#embracing alienation

[1000rh]

All creation depends on alienation, which is a process that uproots us from our place and from the given properties of our existence. As it dislocates us, alienation frees us from our situation. Even though all people are born into a specific social situation in which powerful forces act on them, they are not reducible to the place where they emerge or to these determinative forces, no matter how powerful they may be. As a result of the primary alienation in language, an internal distance forms that allows people to relate to themselves as if to another entity, at the same time as it distances them from others who surround them. We are alienated both from ourselves and from others. No matter what we do, we will never overcome this alienation. It is the basic fact of our existence.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)

[1000rh]

The advantage that alienation confers is that it gives us some purchase on our self-division. Rather than just suffering this self-division until it eventually spells our doom, we can relate to it, manipulate it, and even augment it. Through the act of taking up our alienation instead of constantly trying to overcome it, its status undergoes a transformation. From seeing our alienation as a burden to overcome, we begin to view it as what frees us from what we are. Revising the negative judgment regarding alienation is a crucial political task, especially in an era that proffers endless schemes for overcoming it.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)

[1000rh]

The political distinction between subjectivity and symbolic identity becomes apparent whenever a dicey social issue arises. For instance, if a person asks me my views on the death penalty, rather than think through all the permutations of the issue and come to some conclusion, I can rely on whatever symbolic identity I see as my own. I can consider the teachings of the Catholic Church and tell my interlocutor that I'm opposed to the death penalty on that basis. Or I can point out that my parents raised me according to the strict code of the Ten Commandments lead me to see the death penalty as an expression of justice. I might even have recourse to my identity as a political liberal to find a ground for opposing this harsh punishment. In each of these cases, some form of symbolic identity provides an exit from the burden of subjectivity. Identity supplies ways to resolve the existential problem that subjectivity poses. Whenever I don't know what to think or how to act, my identification with a specific symbolic position intervenes to guide me toward a clear answer.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)

[1000rh]

Symbolic identity provides markers of what one is to plaster over the question of who one is. This obfuscation is not avoidable: there is no subjectivity without a symbolic identity attached to it. It is impossible to avoid having an identity. This is what allows us to have a way of relating to others and of navigating our social situation. At the same time, symbolic identity, despite being unavoidable, is a flight from subjectivity. We seek respite from the problem of subjectivity in the promised security of our symbolic identity. The necessary failure of identity to provide this security doesn't lessen our proclivity to seek it out continually for what it promises. Our political being depends on the relationship that we adopt to our symbolic identity.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)