Embracing Alienation
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- Alienation has historically been seen as a woe to be remedied through political struggle, as a situation to avoid and ameliorate. But alienation is emancipatory insofar as it marks our distance from the social determinations of identity. We can even look at the great emancipatory movements and see how they are implicitly insisting on alienation as the key to emancipation.
Babe come quick new Todd McGowan video just dropped
Todd always looks like he ready to ball up someone. Love it
“… much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” - I chuckle every time I read this quote from Sigmund Freud.
literally abandoned my child to go watch this video
Teaching the kids early the important lesson of alienation 😆
@@nah8845 exactly, at least I’m not forcing them into the symbolic identity of “treasured son”
Okay Daniel Plainview…
Embrace Your Alienation!
*this message is sponsored by Under Armor®
Under Armor implies that there is an 'under' under the armor, but really the 'under' is the armor itself 🥸
I just finished Emancipation After Hegel and am about to re-read it front to finish. It has been a truly landmark text that pulls together a lot of things I have long been reflecting upon. This pairs with it so very nicely. Thank you for both!
Do you find this helps stabilize who you are?
Sounds very Fichtean (Anstoß) to embrace alienation in this manner. I'm going to start thinking of Fanon as the "rejection of place". Can't wait to read the new book. Thank you 🙏
Thanks for putting this up. I always get so much out of you talking through these concepts.
This video is incredibly concise and understandable for such heavy subject matter. Thank you!
This comparison might not be made often, but the idea of alienation as a means of solidarity reminded me of Richard Dawkins' well-known stance. Around the time he released "The God Delusion," Dawkins would often respond to preachers asking how he could be an atheist by saying something like, "Atheists are just like Christians, we just go one God further." This concept of universality through negation is a profound insight of psychoanalysis. Funny how even deeply anti-psychoanalytic folks like Dawkins can stumble upon these little gems from time to time.
really good comment. I would point out though that dawkins has reconsidered his ideas on psychoanalysis, as in recent years a lot of his own ideas have come very close to Freud and Jung. (more to freud). I dont remember well in what interview or lecture, but he did comment on it some years ago.
Richard dawkins sells opinion piece magazines and spends his waking hours yelling at children's fashion choices on twitter. Take him seriously at your own risk as he has become his own meme.
@@Jasmine69420 i dislike Richard Dawkins, i was just pointing out that he has changed his views
Todd, this monologue in discussion form is excellent.
I was gunna identify fully with my symbolic identity but then I got high *music*
Great video. I think your point (and your new book) are of profound importance especially right now, and deserve the widest possible audience. In times of political instability like our own, the fear of alienation and the desire to overcome it seem to increase exponentially. By the way, some day you need to do a video where you go through the books on the bookshelf behind you, and explain their significance for you.
I'm happy to come across you from another teacher online
thank you todd!!!
You just made my day Todd! Thanks for this 😍😍😍😍
Would like to know how to approach questions like these:
Does every subject experience the same degree and quality of alienation?
How does one address the subjective demands of those who experience alienation through social exclusion and marginalisation?
Isn't there a doubled structure of alienation when it comes to subjects of violence or disability?
What happens to alienation as political act for those who have no valid right to politics or access to tools of resistance?
It's a great series of questions. My point here would be that when we are deprived of any political voice at all or subjected to extreme violence, we lose touch with our alienation. It's not that we are more alienated or that we are less alienated. It's always about how we relate to and register our alienation.
really enjoyed this.
Thanks Todd, wonderful encapsulation. The question remains, I believe, whether any of these ideas are able to be operationalised by a subject without an analysis. I suspect not. It remains an idea, of the order of knowledge (the university discourse), without the object petit a falling.
Read the book in about 3 days (I am a slow reader, and was splitting the time between this and Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure). It was excellent and has helped me better understand some other stuff I am reading.
It does seem to be me to be the case that primary alienation is inaccessible, and that the only way to get beyond overidentification with a predetermined social position (which I consider to be 2nd order alienation) would not involve a return but rather somehow working through the 2nd order alienation so that we actually reach yet a further level of alienation. For me the idea that we could directly get back to primary alienation would still be some kind of fantasy of immediacy of access to what is really just a structural void that is not directly accessible to a thinking, speaking, socially mediated subject.
Guys, pres at my place, and then we’re goin out and getting alienated. Whose down?
"By seeking to create heaven on earth we have created hell on earth."
~U.G. Krishnamurti
Lol when's the podcast episode on the book? I love it when u and Engley talk :) (Btw, halfway thru the book, just finished the Oppression chapter, very good! I'm w/ GCAS so will be taking your Hegel class next month, cya soon!)
Hey Todd, any chance you have a Letterboxd? Or some other repository for your incredible film analysis/reviews?
That's an interesting idea. I'll definitely think of something to do, maybe a video going through different directors or genres or something like that
I'm understanding a kind of zero-sum tension between subjectivity and identity, and that we are continuously trading one for the other (perhaps a big misunderstanding on my part - I don't know if it's my mistake to slip 'subjectivity' in where you've been talking about 'alienation'). It seems like most people have to kind of bounce and calibrate between the two without ever fully reaching either side, at least to live in society.
So if any of that makes sense, I wonder about the concept of no-self in Buddhism; it seems like that paradigm rejects identity (or at least wholeness of identity), but I'm not sure that it embraces subjectivity, and it seems agnostic (or perhaps to posit a transcendent stance) on alienation.
The positive evaluation of alienation is very interesting, I think also defended by xenofeminists and zizek (identifying with the "plus" of LGBTQ+), and even back with lyotard in libidinal economy, and "difference by itself" in deleuze. All nicely tied together by identifying with excresions and excess in bataille. Nice stuff.
6:31 *extimacy*
Todd, I'm so impressed with your ability to take a theme and run with it for a good (and enjoyable) 40 minutes. I would love to see you stretch your legs and share some of your more ambitious ideas.
Hi Todd! Great joke at the start and very interesting way of looking at alienation. I must say that a lot hinges on how one defines alienation, and it's not clear to me that your use is consistent with other important ways of using the term. Anyway, I wonder what you think of the following logic.
IF: (per this lecture) primary alienation is the basis of freedom,
AND IF (following Marx 1844 ms): the species-being of humans is precisely freedom from any form of predetermined identity,
IT FOLLOWS that in the McGowan framework, alienation from species being would actually be a SECOND-ORDER form of alienation, that is, socially imposed alienation from the fact of our constitutive alienation
Or to put it in the form of a contradiction: NONALIENATION (as social identity) = ALIENATION (from species-being)
PS I am playing around with an idea related to work called "the workday enjoyment loop". The idea is that if we were merely alienated in the Marxist sense from our jobs, we would have a mental breakdown and not be able to keep working (I've come close). Therefore, in order to keep working, we have to learn to enjoy this repeated experience of going to work everyday and doing the same old annoying crap in some form. Even if their are negative affects associated with "the workday enjoyment loop" (complaining, etc) there has to be enough juice there to keep them going to work everyday, and this creates a closed self-reinforcing feedback loop that is difficult to break out of.
In your framework, I would almost say that "the workday enjoyment loop" is a form of 2nd order alienation beyond primary alienation, but if we are thinking in this way, then I might say that we also can't get back to primary alienation, but instead need to be alienated YET AGAIN from our 2nd order alienation.
But given the lack of alternative institutions to help workers survive who are struggling against capitalist norms, I believe this could actually be quite risky and dangerous for most workers--they risk either becoming mentally ill, or just becoming unemployable and thus starving, becoming homeless, etc.
This is a problem that I don't think can be solved through theory but only via a praxis that actually offers workers real alternatives to the status quo so they can have the freedom to think dangerous thoughts without losing their ability to find food and shelter and maintain themselves as human beings.
at 11:30 ... why can't the subject be reduced to a combination of identities?
Because there is always some leftover. If you list all the categories a person belongs into, you’re not given an identical copy to the source. At most basic because people are not lists, but further than that what you can interpret from that list is not necessarily what can come out of the person described. There could be attributes the list strongly implies that the person might not, there could be actions and decisions from the person which don’t directly Derivate from any of the qualities in the list.
Is alienation ontologically prior to subjectivity?
It is subjectivity. But there must be contradiction operative ontologically for alienated subjectivity to be possible.
It is very prevalent within psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic circles the idea of wholeness, completion and belonging. You would be up against it where you to remind such folk of Freud's 'common unhappiness' concept, many flee from such an idea at every turn.
Humans exist in flux. The idea of completion is a derangement based in anxiety analogous to nostalgia as a product of depression.
"It is very prevalent within psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic circles the idea of wholeness, completion and belonging." Jungian circles maybe, but never Freud or Lacan.
This sounds like a good critique of 'identity' politics, particularly when woke identitarians see class as just another identity, when in fact it is a social and economic relation. In the UK, the Cass review has highlighted the physical and psychological harm done to vulnerable children who have been persuaded by activists promoting trans ideology that they can overcome their alienation and distress by identifying as a different gender. Gender turns out to be a nebulous phenomena particularly when advocates claim that gender is an internal identity - a kind of gendered soul that can be born in the wrong body. No wonder the whole edifice of trans ideology is starting to collapse. For distressed teenagers with mental health problems, a good place to start would be to embrace lack, dissatisfaction and uncertainty, as Todd advises.
Ok, let's think of alienation as an individual characteristic as opposed to a universal concept, so there has to be a magnitude score, autistics and schizophrenics high and neurotypicals lower, and this explains some human behaviours, like Repetion Drive, perhaps the propensity to repeat excessively corresponds to the degree of self alienation, in other words novelty isn't fun if you have no idea what you want, so just find a comfortable routine.
Autistic people only exist under oppressive structures. In functioning societies people recognize autism for what it is; intelligence.
that joke 😂🎉
As someone who did a lot of meditation, I think you are misrepresenting at least some of the more traditional forms of meditation found in both Western apophatic mysticism and at least some traditional forms of buddhism. If we accept your definition of alienation, then meditation at least as I studied and practiced it would is nothing other than sitting and ACTIVELY PRACTICING ALIENATION. The idea is that normally we identify with the stream of thoughts, perceptions, and sensations that we experience. In meditation, however, one steps back from that identification, and whatever experience occurs, like the neurotic patient avoiding conscription, one says "That's not it!" By taking the position of the observer of subjective experiences, we undermine the identity of those experiences with the subjective point of observation.
The idea is that through meditation, one ultimately comes to recognize that there is nothing but a Void or Gap beneath all subjective identifications. And the next step would be to realize that nevertheless, as we are humans, we will continue to have thoughts and perceptions and sensations but now we can work with them from a space of non-identity and freedom rather than mistaking them as representing some kind of permanent essence. Basically this form of meditation is trying to undermine the idea of soul as some kind of substantial essence representing our true self. There is actually no-thing there that is stable and could serve as the basis for some kind of fixed and substantial identity.
However, to be sure, what Zizek refers to as "Western buddhism" does often present meditation in the way you characterize it in your talk.
sorry but the negativity of the subject as the way we can give ourselves the law is so much richer and compelling that your conception of a lack of self-identity. also freedom as freedom from is such an anemic picture of freedom