Stefan Bird-Pollan

Stefan Bird-Pollan

Research interest(s)/area of expertise

• • Kant, Kant's theory of the subject and its relation to Kant's ethical theory
  • Hegel, Hegel's theory of the subject, Hegel's aesthetics and political philosophy
  • Aesthetics: the German tradition in aesthetics from Kant to Adorno; philosophy of film/film aesthetic
  • Ethics, Kantian ethics
  • Critical Theory, especially Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse
  • Psychoanlaysis, Freud, Lacan and Object Relations Theory
  • Political philosophy: contemporary debates and history, 17th century to the present

Research

I am interested in how theories of the subject are related to ethical theories.

My first book, "Hegel, Freud and Fanon; the Dialectic of Emancipation," on the Martiniquan social theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, is a reconstruction of Fanon's theory of the subject through the work of Hegel and Freud. I show how Fanon's view of the subject preserves many important insights of the enlightenment while steering clear of the sorts of racial prejudices which are endemic in European and American society.

I am currently working on a book in which I develop an account of Kant's ethical theory from the perspective of the theory of judgment as articulated in the first "Critique." Taking Kant's theory of judgment as a starting point allows me to argue that, since for Kant judgment is always the representation of representation, moral judgment must be understood to be promoted by our receptivity to feeling. This point of departure means that all duties are constructed in response to feeling. This also means that the categorical imperative is to be understood as the process or universalizing outwards, as it were, from a particular situation.

My second project concerns works out the ideal metapsychological type of voters who are attracted to different kinds of authoritarian rule. I argue that what makes authoriarian rules (populists and others) attractive to such voters is that these leaders break with traditional representationalist politics in favor of seeming to give voters immediate access to power through identification with the ruler.

In addition, I am working on several articles on Hegel, both his aesthetics and the "Phenomenology of Spirt." I am also writing about Stanley Cavell.