Review: Hegel, Freud and Fanon. The Dialectic of Emancipation. London-New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78348-301-3. Pp. 262. £29.95

(2) Thus, the idea of rehabilitating a ‘normal’ structure of the subject comes together with a decided rehabilitation of German Idealism (especially Hegel, but also Kant) in a commonly unfriendly context, and with a strong critical intention (substantiated through an elegant reading of Freud and Fanon). Bird-Pollan takes the three levels to rely on each other in a dialectical way, influencing each other, and thus enabling the detection and critique of shortcomings while at the same time preserving the possibility of a ‘healthy’ functioning of both the individual and the socio-political realm. Hegel’s account of the subject, effectively reclaimed by Bird-Pollan, is a dynamic one which never separates the essential struggle for freedom from the experience of suffering and ‘radical oppression’ (31). The latter project, while aiming at emancipating the colonialism debate from Western bias, is said to lead to ‘devastating’ political consequences insofar as it essentializes the colonial condition of the subject as a more authentic point of access to the nature of subjectivity, instead of seeing it as the pathological result of the colonial false ontology and oppression (71).