Projective transformations of convex bodies and volume product

In this paper we study certain variational aspects of the volume product functional restricted to the space of small projective deformations of a fixed convex body. In doing so, we provide a short proof of a theorem by Klartag: a strong version of the slicing conjecture implies the Mahler conjecture. We also exhibit an interesting family of critical convex bodies in dimension $2$ containing saddle points for this functional.