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 setting 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 Unionists, 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 conception, 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 (if friend and enemy are understood as objective terms) or by presuming a perpetual war of all against all. Antagonism, as a figure of the incommensurable, opens a perspective onto the deeply conflictual 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.