If we would have to identify the most controversial concept today, “happiness” would certainly figure among the main candidates for this role. On the one hand, “happiness” 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 the synonymous for the “good life”. On the other hand, capitalism today, notwithstanding the general apathy and despair due to permanent crises of capitalist system (climate change, pandemics, financial crisis etc.), still legitimises itself with, if not guarantee, at least promise of happiness. Despite different historical contexts which again and again gave meaning to the concept of happiness, there can still be identified a common denominator, which has today, in the era of late capitalism, 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 whether one is happy or not, what does it mean to be happy and how do 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 talk will try 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 materialist perspective, happiness is something that we have or we 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, Freudian-Lacanian theory of repetition.

Nedoh is a Research Associate of the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia