ABSTRACT
This chapter begins sketching the unorthodox sociology of Tarde, tracing its indirect influence into the 'sociology of association' of Latour's Actor-Network Theory, traversing Heidegger's spatial intuition and following their explicitation in Sloterdijk's Sphereology. It emphasises the relevance of these approaches in decisively moving beyond the binary impasse of contractualist and organicistic understandings of the social, a question keeps resonating: where is the event? The notion of being-in-the-world seemingly posits relation as its ontological foundation. With the concept of Dasein the subject/object distinction is dissolved into the original, situational relationality of the being-there: accordingly, beings are 'bundles' of situated relations, pure relata. Through the concept of double-structure we thus hold together both a notion of virtual as inoperose impotentiality, and the actual relationality in which it unfolds. Thus the project of transcendental empiricism surfaces, as what allows one to cut through transcendental subjectivism and objective empiricism, ontologies of presence and flat ontologies of relations.
