Turning the conceptual axis of political conflict does not appear to be a simple task in light of the recent tradition. This tradition is centred on the contestation of order and an essential orientation of politics from distinction to destitution, up to the pure fragmentation of political aggregates. However, there is more that can be distilled from contemporary approaches which identify a different tendency, particularly around antagonism and politics in general. This is the case concerning the set of philosophico-political positions that generally refer to Jacques Lacan and the renewal of psychoanalytical practice.

If it is necessary to trace a starting point, if not exactly the origin, we could certainly turn to the experience of the Cahiers pour l’analyse, a journal from the late 1960s which was animated by a group of École Normale Supérieure students who had a Lacanian-Althusserian orientation in philosophy and a Maoist orientation in politics. Starting from this main segment made up of the Cercle d’épistémologie, there have been a number of expressions of this approach, from the Ljubljana school of Žižek, Dolar, and Zupančič to that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe at the University of Essex. However, here we are not particularly interested in the historical articulation of this tradition,

but rather the philosophical structure which lies at the base of a first and partial rotation of the conceptual axis for understanding conflict and politics.