ABSTRACT
The salient point here is that when we follow these thinkers’ acknowledgement of relations
that exceed the oppositional frame, we glimpse an underlying principle: there is a fundamental
relationality that subtends opposition. Or, to put it differently, if we recall that even antagonism
is a form of relation, we are led to ask prior questions, often overlooked by IR analysts who take
‘competition’ as the first, often sole relational principle: in the project of theorizing ‘inter-
national relations’, what is the full range of relations to consider? More fundamentally, what
are the onto-political grounds of relation? It is worth noting here that these are the questions
raised by ancient dialecticians, including both early Chinese Daoist philosophers such as
Laozi and Zhuangzi and pre-Socratic Greek philosophers such as Anaxamander and
Asking these a priori questions, we can first observe that our interactions do not move solely
along an agonistic set of circuits driven always by a will-to-dominance. Our physical survival,
from birth, entails relations of all kinds, generating in us what we might call a will-to-relation-
ship, or a desire-for-relationship, however mixed with contrary desires. That is, amid this world
of mutual yet volatile and interpenetrating relationality, we survive by necessary relations of
care interwoven, historically, with microphysical and macropolitical relations of coercion or
domination. Our condition on earth might be described not strictly as competitive engagement
over scarce resources, but rather as a ‘microphysics’ of contingent survival and inter-position-
ality that we undertake with-and-against others.11
