Losing Oneself: Self-Alienation in Post-Kantianism and Beyond

Royal Holloway, University of London and the London Post-Kantian Seminar host a one-day conference entitled “Losing Oneself: Self-Alienation in Post-Kantianism and Beyond”. The event receives funding from the Mind Association and Royal Holloway.

It is among the most human and yet most dehumanizing experiences to lose oneself—to suffer self-alienation. This can be brought on by everyday emotions like shame or guilt about a job done badly or a friend left hanging; it can be a consequence of inhumane conditions of labour; it can go along with traumatic or violent events; and it can be a core experience of those going through persecution, internment, and civilizational collapse. Crucially, even the mere reflection on oneself as human can engender self-alienation. The phenomenon of self-alienation thus has an array of aspects that range from the psychological via the social, political, existential, and metaphysical, to the aesthetic and literary.

In modern times, an important philosophical tradition that responds to this vulnerability of human life is post-Kantianism broadly construed: first taking center stage in Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, the problem of self-alienation was further developed by Arendt, the Frankfurt School, and then post-Wittgensteinian authors like Cavell, Diamond, and Crary. The problem also reaches beyond post-Kantianism and is at the center of current debates in political philosophy, philosophy of action, feminism, philosophy of gender, aesthetics, and the philosophy of epistemic injustice. This conference brings together authors from within and beyond the post-Kantian tradition, as well as junior and senior researchers.

The event is free and open to all! To register and for any inquiries please contact: [email protected].

Speakers and Respondents:
Benedict Blunt (Oxford) 
Diana Craciun (UCL)
Lizzy Holt (UCL)
Thomas Khurana (Potsdam)
Quill Kukla (Georgetown/Hanover)
Spencer Alexandria Nabors (Georgetown)
Jens Pier (Royal Holloway)
Francey Russell (Barnard/Columbia)
James Ternent (Cambridge)