If we had to identify the most controversial concept today, “happiness” would certainly figure among the main candidates for this role. On the one hand, “happiness” has represented one of the main ethical axes in the history of philosophy – from Greek _eudaimonia_ to Bentham’s “greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” Ethics was almost inextricably connected with the search for happiness, which was already in Greek synonymous for the “good life”. On the other hand, capitalism today, notwithstanding the (...) general apathy and despair due to the permanent crises of the capitalist system (climate change, pandemics, financial crises, etc.), still legitimises itself with, if not guarantees, at least a promise of happiness. Despite different historical contexts which again and again gave meaning to the concept of happiness, a common denominator can still be identified, which today, in the era of late capitalism, has even gained the status of a cornerstone of our hegemonic image of happiness. Happiness is a question of being. The evocation of happiness usually raises the question of whether one is happy or not, what it means to be happy, and how we become so. Happiness is thus inextricably connected to the question of identity: it is the sensual expression of our being, of what we supposedly are. In contrast to this “ontologisation of happiness”, the article tries to show not only that there is a _materialist concept of happiness_, but also that the latter bases itself on the primacy of the verb “having” instead of “being”. From a materialist perspective, happiness is something that we have or encounter, and not something that we are. Two references are crucial in this articulation: first, Benjamin’s formulation of happiness from his last essay “On the concept of history”, and second, the Freudian-Lacanian theory of repetition. (shrink)

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in which two influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito's theory, the article lays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racial difference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life. However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘flesh without body’, (...) Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach, in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. The second part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relations between primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derived an alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the fact that already in his early essay “The Logical Time” Lacan suggested that the “ontological form of anxiety” is the constitutive element in the process of the constitution of subjectivity, thus far there have only been rare attempts at inquiring into the relation between the affect of anxiety and Lacan’s critique of classical ontology, which this article will try to explore. Specifically, my argument will be that Lacanian anxiety, unlike, for instance, its Heideggerian variation, is inextricably connected with (...) the third dimension of being, which amounts to what Lacan in Seminar XI labelled “the unrealized,” i.e. to the peculiar structure of the unconscious, which distorts the classical ontological opposition between being and non-being. For Lacan, the unconscious, rather than referring simply to repressed unconscious content, is instead structured around a “pre-ontological” gap or “ontological negativity”. While anxiety notoriously “does not deceive,” it does not deceive only regarding the subject’s encounter with the real, but also – and most importantly – regarding the specific ontological structure of the unconscious, which includes the negativity as its own “material cause”. In this respect, anxiety might be regarded as an “ontological” or even objective material affect – yet not in a posthumanist sense of the affect of being/matter, but rather as the affective correlate or material signal for the fracture of being itself. In short, without this specific ontological gap/negativity, there would only be fear and frustration, not anxiety, which brings anxiety into the domain of metapsychology. (shrink)

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in which two influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito's theory, the article lays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racial difference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life. However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘flesh without body’, (...) Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach, in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. The second part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relations between primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derived an alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact. (shrink)

This paper first outlines the key traits of some critiques of Agamben’s theory of the subject. What they have in common is an emphasis on the limitations of his conception of political agency, which is based on the one hand on an apathetic and passive figure such as the Muselmann, and on the other, on Bartleby, the Scrivener, who epitomises Agamben’s notion of potentiality. Following this short review I then focus on Agamben’s recent article “K.,” in which he compares and (...) contrasts the two Kafkian figures of K. from The Trial and The Castle in the context of Roman law. Considering Benjamin’s distinction between a virtual and real state of exception, Josef K. and land surveyor K. adopt two different positions with regard to the form of law on which the structure of sovereignty is based. Josef K. represents bare life, which persists along the internal boundary that is constitutive of the form of law, while land surveyor K. is the subject that manages to erase this internal boundary and, thus, represents the only Agambenian figure that can effectively suspend and abolish the form of law. (shrink)

This article offers a critical examination of the contemporary imperative to ‘trust science’ from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It begins by putting contemporary scientific research...

This article examines Giorgio Agamben’s rejection of the religious term Holocaust as a name for the extermination of the Jewish people. Agamben rejects this term (and eventually prefers the...