Things are. Philosophy is constitutively ill equipped to own up to this fact, which is both banal and singularly inexplicable.

This is because it is a very particular kind of fact. Specifically, it is not the kind of fact that can be represented, not the kind of fact that we can know.

Yet this is not because it is ineffably ‘beyond language’. It is because our relation to it goes deeper than representation and knowing, because this very particular fact makes a particular kind of claim on us.

This claim is political in a fundamental sense. It bears on our being in common, as we share exposure to it.

In this book I define ‘political ontology’ as the clarification of the problems outlined in the above eight sentences. I demonstrate what such a practice of thought would entail via critical readings of a set of modern philosophers – Heidegger, Levinas, Benjamin, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein – all of whom, I work to show, deal with their consequences. Running alongside these readings, and the primary motivation for them, is a concern with presenting a defence and development of the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.