not share the ethico-political principles needed to reach a consensus, then critics argue there is little reason to conceive that antagonism can be reduced into anything less. Under a framework under which there are no shared ethico-political commitments, there is also no normative basis for prohibiting the use of political violence. Finally, critics contend that this lack of common understanding not only problematizes the transformation of antagonism into something else, but it further contradicts the essence of antagonism itself. It is argued that deliberation is constitutive of conflict, insofar as antagonism requires a certain degree of understanding of the "other" and an ability to use shared speech acts to explain points of divergence with opposing parties; this becomes difficult to do under an agonistic framework. Critical conceptions Other works have invoked conceptions of agonism and the agon in a more critical sense beyond that of political counter-hegemony. This usage of agonism has been explored at some length by Claudio Colaguori in his book Agon Culture: Competition, Conflict and the Problem of Domination. According to Colaguori, "the agon is literally the arena of competition, the scene of contest, and the locus of adversarial conflict." He continues, writing "The philosophy of agonism affirms the idea that transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest...the concept of agonism is often understood in an affirmative sense as the generative principle of economy, society and even natural ecology and personal growth... The ambivalent character of agonism is that it is often seen as a mode of transcendence, while its instrumental relation to the mode of destruction is rarely acknowledged." For Theodor Adorno, agonism is also about the "theodicy of conflict" where opponents "want to annihilate one another... to enter the agon, each the mortal enemy of each." Agonism forms part of the instituted social order where society "produces and reproduces itself precisely from the interconnection of the antagonistic interests of its members." Adorno also sees agonism as the underlying principle in Hegel's dialectic of history where "dialectics" (i.e., growth through conflict) is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of them: "neither a system nor a contradiction." Colaguori reconstructs the concept of the agon to invoke this critical, destructive aspect as a way of extending Adorno's critique of modern domination and to identify how the normalization and naturalization of conflict is used