Abstract
This chapter advances a heterodox reading of ontology that takes inspiration from Heideggerian fundamental ontology and Lacanian psychoanalytical insights about the role of desire and enjoyment in the production of political subjectivities and social order. It reads ontology not as the ground of Being nor as any ‘in the last instance’ material or unobservable structure that grounds a scientific discourse about politics or a fundamental existential outlook on the human condition. Rather, ontology is here understood as the formal non-ground (the void or abyss) of a generative negativity that operates as the condition of possibility/impossibility for the constitution of worldly objects. Such a political ontology emphasises both the impossibility and the necessity of articulating a critical meta-language for a critique of the depoliticised treatment of pluralism in international political thought offered in Chaps. 2–4. As a corollary to a void ontology, this chapter also proposes a phenomenology of the political that rests on a rehabilitation of messianic nihilism.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbott, Mathew. 2014. The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2005. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Althusser, Louis. 1979. For Marx. Trans. B. Brewster. London: Verso.
———. 1994. Ideological State Apparatuses. In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso.
Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press.
———. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 2005. The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Books.
Ashley, K. Richard. 1988. Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2): 227–262.
Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. P. Hallward. London; New York: Verso.
———. 2003. St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2007. Being and Event. London; New York: Continuum.
———. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Trans. Alberto Toscano. New York: Continuum.
Barrett, Michele. 1991. The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Bartelson, Jens. 2009. Visions of World Community. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Beardsworth, Richard. 1996. Derrida and the Political. New York: Routledge.
Bellamy, Elizabeth. 1993. Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political? Diacritics 23(1): 24–38.
Bellamy, Richard. 1999. Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise. London: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007a. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books.
Berlin, Isaiah. 2001. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2002. Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernstein, J. Richard. 2011. Beyond Objectivism and Relativisn: Sciecne, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bhambra, Gurminder. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. London: Palgrave.
Braver, Lee. 2012. Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.
Breckman, Warren. 2013. Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Breton, Stanislas. 2011. A Radical Philosophy of St Paul. Trans. Joseph Ballan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Campbell, David, and Michael Dillon. 1993a. Introduction. In The Political Subject of Violence, eds. D. Campbell and M. Dillon. Manchester, UK; New York, NY: Manchester University Press; St. Martin’s Press.
———. 1993b. Postface: The Political and the Ethical. In The Political Subject of Violence, eds. D. Campbell and M. Dillon. Manchester, UK; New York, NY: Manchester University Press; St. Martin’s Press.
Colebrook, Claire. 2005. Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Connolly, E. William. 1991. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC and New York: Duke University Press.
Cox, Robert. 1981. Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10(2): 126–155.
Dallmayr, Fred. 2010. Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and G.D. Carlson. New York: Routledge.
Devetak, Richard. 1995. The Project of Modernity and International Relations Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 24(1): 27–51.
Dillon, Michael. 1996. Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought. London; New York: Routledge.
Doucet, G. Marc. 1999. Standing Nowhere(?): Navigating the Third Route on the Question of Foundation in International Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28(2): 289–310.
Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London; New York: Verso.
Edkins, Jenny. 1999. Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back in. London: Lynne Rienner.
Epstein, Charlotte. 2011. Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International Politics. European Journal of International Relations 17(2): 327–350.
Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Flathman, E. Richard. 2005. Pluralism and Liberal Democracy. Baltimore, NJ: John Hopkins Press.
Forst, Rainer. 2013. Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Truth and Power. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. C. Gordon, 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester.
Freeden, Michael. 2013. The Politcal Theory of Political Thinking; An Anatomy of Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frosh, Stephen, and Lisa Baraitser. 2008. Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 13: 346–365.
Frye, E.C. 1966. Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. The Journal of Politics 28(4): 818–830.
Galston, A. William. 2002. Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gellner, Ernest. 2003. The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
George, Jim. 1994. Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)introduction to International Relations. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Geuss, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Glynos, Jason. 2000. Thinking the Ethics of the Political in the Context of a Post-foundational World: From an Ethics of Desire to an Ethics of the Drive. Theory & Event 4(4).
Gramsci, Antonio. 1986. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Q. Hoare and N.G. Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 2007. Enlightenment’s Wake. Abingdon: Routledge.
Gunnell, John. 2014. Social Inquiry After Wittgenstein and Kuhn: Leaving Everything as It Is. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Hamati-Ataya, Inanna. 2014. Transcending Objectivism, Subjectivism, and the Knowledge In-Between: The Subject in/of ‘Strong Reflexivity’. Review of International Studies 40(1): 153–175.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Letter on Humanism. Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Collaboration with J. Glenn Gray. In Heidegger, M. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell, 217–265. New York: Harper Collings Publishers.
———. 1994. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, vol 65. Frankfurt am Main: Vitorrio Klostermann.
———. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hennig, Boris. 2008. What Is Formal Ontology. In Applied Ontology. An Introduction, eds. K. Munn and B. Smith. Ontos Verlag: Frankfurt, Germany.
Herzog, Don. 1985. Without Foundation: Justification in Political Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hobson, M. John. 2012. The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoffman, Mark, and J. Nicholas Rengger. 1992. Modernity, Postmodernism and International Relations. In Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, eds. J. Doherty, E. Graham, and M. Malek. Basingstoke and London: MacMillan.
Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
———. 2009. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Honig, Bonnie, and Marc Stears. 2011. The New Realism: From Modus Vivendi to Justice. In Political Philosophy Versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, eds. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, T. Patrick. 2009. A Faulty Solution to a False(ly Characterised) Problem: A Comment on Monteiro and Ruby. International Theory 1(3): 455–465.
———. 2010. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New York: Routledge.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. Trans. J. Barnes. London: Verso.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack. London and New York: Verso.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philip, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1997. Retreating the Political. Trans. S. Sparks. London: Routledge.
Lake, David. 2011. Why “isms” Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to Understanding and Progress. International Studies Quarterly 55(2): 465–480.
Larrain, Jorge. 1979. The Concept of Ideology. London: Hutchinson.
Lassman, Peter. 2011. Pluralism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.
Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
———. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell.
———. 2000. Writing: The Political Test. Trans. David Ames Curtis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Levine, J. Daniel. 2012. Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lichtheim, George. 1967. The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays. New York: Random House.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press.
Mannheim, Karl. 1991. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge.
Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital, vol 1. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1974. The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Mason, Elinor. 2015. Value Pluralism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer edn, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/value-pluralism/
Meier, Heinrich. 1995. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michel, Torsten. 2012. In Heidegger’s Shadow: A Phenomenological Critique of Critical Realism. Review of International Studies 38(1): 209–222.
———. 2013. When One World Is Not Enough: Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry as a Narrative of IR Meta-theory. Millennium: Jounral of International Studies 41(2): 270–289.
Monteiro, P. Nuno, and Ruby G. Keven. 2009. IR and the False Promise of Philosophical Foundations. International Theory 1(1): 15–48.
Morgenthau, Hans. 1971. Thought and Action in Politics. Social Research 38(4): 611–632.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1993. The Return of the Political. London: Verso.
———, ed. 1999. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.
———. 2005. On the Political. New York: Routledge.
Mulhall, Stephen. 2003. Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Oxford: Calrendon Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2008. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham Univerity Press.
Negri, Antonio. 2009. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Neumman, Iver, and Jennifer Welsh. 1991. The Other in European Self-Definition: An Addendum to the Literature on International Society. Review of International Studies 17(4): 327–348.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.
———. 1997. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2001. The Gay Science. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Odysseos, Louisa. 2007. The Subject of Co-existence: Otherness in International Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Onuf, Nicholas. 2013. World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations, reissued edn. London; New York: Routledge.
Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Paipais, Vassilios. 2016. The Promise of Ontology: Nihilism for a Pluralist World. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(1): 64–71.
Palonen, Kari. 2006. The Struggle with Time: A Conceptual History of ‘Politics’ as an Activity. Münster; Hamburg; London: LIT.
———. 2014. Politics and Conceptual Histories: Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives. London: Nomos/Bloomsbury.
Patomäki, Heiki, and Colin Wight. 2000. After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism. International Studies Quarterly 44(2): 213–237.
Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press.
Prozorov, Sergei. 2009. Generic Universalism in World Politics: Beyond International Anarchy and the World State. International Theory 1(2): 215–247.
———. 2012. The Katechon in the Age of Biopolitical Nihilism. Continental Philosophy Review 45(4): 483–503.
———. 2013. What Is the ‘World’ in World Politics? Heidegger, Badiou and Void Universalism. Contemporary Political Theory 12(2): 102–122.
———. 2014a. Ontology and World Politics: Void Universalism I. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2014b. Theory of the Political Subject: Void Universalism II. London and New York: Routledge.
Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1999. Ethic of State and Pluralistic State. In The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe, 195–208. London: Verso.
———. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2008a. Constitutional Theory. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sil, Rudra, and Peter Katzenstein. 2010. Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. London and New York: Palgrave.
Sjolander, T.C., and S.W. Cox. 1994. Beyond Positivism: Critical Reflections on International Relations. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Skinner, Quentin. 1998. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. M. Eldred. London and New York: Verso.
Smith, Steve. 1995. The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory. In International Relations Theory Today, eds. Ken Booth and Steve Smith. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Smith, Steve, Ken Booth, and Marousia Zalewski, eds. 1996. International Theory: Positivism and Beyond. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; New York.
Special Issue. 2002. Pragmatism in International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31(3): 453–690.
Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the Political. London: Routledge.
Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. 2010. A God Over God Versus the Political Over Politics? Schelling, Lefort and the Originary Identity of Theological and Political Form. Ars Disputandi 10(1): 134–149.
Strathausen, Carsten. 2009. Introduction: Thinking Outside In. In A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, ed. Carsten Strathausen. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1975. What Is Political Philosophy? In Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin. Indianapolis: Pegasus.
———. 1996. Notes on Carl Schmitt, the Concept of the Political. In The Concept of the Political, ed. Carl Schmitt. Trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strong, B. Tracy. 2012a. Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Bannister in the Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Symposium: Kratochwil’s “Tartu Lecture” and Its Critics. 2007. Journal of International Relations and Development 10(1).
Taubes, Jacob. 2004. The Political Theology of Paul. Trans. Dana Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tickner, Arlene, and David Blaney, eds. 2013. Claiming the International: Worlding Beyond the West. Abingdon; New York: Routledge.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper and Row.
Tomšič, Samo, and Andreja Zevnik, eds. 2015. Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
Tønder, Lars, and Lasse Thomassen, eds. 2006. Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Toulmin, Stephen. 1992. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vatter, Miguel. 2014. Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom. New York: Fordham University Press.
Venn, Couze. 2000. Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity. London: SAGE.
Viroli, Maurizio. 2002. Republicanism. New York: Hill and Wang.
Walker, R.B.J 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— 2009. After the Globe, Before the World. London: Routledge.
——— 2010. After the Globe, Before the World. London: Routledge.
Weber, Max. 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
———. 2004. The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation, eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Wendt, Alexander. 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenman, Mark. 2013. Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.
White, K. Stephen. 2002. Introduction: Pluralism, Platitudes, and Paradoxes: Fifty Years of Western Political Thought. Political Theory 30(4): 472–481.
Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2003. Relativism, History and the Existence of Values. In The Practice of Value, ed. Joseph Raz, 106–120. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Williams, Caroline. 2001. Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject. London; New York: Athlone Press.
Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zevnik, Andreja. 2016. Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics: Rethinking the Ontology of the Political. London; New York: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
———. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 1994. The Spectre of Ideology. In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso.
———. 1996. Fantasy as Political Category: A Lacanian Approach. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 1: 77–85.
———. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2002. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2003a. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London; New York: Verso.
———. 2007. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London; New York: Verso.
———. 2010. Paul and the Truth Event. In Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, eds. John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
———. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London; New York: Verso.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Paipais, V. (2017). Introduction: Ontology and Depoliticisation in a Pluralist World. In: Political Ontology and International Political Thought. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57069-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57069-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57068-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57069-7
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)