On Current Debates in Political Ontology Research.

The paper will discuss the terms and relevance of a current debate among post-foundationalist ontology theorists. It elaborates the critique of Oliver Flügel-Martinsen (2017) against Oliver Marchart regarding the Essex-school’s quasi-axiom of radical contingency as a correlational factor of social antagonism. The research question relates to why the former poses the suspicion that the Essex-School entices social division, any why this debate is hence relevant to our contemporary crisis of coherent communication spaces. The argumentative path will discern a misconception of Flügel-Martinsen on the question of radical contingency, as resorting from a Ranciérian objection to Laclau and Marchart. I argue this stems from missing that for Essexians any practice of meaning has the potential to be always overdetermined by several political projects. Marchart’s position entails that subjects are only confronted with a sense of social reality if there is a border that placates, but also indicates the contingency of the social. Boghossian’s, Vogelman’s and Flügel-Martinsen’s criticisms respectively, overlook the necessity of drawing a boundery to what 'society' is not, by pertaining to something that gets necessarily excluded in order to achieve any type of normative complex. This is because the infinite regress of legitimation – we import by subscribing to a post-structuralist ontology of dif-ference (see Derrida) – has to be arrested at some contingent point to have any normativity at all (although an ontologically weak one). This does not translate into new kinds of relativism or endless plurality of societal truths, but into a need for an investment of the empty value of truth onto always contingent (not accidental) particularities. The antagonistic exclusion at stake in Essexian political theory will be shown to concern an enactment/incarnation of the loss of something that is effectively an impossibility – the fullness of society, which can be figured as total normativity, that is merely the obverse of a total contingency. For Marchart drawing a political frontier concerns naming an obstruction to the latter, and thus operationalising the absence of a harmonious society, which is present only in being represented by a particular difference in the symbolic order (leading any inside/outside distinction of Flügel-Martisen ad absurdum)