A Critique of the Ontological Primacy of the Political

In this paper I take issue with the status granted the political in the writings of Laclau and Mouffe. The main conclusion is that the claim of the ontological primacy of the political over the social must be given up. What can be maintained is the autonomy of the political (vis a vis other possible forms of articulations) and the general possibility of political articulations of all social identities. However, such a possibility cannot elevate the political to an ontological primary status, since the possibility of politization is paralleled with the possibility for all other types of social articulations of artistic, economic, etc. character. In terms of the recent development in discourse theory, my main claim is that the political conceptualises one specific set of logics, next to, and on the same ontological level, as other logics (economic etc.)