“… 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.
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!
Although this essay is mostly about societal applications, I find this notion & Todd-Hegel’s overall “reconciliation-with-contradiction” thing to be also existential-wise a crucial antidote for this anxiety-ridden generation’s “mental health” problems, as briefly implied via the Freud quote. There’s no final calm state where you can perfectly enjoy everything & you’re not alone in it, growing up means tarrying with this absurdity; it could be true comfort above all psychotherapies. Thanks to professor always & hope you touch on this part as well someday if this doesn’t go against the teachings 🙏🏻
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.
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 🙏
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.
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.
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.
This is such a brilliant concept. However, I have my reservations, as far as its application in the post-modern world is concerned. The post-modern world is highly fragmented into self-identities (officially and/or externally certified), which constitute the high diversity of the division of labor, always asking for more. To be fundamentally alienated is to not fit in to whatever identification, identity, list of properties are applied to the subject to present itself to the world. There will always be a gaping hole, and individuals will strive to uphold this mask of "self-identity", at the detriment of the subject. The tighter the identity, the more agonizing the task. This leads to a paradox. One can never be truly alienated as long as she/he acts from the point of a specific identity, i.e. a doctor, an engineer, a professor, etc., and assumes responsibility of the mask. This world needs a "profile" in order to move and let you operate into it. It is from the point of self-identity that one speaks, and is expected to be heard. Even to be "unemployed" means a specific identity, a profile, and a category in this world. Even to be "disabled" means a certain identity in our identity politics driven world. What if someone meets the "criteria" of these two "self-identities", but does not fit into those two "profiles"? The problem arises and appears like the Wittgenstein's ladder. What if one resists classification and this is one's normative stance? If one concludes that she/he is closing to "nothing", to "nothingness", due to a consistent application of this "alienation", she/he may find that the others do not simply care to enter into dialog. The current world seems to need the mask of "identity" in order to render the subject "harmless", "recognizable", and "assimilable" (i.e. a cogwheel into the Machine). To deny this self-identification equals to "exclusion". While I find Lacan brilliant, even genius, I disagree with the label of "psychoanalysis". It is the form, the label I am opposed to, not the content and the praxis. Being a "psychoanalyst" in the Symbolic Order seems to be nothing more than discipline, and a certain "identity" and "profile", and it constitutes -as everything else- a commodity, as commodities are cinema, cars, psychiatry in the form of administering prescriptions for pills, and so on. Why choose psychoanalysis instead of psychiatry prescribing pills towards remedying existential angst and symptoms? One would also argue that Capitalism is the driving force which brings forth and creates the Desire for the Analyst (Capitalism, as you said, is all about desire!), and psychoanalysis as a commodity. The desire is for the commodity, not for the analyst; what a paradox! One could argue that Socrates was a psychoanalyst, one of the first, but Socrates resisted his classification into this or that, into a specific "identity/profile". The price paid is known: Socrates drank the conium, and this happened under the rule of democracy. The very architecture, the social, techno-political mechanics of our world do not allow for a positioning outside this world. In other words, no self-identity/profile loss acquires any sense if the "identity/profile" of the entire edifice stays unchanged, and particularly if the subject speaking does so from a place of a "profile". So, the hypothesis of embracing alienation is only of theoretical value. In the Ancient Greek world displacement was a usual practice in case someone wanted to be alienated. In case, for example, an Anthenian citizen left Athens, he could move to Corinth without having an "identity" nor needed an "identity" in order to enter the city-state and live in; even without having a certified name. I would really appreciate you commenting on the above remarks.
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!)
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.
"It is very prevalent within psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic circles the idea of wholeness, completion and belonging." Jungian circles maybe, but never Freud or Lacan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, the subject unconsciously seeks wholeness through the acquisition of desired objects/experiences.. There's the visible desire (that car, that commodity) and the invisible overage (Jouissance) that can never be seen by the subject or realized -- because the subject is split. I think I understand this so far. Question: The desiring subject and its ordinary objects can be represented in static images. So, are there any photo books that specifically document jouissance? Thank you!
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thank you. I make up that it’s harder to show this in a static image than a film. Are there any films that you particularly recommend to illustrate the concept? Apologies if you covered this in another lecture. Thanks again.
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.
Chapter 2 footnote 4 - according to my internet sources, Copernicus was a priest and thus celibate, never married nor had children (altho a scandalous relationship with a distant cousin ‘housekeeper’ is documented). What is a citation for the claim in this footnote?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I highly disagree with this video. Not in a way that I disagree about the historical examples, nor because I disagree the theory; instead I think you elaborate it in a way that is not very helpful. Before I drop some wall of text here, I must say that I'm not a native English speaker and this is not a easy topic either. So do expect poor writing, and I apologize in advance for that. There are two points that I don't agree. First, the whole concept about alienation in this video is nothing more than the divided subject. Why not just use the divide subject to explain it? It is not only possible to achieve "I am I", but actually rather easy. The way I approach it is "I am a wound of the trauma I experienced that always trying to heal". In this way, the lacking and the wholeness overlaps at each other, and it's really easy to imagine a lacking that doesn't start with completeness (because the lacking start at the trauma itself, but the trauma is exactly what I am), it's also not hard to imagine a wholeness persists with lacking too (because my existence is born with flaw, thus the flaw is a part of my wholeness). The second part that I do not agree is much more daring. I do not agree with just calling that "the efforts to cure alienation is the source of oppression", because it's not hard to see that every "efforts to cure the alienation" you mentioned in the video is means of alienation themselves. And so it goes back to the first point - the theory about divided subject already points out that any identity is doomed to be partial, inconsistent, distorted, and fail to reflect the subject. And following that theory it's easy to see that any attempts to try to fit people into an identity is alienation. It's impossible to simply embracing alienation but also fight against oppression. The way I see it is, the oppression did not from the attempts to try to cure alienation. The cure of alienation is a lie, a lure. It lures people to submit into alienation, and it is the submission that fuels the oppression. It's completely political, to a degree that I can't say they have the same structure, instead I should say it is politics itself. The ruling structure completely overlaps with the structure of enforcing alienation (although, it works in persuasive ways). Ruling itself is always achieved by either by actual alienation that leads to violence, or by implied alienation that leads to the games of identities. So I think the real radical emancipatory gesture is to take back alienation, not just embrace it - I am the only one that alienates myself thus I reject anyone else doing it to me. By this way, alienation is reduced (or perhaps I should say restored) to the dividing gap of the divided subject, which is a part of the subject itself; and at the same time "embracing certain alienation" is also reduced (or restored) to uphold the subjectivity.
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
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.
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 🥸
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…
@dwallace67 important to preserve your freedom and autonomy in the face of oppressive bondage.
Your channel is an absolute gem 🥹
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?
Although this essay is mostly about societal applications, I find this notion & Todd-Hegel’s overall “reconciliation-with-contradiction” thing to be also existential-wise a crucial antidote for this anxiety-ridden generation’s “mental health” problems, as briefly implied via the Freud quote. There’s no final calm state where you can perfectly enjoy everything & you’re not alone in it, growing up means tarrying with this absurdity; it could be true comfort above all psychotherapies. Thanks to professor always & hope you touch on this part as well someday if this doesn’t go against the teachings 🙏🏻
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
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!
Todd, this monologue in discussion form is excellent.
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.
Thank you.
I was gunna identify fully with my symbolic identity but then I got high *music*
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.
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.
I'm happy to come across you from another teacher online
You just made my day Todd! Thanks for this 😍😍😍😍
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.
This is such a brilliant concept. However, I have my reservations, as far as its application in the post-modern world is concerned. The post-modern world is highly fragmented into self-identities (officially and/or externally certified), which constitute the high diversity of the division of labor, always asking for more. To be fundamentally alienated is to not fit in to whatever identification, identity, list of properties are applied to the subject to present itself to the world. There will always be a gaping hole, and individuals will strive to uphold this mask of "self-identity", at the detriment of the subject. The tighter the identity, the more agonizing the task. This leads to a paradox. One can never be truly alienated as long as she/he acts from the point of a specific identity, i.e. a doctor, an engineer, a professor, etc., and assumes responsibility of the mask. This world needs a "profile" in order to move and let you operate into it. It is from the point of self-identity that one speaks, and is expected to be heard. Even to be "unemployed" means a specific identity, a profile, and a category in this world. Even to be "disabled" means a certain identity in our identity politics driven world. What if someone meets the "criteria" of these two "self-identities", but does not fit into those two "profiles"? The problem arises and appears like the Wittgenstein's ladder. What if one resists classification and this is one's normative stance?
If one concludes that she/he is closing to "nothing", to "nothingness", due to a consistent application of this "alienation", she/he may find that the others do not simply care to enter into dialog. The current world seems to need the mask of "identity" in order to render the subject "harmless", "recognizable", and "assimilable" (i.e. a cogwheel into the Machine). To deny this self-identification equals to "exclusion".
While I find Lacan brilliant, even genius, I disagree with the label of "psychoanalysis". It is the form, the label I am opposed to, not the content and the praxis. Being a "psychoanalyst" in the Symbolic Order seems to be nothing more than discipline, and a certain "identity" and "profile", and it constitutes -as everything else- a commodity, as commodities are cinema, cars, psychiatry in the form of administering prescriptions for pills, and so on. Why choose psychoanalysis instead of psychiatry prescribing pills towards remedying existential angst and symptoms?
One would also argue that Capitalism is the driving force which brings forth and creates the Desire for the Analyst (Capitalism, as you said, is all about desire!), and psychoanalysis as a commodity. The desire is for the commodity, not for the analyst; what a paradox! One could argue that Socrates was a psychoanalyst, one of the first, but Socrates resisted his classification into this or that, into a specific "identity/profile". The price paid is known: Socrates drank the conium, and this happened under the rule of democracy.
The very architecture, the social, techno-political mechanics of our world do not allow for a positioning outside this world. In other words, no self-identity/profile loss acquires any sense if the "identity/profile" of the entire edifice stays unchanged, and particularly if the subject speaking does so from a place of a "profile". So, the hypothesis of embracing alienation is only of theoretical value.
In the Ancient Greek world displacement was a usual practice in case someone wanted to be alienated. In case, for example, an Anthenian citizen left Athens, he could move to Corinth without having an "identity" nor needed an "identity" in order to enter the city-state and live in; even without having a certified name.
I would really appreciate you commenting on the above remarks.
Alienation is emancipation
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!)
really enjoyed this.
thank you todd!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"By seeking to create heaven on earth we have created hell on earth."
~U.G. Krishnamurti
So, the subject unconsciously seeks wholeness through the acquisition of desired objects/experiences.. There's the visible desire (that car, that commodity) and the invisible overage (Jouissance) that can never be seen by the subject or realized -- because the subject is split.
I think I understand this so far.
Question: The desiring subject and its ordinary objects can be represented in static images. So, are there any photo books that specifically document jouissance? Thank you!
Sure, but I don't know anything about photo books, so I wouldn't be the person to asks which ones.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Thank you. I make up that it’s harder to show this in a static image than a film.
Are there any films that you particularly recommend to illustrate the concept? Apologies if you covered this in another lecture. Thanks again.
@@mudhen9295 There are many films that do: Holy Smoke, Summer of Sam, Do the Right Thing, the Insider, just to name a few.
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.
Chapter 2 footnote 4 - according to my internet sources, Copernicus was a priest and thus celibate, never married nor had children (altho a scandalous relationship with a distant cousin ‘housekeeper’ is documented). What is a citation for the claim in this footnote?
Is alienation ontologically prior to subjectivity?
It is subjectivity. But there must be contradiction operative ontologically for alienated subjectivity to be possible.
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.
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.
Guys, pres at my place, and then we’re goin out and getting alienated. Whose down?
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.
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.
6:31 *extimacy*
I highly disagree with this video. Not in a way that I disagree about the historical examples, nor because I disagree the theory; instead I think you elaborate it in a way that is not very helpful.
Before I drop some wall of text here, I must say that I'm not a native English speaker and this is not a easy topic either. So do expect poor writing, and I apologize in advance for that.
There are two points that I don't agree. First, the whole concept about alienation in this video is nothing more than the divided subject. Why not just use the divide subject to explain it? It is not only possible to achieve "I am I", but actually rather easy. The way I approach it is "I am a wound of the trauma I experienced that always trying to heal". In this way, the lacking and the wholeness overlaps at each other, and it's really easy to imagine a lacking that doesn't start with completeness (because the lacking start at the trauma itself, but the trauma is exactly what I am), it's also not hard to imagine a wholeness persists with lacking too (because my existence is born with flaw, thus the flaw is a part of my wholeness).
The second part that I do not agree is much more daring. I do not agree with just calling that "the efforts to cure alienation is the source of oppression", because it's not hard to see that every "efforts to cure the alienation" you mentioned in the video is means of alienation themselves. And so it goes back to the first point - the theory about divided subject already points out that any identity is doomed to be partial, inconsistent, distorted, and fail to reflect the subject. And following that theory it's easy to see that any attempts to try to fit people into an identity is alienation. It's impossible to simply embracing alienation but also fight against oppression.
The way I see it is, the oppression did not from the attempts to try to cure alienation. The cure of alienation is a lie, a lure. It lures people to submit into alienation, and it is the submission that fuels the oppression. It's completely political, to a degree that I can't say they have the same structure, instead I should say it is politics itself. The ruling structure completely overlaps with the structure of enforcing alienation (although, it works in persuasive ways). Ruling itself is always achieved by either by actual alienation that leads to violence, or by implied alienation that leads to the games of identities. So I think the real radical emancipatory gesture is to take back alienation, not just embrace it - I am the only one that alienates myself thus I reject anyone else doing it to me. By this way, alienation is reduced (or perhaps I should say restored) to the dividing gap of the divided subject, which is a part of the subject itself; and at the same time "embracing certain alienation" is also reduced (or restored) to uphold the subjectivity.
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
that joke 😂🎉