Lasse Thomassen
Biographic Data
| ID | 245320 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lasse Thomassen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lasse |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomassen |
| SIGNATURE | THOMASSEN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4706-6627 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 176 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Introduction: Representative Institutions and Radical Change
Do representative institutions help foster or impede radical change? While the question is not new, political developments across the world over the last three decades call political theorists and activists to consider the relationship between representative institutions and radical change. “Representative institutions” here refers to a range of institutions, from formal political institutions such as parliaments and political parties to unions a…
Pandemonium and Critique
Introduction to Parallax 30(2), edited by Margarita Palacios and Lasse Thomassen
Democratic Multiplicity: Perceiving, Enacting, and Integrating Democratic Diversity
This edited volume argues that democracy is broader and more diverse than the dominant state-centered, modern representative democracies, to which other modes of democracy are either presumed subordinate or ignored. The contributors seek to overcome the standard opposition of democracy from below (participatory) and democracy from above (representative). Rather, they argue that through differently situated participatory and representative practic…
The “populist” foundation of liberal democracy: Jan-Werner Müller, Chantal Mouffe, and post-foundationalism
This article examines the connection between populism and post-foundationalism in the context of contemporary debates about populism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that there is something “populist” about every constitutional order, including liberal democratic ones. I argue so drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of hegemony, agonistic democracy, and left populism. Populism is the quintessential form of post-foundational politics because, r…
All Claims Are Representative Claims: Response to Thomás Zicman de Barros
This response to Thomás Zicman de Barros argues that so-called post-representative movements do not avoid representation as speaking for. A deconstructive reading of Gayatri Spivak's distinction between Darstellung and Vertretung shows that, while they cannot be reduced to one another, they nonetheless imply one another. As a result, post-representative movements such as the 2013 Brazilian Jornadas de Junho movement do not escape representation a…
Introduction: New Reflections on Ernesto Laclau's Theory of Populism
Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism has become huge-ly influential in the study of populism and is now considered one of the key references in the academic literature. Beyond academia, his work has been taking up by political activists in Latin America and Southern Europe in particular. The four articles collected in this symposium critically examine Laclau’s theory. Among other things, the articles analyze the formalism in his work, the relation…
Book Roundtable
Discussion text: Chin, C. 2018. The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought. New York, Columbia University Press. Respondents: Lasse Thomassen (Introduction), Joe Hoover (Reconstructing Rorty? Between Irony and Seriousness), David Owen (Practices of Political Theory), Paul Patton (Rorty’s ‘Continental’ Interlocutors), Clayton Chin (Rorty’s Pragmatic Political Theory: On Continental Thought and Ontology)
Discourse and Heterogeneity
The Derrida - Habermas Reader
The first book to consider the debate between two of the most prominent philosophers and social theorists of the 20th century: Jacques Derrida and Jürgen HabermasThis book presents a unique collection of articles by the two figures and by those who have written about them, and includes pieces published in English for the first time.The book will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in the implications of Derrida's deconstructi…
Representing the People: Laclau as a Theorist of Representation
Going beyond conventional conceptions of political representation, Ernesto Laclau takes representation to be a general category and not just limited to formal political institutions, and he takes representation to be performative in that it also brings about what is represented. This article examines the implications of this conceptualization of representation for Laclau’s theory of populism. Laclau takes populism to be exemplary of his conceptio…
Hegemony, Representation and Britishness
This chapter lays out Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse and hegemony as the theoretical framework that, together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, guides the analyses of the cases studied in the book. The chapter engages with the existing literature on the contemporary representations of Muslims in Western society in order to explain how the position developed in the book – that representation is constitutive – differs from that literatur…
(Not) Just a Piece of Cloth: Recognition and Representation
This chapter looks at the concept and practice of recognition so often associated with identity politics and multiculturalism. The chapter shows how recognition and representation are mutually implied. Representations must be recognised and taken up in order to have force; and recognition is always recognition of particular representations. I develop this through a detailed discussion of Begum , a legal case from the mid-2000s. The case is partic…
Conclusion: Multiculturalism, Britishness and Muscular Liberalism
The Conclusion looks at David Cameron and his speeches on terrorism, immigration, liberalism and Britishness to illustrate the points made throughout the book. Together the analyses and discussions of the book serve to show that there is no inclusion without exclusion, that inclusion and exclusion are intrinsically linked to identity, and that, since identities are constituted at the level of representation, we need to analyse identity and inclus…
Hospitality beyond Good and Bad
This chapter on the concept and practice of hospitality goes back to the time around the millennium and the first years of the New Labour government. It takes a novel – Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good – as its object of analysis. The chapter is about identity, inclusion and exclusion, but it is more about ‘us’ (White, liberal middle-class, etc.) than about those marked as exotic others, those whom multiculturalism is usually taken to be about. Throu…
British Multiculturalism and the Politics of Representation
What is the connection between inclusion, exclusion and identity? This book argues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be studied as struggles over the representations of the identities involved. The book engages with a range of debates and themes including Britishness, race, the nature and role of Islam in British society, homelessness and social justice, and it adopts a post-structuralist approach to the theoretical and practical…
British Multiculturalism and the Politics of Representation
Uses poststructuralist theory to connect inclusion, exclusion and identity, centred around real-world case studies from British culture, politics and law Lasse Thomassen argues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be viewed as struggles over how these identities are represented. He centres this argument through careful analysis of cases from the last four decades of British multiculturalism. Key Features Uses a fresh, poststructural…
Elucidating Social Science Concepts
In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide , Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium – Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khan…
Strangers in Our Midst
Migration challenges how we think about justice and state sovereignty. This is no less the case for political theorists, and this review symposium focuses on the work of one of the foremost political theorists working on these questions today. In his latest book – Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Migration – David Miller argues for a realist approach to migration, an approach that takes into consideration not just what we ought…
From Protest to Party: Horizontality and Verticality on the Slovenian Left
This essay analyses the politics of horizontality—a key characteristic of recent forms of protest and activist citizenship—through the case of the 2012–2013 protests in Slovenia. The Slovenian case is illustrative because we can trace the emergence of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism and, subsequently, the United Left from protest through movement to party. Since we believe that horizontality and verticality are present in both movements a…
Mind the gap: Lawrence Hamilton and aesthetic representation
Lawrence Hamilton's conception of aesthetic representation is part of the representative and constructivist turns, and I use a critical reading of his work to examine how we can conceptualise the constitutive character of representation; and the implications for political institutions and activism of taking representation as constitutive. I show how Hamilton limits the effects of the two turns in two areas in particular: the notion of human needs…
Poststructuralism and Representation
This article maps debates within poststructuralism, particularly poststructuralist political theory. I argue that the category, or question, of representation can make sense of theoretical and political debates within poststructuralism in general and poststructuralist political theory in particular. Poststructuralists criticise all forms of presence, whether the presence of the subject, identities or structures. Following poststructuralism, repre…
Introduction: The making of international relations
In this review symposium, Pinar Bilgin, Ann Towns and David C. Kang discuss Barry Buzan and George Lawson’s The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. In the book, Buzan and Lawson set out to provide a history of how we came to think about international relations in the way we do today. They explore the roots of our contemporary conceptions of the state, revolution, the international and modernity. Th…
Introduction: The killing fields of inequality
Göran Therborn’s recent book The Killing Fields of Inequality is an opportunity for political scientists to reconnect with a thematic that has for long been the pre-occupation of sociologists: inequality. The killing fields to which Therborn refers in the title of his book are inequalities of wealth, health, education, dignity, and so on. These inequalities are killing fields because they result in millions of premature deaths every year, not jus…
Introduction: Democracy disfigured
In this book review symposium, Jan Biba, Jeffrey Edward Green and John P. McCormick take on the work of democratic theorist, Nadia Urbinati. In Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth and the People, Urbinati argues for what she calls a ‘diarchic’ conception of democracy, whereby opinion and will formation must not collapse into one another (hence diarchy rather than mono-archy). This has implications for how we think about issues such as representa…
Introduction: Analytic, Continental and the question of a bridge
In philosophy and political theory, divisions come and go, but some persist despite being obviously problematic. The analytic and Continental divide is one such division. In political philosophy and political theory, the division has been particularly pronounced. Analytic and Continental thinkers are divided not only over substantial issues but also over the very nature of political theorising. In spite of this fundamental nature, theorists often…
Political theory in the square: Protest, representation and subjectification
Antagonism, hegemony and ideology after heterogeneity
This article examines the implications of the introduction of the category of 'heterogeneity' in Ernesto Laclau's most recent work. Laclau's theory of hegemony and discourse theoretical approach to ideology is often associated with the category of 'antagonism'. I argue that heterogeneity should be the central category of hegemony and discourse analysis, and that antagonism can be seen as a strategy of ideological closure. In addition, heterogenei…
Within the Limits of Deliberative Reason Alone: Habermas, Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Democracy
In this article, I take Habermas's treatment of civil disobedience as a litmus test of the way in which Habermas relates to the imperfectness of democracy. The case of civil disobedience, which Habermas deems to be a normal part of a mature constitutional democracy, shows that Habermas is ultimately unable to submit all decisions and distinctions to the public use of reason as envisaged in his deliberative account of democracy. As a consequence, …
Representing the People: Laclau as a Theorist of Representation
Going beyond conventional conceptions of political representation, Ernesto Laclau takes representation to be a general category and not just limited to formal political institutions, and he takes representation to be performative in that it also brings about what is represented. This article examines the implications of this conceptualization of representation for Laclau’s theory of populism. Laclau takes populism to be exemplary of his conceptio…
The Inclusion of the Other: Habermas and the Paradox of Tolerance
In his most recent work, Jürgen Habermas has proposed a deliberative account of tolerance where the norms of tolerance—including the threshold of tolerance and the norms regulating the relationship between the tolerating and the tolerated parties—are the outcomes of deliberations among the citizens affected by the norms. He thinks that in this way, the threshold of tolerance can be rationalized and the relationship between tolerating and tolerate…
Beyond Representation? 1
Journal Article Beyond Representation? Get access Lasse Thomassen Lasse Thomassen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 60, Issue 1, JANUARY 2007, Pages 111–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsl051 Published: 19 December 2006
(Not) Just a Piece of Cloth: Begum, Recognition and the Politics of Representation
To understand the politics of recognition, one must conceive of it as a politics of representation. Like representation, recognition proceeds at once in a constative and a performative mode, whereby they bring into being what is simultaneously represented or recognized. This structure has paradoxical implications. The politics of recognition is also a politics of representation in the sense that it always involves questions such as, Which represe…
Strangers in Our Midst
Migration challenges how we think about justice and state sovereignty. This is no less the case for political theorists, and this review symposium focuses on the work of one of the foremost political theorists working on these questions today. In his latest book – Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Migration – David Miller argues for a realist approach to migration, an approach that takes into consideration not just what we ought…
Reading radical democracy: A commentary on Clive Barnett
From Protest to Party: Horizontality and Verticality on the Slovenian Left
This essay analyses the politics of horizontality—a key characteristic of recent forms of protest and activist citizenship—through the case of the 2012–2013 protests in Slovenia. The Slovenian case is illustrative because we can trace the emergence of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism and, subsequently, the United Left from protest through movement to party. Since we believe that horizontality and verticality are present in both movements a…
All Claims Are Representative Claims: Response to Thomás Zicman de Barros
This response to Thomás Zicman de Barros argues that so-called post-representative movements do not avoid representation as speaking for. A deconstructive reading of Gayatri Spivak's distinction between Darstellung and Vertretung shows that, while they cannot be reduced to one another, they nonetheless imply one another. As a result, post-representative movements such as the 2013 Brazilian Jornadas de Junho movement do not escape representation a…
Poststructuralism and Representation
This article maps debates within poststructuralism, particularly poststructuralist political theory. I argue that the category, or question, of representation can make sense of theoretical and political debates within poststructuralism in general and poststructuralist political theory in particular. Poststructuralists criticise all forms of presence, whether the presence of the subject, identities or structures. Following poststructuralism, repre…
Communicative Reason, Deconstruction, and Foundationalism: Reply to White and Farr
How should we read Jürgen Habermas, and is it possible to defend a nonfoundationalist conception of communicative reason? In “‘No-Saying’ in Habermas,” Stephen K. White and Evan Robert Farr read Habermas’s writings on civil disobedience through the idea of no-saying, which they believe to be “just as primordial” as consensus or yes-saying in Habermas’s theory of communicative reason. By underlining this otherwise underdeveloped aspect of no-sayin…
The Politics of Iterability: Benhabib, the Hijab, and Democratic Iterations
In her recent work, Seyla Benhabib has appropriated Jacques Derrida's notion of iterability—or iteration in Benhabib's terminology—whereby repetition always implies alteration. This gives her a dynamic conception of democracy and citizenship that is sensitive to otherwise excluded constituencies. Nevertheless, I take issue with the ways in which Benhabib limits the effects of iterability. She does so by separating the transformative effects of it…
Deliberative democracy and provisionality
The “populist” foundation of liberal democracy: Jan-Werner Müller, Chantal Mouffe, and post-foundationalism
This article examines the connection between populism and post-foundationalism in the context of contemporary debates about populism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that there is something “populist” about every constitutional order, including liberal democratic ones. I argue so drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of hegemony, agonistic democracy, and left populism. Populism is the quintessential form of post-foundational politics because, r…
Elucidating Social Science Concepts
In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide , Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium – Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khan…
Mind the gap: Lawrence Hamilton and aesthetic representation
Lawrence Hamilton's conception of aesthetic representation is part of the representative and constructivist turns, and I use a critical reading of his work to examine how we can conceptualise the constitutive character of representation; and the implications for political institutions and activism of taking representation as constitutive. I show how Hamilton limits the effects of the two turns in two areas in particular: the notion of human needs…
The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Legacy on 03/02/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2015.1006928
The indignados, populism and emotions in political theory: A response to Paolo Cossarini
This is a reply to:Cossarini, Paolo. 2014. “Protests, emotions and democracy: theoretical insights from the Indignados movement.” Global Discourse. 4 (2–3): 291–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.895930
Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(2011). Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Critical Horizons: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 103-107
Deconstruction after Derrida
Over the last years, there has been a steady stream of books published on deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida in addition to the many books by Derrida himself. Derrida’s death on 8 October 2004 in no way stopped this wealth of publications, including texts on Derrida, deconstruction, and politics. There have been a number of books on Derrida,1 including edited volumes,2 and there is now a Derrida journal, Derrida Today. This is in addi…
Gladiator , Violence, and the Founding of a Republic
Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator presents a view of the transition from dictatorship to the republic that one also finds in the discourses of certain political leaders today. I argue that we can learn about violence and the founding of a republic from an analysis and, especially, a critique of Gladiator
Methods and philosophy of social science for discourse theory 1
Lacanian Political Theory: A Reply to Robinson
In this response to Andrew Robinson's review of ‘The politics of lack,’ I argue that, although Robinson puts forward a number of interesting and succinct points about Lacanian political theory, his review rests on misunderstandings of post-structuralist political theory and misreadings of the texts under consideration. More specifically, I argue that his use of the labels ‘Lacanian’ and ‘theorist of lack’ is problematic; that his position rests o…
Deconstruction and Pragmatism
Books Reviewed
Books Reviewed
The Politics of Lack
Postmodern Culture - Volume 11, Number 3, May 2001
Anmeldelser
Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis
Preface. (Claudio Minca) 1. The Post Modern Turn. (Michael Dear)Part I: Cities. 2. Exploring the Postmetropolis. (Edward W. Soja)3. Postmodern Geographical Praxis? Postmodern Impulse and the War against Homeless People in the Post-Justice City. (Don Mitchell) 4. Hiding the Target: Social Reproduction in the Privatized Urban Environment. (Cindi Katz) Part II: Scales. 5. Shifting Cities. (Giuseppe Dematteis) 6. Adventures of a Barong: A Worm's-Eye …
Lacanian Political Theory: A Reply to Robinson
In this response to Andrew Robinson's review of ‘The politics of lack,’ I argue that, although Robinson puts forward a number of interesting and succinct points about Lacanian political theory, his review rests on misunderstandings of post-structuralist political theory and misreadings of the texts under consideration. More specifically, I argue that his use of the labels ‘Lacanian’ and ‘theorist of lack’ is problematic; that his position rests o…
Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique
Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. By David Couzens Hoy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 288p. $35.00. This book examines the value of different so-called poststructuralist philosophical approaches to normative justification and political resistance. The label “poststructuralist” is a contended one, and David Couzens Hoy provides a useful discussion of it. He includes discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche as the most impor…
Reading radical democracy: A commentary on Clive Barnett
Legality and Legitimacy
Antagonism, hegemony and ideology after heterogeneity
This article examines the implications of the introduction of the category of 'heterogeneity' in Ernesto Laclau's most recent work. Laclau's theory of hegemony and discourse theoretical approach to ideology is often associated with the category of 'antagonism'. I argue that heterogeneity should be the central category of hegemony and discourse analysis, and that antagonism can be seen as a strategy of ideological closure. In addition, heterogenei…
A Basic Closure of Perspective’? Reply to Robinson and Tormey 1
The Inclusion of the Other: Habermas and the Paradox of Tolerance
In his most recent work, Jürgen Habermas has proposed a deliberative account of tolerance where the norms of tolerance—including the threshold of tolerance and the norms regulating the relationship between the tolerating and the tolerated parties—are the outcomes of deliberations among the citizens affected by the norms. He thinks that in this way, the threshold of tolerance can be rationalized and the relationship between tolerating and tolerate…
Beyond Representation? 1
Journal Article Beyond Representation? Get access Lasse Thomassen Lasse Thomassen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 60, Issue 1, JANUARY 2007, Pages 111–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsl051 Published: 19 December 2006
Within the Limits of Deliberative Reason Alone: Habermas, Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Democracy
In this article, I take Habermas's treatment of civil disobedience as a litmus test of the way in which Habermas relates to the imperfectness of democracy. The case of civil disobedience, which Habermas deems to be a normal part of a mature constitutional democracy, shows that Habermas is ultimately unable to submit all decisions and distinctions to the public use of reason as envisaged in his deliberative account of democracy. As a consequence, …
Human emotions: A sociological theory by Jonathan H. Turner | Radical democracy: politics between abundance and lack by Lasse Thomassen and Lars T⊘nder, eds | Aversive democracy: inheritance and origi…
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Methods and philosophy of social science for discourse theory 1
Deconstruction after Derrida
Over the last years, there has been a steady stream of books published on deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida in addition to the many books by Derrida himself. Derrida’s death on 8 October 2004 in no way stopped this wealth of publications, including texts on Derrida, deconstruction, and politics. There have been a number of books on Derrida,1 including edited volumes,2 and there is now a Derrida journal, Derrida Today. This is in addi…
Gladiator , Violence, and the Founding of a Republic
Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator presents a view of the transition from dictatorship to the republic that one also finds in the discourses of certain political leaders today. I argue that we can learn about violence and the founding of a republic from an analysis and, especially, a critique of Gladiator
The Cartoons that Shook the World by Jytte Klausen
Derrida, Time, and Political Subjectivity
Political theory in a provisional mode
Given the imperfectness, uncertainty and disagreement that characterises politics, we should treat policies, institutions and ideals as provisional. I take this basic understanding of politics as my starting point, and I then ask two questions: How should we think of provisionality in politics? What are the effects of introducing provisionality into political theory? I start from a critique of the way provisionality is conceptualised by contempor…
Unstable universalities: Poststructuralism and radical politics
Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(2011). Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Critical Horizons: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 103-107
The Politics of Iterability: Benhabib, the Hijab, and Democratic Iterations
In her recent work, Seyla Benhabib has appropriated Jacques Derrida's notion of iterability—or iteration in Benhabib's terminology—whereby repetition always implies alteration. This gives her a dynamic conception of democracy and citizenship that is sensitive to otherwise excluded constituencies. Nevertheless, I take issue with the ways in which Benhabib limits the effects of iterability. She does so by separating the transformative effects of it…
Sociology (52 works) · Philosophy (50 works) · Political science (49 works) · Law (46 works) · Politics (43 works) · Epistemology (41 works) · Philosophy (37 works) · Law (36 works) · Political philosophy (17 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (13 works)