Alienation-Critique in Anti-colonial Thought

• In Event: Critical Theory and Historicity: (Re)imagining an Emancipated Future

Abstract

The concept of alienation has occupied a fraught place in the tradition we know as critical theory. While it was explicitly taken up by Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, others such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were skeptical of the humanist underpinnings of alienation-critique, which for them remained mired in Enlightenment metaphysics of the subject. After a long period of dormancy, the concept has been recently revived; scholars such as Rahel Jaeggi have sought to rescue the concept in ways that sever the idea from its roots in the Marxist tradition to remedy the problems of essentialism. This paper explores the place of the concept of alienation in critical theory today by examining the contested legacy of this idea and proposing a renewed theory that draws on engagement with alienation in the thought of anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Ali Shariati. We will explore how this alternative trajectory of the concept, which was grounded in a socio-historical approach, might provide fruitful resources to rethink critical theory and its categories today. If critical theory must be attuned to the historical conditions of its own articulation, then how might a critical theory of alienation grounded in the historical experiences of colonialism yield new insights for critical theory tout court? The paper will also shed light on the relationship of critical theory with humanism, Marxism, and the colonial context in which it articulated itself.

Author

• Arwa Awan, University of Chicago