The thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism, thus the political, is central to Chantal Mouffe's call for taming antagonism into agonism, or agonistic pluralism. Within planning theory, Mouffe's conflictual ontology that underpins this call has raised questions over the ontological assumption of the presently prominent and consensus-oriented communicative and deliberative planning approaches. This is because these approaches consider consensus formation as a normative ideal and always at least a potential outcome from open and inclusive deliberation, that is, ontological. Yet, the notion that antagonism is also an ever-present possibility for all social relations and therefore an ineradicable risk for consensus-building effort in planning practices appears to be increasingly accepted even by communicative planning theorists. In this article, I trace the origin of Mouffe's thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism back to both her original collaborative work with Earnest Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and Carl Schmitt. With Derrida and Laclau, I then argue that this Mouffean thesis does not hold: antagonism operates at the ontic level in the social and it is only but one way of discursively inscribing the experience of exclusion and the use of power. This insight supports a new, post-antagonism approach to politics and the political based on the ontology of radical negativity. Finally, I discuss how this approach can be linked with planning theory by adopting a de-ontologised notion of the political. I conclude by arguing that since agonism is not the only option for dealing with antagonism for the socially established actors, for example, planners, its implementation in planning practice can appear merely as a top-down imposition of a democratic ethos. Sometimes, depoliticisation of agonistic planning might therefore be necessary.

Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism calls for the mediation of antagonism. In planning theory, increasingly influential agonistic planning theory has taken inspiration from Mouffe’s neo-Schmittian radical democratic theory and promoted as its democratic task the transformation of antagonistic relation between friends and enemies into agonistic ones between adversaries. To accomplish this democratic task, however, I argue that it is not enough to transform antagonism into agonism and that agonism must also be prevented from transforming into antagonism. To this end, I first consider how Carl Schmitt’s formulation of the political as the friend–enemy concept is presupposed in his understanding of the state and is linked directly to his decisionist theory of sovereignty. Transforming antagonism into agonism could thus potentially compromise the effectiveness of sovereign decisions and the unity of social order, and I argue that the mediation of antagonism should be considered to involve the mediation between friends and enemies as well as the mediation between chaos and order. Yet the Mouffean figure of the adversary cannot adequately address the latter. With Bauman and Norval, I draw attention to Zygmunt Bauman’s figure of the stranger in the mediation between chaos and order and, with Sandercock, to a possible complementarity between Mouffe-inspired agonistic planning theory and Sandercock’s postmodern therapeutic planning theory. This complementarity is then examined through a number of empirical planning literature on agonistic and therapeutic planning practices, and I conclude by calling for the recognition of both the Mouffean figure of the adversary and Bauman’s figure of the stranger in implementing the democratic task of agonistic planning theory.

According to them, this is because Mouffe makes a sharp distinction between subjective and ethical or moral values that are beyond reason and political/normative values that are more susceptible to rational debate (McAuliffe and Rogers, 2019: 6). Rather than accepting that 'not all values are beyond reason' (p. 11), they claim that a marked distinction Mouffe subsequently makes between these values prohibits her from analysing, e.g., why people persist in fighting for particular radically distinct values (e.g. truth, justice), empirical conditions that might facilitate what Mouffe calls the 'democratic task' of agonistic pluralism, or the transformation from more ethically driven antagonistic forms of politics towards more productive normative value-driven agonistic ones (McAuliffe and Rogers, 2019: 6). This short response wishes not to gainsay McAuliffe and Rogers' (2019) enormously insightful perspective they call 'radical ethical pluralism' (p. 11) but to merely point out that they may have overexaggerated the sharpness of the distinction Mouffe draws between the ethical and the normative values and mischaracterised Mouffe's democratic task as a result. This would be a shame, for McAuliffe and Rogers (2019: 1) entirely agree with Mouffe in considering this task necessary for constructing genuinely open, inclusive and democratic planning practice. Strictly speaking, then, the democratic task is in fact a possible way merely of carrying out politics. It involves differentiating and excluding 'the enemy' from 'adversaries', or friendly enemies, (Howarth, 2008: 178) and making contingent political decisions in the face of competing interpretations of the liberal democratic values or principles of