Embracing Alienation 

Babe come quick new Todd McGowan video just dropped

“… 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.

Todd always looks like he ready to ball up someone. Love it

literally abandoned my child to go watch this video

Embrace Your Alienation! *this message is sponsored by Under Armor®

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 🙏🏻

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!

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 🙏

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.

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.

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

You just made my day Todd! Thanks for this 😍😍😍😍

"By seeking to create heaven on earth we have created hell on earth." ~U.G. Krishnamurti

thank you todd!!!

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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!)

Guys, pres at my place, and then we’re goin out and getting alienated. Whose down?

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.

Hey Todd, any chance you have a Letterboxd? Or some other repository for your incredible film analysis/reviews?

at 11:30 ... why can't the subject be reduced to a combination of identities?

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.

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.

Is alienation ontologically prior to subjectivity?

6:31 *extimacy*

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)

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.

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.

that joke 😂🎉

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