Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: What is Antagonism?
- 1 ‘What's Going on with Being?’: Laclau and the Return of Political Ontology
- Part I Thinking the Political
- Part II Thinking Politics
- Part III Politicising Thought
- Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics of Intellectual Engagement
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics of Intellectual Engagement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: What is Antagonism?
- 1 ‘What's Going on with Being?’: Laclau and the Return of Political Ontology
- Part I Thinking the Political
- Part II Thinking Politics
- Part III Politicising Thought
- Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics of Intellectual Engagement
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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 antagonism is the name that was proposed for the co-original condition 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 everyday 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 phenomenologically 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 political conflict and social sedimentation. This passage led us, in a Laclauian vein, to the symbolic laws of difference and equivalence – 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, antagonism is a precondition for establishing frontiers within political discourses. But, as I have demonstrated, antagonism is indispensable for the production of any kind of meaning and, ontologically 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.
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- Information
- Thinking AntagonismPolitical Ontology after Laclau, pp. 206 - 217Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018