Emmanuel Robert

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.