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Politics
Bruno Bosteels
Which imbecile spoke of an ontology of the revolt? ()
The revolt is less in need of a metaphysics than
metaphysicians are in need of a revolt.
Raoul Vaneigem, Trait de savoir-vivre
lusage des jeunes gnrations
1
Faced with the ubiquitous return of the question of being in the field of political thought
today, put into relief most eloquently by the present collection of essays, I am tempted to repeat
Theodor W. Adornos gesture when in Part One of his Negative Dialectics, as he himself
explains, ontology is understood and immanently criticized out of the need for it, which is a
problem of its own.1 In keeping with this model, I too would want to ask in what way the
answers of the ontological turn in self-anointed leftist circles today may be the recoil of the
unfolded, transparent question, and to what extent these answers also meet an emphatic need, a
sign of something missed, even if it does not, or no longer, correspond to what Adorno sees as
a longing that Kants verdict on a knowledge of the Absolute should not be the end of the
matter.2 We need not stoop to the level of Adornos blunt and for this reason often ill-understood
attacks on the new fundamental ontologies in Germany, Martin Heideggers in particular, to raise
again the question about the need for a leftist ontology today. This would mean asking not only:
What are the uses and disadvantages of ontology for politics, and a leftist one to boot? But also:
Where does this politico-ontological need stem from in the first place?
The initial task would consist in outlining the general form or platform in which the
question of being is presented to us today in the context of political thought. As opposed to
Adornos claim, the way this happens is no longerif ever it was the casethrough an appeal to
a supposed substantiality, or to some version or other of the absolute, surreptitiously brought
back to life behind Kants back. In fact, if there is a common presupposition shared by all
present-day political ontologies touched upon in this volume, it is that ontology is not, cannot be,
or must not be a question of substance or the absolute. It presupposes neither the presence of
being nor the identity of being and thinking as a guide for acting. To the contrary, ontology here
is described as spectral, nonidentical, and postfoundational. It tries to come to terms, not with
present beings but with ghosts and phantasms; not with entities or things but with events
whether with events in the plural, or, alternatively, with the singular event of presencing as such,
which should never be confounded with a given present, albeit a past or future one.
Consequently, there can be no determinate politics, not even a democratic or radical-democratic
1
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1990), xx.
See also Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).
2
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 61-63.
Reiner Schrmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans.
Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 9. Schrmann himself,
despite his insistence on a necessary ignorance as to Heideggers question how a political
system, and what kind of one, can at all be coordinated with the technological age, does not fail
to suggest that the experiences of direct democracy, no matter how shortlived, would after all be
most attuned to an economy of being qua event of presencing and expropriating. To use the
words of Roland Vgs in this volume: Democracy, as a particular political formation, is the
only universalizable paradigm because it is capable of turning its own foundational principle
against itself.
4
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 19.
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 29 and 72.
6
Alain Badiou, Thorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 153. For a detailed account of Lacans early
ontological reflections, see Franois Balms, Ce que Lacan dit de ltre (Paris: PUF, 1999).
7
Parmenides, fragment 3. Friedrich Nietzsche in this context can be said to inaugurate the
closure of metaphysics when in a note from 1888, included in The Will to Power, he writes:
Parmenides said, one cannot think of what is not;we are at the opposite extreme, and say
what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), aphorism 539. For a commentary on
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 284-285.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11.
10
Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? (Qu'est-ce que les Lumires?"), in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32-50.
12
See, for instance, Gianni Vattimo, Postmodernity, Technology, Ontology, Nihilism &
Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, & Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McCuaig (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004): The expression is meant to be taken in its most literal sense:
it does not simply indicate, as Foucault thought, a philosophy oriented primarily toward the
consideration of existence and its historicity rather than toward epistemology and logicthat is,
toward what would be called, in Foucaults terminology, an analytic of truth. Rather, ontology
of actuality is used here to mean a discourse that attempts to clarify what Being signifies in the
present situation (3-4). Roberto Esposito, on the other hand, goes so far as to speak of an
ontology of actuality to describe the best of what all Italian philosophy has to offer: If one
considers those Italian authors who are known internationallyfrom Machiavelli to Vico, to
Croce, and to Gramsciwe can assert that all of their reflections are placed at the point of
encounter and tension between history and politics. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition or
for that matter German hermeneutics and French deconstruction, the continual problem for
Italian philosophy has been thinking the relationship with the present day [contemporaneit],
that which Foucault would have called the ontology of actuality, which is to say an
interrogation of the present interpreted in a substantially political key. Thinking above all of Vico
or differently of Gramsci, history and politics have constituted the obligatory point of transition
from which and through which the dimension of thought generally has been constituted in Italy.
See Timothy Campbells interview with Esposito in diacritics 36.2 (2006). As for Fredric
Jameson, we should think of the subtitle to his A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of
the Present (London: Verso, 2002). Another forgotten figure in this context, aside from Italian
weak ontology, is Georg Lukcs, who saw his magnum opus as moving in the direction of an
ontology of social being. See his Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins, 2 vols., ed. Frank
Benseler (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984-1986).
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