Alienation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alienation is a term that is employed commonly in a number of disciplines to describe and explain the sense of estrangement that organizes the relationship between the subject and itself on the one hand and the subject and its relationship to history, power, and authority on the other hand: estrangement from the state in Georg Hegel, from God in Ludwig Feuerbach, from labor in Karl Marx, or from essential sexuality in Sigmund Freud. Anthropology, philosophy, economic theory, sociology, and political science all refer to the tensions that result from the sense of alienation experienced by the subject. The word alienation, however, comes from the Latin term alius, meaning “other” or “another,” from which the term alienus, meaning “of another place or person,” is derived. In this way the meaning of alienation has a spatial and existential significance. In the fifteenth century it came to mean the loss of mental faculties and thus the presence of insanity, and by the mid-nineteenth century physicians who concerned themselves with mentally disturbed patients were called alienists.

Alienation is a developmental process in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) and in 1844 writings by Marx that engage two gestures: Entfremdung (estrangement) and Entáuberung (externalization). The “unhappy consciousness” of Hegel is unhappy precisely because it is conscious of its own divisions, of its alienated relationship to its world, and thus cannot attain the unity that it seeks. In the ideality of the state this unhappy consciousness materializes itself as a subject. In Marx, labor itself is an object from which the worker is alienated, a realization that becomes possible only through the development of class consciousness. This materialization of the subject in late Marx (Grundrisse [1867] and Das Kapital [1857-1858]) through the experience of alienation from the labor process acquires a materiality that is expressed in Vergegenständlichung (reification), enabling the transformation of Hegel’s idealism into Marx’s materialism, a point that later, as reification, acquires centrality in the work of Gyorgy Lukács and the Frankfurt School.

In Marx the worker experiences the object of his or her labor as alien and threatening so that, despite the fact that it has been produced through the worker’s labor, it is not accessible to the worker. For Marx abstracted forms of consciousness such as religion are symptomatic of the alienating experiences of workers, and only through the recognition of those forms as symptomatic of a frustrated historical experience, along with the abolition of capitalist ownership of the means of production that will interrupt the alienation of the worker from his or her labor, can they be overcome and allow for the emancipation of the subject.

For Feuerbach (1841) religion constitutes the alienated form of human realization of the divided subject. This is a process in which the subject understands itself as having been alienated from its own human essence and has turned that essence into an abstracted object of worship. In Future of an Illusion ([1928] 1975), Moses and Monotheism (1938), and Civilization and Its Discontents [1930] 1962), Freud recognizes civilization as the location where the understanding of the frustrated relationship of the subject with itself takes place. The overcoming of the sense of alienation is engendered either by the recovery of the subject’s relationship to the divine (in the theological tradition) or by the recovery of the libido (in Freud). However, since alienation belongs to the historical process of subject formation and recognition, a process that reveals as much as it constitutes the process of civilization itself, alienation is taken to be the ransom of civilization, a point of no return (to nature or essence) for the human subject.

In the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly in that of Theodor W. Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1972), alienation is the result of the rationalization of the process of cultural production, a process that is analogous to the injustice that is produced through the rationalization of the market. In that sense Adorno sees alienation not as part of the process of subject formation that has within it the potential for emancipation, as Marx saw it becoming as part of the historical process, but as constitutive of the new, modern subject that rests on reason, a reason that in modernity has become bankrupt without any prospects of resistance.

SEE ALSO Alienation-Anomie; Consciousness; Frankfurt School; Freud, Sigmund; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Lukacs, Georg; Marx, Karl; Power; Religion; Sexuality

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas. [1841] 1957. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. New York: Harper.

Freud, Sigmund. [1928] 1975. Future of an Illusion. Trans. James Strachey with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton.

Freud, Sigmund. [1930] 1962. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton.

Freud, Sigmund. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage.

Hegel, Georg W. F. [1807] 1967. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. with an introduction and notes by J. B. Baillie and with an introduction by George Lichtheim. New York: Harper & Row.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. [1944] 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press.

Marx, Karl. [1844] 1988. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Marx, Karl. [1857-1858] 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. and with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1967. Capital Vol. 1, A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Paperbacks.

Neni Panourgiá