Emmanuel Robert
- PhD Student
- Supervisor: Dr Christopher Brooke
Contact
About
Thesis Title: Governing the Unconscious. The Wager of the Behavioural Project
Biography
I am a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a grateful holder of the El-Erian Scholarship. Prior to Cambridge, I have been educated in my home country Switzerland completing an MPhil in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute (Geneva) after having read Political Science from the University of Lausanne.
Outside the perimeters of academia, I keep one foot in the world of literature as a keen reader and writer of poetry, and another in the world of reality through my affiliations with the Foodbank and other active societies.
I also speak French, German, and mumble some street-level rudiments of Spanish and Arabic (Egyptian).
Research
My research looks at the rise of behavioural science in modern politics (e.g. the nudge) and seeks to unravel its ambition in terms of a politics of the unconscious. More largely, it claims that the discovery of the unconscious, at the outset of the nineteenth century, has made possible a new rationality of government: that of psychopolitics. This new form of politics is to be found in the emergence of neo-liberalism around Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays and later in more advanced forms, of which behavioural science is one successful expression. Not yet (if ever) a political thinker, I would like to think of myself as a political rethinker eager to shake off some of the rigidity and frigidity which often conditions the course of disciplinary thinking. This intellectual rethinking I hope to do across my dissertation by bringing depth-psychology, notably concepts and concerns from psychoanalysis in dialogue with politics and political theory.