The concept of happiness is a rather tainted and off-putting one for philosophers. It has, in contemporary society, been reduced to the simple answers of the self-help industry, consumerist trends and the polluted rhetoric of the politician. In this major intervention into both contemporary philosophy and how we live now, Alain Badiou attempts to rehabilitate the notion of 'being happy'. He claims, 'the category of happiness, such as it is promoted today, has largely been reduced to what I would call satisfaction' and satisfaction for Badiou simply isn't good enough. Risk, adventure, peril are what true happiness is all about. Putting oneself in the position to feel and experience things that go beyond simply feeling calm and at peace, deliberating disturbing our equilibrium and asking questions of ourselves is where true happiness lies.
Badiou is also asking a serious political question in his interrogation of happiness: what does it mean, socially and politically, to simply accept one's place in the world? It's each individual's political responsibility to disrupt our allotted places in the universe, up-end the social order, bring about something new.
This is a crucially important piece of lively, life-giving philosophy from one of the world's greatest living philosophers.
About the Author
Alain Badiou teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, France. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works.
Justin Clemens is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of many books on continental philosophy, including The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory (2003), Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (2013) and, with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014). He has edited many academic collections, including translating and editing Alain Badiou's Infinite Thought (Continuum 2003) with Oliver Feltham.
Industry Reviews
[The] book has a genuine intimacy to it ... [The] text displays his urgency to say more, to be clear, to keep going, to re-invent, and to express the "true life" through a generalised fidelity to his still ongoing project. * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *
In this lucid and provocative essay, one of our greatest living thinkers inquires after the meaning of happiness. Badiou argues that projects of emancipation and liberation are the surest means to an active, non-complacent contentment, although 'Happiness' is as much a spirited defense of classical philosophy as it is a call to action. We need Alain Badiou more than ever. * Tom Eyers, Associate Professor, Duquesne University, USA *
What defines true happiness has been a fundamental question of philosophy since at least Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Alain Badiou in this little book steals it back from the self-help industry and restores it to its metaphysical grandeur. * Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Comparative Literature and Society and Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University, USA *
