This article introduces a critical comment on Oliver Marchart’s book Thinking Antagonism. Political Ontology after Laclau. The authors identify how Marchart, while assuming the same political aim as his mentor Ernesto Laclau – i.e. ‘to make politics thinkable again’ –, does so from an ‘eccentric’ place in regard to the philosophical field. Indeed, Marchart’s main objective is to put antagonism back into its place. Why should antago-nism be put back into its place? Because Laclau would have displaced it from the previous ontological status that he himself – along with Chantal Mouffe – had given to it when he later introduced the notion of dislocation.
The authors propose a psychoanalytical reading of Laclau’s work arguing that psychoanalysis also allows to decipher the fundamental place that antagonism has in the theory of hegemony. From this perspective they set out to think antagonism from the theory of knots, thereby specifying the notion of contingency and the subject’s place and considering how affection is at the basis of Laclau’s theory.
