Cont Philos Rev (2010) 43:445–466

DOI 10.1007/s11007-010-9153-6

Foucault’s politicization of ontology

Johanna Oksala

Published online: 8 October 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract 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 objec-
tivity. 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 provo-
cation 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 arbi-
trary 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.

Keywords Foucault
Political ontology
The political
Politics
Power

J. Oksala (&)
School of Humanities, University of Dundee, Nethergate, DD1 4HN Dundee, Scotland
e-mail: j.k.oksala@dundee.ac.uk

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I begin by making two claims about political ontology that at the outset seem to
contradict each other. First, I argue for the importance of ontological inquiry in
political philosophy. Many prominent thinkers agree that current political events
indicate that we urgently need new ways of thinking about politics, but they
sometimes argue for the strict separation of the political and the ontological. Simon
Critchley, for example, argues in his seminal book Infinitely Demanding (2007) that
if we are doing politics we should not pin our hopes on any ontology, because
politics is a disruption of the ontological domain and separate categories are
required for its analysis and practice.1 My claim is that, on the contrary, for the
theoretical rethinking of politics to amount to an effective response to practical
political problems it cannot avoid ontological investigation. Politics cannot shun
ontology because ultimately the two cannot be separated.
My second aim is to argue against any essential definition of ‘the political’ that
attempts to defend its autonomy and specificity vis-à-vis other social domains. The
importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy is often established
through an emphasis on the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’:
Political science deals with the empirical field of ‘politics’, whereas political
philosophy is not about the facts of politics, it is about the nature of ‘the political’.2
Chantal Mouffe, for example, explicates the distinction by borrowing the
vocabulary of Heidegger: ‘Politics’ refers to the ontic level and deals with the
manifold practices of conventional politics, while ‘the political’ has to do with
the ontological level and concerns the very way in which society is instituted.
Mouffe argues that it is the lack of understanding of ‘the political’ in its ontological
dimension that lies at the heart of our current incapacity to think politically.3
While the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ has become
commonplace, efforts to define what constitutes ‘the political’ in its ontological
dimension have repeatedly run into difficulties. Whether we think of Carl Schmitt’s
definition of the political as always referring to the friend/enemy distinction, or of
Hannah Arendt’s contested distinction between the social and the political, the
problem with defining the political as a distinct and autonomous ontological domain
is that it places certain questions, issues and experiences outside of politics.4 To put

1
Opposition to ontology is also common in feminist theory. Ontology is understood to be either
politically irrelevant or pernicious because it masks an effective ideology of oppression. See e.g., Fraser
and Nicholson (1990).
2
A distinctive notion of the political was first developed in the context of German political thought by
Carl Schmitt, who sought to differentiate the political from other domains of the social such as the
economic or the aesthetic. The importance of the distinction has been particularly strong in French
political philosophy (le politique, la politique) and has been developed in different ways in the work of
such thinkers as Claude Lefort and Jean-Luc Nancy. The political has now also become a standard
concept in Anglo-American political theory influenced by Continental philosophy and particularly by
Heidegger’s thought. For an overview of the conceptual difference between ’politics’ and ’the political’,
see Marchart (2007). On contemporary theorists in whose thought the distinction between politics and the
political is crucial, see e.g., Lefort (1986, 1988, 2000), Nancy (1991, 1993, 2000), Laclau and Mouffe
(1985).
3
Mouffe (2005, pp. 8–9). See also, e.g., Mouffe (2000).
4
See Schmitt (1996), Arendt (1990, 1999).

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the problem in more provocative terms, purely ontological investigation turns out to
be a political act itself, establishing the boundaries of the realm of proper politics.
In emphasising the importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy I am
thus not advocating inquiry into the fixed essence of politics. Neither am I
advocating any form of regional ontology, inquiry into the region of reality
understood as political. Such an inquiry would be not only politically but also
theoretically problematic. Distinguishing some realm of reality as ‘political’, and
then attempting to clarify the ontology pertaining to it, would imply that a prior
ontological distinction between what belongs to the political domain and what does
not has already been made and is securely in place.
What I am advocating is an ontological inquiry into the way in which reality is
instituted that reveals this institution as a political process. My claim is that political
philosophy does not need ontology in order to define and circumscribe a distinct
region of reality as the political domain. There is a more fundamental need to
understand how all ontology—our understanding of reality—is achieved in social
practices and networks of power rather than being simply given. This ontological
inquiry inadvertently results in an implicit understanding of the political. It is not a
distict domain of social reality, but its precondition: It concerns the contestation and
struggle over the institution and disclosure of reality.
Hence, what I mean by political ontology is a politicized conception of reality.
My aim is to problematise the relationship between ontology and politics by putting
forward such a conception with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project.
I argue that Foucault’s famous slogan ‘power is everywhere’ means no more and no
less than that the extension of the political cannot be securely limited. His thought
amounts to an effort to politicize regions of reality that have been depoliticized,
and this is his most important contribution to philosophy as well as to politics.
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. Foucault 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. The important
philosophical idea behind Foucault’s hybrid notion of power/knowledge is that
social practices always incorporate power relations, which become constitutive of
forms of the subject as well as domains and objects of knowledge. They are not
subjects and objects existing in the world as pre-given constants, but are rather
constituted through practices of power. This is a radical, ontological claim about the
nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices always
incorporating power relations, but also of concrete struggles over truth and
objectivity in social space. The effect is the profound exposure and a critical
rethinking of ontological commitments and background beliefs concerning social
reality.

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448 J. Oksala

1 The end of metaphysics

Foucault is commonly read as a ‘postmodern’ thinker who reiterated the mantra of

the end of metaphysics. It is claimed that he firmly resisted all attempts to think
about anything resembling ontology.5 When the word ontology is used as nothing
more than a convenient label for a mistaken and parochial search for timeless
essences or substances, it is hardly worth debating whether Foucault ridiculed such a
task. An important strand going through the whole of his thought is his continuous
emphasis on the contingency of the present as opposed to the search for any
ahistorical necessities or essences. His intellectual project is characterised by
systematic scepticism with respect to all anthropological universals, and by an
incessant attempt to consider how that which is could be otherwise. He stated
provocatively: ‘‘Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis
of society.’’6
Recognition of the ontological contingency of the present is in no way original,
nor is it specific to Foucault’s thought, however. Its intellectual forerunners can be
traced to at least three significant developments in 19th-century German thought—
the Marxian, the Nietzschean and the historicist. Nor does the idea that the social
order exists only as a contingent product of human activity in itself mark the end of
metaphysics. It is rather intrinsic to the metaphysical worldview with which we are
lumbered by virtue of being modern: Most of us believe that our social and political
order is the outcome of a contingent series of events without higher purpose,
direction or meaning. The ontological commitment to the contingency of the human
realm as opposed to a permanent divine order, for example, is in many ways as
much the unquestioned starting point of philosophical inquiry today as the existence
of God was the unquestioned starting point of philosophy in the Middle Ages.
Bernard Flynn argues that political philosophy was not simply deduced from
metaphysics in the works of the great thinkers of the past. Nevertheless,
metaphysics, understood as the discourse that established the ultimate grounds,
did provide the fundamental concepts that defined the field of the political: It
structured the horizon of pre-comprehension through which classical philosophy
approached it. The ‘true world’ revealed by metaphysics merged with Christianity
to become both the theological and the political foundation of pre-modern Europe.
For Flynn, the end of metaphysics refers to the process in which the foundations of
classical strategies of philosophical and political justification became contestable,
thereby revealing the phenomenon of the political.7 He emphasises the importance
of the work of Claude Lefort, who has argued that modern democracy was instituted
and sustained precisely through the dissolution of the metaphysical markers of
certainty. The French Revolution inaugurated a history in which people experienced
a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, as well
5
Stephen White, for example, argues in his book Sustaining Affirmation (2000) that there is a broad
ontological turn taking place in political philosophy, and he mentions Foucault as one of the thinkers who
has helped to bring ontological reflection to the forefront. He claims that there is no sustained affirmation
of a particular ontology in his work, however.
6
Foucault (2000a, p. 356).
7
Flynn (1992).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 449

as to the basis of relations between the self and others, on every level of social life.
Without the firm markers of certainty no one had any definite answers to the
questions that arose in social and political practices. What distinguishes modern
democracy from totalitarian forms of government is thus precisely the fact that in
democracy the lack of a necessary foundation of society is not covered over, but
institutionally recognized.8
We could thus contend that the end of metaphysics, understood as referring to the
acceptance of the indeterminacy of reason and the fundamental contingency and
singularity of the present, was indispensable as far as a new understanding of the
political in philosophy was concerned. It is precisely the incessant questioning of
every necessity that opens up the possibility of a radical philosophical investigation
of the present, and indeterminacy, not metaphysical certainty, must characterise
political thought. Hence, while the idea that the right ontology would furnish a basis
for the right political order has had disastrous consequences—Plato and Heidegger
are often used as clichéd examples—only the lack of firm ontological foundations
seems to open up a truly political dimension of thought.
Against this background it would seem important, but also somewhat trivial, to
argue that there is no pre-given, essentialist or foundational ontology in Foucault’s
thought: It would betray his principle aim of investigating the fractures in the
present. Yet, on a deeper level, to argue for the contingency and indeterminacy of
the present means, of course, precisely to make an ontological claim. When we
argue against one metaphysical schema—the existence of absolute foundations, for
example—we cannot help but adopt another. The end of metaphysics cannot
therefore amount to a simple denial or inversion of foundationalism in favor of
naı̈ve empiricism. The idea that all ontological orders are nothing but contingent,
empirical arrangements cannot be established by empirical sciences, but must be
argued for philosophically.
Modern thought has become irreversibly aware that all thinking necessarily relies
on ontological commitments of some kind, and exposing them to a clear view has
become one of the critical tasks of philosophy, including political philosophy.
Shying away from ontological inquiry can therefore only constitute a position of
hypocrisy for us: Not mentioning the word ontology does not mean that questions
concerning it will disappear. Moreover, if ontology is understood as the framework
that functions to constrain all our political theorizing and action within the limits
it sets, it also forms a fundamental limit to our efforts to overcome oppressive
attitudes and practices. If Foucault’s thought does not contribute anything to
ontological questioning, then neither does it ultimately contribute anything
significant to political philosophy.

2 The denaturalization of ontology

The modern political predicament of having to slice ontology open for contestation
has meant its profound denaturalization. Foucault’s radical nominalism is one form

8
See e.g., Lefort (1986, 1988), Flynn (2005a).

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that this denaturalization has taken. While Foucault’s archaeological works are
sometimes seen as apolitical and as constituting a distinct phase from his
genealogical works, it is important to see that they in fact lay down the nominalist
ontological premises that make possible the politicization effected by his
genealogies. To be able to argue that entities such as homosexual, delinquent and
pervert are not natural phenomena which human sciences could simply discover,
describe and refer to objectively, but effects of power relations and political
struggles, requires a profound denaturalization of ontology: We have to sever any
direct, natural or necessary link between scientific concepts and their referents.
If the dissolution of the firm markers of certainty shook our metaphysical
worldview profoundly, the crisis was irrevocably deepened by the linguistic turn
that structuralism and post-structuralism represented in French thought: reality is
not only linguistically meditated, but also, to varying degrees, linguistically
constituted. Every linguistic description is already the imposition of an ontology,
but there is no direct referential correspondence between words and objects. The
reference of our words is radically indeterminate and makes possible a number of
interpretations, the acceptability of which depends on historically varying condi-
tions, both discursive and non-discursive.
In The Archeology of Knowledge the idea that discursive practices systematically
form the objects of which they speak is put forward through an analysis of
statements and discursive objects. Discursive practices constitute their objects of
study through rule-governed transformations, and do not simply articulate the
already existing and ordered things themselves. Archaeology must therefore
‘‘substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular
formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.’’9 It must attempt to analyse the
historical set of rules that govern the formation of discursive objects. As Beatrice
Han describes Foucault’s archeological reduction of traditional metaphysics, it rests
on a double postulate:
Firstly, the nominalist thesis that it is not through reference to ‘things’ that one
defines ‘words’, but through ‘words’ that one can conceive of ‘objects’
produced by discourse. Secondly, the quasi-structuralist claim that since the
identification of these ‘objects’ can no longer be achieved through their
hypothetical ‘correspondence’ with things, the only way of understanding
their identity is to start from the ‘set of rules’ that allows their formation.10
While Foucault’s archaeology studied the rules of formation for scientific
discourse on a purely discursive level without raising questions of the referent, it is a
mistake to see it as a form of discursive idealism. The idea is not that language
somehow exhaustively brings things into existence. Neither is archeology an
extreme form of nominalism that would deny any correspondence at all between
language and being. We must assume that reality lends itself more readily to some
interpretations rather than others, otherwise nominalism would leave our interaction

9
Foucault (1972, pp. 47–48).
10
Han (2002, p. 54).

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with and description of the world a complete mystery.11 In bracketing the question
of correspondence Foucault does not deny that there is any, he rather problematizes
the possibility of simply pairing up true sentences and objective reality. He does not
deny extralinguistic reality, but he does deny that it comes naturally ordered into
facts or states of affairs, which we could then simply hook up with true statements.
Knowledge is always produced in practices, in the disjunction of language and
visibility.12
Foucault politicized his archaeological nominalism in his genealogical texts of
the early 1970s by explicitly linking it with Nietzsche. Instead of studying the
conditions of acceptability for true interpretations on the level of the discursive rules
of formation, he turned to the Nietzschean thesis that things only have the meaning
that the dominant interpretation gives them. His guiding question in a series of
lectures delivered in Brazil in 1973 was how domains of knowledge had been
formed on the basis of social practices: how social and political practices
engendered domains of knowledge and brought into being new objects, concepts,
and forms of subjects. Before engaging in a historical inquiry into social practices—
in this instance juridical practices—he devoted the first lecture to a rare discussion
of his ontological premises. He suggested that Nietzsche’s thought presented the
best philosophical model upon which to draw in trying to understand how social
practices engender reality.13
Foucault credits Nietzsche with having made a crucial break in the tradition of
Western philosophy by cutting knowledge and things apart. He attributes to
Nietzsche the claim that there is no natural or necessary resemblance, no a priori
affinity between knowledge and the things that are known. Any ontological schema,
any interpretation of reality, is an imposition, not a pure description of the given.
His starting point is Nietzsche’s text, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’
and the distinction between the words Erfindung—invention—and Ursprung—
origin—that he employs in it.14 The significance and provocation embedded in this
distinction lies in Nietzsche’s claim that knowledge is an invention, not an originary
discovery. Knowledge is produced, manufactured by a series of mechanisms and
obscure power relations. It is not inscribed in human nature, and even more
radically, it is not even inevitably connected to the world to be known.15
According to Foucault, Nietzsche thus effected a significant double break with
the tradition of Western philosophy: a break between knowledge and the world,

11
Cf. Hacking (1984, p. 122).
12
In his analysis of Foucault’s ontological premises, Deleuze (1999) claims that Foucault’s central aim
was to challenge the empirical dogma that we speak of that which we see and see that which we speak of.
He denied any isomorphism or conformity between words and things, or in Deleuze’s terminology
between the visible and the articulable. If a statement has an object, it is a discursive object unique to the
statement and not isomorphic with any visible object. He emphasised that this thesis does not imply the
erroneous interpretation that, for Foucault, everything is discursive. Foucault attributed epistemological
primacy to statements as they are capable of determining visibilities, but he nevertheless insisted on the
irreducibility of the visible.
13
Foucault (2000b, p. 9).
14
See Nietzsche (1976).
15
Foucault (2000b, pp. 6–7).

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as well as between knowledge and human nature. Foucault claimed that Western
philosophy since Plato was characterised by the idea that things to be known and
knowledge itself were in a relation of continuity: Knowledge was ‘‘characterised by
logocentrism, resemblance, congruence, bliss and unity.’’16 The persistent and
haunting question that followed was the sceptical challenge. What assurance was
there that knowledge had the ability to truly know the things of this world instead of
being indefinitely prone to error, illusion and arbitrariness?
The history of philosophy had suggested a series of different answers. For
Descartes, God was the principle that ensured harmony between knowledge and the
things to be known, which is why Descartes had to prove His existence. While
Kantian critique questioned the possibility of knowledge of a truth or reality in
itself, it nevertheless advocated the belief that there was a universal nature of
knowledge secured by its universal conditions in experience. Nietzsche no longer
found the assurance offered by the existence of God or eternal and universal human
nature acceptable, however. If the relation between knowledge and the things to be
known was arbitrary, the existence of God at the centre of the system was no longer
indispensable—and vice versa, the death of God resulted in the breaking apart of the
orders of knowledge and things.17 Neither was knowledge tied to human nature, but
was the historical and circumstantial result of conditions outside its domain. It was
an invention, an event that fell within the category of an activity, not a faculty or a
universal structure.18 In Kantian terms, his claim was that the conditions of
experience and the conditions of the object of experience were completely
heterogeneous.19 Foucault sums up Nietszche’s position with broad strokes:
Knowledge must struggle against a world without order, without connected-
ness, without form, without beauty, without wisdom, without harmony and
without law. That is the world that knowledge deals with. There is nothing in
knowledge that enables it, by any right whatever, to know this world. It is not
natural for nature to be known—there can be no relation of natural continuity
between knowledge and the things that knowledge must know—Knowledge
can only be a violation of the things to be known, and not a perception, a
recognition, an identification of those things.20
With Nietszche, knowledge thus becomes fundamentally perspectival and finite,
and reality, as we know it, disturbingly contingent and arbitrary.21 It also becomes
importantly historical and political. Foucault argues that when Nietzsche speaks of
the perspectival character of knowledge he is not claiming that knowledge is always
bounded by certain limits derived from human nature, the human body or the
structure of knowledge itself. He is rather pointing to the fact that there is
knowledge only in the form of a certain number of actions by which human beings
16
Ibid., 12.
17
Ibid., 9–10.
18
Ibid., 12–14.
19
Ibid., 9.
20
Ibid., 9.
21
Foucault refers to The Gay Science, aphorism 109 as an example. See Nietzsche (1974, p. 168).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 453

violently take hold of things, react to certain situations, and subject them to relations
of force.
…knowledge is always a certain strategic relation in which man is placed.
This strategic relation is what will define the effect of knowledge; that’s why it
would be completely contradictory to imagine a knowledge that was not by
nature partial, oblique, and perspectival. The perspectival character of
knowledge derives not from human nature but always from the polemical
and strategic character of knowledge. One can speak of the perspectival
character of knowledge because there is a battle, and knowledge is the result
of this battle.22
Foucault brushes aside the possible objection that this politicization of
knowledge cannot in fact be found in Nietzsche, but is produced through his own
obsession with power relations. He claims that it is irrelevant whether this summary
and simplified account is the Nietzschean conception of knowledge. What he is
looking for is a philosophical model for conducting his own historical analyses of
truth games—discursive practices capable of producing truths and engendering
reality.23
In sum, in the 1970s Foucault was increasingly looking for theoretical ways to
account for the lacunae in his archeological analyses: the political conditions and
effects of knowledge. He was clearly not satisfied with seeing the relationship
between power and knowledge as external—it was not simply a case of sensorship
or incitement. Rather, the critical questioning of truth and objectivity had to proceed
all the way down to the level of ontology, to their constitution. He did not change or
even substantially modify his archeological nominalism in his later writings on
power, however. Instead, the double theoretical foundation of the initial nominalism
deployed in The Arhaeology of Knowledge and the subsequent Nietzschean idea of
the strategic character of knowledge were important steps on his way to introducing
the fully-fledged conception of productive power in Discipline and Punish in 1975.

3 Productive power

Foucault’s denial of ontology is often seen as a consequence of his methodological

focus on practices: instead of natural objects or things, there are only practices that
are constitutive of discursive objects.24 The focus on generative practices should be
read as an ontological commitment, however, not as a denial of ontology. The focus
on generative practices rather than supposedly natural objects amounts to a critique
of forms of natural realism, and it also points to the methodological failure of the
22
Foucault (2000b, p. 14).
23
Ibid., 13.
24
Foucault confirms the centrality of social practices in his thought on numerous occasions. He singles
them out as the constant object of his studies: What unites and gives coherence to his always partial and
local analyses is that they have the realm of practices as their homogeneous domain of reference. See,
Foucault (1991a, p. 48). In one of his last interviews he mapped out his whole thought as studies of
different aspects of practices. See, Foucault (2001, p. 1512).

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philosophy of the subject or of consciousness: The constitution of experience cannot

be understood through radical self-investigation—by analysing the intentional acts
of the solitary subject.
Foucault’s analysis of social practices thus does not amount to sociological or
even conventional historiographical study, but to historical ontology.25 It does not
study some metaphysical principles or essences under or above concrete practices. It
denotes a specific philosophical perspective on practices, however. As Paul Veyne
notes, the step of disqualifying the natural object is what gives Foucault’s work its
philosophical—rather than simply historical—stature.26
Hence, when Foucault’s commentators label him a nominalist they generally
refer to some form of social constructivism.27 Social practices, not pure language,
bring into being, or institute, a world of significations, and reality as we know it is
the result of such an institution. All knowledge, both scientific and the taken-for-
granted common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and
maintained by social practices, but comes to be understood as the given, objective
reality. The historical contingency embedded in its institution is forgotten and
reality assumes the form of an unproblematized and objective given.
Foucault’s thought thus formed a significant strand in the effort to theorise the
social construction of reality that became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s.28 It is
my contention that his most original and important contribution to this project was
his conception of productive power. As his arguably most famous single sentence
states: ‘‘Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth.’’29
The idea that power produces reality can be understood in different ways,
however. While some of Foucault’s critics have dismissed it as an outlandish notion
attributing to power metaphysical properties of genesis, commentators more
sympathetic to his thought have sought to explain it in more rational, but widely
varying ways.
Ian Hacking has argued that in order to understand the constitutive role of power
and knowledge one has to limit the scope of Foucault’s analyses thereby making
them compatible with naturalism. He argues that Foucault’s account should be
limited to explaining the constitution of only certain kinds of entities understood as
social or political, such as the objects of the social sciences. According to Hacking,
Foucault restricted his analysis to human sciences for the reason that only in those

25
Foucault’s late essays on Kant’s article ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ introduced his idea of philosophy
as an ontology of the present or an ontology of ourselves. This critical ontology turns around Kant’s
question of the necessary limits that knowledge has to refrain from transgressing and asks instead what
place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints in what is
given to us as universal and necessary. The aim is thus to transform the critique conducted in the form of
necessary limitation into a critique that seeks out the possibilities of change. See e.g., Foucault (1991a,
1997).
26
Veyne (1997, p. 168).
27
Veyne (1997), Flynn (2005b) and Hacking (2002), for example, have all argued that Foucault’s
historical nominalism is a form of social constructivism .
28
Cf. Berger and Luckmann (1967), Castoriadis (1987).
29
Foucault (1991b, p. 194).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 455

do truths have constitutive effects on the subjects under study. In the natural
sciences our invention of new identities and categories does not ‘really’ change the
way the world works. Even though we may create new phenomena, which did not
exist before our scientific endeavours, what happens in our experiments is
constrained by the world: If we do certain things, certain phenomena will always
appear. In the social sciences, however, we may generate kinds of people and kinds
of action as we devise new classifications and categories. Categories of people come
into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those
categories and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.30
Hacking thus understands constitution according to the naturalist model as causal
interaction between empirical facts and conscious agents who are affected by them.
Social sciences, unlike natural sciences, are interactive with their objects: Concepts,
practices and people interact causally. While Hacking calls this position ‘dynamic
nominalism’, he acknowledges that it could equally be called ‘dialectical realism’.31
He wants to retain a robust natural realism while accepting that in the social realm
cultural practices may have constitutive effects on the agents.
It is my contention that Foucault’s radical nominalism and his continuous
emphasis on the constitutive role of social practices make it problematic to ground
his thinking on forms of naturalism, however. Despite his qualified acceptance of
the label ‘positivist’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the explicit critique of
naturalism put forward only a couple of years earlier in The Order of Thing makes it
clear that the label should be understood primarily as ironic.32 Hacking’s model also
relies on a strict dichotomy between the social and the natural, an ontological
distinction in itself, which is not absolute or given, but an important point of
political contestation. Neither do all of Foucault’s analyses neatly fall into the
category of the social: His interest also encompasses life-sciences such as biology
and medicine, for example.
Han (2002) offers a compelling transcendental reading of productive power. In
contrast to Hacking’s naturalist reading, she claims that its constitutive role is not
reducible to empirical claims about practices and institutions causally affecting the

30
Hacking (1984, p. 122).
31
Hacking (2002, p. 2).
32
Foucault (1972, p. 125) and (1989, pp. 303–344). In The Order of Thing Foucault argued that Kant’s
thought marked the threshold of modernity and with him all traditional questions of metaphysics came to
an end. All naı̈ve metaphysical belief that our representations and reality—or words and things—simply
coincided could not be upheld anymore, because all objectification required the transcendental
organization of human thought in order to be understood as such. As the human being also becomes an
empirical object in this same historical conjunction, however, the anthropological structure specific to
modernity—Man as an empiro-transcendental doublet—was born. Man becomes ‘‘the fundamental
disposition that has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought since Kant until our own
day’’ (Foucault 1989, p. 342). All modern philosophy, including Foucault’s own thought, is a necessary
effort to deal with the paradoxes imbedded in this figure. As well as a vehement critique of
phenomenology as a contemporary effort to solve it, The Order of Thing also contains a critique of
naturalism as its inevitable complement. Since it is clear which side was the main enemy in the 1960s
France, however, not too much ammunition is spent on the critique of naturalism: despite being post-
Kantian, naturalism is pre-critical. It forgets the dependence of experience on transcendental
determinations in its ontologization of empirical knowledge. For more on Foucault’s critique of
naturalism and phenomenology, see e.g. Gutting (1989), Han (2002), Oksala (2005).

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456 J. Oksala

people involved in them, but should rather be understood as providing the historical
conditions of possibility for producing true discourses.33 Genealogy studies the
power-knowledge nexus, a collection of practices, discursive and non-discursive, in
which truth is produced. As in archaeology, the approach is transcendental in the sense
that Foucault wanted to identify the historical conditions of acceptability for
statements to be considered true or false. In contrast to archaeology, however, he
recognised in his genealogies that it was not possible to define these conditions on a
purely epistemological level. Genealogy had to question the allegedly neutral and
disinterested character of scientific practices by showing that they obey imperatives
that have nothing to do with theoretical or epistemological demands, but were shaped
by political interests such as the disciplinary control of the human body. Furthermore,
the circular relationship between power and knowledge meant that while the
historically varying conditions of acceptability determined when truth could be
predicated in the first place, when it was actually predicated, it in turn influenced its
own conditions of acceptability. In other words, it was not only as a function of
epistemic rules, but also in reference to what was effectively recognised as true, that
the field of acceptability of propositions was constituted and transformed.34
A transcendental as opposed to empirical reading of productive power is able to
account for the contextualist insight that the social and political context of scientific
knowledge can shape its content irrespective of whether it takes human behavior or
physical processes as its object of study. Socially and historically determined
background beliefs will inevitably shape the evidential relations in scientific
practice, for example.35 It is my contention that the productive effects of the
intertwinement of power and knowledge are thus not restricted to subjects
internalising norms and identities produced by human sciences and behaving
accordingly. Power also produces reality by shaping the conditions of acceptability
for true discourses. In any society the production of truth responds to a certain
number of imperatives and conditions that are not purely theoretical, but also
practical and political. Our understanding of reality is inevitably the effect of power
relations also in this sense.
Han’s critical claim is that a transcendental reading of the power-knowledge
nexus means that, far from being a contingent and historically given configuration, it
turns into an independent quasi-metaphysical entity capable of determining the
possible forms and domains of knowledge and transforming itself in history. She
claims that despite Foucault’s explicit denials, secretly there is a metaphysics of
power at work in his thought. Power-knowledge becomes an essence definable in
itself, returning Foucault to the sort of metaphysics that genealogy sought to combat
by giving primacy to perspective and interpretation against any essentialist

33
See also Oksala (2005).
34
Han (2002, p. 104). Han, however, like Hacking, raises the question of what extension should be
accorded to Foucault’s claims. Her problem is with mathematical propositions, which seem to contradict
Foucault’s thesis that it is impossible to define truth independently of power relations. She concludes that
Foucault’s analysis shows a tendency to turn a particular case into a generality without enough
justification. See Han (2002, pp. 140–141). See, e.g., Longino (1990, 2002).
35
See e.g., Longino (1990, 2002).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 457

ontology.36 While Han acknowledges that the other possibility would be to accept
Foucault’s explicit description of power-knowledge as an analytic grid, a mere
theoretical tool designed to clarify the conditions of acceptability of a system, such
acceptance would only land him in even more serious trouble.37 He would avoid the
metaphysics of power, but the problem with a mere analytic grid is that it is
deprived of any foundation.
It is my contention that it is exactly in the light of Foucault’s politicization of
ontology, however, that we can understand the ontological status of his own
analyses. Power-knowledge is a mere analytical grid and an ontological concept
because ontology consists of mere analytical grids. In reading Foucault’s claims
about power we must take seriously the consequences of his politicization of
ontology for all theoretical activity, including his own. There can be no pure theory,
because the categories that we use to think about reality are the products of our
society. There exists no place outside of language, power, society and history from
which one could construct a theory of them. The ontology that we are trying to
understand, deconstruct, critically unveil, dismantle or modify is the result of a
process of sedimentation, but it is also partly our own doing.
What gives philosophy a privileged role in the paradoxical quest for ontological
understanding is that it is—or should be—aware of the way it is restricted and
implicated. It can and must be critically self-reflective of its own concepts,
categories and definitions, their power effects on the one hand and their contingent
and provisional nature on the other. As Han herself notes, the theoretical
justification of genealogy could be connected to the honesty with which genealogy
reflexively interrogates the perspective presupposed by its own questioning,
following the paradox according to which the only possibility for an interpretation
to be authentic lies in the explicit illumination of its interpretative character.38
Foucault’s idea of a constitutive power-knowledge nexus must be understood, in
the light of his ontology, as another analytical grid, fighting for hegemony in the
game of truth. It is an uncertain and contingent attempt to make our world
understandable from a distinctive theoretical and political perspective. It is a move
in a truth game, a weapon in the struggle over objectivity and truth: what there is in
our world and how it is, what counts as real and what counts as incoherent fiction.
The difficult question thus does not, in my view, concern the ontological status of
Foucault’s analytic grid. It concerns our criteria of truth for ontological statements.
If all ontological orders are violent impositions fighting for hegemony, bound by
political and socio-historical conditions, why should we understand reality through
the grid that Foucault proposes rather than maintain our comforting belief in naive
realism, for example? Why should we accept that there is no direct referential
correspondence between words and things or that social practices constitute
contingent orderings, which we take for granted and understand as objective reality?
36
Han (2002, pp. 142–144).
37
See e.g., Foucault (1990a). Foucault explicitly denied that the concepts of power and knowledge could
be used to identify general principles of reality. ‘‘No one should ever think that there exists one
knowledge or one power, or worse, knowledge or power, which would operate in and of themselves’’
(Foucault 1997, p. 52).
38
Han (2002, p. 102).

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458 J. Oksala

It is precisely because Foucault’s analyses are philosophical or ontological,

however, and not positivist or empirical that the difficult question of their truth
arises. Nor does this question concern only Foucault, but is equally pertinent to any
distinctively philosophical analysis of political reality. The truth of ontology is
necessarily beyond empirical verification because it conditions it. In philosophy we
are inevitably beyond the realm of true or false in this sense, but in everyday life we
also constantly operate on the basis of assumptions that cannot be empirically
proved or disapproved.

4 Governmentality

Commentators often read Foucault’s lectures on the history of governmentality

Security, Territory and Population and The Birth of Biopower as another major
turning point in his thought: They represent a shift to more traditional political
theory in being concerned with the development of the modern administrative state.
The lectures have inspired many influential studies, mainly in the social sciences.39
While not wishing to discredit this original and groundbreaking work in any way,
I nevertheless contend that what is often overlooked in discussions on Foucault’s
history of governmentality is its distinctively philosophical focus. While the lectures
represent his most explicit engagement with the question of politics, they continue
his critical ontology of the present in crucial respects and build upon the ontological
premises elaborated in his earlier work.
In the first lecture of the series The Birth of Biopolitics in the year 1979 Foucault
confirms that ‘‘the question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard
to madness, disease, delinquency, and sexuality.’’40 The thread that goes through all
these investigations is his historical nominalism.
The point of all these investigations—is to show how the coupling of a set of
practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus (dispositif) of knowledge-
power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and
legitimately submits it to the division between true and false.41
In all these cases, it was not a question of showing ‘‘how these objects were for a
long time hidden before finally being discovered’’—the position of natural realism.
Neither was it one of discursive idealism—a matter of showing how they were
‘‘only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason
finally having reached its zenith.’’
It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices—
from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth—was able
to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality,

39
See e.g., Burchell et al. (1991), Barry et al. (1996).
40
Foucault (2008, p. 19).
41
Ibid.

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 459

etcetera), nonetheless become something, something however that continues

not to exist.42
Foucault’s distinction between ‘existing’ (exister) and ‘becoming something’
(devenir quelque chose) in this paragraph marks the distinction between the two
ontological positions of historical nominalism and natural realism. According to his
historical nominalism, madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality do not exist as
natural objects, but this does not mean that they are illusions or errors. Foucault
emphasises that they are part of reality, they are nevertheless something, because
they are established in a set of real practices which imperiously mark them out in
reality.43
While continuing his ontology of the present the lectures nevertheless introduce
new terminology, as well as moving to a new domain of inquiry. In these lectures
government becomes Foucault’s preferred term for power while governmentality
takes the place of power-knowledge in functioning as the main theoretical tool for
analysing the historical and political production of social reality. Foucault discusses
a range of individual political thinkers and theories in his lectures, but his main
interest lies again in understanding the larger institutional and epistemic context in
which these theories became possible. Governmentality denotes the underlying
political rationality, the historical conditions—epistemic as well as institutional—
for political thought and practice in the modern period. These conditions are
examined through historiographical study, but they cannot be reduced to empirical,
institutional facts about politics.
Foucault’s notion of governmentality emerged in his forth lecture in the year
1978. The word ‘governmentality’ is not only ugly—as Foucault himself noted—it
is also ambiguous.44 He argued that while government historically referred to a wide
range of practices, from governing children to religious guidance of the soul, in the
context of the modern state it had taken the form of governing a population by the
means of scientific knowledge. It was this historical development, ‘‘the history of
governmentality’’ or ‘‘the genealogy of the modern state’’ that he attempted to
expose in his lectures. He wanted to articulate and to reveal, through a historical

42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
See e.g., Foucault (2007, p. 115). He explains that it refers, on the one hand, to a distinct logic and
economy of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and that can be distinguished from both
sovereign power and disciplinary power in terms of its rationality, its aims and its means. On the other
hand, it also refers to the actual historical process through which Western societies became
governmentalised: techniques of governmental management developed, spread and came to dominate
our political landscape. Saar (2010) argues that the three-fold quasi-definition that Foucault offers in the
fourth lecture must be understood as an ad hoc definition, since it is hard to see how something can
meaningfully be said to be an ‘‘ensemble’’ of something, a temporal ‘‘tendency’’ and the ‘‘result of a
process’’ at the same time, the latter only explained with the help of the term to be defined. He suggests
that semantically the term aims at the whole sphere that can be said to be ‘‘gouvernemental’’, i.e., relating
to the instance and the act of government. See Foucault (2007, pp. 108–109).
After the 1978 lectures the meaning of the term ‘governmentality’ shifts slightly from a historically
determined sense to a more general sense. Government and governmentality come to designate the
general way in which the conduct of individuals or groups is directed. See e.g., Foucault (1982). See also
Senellart (2007, pp. 388–389).

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460 J. Oksala

analysis, the development of a specific type of political ontology as well as power

technology that was fundamental to the exercise of modern state power. He wanted
to identify the historical conditions—such as Christian pastoral power and the birth
of political economy—that have produced the modern administrative state: A
historically specific form of power with a distinct rationality. In short, Foucault’s
focus is still on the political and historical constitution of reality, but he is now
interested in the constitution of those entities that are commonly understood to
belong to the political realm. His nominalism is now applied to the state.
Foucault criticised not only the tendency to demonise the state in political
thought—to see it as the simple enemy and the root of all political problems—but
also the attempts to theorise its essence: ‘‘The state is not a universal nor in itself an
autonomous source of power… the state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a
regime of multiple governmentalities.’’45 Martin Saar argues in his study of the
methodological and historical presuppositions of Foucault’s lectures that one of
their key challenges to traditional political historiography is the nominalist claim
that the state cannot be a neutral and natural given of political thought. It too is an
element and a product of political struggle: the effect of discursive and practical
negotiation. The idea of governmentality thus radically historicises the state and
dissolves its fixed identity into a multiplicity of institutions, procedures, analyses
and reflection, calculations, and tactics.46 ‘‘The state is a practice…inseparable from
the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of
doing things.’’47
Saar also emphasises the distinctiveness of the level on which Foucault’s
historical analysis operates. As a form of genealogical history it relates discourses
and practices, the textual and the social. Practical texts like edicts on trade and
commerce, the political tracts of the physiocrats and the programmatic statements of
jurists and economists form the material from which Foucault draws his conclusions
about the practice as well as the theoretical articulations of the new, liberal form of
government. Understanding the historical conditions of the modern state requires
that the intellectual and the social are not seen apart from each other, as two
different realms of reality, but as parts of a conglomerate. Such a history of
governmentality is less concerned with what there is in the realm of supposedly
neutral historical ‘facts’ and focuses instead on the processes and procedures that
‘make’ and produce facticity and normativity in a given historical, epistemological
and social field. Foucault’s history of governmentality is therefore neither history of
politics nor history of political ideas, but of politic-as-reality: A historical tracing of
the many ways in which institutional and epistemic conditions shape what people
can effectively do and think as political agents.48
Foucault’s specific aim is to identify a particular regime of truth that conditions
politics as we understand it today: It is a realm that is limited and shaped by truths,
particularly the autonomous laws and regularities of economics. In trying to
45
Foucault (2008, p. 77).
46
Saar (2010).
47
Foucault (2007, p. 277).
48
Saar (2010).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 461

understand the historical emergence of this particular, liberal regime of truth he is

not trying to identify ‘‘an epistemological threshold on the basis of which the art of
government could become scientific.’’49 He is not interested in determining the truth
value of certain propositions about the economy or the population. He is interested
in the historical conditions that make it possible to predicate such truths and to make
them constitutive of our practices of government. His analysis focuses on
the articulation of a particular type of discourse and a set of practices, a
discourse that on the one hand, constitutes these practices as a set bound
together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand legislates and can
legislate on these practices in terms of true or false.50
In the new, liberal regime of truth practices of government are not assessed any
longer on the basis of whether they conform to moral or divine laws, but on the basis
of whether they conform to scientific truths. To understand what politics is today we
have to grasp how our modern conception of economy emerged ‘‘though a series of
complex processes that are absolutely crucial for our history’’ and how it came to
designate ‘‘a level of reality and a field of intervention for government.’’51
Exercising political power has come to mean governing a population on the basis of
forms of knowledge such as economics. Foucault was not attempting to write
another political history of European states or to trace the intellectual history of
political ideas about government. He wanted to expose the institutional and
epistemic conditions that constitute and limit our understanding of political reality
as well as our concrete practices of governing.

5 Conclusion: the ubiquity of the political

While many strands of political thought emphasise and valorise pluralism—forms

of liberalism as well the work of Arendt and her followers, for example—the
understanding of pluralism they advocate often relies on unproblematised ontology.
Reality, or the common world in which we live, is simply assumed as given, while
plurality refers to the diversity of interests, needs and values of individual subjects.
Foucault’s political ontology takes a step back in questioning the grounds of
pluralism. According to him, the common world is already a sedimentation of power
relations and not simply a given and objective space containing the plurality of
individuals who inhabit it. It is already fundamentally plural on the level of its
institution. Political thinking that relies on forms of naı̈ve realism is thus blind to the
political dimension of the constitution of everyday reality.
It is also blind to the agonistic nature of politics. If the ontological order of things
is inevitably the expression of hegemonic power relations—including acts of
domination and exclusion—then the differing interpretations of the world, social
order and human life cannot, in principle, be reconciled in a harmonious and
49
Foucault (2008, p. 18).
50
Ibid., 18.
51
Foucault (2007, p. 95).

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462 J. Oksala

homogenous unity.52 The constitutive nature of power strongly implies that the
plurality of interpretations about everyday reality, social order and human life
cannot be eliminated in politics. Objectivity can only be the fragile and temporary
victory of an ongoing political struggle, and ontology is the sedimented effect of it.
While political conflict is traditionally understood as conflict over the distribution
of resources—economic and social equality—or over fundamental values, my claim
is that Foucault considerably broadens the range. Politics is not only a struggle over
resources and values. It is a more fundamental battle for truth and objectivity.
Politics discloses a world: It becomes essentially a struggle to realise a unique world
through the definition of what there is. Is there such a thing as a superior race? What
about marital rape? Or pathological sexuality?
The somewhat disquieting consequence of Foucault’s ontological view is the
ubiquity of the political. If politics is ultimately concerned with what there is, its
scope cannot be easily demarcated. Rather than trying to maintain the specificity of
the political, Foucault explicitly embraced its ubiquity and coined the expression
‘politics of truth’. He noted that because power relations are rooted in the whole
network of society, political analysis cannot be reduced to the study of a series of
institutions that would merit the name ‘political’.53 The political must rather be
understood as a historically variable process of rationalisation and division of power
that is coextensive with society.
It is my contention that his broadening of the meaning of the political does not
amount to a depoliticizing and totalitarian gesture, however. It does not imply that
everything is political in the same way, or that all areas of life are already and in
advance under the rule and rationality of state politics, for example. The constitutive
power network can translate into a variety of political possibilities, but philosoph-
ical analysis and political activism must make the translation: they must expose and
analyze the power relations that are immanent in our practices and institutions,
unmask the ensuing forms of domination, violence and exclusion, contest their
inevitability, and demand change. While many of the social practices that we
engage in every day might seem completely apolitical—treating the sick, doing
household chores, travelling to work—they can and have been politicized by
revealing and contesting the power relations operative in them: the power of doctors
over patients, of men over women, of capitalists over workers.
Foucault’s analyses have effectively opened up new domains for political
criticism and activism in refusing to secure the limits of the political in advance. His
aim was to imagine and bring into being new schemas of politicization: By
uncovering new kinds of relations and mechanisms of power he brought into the
political debate new questions and areas of experience such as insanity, delinquency
and sexuality. In exposing concepts, categories and practices as sedimentations and
expressions of power relations he attempted to reveal the exclusion, domination and
violent treatment of those at the losing end of the struggle for objectivity and truth:
52
Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics at the heart of which is dissent, rather than
the search for consensus. William Connolly, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe, most notably, have
argued for an agonistic account of the political. See Connolly (1991), Honig (1993), Mouffe (1993, 2000,
2005).
53
Foucault (1982, p. 224). On Foucault’s understanding of ‘the political’, see also, Foucault (1980).

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Foucault’s politicization of ontology 463

How their views have been branded as false and irrational and their behaviour as
abnormal and pathological. The effect is a fundamental politicization of truth as
well as a problematization of violence, exclusion and marginalisation.
In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, as well as in his interviews in the
1980 s Foucault introduced the concept of ‘problematization’, a notion he claimed
was common to all his work since History of Madness.54 It refers to the way that
certain forms of behaviour, practices and actions can emerge as possible objects of
politicization, redescription and, ultimately change. He explains that for a practice, a
domain of action or behavior, to enter the field of political problematization it is
necessary for a certain number of factors to have first made it uncertain, to have
made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a number of difficulties around it.
This is the result of social, economic and political processes, but their role is only
that of instigation. Effective problematization is accomplished by thought. When
thought intervenes it does not assume a unique form that is the direct result or the
necessary expression of the social, economic or political difficulties. It is an original
or specific response, often taking many forms, sometimes contradictory in their
aspects.55
The notion of problematization can thus be understood as the possibility of
contesting and transforming ontology. The politicization of ontology is not just a
process of unmasking, but also one of redescription. Thought is capable of
problematizing itself, of taking a step back from the practices in which it is
embedded and exposing, at least to some extent, the hidden grammar, the
rationality, that regulates them. It allows one to take distance from forms of
behavior, and to reflect on them as a problem. The politicization of ontology thus
does not mean its replacement or denial, but its problematization: ‘‘Thought is
freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself
from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.’’56
It is also important to emphasise that the word ontology has two distinct
meanings: it commonly refers both to the fundamental nature of reality and to the
systematic study of this nature. While the first sense must be understood in the
context of Foucault’s thought to comprise a diverse set of competing background
beliefs about reality that are always politically and socio-historically bound, the
second refers to the activity of exposing them and critically questioning their
constitution. While ontology in the second sense is an individual activity, always
partial, socio-historically bound and fallible, in the first sense it cannot be the
exclusive achievement of an individual at all. Ontology understood as the grid of
intelligibility inside of which it is possible to think is formed by a web of social
practices, and it does not form a unified and closed system. It is thus not through the

54
See e.g., Foucault (1988, 1990b, 1991c ). Foucault explains that in History of Madness the question
was how and why, at a given moment, madness was problematized through a certain institutional practice
and a certain apparatus of knowledge. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish, for example, he analysed the
changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices
and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Foucault (1988,
p. 257).
55
Foucault (1991c, pp. 388–389).
56
Ibid., 388.

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464 J. Oksala

supreme mental effort of the philosopher—such as the epoche or some ingenious

moment of vision—that the ultimate truth about reality can be revealed. While
philosophy can contribute to the creation of new concepts, theoretical tools and
ways of conceiving of the world, no one person can create an ontology in this
sense.57 The idea that practices engender reality does not eliminate the role of the
individual, but it does limit it. The web of practices in which we are embedded
necessarily shapes our thought and understanding. Nothing we do can change the
totality of it, but equally nothing we do is insignificant either.
In sum, I have suggested that Foucault’s critical project should be read as a
serious attempt to problematize the relationship between ontology and politics.
Rather than translating the right ontology into the right politics, he reverses the
argument. The task of philosophy is not to secure knowledge about the true nature
of reality that could then be converted into the right political order. The radicality of
his method lies rather in showing how the ontological order of things is itself the
outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. His
genealogies make visible the historical struggles over truth and objectivity; how our
understanding of reality is constituted in a piece-meal fashion in historical practices
that always incorporate power relations. In short, all ontology is always already
political ontology.

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