While the "cruelty" in Marat/Sade is not, ultimately, a moral issue, it is not an aesthetic one either. It is an ontological issue.

This is what academics call 'ontological security', a sense of order and continuity in relation to experiences.

state institutions (the military, in particular) appear to enjoy limitless autonomy, causal influence, and ontological primacy as the sole constitutive force in the political and social realm

As the philosophers might say, 'literature' and 'weed' are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things.

Any ontology of the present needs to be an ideological analysis as well as a phenomenological description

Apart from the Bank, three types of social actors appear in the texts during this period: states and governments; companies, banks and industry; engineers, technicians and experts. This social ontology confirms the standard account of post-war reconstruction as industrial, Fordist and Keynesian.

achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union

By the early decades of the twentieth century, this culture, with its attendant ontological anxieties, had taken the form of modernism.

‘ontological anxiety’: namely, the feeling (sometimes accompanied by a particularly intense hangover) that one is a pointless, superfluous being

Some of the most powerful passages in Dick’s work are those in which there is an ontological interregnum: a traumatic unworlding is not yet given a narrative motivation

it is also an 'ontological' struggle, a struggle which concerns the thing itself, a struggle that goes on in the very heart of the protests themselves