Towards a political ontology of violence: Laclau, Nietzsche and the ontological difference
Abstract
This paper calls for a political ontology of violence addressing violence as a specifically political reality. Through a critical engagement with the “ontological turn” in
political theory and the political ontologies of conflict and violence in Laclau and Marchart, it asks what the notion of the “ontological difference” brings to our
understanding of political violence. By putting the ontological assumptions of political thought in question, this notion offers a critical alternative to the stand-off between
ideal-theoretical/proceduralist and realist/empiricist approaches that dominate mainstream political theory. But it is unclear whether it has resources for a constructive
ontology of antagonism of use for conceptualising political violence. The experiment is therefore to cross-fertilise these political ontologies with a processual post-Nietzschean ontology modelled on the formation of labile, living unities in relations of tension with others, such that political violence erupts when relations of tension descend into total negation.
References
Connolly, William (1995), The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press.
Fritsch, Matthias (2008), “Antagonism and Democratic Citizenship (Schmitt, Mouffe, Derrida)”, in Research in Phenomeology, 38/ (2): 174-197.
Laclau, Ernesto, Mouffe, Chantal (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, Verso.
Laclau, Ernesto, (1996), Emancipation(s), London, Verso.
Laclau, Ernesto (2014), The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, London, Verso.
Marchart, Oliver, (2018), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau, Edinbrgh, Edinburgh University Press.
Rummens, Stephen (2009), “Democracy as Non-Hegemonic Struggle: Disambiguating Chantal Mouffe”s Agonistic Model of Politics”, in Constellations 16/ (3): 377-391.
Siemens, Herman (2012), The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to Deconstruction, in Martinengo, Alberto (2012), Beyond Deconstruction: Rethinking Myth, Reconstructing Reason, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter: 213-233.
Victoroff, J. & Adelman, J. (2012), “Why Do Individuals Resort to Political Violence? Approaches to the Psychology of Terrorism”, in Marie Breen-Smyth, edited by, The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence, London, Routledge.
Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
