Experiencing Estrangement

Lucy Myers

Deakin University's HDR Philosophy Seminar Series invites current Australian graduate students to present their work for feedback, discussion, and engagement. We aim to foster a supportive space so that the seminar is thoughtful and constructive for all involved. We look forward to seeing you there!

Details: Experiencing Estrangement

Abstract: Contemporary treatments of alienation and estrangement assume a direct symmetry between alienation and humanism, either through maintaining the logic of Althusser’s break or utilising it as a recovery of some unified human essence. This conclusion is in discordance with alienation’s broad conceptual history, with its primary inheritors posed as Marx and Heidegger. In this paper, I want to show the fallibility of this logic with Marx and Heidegger’s fundamental breaks with traditional metaphysics, which in turn force reconsiderations of alienation on these grounds. Working from Heidegger’s own discussion of Marx in his infamous ‘Letter on Humanism’, through Derrida and Axelos’ positionings of Marx and Heidegger, this paper will sketch a reconceptualization of alienation as a properly historical concept irreducible to a fixed human essence.

Bio: Lucy Myers is a candidate in the Master of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, where her thesis is on the concept of alienation in the history of Western philosophy. 

Zoom Link:

https://deakin.zoom.us/j/81514948590?pwd=dxLPSIP3zQ2D0texqlHfYbzJEACDu5.1

Meeting ID: 815 1494 8590 // Password: 14043504