... of mediacy and self-alienation – to more and more social fields. The chapter takes its lead from Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau and Frank Ankersmit, to claim that representation should be understood as, precisely, a relation of non-identity between represented and representative, as only then it attests...

...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...

... use of the idea of political difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau. After an overview of current trends in social post-foundationalism and a genealogical chapter on the historical emergence of the difference between the concepts of ‘politics’ and ‘the political...

... for political change: Ernesto Laclau’s concept of sedimentation, and Hannah Arendt’s notion of crystallisation. The former helps to understand how political discourses gradually take shape and come to determine our understanding of the social. Arendt, on the other hand, employs...

... that a more radical-democratic conception of prefigurative politics is needed. It builds on the work of various radical-democratic theorists – primarily Hannah Arendt and Ernesto Laclau, but also others such as Claude Lefort, Rosa Luxemburg, and Judith Butler – to reveal the radical potential...

... with Ernesto Laclau’s constructivist concept of representation. Prefigurative democracy requires a synecdochal form of representation, where one part (e.g. an activist tent camp) symbolically ‘stands for’ a much larger group, agenda or discourse. In fact, this representative relation is prefigurative in its...

... the empirical realm and withdraws into a politically disabling transcendental reflection. The second, offered by poststructuralist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, I call the mere openness argument. While Laclau insists on the political usefulness of deconstruction, he argues that, as a matter...

... as to the irreversibility of this absorption or enclosure of the political in the ‘iron cage’ of an increasingly bureaucratised and managed society are drawn. How does Ernesto Laclau proceed about showing the primacy of the political? And how does he define the political and the social in the first place...

...The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism...