely corpo-
rate or sectorial interests, while the latter aim at a much wider alli-
ance of struggles directed against, for instance, the ‘power bloc’ as
such. It should be noted that there is no value claim involved here:
‘democratic’ simply means, in Laclau’s terminology, differentially
articulated (while ‘popular’ means equivalentially articulated) and
has nothing to do with democracy as a political regime.
10. The same must be said with respect to the classical subcultural stud-
ies approach and a certain reluctance or inability to theorise the
counter-cultural function of protest formations. As long as subcul-
tures are supposed to remain on the level of ‘symbolic resistance’ or
‘resistance through rituals’, they will remain within the sphere of
micro-politics. Only when these rituals enter a chain of equivalence
do they become politicised. Hence, to restrict the analysis to matters
of ‘style’ and ‘aesthetics’ rather than political mobilisation will nec-
essarily lead to a depoliticised account of subcultures.

Chapter 6

1. The more dislocated a given society, the more jumping-off points

for political protest. In this respect, protests appear to emerge every-
where – which is the reason why we are living in ‘protest societies’
or ‘social movement societies’ as some sociologists claim (see Meyer
and Tarrow 1998; Rucht and Neidhart 2002).
2. We have argued in Chapter 4 that what is usually called micro-politics
has nothing to do with politics, but tends to describe those reverbera-
tions of the political that make the social tremble.
3. Let me stress once again that I am not denying that the echo of the
political (of the political institutions of the social) pervades even all
the way into our hospitals’ maternity wards. The social is the echo
chamber of the political, but it is not in itself politics.
4. The whole quote, which is crucial, reads as follows: ‘The Desire
for Recognition which provokes the Fight is the desire for a desire
– that is, for something that does not exist really (since Desire is

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Thinking Antagonism

the “manifest” presence of the absence of a reality): to want to be

“recognized” is to want to be accepted as a positive “value” – that
is, precisely speaking, to cause oneself to be “desired.” To want to
risk one’s life, which is the whole reality of a living being, in favor
of something that does not exist and cannot exist as inert or merely
living real things exist – this, then, is indeed to negate the given
which one is oneself, this is to be free or independent of it. Now, to
negate oneself, in this full sense, and nevertheless to preserve one-
self in existence, is indeed to create oneself as new and therefore to
exist as created by oneself – that is, as free or autonomous’ (Kojève
1980: 225–6).
5. Lacan criticises Hegel (and whenever he says Hegel he means Kojève)
for not integrating the Symbolic into the framework of the dialectics
of recognition, thus remaining within the impasse of the Imaginary.
While Lacan also uses the Kojèvian dialectics as a model for the dia-
lectics of the Imaginary (where the other is written with a small o),
Lacan’s capitalisation of the Kojèvian Imaginary other into the Other
(of the Symbolic) can be seen as a way out of that impasse.
6. This concurs with our thesis that minimal politics aims to maximise
politics.
7. It is apparent that this game is exposed to the danger of circularity,
except that it is not a danger but a necessary implication of the model
of political difference (Marchart 2007a): Politics and the political can
only emerge from each other, yet there remains that minimal differ-
ence of non-concurrence that precludes coming full circle and blocks
every deductive thought. Hence the inevitability of political judge-
ment as the virtue that is absolutely necessary to achieve plausible
articulation on both sides of the difference.
8. And vice versa: every – initially – successful grounding causes a new
degrounding, as, in Laclau’s words, older sediments of the social are
dislocated by new institutions and in turn set off alternative efforts
at institution.

Chapter 7

1. I went so far as proposing that all social being, to the extent to which
it is constantly grounded and ungrounded by an outside instance of
radical negativity, is nothing other than the political in a different
mode, i.e. in the aggregate state of social sedimentation.

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Notes

2. In contrast to epistemology, to remind us of what was said in

Chapter 1, ontological claims are not launched from the position
of presumably detached, outer-worldly mind. They are enacted
within a social world defined, in its entirety, by the political. In
this enlarged sense of the political, rather than politics, a practice
of ontological questioning is always already imbued with a ‘weak’
political force. It is inscribed, and inscribes itself, into social rela-
tions which, in the last instance, are grounded in the political
moment of institution.
3. This move from inhabiting to enacting is congruent with a left-
Heideggerian ontology of the political: inhabiting, as understood
here, is but the political version of what Heidegger, in an entirely
unpolitical way, called ‘dwelling’.
4. This is not to say that being can or should be named in any way. The
name of being will always be debated and any particular proposal
will encounter resistance.
5. For clarification it should be remarked that within the Laclauian
framework any positive difference within a system of differences can
be considered ‘conceptual’. This implies that concepts are not neces-
sarily ideational items, but descriptive features – or, in yet another
paradigm, systemic functions – are also conceptual to the extent
to which they operate within a system of differences (as far as, for
instance, the societal function of the political system can be differ-
entiated from the respective functions of the economic system, the
educational system, etc.).
6. To void confusion with mystical vacuity, it should be stressed that
the empty signifier is not a ‘pure’ signifier or ‘signifier without signi-
fied’ (as Heidegger sometimes seems to forget, ontological being is
never untainted by the ontic). The latter notion, for Laclau, would
be self-defeating, since a signifier without any signified could only
produce noise and the process of signification would break down
completely. Consequently, the empty signifier is not located outside
the realm of signification, but ‘is a place, within the system of signifi-
cation which is constitutively irrepresentable; in that sense it remains
empty, but this is an emptiness which I can signify, because we are
dealing with a void within signification’ (PR 105). Put differently,
there will always be a remainder of signifieds, there will be traces
of a particular content, and hence the empty signifier will always
only be tendentially empty: the longer the chain of equivalence, the
‘emptier’ the signifier that serves as a nodal point for this chain.

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Thinking Antagonism

And the longer the chain of equivalences, the more we move from
the conceptual order to the nominal order. See also Laclau’s own
engagement with the mystical tradition in his article ‘On the Names
of God’ (RFS 37–51; see also RFS 26–30).
7. A perhaps surprising consequence of this political theory of nam-
ing could be that, in the strict sense, a personal name might not be
regarded as a name from the perspective of political ontology. There
are exceptional cases, though, when, as in revolutionary times, chil-
dren are given the names of heroes of the revolution. In cases like
these, the name is inscribed into a revolutionary chain of equiva-
lence against the Ancien Régime and therefore functions to signify
unity against an outside threat. In most cases, however, personal
names belong to the sedimented realm of differences, where they
are indeed semantically overdetermined (they are associated with a
particular culture, region, language, gender or social class), i.e. they
do signify, but their originally political meaning is largely forgotten
and becomes only reactivated in moments of conflict, ethnic war for
instance, when personal names are experienced as markers of group
affiliation.
8. Admittedly, a name of this scope will go beyond the horizon of
most rival political ontologies and will be difficult to accommo-
date within the conceptual order of a scientific discipline. It may
even sound, from the strictly ‘scientific’ perspective, like utter
nonsense – which should not surprise us, given that emptying
a signifier of its signifieds can only result in nonsense. Meaning
production is interrupted. What we are looking for, however,
is a form of regulated ‘nonsense’ that results from a reflective
intervention into the conceptual field, whereby a certain degree
of conceptual content is retained, as will be explained presently.
While antagonism is an empty signifier to some degree, it is also
a concept to some degree.
9. It goes without saying that Laclau, of course, does not abandon the
conceptual order of theory. The point of the matter is that, apart
from his theoretical work, which to a significant degree – simply
by being theoretical – remains within the conceptual order, Laclau’s
theory of naming, when applied to his own theoretical intervention,
allows us to exactly determine the moment of antagonism (of equiv-
alence) in his own work. It consists in the reflective intervention of
moving populism to the centre of political theory. Laclau is, first and
foremost, the thinker of populism.

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Notes

10. A more careful reading of epistemologists along the lines of

Heidegger’s engagement with Kant would show, however, that it
is impossible to completely bypass ontological questions.
11. As a reflective intervention that will transform philosophy into a
practice of ‘thinking’ that is both ‘more’ than philosophy and ‘less’
than philosophy, political ontology may well assume the status of a
prima philosophia vis-à-vis other philosophical sub-disciplines (see
Marchart 2007a: 162–9; 2013a: 245–88).
12. Since the dualism between ego and world remains ultimately
unbridgeable, this goal can only be attained, of course, via the bridg-
ing vertical connection to ‘God’, the foundation of the foundation,
so to speak – confirming Heidegger’s notion that every metaphysics
is onto-theology.
13. See the political diagram of powers in the Netherlands during
Spinoza’s time in Balibar (2008a: 22); on Balibar’s own differen-
tiation between la and le politique at the hands of Spinozism see
Balibar (1993).
14. The only systematic attempt to this effect that I am aware of was
made by the French Suárez specialist Jean-Paul Coujou (2006).
Unfortunately, there is no scope for a detailed discussion of this
effort here.
15. Any historically more specific delineation of ontology would
thwart the ahistorical Heideggerian division of occidental his-
tory into a small number of great eras. On the Heideggerian Left,
Reiner Schürmann’s otherwise magnificent study of the history of
Western philosophy Broken Hegemonies (2003) has the one fault
that it follows Heidegger in the division of history into great eras –
Schürmann established the Greek, the Latin and the modern eras.
In contrast to Heidegger, Schürmann at least provides a historico-
political index to his theory of stages. The eras each have an atten-
dant hegemonic fantasm – in Laclau’s theory of hegemony, one
would speak of an imaginary horizon – which allows a given cul-
ture ‘to say what is’, i.e. to classify the world and divide power:
‘A fantasm is hegemonic when an entire culture relies on it as if it
provided that in the name of which one speaks and acts’ (Schür-
mann 2003: 7). The history of such fantasms is thus, he argues,
the history of ultimate points of reference or standards (Laclau
would probably speak of empty signifiers here), which have no
proper being beyond their relational function of reference and are
therefore literally ‘nothing’: non-res. In the history of philosophy,

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Thinking Antagonism

these points of reference are principles and foundations which do

not appear in the realm of all being and yet – or because of this
– have an ultimate authority. It has traditionally been the task of
philosophy to secure the delivery of such sovereign signifiers. With
great precision, Schürmann traces the self-deconstruction of the
hegemonic fantasms he found in the history of philosophy and in
doing so confirms that hegemonic formations are never monolithic
systems of suppression, but that all hegemonies have indeed for
ever been ‘broken’, that is to say, in the process of breaking apart.
This insight is characteristic for a post-foundational understand-
ing of politics. Yet, Schürmann keeps his sights firmly set on the
longue durée and only three grand paradigms. Even if we accept
that metaphysical points of reference can certainly be of a long-
lived nature, we must ask for the origins of their durability. An
explanation that is exclusively immanent in philosophy – ‘inner
plausibility’, for instance – would obviously not suffice. This rea-
son could more likely lie within the scope of what Negri described
as the ‘implicit political dispositif’ of a given ontology. It lingers
in a political project that is able to implicitly formulate an ontol-
ogy in the field of philosophy and guarantee its connectivity with
the conditions of the hegemonic situation, i.e. the social struggles,
of its time. One might assume that this political dispositive of an
ontology continues to exist as long as it is an inseparable part of
the hegemonic formations of a given society – or provides a symp-
tomatic marker of its crisis. We will return to Schürmann in the
next chapter.

Chapter 8

1. In fact, reversing the order of priority is absolutely congruent with the

reversible nature of the political difference. It was claimed through-
out our study that politics should be seen as an attempt at instantiat-
ing the political (which, eo ipso, remains absent). The political, far
from serving as a stable ground, re-emerges from its aggregate state
of social routines only by way of politics as the practice of activating
dormant antagonisms. The social, in turn, is also made of a par-
ticular kind of practices, but these are iterative practices by which a
given set of differences is kept in place, while, to stick to Laclauian
terminology, political action involves the articulation of differences
into a chain of equivalence.

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Notes

2. Schürmann points out that such a reversal goes against the grain of
the metaphysical tradition of Western foundationalism and, there-
fore, is ‘more than a simple inversion of the relationship between
being and acting; it is the subversion of that classical relation, its
overturn (vertere) from the base (sub-)’ (Schürmann 1990: 7).
3. It should be noted that Schürmann is not alone in pointing out the
practical nature of being. A ‘praxeological’ turn has always been
an option in the tradition of left Heideggerianism and was promi-
nently defended, for instance, by philosophers associated with the
Yugoslavian Praxis Group, most prominently by Gajo Petrović.
4. A certain aloofness characteristic of Heidegger’s notion of ‘being’
thereby reflects in his notions of acting and thinking.
5. This is the reason why I have insisted on the notion of ‘differentialised
negativity’ rather than simply equating negativity with theoretical
tropes of difference as is the tendency in Diana Coole’s otherwise
impressive study on ‘Negativity and Politics’ (Coole 2000).
6. To the banal juxtaposition of materialism and idealism, i.e. to
a ‘struggle’ of two trends allegedly present throughout the his-
tory of philosophy, one must object that neither is materialism
per se progressive, nor is idealism per se bourgeois in the sense of
‘reactionary’. Their political spin depends on their given hege-
monic articulation with political positions outside of the field of
philosophy (which are also, of course, represented within the field
of philosophy).
7. Political action, in other words, is a deeply metaphysical enterprise
based on the foundationalist working assumption that the social can
be provided with a stable ground by a political subject – for other-
wise there would be no action to start with. Only democratic politics
may at the same time encourage us to accept the ultimately ground-
less nature of the social.
8. To specify: I negate because (a) my being is negated, and (b) my
pre-political requests emerging from that dislocation remain
frustrated.
9. Here we can see the difference with regard to a strategy of popu-
list mobilisation. In the latter case, ‘the power bloc’ may also be
portrayed as a homogeneous entity, yet in many cases it will have
a determinable content such as the governing party, the ruling elite,
etc. The moment when populists start portraying the power bloc in
terms of an all-powerful entity, their discourse moves from the polit-
ical terrain to the phantasmatic (to conspiracy theories, for instance,
such as a world-wide Jewish network).

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Conclusion

1. If examples are needed: antagonism is experienced, in its aggre-

gate state of relations of subordination, in moments when women,
migrants or workers may encounter institutional ‘glass ceilings’ or
get the impression of ‘being stuck’ socially. In moments like these,
the social world appears to us, not as a smooth and plain space, but
as an uneven and slippery terrain full of traps and institutionalised
obstacles. But, as soon as these sedimented relations of subordina-
tion become reactivated by an emergent antagonism, the pre-political
experience of subordination will be transformed into a politicised
experience of oppression. A process of politicisation begins where
negativity is being experienced as such – unmediated, as it were, by
social institutions and routines.

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254

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Index

Abensour, M., 71, 183, 201 Bush, G. W., 161

Adorno, T., 32, 47–8, 100, Butler, J., 14, 219n, 221n
102
Agamben, G., 77, 147 Certeau, M. de, 132, 141
Althusser, L., 2, 41, 47–8, Clausewitz, C., 66f, 70
192–4, 197, 223n, Connolly, W., 8f, 74, 219–20n,
228n 224n
Arendt, H., 13, 53, 74 Coole, D., 239n
Aristotle, 76, 130, 142, 151 Coujou, J. P., 237n
Aron, R., 53 Critchley, S., 214

Badiou, A., 13, 83, 138, Dallmayr, F. R., 58–60

160–1, 202, 219–20n Della Volpe, G., 41
Balibar, É., 4, 13, 34, 176–7, Deleuze, G., 4, 19, 52,
204, 237n 105, 133, 135, 147,
Barthes, R., 21 160, 177, 200–1,
Bataille, G., 53 219n
Beasley-Murray, J., 232n Derrida, J., 23, 42, 52, 94,
Berger, P., 87 145, 171, 176, 221n,
Berkeley, G., 219n 228n
Bismarck, O., 132 Descartes, R., 34, 45, 174–6,
Bourdieu, P., 39, 48, 101, 219n, 227n
222n Dreyfus, H., 224–5n
Braver, L., 11
Breton, A., 53 Enden, F., van den, 198
Buck-Morss, S., 11 Esposito, R., 220n

255

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Thinking Antagonism

Fiske, J., 124–5 173, 178, 185–8, 195–6,

Foucault, M., 4, 9f, 31, 40, 199, 219–20n, 222n,
63–71, 99–101, 104f, 224–6n, 229–30n, 235n,
139, 159, 176, 203, 237n, 239n
219–20n, 224–5n Heine, H., 50
Freud, S., 95, 143, 148 Hobsbawm, E., 2
Hölderlin, F., 50
Gadamer, H.–G., 27 Honig, B., 74
Galileo, 90 Husserl, E., 27, 88, 90–1, 93,
Gill, S., 201 98, 227–8n
Gramsci, A., 2, 16f, 19, 28, Hyppolite, J., 53
112, 119–20, 122, 128,
130, 132, 136, 139–42,
146–7, 152, 159, 178–9, Kant, I., 3, 9, 31, 41, 49–51,
191–4, 199, 201, 209–10, 60, 63–4, 109, 145,
224n, 231n 168, 193, 219n, 223n,
Guattari, F., 133, 135 237n
Kaprow, A., 185
Habermas, J., 11 Kateb, G., 219n
Hall, S., 22, 111, 119–21, Kojève, A., 1, 53–4, 144,
216, 231n 187–8, 197, 234n
Hardt, M., 83, 147 Kompridis, N., 203
Harney, S., 189 Koselleck, R., 81
Hebdige, D., 120–1 Kraniauskas, J., 221–2n
Hegel, G., 31, 34, 40–2, Kripke, S., 161–2
46–53, 55, 100–3, 105, Kuhn, T., 170
144, 168, 186–8, 200,
207, 219n, 223n, Lacan, J., 1, 18, 24, 26, 28,
230n, 234n 43f, 53, 65, 105, 139,
Heidegger, 1, 4–5, 9–11, 143f, 147, 149, 161, 163,
13–5, 18, 26–7, 30–1, 219n, 223n, 234n
34, 41, 47f, 51–7, 60, 62, Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 13
70–1, 87–8, 97, 137, 142, Latour, B., 229n
146, 151, 158–9, 165–6, Lazzarato, M., 147

256

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Index

Lefort, C., 5, 13, 74, 133–5, Nietzsche, F., 66–7, 146f,

153–4 154, 176, 180, 200–1,
Lenin, W., 138–9, 143, 192 209, 225n
Leonardo, 210–3 Novalis, 50
Loraux, N., 31, 63–5, 77–80,
83 Perón, E., 232n
Louis XIV, 68 Perón, J., 232n
Luckmann, T., 87 Petrović, G., 239n
Lyotard, J., 13 Plato, 52, 55, 74, 78–9

McGuigan, J., 232n Queneau, R., 53

Machiavelli, N., 74, 76, 130,
135, 141–2, 147, 151, Ramos, J., 2
176, 198, 201, 210 Rancière, J., 13, 71, 75, 145,
Mao, 32 183, 201, 220n
Marx, K., 3, 31, 37–40, 43–8, Ricœur, P., 13
66, 70, 100–1, 168, 176, Rogozinski, J., 13
187, 219n, 220n, 224n, Rousseau, J.–J., 225n
225n Rubin, J., 127, 129
Meiksins Wood, E., 178 Russell, B., 161
Melville, H., 147
Merleau-Ponty, M., 53 Sartre, J. P., 1, 54, 59, 143,
Moten, F., 189 145, 223n
Mouffe, C., 1, 6, 16–7, 24, Saussure, F. de, 20, 110,
30, 40, 42, 47, 57–60, 116
64, 74–5, 82, 122–4, 142, Schlegel, F, 50
152, 210, 213, 220n, Schmitt, C., 13, 40, 63,
229n, 231n 164
Musil, R., 203 Schürmann, R., 34, 56,
71f, 183–4, 186f,
Nancy, J., 13, 84, 102f, 105–6, 237–9n
207, 219–20n, 230n Schütz, A., 227n
Negri, A., 4, 34, 83, 147, Schwabowski, G., 148–9
174–8, 219n, 238n Simondon, G., 226n

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Thinking Antagonism

Spinoza, B., 34, 174, Vattimo, G., 8, 181, 219n

176–7, 198, 219n, Vernant, J.–P., 78
237n
Stiegler, B., 31, 63–5, 71–7, Weil, E., 53
183, 225–6n White, S. K., 219n
Swinton, J., 37–40, 220n Wittgenstein, L., 27
Wolff, C., 219n

Tassin, E., 74 Zac, L., 56–8

Taylor, C., 9, 219n Žižek, S., 2, 30, 43, 48,
Thierry, A., 68, 70 138–40, 145, 161, 163,
Trump, D., 132 219n, 221n

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