Happiness

Alain Badiou, A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474275552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Metafísica filosófica

'All philosophy is a metaphysics of happiness…or it's not worth an hour of trouble' claims Alain Badiou in this lively intervention into one of the most persistent themes in philosophy: what is happiness? And what do I need to do to be happy? The desire to be happy is one of our most universal goals and yet there doesn't seem to be any easy answers or formulas for achieving happiness. And the concept has become so commodified and corrupted to be almost unrecognizable as something worth pursuing. In light of this, should we just give up the aspiration to be happy altogether? Alain Badiou thinks not. While eschewing futile procedures for magically becoming 'happy', Badiou does passionately maintain that in order to be truly happy we need philosophy. And, bolder still, that a life lived philosophically is the happiest life of all!

1

Philosophy and the Desire of Philosophy

As many readers know – Rancière and his friends once gave this title to the wonderful journal they founded – Rimbaud uses a strange expression: ‘logical revolts’. Philosophy is something like this: a logical revolt. It is the combination of a desire for revolution – real happiness demanding that one rise up against the world as it is and against the dictatorship of established opinions – and of a rational exigency, the revolutionary drive being incapable of achieving alone the goals it sets itself.

Philosophical desire is indeed, very generally speaking, the desire for a revolution in thought and in existence – as much collective existence as personal existence – and with the aim of a real happiness, distinguished from that semblance of happiness which is satisfaction. True philosophy is not an abstract exercise. Since Plato, it has taken a stand against the injustice of the world. It rises up against the miserable state of the world and human life. But it does all this in a movement that always protects the rights of argumentation and which, in the end, proposes a new logic in the same movement by which it disengages the real of happiness from its semblance.

Mallarmé offers us this aphorism: ‘All thought emits a throw of the dice.’ It seems to me that this enigmatic formula applies equally to philosophy. The fundamental desire of philosophy is to think and realize the universal, among other things because a happiness that is not universal, which excludes the possibility of being shared by every other human animal capable of becoming its subject, is not a real happiness. But this desire is not the result of necessity. It exists in a movement that is always a wager, a risky engagement. In this engagement of thought, the part of chance remains indelible.

We thus draw from poetry the idea that there are four fundamental dimensions of desire that characterize philosophy, especially insofar as it is oriented towards the universality of happiness: the dimensions of revolt, logic, universality and risk.

And is this not the general formula of a desire for revolution? The revolutionary desires that the people rise up; that they do so in an effective and rational fashion, and not in barbarism and rage; that this uprising has an international, universal value, and is not limited by a national, racial or religious identity; finally, the revolutionary assumes the risk, the chance, the favourable circumstance, that often happens only once. Revolt, logic, universality, risk: these are the components of the desire for revolution; these are the components of the desire of philosophy.

But I think that the contemporary world, our world, sometimes called the ‘Western’ world, exerts a strong negative pressure on the four dimensions of such a desire.

First, our world is a world in part inappropriate or inappro-priable for revolt: not that there isn’t any, but because what the world teaches or pretends to teach is that it is, in its realized form, already a free world; or a world for which liberty is the organizing value; or, again, a world such that there is no place for wanting or hoping for better (in a radical sense). Therefore this world declares that it has arrived, with imperfections (that one makes an effort to correct), at the threshold of its internal, intimate liberation. And that, in sum, regarding happiness, it is that from which we can expect the best propositions and the best guarantees. But, as this world simultaneously standardizes and commercializes the stakes of this freedom, the freedom that it proposes is a freedom captive to that which it is destined by the network of the circulation of commodities. Thus it is not ultimately appropriate either to the idea of revolting to be free (an antique, ancient theme, the very signification of all revolt) since, in a certain fashion, freedom is proposed by the world itself; nor is it any more appropriate for what one could call a free use of this freedom, since freedom is coded or precoded in the infinite shimmer of commodity production and in what monetary abstraction institutes on that basis.

This is why this world has, in regard to revolts or the possibility of revolt, a disposition that one could call an insidiously oppressive disposition. Whence its proposition regarding happiness is already suspect of latent corruption.

Secondly, this world is inappropriate for logic, principally because it is submitted to the illogical dimension of communication. Communication and its material organization transmit images, statements, words and commentaries, whose assumed principle is incoherence. Communication, in order to establish the reign of its circulation, undoes, day after day, every bond and every principle in a sort of untenable and unbound juxtaposition of all the elements that it carries. One can also say that communication proposes to us in an instantaneous way a spectacle without memory; and that, from this point of view, what it more essentially undoes is a logic of time.

This is why we will maintain that our world is a world that exerts a strong pressure upon thought in its principle of consistency, and that, in a certain fashion, it instead proposes to thought a sort of imaginary dispersion. But one can show – we will do it, but in truth everyone knows it – that real happiness is of the order of concentration, of intensification, and cannot tolerate what Mallarmé called ‘these latitudes of indeterminate waves in which all reality dissolves’.¹

Thirdly, this world is inappropriate for the universal, for two correlative reasons. First, the true material form of its universality is monetary abstraction or the general equivalent. In money resides the only effective sign of everything that is universally circulated and exchanged universally. Next, because, as we know, this world is at the same time a specialized and fragmentary world, organized in the general logic of productive specializations and in the encyclopaedia of knowledges such that only a slim fragment is able to be mastered. Simultaneously proposing an abstract and monetary form of the universal, and burying under this form a specialized and fragmentary reality, this world exerts a strong pressure upon the very theme of the universal, in the sense that philosophy understands it. Suffice it to say that its ‘happiness’ is reserved for defined groups and competitive individuals, who won’t hesitate to defend it as an inherited privilege, against the mass of those who don’t benefit from it in any way.

And, finally, this world is inappropriate for the wager, for the risky decision, because it is a world where nobody any longer has the means to deliver their existence to chance. The world, such as it is, is a world in which the necessity to calculate security reigns supreme. Nothing is more striking in this regard than the fact that teaching, for example, is organized in such a way that the necessary prioritization of the calculation of professional security and its adjustment to the dispositions of the job market is increasingly important. And thus, in a certain way, it is very early taught that the figure of the risky decision must be revoked and suspended, to the profit of an evermore premature calculation of a security, which, moreover, proves itself uncertain in reality. Our world delivers life over to the meticulous and mandatory calculation of this doubtful security, and orders successive sequences of existence according to this calculation. But who doesn’t know that real happiness is incalculable?

I would therefore say that the philosophical desire for a revolution of existence, if we conceive of it as this knot of revolt, logic, universality and risk, encounters in the contemporary world four principal obstacles, four mandatory pressures, that are the reign of the commodity, the reign of communication, monetary universality and technical and productive specialization, all subjectively tied by the calculation of personal security.

Capitalism and commodities, techniques of anarchic communication, the limitless authority of monetary circulation, the obsession with security – such are the major obstacles that the contemporary world sets up in opposition to the deployment of the desire for revolution in all its forms. These obstacles aim to reduce the ineluctable idea of the true life, of happiness, to the semblance of a consumer satisfaction.

How can philosophy rise to this challenge? Can it do so? Is it capable of it?

In sketching a response, let us radically simplify the global philosophical situation. We distinguish three principal currents.

First, there is the phenomenological and hermeneutical current, a current which goes back to German Romanticism and whose principal contemporary figures, in the broad sense, are Heidegger and Gadamer. Second, there is the analytic current, which began with the Vienna Circle, with Wittgenstein and Carnap, and which today dominates all English and American university philosophy. And, third, there is the postmodern current which borrows from the two others, and which has undoubtedly been most active in France, inasmuch as we can link it to Jacques Derrida or Jean-François Lyotard. Of course, there are, at the heart of these three fundamental orientations, innumerable mixtures, intersections, knots and common parts, but I believe that these have the merit of sketching a sort of tolerable cartography of the state of things. What interests us here is how each current designates or identifies the desire of philosophy and its possible creative effects in the real world; therefore, what is for each current the definition, explicit or latent, of the true life, whose affect is real happiness.

The hermeneutic current assigns to philosophy the aim of deciphering the sense of existence and thought, and one can say that its central concept is that of interpretation. There are words, acts, configurations, historical destinies whose sense is obscure, latent, hidden, veiled, unrevealed. A method of interpretation will seek a clearing of this obscurity and attempt to bring out a primordial sense that is a figure of our destiny in its relation to the destiny of being itself. If the essential operator is that of interpretation, it is evident that it is a question of unveiling or of opening to an inaugurally inapparent sense. The fundamental opposition for hermeneutic philosophy is that between the closed and the open. The destiny of philosophy is to hold itself in the opening to latent sense and, consequently, to disencumber or disoccupy thought of its recession in the closure, latency and obscurity of its sense. Revolutionary desire, in thought, is that of a clearing. And real happiness is a subjective figure of the Open.

The analytic current assigns to philosophy the aim of a strict delimitation between statements that have sense, or which are provided with sense, and statements that don’t have it; between what one has the right to say and what is impossible to say; between what can make a consensus around a shared sense and what is incapable of it. Here the major instrument is not interpretation, but the grammatical and logical analysis of statements themselves: this is, moreover, why this current has largely had recourse to the heritage of logic, including its mathematical form. It is a question of a study of the laws and resources of language, the central concept this time being the rule. Drawing out the rule that authorizes the agreement about sense is in the end the essential concern of philosophical activity. We could say that the most important opposition here is not that between the closed and the open, but the opposition between the ruled and the unregulated, between what conforms to a recognized law and what, subtracted from every law as unidentifiable according to a rule, is necessarily illusion and discordance. The aim of philosophy, from this perspective, is therapeutic and critical. It is a question of exposing the illusions that divide us, the non-sense that fosters division and opposition. Revolutionary desire, in thought, is that of a democratic division of sense. And real happiness is the affect of democracy.

Finally, the postmodern current assigns to philosophy the aim of deconstructing the received truths of the modern world. It is not a question, this time, of bringing out a latent sense, nor of delimiting sense from non-sense. It is a question of showing that the very question of sense must be otherwise disposed, and, consequently, of deconstructing its anterior figure, of dissolving the great constructions that were – particularly in the nineteenth century and previously – the idea of the historical subject, the idea of progress, the idea of revolution, the idea of humanity; of showing that there is an irreducible plurality of registers and languages in thought as in action, a plurality that does not allow itself to be reabsorbed or unified in a totalizing problematic of sense. Centrally, the objective of postmodern thought is to deconstruct the idea of totality, through which philosophy itself is put in question, destabilized – in such a way that the postmodern current instead stimulates what we can call mixed or impure practices. It situates thought on the edges or on the margins, in the incisions. And, above all, the postmodern current will place the legacy of philosophical thought within a play that ties it to the destiny of art. Revolutionary desire is finally that of inventing new forms of life, and real happiness is nothing other than the jouissance of these forms.

What now interests us is to ask if there are traits common to these three dominant orientations. We ask if, in the way that they take up the challenge that the world opposes to the desire of philosophy, they follow, on such or such a point, parallel or comparable routes.

There is straightaway a very important negative trait. These three currents announce the end of metaphysics, and, therefore, in some way, the end of philosophy itself, at least in its classical sense or, as Heidegger would say, in its destinal sense. For Heidegger, there is a closure of the history of metaphysics. Philosophy is incapable of moving itself forward in the element of metaphysics. And this closure is also the closure of an entire epoch of the history of being and thought. One can also say that for the ideal of truth, which organizes classical philosophy under a traditional definition of a ‘search for the truth’, there is substituted the idea of a plurality of sense. I am profoundly convinced that the current pass of philosophy organizes itself around the decisive opposition between truth, the central category of classical philosophy (or, if you like, of metaphysics), and the question of sense, supposed to be the question that occurs in modernity just where the classical question of truth is closed.

For the hermeneutic current, truth is a category of metaphysics, which must be taken up in the direction of a destinal sense of being. The world is composed of an interlacing of interpretations that no transcendent being is able to oversee. The coming reign of the open delivers us from the abstract univocity that represents the true idea.

For the analytic current, it is clearly necessary to abandon the grand design of a ‘search for truth’. The sole point of departure is the configuration of statements. Sense itself is relative to the grammar of reference. When you want to delimit sense from non-sense, it is always necessary to refer to the universe of rules in which you are operating. There are consequently several senses or several regimes of sense, which are incomparable, and this is precisely what Wittgenstein named ‘language games’. The plurality of language games is expressly opposed to the idea of a transparent recollection under the sign of truth.

Lastly, the postmodern current deconstructs the traditional support of truths, or that for which there is truth, to which philosophy had traditionally given the name of subject. One can say that an essential axis of the postmodern current takes it upon itself to deconstruct, insofar as it is a product of metaphysics, the category of subject. There is therefore no subject for whom or for what, or on the basis of whom or of what, there would be truth. There are only occurrences, cases, disparate happenings, and there are genres of discourse, themselves heterogeneous, to gather these disparate cases.

Finally, hermeneutics, analytic, and postmodern philosophy organize a triple opposition between sense – open and plural, symbol of modernity – and the idea of univocal truth – held to be metaphysical and archaic, even ‘totalitarian’. This is the common negative trait.

Positively, now, there is a very striking common trait: the central importance of language. It is really through and within the tendencies of these three currents that what one could call the great linguistic turn of Western philosophy was produced. This central place of language, which, again, will be organized or disposed in a differentiated way in the three currents, is perhaps their most obvious common trait. For the hermeneutic current, of course, interpretation, interpretative activity, operates principally on the basis of speech acts, acts of signification, and language is, as the last resort, the very site where the question of the open is decided. It is here, and nowhere else, that is, ‘on the way to language’ – ‘language’ preceding understanding in the system of interpretation – that our disposition for thought is accomplished. For the analytic current, statements are the primary material, and, at the end of the day, philosophy is a sort of generalized grammar under the sign of the force of the rule; what exist are sentences, fragments, or types of discourse. Finally, postmodern deconstruction is a linguistic and scriptural action directed against the stability of metaphysical abstractions. The three currents thus place the question of language at the absolute centre of philosophy as such; regardless of whether it is a question of interpretation, of the rule or of deconstruction in the guise of the opposition between speech and writing, one has finally an assumption of language as what one could call the great historical transcendental of our time. We can say, consequently, in order to simplify things, that contemporary philosophy in its main tendencies sustains two axioms, such is its constitutive logic:

first axiom: the metaphysics of truth has become impossible;

second axiom: language is the crucial place of thought because it is there that the question of sense is decided.

These two axioms organize in their manner the opposition that is the essential pass of the philosophical question today: namely the relationship between sen...