Abstract

The essay analyzes antagonism as the site of the emergence of the political subject. Antagonism is not an objective relationship, and cannot be reduced either to dialectic contradiction or to real opposition. The subject is not a substance, but the name of the division between the ontic and the ontological, and of the impossibility of constitute itself as an objective order. The divided subject is a political subject insofar as the political is thought as the site of the institution of the social.