Roberto Esposito - Instituting Thought

This perspective is not fully convincing, not only because it makes reference to a weak ontology, 2but also because it takes a very heterogeneous group of philosophers back to the same paradigm. While Marchart does reconstruct their different itineraries, pointing out semantic and conceptual dissimilarities, he does so within a single horizon. A problem of this kind – also present in Carsten Strathausen’s book on neo-ontology, 3where he assembles a series of thinkers who share an overcoming of Marxian and post-Marxian dialectics but do not really have much in common – is instead absent in Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen’s research on political ontology. They divide the thinkers included in Radical Democracy into the opposed categories of lack and abundance: “two different versions of radical democracy follow from this: one that emphasizes the hegemonic nature of politics, and another that cultivates a strategy of pluralization.” 4The former, generally thinkers with a Lacanian background, like Laclau for instance, think of the political starting from a constitutive lack, and institutionalize it as an absent foundation. Not only democracy, but also the hegemonic alternatives that succeed one another within it are always internally destabilized by a lack of substance that renders them structurally incomplete and impermanent. On the other hand, the ontologies of abundance, in which one can easily recognize Deleuze’s profile and that of nomadic thinkers, create ever new networks of materiality, flow, and energy. The sign of some sort of lack transpires in their case too, but it is always filled by new differences, which succeed one another in a potentially infinite becoming. In this game of mutually reflecting mirrors, there seem to be two political theologies that face each other, counterposed and complementary, one negative, the other positive. For one – one could say – there is nothing within being, for the other, nothing external to being.

1 1 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 2.

2 2 Cf. also Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of a Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

3 3 Carsten Strathausen, “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology,” Postmodern Culture 16.3 (2006): 1–38.

4 4 Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). For the bipolarity between theories of emptiness and theories of fullness, see also Laura Bazzicalupo, “Radicalizzare la democrazia: Produttività politica del vuoto o pienezza ontologica,” in Almanacco di Filosofia e Politica, ed. Roberto Esposito, vol. 1: Crisi dell’immanenza: Potere, conflitto, istituzione, ed. Mattia Di Pierro and Francesco Marchesi (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), pp. 75–92, here p. 7.

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