Alienation, Marx and the Logic of Estrangement - Ray Brassier

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:01

  Personally, I'm happy to accept this, you know, the Marxist account of alienation and the distinction between the two levels. I think that's really indispensable. And really, I think, you know, the attempt to give a positive valence to the notion of alienation in the context of the debates we've had about freedom…

• 00:08:35

  And because history... The historicity of social existence entailed that there's going to be... That the size of nature, the kinds of determinations that enter into being human are going to be undergo only... Undergo constant transformation through time. And this is tied to the notion of universalism, I guess. That…

• 00:13:35

  I mean I've been asking you for a number of years. And it's... How do you conceive the notion of the subject? The subjectivity? How... If we understand... If we come from this generic type of understanding then how it can subjectify it? How can we produce a subject out of this generic understanding of the human…

• 00:18:29

  Understanding... In a way... A proper diagnosis of the mystification... That leads us to misrecognize... Our own... Self-relation and take it to be the self-relation of an object... Is... You know the first step... The indispensable preliminary... Towards the recovery... Or the reassertion... Of this... Subjective…

• 00:25:21

  In this regard, so I think that, you know, constitutive of rationality are tied to processes, to processes that unfold in space and time. That's, so that's in a way that one part of the answer to the question is to say that... The link between rationality and negativity is that rationality can be understood in terms…

• 00:30:49

  Both terms of the relationship are constantly undergoing transformation. So, question? So... Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this is the last one. You're saying that... That the process from I to we... Is a cognitive process. So I'm wondering... In kind of... Discourse around... Communization and self-abolition... Which in some…

• 00:34:47

  So to be able to fuse together impersonality, personality, and sociality. And that means that what needs to be abolished is the self as the, you know, the kind of, whatever, the ideological, whatever kind of ideological misrecognition prevents you from achieving, you know, the transition from I to we and back again…

• 00:44:52

  of our current kind of you know epistemic limitations thanks for being with us and unfortunately well, unfortunately, fortunately we have to keep going with this evening yeah, thanks so much Ray really, really appreciate it look, I'm sorry about the the headshot sorry about the cutouts but anyway thanks, thanks again…