Abstract
Alienation is a central concept to critical theory, but one that has been challenged as being overdetermined and incoherent. I read alienation as plagued by two key conceptual ambivalences: that a) alienation describes i) both a constitutive and necessary condition, but ii) one that critique seeks to overcome, and b) that to be ‘unalienated’ implies i) a condition of authentic individuality, breaking from repressive and conformist social mores, but ii) also the reintegration of the subject into the bonds of sensuous community — a condition felt to be lost in modern life.
In this thesis, I aim to clarify the significance of alienation in Hegelian critical theory. To this end, I consider this question as carrying three related sub-questions: a) what ‘alienation’ is understood as, b) why it is a ‘critical’ notion, and c) what emancipatory ideal an unalienated condition is supposed to imply.
I argue that a close reading of Hegel, Marx and Marcuse shows that alienation’s conceptual tensions are not as intractable as they appear. For these thinkers, alienation describes a social pathology of the modern subject that sees itself as autonomous and free, but finds itself dependent on, constituted by, and objectified in, its relations to the social whole. For the Frankfurt School, if alienation complicates the bourgeois ideal of freedom, it does not invalidate it outright: overcoming alienation would mean a change in the dialectical relationship between dependence and freedom. For Hegel, this would mean a conscious reconciliation of the subject with Sittlichkeit [ethical life]. For Marx, this would mean overcoming the bourgeois/citoyen bifurcation of the subject so that ‘species-being’ becomes something the subject can freely appropriate in concrete social life. For Marcuse, this would mean a change in the relationship between the pleasure and reality principles, so that repression becomes free sublimation in an aesthetic state.
In the final chapter, I put Marcuse’s dialectical overcoming to the test with Axel Honneth’s alternative positing of misrecognition as the central normative category of critical theory. By contrasting Marcuse and Honneth’s distinct forms of ‘Hegelian critical theory’, I aim to clarify how the subtle distinctions between these two related Hegelian notions (alienation and misrecognition) inform distinct emancipatory logics in first and third generation of Frankfurt School thought. I argue that, if Honneth’s focus on the intersubjective and ‘moral feeling’ captures something missed in earlier critical theory, his pragmatist ontology misses the centrality of negativity to critique, and skews critical theory’s emancipatory aims.