Professor Michael Stern earned his doctorate in Scandinavian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. After a visiting position at the University of Chicago, he arrived at the University of Oregon in 2001. Stern is currently the Director and a Professor of the Scandinavian Program. He also teaches for the German side of the department, and for the Humanities Program. Stern’s scholarly interests revolve around on the imperative of placing different lineages of thought in conversation in an age of increasing censorship and erasure. His analysis extends to narratives as well and how they allow us to gain insight into how human cultures codify experiences and accord them value.
Stern’s first book, Nietzsche’s Ocean, Strindberg’s Open Sea, explored how two late 19th century figures, Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg, criticized European, bourgeois conceptions of subjectivity. His subsequent research exploring Nietzsche’s critique of morality as it relates to restrictions and conceptions of the body and on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s conception of human subjection to an absolute demand deepened this analysis and led to an engagement with the limits of “freedom” within a philosophical tradition that bases its ethical analyses on the possibilities accorded and necessitated by volition. When considering this turn in his work as it relates to earlier concerns about narrative, Stern decided to investigate how thinkers reacted to the limits of their knowledge, and how the unknown became a springboard for both moral speculation and regulation in the European intellectual tradition. This then led to an interest in Africa, because there are few areas where the limits of European knowledge was more assiduously camouflaged by the imposition of a system of understanding that claimed absolute purchase on the human being. In other words, the way colonialism and globalization have created an understanding of the human being as such is an area of utmost concern. His second book, Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought opens with Nietzsche's work on the human imagination and its institutionalized restrictions, written around when the Congress of Berlin divided Africa without the presence of Africans. The book ends with the Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui's understanding of temporality, form, and naming as he creates a slave memorial in a Danish setting. The rationale behind the book is this: Nietzsche, a theorist of power, morality, and aesthetics supplies a description of a world making that also destroys. His notion of the will to power explains how particular and local interpretations spread and dominate. Stern situates Nietzsche's thought alongside those of Africana artists and thinkers who, confronted with the effects of the slave trade and colonial violence, speak to new theoretical paradigms addressing erasure and displacement and its relationship to form making. Eschewing notions of hierarchal authority and keeping in mind how epistemological racism has delimited our philosophical possibilities, Michael Stern employs thought from each lineage to open the space for what Frantz Fanon calls a human with a new sense for rhythm. What emerges is a different sense for history, morality, culture, and political life.
Currently Stern is inching towards the completion of the first part of a two-part comparative project exploring the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological lineages. The first part, a monograph entitled The Singing Socrates describes the way Plato’s Socrates came to represent the pre-history of the 19th century rational subject and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s receptions of this figure indicate cracks in the structure of western thought. These “cracks” allow the light of “otherness” to shine through. The Singing Socrates concludes with a discussion of European colonialism as it relates to historical conceptions of culture and the human being. The second part of this project: Towards an Alluvial Poeticsˆ, takes up where the ˆThinking Nietzsche monograph leaves off.
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