Brief Reviews

Todd McGowan – Embracing Alienation [Review]

Embracing AlienationFinding Comfort in Our Otherness

A Review of

Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves
Todd McGowan

Paperback: Repeater, 2024
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Reviewed by Len Newton

This past May I started reading Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves by Dr. Todd McGowan. Then my wife had a baby (mine, in case you were concerned). While I would not say the general state of things was rosy when I began reading, we had not yet set loose the boulder of dystopian capitalist authoritarianism we seem so eager to be crushed by. In fact, I had all but convinced myself that there was no way we as a nation would try to swap the golden fetish with our little bag of sand. I was downright hopeful.

I was also wrong.

I only bring this up to note that I was in two very different headspaces when I started the book and when I finished, which resulted in my having two wildly different, but equally positive, experiences with the ideas therein.

As you may have guessed from the title, the book is all about alienation and why we should embrace it. According to McGowan,

“[The book’s] claim is that the effort to overcome alienation is not a radical response to the current state of things, but a failure to see the constitutive power of alienation for us. Instead of trying to overcome alienation and accede to an unalienated existence, we should redeem alienation as an existential and political program. Alienation is emancipation” (9).

The bulk of the text consists of a detailed examination of alienation, its implications on us as alienated subjects, and the repeated folly of those who try to overcome this alienation. Essentially, the one thing all humans have in common is that we don’t fit. None of the markers we use to identify ourselves ever deliver the belonging and refuge they promise. We are all just uncomfortable little hermit crab guys searching for a shell that we will never find.

Embracing Alienation tickled my brain in just the right way. McGowan, a long-time professor at University of Vermont, clearly revels in taking us by the hand and leading us through the forêt philosophique, pointing out noteworthy flora and fauna, overturning logs to show us the creepy-crawlies underneath, and guiding us to beautiful, sun-drenched vistas. Using the lens of humans as alienated subjects, he weaves together thinkers from Aristotle to Zizek, plus a kaleidoscope of other authors, filmmakers, and culture-creators. Like a freshman honors seminar in the best possible way, McGowan exposes us to thoughts and thinkers and new perspectives in a way that challenges and provokes without overwhelming the reader with undue jargon or forays on confusing flights of fancy (like this review).

Then, as I mentioned, my wife had a baby. Gus. He is the best. He also drastically reduced my capacity for anything that is not Gus. Flash forward to the election and I may or may not have lost my mind a bit. Who’s to say? Who’s to judge? It was then Thanksgiving weekend when I remembered that people still had expectations that I still had to fulfill. So, I pulled on my big boy pants, started reading, and found that the end of Embracing Alienation was exactly what I needed to hear.

That is not to say it is what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear how I should radicalize, join a hip, stylish, underground left-wing guerilla activist network, then rocket to fame and the highest echelons of the New York intelligentsia for my brave, cutting memoirs written on toilet paper while in solitary confinement after being unfairly convicted for allegedly taking part in some sort of violent action funded by dark Canadian drug money.

Although the book is, at least in part, an explicit response to the first Trump administration, McGowan argues for something much different and much deeper than my own frenzied fever dreams. Starting in chapter 5, McGowan transitions from examining the nature of our alienation to an argument for alienation as the true source of all solidarity. As uncomfortable little hermit crab guys, we seek out communities that give us identity and belonging. “Communities promise respite from the burden of subjectivity” (113). There are two problems with this, though. First, communities never live up to this promise.

“The security the community provides is always illusory. No symbolic identity can ever relieve one of the problem of alienated subjectivity. Even within the comforts of a community and the identity that it offers, one remains an alienated subject. The problem persists. The community gives me a symbolic identity, but that identity ends up being at odds with itself. Its security is ultimately insecure” (120).

In other words, our little naked hermit crab guys will never fit in any shell they find. The second problem is that every community, by its very nature, must define itself by who is in and who is out. For any community to exist, it must have an enemy, someone/thing/other to identify itself against. We only know who’s in by who is out. At some level, even the best-meaning, most inclusive community is held together by exclusion, and “the attempt to cure alienation always entails recourse to oppressive measures” (149).

As an alternative, McGowan argues that “what we all have in common is our inability to be identical with ourselves or with our community” (134) and we should lean into this inability in order to see ourselves not as member communities, but as public beings who, by recognizing our own discomfort, can see the same in others, thus fostering solidarity.  We further this by creating more public spaces: spaces where no one community can lay claim, where we all feel uncomfortable and exposed for the sake of all being offered access. It is for these public spaces- libraries, buses, schools, parks, open clinics- spaces that are inherently egalitarian and inherently fragile, that we must fight.

“Rather than trying to cure alienation, the project of emancipation…tries to reconcile us to our alienation, to see alienation itself as freedom. It is only when we embrace alienation that we can move beyond the lure of a self-identical subject…and society. We produce a society structured around the public rather than our private communities…The embrace of alienation- is the foundation of egalitarian living and egalitarian society” (150).

While I will always hem and haw over whether I am doing enough, this at least is something tangible I can do now. I can lean into the naked little hermit crab guy in me and see the naked little hermit crab guy in others. I can keep working to make sure the public school where I work stays public. I can advocate for our libraries and parks. I can get out of the for-profit, algorithm bespoke “community spaces” and immerse myself in places where truly anyone has access. While this is surely not everything, it is definitely something.

Do I have quibbles with Embracing Alienation? Sure. Does it sag a bit in the middle? Yes, especially if one is not particularly invested in such intricacies as Louis Althusser’s thoughts on Marx’s shift from humanistic philosophy to scientific analysis. Does McGowan utterly exhaust the word, alienation? Yes. He loves it. On page 88, he uses some form of it 17 times and throws in two more in German just because. Is there some observation I have overlooked that would not only alter our entire perception of the book but also push the discourse forward in a meaningful and rigorous way? Of course.

But does McGowan have an important message for uncertain times? One that could possibly lead those who heed the call to make the world a little bit better? Absolutely.

Len Newton

Len Newton is a teacher who lives in Indianapolis with his wife, son, and cat. He has achieved nothing of note, but will talk to you endlessly at a party about things you probably don't care about.


 
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