The phrase "a privation" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a state of being deprived of something essential, such as basic necessities or comforts.
Example: "The harsh winter brought about a privation that the villagers had never experienced before, forcing them to rely on each other for survival."
Alternatives: "a deprivation" or "a lack".
Hardly a privation, you might say.
It wasn't a privation, cutting back - just a 24-hour job.
Privacy was literally a privation, a closing off of the most important realm of human life: the public.
Heizer's "Double Negative" and Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" — one a privation, the other an accretion — form an essential pair in the canon of twentieth-century sculpture.
One consequence of Augustine's mature view of evil as "non-being", a privation of the good, is that evil eludes our understanding.
An embellished style can also be a lazy and imprecise style, taking us further away from the subject at hand rather than magnifying it; and linguistic profusion can be a mask for a privation of feeling or experience.
In any case, in the development of Nishida's thought, "being" is thought of in terms of the objectivity of determinate things, "relative nothingness" is understood as a mere privation or simple negation of being, and an enveloping sense of "nothingness" is provisionally associated with a kind of transcendental subjectivity of consciousness or the heart-mind.
Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation — an inability to secure the means of survival.
To be unemployed is a terrible privation, one that eats at the soul and spirit as well as the body.
Evil was claimed not to have any positive reality, but to be a mere "privation" or "lack" of being.
Avicenna explains the inferiority of the lowest type of efficient cause as follows: This type gives being to an effect that does not exist after absolute nonexistence but after a specific privation in matter.
