Abstract

tarting from the ambiguity of humanist and post-humanist concepts, the place occupied by the social as a political dimension in these critical-theory constructions and especially in ecological and new ontological approaches is examined. Two classical categories seem crucial for the investigation: oikonomia and koinonia. While the former denotes the political order (dispositif), the structure as provided by law but also by utopian notions of salvation addresses the latter, that which constitutes the sociality of the social as such and provides social coherence. Posthumanistic theories, so the thesis, tend to lose sight of the conoistic dimension. To be sure, they extend the social by including the nonhuman and nonsocial, such as artefacts, things, technologies, and so on, but by thinking preferably in terms of networks and by postulating a symmetry of their interrelationality, they miss the essential incommensurability between interpersonal relationships and the more formal and diagrammatic concept of network-relations. The argumentation carried out on the abstract level of philosophical validity criticism, however, has immediatepolitical consequences. For neglectingwhat makes the social social as well as misappropriating the essential differences between relation and relationship corresponds directly to the current political crisis of the social.