Table Of ContentA L I E N A T I O N
RAHEL JAEGGI
Translated by Frederick Neuhouser
and Alan E. Smith
Edited by Frederick Neuhouser
ALIENATION
new directions in critical theory
C6471.indb i 6/3/14 8:38 AM
new directions in critical theory
Amy Allen, General Editor
New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contem-
porary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The
series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with
a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race,
sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.
Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Refl ective Judgment , María Pía Lara
The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy
Allen
Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee
The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment , Alessandro Ferrara
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence , Adriana Cavarero
Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World , Nancy Fraser
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , Axel Honneth
States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity , Donna V. Jones
Democracy in What State? Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues , edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo
Gomez-Muller
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics , Jacques Rancière
The Right to Justifi cation: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice , Rainer Forst
The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment , Albena Azmanova
The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr
Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel
Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity , Hartmut Rosa
The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara
Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram
Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life , Axel Honneth
Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici
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ALIENATION
RAHEL JAEGGI
Translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith
Edited by Frederick Neuhouser
columbia university press new york
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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
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
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Jacket Design: Jason Alejandro
References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor
Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the
manuscript was prepared.
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CONTENTS
Foreword Axel Honneth vii
Translator’s Introduction Frederick Neuhouser xi
Preface and Acknowledgments xix
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 3
2. Marx and Heidegger: Two Versions of Alienation Critique 11
3. The Structure and Problems of Alienation Critique 22
4. Having Oneself at One’s Command:
Reconstructing the Concept of Alienation 32
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 51
6. “A Pale, Incomplete, Strange, Artificial Man”:
Social Roles and the Loss of Authenticity 68
7. “She but Not Herself”: Self-Alienation as Internal Division 99
8. “As If Through a Wall of Glass”: Indifference and Self-Alienation 131
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vi CONTENTS
PART 3 ALIENATION AS A DISTURBED APPROPRIATION
OF SELF AND WORLD
9. “Like a Structure of Cotton Candy”: Being Oneself as
Self-Appropriation 155
10. “Living One’s Own Life”: Self-Determination, Self-Realization,
and Authenticity 199
Conclusion: The Sociality of the Self, the Sociality of Freedom 216
Notes 221
Work s Cited 251
Index 261
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FOREWORD
Axel Honneth
NO CONCEPT HAS BEEN MORE powerful in defi ning the character of early
Critical Theory than that of alienation. For the fi rst members of this tradition
the content of the concept was taken to be so self-evident that it needed no
defi nition or justifi cation; 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 prod-
uct 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. Philo-
sophical 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 defi ning 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
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viii FOREWORD
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 prin-
ciples of justice but because they confl ict with the conditions of willing and of
executing what we will. In such reactions to the conditions of our social world
we inevitably fi nd 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 diffi culties 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 fi rst task the author is helped
by the fact that she is equally well versed in the classical history of the con-
cept 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 es-
sentialist consequences can be avoided by relying on more formal accounts of
human capacities. With respect to the second task, the author benefi ts 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 defi ne 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 diffi culties that plague the classical concept of alienation.
With precision and boldness she sketches the two traditions, deriving from
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FOREWORD ix
Rousseau, that analyze the pathologies of modern life more or less explicitly in
terms of processes of alienation: fi rst, 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 in-
creasing impossibility of returning from the universal into self-chosen, authen-
tic 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 tradi-
tions, an objectivistic conception of the human essence serves as the norma-
tive 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
specifi c 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 con-
cept 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 ap-
propriates the fruits of a comprehensive, in-depth discussion of freedom that
has taken place in the past two decades among Harry Frankfurt, Ernst Tu-
gendhat, 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 alien-
ation has been shifted to the dimension of the individual relation to self, Rahel
Jaeggi shows in the fi nal 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.
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