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Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems
»Entfremdung« beherrschte als gesellschaftskritischer Begriff die von Marx inspirierten Diskussionen der Studentenbewegung, war zuletzt jedoch aus dem Repertoire kritischer Gesellschaftsanalyse verschwunden. Rahel Jaeggi eignet sich den Begriff zur Benennung gegenwärtiger Lebensrealität neu an: Für sie bedeutet er Indifferenz und Entzweiung, Machtlosigkeit und Beziehungslosigkeit sich selbst und einer als gleichgültig und fremd erfahrenen Welt gegenüber. In anschaulichen Analysen macht sie den Begriff der Entfremdung wieder fruchtbar, um eine kollektive und individuelle Befindlichkeit zu beschreiben, nach der wir uns nicht als autonom gestaltende Subjekte unserer Existenz erfahren, sondern der Dynamik uns bestimmender Zwangsverhältnisse ausgeliefert sind.
267 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 29, 2018
Jaeggi’s book is interesting and promising, but ultimately fails to deliver. Alienation is surely a concept worth recovering, but she fails to do so, instead offering yet another recycling of the Romantic solution to the dehumanizing and oppressive situation of nascent capitalism.
I’ll use her seventh chapter as my primary example, because I think that’s where the problem with her argument is most transparent. She offers an example of an alienated woman, who is a feminist and yet has the tendency to behave like a giggling girl when in the presence of her male lover. The chapter is an attempt to explain why exactly she is alienated, and to offer a solution to that alienation that does not have recourse to the “Archimedean vantage point of a true self.” In this, she clearly fails completely.
First, she does, consistently, assume the existence of exactly such an Archimedean vantage point. When she explains that a person is no longer alienated when “I understand myself as the person I am and at the same time I project—or fashion—myself as the person I want to be,” she is clearly making the same mistake we see so often in any attempt to begin from a Lockean individualist concept of the conscious self. That is, who is the “I” doing this understanding, interpreting, and projecting if it is NOT exactly such an Archimedean “true self”? This is the same problem Hume famously faced in his Treatise—although he noticed it later on. And we’ve seen it in every attempt to rescue this model of the subject since Locke, from Hume to the Romantics to phenomenology. There just must be some kind of a homunculus for this to work.
So although she objects to Harry Frankfurt’s idea of “volitional necessity” because she (correctly) claims that it ignores the possibility that these “necessities” might be just deeply held ideological beliefs, she must ultimately resort the same concept to save her alternative theory. She assumes that if her alienated feminist were to “adapt herself to the traditional role of a woman” she would have difficulty because she would have to “close off” some of her “fundamental desires and longings.” But “fundamental desires and longings” is no different from what Frankfurt means by “volitional necessities,” and is ultimately just another term for deeply held ideological beliefs. (Not that they are bad ideological beliefs, but they are not the ultimate ground Jaeggi wants them to be...)
She cannot conceive of the possibility that the conflict might result simply from inadequate ideology—that is, from the failure of the woman’s particular feminist ideology to adequately provide her with a meaningful life—which is, of course, the task of all ideologies in the Althusserian sense. Instead of having two conflicting desires, we might consider her as having an inadequate ideology. (Not that feminism is an inherently inadequate ideology, but that her particular version of it is incomplete.)
Her problem seems to stem from her assumption of the categories of bourgeois ideology, including the idea that all subjects must, in Lockean fashion, first “possess” themselves and then enter into social relations. Also, she assumes a host of concepts central to the capitalist ideology of the subject: emotion, self, love, interpretation, etc. So she winds up constructing another version of the Romantic subject, whose only hope is to adapt to the world through creative imagination, acts of interpretation, and the seeking of an “internal coherence”; essentially, we are to make ourselves into a perfect New Critical poem.
She cannot consider that rather than there being some Archimedean true self doing this “understanding” and “interpreting,” there might be a socially produced (ideological) discourse in which this is being done. And so, we are forced to accept that her alienated feminist cannot possibly form “authentic desires” in a world in which she is forced to choose between “emancipation without protection” or “protection without emancipation”: that is, between feminism and the rich boyfriend. But why must we assume “emancipation” and “protection” are the core desires/needs of all humans? What if her “authentic desire” were to alter the social conditions? Why can this NOT be an authentic desire? For Jaeggi, it just can’t. Ideological values just can’t ground a self, she tells us.
The major problem, then, is that she leaves us with the demand that we adjust ourselves to the world as it is, instead of altering our social conditions to reduce alienation. And her version of alienation excludes the problem of inadequate ideologies, which is the classic marxist understanding of the term, and instead assumes that there is some “Archimedean true self” that must be satisfied—while at the same time repeatedly insisting that she has escaped the belief in such a true self. We’ve seen this same solution too many times now, it seems, to make these mistakes again. She promises a theory of alienation, and instead offers yet another discursive procedure with which to reproduce the capitalist ideology of the subject.
I’ll use her seventh chapter as my primary example, because I think that’s where the problem with her argument is most transparent. She offers an example of an alienated woman, who is a feminist and yet has the tendency to behave like a giggling girl when in the presence of her male lover. The chapter is an attempt to explain why exactly she is alienated, and to offer a solution to that alienation that does not have recourse to the “Archimedean vantage point of a true self.” In this, she clearly fails completely.
First, she does, consistently, assume the existence of exactly such an Archimedean vantage point. When she explains that a person is no longer alienated when “I understand myself as the person I am and at the same time I project—or fashion—myself as the person I want to be,” she is clearly making the same mistake we see so often in any attempt to begin from a Lockean individualist concept of the conscious self. That is, who is the “I” doing this understanding, interpreting, and projecting if it is NOT exactly such an Archimedean “true self”? This is the same problem Hume famously faced in his Treatise—although he noticed it later on. And we’ve seen it in every attempt to rescue this model of the subject since Locke, from Hume to the Romantics to phenomenology. There just must be some kind of a homunculus for this to work.
So although she objects to Harry Frankfurt’s idea of “volitional necessity” because she (correctly) claims that it ignores the possibility that these “necessities” might be just deeply held ideological beliefs, she must ultimately resort the same concept to save her alternative theory. She assumes that if her alienated feminist were to “adapt herself to the traditional role of a woman” she would have difficulty because she would have to “close off” some of her “fundamental desires and longings.” But “fundamental desires and longings” is no different from what Frankfurt means by “volitional necessities,” and is ultimately just another term for deeply held ideological beliefs. (Not that they are bad ideological beliefs, but they are not the ultimate ground Jaeggi wants them to be...)
She cannot conceive of the possibility that the conflict might result simply from inadequate ideology—that is, from the failure of the woman’s particular feminist ideology to adequately provide her with a meaningful life—which is, of course, the task of all ideologies in the Althusserian sense. Instead of having two conflicting desires, we might consider her as having an inadequate ideology. (Not that feminism is an inherently inadequate ideology, but that her particular version of it is incomplete.)
Her problem seems to stem from her assumption of the categories of bourgeois ideology, including the idea that all subjects must, in Lockean fashion, first “possess” themselves and then enter into social relations. Also, she assumes a host of concepts central to the capitalist ideology of the subject: emotion, self, love, interpretation, etc. So she winds up constructing another version of the Romantic subject, whose only hope is to adapt to the world through creative imagination, acts of interpretation, and the seeking of an “internal coherence”; essentially, we are to make ourselves into a perfect New Critical poem.
She cannot consider that rather than there being some Archimedean true self doing this “understanding” and “interpreting,” there might be a socially produced (ideological) discourse in which this is being done. And so, we are forced to accept that her alienated feminist cannot possibly form “authentic desires” in a world in which she is forced to choose between “emancipation without protection” or “protection without emancipation”: that is, between feminism and the rich boyfriend. But why must we assume “emancipation” and “protection” are the core desires/needs of all humans? What if her “authentic desire” were to alter the social conditions? Why can this NOT be an authentic desire? For Jaeggi, it just can’t. Ideological values just can’t ground a self, she tells us.
The major problem, then, is that she leaves us with the demand that we adjust ourselves to the world as it is, instead of altering our social conditions to reduce alienation. And her version of alienation excludes the problem of inadequate ideologies, which is the classic marxist understanding of the term, and instead assumes that there is some “Archimedean true self” that must be satisfied—while at the same time repeatedly insisting that she has escaped the belief in such a true self. We’ve seen this same solution too many times now, it seems, to make these mistakes again. She promises a theory of alienation, and instead offers yet another discursive procedure with which to reproduce the capitalist ideology of the subject.
March 29, 2022
a really cool reconstruction of the concept of alienation from a somewhat analytic hegelian/heideggerian perspective. Jaeggi is sensitive to the essentialist critique of alienation as a fall from grace, so instead seeks to reconstruct the concept as the loss of the capacity for self determination and autonomy in one's collective or social constitution. it feels a little methodologically individualist at times, up until the last chapters. as someone who is not a reader of hegel or heidegger but spinoza or simondon, it felt like the book unfolded backwards. still, i got a ton out of it and i think it should be required reading for (academic) marxists to move past 1990s-isms that still hang around. also i found it at times an oddly therapeutic/diagnostic read as someone who of course oscillates between being enmeshed feelings of collective political empowerment and drastic and debilitating alienation? anyway.
May 22, 2020
From my reading, it appears that the alienation critique is two-part. First, it has a descriptive component - from what, or from who are we alienated? Secondly, it has a normative component - why is alienation bad, rather than value-neutral or positive? Jaeggi's book does a good job of focusing on the former part by developing, through the latter six chapters, an account of what the self is and how one can be alienated from it. What she doesn't do, however, is focus much on the normative component. As well, it seems to me that there is serious interplay between these two components that is largely ignored.
In terms of her account of the self and how one becomes alienated, Jaeggi does a great job. She gives some concrete accounts of alienation, explains how each is, in their own unique sense, alienating, and then provides a unifying account, based on all of the ways in which each is alienating, as to what alienation is. Her account boils down to something like this: the self is relational, it is what one does and identifies with both in their self and in the world. When the self is alienated from itself, some part of the relation is deficient - our actions don't accord with our identity, our identity is conflicted, etc.
Concerning her discussion of the self, I largely agree. My one critique would be something like so: Given this view of the self, when we consider that each self is, to an extent, built by others before coming into being for itself (parents, education, etc.), does this somehow undermine the authenticity of the self? We can still choose to appropriate new shapes of the self, but won’t the decision to do so itself be conditioned on the given still (i.e. whether we change ourselves depends on how we were raised)? In what sense can it be authentic then, how can it be a self, something individuated, if the basis on which it is individuated is itself something given?
Concerning the normative component of alienation, alienation is understood as bad insofar as it negatively affects one's wellbeing. For Hegel and Marx, their account of wellbeing was objective - there are certain things individuals ought to do, and they are alienated and worse-off to the extent that they do not or cannot. Jaeggi thinks this is contestable, and instead tries to ground her view in what is typically referred to as desire-satisfaction theory of wellbeing, a subjective view. What is good for the agent is what they desire (typically with a few more qualifiers). She fails to develop the normative component beyond this, but I take the normative force to be something like this: alienation is bad insofar as it inhibits the agents ability to effectively pursue desires, or have desires.
While she does not really engage with the wellbeing literature, it is important to note that this kind of view is not incontestable. While desire-satisfaction theory is probably the most popular, it is by no means accepted by all. So, her view is still contestable in this sense. As well, there are aspects of desire-satisfaction theory that seem to be alienating. If we consider the problem of adaptive preferences, agents whose desires/preferences adapt to their situation, it seems that the normative component can be alienating in its own way. If an agent has a certain desire iff it is in a certain set of conditions, and if it were otherwise, they would not have the desire, it seems the idea of desire-satisfaction theory as being an exhaustive account of what is good for the agent is problematized. Certainly, it seems, it would be good for the agent to not adapt, to not have their feasible set of desire-targets arbitrarily restricted. If this is so, it problematizes Jaeggi's account insofar as it relies on desire-satisfaction theory being an exhaustive account of what is good for the agent. This would mean that, potentially, not all alienation will be bad - we may even think being alienated from adapted preferences would be good. This would mean that the alienation critique loses its normative force.
Another issue is whether it is always appropriate for an agent to appropriate some part of the world. In Jaeggi's account, an agent is alienated insofar as they don't make the world their own by appropriating some part of it. However, if we consider a world that is morally repugnant, is it good to make some part of it our own? Would it not be preferable for the agent to, in a way, internalize themselves and withdraw from the world? Consider the case of a woman who lives in a sexist society - she can make the world her own by buying into her role as conceived by the patriarchy, or she can alienate herself from the world and refuse, thereby saving her dignity. It isn't clear if, or how Jaeggi's account can handle cases like this where it seems better for the agent to have her dignity, rather than to appropriate some part of a repugnant world.
Lastly, it seems that Jaeggi's account necessitates that people view themselves as responsible agents, and disallows the possibility of non-agential alienation. Depending on how robust of an account one makes of agency, it seems that this means all but normally functioning adult humans cannot be alienated. This seems potentially problematic - if we consider a case in which a non-human animal's habitat is destroyed, it seems as though they are, in a way, being alienated. Jaeggi's conceptual framework does not allow for us to say this, but it seems to be somewhat plausible to say so.
As well, even in trying to avoid the essentialism of her predecessors, Jaeggi provides essentialism of her own by necessitating that people view themselves as responsible agents. It isn't clear why I ought to view myself as a rational agent - could I not instead be a child for life, disavowing responsibility? Why is this problematic? Attempts to answer this question may bring in more conceptual baggage and make it harder for Jaeggi's account to remain relatively-essentialism-free.
Overall, the book is interesting and well-written and argued. She pulls from a plethora of diffuse thinkers and provides an interesting synthesis of their thought. While the book has its flaws, it is most certainly worth reading.
In terms of her account of the self and how one becomes alienated, Jaeggi does a great job. She gives some concrete accounts of alienation, explains how each is, in their own unique sense, alienating, and then provides a unifying account, based on all of the ways in which each is alienating, as to what alienation is. Her account boils down to something like this: the self is relational, it is what one does and identifies with both in their self and in the world. When the self is alienated from itself, some part of the relation is deficient - our actions don't accord with our identity, our identity is conflicted, etc.
Concerning her discussion of the self, I largely agree. My one critique would be something like so: Given this view of the self, when we consider that each self is, to an extent, built by others before coming into being for itself (parents, education, etc.), does this somehow undermine the authenticity of the self? We can still choose to appropriate new shapes of the self, but won’t the decision to do so itself be conditioned on the given still (i.e. whether we change ourselves depends on how we were raised)? In what sense can it be authentic then, how can it be a self, something individuated, if the basis on which it is individuated is itself something given?
Concerning the normative component of alienation, alienation is understood as bad insofar as it negatively affects one's wellbeing. For Hegel and Marx, their account of wellbeing was objective - there are certain things individuals ought to do, and they are alienated and worse-off to the extent that they do not or cannot. Jaeggi thinks this is contestable, and instead tries to ground her view in what is typically referred to as desire-satisfaction theory of wellbeing, a subjective view. What is good for the agent is what they desire (typically with a few more qualifiers). She fails to develop the normative component beyond this, but I take the normative force to be something like this: alienation is bad insofar as it inhibits the agents ability to effectively pursue desires, or have desires.
While she does not really engage with the wellbeing literature, it is important to note that this kind of view is not incontestable. While desire-satisfaction theory is probably the most popular, it is by no means accepted by all. So, her view is still contestable in this sense. As well, there are aspects of desire-satisfaction theory that seem to be alienating. If we consider the problem of adaptive preferences, agents whose desires/preferences adapt to their situation, it seems that the normative component can be alienating in its own way. If an agent has a certain desire iff it is in a certain set of conditions, and if it were otherwise, they would not have the desire, it seems the idea of desire-satisfaction theory as being an exhaustive account of what is good for the agent is problematized. Certainly, it seems, it would be good for the agent to not adapt, to not have their feasible set of desire-targets arbitrarily restricted. If this is so, it problematizes Jaeggi's account insofar as it relies on desire-satisfaction theory being an exhaustive account of what is good for the agent. This would mean that, potentially, not all alienation will be bad - we may even think being alienated from adapted preferences would be good. This would mean that the alienation critique loses its normative force.
Another issue is whether it is always appropriate for an agent to appropriate some part of the world. In Jaeggi's account, an agent is alienated insofar as they don't make the world their own by appropriating some part of it. However, if we consider a world that is morally repugnant, is it good to make some part of it our own? Would it not be preferable for the agent to, in a way, internalize themselves and withdraw from the world? Consider the case of a woman who lives in a sexist society - she can make the world her own by buying into her role as conceived by the patriarchy, or she can alienate herself from the world and refuse, thereby saving her dignity. It isn't clear if, or how Jaeggi's account can handle cases like this where it seems better for the agent to have her dignity, rather than to appropriate some part of a repugnant world.
Lastly, it seems that Jaeggi's account necessitates that people view themselves as responsible agents, and disallows the possibility of non-agential alienation. Depending on how robust of an account one makes of agency, it seems that this means all but normally functioning adult humans cannot be alienated. This seems potentially problematic - if we consider a case in which a non-human animal's habitat is destroyed, it seems as though they are, in a way, being alienated. Jaeggi's conceptual framework does not allow for us to say this, but it seems to be somewhat plausible to say so.
As well, even in trying to avoid the essentialism of her predecessors, Jaeggi provides essentialism of her own by necessitating that people view themselves as responsible agents. It isn't clear why I ought to view myself as a rational agent - could I not instead be a child for life, disavowing responsibility? Why is this problematic? Attempts to answer this question may bring in more conceptual baggage and make it harder for Jaeggi's account to remain relatively-essentialism-free.
Overall, the book is interesting and well-written and argued. She pulls from a plethora of diffuse thinkers and provides an interesting synthesis of their thought. While the book has its flaws, it is most certainly worth reading.
April 6, 2025
Thought an additional case study on the ways in which our visible social identities like gender and race can be alienating in the face of discrimination would’ve been cool. Overall, highly illuminating
July 5, 2018
I went into this book being very sympathetic with Jaeggi's project of trying to recover the concept of alienation without recourse to an overly substantialist conception of human nature or the human essence, but in the end I was underwhelmed by the arguments she provided in favour of her account. There were a few recurrent frustrations that I had with the book that led me to this conclusion.
Firstly, her conception of essentialism is never fully spelled out, and thus I was never fully clear what she meant when she opposed her account to an an essentialist account. Jaeggi surely has an ideal of life in mind when she thinks about what a non-alienated life involves and why it is preferable to an alienated life, but how does this not presuppose a sense in which there are better and worse ways of living? In response to this, she vacillates between seeming at once to say that individual sovereignty is an ideal of the modern age and thus she is engaged in an immanent critique based on this ideal, and suggesting that this ideal has a more fundamental claim. The question of how to live may be posed in a historical context, but the validity of the question and the answer reach beyond this context, so it is not enough to suggest that your critique is immanent to justify its normative force.
My question then becomes how can we develop a normative account in a deep sense, without some residue of essentialism? While Jaeggi clearly shows that the "container" view of the self is problematic, I don't think she shows that her views are non-essentialist, but rather that they are more sophisticated and stand up better to scrutiny.
Similarly, she seems to misread some thinkers she uses in her account. For example, Jaeggi suggests Frankfurt's notion of "volitional necessities," posits an essential core of the self that is unchangeable over time and not subject to reflection. I may be wrong but I don't think Frankfurt was saying that "volitional necessities" are unchangeable and form an eternally intractable core of the self, but making the phenomenological point that at some point in reflecting on our desires we will come to a point where we just say I simply care about X, and that is why I am pursuing X. I never took Frankfurt to be positing an essence and Jaeggi struggles to find textual evidence to backup her reading in my view.
Lastly, much of Jaeggi's argument is nothing new. While I agree with her account of the self and am sympathetic to the account of alienation she provides, I don't see how her perspective on the self has moved past similar points made by Gadamer and Taylor. This is not to suggest that she is wrong, but it did leave me a bit underwhelmed.
The book is still worth a read by anyone interested in the topic, but it is not without significant flaws.
Firstly, her conception of essentialism is never fully spelled out, and thus I was never fully clear what she meant when she opposed her account to an an essentialist account. Jaeggi surely has an ideal of life in mind when she thinks about what a non-alienated life involves and why it is preferable to an alienated life, but how does this not presuppose a sense in which there are better and worse ways of living? In response to this, she vacillates between seeming at once to say that individual sovereignty is an ideal of the modern age and thus she is engaged in an immanent critique based on this ideal, and suggesting that this ideal has a more fundamental claim. The question of how to live may be posed in a historical context, but the validity of the question and the answer reach beyond this context, so it is not enough to suggest that your critique is immanent to justify its normative force.
My question then becomes how can we develop a normative account in a deep sense, without some residue of essentialism? While Jaeggi clearly shows that the "container" view of the self is problematic, I don't think she shows that her views are non-essentialist, but rather that they are more sophisticated and stand up better to scrutiny.
Similarly, she seems to misread some thinkers she uses in her account. For example, Jaeggi suggests Frankfurt's notion of "volitional necessities," posits an essential core of the self that is unchangeable over time and not subject to reflection. I may be wrong but I don't think Frankfurt was saying that "volitional necessities" are unchangeable and form an eternally intractable core of the self, but making the phenomenological point that at some point in reflecting on our desires we will come to a point where we just say I simply care about X, and that is why I am pursuing X. I never took Frankfurt to be positing an essence and Jaeggi struggles to find textual evidence to backup her reading in my view.
Lastly, much of Jaeggi's argument is nothing new. While I agree with her account of the self and am sympathetic to the account of alienation she provides, I don't see how her perspective on the self has moved past similar points made by Gadamer and Taylor. This is not to suggest that she is wrong, but it did leave me a bit underwhelmed.
The book is still worth a read by anyone interested in the topic, but it is not without significant flaws.
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February 12, 2023The problem with Jaeggi’s Alienation can possibly be best framed in the contradiction in their proposed aim: the defining of alienation in the formula of a ‘relation of relationlessness’. A formula - an abstraction - is inherently not the appropriate tool to grapple with a phenomenon (and alienation is barely a phenomenon) that is abstracting in itself, that takes the ‘subject’ and makes alien the world, other people and itself and creates a disjoint that is difficult to navigate. Jaeggi’s discussion is all too focussed on the process of self-alienation; but it is unclear why self-alienation should be primary over alienation to the world or to others. As all these relations co-constitute each other - let alone are constitutive of any conception of the self - it just reads as a continuation of the atomised subject.
Also - there is an absolute absence of any discussion of ideology or of capitalism; of the primary factors that create our proposed ‘relationlessness’. It is just an abstracted analysis of an issue that necessarily cannot be treated in the abstract - alienation may perhaps be an ontological condition (maybe), but the manifestation we are experiencing is necessarily tied to the material conditions of capitalism, the ideological insistence on separated subjects floating through markets in attempts to acquire capital (or just enough to get by, more accurately). To not acknowledge that makes the analysis just a bit absurd - detached from why we care about alienation critique in the first place.
(There is also an issue with using Marx and Heidegger as two opposing accounts of alienation, particularly as Jaeggi uses Being and Time as the primary articulation from Heidegger, never citing Letter on Humanism and the direct reference to Marx’s ‘estrangement’ he makes there, but that is also quite literally my masters thesis).
Also - there is an absolute absence of any discussion of ideology or of capitalism; of the primary factors that create our proposed ‘relationlessness’. It is just an abstracted analysis of an issue that necessarily cannot be treated in the abstract - alienation may perhaps be an ontological condition (maybe), but the manifestation we are experiencing is necessarily tied to the material conditions of capitalism, the ideological insistence on separated subjects floating through markets in attempts to acquire capital (or just enough to get by, more accurately). To not acknowledge that makes the analysis just a bit absurd - detached from why we care about alienation critique in the first place.
(There is also an issue with using Marx and Heidegger as two opposing accounts of alienation, particularly as Jaeggi uses Being and Time as the primary articulation from Heidegger, never citing Letter on Humanism and the direct reference to Marx’s ‘estrangement’ he makes there, but that is also quite literally my masters thesis).
August 23, 2023
Theories of alienation seek to systemise vague, ill-defined feelings of ennui or dissatisfaction. The idea is that such feelings might be a product of social institutions, and that reform (or revolution!) of such institutions could lead to us living better lives (in some subjective or objective sense). This clarifies the stakes of such a theory -- for example, should we aim for a state-communist society in which workers have collective control over production, or would such a society still produce alienated individuals? This also makes the exercise in principle social-scientific, in the narrow sense of making falsifiable predictions about how people will feel in different social contexts.
This book focuses on the pre-scientific task of clarifying what alienation is. Specifically, the book develops a philosophy of personal identity which claims (roughly) that identity persists over time when a person can maintain a compelling narrative about the ways they interact with the world. Alienation occurs when such a narrative can no longer be maintained.
One problem with divorcing the conceptual analysis (what is alienation?) from a sociological analysis (what produces alienation?) is that it's hard to know how the book can be usefully critiqued. For example, Jaeggi spends some time arguing that identity is formed *in how one relates to the world*, rather than internally. This seemed a bit strong -- but I wasn't sure whether my qualms were nit-picking, because I wasn't sure why this argument mattered.
That said, the book is generally compelling. Its core theory seems correct, and I think it will provide a useful foundation for those of us wanting to do social science. 4 stars.
This book focuses on the pre-scientific task of clarifying what alienation is. Specifically, the book develops a philosophy of personal identity which claims (roughly) that identity persists over time when a person can maintain a compelling narrative about the ways they interact with the world. Alienation occurs when such a narrative can no longer be maintained.
One problem with divorcing the conceptual analysis (what is alienation?) from a sociological analysis (what produces alienation?) is that it's hard to know how the book can be usefully critiqued. For example, Jaeggi spends some time arguing that identity is formed *in how one relates to the world*, rather than internally. This seemed a bit strong -- but I wasn't sure whether my qualms were nit-picking, because I wasn't sure why this argument mattered.
That said, the book is generally compelling. Its core theory seems correct, and I think it will provide a useful foundation for those of us wanting to do social science. 4 stars.
November 23, 2025
i do get that there is something to be frustrated with here – the argument only really comes together with jaeggi's 2016 postscript (and her subsequent work), the text itself really is somewhat lacking in reflections about ideology, power and political organisation – but having said that, i really enjoyed her social (not political) philosophical exploration of the phenomenon, her hegelian understanding of the freedom to lead our own lives: always-already social, the individual inherently embedded in social structures and enmeshed with others.
January 12, 2025
Potent attempt to deal with a real if overlooked as unfashionable issue, marred by turgid prose. Jaeggi disagrees with Rorty etc’s concept of essential, romantic self vs an existentialist, we’re thrown in the world and making it up as we go along approach. Argument would have been much more forceful if grounded in real world or literary examples, but these are few, other than a brief discussion of Henry James’s helplessly deluded (in Jaeggi’s opinion) Isabel Archer.
April 15, 2023
radio show idea to sell to NPR: Click and Clack listen to caller complaints about their selves improperly relating themselves to themselves in the relation and attempt to provide diagnostic help live on the air.
November 24, 2023
So incredibly dense but so incredibly interesting. Genuinely breaths so much depth into the ongoing Alienation debate in political / analytical Philosophy.
Some parts I found interesting:
https://www.tumblr.com/francesbeau/73...
Some parts I found interesting:
https://www.tumblr.com/francesbeau/73...
September 10, 2024
great account of alienation and thorough critique of existentialist/marxist theories
May 30, 2025
Interessante Neu-Interpretation des Entfremdungsbegriffs anhand klarer und leitender Beispiele. Dieses Buch ist nicht nur für Philosophie-Studierende relevant sondern betrifft uns gesamt-gesellschaftlich. Dennoch verbleibt bei mir die Frage: Sind alle Entfremdungserfahrungen solche Krisen? Oder ist es nicht oftmals doch arger als das?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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