Embracing Alienation

McGowan opens with humour: nobody has ever said to their friends, «let's get alienated»; alienation seems to have nothing in common with pleasures like eating pizza, playing tennis or falling in love, and is seen as something to avoid. The left tradition descending from Marx also conceives political action as a struggle against alienation. The author's claim is radical: this negative view misses alienation's emancipatory character.

The central thesis is stated clearly: alienation is not a departure from a «true self» we once had and then lost. It is primary — we are alienated from the moment we emerge as subjects until we die, and its only «cure» is death. It is precisely this inner distance — our failure to coincide with ourselves — that frees us from the conditions of our birth and from biological and social determination. His examples: someone raised as an ardent capitalist in the Midwest can become a Marxist; someone pressured to «be a man» can become feminine.

McGowan grounds the idea in Freud's unconscious. The unconscious drives us to act against our own interests: someone afraid of heart disease eats doughnuts instead of broccoli, someone who wants a healthy relationship chooses a partner who brings only pain. We usually see this as an absence of freedom; the author argues the opposite — it is exactly because the unconscious escapes conscious control that it breaks the chain of determination and opens an alternative possibility. «We are free because we are divided within ourselves.»

The most memorable part of the introduction is the example of names. No child chooses its own name; a name is an «act of violence» imposed by parents or other adults, loading the child with a destiny. In a footnote McGowan recounts how his mother claimed to have let him «choose» his name by drawing slips of paper from a hat — and shows that even this does not abolish alienation, since the adults wrote the slips. The very sentence «My name is Todd» betrays the gap between speaker and name.

At the start of Chapter 1 the author sets out the key distinction between subject and identity: identity is made of social positions — job, family status, religion, politics, ethnicity — while the subject never fully coincides with any of them. That «failure» is subjectivity itself. From here opens a critique of identity politics and of consumer culture's offer of «identities for sale».

McGowan's ideas are genuinely refreshing and offer a strong philosophical reply to the self-help industry's promise of finding your «real self». But the text is dense with Hegel, Lacan, Sartre and Fanon and written in academic language that may tire a non-specialist.

• Abstract ideas are explained through everyday examples (naming, eating doughnuts, clashing with the boss)
• Extensive footnotes engage in dialogue with Hegel, Sartre, Žižek and Russell
• The argument advances step by step, applied in each chapter to a new domain (modernity, capitalism, the public)