Decapitating Hydra: The Ontological Turn

Thinking Antagonism is an exercise in political ontology. It participates 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). 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 historical 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 investigation, 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 language 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 epistemology. Some would go as far as denouncing epistemology – the science concerned with the conditions of possibility of true knowledge – 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 understanding 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.