Journal Article

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness

Zalloua, Zahi

2018

Overview

The \"happiness\" in \"'undeserved' happiness\" here should not be conflated with complacent satisfaction, with the attainment of a happy state—a view of happiness that psychoanalysis consistently questions—but should be understood instead as referring to modes of enjoyment, to unruly acts of libidinal gratification and self-cultivation incongruous with the capitalist maxim, happiness as the deserved fruits of social productivity. [...]Marcuse's formulation throws a wrench in the logic of reward and punishment that often informs the contemporary discourse of privilege, a logic that unwittingly transforms the critique of structural inequalities into a matter of individual conscience: you should be verbally punished for assuming your unearned privilege (visible in the act of calling out someone's privilege in the accusatory charge, \"your privilege is showing\"), and rewarded for confessing your given privilege (whether or not that confession leads to a deeper engagement with the structural problems at work). [...]I reread Marcuse's call for undeserved happiness along Žižekian lines as effecting a shift from privilege to fantasy: from the liberal imperative to \"check your privilege\" to the psychoanalytic injunction to \"check our fantasy.\" Because it is acknowledged as unearned, undeserved, the need for happiness can only be boldly affirmed, not \"objectively\" measured or assessed. According to ŽLžek's reading of this Lacanian notion: \"The act proper is the only one which re-structures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent's situation\" (2001, 85).

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: Happiness / Hegemony / Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981) / Laclau, Ernesto (1935-2014) / Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979) / Middle class / Multiculturalism & pluralism / Oppression / Politics / Psychoanalysis / Social exclusion / Society / Utopias