I like Todd McGowan. He writes and talks about the most jargon-heavy areas of philosophy (German Idealism, Lacan, Marxism) and somehow finds a way to keep it simple and accessible. His simplicity is the biggest indicator of the vastness of his knowledge.
Recently, I read his 2024 book “Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves”. This is a short review of the book.
Alienation is perceived as a negative thing by most. It means being separated from our essence. It’s what prevents us from living our lives in full and on our own terms. Its source is capitalism, which structures our lives around the circulation of commodities, or modernity, which uproots everything and displaces the human being. Emancipation means being free from alienation.
This view is what McGowan rejects in his book. Following the tradition of German Idealism, McGowan sees alienation as neither negative nor positive. It’s simply the basis of our subjectivity. This notion of alienation started with Kant—even though Kant never used the term alienation in his works. For Kant, the subject “refers to the entity that relates negatively to itself, one that is never just what it is.”1 Hegel builds on top of Kant’s subject and views alienation as the condition of any self-awareness.
Identity consists of the various social positions that one occupies: job, familial status, religious affiliation, political preference, ethnicity, and so on. No matter how much I see myself as any or all of these identities, I am never fully identical with them. This failure is subjectivity.2
Thus, McGowan views alienation not as a modern phenomenon but as a constitutive part of the human condition. We become who we are through alienation. As Slavoj Žižek says, “there is no actual life external to alienation which serves as its positive foundation.”3
What McGowan warns against is not alienation but attempting to run away from it. Throughout the book, he repeats that any political project that promises an unalienated life to people is doomed to become oppressive. He criticizes both fascism and communism from the same standpoint. For him, discriminatory politics is also rooted in the rejection of alienation. Immigrant, woman, queer, Jew… These are all treated as stable identities.
Marx’s notion of alienation is also rejected. Marx blames capitalism for alienating the worker by reducing them to a commodity in the labor market and separating them from the fruits of their labor. For Marx, this alienation will be removed in a communist society. McGowan says Marx’s notion of alienation is a remnant of Feuerbach’s humanism in the early Marx, who believes there’s a human essence deep down in everyone.
Lastly, the liberal emphasis on community is described as an escape from alienation. Community, McGowan says, is an act of exclusion. Through exclusion, it offers a sense of belonging and a stable identity. For McGowan, the emphasis should be on the notion of the public rather than community. The public is the open space that belongs to no one and therefore belongs to everyone. No one can be fully integrated into the public since there’s always an other whose alterity threatens us.
McGowan’s notion of the public and of embracing alienation reminded me of a wonderful speech given by Ferda Keskin on “Neoliberalism and the transformation of public space”. In his closing thoughts, Keskin says something very similar to McGowan: “We need to stand on the threshold of our identities.” For Keskin, emancipation requires us to drop terms like “individual” and “society” and replace them with “singular” and “communality”. He emphasizes the importance of “borders”, since it’s the border between us that creates “the other”, and without the other, there cannot be a public space. We need to forget utopian ideas like removing or transcending borders—which, according to Keskin, is an absurd attempt that has plagued Western philosophy since Plato. Instead, we need to embrace the borders and be able to stand on the threshold of our identities—thus accepting we can never be at the center—so we can create a communality of singulars in the public space.