Jennifer Gaffney - Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding

Philosophical Projections

Series Editor: Andrew Benjamin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, Kingston University, UK, and Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought, Monash University, Australia

Philosophical Projections represents the future of modern European philosophy. The series seeks to innovate by grounding the future in the work of the present, opening up the philosophical and allowing it to renew itself, while interrogating the continuity of the philosophical after the critique of metaphysics.

Titles in the Series

Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition , Eran Dorfman

The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence , Richard A. Lee

Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy , Leslie Hill

The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? , Stephane Symons

On the Brink: Language, Time, History, and Politics , Werner Hamacher, edited by Jan Plug

Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding , Jennifer Gaffney

Refugees: Towards a Politics of Responsibility (forthcoming), Nathan Bell

Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Copyright 2020 by Jennifer Gaffney

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gaffney, Jennifer, 1987-author.

Title: Political loneliness : modern liberal subjects in hiding / Jennifer Gaffney.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. | Series: Philosophical projections | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020008579 (print) | LCCN 2020008580 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786606945 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781786606952 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Alienation (Philosophy) | Communities. | Political sciencePhilosophy. | Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975.

Classification: LCC B808.2 .G34 2020 (print) | LCC B808.2 (ebook) | DDC 320.01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008579

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008580

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Never before have we been so interconnected, so accessible to one another. The global networks of technology and commerce that order our daily lives have made even the furthest corners of the earth reachable in a single Skype call. They have made possible the exchange of commodities across every part of the world, and they have granted to anyone with a smartphone and a social media account access to the most important political and cultural movements taking place across the globe. Never before have we been able so vigilantly to keep track of one another, to communicate so quickly our ideas and opinions, and to share so publically the details of our private lives. And yet, while these things no doubt mark our age as one of heightened togetherness, it is the provocation of this work that we have never before been so lonely. This paradoxthat we are more extremely together and more extremely apart than ever beforemakes the loneliness of the current age especially peculiar. The task of the present inquiry is to develop a framework for interpreting this peculiar lonelinessor the fact that in an era of hyperbolic interconnectedness, there is nevertheless a widespread sense that we belong nowhere, that we have lost our nearness to others, and that we are neither supported by nor responsible for the communities in which we find ourselves.

Philosophical inquiry into the peculiar loneliness of the current age is by no means new. Martin Heidegger, for instance, draws attention to it in his 1951 essay The Thing when he says:

All distances in time and space are shrinking . Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. He now receives instant information by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all... the peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication.... Yet, the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness... despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent.

We see, then, that the peculiar loneliness of the current age and the problematic it creates regarding the possibilities for authentic communal life is well-trodden territory in twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental thought. Yet, as central as this problematic has been, its political stakes remain underdeveloped. Taking my point of departure from these critiques of the instrumental rationality of the modern age, it is the goal of the present inquiry to develop the peculiar loneliness of the current age in a political register. Central to this work is the claim that neoliberal subjectivity has rendered us lonely in ways that have yet to be fully appreciated but that are nevertheless decisive for thinking the possibilities for authentic communal life today. In this, my aim is to frame the problem of loneliness in terms of the political alienation of modern life, a form of alienation that I will suggest owes its existence to the political structures that we have inherited from the liberal tradition and the forms of subjectivity that these structures produce.

Whereas much has been said about the existential, psychoanalytic, and social dimensions of loneliness, scholarly inquiry into the political significance of this problem has only recently begun to take shape. Jill Stauffer has carved out a space for thinking the problem of loneliness politically in her recent work Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard . Stauffer conceives of loneliness as a symptom of the unwillingness, often on the part of just-minded people, to listen to those who have suffered injustice. She thus defines loneliness as

the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as a member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over ones life possibilities. It is a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed to themon their own terms.