I’ve lived in four different countries and moved between five cities over the course of my life, so being an “alien” has never felt unfamiliar to me. For a long time, I treated that feeling as a phase, something I would eventually outgrow. Lately, though, I’ve been asking myself: what if this sense of alienation doesn’t end at all?

Ironically, I don’t even know where I could say “home” is. After years of moving, I’ve found places that suit my personality, places where daily life feels easier or more aligned with who I am. And yet, none of them feel like home in a deep, settled way. At the same time, the place I come from doesn’t quite fit me either. My values doesn’t sit comfortably within its culture. So I’m left with this strange realization: I don’t know if there is any place in the world where I wouldn’t feel alienated.

I stumbled upon Embracing Alienation by accident. It was the end of the year, that moment when social media fills up with “best reads” lists, and someone mentioned it in passing. At first glance, the book title gives the opposite vibe of the usual self-help advice. So many books urge us to “find ourselves,” to heal, to arrive at some final, whole version of who we are. This one asked us to do the opposite: to embrace alienation. That alone was enough to pull me in. It also broke a nonfiction reading slump I’d been stuck in for nearly two months.

The main idea of the book is everywhere we look, we are encouraged to escape alienation. And yet, alienation is the source of human suffering as well as the source of everything that makes life meaningful. Without alienation, McGowan argues, we wouldn’t suffer, but we also wouldn’t enjoy anything. We would lack the space to act against what has been given to us. We would be nothing more than the product of forces like culture, history, and circumstance. Alienation creates an opening. It makes creativity, pleasure, and resistance possible.

Reading this helped me rethink something I’ve often wondered about: why moving abroad seems to make people feel freer. Someone leaves country A for country B and feels liberated, while people born in country B feel constrained and dream of leaving. Then someone from country B moves to country A and says the same thing. At some points, it starts to feel like the place itself isn’t the real problem. This book puts words to that intuition. It suggests that what we often call “belonging” is tied to fixed social places and that those places are, in fact, limits on freedom. Freedom begins with the ability to leave an assigned place, to be uprooted. Modern displacement, uncomfortable as it is, opens a space for emancipation. Longing for a perfect home may be chasing something that never truly existed.

Instead of treating alienation as something to overcome, it argues that the desire to eliminate alienation is itself misguided. Alienation is not an obstacle to freedom; it is the freedom. It separates us from ourselves just enough to allow us to act against the forces that would otherwise define us completely. But this only works if we recognize alienation for what it is. Emancipation, the book suggests, isn’t about curing alienation, but reconciling ourselves to it, and seeing it as the very condition that makes change possible.

That said, the book is not an easy read. The biggest challenge for me was the presentation. The core argument, that a society trying to transcend alienation will fail, and that alienation must be embraced as the basis of politics, is repeated again and again, often in dense, highly abstract and complicated sentences. While I understand the philosophical purpose behind this repetition, it can feel exhausting, especially for readers who are no familiar with the writing style and the complexity of fhe language.

Still, despite its difficulty, this book offered clarity. And perhaps that’s what I (and some of us) needed most: not reassurance that alienation will someday disappear, but permission to stop waiting for it to end.

Summary

Alienation Is the Hidden Engine Behind Human Freedom and Creativity

All creation begins with alienation. Alienation uproots us from our place in the world and from the roles and properties we are born into. It creates distance, and that distance is not a flaw. It is the starting point.

Every person enters life within a specific social situation. Powerful forces, such as culture, class, language, history, shape us from the very beginning. Yet none of us can be reduced entirely to these conditions. No matter how strong they are, they never fully determine who we become. Something always resists being pinned down.

Alienation can also be understood as a lack of complete self-identity. We are never perfectly identical with ourselves. And paradoxically, this inner split is what gives us freedom. Because I am not fully at one with myself, I cannot be entirely shaped or controlled by external forces. If I am already divided within, I can never be just one fixed thing, or simply what my circumstances demand me to be.

In political theory, especially following the ideas of Karl Marx, alienation is often treated as an enemy, something political struggle should eliminate. From many perspectives, alienation looks like a condition to be cured or overcome.

But this view misses a deeper truth. Alienation is not a problem, but a resource. It is the condition that allows us to step beyond our given situation. Without it, there would be no room for resistance, imagination, or transformation. Alienation is what makes transcendence possible.

Why Believing We Can Escape Alienation Makes Life More Violent, Not Happier

Alienation, on its own, is not what makes life unbearable. What makes it unbearable is the belief that we should be able to escape it, that there exists a past or a future where we could finally live free from its weight. Once we believe such a state is possible, alienation starts to feel like a personal failure rather than a basic condition of existence.

This belief reshapes how we experience life. Existence turns into a constant struggle toward an imagined happiness waiting on the other side of obstacles. Unhappiness is no longer understood as a normal part of being human, but as something to run away from. And in chasing this fantasy of an unalienated life, people often end up fleeing from life as it actually is. Everyday moments lose their value because they are measured against an impossible ideal.

The real danger comes from the conviction that we ought to be fully self-identical and that something has gone wrong when we fail to achieve this. People become dangerous not because they are alienated, but because they believe alienation is a defect they must eliminate. When escaping alienation is treated as a real and urgent goal, it can justify almost anything.

History shows how this logic scales up. The dream of a life without alienation has fueled bullying, authoritarian regimes, and even mass violence. If people believe freedom from alienation is achievable, they may be willing to use force to bring it into existence. The image of a purified, unalienated future becomes a moral excuse for cruelty. Accepting alienation as a permanent feature of subjectivity, by contrast, is one way to resist this slide into violence.

Crucially, accepting alienation does not mean accepting oppression. Oppression arises not from alienation itself, but from attempts to escape it. People try to outrun their inner division by attaching themselves to commodities, status, or tightly bounded communities. They exclude others in the hope that alienation can be pushed outward, placed onto someone else. But this strategy never works.

Those who own the most still want more. Those with the highest social status often feel the most insecure. Exclusionary communities are haunted by the constant fear of an outsider at the gate, someone who might undo the fragile sense of unity they rely on. On a personal level, the attempt to escape alienation produces bullying and cruelty. On a social level, it hardens into oppression, reification, and, at its extreme, genocide.

Recognizing alienation as a constitutive part of being human offers a different path. It does not promise escape or purity. Instead, it provides a way to push back against the damage caused by the endless, and destructive, attempt to overcome what cannot be overcome.

Why Identity Never Fully Explains Who We Are and Why That Gap Matters Politically

To understand how alienation works, we have to begin with a basic split: the gap between subjectivity and identity. Identity is made up of the social positions we occupy, like our job, family role, religion, political views, ethnicity, and countless other labels. These identities shape how others see us and how we move through the world. Yet no matter how strongly we identify with them, we are never fully identical to any of them. Something always fails to line up. That failure is what subjectivity is.

Subjectivity names the part of us that cannot be reduced to a role or label. I can reshape my identities, switch between them, or try to combine them, but none of them ever fully coincide with who I am. There is always a remainder that escapes description.

Symbolic identity plays a crucial role here. It provides ready-made markers that answer the question what am I? and, in doing so, cover over the more unsettling question who am I? This concealment is unavoidable. There is no subjectivity without some form of symbolic identity attached to it. We cannot opt out of identity altogether, because it is what allows us to relate to others and navigate social life at all.

At the same time, symbolic identity functions as a kind of refuge. It offers relief from the discomfort of subjectivity by promising stability and clarity. We lean on identity to escape the unease of not fully knowing who we are. Even though identity never actually delivers the security it promises, we keep returning to it. How we relate to our symbolic identity, whether we cling to it or hold it at a distance, shapes our political life.

There is, however, another possibility. We can confront our symbolic identities from the perspective of our alienated subjectivity. Doing so is already a political act. In fact, it is the most basic and important one, because it allows us to act beyond the narrow limits of the identities we inherit. When we question our identities rather than sink into them, we open space for political action that is not trapped inside a fixed symbolic framework.

By contrast, dissolving ourselves completely into an identity lets us avoid political questions altogether. Politics is reduced to defending who we already think we are.

Symbolic identity is so seductive precisely because it seems to offer a way out of alienation. The search for an identity that finally fits is an attempt to cure the discomfort of being divided within ourselves. Identity makes us appear whole and self-coincident, even though this wholeness is an illusion. While subjectivity is always slightly out of joint, identity smooths over this misalignment.

Recognizing that every identity ultimately fails does not leave us empty-handed. On the contrary, it keeps us grounded in the question of subjectivity itself. Because identity and subjectivity never fully align, we retain the freedom to question, resist, and move beyond the limits of any identity we are given.

Politics Begins with Alienation

When we ignore alienation, we inevitably misunderstand how politics actually works. Politics does not begin with party membership, ideological labels, or voting preferences. It begins much earlier, in the uneasy relationship each of us has with the social order we inhabit. We are political beings not because we choose to be, but because we never fully fit into the world as it is given to us.

To be political is not to be neutral. No subject can be neutral, because every subject is already distorted by language and meaning. Signification shapes us, marks us, and pulls us out of alignment with ourselves. This fundamental alienation is what makes us political in the first place. Politics grows out of this misfit between who we are and the structures we live within.

Without alienation, human existence would lose its singularity. If we were perfectly natural, fully at home in ourselves, we would simply blend into the social order. Alienation “denaturalizes” us. It pulls us out of the category of a mere human animal and gives our lives a unique, irreplaceable value. It is this distortion, not conformity, that makes a subject matter.

Problems arise when we misunderstand this excess. When we treat the subject’s strangeness or perversity as a natural defect, something that should be corrected or normalized, we put what is most valuable at risk. The attempt to smooth out this excess threatens the very singularity that defines subjectivity.

Alienation, then, is both the problem and the solution. It becomes a source of horror when we try to eliminate it, when we imagine a fully coherent, normalized subject as the goal. But modernity also opens up another possibility: learning to endure the distance we have from ourselves.

Reframing alienation as the foundation of ethical life allows us to resist the violence that comes from trying to erase difference, both in ourselves and in others.

My Favorite Bits

One doesn’t have to leave home to be an alien there. Just like everyone, I have an internal foreignness that interrupts the transmission of the community’s dictates to me.

Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation

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Author: Todd McGowan
Publication date: 9 April 2024
Number of pages: 206 pages

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