Alienation

265 Pages·2014·1.63 MB·English

by  Jaeggi

ALIENATION
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY
Amy Allen, General Editor
New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and
contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed.
The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with
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The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization,
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ALIENATION
RAHEL JAEGGI
Translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith
Edited by Frederick Neuhouser
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2014 Campus Verlag GmbH
English edition copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press ISBN 978-0-231-53759-9 (e-book) The
translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Work
in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the
German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen
Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jaeggi, Rahel.
[Entfremdung. English]
Alienation / Rahel Jaeggi; translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith; edited by Frederick
Neuhouser.
pages cm.—(New directions in critical theory) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-15198-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-53759-9 (e-book) 1. Alienation (Social
psychology) 2. Self psychology. I. Title.
HM1131.J3413 2014
302.5'44—dc23
2013044698
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
CONTENTS
Foreword Axel Honneth
Translator’s Introduction Frederick Neuhouser
Preface and Acknowledgments
PART 1. THE RELATION OF RELATIONLESSNESS:
RECONSTRUCTING A CONCEPT OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
1. “A Stranger in the World That He Himself Has Made”: The Concept and
Phenomenon of Alienation
2. Marx and Heidegger: Two Versions of Alienation Critique
3. The Structure and Problems of Alienation Critique
4. Having Oneself at One’s Command: Reconstructing the Concept of
Alienation
PART 2. LIVING ONE’S LIFE AS AN ALIEN LIFE: FOUR CASES
5. Seinesgleichen Geschieht or “The Like of It Now Happens”: The Feeling of
Powerlessness and the Independent Existence of One’s Own Actions
6. “A Pale, Incomplete, Strange, Artificial Man”: Social Roles and the Loss of
Authenticity
7. “She but Not Herself”: Self-Alienation as Internal Division
8. “As If Through a Wall of Glass”: Indifference and Self-Alienation
PART 3. ALIENATION AS A DISTURBED APPROPRIATION OF SELF
AND WORLD
9. “Like a Structure of Cotton Candy”: Being Oneself as Self-Appropriation
10. “Living One’s Own Life”: Self-Determination, Self-Realization, and
Authenticity
Conclusion: The Sociality of the Self, the Sociality of Freedom
Notes
Works Cited
Index
FOREWORD
Axel Honneth
NO CONCEPT HAS BEEN MORE powerful in defining the character of early
Critical Theory than that of alienation. For the first members of this tradition the
content of the concept was taken to be so self-evident that it needed no definition
or justification; it served as the more or less self-evident starting point of all
social analysis and critique. Regardless of how untransparent and complicated
social relations might be, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer regarded the
alienated nature of social relations as a fact beyond all doubt. Today this shared
assumption strikes us as strange, for it seems as though these authors, above all
Adorno, should have realized that the concept rested on premises that
contradicted their own insight into the danger of overly hasty generalizations and
hypostatizations. For the concept of alienation—a product of modernity through
and through—presupposes, for Rousseau no less than for Marx and his heirs, a
conception of the human essence: whatever is diagnosed as alienated must have
become distanced from, and hence alien to, something that counts as the human
being’s true nature or essence. Philosophical developments of the past decades
on both sides of the Atlantic have put an end to such essentialist conceptions; we
now know that even if we do not doubt the existence of certain universal features
of human nature, we can no longer speak objectively of a human “essence,” of
our “species powers,” or of humankind’s defining and fundamental aims. One
consequence of this theoretical development is that the category of alienation has
disappeared from philosophy’s lexicon. And nothing signals more clearly the
danger that Critical Theory might become obsolete than the death of what was
once its fundamental concept.
Yet in recent years it has seemed to more than a few philosophers that our
philosophical vocabulary lacks something important if it no longer has the
concept of alienation at its disposal. It is often the case that we can hardly avoid
describing individual forms of life as alienated; not infrequently we tend to
regard social conditions as failed or “false,” not because they violate principles
of justice but because they conflict with the conditions of willing and of
executing what we will. In such reactions to the conditions of our social world
we inevitably find ourselves falling back on the concept of alienation, even if we
are aware of its essentialist dangers; as antiquated as the talk of alienation may
be, it apparently cannot simply be eliminated from our diagnostic and critical
vocabulary. This book can be understood as a philosophical defense of the
legitimacy of the category of alienation. Its aim is to revive for us today the
social-philosophical content of this reviled concept.
The author, Rahel Jaeggi, is completely aware of the difficulties that such an
undertaking entails. Updating the category of alienation requires not only the
conceptual skills necessary for explicating its meaning in such a way that,
without losing its critical force, it avoids essentialist presuppositions; beyond
this, it must also be shown that it is truly indispensable for a critical diagnosis of
the conditions of social life. In tackling the first task the author is helped by the
fact that she is equally well versed in the classical history of the concept of
alienation and in recent, analytically oriented debates concerning the nature of
personhood and freedom. This familiarity with two philosophical traditions that
until now have been split off from each other enables her to identify precisely
those places in the classical concept of alienation where essentialist
consequences can be avoided by relying on more formal accounts of human
capacities. With respect to the second task, the author benefits from a
considerable talent for the phenomenological description of everyday life. This
talent enables her to depict human phenomena such as rigidity, the loss of self,
and indifference so vividly that the reader is virtually compelled to look for ways
of recovering the concept of alienation. These two philosophical sources define
the strategy and landscape of the present investigation: it begins with a historical
sketch of the concept of alienation that makes clear both the conceptual strengths
and the essentialist presuppositions of the concept; in its main section it brings to
light, through descriptions of types of individual self-alienation, the analytic
potential of recent accounts of human freedom, which it then uses to establish a
concept of alienation free from the defects of essentialism.
Her historical treatment shows with masterful lucidity how clearly Rahel
Jaeggi grasps the difficulties that plague the classical concept of alienation. With
precision and boldness she sketches the two traditions, deriving from Rousseau,
that analyze the pathologies of modern life more or less explicitly in terms of
processes of alienation: first, the tradition of Marx and his heirs, who, following
Hegel, understand alienation primarily as a disruption in human beings’
appropriation of their species powers due to the structure, especially the
economic structure, of their societies; second, the existentialist tradition of
Kierkegaard and Heidegger, who understand alienation in terms of the
increasing impossibility of returning from the universal into self-chosen,
authentic individuality. In both cases the conceptual core of alienation is, as
Rahel Jaeggi succinctly puts it, a “relation of relationlessness,” namely, a
defective, disturbed relation to that relation—whether it be cooperation with
others or a relation to self—that constitutes the human being’s authentic nature.
From this it is easy to see the extent to which, for both Marxist and existentialist
traditions, an objectivistic conception of the human essence serves as the
normative foundation of alienation critique. For both, alienation consists in a
prior human relation (in the former case, a relation of labor, in the second case, a
specific form of inwardness) that has been lost sight of to such an extent that it
can no longer be brought back into our own life practices.
On the basis of this insight into the architectonic of the classical concept of
alienation, Rahel Jaeggi develops in the main section of her study, with the help
of brilliantly portrayed individual cases, an alternative model of alienation that
refrains from characterizing human nature in terms of a single, distinctive
aspiration. She sees the possibility for such a parsimonious foundation for the
concept in elements of a conception of freedom that looks to the functional
conditions of human willing and of executing what we will. In constructing a
foundation for her concept of alienation, Rahel Jaeggi appropriates the fruits of a
comprehensive, in-depth discussion of freedom that has taken place in the past
two decades among Harry Frankfurt, Ernst Tugendhat, Thomas Nagel, and
Charles Taylor. The result of this extraordinarily productive reappropriation,
which runs through this book as a second level of argumentation, is the thesis
that alienation is an impairment of willing that results from a disappearance of
the possibility of appropriating—of making one’s own—one’s self or the world.
Once the weight of the concept of alienation has been shifted to the dimension of
the individual relation to self, Rahel Jaeggi shows in the final step of her work
how the necessary transition to social analysis is to be taken from here:
impairments in processes of appropriation, as manifested in indifference to one’s
acquired social roles or in the failure to identify with one’s own desires, often
have their cause in social relationships that fail to satisfy the necessary
conditions for such processes of appropriation.
In this manner the present book marks out the paths by which it is possible to
reclaim a contentful concept of alienation by formalizing the normative
framework of alienation critique. Whoever follows the signposts provided will
discover that future talk of alienation by social critics and diagnosticians of
society need not signify a falling back into a musty essentialism. For the Institute
for Social Research it is at once satisfying and encouraging to be able to receive
Rahel Jaeggi’s work into its own ranks.
Frankfurt, September 1, 2005
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION