Chantal Mouffle is interested in the question of "What is it to differ?" (emphasis in Mol)
this question is relevant "when it comes to events at the level of the state" and "when it comes to a single person's fleshy life"; "where international rules are being laid down for the patenting of genes"; "when it comes to the architectural and organizational design of a hospital ward" -- all of these "have to do with the organization of human lives and the world that comes with this, and in all of them rules, regulations, ideals, facts, frictions, frames and tensions are paramount"
the sites are political, and Mouffle believes "that difference should be taken a lot more seriously in political theory" (Mol's summation, 114)
"Taking difference seriously requires, or so Mouffle argues, a continuing movement between taking distance and mixing things together [...] what is attended to are resonances and similarities between, for instance, the mechanics of ways of relating"
the way in which "frictions are vital elements of wholes" (115)
"Mouffle sketches an image of the relation between different political constituencies that comes close to the image of relation between different objects enacted that is sketched in the present study"
see her The Return of the Political, Verso, 1993