alienation

noun

1. (uncountable, usually)The act of alienating.

   “The alienation of that viewing demographic is a poor business decision.”

   “That the mode of alienating their lands, the main source of discontent and war, should be so defined and regulated as to obviate imposition and as far as may be practicable controversy concerning the reality and extent of the alienations which are made.”

   “Wearing an Audie Murphy black jacket, playing a Chuck Berry guitar, and performing his electrified alienation with passionate indifference, Dylan assassinated the audience.”

2. (uncountable, usually)The state of being alienated.

   “His alienation from his family means he has nowhere to go at Christmas.”

   “I refer to the state of our divisions and alienations of spirit on account of religion.”

   “As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the terrain where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself. In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals from him is in reality separating him from his own time.”

3. (uncountable, usually)Emotional isolation or dissociation; a feeling of disconnection or of being an outsider.

   “My alienation was so complete back then that I was withdrawn and distant from everyone I knew.”

   “But these domestic alienations are not confined to those who once moved in the higher orders of society--the monthly registers announce almost as many divorces as marriages, and the facility of separation has rendered the one little more than a licentious compact, which the other is considered as a means of dissolving.”

   “To watch it even once is to be distracted, but in an evocative and resonant manner--to be drawn away from Benning's travels and alienations and reminded of one's own.”

4. (uncountable, usually)Verfremdungseffekt.
5. (uncountable, usually)The transfer of property to another person.

   “The most usual and universal method of acquiring a title to real estates is that of alienation, conveyance, or purchase in its limited sense: under which may be comprized any method wherein estates are voluntarily resigned by one man, and accepted by another; whether that be effected by sale, gift, marriage settlement, devise, or other transmission of property by the mutual consent of the parties.”

6. (Marxism, uncountable, usually)The estrangement of people from aspects of their human nature as a consequence of the division of labour and living in a society of stratified social classes.