Looking for something else, I came across a piece by Martin Saar on the theme of
What is Political Ontology? It’s in the Dutch journal Krisis, and it is a review of the expanded, German-language edition of Oliver Marchart’s book on post-foundational political thought (it appears to have added a discussion of Agamben, amongst other things).

Saar raises three related questions at the end of his review. First, he notes that there might be more than one understanding of ‘ontology’ flying around discussions of political ontology and ontological politics – in addition to the by now rather standard Heideggerian-inflected one that Marchart elaborates, he notes a Deleuzian-materialist-pluralist style, and also a ‘social ontology’ version related to Hegelian-inflected styles (like Honneth I guess). He does not mention, but one might throw into the mix, the sense of ‘ontological politics’ that circulates around STS/ANT-inflected worlds, from Latour, John Law, Anne-Marie Mol and the like. This seems to be a quite distinctive (and preferable) notion of onto-talk, one which is more concerned with tracing the deep commitments that shape practices (as a result, it also seems to find it difficult not to find itself constrained to invent new and more complex ways of saying ‘constructed’), rather than making very grand philosophical claims about the foundationally post-foundational contingency of necessary contingency.

Saar’s second point is one about the practice of philosophy that political ontology represents – this is the theme that animates me, the sense that work of this sort is characterised by certain sorts of rhetorical and argumentative devices and conventions that might, if you look at them carefully, be somewhat at odds with proclamations about a democratic/emancipatory ethos and such things. And it relates to the third point that Saar raises, about the degree to which elaborate political ontologies premised on variants of the politics/political distinction struggle not to reduce ‘real’ politics to so many stylized facts which confirm one or other of the a priori propositions laid out by the theory – they are always cashed-out as ‘applied political ontology’ as Saar puts it.  Again, a key difference from the ANT-STS style of ‘onto-pol’ talk, which informs rather more robust, that is, tentative, empirical work than does standard philosophized political ontology, whose great contribution to methodology has been to develop a weird style of semiotized ‘Discourse Theory’ which reduces all politics to a practice of naming (I find the claim made by adherents to the ontological-difference-equals-political-difference style of political theory which Saar is discussing in this piece, to the effect that this work is distinctive because unlike other political theories it puts conflict, contestation and antagonism at the centre of things, rather unconvincing on the face of it – this is an emphasis in all sorts of work, from Michael Walzer to Bernard Crick. What might be distinctive is the insistence on deriving these facets of political life from more or less elaborate philosophical claims about contingency, or lack, or abundance; and it is this move that seems to shape the methodological pay-offs of such work, which point in the direction of looking at what, in another theoretical idiom, one might call processes of framing as the privileged focus of analysis).