Happiness

ISBN-13: 9781474275538 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 136 str.

France) Alain Badiou (École Normale Supérieure;A. J. Bartlett;Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne)

Opis

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.

Recenzje

[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

Spis treści

Acknowledgements Note on the Text/Translation Translator's Introduction: Happiness is Revolting by A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens Introduction: The Metaphysics of Real HappinessI: Philosophy and the Desire of PhilosophyII: Philosophy and Antiphilosophy put to the test of happinessIII: To be happy, must we change the world?IV: Destination and Affects of PhilosophyConclusionIndex

O autorze

Alain Badiou is a world-renowned French philosopher, formerly chair of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has authored multiple major works of philosophy, many of which have been published in English by Bloomsbury, including Being and Event (2005), Logics of Worlds (2009), and The Immanence of Truths (forthcoming, 2021). 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.