Alienation
On the metaphysics of a critical concept

The world within us and the world as it appears outside do not coincide. We move through days surrounded by things we do not need, performing labor whose ends we do not fully see, governed by a transactional social order. The result is myriad symptoms: generalized anxiety, a tightness in the chest when a stranger comes near; restlessness at night, abetted by the cursory scroll; a quiet exhaustion borne of the sense that we are condemned to repeat. We feel, however dimly, that our private unease is knotted to transformations of history, yet what is lived as inner malaise remains at a psychic distance from its own contingency.

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Distractions abound to guarantee that distance, propelled by consumer culture and individual choice, the promise that a purchase will secure a stable self. Neoliberal institutions, meanwhile, interpret structural limitations as failures of personal coping, teaching skills without substantive consequence, treating anger as pathology. In countries like Jordan, a deeper political distraction abets the social one: the question of freedom is resolved through dependency on foreign aid; parliaments negotiate with neocolonial agencies rather than their publics, organic communities eroded as reforms turn bread, for instance, into an IMF variable on a spreadsheet.

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Against this backdrop, the seminar begins with an intellectual history of the concept of alienation. Rather than treating it as a free-floating signifier, we will approach it as a category that responds to structures of material domination. We will trace its emergence in the nineteenth century alongside the colonial and capitalist expansion of the European nation-state: from G. W. F. Hegel on objectification and recognition; through Karl Marx and Georg Lukács on labor, the commodity form, and reification; to Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon on action and the fractures of empire.

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We will then follow the concept contrapuntally. As the European nation-state has structured the postcolonial era, we will ask how indigenous traditions experience and resist alienation. How might metaphysical systems rooted in holism and relationality avoid the impasses of alienation’s secular history while still responding to material domination? We will work closely with two constellations: the First Nations of Turtle Island (otherwise known as North America), including Vine Deloria Jr. of the Standing Rock Sioux and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg; and the Arab-Islamic tradition, including Ḥasan Ḥanafī and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ṭāhā.

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Throughout the seminar, we will treat alienation as the ground for both complicity and emancipation. How might alienation be named without being naturalized? What kinds of histories, practices, and metaphysical commitments unsettle its foundations without affirming the framework of the nation-state? And from both sides of the Jordan River, how might the enormous energies currently directed toward maintaining the structures of alienation, or merely alleviating its symptoms, be freed to make a shared life?