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appropriating of my life. We find sed to be’, and instead, regard
here the conceptual core of the conflict of our free will. Our
alienation as a ‘relation of rela- ‘essence’ then is, so to speak,
tionlessness’, namely, a relation not something determined as
in itself but also described as a nature or work, or sociality, or
defective, disturbed relation to the being embedded into and a
that relation —whether it be the product of history. Our essence
disturbed bond to externalities is our ability to execute what we
or to the self. The life practices will. Conversely, what we want
in an alienated state are dis- to examine here are the condi-
rupted in the sense that my abil- tions under which we live with
ities of appropriation, as others and with ourselves, and
described above, are arrested the possibilities of shaping
through some force. Once these conditions. In order to
again, originally, the concept of avoid essentialism, we turn to
alienation—as Jaeggi diag- analytically oriented debates
noses it, a product of modernity concerning the nature of per-
through and through—presup- sonhood and freedom, which
poses, a conception of the lead to the consideration of
human essence. In Marx under- human capacities.
standing, we have been di-
vorced from our natural
life-activity through alienated
labour, and for Rousseau, man
is violently disconnected from
his belonging to nature and put
in chains. This is how we first
considered alienation: If some-
thing is alienated from some-
thing, it must be distanced from
something else that has been
previously united with it, with its
‘true’ nature or essence. How-
ever, we can turn our attention
away from the different interpre-
tations of what we are suppo-