Politicizing ontology

I Introduction

Several scholars have observed that during the past two decades or so an ‘ontological turn’ has become influential in human geography and beyond. Embedded in conceptual signposts including ‘flat ontology’ (Springer, 2013), ‘process ontology’ (Roberts, 2014), ‘object-oriented ontology’ (Shaw and Meehan, 2013), ‘historical ontology’ (Hacking, 2002; Elden, 2003a), ‘ethnographic ontology’ (Blaser, 2014), ‘onto-cartography’ (Bryant, 2014), ‘ontology of ourselves’ (Harvey, 2007, Dean, 2010: 2), ‘social ontology’ (Escobar, 2007; Schatzki, 2003), ‘ontological politics’ (Joronen, 2013; Whatmore, 2013), ‘empirical ontology’ (Law and Lien, 2012), ‘new materialism’ (Kirsch, 2013) and different ramifications of ‘speculative realism’ (Bryant et al., 2011), the turn to ontology has admittedly created a significant collection of metaphysical principles, conceptual shifts and onto-historical descriptions that have each in their own way challenged us to think about the constitution of the world and space anew. Some scholars arguing for the need to revise our ontological premises also make the case that this will release important new energies in political thought and our understanding of the political. Particularly vocal in this regard have been scholars working under the labels of ‘new materialism’, ‘assemblage thinking’ or ‘posthumanism’. By moving beyond what the discussion frames as a tired Enlightenment vision of anthropocentric politics, the scholarship questions the way political traditions ‘map political agency exclusively onto the human side of a human/nature dualism’ and proposes a ‘rebellion against modernist dreams of human mastery over passive matter’ (Latta, 2014: 324).

Here we wish to argue against certain uses of ontology as being necessarily fruitful for enlivening political thought. There is another branch of scholarship, we suggest, that allows us to approach the relation between the political and the ontological as questioning and thus remaining true to the idea of events and situations as always emerging and constituting in multiple ways. By following this line of thought, particularly but not exclusively grounded on the works of Heidegger, Foucault and Agamben, we wish to reject at the outset all attempts to define unequivocal ontological stances. We do this regardless of whether they are set to conceive the always emergent and unpredictable assemblages (and the politics they imply) or strive to plant ontological foundations on particular conditions, such as the mathematical exactitude or vitalist forces (e.g. Elden, 2006; Graham and Shaw, 2010). Too often the term ontology is employed as an assumed mandate to speak in the name of reality rather than to question it (Schmidt, 2013). ‘Ontology’ then ceases to mark an inquiry and instead stands for an answer that provides a foundation or a theoretical stance (Barnett, 2008; Lynch, 2013; McNay, 2014). We argue that with this use of ontology the possibility to properly understand how ontology relates to the political is lost, and the politics of the act of founding is concealed.

Here we propose ontological thinking not as a way of having the last word regarding the structure of reality, but as the questioning of the ways in which reality happens. This, we argue, brings forth two aspects crucial for rethinking the relation between the political and the ontological. First, only by approaching ontology as an event, rather than a foundation, can we maintain the degrees of freedom for political thought and action that guard against what Sundberg (2014: 34) calls ‘the ontological violence authorized by Eurocentric epistemologies’ that fortify ‘universalizing claims’ about the (political) world (see also Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Mitchell and Elwood, 2012). Second, rather than deciding the ontological comportment beforehand, we suggest it is more appropriate to inquire into the finite ways in which ontologies take place by revealing things to us. In the next section, we provide a more detailed account of what this mode of thought entails by focusing particularly on the different modes of ontological thought. In the second section of the paper, we discuss the problems and ambiguities that arise from losing sight of the inherent relationship between the political and the ontological. Politics, we argue in the third section, refers to our response(s) to what structures the happening of the world and so positions us to its revealing. Such politics does not place human beings exclusively at the centre of being, but rather it sees them as participants playing a decisive role as respondents and guardians of the openness of revealing.

II Rethinking the ‘ontological’ in turn(s) to ontology

In her recent contribution, Annmarie Mol (2012) expressed concern about the way ‘new materialists’ have started to proclaim a turn towards an ontology that would focus on the ‘matter itself’. Matter, Mol reminds, is ‘never by “itself” all by itself’, but as a good Latourian would say, it is related, interacted and dislocated. New materialism, Mol continues without mincing her words, ‘has no way of talking about what matter “itself” does, other than naively echoing natural science textbooks and journal articles – minus the materials and methods sections’ (Mol, 2012: 381). Without a doubt, the recent affinity to introduce new ideas to human geography under the rubric of ‘ontological turn’ has been similarly ambiguous in all its vigour (Blaser, 2014; Braun, 2008; van Heur et al., 2012). Far from a uniform or straightforward intellectual project, the ‘ontological turn’ in spatial theory has emerged as a collection of divergent and partly contradictory positions which range from the revaluation of philosophies of immanence to the rise of assemblage/compositional thinking and the valorization of the vitality of material entities in the constitution of the more-than-human world (e.g. Doel, 1996; Whatmore, 2006; Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Shaw and Meehan, 2013).

Running through this diversity, however, there are several ontologically pertinent themes that seem to justify the idea of a ‘turn’ (in singular), such as the following: the radical questioning of the central position of ‘the human’ in Western (modern) philosophical tradition (labelled as posthumanism); the belief that political decisions are produced by pre-subjective and largely autonomous ‘affects’; and the idea that agency, understood as efficacy rather than intentional action, is always distributed across the assembled bundles of humans, non-humans, issues and things that compose the contingently emerging socio-material world (e.g. Whatmore, 1997; Thrift, 2004; Castree and Nash, 2006; Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Shaw, 2012; Squire, 2014). Many of the proponents of the turn to ontology also share a mode of argumentation that follows a familiar pattern of paradigm creation. On these occasions, a prevalent conception of reality is recognized as obsolete and then replaced by a renewed ontology that is more firmly attached to the elements that previous approaches are claimed to have downplayed, veiled, excluded or rejected. To paraphrase Law and Lien (2012), such paradigm-building tends to operate on the established grounds of ‘ordered ontology’, which remains a vestige of the long tradition of Western metaphysical thinking, which itself goes back to the early Greek philosophy and cosmology. Heidegger, like many others after him, Derrida in particular, has aptly called this metaphysical ambition to ontological ordering and grounding ‘onto-theology’ (Heidegger, 2002, 2003). Onto-theology, in short, is a mode of thinking accompanied by the metaphysical aim to define the ultimate ground, conditions, categories, forces, causes, ideas, forms, permanent structures and/or essences through which the manifold identities, relations and differences of entities (or beings) are constituted (for a more detailed discussion see Thomson, 2005; Joronen, 2012). Against the notion of ‘ordered ontology’ (or onto-theology) Law and Lien (2012) suggest a way of thinking, inaugurated by Nietzsche and pragmatists, that focuses on the ‘empiric ontologies’ as they are enacted in practices through which we are connected to things.

However, we consider that Law and Lien (2012) fall short in their critique of onto-theology as being merely about fixing ontological stances even though they direct the inquiry in the right way. On the reverse side of the onto-theological coin lies the obliteration of the question of being, or what Heidegger calls the ‘oblivion of being’ carried in the tradition of Western thought (Heidegger, 2003, 2012; see Rorty, 1991: 29–31; Joronen, 2012). In Heidegger’s (1991) reading, the abandonment of being as a Nietzschean ‘empty vapor’ in favour of the endless becoming of ontic entities eclipses how the ontological question becomes structured in the process (Heidegger, 1977, 2001). Onto-theology, by celebrating the endless becoming of entities, makes the question of being its sticking point and reduces it to the essential, unchanging and enduring ground of things. As Heidegger (1991, 2003) explains, both the idea of ordering and becoming remain within the deep currents of Western onto-theology and as such cannot place properly the question of their own ontological legitimacy. While the first one aims to pose grounding conceptions that define beforehand the fundamental ontological structures behind how the real really is, the other crosses out being altogether by paradoxically making change the enduring ontological ground of things. Crucially, both moves effectively conceal the originary question concerning how being happens as a ‘finite way of revealing’. This originary question has less to do with what the world is in essence and more with how being happens and takes place by revealing the changing compositions of entities. Onto-theologies, in turn, not only veil the finitude and eventuality of all ontological comportments but also block openness for (ontological) events to come. ¹

It is here, we argue, that a fundamental ontological difference can be drawn between being as an ultimate onto-theological ground and be-ing (or beyng/Seyn, as Heidegger underlines the difference) as a concealed openness, an ‘ab-ground’ (Ab-grund), which grounds by keeping the openness away. In this renewed understanding of ontological difference (now understood as a difference within being itself) ‘the event’ (das Ereignis) becomes a mediating factor: it appropriates particular ontological conditions of revealing from the openness of be-ing by simultaneously concealing it (Heidegger, 1972: 19, 2012, 2013; see also Strohmayer, 1998; Elden, 2003b; Schatzki, 2007; Joronen, 2013). What onto-theological thought does is a complete oblivion of this process of concealing-revealing. Yet, if onto-theological thought leads to an ‘oblivion of being’, Ereignis allows the opposite: a proper access to the ontological questioning. The event (Ereignis) hence does not mark another ontological scaffolding – a new ‘ontology of the Event’ – but something that has been hidden within different ontological comportments all along (Heidegger, 1972: 6, 8, 24, 2003: 84–6). Heidegger’s discussions of early Greek notions of tekhne, phusis and wonder, or modern ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) (Heidegger, 1977, 2003, 2012), should be understood as a series of efforts to uncover and ‘turn back’ (Kehre) to think of this forgotten ‘history of be-ing’ (Geschichte des Seyns) – the veiled ‘structures of revealing’ and the legacy of oblivion they produced (see Joronen, 2012).

Unlike Heidegger, our attempt here is not to recover the un-thought ‘history of be-ing’ but simply to acknowledge that an ambiguity of being underlies all ontological thought. What we thus want to suggest is, firstly, an explicit relocation of the foci of ontological thought from answering to questioning. Accordingly, we propose a move from building new ontological grounds to a mode of thought that concentrates on questioning the ways in which events ‘appropriate’ revealing(s) (i.e. an inquiry into ‘what happens’ and ‘becomes ontologically revealed’). Secondly, we are not interested in ontology as a mere intellectual exercise, but rather because all things and the assemblages they form already contain particular modes of revealing and coming-into-being and are thus always already ontological in nature.

Considering the above, we welcome efforts to comprehend multiple ontologies in terms of the actual connections through which they emerge. With this, we refer to different ramifications of relational thought, which consider ontologies in relation to associations that in all of their messiness are geographically open, diversely connected and refuse to claim academic privilege (e.g. Abrahamsson et al., 2015; Malpas, 2015). Ontology, however, consists of more than a mere description of manifold collections (or ‘assemblages’) of actual relations. There is little sense, we think, to equate ontology with relations. First, relations contain ‘modes of being’ that exceed these relations by defining how they were directed, structured and revealed in the first place (see Häkli, 2008; Martin and Secor, 2014; Joronen, 2016a). Moreover, we do not subscribe to a view of reality only as ‘a series of negotiations between objects’, so that changes in particular relational compositions would always enact new ontologies (cf. Shaw and Meehan, 2013: 218; Bawaka Country et al., 2015). The reduction of ontology to relations also comes close to onto-theological grounding of being solely to ontic things, which downplays the very idea of ontology as a mode of questioning the differentiation of being itself.

A somewhat different approach to ontological multiplicity has been adopted by contributions that fall under the rubric of ‘indigenous ontology’. Here we cannot but agree with Hunt (2014) on the importance of safeguarding the ontological plurality against Eurocentric appropriations of ontology in geography. Indeed, at times the premises of relational and more-than-human thought seem to work well together with indigenous ontologies (e.g. Bawaka Country et al., 2015). However, we also see profound problems in efforts to combine ontological assumptions of new materialism with ethnography-based inquiries into indigenous world-making, as the academically pre-ordered ontology risks colonizing rather than valorizing the delegate effort to grasp indigenous ways of being (see Cameron et al., 2014; de Leeuw, 2014; Wright et al., 2015). As Scott’s (2007) study of the Arosi people on the Solomon Islands shows, approaches that employ theories of relationality cannot think of autonomously existing entities – part of the indigenous ontology of the Arosi – as anything other than cultural fiction or entities somehow incapable of accessing their inner capacity for plural relationality.

This issue is directly related to the proposed move beyond anthropocentrism that either explicitly or implicitly motivates much of the ontological thought in human geography. We recognize the thrust towards posthumanism as an inspiring facet in the turn to ontology, which has important critical potential to open new vistas in the study of more-than-human geographies (e.g. Whatmore, 2006; Donaldson et al., 2013). However, we also argue that an attempt to overcome anthropocentrism by means of fixing a non-anthropocentric ontology as the ground from which to analyse the entwinement of human and non-human entities leads to problems peculiar to all onto-theological thought. Firstly, non-anthropocentric thought remains in a dualistic relation to the position it seeks to overcome, finding no way to appreciate the ‘trace’ of humanism in any form of posthumanism (Rae, 2014). Secondly, as an onto-theology new materialism cannot but qualify positions incompatible with its foundations as flaws, historical failures or intellectual fantasies (Anderson and Perrin, 2015). Consider the notion of ‘enframing’ (Gestell) we took up earlier. As Heidegger (1977: 17–19) underlines, ‘enframing’ emerged in the course of modernity as a mode of ordering-revealing that places human experiences and needs as the measure of the value of things and as such reverting everything to orderable ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). While this historical modality of revealing clearly poses a peculiar apparatus of human-centred onto-theology (Agamben, 2009: 11–12), it can neither exhaust the question of the human nor be qualified as mere fantasy. To think it can, like Anderson and Perrin (2015) argue new materialist critiques of anthropocentrism tend to do, ends up treating ‘the human’ as an ‘otherworldly construction’ that has been abstracted from material and worldly immanence. Instead of dismissing human-centred ways of revealing as mere fallacies, they need to be studied as worldly practices that are intertwined with peculiar ontological presumptions and, indeed, that contain their own politics of ontology.

What we wish to advocate is an open understanding of anthropos, which departs from Eurocentrism and the onto-theological idea of human mastery over non-human entities, without portraying humans simply as entities among other entities and thus sacrificing the vital element that is unique to the relation between being and human beings; namely, the capacity to guard, question and care about the question of being – of its openness and revealing (Heidegger, 1977: 221). It is this human capacity, at once non-privileged and embedded, upon which we build our understanding of the politics of ontology. This said, we want to emphasize again that our aim is not to place human beings back at the centre of being/revealing but rather to remain vigilant and ontologically rigorous on whatever unpredictable, (im)possible and surprising events the revealing (Ereignis) may bring to us. This vigilance, or responsiveness, we call ontological thinking (Heidegger, 1976: 168–9). In encounters between being (event) and human beings, it is hence the former that gives revealing to the latter, who in turn participate in these ‘events of revealing’ by receiving and responding to them (Heidegger, 1972). Such an approach is not merely about relationality – of how human and non-human, or indigenous and non-indigenous entities continuously re-/relate to one another (Bawaka Country et al., 2015) – but is above all about the ways in which these relationalities are revealed and structured. Ontological thought, then, is about questioning and confronting the structures of what is gathered-together and revealed to us. We therefore think of ontologies as events of revealing – as places of questioning, to which one finds oneself thrown in. Such events present reality as it ontologically takes place for us and hence calls us to think of, question and respond to its mode(s) of revealing.

A case in point: biopolitics, as Foucault recognized it and traced back its genealogy, is not about fixing an academic onto-theology or about analytics restricted to particular relational bundles. Rather, it is a questioning of a historical form of power, which has the capacity to locate and constitute life through numerous, often unexpected assemblages, (cultural) practices, subjectivities and techniques of government. We read biopolitics (as a concept, thought and action) as a response to this form of power. It is an ontological politics practised now and here, rather than an ontological ground fixed for the purposes of empirical inquiries.

So we argue that ontology cannot be reduced to an effort to lay down an enduring foreground conception of how things are constituted. Ontological thought should rather inquire into, and properly respond to, our existential situation and as such politicize ontological situatedness; that is, how things are always already revealed to us. By saying ‘us’, we do not mean ‘only us’ as revealing(s) may consist of ontological positions of different kinds. Yet, without acknowledging our ontological situatedness, there is a chance that we may end up forgetting the crucial point made by Heidegger, Foucault and Agamben, each in their own way, about the belonging togetherness of being and action, life and form (Agamben, 2011: 53–67, 2014; Foucault, 1997: 99–100; Heidegger, 1998: 155–82; see also Abbott, 2014). It is the political consequences of this oblivion that we turn to next.

III The ontological turn and the political

The shift in ontological thought from questioning to speaking for reality, or what Barnett (2008: 187) calls the rise of an ‘ontological register of theoretical argument’, is also reflected in the ways ‘the political’ has been connected to ontology in recent geographical literature. There are three distinguishable yet often interconnected routes through which the question of the political has entered the ontological scene and vice versa. In what arguably is the most self-evident encounter between ontology and politics, the latter signifies some pertinent and weighty issues that characterize our times: urban struggles, geopolitical conflicts, global warming, irregular migration and disruptions in socio-technological systems (Pickering, 2005; Coward, 2012; Hinchliffe and Lavau, 2013; Dittmer, 2014; Darling, 2014). Insofar as these are approached and conceived in radically new ways, they link the ontological turn to political issues that, practically speaking, are already there. Secondly, in contrast to simply rethinking matters generally recognized as political, the term has been subjected to ontological scrutiny through its intimate connection with the idea of (human and non-human) agency. Inasmuch as ontological thought works to reject the notion of the human subject as intentional, reflexive and autonomous, it categorically rejects the possibility for political phenomena that are inherently anthropocentric (Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Roberts, 2012; Lehman, 2013; Booth and Williams, 2014; Yusoff, 2015).

Third, in what often remains but an implicit connection between the ontological turn and the political, the latter is presented as the horizon of change whereby new ways of conceiving the world gradually make their way into everyday knowledge and practices and thus produce changes to our now unsustainable modes of existence. Hence, we could imagine, as Bennett (2010) does, that if we were to become more attentive to ‘the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans’, we would probably not ‘continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways’ (Bennett, 2010: 112–13; see also Braun, 2008; Lorimer, 2012; Coole, 2013). At stake here is a (cosmo)political pedagogy of deep-going change whereby, departing radically from Western modernity, humans and non-humans might learn to live together in an environmentally sustainable and ethically sound way (e.g. Paulson, 2001; Bingham, 2006; Whatmore, 2013; Knox and Huse, 2015).

IV Politicizing ontological situatedness: Receiving, responding and guarding

Given the disparities in conceptions of ontology and its relation to politics, we want to end by reflecting on the question we started with, namely, how to properly connect politics with ontology. As we argued earlier, ontology does not refer to a ground of reality that needs to be predefined in order to cast a proper notion of the political. Ontology rather marks a problem according to which our thinking of the world already takes place within the revealing of the world and hence needs to start by recognizing our ontological situatedness. It is this point of encounter, the place in which we receive and respond to the happening of revealing, where we think the discussion of politics should be located.

Before taking further steps, it is pertinent to point out a possible ontological fallacy regarding the notion of the political. Apparently, we cannot define what politics is without undermining our own critique of onto-theological grounding. This, however, is precisely what we wish to argue for: that politics is not something that grows out of predefined (ontological) notions of the political; instead politics takes place in relation to the place where its state of affairs is ontologically settled. Being and politics hence intertwine and co-constitute one another in the most fundamental way: inasmuch as politics is situated by the happening of being (Ereignis), the way being happens is always a matter of proper response – politics. In the following, we aim to articulate this co-constitution between ontology and politics in terms of reciprocity of reception and response.

To begin with, we understand politics as a relation, capturing the ways through which reality happens to us (via sites of its revealing), as well as how we respond to this happening of revealing. Whether we look at this happening in terms of the ultimate ‘giving’ of being, as Heidegger (1972: 5–6, 18–19) underlines the ontological primacy of the events of revealing, or focus on the side of human reception, politics in each case relates to our actions regarding what ontologically conditions and positions us. With this we do not intend to support the human-centred phenomenalism of fully autonomous liberal subjects or the modern anthropomorphic politics of isolated agency (Ash and Simpson, 2014; cf. Elden, 2003b: 47–9; Joronen, 2012: 370–2), but rather we refer to thinking that is attached to looking at, and acting upon, how that ‘what occurs’ occurs (see Dastur, 2000; Malpas, 2012). Politics, we suggest, refers to our participation in the process of revealing: inasmuch as we link the notion of the ontological to questioning the ways in which the world happens and reveals itself, the key to the political lies in our comportment towards these events of revealing. We use the expression ‘politics of ontology’ solely in this regard; that is, in relation to the alreadiness, situatedness and finitude of revealing.

Each of these elements raises various challenges regarding the notion of politics. Firstly, it is our reception of revealing, which allows proper access to politics, as it brings together politics, being (ontology) and place (situatedness) and hence helps us to avoid exercising politics inconspicuously at the level of ontology. Politics of ontology, one could hold, refers precisely to what is at stake in questioning. Understood in this way, ontological questioning is always part of our situated horizon of being, which comes along with the entities now part of our world and which our thinking, and political action, should properly respond to, i.e. politicize. We consider recent onto-theological takes, for instance, on materialism as responses to the environmental catastrophes and human-centrism of our times, rather than as discoveries of more appropriate conception(s) of reality (see Radloff, 2007: 54). What distinguishes us from these positions is, hence, our urgent wish to acknowledge our situated ‘alreadiness’ as ‘that which gives food for thought’ as well as ‘that which is to-be-thought of’ (Heidegger, 1976: 167).

As the first point indicates, our participation in the process of revealing cannot consist of a mere apprehension of reality (the act of reception). Inasmuch as reception underlines the ontological situatedness of political action, our response is concerned with making a stand in the state of affairs so revealed (see Häkli and Kallio, 2014). As a response to the ontological alreadiness – to the fact that we are always already positioned by the revealing, thrown in the midst of things – ontological thought has two options. Either to settle with some modality of being and so take its ground of revealing for granted (the oblivion) or to raise awareness about the situated conditions that being holds upon us. Yet one needs to be cautious here. We are not reintroducing the old division between necessity and contingency by simply making contingency the ultimate goal of politics (Braun, 2011). In this regard, unlike Shaw and Meehan (2013), we are not trying to formulate an authentic politics that poses a pure overcoming of the prevailing situatedness for the sake of contingency itself; in particular because the constant state of change, instability and exceptionality can also operate as principles of government (see Agamben, 2011: 64–5; Heidegger, 2003). Some forms of neoliberal government, for instance, operate precisely by demanding constant adaptation that governs populations and bodies through the precarious positions and constantly changing conditions it moves them to (see Alt, 2015; Joronen, 2016b; Rose, 2013). Ontological questioning, we hold, cannot be ignorant of the ways in which ontological principles may resonate with structures of domination and discrimination. Rather, such inquiry needs to take seriously the interconnectedness between ontology and politics, being and (political) action.

This brings us to the third facet we want to add to the reciprocity between reception and responding: the idea of guarding what is own-most to being. With this, we want to outline a simple point about the positive and affirmative nature of the relation between politics and ontology. Namely, that politics should not be a mere reception of revealing as it happens now, but it needs to stay tuned to the ontological openness of being in all of its plenitude and unpredictable eventuality. The reason for this is simple: being cannot be treated as a mere (onto-theologically machinated) ground of reality; instead it denotes an openness that makes any grounding possible in the first place (as a ground that ‘stays away’; ab-grund in Heidegger’s vocabulary). As an openness, being (or be-ing/Seyn) as such cannot ever be captured, defined and reasoned; only the nature of its happening(s) can be questioned. The response for ontological situatedness is thus never just about reception and responding but is also about guarding the openness hidden within the potentiality for things not to exist as they now exist for us. We thus see the politics of ontology as a response to various ways in which ontologies have been politicized in societal (power) relations, but above all we see it as a task of thinking – as an ethical responsibility to be aware of the dangers, and veiled politics, of all onto-theological scaffoldings. This guarding, we conclude, cannot be reduced to an ultimate ontological foundation or considered as completely hollow humanist vapour. Together with reception and responding, to guard is to acknowledge our situatedness that remains open to the unpredictable ontologization(s) and manifold ontologies to come.

V Conclusion

In this paper, we have argued that while the recent turn to ontology in human geography and cognate disciplines has brought novel approaches to bear in several scholarly discussions, it has a troubled relationship with the idea of the political. In exposing some key dimensions of this relationship, we have argued that ontological thought should become enmeshed in situated questioning rather than posing locked-in answers that create problematic onto-theological relationships with the question of being (and ontology). Most of the problems between ontology and politics result from this onto-theological grasp, which assumes the privilege of talking on behalf of reality and renouncing our outdated and false ontological conceptions. We see such an assumption as being problematic because it leads to the inability to think of politics beyond its own foundations. This is particularly evident in the categorical dismissal of human-centrism in some posthuman approaches that make bold onto-theological claims about the empirical falsity of all human-centred phenomena, but it also characterizes approaches that, for instance, consider change itself as political. Moreover, onto-theological thought remains blind to the political moves it inconspicuously makes by claiming its own foundations as metaphysically equivalent with the way in which the real comes to being. As we have argued, the way things emerge is not a process grounded beforehand on metaphysical foundation, but instead it is a finite happening of ‘revealing’ to which we should seek properly to respond. Instead of positing an alternative onto-theology, we hence suggest questioning as the mode of articulating the limits of the ontological conditions and structures of events – their ‘ontological politics’. We are therefore not only critical of the ontological solidification, sedimentation and grounding of all kind, but also we find in-depth problems in the conceptions of the political so established.

Politics, as we see it, is an action positioned by being; a unity of being and action. Such a sense of politics takes seriously the ontological situatedness of acting, knowing and being and hence those limits that situations create for it. The notion of ontological politics we have introduced rests upon responsiveness to our existential relation to whatever is (and becomes) revealed to us and the need to guard ontological openness for events to come. Otherwise, there is a danger that the ontological fixity, whether presented in a form of academic or indigenous ontology, remains ignorant of the violence and exclusion that is practised upon its own foundational principles.