Alienation

This chapter traces alienation's conceptual trajectory through Marx's and Lacan's work, examining parallel movements from prominence to displacement in both thinkers. Marx's early writings, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, identified four estrangements under capitalism: from self, nature, products, and others. Though Marx later abandoned the term, alienation's logic continued structuring his critique of commodity fetishism and wage-labor. Lacan similarly engaged alienation intensively between 1964-1968 before dropping it, though its logic persisted. Early Lacan theorized imaginary alienation through the mirror stage—the subject constituted through external images. Later, he developed symbolic alienation: the subject represented by signifiers in the Other's field, producing an inevitable "forced choice" between being and meaning. This structural alienation, intensified through separation and the objet petit a, became Lacan's "pivotal point." Both thinkers reveal alienation not as recoverable loss but as constitutive condition—humanity estranged from itself through labor (Marx) and language (Lacan).