This article shows how Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort try to explain the relationship between universality and particularity in modern democratic societies, politics and civil society. It will demonstrate that Habermas defends a substantive kind of universality that is opposed to particular positions and thus to real politics. This article further argues that Lefort’s lesser known theory of negative universality is better at combining a universal and a particular perspective. It claims that where Habermas requires citizens to transform their particular (...) interests, Lefort emphasizes that individual actors should acknowledge their particular position and interests when invoking universal principles. The article further argues that their disagreement leads to a different interpretation of ideology, politics, power, civil society, human rights, popular sovereignty, elections and the state. (shrink)

For thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, it is not possible to engage with metaphysical questions without simultaneously considering other, more political problems concerning the power relations...

The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method (...) lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics. (shrink)