Entities in the world, from sub-atomic particles upwards, lack completion and a fullness of being. People are no exception: self-alienation, the lack of self-identity, is an irreducible aspect of our existence that we should get used to.
Sean Sheehan
The moral, as Todd McGowan indicates in the subtitle of his new book, “Embracing alienation”, is that we shouldn’t try to find ourselves.
McGowan is one of those rare writers able to explain philosophical ideas in plain language without sacrificing their richness. In this book, he uses ideas from psychoanalysis and philosophy, principally from Hegel and Lacan to convey the message that alienation has an emancipatory force.
Self-divided, split within ourselves, we possess a resistance to what society or biology obliges us to be: “I have an internal foreigness that interrupts the transmission of the community’s dictates to me.” We are not identical with the symbolic identity that we grow into and Jean-Paul Sartre gave a famous example – the waiter who acts as if he is waiter – that is still recognisable. A waiter who really believes in their role is acting in bad faith.
Alienation is often figured to be a result of industrial capitalism – the idea is there in early Marx – but the kind that McGowan focuses on is constitutive of being human. Modernity makes our lack of wholeness more evident and our alienation is worth celebrating because it removes the illusion there is a true self which, if only it could be recovered, would make us happy.
Shakespeare’s great tragedies are looked at for their insights into ‘breaking up with oneself’ and the updated Battlestar Galactica television series is examined to illustrate the inevitability of one’s alienation.
Trying to escape from this truth, promising a return to a wished-for wholeness that was never there, is the stuff of far-right nationalism and racism. It is the siren call of yoga, meditation and Buddhism and is used subliminally in advertising
Examples from the factual and the fictional are superbly well chosen by McGowan. He uses bus travel, public transport, as an example of the absence of an assigned place for passengers according to their symbolic identity.
Wealth cannot buy you a better seat and the public space is a space of freedom, as Rosa Parks insisted on demonstrating when she sat in a seat reserved for white people in the US.
It is why the movie “Speed” to so superior to “Speed 2: Cruise control”: in the original, the riders interact; in the sequel, passengers are ensconced within their private identities.
The novels of Jane Austen, especially “Persuasion”, are used to show how her admirable characters are those who accept their alienation while the villains are those who used the alienation of the public realm for their own selfish purposes.
“It is only as alienated beings that we can find ourselves where we aren’t… [and] experience solidarity with equally alienated others”.
“Embracing Alienation: why we shouldn’t try to find ourselves” is published by Repeater Books
(Photos: Pixabay)
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