Rahel Jaeggi

Stanowisko

Jaeggi revived the concept of alienation, which had fallen out of favour because it seemed to presuppose a fixed human nature or “true self” from which we are estranged. She reconstructs it without such essentialism: alienation is a “relation of relationlessness”, a deficient relation to oneself and the world in which one cannot make one’s own actions, roles and desires one’s own. “Kritik von Lebensformen” challenges the liberal view that ways of life are private matters beyond rational dispute. Forms of life – bundles of practices such as the family or the market – are attempts to solve problems, and they can be criticised when they fail at the problems they themselves face; drawing on Hegel and Dewey, she calls this a form of immanent critique that can set off learning processes. Her conversation with Nancy Fraser treats capitalism as an institutionalised social order rather than only an economy, and “Fortschritt und Regression” asks how social progress can be told from regression without assuming a fixed goal of history.

Życie i kontekst

Rahel Jaeggi (born 1966 in Bern) is the daughter of the Swiss sociologist and writer Urs Jaeggi and the psychoanalyst Eva Jaeggi. She studied philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, writing her master’s thesis on Hannah Arendt, and took her doctorate in Frankfurt in 2002 under Axel Honneth, whose assistant she was for many years; she qualified as a professor there in 2009. From 2009 she was professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and from 2018 she directed its Center for Humanities and Social Change. In 2025 the New School for Social Research in New York announced that she would join its philosophy department from autumn 2026.

Główne dzieła

• Alienation (2005)
• Critique of Forms of Life (2014)
• Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (with Nancy Fraser, 2018)
• Progress and Regression (2023)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Przyspieszenie, rezonans i dobre życie”