Deconstructing Politics: Interview with Author Lasse Thomassen

1 July 2026

In your book, you argue that deconstruction is a critical, timely, distinctive way to practice political theory. Can you explain what you mean? 

The book shows that deconstruction is a distinct and also effective way of doing political theory. I realise that, to some people, that may seem odd. Deconstruction is not the first thing that comes to mind when you say ‘political theory.’ And it's true that deconstruction originated in philosophy, and then it traveled to literary theory, especially in North America, and to cultural theory. But it's also been used by some political theorists, and I draw on some of that work.  

In the book, I show that—with a bit of translation from one discipline to another—we can formulate a kind of political theory out of deconstruction. I want to use deconstruction to think about political concepts and political phenomena, like sovereignty, democracy or populism, truth and post-truth. We can really learn something new about these political phenomena by looking at them through deconstruction. 

The thing about deconstruction is that it's not exactly an ‘ism.’ It's not exactly a theory about the world. It's more like a way of reading or a way of analysing. So, it's not systematic in the way that you might expect political theories or political philosophies to be. But I try to systematise deconstruction as much as possible. This attempt at systematisation is always going to come up against a limit, because there isn't a system that we can call ‘deconstruction’, a set of premises or a method that you can pull out of a textbook and then apply. 

To address this, in the book, I ‘perform’ deconstructions of different political phenomena, such as 9/11, Trump's post-truth discourse, or the debates around Covid-19, state sovereignty and freedom. I try to show what you can do with deconstruction. 
 
What happens when you bring deconstruction to political theory? How does it differ from other approaches?

As I mentioned before, one main difference is that deconstruction is not really a theory. It doesn’t come with a set of premises or an ontology and epistemology or a theory about the relationship between, say, democracy and populism. For instance, Derrida talks about ‘democracy to come.’ That’s not exactly a theory in the way of, say, Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative democracy or Phillip Pettit‘s republicanism. 

There’s often this expectation that political theory can tell us how to act and what kind of decisions to make, and what are the best political institutions for realising the most just or most equal and free society, and so on. 

In a normative sense? 

Yes, in a normative sense. And you don't get that with deconstruction, at least not in a straightforward way. Deconstruction is more like a practice of reading, a way of analysing phenomena, events, or discourses. 

Take, for example, when we call 9/11 an ‘event’—which is an example I use in the introduction to the book. The very concept of an ‘event’ is aporetic. On one hand, we call 9/11 an event because it’s something singular; there’s nothing else like it. And we use ‘9/11’ as a way to single out that event-ness: there is only one 9 September 2001. But, at the same time, this reveals an aporia (or paradox, if you like). For something to be an event, it must be one of many; it must be something that we can put into the box, the category ‘events’. We can't call something an event and escape this paradox, this aporia. Instead, we need to consider what this means, and how it plays out in particular discourses.  

Analyzing an event like 9/11 through deconstruction won’t necessarily help you decide what to do. Should we continue to call 9/11 an event? Should we qualify it as a ‘major’ or ‘world’ event? But such an approach can help us understand what people do when they call 9/11 an event. What was made possible by calling 9/11 a decisive, unprecedented event, where there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’? What did that make possible in terms of policy? What measures did it enable the Bush administration to implement? How did it help facilitate or make possible the ‘War on Terror’? This approach can help us see what kind of solutions become possible and come to appear as ‘natural’ when phenomena are framed in a particular way.  

Deconstruction helps us see that there's no natural way of thinking about something. We have to examine, analyse, and deconstruct how we come to think of some things as natural and other things as cultural, for instance. 

In the book, you don't just tackle 9/11; you also look at more recent phenomena, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of Donald Trump. Is there something about our contemporary moment that makes deconstruction a particularly useful approach to political theory? 

I wrote part of the book during the pandemic and during the first Trump presidency. For instance, the chapter on post-truth was written in 2021-22. 

Deconstruction is a particularly useful approach because it gives us a very distinct take on truth and post-truth. Often, deconstruction is associated with relativism, but I show that to be a misunderstanding. It is true that deconstruction puts values like truth and reason into question. But it does so only in the name of truth and reason. 

Let me explain. From the perspective of deconstruction, we should answer to reason. For instance, I can say that this or that kind of vaccine is good because it's effective, and I can reason by pointing to evidence that scientists have obtained through experiments or by using statistics. And when I do so, I answer to reason. But there's something more, because I must also answer for reason. I have to accept that we can ask questions of reason, of what we take as reason. For example, what are the notions of evidence and so on that structure, let's say, epidemiology, in this case? I would rather have a vaccine that scientists say is, in all probability, safe and effective than trust someone like Trump or Kennedy on such issues. But deconstruction also insists that reason requires us to answer both to reason and for reason. We cannot simply take reason as given. 

Now, think about Trump and post-truth. For Trump, his ‘truths’ are real. He holds his truths absolutely. If, for example, he says that the peace plan with Iran is a victory for the US, that’s the end of that. There's no discussion. And anyone who thinks otherwise must be an idiot. In the case of deconstruction, truth is always both conditional and unconditional. It’s conditional because it’s always articulated through a particular discourse, in a particular context. But if truth were just conditional, then we would have a form of relativism. All we would have would be particular truths. For someone like Derrida, truth is also unconditional. And this unconditionality is different from the absoluteness of Trump's truths. For Trump, his truths are authoritative. End of discussion. For Derrida, we can always ask questions of truth. This distinguishes deconstruction from the post-truth discourse of Trump. 

And who is the audience for this book? 

The book was not really written for those who are already converted to the cause. It’s not for the academic community of Derridean deconstructivists, even if I would hope that they will read it, because there is hopefully also something in it for them. But I wrote the book more for readers who might be interested in deconstruction but may also have certain misconceptions about what deconstruction is. So, for fellow students of politics who may not necessarily be wedded to deconstruction. 

 What is next for you? 

I continue to work on deconstruction. The next book project is on political representation, but through deconstruction. Here, I again draw on Derrida among others. Political representation is one of those concepts that pop up in so many conversations about politics. Sometimes it’s explicit, other times it’s implicit. Like when Andy Burnham takes over from Keir Starmer as Prime Minister in the UK: is that legitimate without holding new elections? Well, that depends, among other things, on what you think political representation is. My own interest in political representation was shaped by how movements from the 1990s onwards criticised political representation. For instance, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Occupy Movement, but also populist movements challenging political institutions as out of touch with the people. 

There is this critique of political representation – that it silences those who are represented, and so on – but at the same time these movements also make representative claims. These claims, for instance, can be about the nature of political representation, or about the people, and they get caught up in this kind of politics of representation. This is what I’m interested in: What are the kind of claims to representation they're making? And I try to do this in the same way as in the book: by combining some – fairly abstract, I have to admit – theory with analyses of these movements.