The centrality of Heidegger to post-foundational political thought relates to his philosophical engagement with questions of ontology and difference. This – what has been called the ontico-ontological difference – has many dimensions; but here it pertains directly to those questions which became, in debates in French, for instance, carried out in terms of the difference between le politique and la politique, or politics construed as ontic arrangements of society, its institutions and orders. These contingent ('political') arrangements arise as such (with different aspects of them becoming at different times the stuff of 'politics') because of the nature of ontology – an ontology that has come to be thought of as 'political'. That is, it is only because the ontological level enables/necessitates contingent arrangements that politics both possible and indeed inevitable. Thus, contingency is necessary for fundamental reasons. The 'foundations' of society are fundamentally contingent. Politics is contingent. Ontology is political.

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