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 metaphysics weighs heavily on their shoulders. The main remainder of metaphysical thinking within the social sciences is social objectivism: the metaphysical assumption of ‘social facts’ as objectively given. In his theory of populism, as we will see in the next chapter, 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 objective 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 constructionism à la Berger and Luckmann, for instance, amounts to no more than an anti-foundationalist mirror image of social objectivism. 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.

We will now start exploring some of the implications of the ontological approach elaborated so far. In Part I, I have concentrated 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 theorisation. Otherwise it could appear as if the conceptual innovation of the political had displaced its complementary partner, politics.