Since the 19th century, the concept of alienation has been central to critical diagnoses of the modern culture. It describes a sense of loss of meaning, of losing oneself in urban and industrial mass societies where interpersonal relationships, creativity and freedom erode.

Everything from the big city and mass culture via the mechanization of working life to the spread of bureaucracy has been described as alienating. The motif of alienation runs through modernist literature, from Knut Hamsun to Dag Solstad, and for a long time the concept played a key role in social critical thinking. But after the 1960s, this role has gradually weakened. Are we no longer alienated in our time?

The German-Swiss philosopher Rahel Jaeggi advocates reviving the concept of alienation and giving it new critical power in the face of today's society. She enters a critical dialogue with the ideological history of the critique of alienation, represented by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx, and shows how the critique is highly relevant for our own time. For Jaeggi, alienation is about a particular experience of loss of freedom, associated with our ability to pursue self-defined, meaningful goals. How can we regain this ability at a time when we experience distant and alien forces – complex information systems, financial markets, global supply chains, geopolitical great power games, ecological collapse – acting directly on our lives?

Rahel Jaeggi (b. 1967) is a Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is considered a continuation of critical theory in the tradition of the German Frankfurt School, with names such as Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas. Her book “Entfremdung” was recently published in Norwegian by the publisher H//O//F, translated by Regine Rørstad Torbjørnsen.

Host is Eirik Høyer Leivestad, philosopher, writer, translator, publishing editor H/O/F and researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Culture in Berlin