Abstract

The urgent task of political ontology is, I believe, neither to investigate the nature of the political nor to define politics; instead, the pressing task is to put into question the political difference itself between the political and politics. The subject of my inquiry is, in other words, the political difference as political difference. To demonstrate this thesis, I examine Oliver Marchart’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions. The political difference takes in Marchart the form of the never-ending play between the political and politics and in Agamben the constantly renewed sovereign decision between life and law. Besides reformulating Marchart’s and Agamben’s positions, I want to show that the never-ending play and the sovereign decision fail to capture the political difference, because it is approached through the differentiated—whether between the political and politics or between life and law. Drawing on the diverse works of Agamben, I argue that the political difference becomes intelligible as the political differentiability that points to the power of differentiation, to the ability of the political differencing to differentiate. And the task of thinking and of political practice is neither the thinking itself nor the political practice itself, but rather to experience political differentiability as the shared field of thinking and practice, as the common dimension of philosophy and politics. I argue that experiencing political differentiability, ontology and politics can avoid falling prey, respectively, to intellectualism and to wild practicism.