Alienated Lives: Having as a Dehumanizing Mode of Existence in Caryl Churchill's "Owners"
Alienated Lives: Having as a Dehumanizing Mode of Existence in Caryl Churchill's "Owners"

Summary/Abstract: Marx's 'radical humanism', as presented in Erich Fromm's prominent study, To Have or to Be, is reflected in his criticism of the capitalist system, not only in terms of its social and economic aspects, but also in terms of its devastating effects upon the human psyche. The capitalist system, Marx and Fromm maintain, produces an impoverished human character dominated by avarice and greed, which tends to alienate all the physical and intellectual senses and replace them by the single sense of having. Instead of the myriad of ways in which an individual can appropriate an object, or human reality in general - such as by the faculty of senses, by thinking, feeling, observing, acting or loving - only the utilitarian, materialistic form of appropriation is considered relevant by the dominant Western mindset. Such a reduction of meaningful human relations to the world is depicted in Caryl Churchill's Owners. Churchill's characters' obsessive need to own - both objects and other people - deprives their lives of deeper meaning and fulfilment, either driving them into despair, madness and suicide, or turning their vitality into destructiveness, compelling them to annihilate everything that cannot be possessed. The paper also focuses on another common feature of Fromm's study and Churchill's play, namely, their recourse to Buddhism, which for both authors represents a system of thought diametrically opposed to the spirit of capitalist society centred in property and egotism.

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