Alienation in History. Estrangement in Language

Alienation and estrangement – two tightly linked concepts, often used interchangeably to designate a certain condition of distance and unfamiliarity, separation and isolation – if analyzed in their historical articulations, delineate different philosophical trajectories that sometimes seem intersect, but at other times may move in different or even opposite directions. Both concepts can be traced back to their origins in German classical philosophy, where they represent subjectivity in its not being at home in the external world. It is mainly Hegel’s speculative system that sets forth Entfremdung (translated both as alienation or estrangement) as an indispensable moment of negativity in the process of the spirit’s self-othering – its externalization (Entäußerung) – revealing both history and language as genuine fields of self-alienation. Marx’s critique of Hegel marks a turning point in the reconsideration of alienation as the fundamental character of sociality shaped by the capitalist modes of production and division of labor. Although Lukács, with his concept of reification, had already touched on the problematics of alienation, only the publication and subsequent translations of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts catalyzed an intensive theoretical engagement with the concept in the Marxist tradition (from Marcuse and Lefebvre to Karel Kosík, the Budapest School, and the Yugoslav Praxis School). Through this rich history of reflections, alienation emerges as a historical phenomenon that epitomizes the core of our social existence in modern societies. On the other hand, the concept of estrangement (Verfremdung, Befremdung, ostranenie, otchuzhdenie) appears to move more toward the aesthetic or perceptual (corporeal) aspects of subjectivity, acknowledging the centrality of language – i.e., the linguistically mediated experience of the world – as the medium where the strange and foreign take place. However, it was Brecht’s theory of estrangement, his famous Verfremdungseffekt, that attempted to keep the levels of alienation and estrangement together: the estrangement-effect as directed to make us aware of alienated social relations by showing that what is taken to be natural is, in fact, historical – i.e., political and changeable. 

Moreover, while estrangement asserts its status of a “good” purposeful displacement which de-naturalizes experience and reveals the true quality of our own otherness, and thus continues to receive further theoretical contributions in contemporary thought (e.g. in cultural studies or translation theories, where various modes of foreignization, hybridization, translingualism are addressed), alienation has gradually fallen into oblivion, even been jettisoned, particularly within postmodern and poststructuralist thought. The rejection of alienation, regarded to be an organic category (Althusser) and to belong to the anthropocentric epistémè (Foucault), an expression of the ideology of origin and the metaphysics of presence (Derrida), actually places us before another task: does the very act of ‘making strange’ (cultural, linguistic, aesthetic estrangements) allow us to reapproach alienation and the possibility of de-alienation? 

Against this historical backdrop, this conference aims to pose the problem of alienation and estrangement by emphasizing their dialectical interplay, hidden implications, and mutual tensions, in order to provide significant insights into key issues of modern and contemporary philosophy. Participants will revisit the crucial moments in the history of the concepts of alienation  (from Rousseau, through Fichte and Hegel, to Marx and Marxist thinkers) and estrangement (from the Romantics to Brecht, psychoanalysis, and contemporary philosophies of language), with the aim of exploring how these concepts allow us to conceive of history as a process of alienation and language as a space of estrangement. 

The event is organized within LANGEST project CUP: B83C22006370007

For information: [email protected]