Actors, Actions, and Their Limits

Abstract

Political theory has long asked who counts as an actor and what constitutes meaningful action. These questions have gained renewed urgency as contemporary crises expose the contingency of categories once taken for granted. This panel interrogates the relationship between political ontology and the conditions of action, asking how assumptions about actors and agency shape what becomes visible, governable, and possible within political orders. Rather than treating the social as a stable background against which politics unfolds, we approach it as a contested domain constituted through classificatory practices, institutional frameworks, and ontological commitments. The papers gathered here explore how political orders produce and police the boundaries of legitimate action and recognized actorhood—boundaries that concern both who is recognized as a political subject and what entities or relations can bear political significance. They examine tensions between ontological insights and the ontic realities of governance, exclusion, and institutional authority. Central to this inquiry is what happens at the limits of political intelligibility: when forms of life, modes of coexistence, or claims to agency exceed or unsettle the categories through which institutions operate. By bringing diverse theoretical resources into conversation, the panel illuminates how the determination of who and what can act politically remains a site of struggle—contributing to efforts to think politics beyond naturalized assumptions about subjects, plurality, and the orders they inhabit.

Title	Details
Between Action and Agency in Hannah Arendt	View Paper Details
When Forms of Life Become Unintelligible: Family, Governance, and Political Ontology	View Paper Details
Politics in the Web of More-Than-Human Relationships. Hannah Arendt, Bruno Latour and the Ecologization of Power	View Paper Details