Colebrook - Narrative Happiness and the Meaning of Life

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND THE MEANING OF LIFEClaire ColebrookNew Formations; Winter 2007/2008; 63; ProQuest Direct Completepg. 82

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Claire Colebrook

But that complete happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following

consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all beings blessed and happy;

but what sort of actions must we assign to them? ... If we were to run through them all,

the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still everyone

supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep

like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production,

what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in

blessedness, must be contemplative, therefore that which is most akin to this must be most

of the nature of happiness. 1

ANIMAL HAPPINESS, HUMAN HAPPINESS AND INHUMAN JOY

We all know, from Nietzsche, about animal happiness. Think of the cow grazing in the field, no

thought of today, no thought of tomorrow. 2 This is a life of the pure present, unmediated by

the desire and disease of consciousness. Human happiness, by contrast, is tied inextricably to narrative, to a sense of one's life as a whole and to the subordination of pleasure and animality

to self-definition. Happiness, from Aristotle's definition of the human as a being who recognises

his potential to give form to himself, to contemporary self-help manuals that stress the creation

of goals and ongoing projects, has always been tied to meaning. While animal happiness is self

present and within itself, human happiness is achieved only by relating any now or present to

the sense of one's ongoing and self-maintaining life. Happiness is the meaning oflife, because

only a life lived with meaning can be happy; and only a happy life - a life where pleasures are

not simply lived but are lived as one's own and as self-defining- can be meaningful.

There is a remarkable consensus throughout the philosophical, psychological and literary

tradition that human happiness is meaningful, and that meaning- or the capacity of a human

life to perceive the world in ordered form - is what allows the organism to maintain itself. The clearest distinction between the animal and the human, along with its sophisticated complication,

is offered by Henri Bergson. Animal instinct acts and maintains itself according to the being it is

given; instinct maximises efficiency, so that the organism can perpetuate its present condition.

Human intelligence, by contrast, creates and invents a form of being, such as technology, which

requires more expenditure of energy and will also alter just what human being is. The animal

and the human both emerge from the tendency towards movement undertaken in order to

maintain life, but they diverge in their modes of movement: the animal remaining within its

own organism's potential, the human giving itself new potentiaJ.3 On the one hand, Bergson's

analysis reinforces the binary between human happiness achieved through self-creation and

animal quiescence achieved through consumption. On the other hand, by pointing to the

82 NEW FORMATIONS


imbrication of the animal and the human, Bergson also points out that our usual image of the

human as achieving happiness through order and meaning is still all too close to the animal's

instinctive efficiency. Bergson therefore indicates another possibility, beyond the human's

proximity to the energy-conserving animal: joy.4 Nietzsche, too, imagined a joy beyond our

organic and life-preserving being. His Untimely Meditations posited initial animal stupidity as an

illusory beatitude; truly joyful becoming is achieved neither by returning to a state before time

and meaning, nor by mastering the meaning of one's life through monumental and meticulous

narration. Instead there can only be a joyfulness in active forgetting. Nietzsche's imagined happy

cow was already an all too human myth of a life imagined as beyond all striving, liberated from

the burdens of a human life subjected to promise, norms and commitments. Joy for Nietzsche

is active forgetting: not a condition of torpor but the creation of means that will allow us to

lose or remain unfaithful to ourselves. For Bergson joy is also different from a return to a state

of animal sympathy with the world, and is instead a passage beyond the human intellect of

utility and quantified pleasure, to an intuition of the movements and sympathies that are not

our own. This notion of joy rejects the animaVhuman dialectic, rejects the idea that the human

abandons happy animal self-presence and sacrifices pleasure for the sake of a meaningful and

self-ordering life. It is a notion best expressed not by the philosophical proposition presenting what is, but by a literary voice which presents what might be. Placing a voice, point of view or

image within a literary text effects an immediate detachment from a subject of enunciation and

from sincerity.

From Spinoza, through Nietzsche to Deleuze (and via a Spinozist literary tradition

that includes Coleridge and Melville) we can set joy both against the (putative or mythic)

immediacy of animal happiness and the ongoing self-maintenance and homeostasis of human

happiness. Literature is one way, I will argue, that the human animal can take its technologies

of meaning- in the form of narration and images - and create a 'line of flight'. Here, the

very technology of language, sense and meaningful time can create a human perception of

animal innocence that disrupts the self-presence of the human. Literature, when subjected

to a 'higher deterritorialisation'5- extended beyond those narrative techniques that allow for

continuity and self-recognition- is joyful rather than happy. It does not maintain the human

in its self-creating wholeness, but uses those machines of self-creation, such as language,

narrative form, style and point of view, for the sake of 'time in its pure state' .6 Whereas

organic time is the time taken by this or that body to fulfil its life and go through time,

literature gives us an image of time in its pure state through relations and differences that

are not the differences of some underlying being. Herman Melville's Billy Budd, for example,

presents Billy as an image of self-contained, self-present innocence liberated from all sense

of interpretation and meaningful social relations - a human who is 'becoming-animal' in

Deleuze and Guattari's sense. Billy presents 'a' life that is not defined through the social

relations of recognition and action. 7 Indeed, Billy's presence has a primarily destructive

and counter-semantic effect, for it is the perception of Billy as a complete and self-sufficient being that disturbs the moral relations of ship-board life. Melville's presentation of Billy

challenges the dominant ideal of happiness as meaningful and self-maintaining, with a

joy that is radically inhuman. It is as though Melville is staging the opposition between

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 83


joy and happiness, between an animal-like innocence on the one hand, and a striving for

self-mastery on the other. The narrative of Billy Budd is driven by the allure of the moral

wholeness of Billy and its directly aesthetic appeal, alongside a resistance to that wholeness

which acts as an accusation or admonishment of the self. Claggart - who will ultimately

engineer Billy's wordly destruction- is drawn to the visual pleasure of Billy as a morally

self-sufficient image:

If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health, and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy

Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had

in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent. To

him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows,

that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and

dancing in his yellow curls made him pre-eminently the Handsome Sailor. One person

excepted, the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of

adequately apprehending the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight

but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed

that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence - to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an

aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain

would have shared it, but he despaired of it.

With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart's, surcharged with energy as

such natures almost invariable are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the

scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.8* Far from feeling a joy at the apprehension of this other being, who is the very expression

of the unself-conscious life of the world, Claggart destroys Billy because the beauty of his

moral unity acts as a challenge to Claggart's all too human and partial perspective. It is the

tragedy of this narrative - the destruction of Billy - that adds a complexity to the tradition of

joy and happiness. On the one hand, following the tradition that runs from Kant to Freud,

we can say that Billy, like the infant or 'his majesty the baby',9 presents an alluring image of

unworldly moral wholeness. The image is desirable, if we can perceive the very joy of life

beyond our own worldly and embodied interests. But the image is also painful, humiliating

or 'chastening' if, like Claggart, we remain in a position of self-interest. Our finitude and

selfishness is painfully intensified. The aesthetic beauty of Billy Budd is also a moral pain;

it challenges our all too human, worldly and located finitude. One can perceive the beauty

of such a moral image only if we recognise or perceive a joy that flows through a life that is

irreducible to one's own personal good.

If animal happiness is strictly unrepresentable and unthinkable- the thought of a being that

simply is with no sense of a world - then joy is no less inhuman. joy is that capacity to expand

beyond the goods and evils that affect one's finite life; it is the recognition of the force of life

as eternal, as above and beyond any of its perceived points. joy is the power to affirm and live

life, rather than judge life. joy is freedom from the position of the self in its relation to the

84 NEW FORMATIONS


world. Joy is not animal happiness: the mere presence to itself of non-self-consciousness. Joy,

to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, is not being, or a finite and bounded sense of what

is, but a becoming-animal. 10 Beyond the simple opposition between animal and human, between

pleasure lived in the here and now, and happiness lived according to a narrative life of purpose

and norms, becoming-animal is an essentially literary phenomenon. Whereas practical or life

oriented perception is bound to the organism, and therefore to self-maintenance, literature is

the creation of points of view beyond the body or present. But this is not to say that literature

is a form of sympathy, in which we place ourselves in the point of view of the other, for once we

have created a literary voice or perception it is no longer grounded in a feeling and moving

body. There is an Idea ofliterature, therefore, that goes beyond narrative identity and character

and allows us to think of 'a' life or perception that is not folded around an organism's striving

for self-maintenance, and it is to this Spinozist literary tradition that I will appeal in this essay.

Before doing so, I would like to mark a distinction between two modes of Spinozism. The first

possibility is offered in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who argue that one

should overcome all the constituted powers of the world in order to return to humanity as a

constituting power: 'homo homo humanity squared' or the saintly love of Francis of Assisi. 11 The

second possibility, and one which I will pursue, regards the turn to the imagination beyond

constituted bodies as a liberation from the generic human. We do not arrive at humanity in

general, or a transcendental power, but multiple powers of imagining, a multiplicity of bodies

that shatters the notion of a general sympathy or 'a' point of view. 12 Here, we consider not what

the animal is from the point of view of human sense and reason, but accept the challenge of

thinking life beyond notions of self, propriety and humanity.

Kant argued that it was the idea of the human personality- the idea of a being who could act

without the motivation of pleasure- that elevated us beyond happiness. 13 If the idea of the human

functions as the ideal of a distance from animality, then the idea of the animal- becoming-animal

or imagining a world beyond the human - has often been proffered as a utopian point beyond

both the human intellect and animal instinct. When Coleridge's ancient mariner narrates how,

after having acted in opposition to the force of life by killing an albatross, he perceives the sea

creatures or water-snakes and 'blessed them unaware,' he describes a redemptive point at which

the self no longer judges life but becomes one with the flow of life. This is a freedom from the

moralising separation of consciousness. Similarly, in Melville's Moby Dick, Ahab's pursuit of the

whale is not the pursuit of an object for some desired end that would give a sense to life; the

pursuit of the whale is an overcoming of the self to become with life as a univocal whole. This

is a life with no end other than itself, a life joyfully liberated from the bounds of the self and

any personal ends that selves might create that are at odds with life.

The Spinozist/Nietzschean/Deleuzean tradition of joy, and its expression in Romanticism,

forms one of the key resistances to human happiness. But we need to be careful of creating

a simple binary between a human happiness of the bounded, self-maintaining organism and

its ongoing meaningful life on the one hand, and an impersonal, eternally returning selfless

joy on the other. The happiness industry today manages to appeal at one and the same time

to the traditional Aristotelian model of a life that is happy only if it is lived as a well-formed

and self-maintaining narrative whole, and to the counter tradition that happiness is at odds

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND TilE MEANING OF LIFE 85


with self-consciousness and meaning. It is therefore quite common to find mini manuals to

happiness in lifestyle magazines that stress 'me' time, self-congratulation, and developing a

sense of one's worth, 14 alongside spiritualist releases from such self-focussed hedonism - the

prime example of which would be the Dalai Lama's best-selling book on happiness. 15 What I

will argue in this paper is that we need to see the ways in which the problem of the human has

always been a problem of the relation between happiness and joy: the relation between a life

as a well-formed and bounded whole and a broader life that exceeds and transcends any single

organism. The Deleuzean/Spinozist/Nietzschean tradition of joy often appears to be nothing

more than the Romanticist 'other' of human happiness, a vitalism asserted in opposition to

Aristotelian good sense. However, the value of Deleuze's philosophy is that it brings a certain

complicity between radical philosophy and unthinking vitalism to the fore, and then offers a

critique of that simple vitalism. Deleuze's philosophy, like so many transcendentalisms, does set

itself against the human self of good sense, narrative continuity and practical self-maintenance.

But it does more than that; and we need to see the ways in which the vitalist anti-capitalism of

one flowing life has always maintained itself alongside the proto-bourgeois self of prudence,

self-management and recognition. Only then can we recognise another vitalism of forces that do

not flow freely in pure act - a radically passive vitalism that recognises a life that does not act.

Joy, here, would not be a return to the proper life belied by the particular body, but a capacity

to intuit the pulses of life that exceed the striving of bodies.

Far from seeing vitalism as intrinsically radical and anti-humanist, a cursory glance at the

contemporary literature on happiness discloses the easy cohabitation of an industry of self-help and self-definition with a commitment to liberation from ossified norms. Indeed, one becomes

a happy self today, not by submitting to codes of honour that would allow one to be perceived

as 'great-souled' (Aristotle), nor by imaging one's self as a personality elevated above pleasure

(Kant), but by overcoming stereotypes, family expectations and social pressures in order to find

one's inner and singular self. The tradition of American transcendentalism that imagines a self

freed from consciousness of self- a self with no external imposed or mediated end -lies at the

heart of American popular culture and its contemporary frenzied appeal for human happiness.

It is possible to see the contemporary form of happiness as liberation from imposed norms as

a loss or reversal of the traditional notion of happiness as self-formation. The liberating power

of the American puritan tradition, the power to experience the world anew with the virgin

glance of the child, animal or even inanimate object lies at the origin of the contemporary

right to be happy. The self in its pure state is un-self-consciously happy. This vital and vitalist

joy, I would argue, could be contrasted with the literary and philosophical traditions that stress

a specifically human happiness. For human happiness, we are told, is never mere life; it is a

life lived with meaning. It is a chosen or ordered life. Joy, by contrast, is not a life that orders

itself towards some end or higher human life; joy is the very becoming of life freed from any

organising image.

In the paragraphs that follow I want to make two claims. First, both the tradition of joy and

the tradition of happiness rely on an aesthetic commitment to a sense of life as a self-effective

whole, a unity that is an end in itself. Whereas the happiness tradition takes this self-ordering end

or whole to be the personal human life, the tradition of joy is critical of personal unity, but does

86 NEW FORMATIONS


so by appealing to an eternal whole of'life' as impersonal immanence and self-effecting cause.

Both traditions, therefore, rely on an original investment in a figure of complex organicism. This

is an originally moral image of a power or becoming that is nothing other than itself, purely

effective and positive, without loss, separation or the imposition of any external or arbitrary

end. This brings me to my second point, which concerns the relation between the politics of

art and pleasure. Put very crudely, we might say that a dominant stream of ideology theory

would argue that there are certain political interests or judgments, which are then rendered

consumable, palatable or pleasurable in art or culture. Even a text as sophisticated as Fredric

Jameson's The Political Unconscious, for example, argues that narrative allows us to live or make

sense of intolerable social conflicts. 16 We would then say that art and culture render political

relations into pleasurable wholes, in which case narrative and its resolution would be the vehicle

for otherwise disordered or incoherent political content. I want to argue the opposite. The

pleasure of wholeness, the pleasure of narrative resolution, is not an ideological mask but is

directly political. The original aesthetic commitment to the pleasure of unity, resolution or life

as a meaningful whole is already a political pleasure. It is a commitment to a life that has no

end other than itself, a life that is a self-effecting power. We can see this commitment in

its complex forms in the literary traditions of joy and happiness, which I will examine below.

But in its simplest form we can see this aesthetic commitment in the contemporary popular

culture of happiness, a culture in which therapy, television talk shows, soap operas and the cult

of celebrity constantly reproduce the image of the well-ordered self. This is a culture in which

self-devolving narratives have become the very life-blood of the political arena, a culture which

grants a normative value to a life that is at one with its own becoming. From the simple notions

of celebrity, in which a self becomes public and is then charted according to the style and life

choices she makes - including the 'Big Brother' phenomena of celebrities whose only claim

to fame is that they are being viewed - to the more complex popularisation of psychology, in

which selves can now re-make and master themselves by buying the appropriate guidance, life

is always understood as the life of a bounded and self-mastering organism. There is a moral

image of the self which is also and at the same time a moral image of the world: life gives form

to and masters itself.

CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD

Aristotle was already drawing on tradition and received wisdom when he began his ethics from

the assumption that we could call no man happy until he is dead. 17 Human happiness, in contrast

to mere animal pleasure, has - from Greek ethics onward - always referred to life as a whole.

Such a life is a narrative life, where the end drives and orders each element, and where the time

of the self is not a mere series of pleasures: not a time of mere 'nows' with no relation to each

other or a grander whole. Narrative time is a time aware of itself, a time bounded by death,

by the sense of an end or the limit of the self. Happiness requires a uniquely moral relation

among time, the self and narrative. Human life is cultural or political, according to Aristotle,

not just because it can act to achieve and create ends, but because it creates itself, and can do

so according to some sense of life as a whole. Moral virtues- those that define happiness- are



not developments of given natural potentials but are produced through acts. 18 The moral self

is not a natural development, working on the merely given, but a whole character or 'ethos'

produced through action. 19 At its highest level this 'whole' would be communal or political. 20 If

each mode of life has its function or ergon, then human life is uniquely blessed by the power to

give an end to itself that is realised through its own activity: eudaimonia is an 'activity of the soul

in accord with virtue'.21 Virtue, here, is not a moral norm but an 'excellence' or flourishing; to

act according to the soul's virtue is to maximise its potentiality, and the human soul's potential

is rational22 - a capacity to intuit proper and essential ends. According to Sarah Broadie we

should not only see Aristotle as arguing that every being has an end towards which it strives,

but that ethics is the understanding of why certain ends are worthy. There is a difference then

between ethics and a merely functional argument:

... apart from the desirability of being able to make sense of oneself to others (a fundamental

dimension of the good life for human beings who, if Aristotle is right, are essentially social,

and the formal nature of whose good is currently being spelt out by him in terms of hierarchies

within society), there is the further question of whether we can or ought to be satisfied with

an objective which to us is ultimate, but whose value we cannot begin to understand. For if

we cannot know why something which is known to us is good, but only that it is, then we can

never come to value it for what about it makes it valuable, and so we can never value it in

the appropriate way. And this can make an ethical difference.23*

Happiness therefore requires the power of self-narration, the ordering of life's affects towards

the decided end oflife. Iflife is ordered by an end which is more than mere life, then the time

of narrated happiness is a time collected and gathered back upon itself. This is a time that is

driven and narrated by what is not the self now. It is the self I would become that allows the

present to be more than itself. The present is rendered meaningful or happy only by the promise

of the future, a future which can be anticipated only as the end of the self (where 'end' refers

both to the ideal self and the termination of the self). Accordingly, John MacDowell argues that

Aristotelian eudaimonia is tied to a specific type of reasoning, in which I consider what to do, and

how to manage my pleasures, according to some idea of what it is to be human. 24 And it is in this

notion of a specific mode of reasoning- to do with decision, deliberation, time and a self that is

achieved through that time - that has more often than not tied human happiness to narrative.

This is because a human life is a meaningful life, with meaning requiring both sameness through

time - for something has sense only if it can be identified in more than one moment - and

change, for meaning is also a capacity to cover more than one instance. It might seem, then,

that we could align happiness with meaning, and meaning with narrative development. There

is only one problem with such an account: narrative itself has its own time and development.

We do not only use narrative to give form to our life, for narrative has its own life. This occurs

both in the desire for narrative, for as readers we become trained in narrative expectation and

fulfilment, and desire in narrative; the literary history of narratives (especially novels) has

often worked critically with narrative desire by presenting a character's desire for meaning as

illusory or misguided. In the previously quoted passage from Billy Budd, for example, we see the

88 NEW FORMATIONS


perception of a desirable ideal self- Billy as a pure, self-present wholeness - as an image that

brings about violence and destruction. The ego ideal that is at the heart of the novel tradition,

which has always set the striving self against the world, 25 is frequently presented critically in

novels after the nineteenth century.

In Reading for the Plot Peter Brooks argues that narrative bears the peculiarly temporal

structure of desire (and that desire is, in many ways, a desire for narration}.26 For Brooks, plot

is not just the laying out or interaction of elements, as structuralist or formalist accounts would

seem to suggest. Plot relies on temporal detour or delay. The fulfilment of narrative desire- the

end- both drives the narrative and is the death of the narrative. The story is over when it reaches

its end, and so the story, like desire in general, strives for its own dissolution or death. Here, I

want to extend Brooks's insistence on the time and desire of narrative in order to point to the

moral meaning of this time. I want to argue that a moral image of the self, or of life, underpins

this narrative logic and this aesthetics. This is the image of time as self-activation that sets forth

only to recover itself, where each moment of time is comprehended within a horizon or unity.

Such a motif of time as a self-activating circle would be contrasted with the time of techne in

which the origin no longer informs and governs the future or force of the effect. Technical time

is a dispersed time, where forces and disruptions cannot be calculated in advance, where what

a self is and does may no longer be within the horizon, anticipation or comprehension of the

self's act. The morality of happiness is a morality of time: life ought to be active and ought to

create its own trajectory towards its end, for a merely technical time will not allow life to master,

organise and create itself.

We can read this morality of time, not only in the two great philosophical epochs of human

happiness - Ancient Greek ethics and enlightenment ethics - but also in the current frenzied

proliferation of manuals on happiness. Consider, for example, Alain de Botton's mobilisation

of philosophy and happiness. 27 De Botton reassures us that philosophy is not some academic

enterprise to do with questions of truth; nor is philosophy a judgment or criticism of the world.

Philosophy is not the creation of utopias, difficult Ideas or radical disruptions of the present.

Philosophy is a way of restoring us to the rhythm of the world, of allowing us to create ourselves

and our lives as our own. From Socrates to Nietzsche, philosophy reconciles us to man as

he actually is and helps us live our life with knowledge of our finitude. We attain happiness,

through philosophy, because we recognise who we are. Alongside de Botton's work there are

endless manuals about happiness and self-management, mostly consisting of rules for stringent

detachment from contingency. 'Don't accept responsibility for what you can't change'; 'Ask

yourself, is this your problem'; 'Liberate yourself from unrealistic ideas you may have of yourself,

of your possible success, thinness or ability'; 'Don't allow imposed images or stereotypes, the

demands of others, to affect your sense of your own worth'.28 Human happiness is the final

vestige of theologism in Western thought. The idea of human life as a self-narrating and self

temporalising whole relies on an image oflife as soul-directed activity, in which immanent ends

govern acts.

To begin with we might note that happiness and the insistence on human narrative has

its historically significant declarations in what might be called the pre- and post-theological

eras.29 Aristotle's definition of the self as formed through political relations, without reference

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND THE MEANING OF UFE 89


to a transcendent norm is - as Alasdair Macintyre has noted - the only coherent way to think

ethically in a world without God. For Macintyre, it is precisely because modern accounts remain

committed to foundations, despite secularism, that moral arguments become 'shrill' and

incapable of any form of genuine discussion.30 The self of eudaimonia makes sense only when

living well is defined immanently; one defines the very function of human life, and then asks

how that potential might be actualised to its fullest degree. If there is no transcendent God or

end beyond life then human life will be required to account and give value to itself. Without

God, we raise the question of the Good towards which life, especially human life, is directed.

Aristotle is unequivocal that this Good is happiness, for only happiness in contrast to all other

ends, is valuable in and for itself and not for the sake of some other good. Many contemporary

commentators on Ancient Greek ethics therefore regard the immanence of Greek thought as

uniquely tied to narration and self-formation. Happiness for Ancient Greek ethics is neither a

pleasure added on to life, nor a pleasure that might accompany living virtuously. Happiness is

the formation of life itself; it is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, where virtue is

not so much a moral value or judgment as it is an excellence or living well. Alasdair Macintyre

has argued that we are suffering from this loss of Greek happiness precisely because today we

tend to think of both morality and the self as things to be known or discovered, rather than as

ongoing activities. Martha Nussbaum has also insisted on the integral role that literature, as an

arena for collective self-formation, has played in Greek ethics, and that it is this literary sympathy

industry that needs to be revived todayY The idea that the 'good' is some value outside human

creation and finitude is, Nussbaum argues, a ruthless and inhuman dimension of philosophy that we would do well without. Philosophy should generate sympathy and pity, and the extension

of, rather than abstraction from our personal affiliations. Julia Annas has insisted that Greek

happiness cannot be confused with pleasure or personal hedonism; only a happiness that is

achieved or actively earned through the self-conscious production of a good life is worthy of

the name.32 Happiness is, therefore, tied expressly to creation and narration; it is valued only

because it is a potentiality that must be actualised, rather than a contingent pleasure that might

befall or flow naturally from one's bodily being.

Greek happiness functions, then, as that whole or moment of cultural poiesis that has been

lost in a world where values now circulate as empty signs or external measures, technical tokens

rather than lived virtues. According to Giorgio Agamben art was once a praxis that was located

within a communicating polity, where the artist took part in the disclosure or opening of the

political world. 33 Today, however, art does not produce anything other than itself; the art object

is nothing more than the act of the artist. Art no longer opens up a world that might allow

us to reflect upon the coming-into-being of the world (as in poiesis), but is a circulating object

defined as that which was created by a certain type of will or act. The Duchamp ready-made is

an act without a revelatory production. What we have lost then is the sense that the human is

not mere life to be managed technically, but the result of creation or actualisation. We have no

sense of the creation of ends. Life has become technical- the mere maintenance of the already

given - and no longer poetic. According to Agamben, what needs to be retrieved is a sense of

life as that which has a potentiality that may not be actualised. The human needs to be brought

back to a sense of its own self-creation: that it has no end beyond itself, and that it must give

90 NEW FORMATIONS


itself its own end: 'Man has on earth a poetic status, because it is poiesis that founds for him the

original space of his world'. 34

We cannot understand Greek happiness, we are told, because we tend to think of happiness as

an isolated pleasure.35 We are unable to see that what makes a life valuable is not what it simply

is but how it is lived, the sense or art that life gives to itself. Ancient Greek happiness operates

as a figure or image of a time when selves were not deflected from their happiness by illusory

values or some external law beyond life. The Ancient Greek citizen did not see law or morality

as an end imposed upon life by some separate authority, nor was he subjected to the marketed

reified and external pleasures and 'goods' of modernity. Neither subjected to some divine law

beyond this world, nor subject to the circulation of meaningless goods within this world, ancient

Greek life ordered and gave the good to itself. A Greek life had no end beyond itself; it became

through its own active self-narration. Such a life was human and more than mere life because it

produced itself through time as a whole, as a meaningful end in itself. The present was not merely

lived but was referred beyond itself to a sense of the end of life. Happiness requires that life not be mere affect or that its time and activity are actively created. Both the power of philosophy and

the power of narrative lie in the capacity for life to give and realise its own ends. Freedom from

determination by mere contingency - a time of random and received pleasures - and freedom

from an illusory imposed order are achieved by a life that narrates and gives meaning to itself.

This is the art of human happiness, the art of a life conceived as a self-ordering whole, a life

worthy of its pleasures.

BEYOND HAPPINESS TO WORTH

It is the worthiness of happiness that for Kant and the eighteenth century grants a whole new

dimension to narrative, and the structure of the self in relation to narrative. If narrative is

crucial to the formation of a self, something like a self is crucial to the function of narrative.

Narrative desire, as Peter Brooks notes, is driven not just by the forces oflife, but the resolution

or dissolution of those forces in an end or death of the self. The narrative must appear as the

very path or force of life, as following the order or sense of the world; but the narrative must

also bring an end or dissolution to the drive oflife. We can make more sense of this if we look at

the eighteenth-century critique of happiness as the end of life, especially as it is formulated by

Kant. For Kant, there are two problems with regarding happiness as the end of human life.

The first problem is the assumption of an anthropological norm: how could mere happiness

function as a lawful moral end? We could dispute just what counts as happiness, and how

happiness would count: should we be trying to maximise pleasure overall, and how can we secure

just what is and is not pleasurable? In a world where happiness were the highest good each

would pursue his own contingent end. Even if we could create an Aristotelian world in which

we are educated to enjoy a life composed of virtues, this would mean that living well would be

grounded on the contingency of feeling. In those trying cases of duty, where we are called upon

to act in the absence of sympathy or inclination, an ethics grounded upon happiness would

not give us the motivation to act. Good actions would depend upon our particular tendencies.

Morality could be neither universal nor lawful, for it would always be subject to the sympathies



of persons and their specific moral development. Surely, though, morality occurs when we act

well regardless of feeling, even if there is no state in which we are without feeling. 36 For Kant,

it is the idea of freedom - that I may act without any hope of happiness or good feeling, but

as a deciding agent - that yields an idea of personality that does not follow from moral feeling

but that induces the feeling of respect: respect for the lawful, dutiful being I might become. I

may not have any love, sympathy or fellow feeling for the human being before me, and acting

well may not contribute to my happiness. Nevertheless, in being able to judge reflectively I can

regard myself as a being elevated above mere feeling, as a member of the kingdom of ends, 37

or one who is capable of granting her own life a worth beyond the contingency of pleasure.

Secondly, if happiness were the end of life then life could only be the cruellest of hoaxes.

Constantly we see the virtuous man whose life does not deliver happiness. (Indeed, viewing the

moral agent who acts without concern for his happiness chastens and humiliates us, giving us

a sense of painful but humanising respect for the soul who can act as if this world were of no

concern or consequence.) just as we often see and are painfully admonished by the virtuous

man who is not rewarded with happiness, so we also see the villain who is unjustly rewarded

with happiness. In the face of such a seemingly immoral world there must be an end beyond

happiness and its cruel contingency. Only such an end would be truly edifying and satisfying

for our moral reason. The problem with happiness, or the striving for the harmonious accord of

our own life, is its arbitrariness and contingency, its lack of meaning or worthiness. We must look

beyond our own contingent feelings and pleasures to the image of an end and worth that is not

that of mere chance or fortune. Indeed, it is the image of a self who can act as if unconcerned for human happiness, that is truly satisfying- coupled with an image of a world in accord with

the laws of our reason. Initially such an image of the moral self may cause pain, for we are all

too aware of our pathological desires and their distance from the purely self-determining agent

of duty. But such pain leads to a higher pleasure: a pleasure that follows from knowing that we

can act as if undetermined by pleasure. Happiness, in its worldly fulfilment, is trumped by a

higher sense of self: a self that can imagine a life beyond its own partial interests. 38

Further, for the post-Kantian tradition of Romanticism, it was Kant's third critique that allowed

us to think beyond the gap between the world we know as lawfully caused, and the freedom that

we can think of as giving a law to itself.39 In art and aesthetic experience, beauty occurs when

the world we experience appears as though it were perfectly created for the formation of our

concepts; the sublime occurs when the world does not offer itself for conceptual ordering. We

nevertheless feel our formative powers striving to give some order to that which goes beyond

our understanding, and so feel a sense of ourselves as beings who cannot be reduced to any

category, but give a category to themselves -what jean-Francois Lyotard referred to as the

'tautegorical'. 40 Kant therefore seems to reinforce the idea that human beings are self-constituting

ends in themselves, but goes beyond the Aristotelian notion that such self-giving occurs in a

narrative directed to a good beyond the self, and instead occurs in the self as personality: the

sense or feeling one has of oneself as the ground of narration, not the figure within narrative.

It is not surprising, then, that Kant's shift in the ideal of self-creation from narration through

time to self-affectation that produces time, is contemporaneous with the complication of self and

narration that occurs with the novel. Even in the earliest novels there is a tension between the

92 NEW fORMATIONS


desire within the narrative - the desire for the central character to achieve their end - and the

desire for narrative - the reader's desire that the end be complicated, deferred, brought into

line with a series of commands for moral worthiness, and effected in some overall lawful moral

whole. We are, I would suggest, still living this tension between two modes of narrative happiness:

a happiness that maintains itself through time in the form of continuity and recognition, and

a happiness that releases itself from all worldly recognition and identified being in order

to become nothing other than a pure law unto itself. There is, therefore, a dialectic that is

irresolvable between happiness and moral pleasure, between a life that enjoys and recognises

its own extended being in the world, and a life that elevates itself above all worldly recognition

and is charged with a sublime joy that is out of this world.

HAPPY ENDINGS

This dialectic between happiness and moral pleasure provides the very force of narrative

character in eighteenth-century novels. On the one hand there is the desire for fulfilment

and worldly pleasure - the desire for marriage or fortune that drives the story. On the other

hand there is the delay of moral self-sufficiency. The character must be able to renounce their

desire or achievement only for it to be rewarded with a higher return at the end. Typically, the

lovers decide to marry regardless of whether they will achieve wealth or recognition; they must

be presented as moral wholes, above mere fortune. Finally, though, the world is presented as

one in which such moral integrity meets with happiness and felicity. This, indeed, was Kant's

own dialectic of happiness. We must assume - in order to satisfY reason - that we would act on

our duty regardless of any end; only such a non-contingent end can grant us that truly moral

elevation of self. At the same time, we must also assume that the world will ultimately not be

at odds with our duty; it is this image of the world - a world in accord with human duty - that

is both produced by the imagination but is also required of the imagination. Morality requires

that we act as if we were not concerned for our personal happiness, only then do we really have

personality. But personality is further strengthened by imagining a world conducive to the

fulfilment ofthe morallaw.41

We might conclude, then, that the image of the self who narrates its own trajectory already

relies on the mythic pleasure of the self-authoring subject, and that narrative in its popular

forms from the eighteenth-century onward reinforces this fundamentally moral pleasure. It is

not just that selves are formed through narrative, nor that narrative produces those moral selves

we would take a higher pleasure in becoming; it is also the case, through the insistent logic of

happy or sublime endings, that the world answers our request for echoing human justice. Either

happiness is granted to those who demonstrate moral worth or personality; or, the renunciation

of happiness presents a moral image of humanity, a humanity freed from the mere pleasures

of this world, capable of perceiving itself as a virtuous soul.

Satisfaction or the narrative fulfilment of a happy ending can only occur with the production

of a self capable and willing to renounce mere life for a moral end. Consider Henry Fielding's

Tom Jones, which is typical of eighteenth-century novels of self-fulfilment and the affirmation

of happiness. On the one hand, narrative pleasure and desire relies on the production of a



worthy self. If marriage acts as a resolution to so many eighteenth-century novels it does so

both as an end of love and of worldly felicity. Tom must express the desire to love and marry

even if this means being cast out from Paradise Hall, and entails renouncing received fortune

and granted pleasures. But he must also, having passed this test, and having transcended a

world of the mere gift of fortune, receive fortune in the end: as though the world itself were

historically transformed to recognise human worth. In such narratives, the self is produced as

a moral end beyond this world, and then the world is conformed as harmoniously rewarding

this self-formation. Happiness is a critique of mere life. Without the image of a self who can

detach himself from mere life the resolution would lack all meaning, all sense or satisfaction,

all moral order.

I want to argue that this is not ideology in the conventional sense; it is not the aesthetic

ordering of political content. The ordering or form is directly invested and desired, a desire

for the self as self-sufficient whole. This is not a cognitive desire but an affective investment.

This goes some way to explaining the direct affect of art. We can find ourselves moved to tears

or laughing - quite physiological responses -when we know the cliched, political or motivated

nature of the artwork. We find ourselves weeping at the end of a Disney film, not because we

believe in the sublime pathos of the death of Bambi's mother or the tragedy ofET's departure,

and not because we are being lulled by some political 'message.' We are moved directly by

the image of the self as detached from worldly pathos. A direct affect of the self capable of

renunciation of this world, the direct affect that Jean Laplanche describes in the seducing gaze

of the parent towards the self-contained and 'worldless' infant: at the heart of the meaning of life is this image ofthe organism that is at one and the same time self-organising and selfless.42

Constitutive of human desire, insofar as it is human, is this investment in the self that is not of

this world, and that gives its own world to itself.43

The subject, as Jacques Lacan had argued, can only begin to be formed with some image

of wholeness or integrity, and so this would explain the long-standing commitment from

Aristotelian philosophy to contemporary cognitive science on the self-maintaining, integral

and autopoetic organism. At the same time, as Lacan also noted, this very image of wholeness

and integrity that presents itself as a world unto itself, cannot be one object or desired thing to

which the subject might bear a relation. It cannot exist within the world of things and pleasures

but rather insists as that ultimate jouissance beyond relations: the fully self-sufficient Thing.44

The moral fantasy of happiness is today, more than ever, this contradictory desire for a self or

subject that is so master of itself that it maintains no relation to an outside - a pure for itself

-and an existence so complete that striving and desire have been transcended. At one and the same time the self-help industry is drawn to the Aristotelian discourse of self-management and

the pseudo-Eastern mystical discourse of self-transcendence.

In the opening of this essay I referred to the specifically literary nature of becoming

animal. If happiness has been considered as the specifically human capacity to create one's

life as a narrative whole, or to create one's self as nothing other than the pure possibility of

self-affection, then the animal has always been marked off as a life devoid of that subjection

to order and self-consciousness. Literature can be defined as becoming-animal insofar as it

questions the distinction between the self-creating man and the absolutely immanent animal.

94 NEw FoRMATIONS


This questioning occurs not through proposition or argument, but through the creation of

images, forms of perception and voices that juxtapose ordering wholes with 'lines of flight,' " where a line of flight is the departure of a potential from its putatively proper end. If humanity

is defined by its power to give itself form, then a line of flight would be the extension of that

form-giving power beyond the human. Whereas happiness has been defined as an activity of the

soul in accordance with virtue- so that we become what we ought to be -joy is the liberation of

creation and potential from virtue, from a definitive excellence. Becoming-animal is that capacity

for literature to present images of wholeness, integrity and self-ordering and then work with

the ways in which those supposedly human predicates can be deflected from their proper end.

As we saw in Billy Budd, the moral image of the beautiful enclosed self, the child that is at once

its own world, is at once a pleasing higher image of who we are, and a painful admonition of

the purer self we must regain.45

Narratives of happy endings both reinforce the moral autonomy and self-production of the

human agent and flirt with a world that must be captured and harmonised with that autonomy.

We can think of the image, but not the biological reality, of Freud's single celled organism:

negotiating the amount of stimulus and disruption from without alongside the desire for

sameness and return.46 Narrative pleasure comes not solely from the self's path towards unity

but also from a life and time that harmonise with this trajectory. Life does not just happen to

us; we give life to ourselves through narration and through a lived time. What is repressed is

not just the mythic or supplementary nature of the wholeness of the ego, but the inhumanity

of time and life. From the self-narrating community of Aristotelian ethics and communication

ethics, to the self-formation models of identity politics and the culture of therapy, human

happiness is the image of the self that earns, activates and is worthy of itself. It is a self that

becomes through a time where the future is governed by a desire for integration of sense and

elimination of distortion, a self responsible for its own time. It is a self as organism rather than

mere machine, a self where narration is the ordering and return oflife.

We can acknowledge the mythical, illusory and narcissistic nature of Freud's supposed original

organism, closed in upon itself, disrupted traumatically from without. But we also need to work

with the cultural necessity or at least intransigence of this illusionY The self is essentially the

myth of its own trauma; we spend our lives mourning the loss of that integrated self we once

were.48 At the biological level, the image of the original organism that subsequently meets with

change may well be an illusion; but at the cultural level it seems to form the very structure of

thinking. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari contrast two modes of vitalism. The first,

that of an Idea that acts but is not, has always been the default position in any consideration of

happiness. According to this style of vitalism, life is pure act and only defiles and reifies itself

when it falls into finitude; happiness is not a state but an ongoing becoming that is liberated

from any subjection to pathos. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari put forward a vitalism of

forces, in which there is neither Life as one underlying flow, nor lives as well-bounded wholes.49

Only this mode of vitalism can take us beyond the fantasy of the happy organism, or the idea

that it is possible to attain a state where one remains as pure act, with outside relations being

limited to those that allow the self to actualise what it always was in potentiality. It was Kant who

originally argued that the very sense of the world, as an ordered and transcendent whole, is an



extension of the idea of the self's own body as an autonomous organism.50 The self-ordering

and autonomous organism is not one idea among others but crucial to the morality of life.

The current discourse on human happiness is evidence of the persistence of this originally

moral image of the closed and self-sufficient organism. 51 For the morality of happiness has

always stressed the self-sufficiency of the human organism. A happiness achieved by drugs

or luck is no happiness at all; happiness is earned as an essential sign of the self's power

for autonomous becoming. There is an almost cliched horror expressed at a happiness

that comes from without. Think of the distopia of Brave New World, or the anxieties that

surround Prozac or ecstasy. Why do we fear, so intensely, a world where happiness might

be engineered in advance? In such a world happiness would have no meaning. 52 There is

something frightening about a world in which we might be happy, but where we were not

responsible for our happiness. There is something both dangerous and redemptive in the

traditional aesthetic commitment to the selfthat is author and activator of its own pleasures.

The danger lies in its narrowing of the domain of morality and responsibility. We need

to recognise moral forces that lie beyond the self and the intended achievement of a good

life. What we repress are the forces of a life which might grant and withdraw happiness

beyond any intention or goal of life. Such forces are coming to the fore in recent empirical

research on happiness, which indicates that the pursuit of happiness - all those concepts

of striving, self-maintenance, projection and command of the future - bear no relation to

lived happiness.53 Evolutionary psychologists have responded by defining happiness as a

useful lure; we are efficient and self-maintaining as long as we pursue happiness, even if pursuit ultimately bears no relation to quality of life. Rather than accept and explain this

illusion of the pursuit of happiness on the basis of life, I would argue that we can turn to

the literary tradition of joy as a critical, mature and enlightened critique of the politics of

happiness. As long as we believe in happiness we believe in a politics of intent, agency and

worthiness: ignoring all those forces - from language and economics to genetics - that

traverse and produce the bounded selves of a culture. 54 Literature's capacity to stage and

pervert narrative desire can be seen, respectively, in Claggart's perception of Billy which

is at once desiring and destructive, and in the narrative structure of Billy Budd. The story

produces an image of innocence beyond human instrumentalism, and then stages the tragic

destruction ofthat image. That capacity for the tragic is a joy beyond happiness, the power

of the human organism to say 'no' to narrative resolution and moral pleasure.

Recently, within two otherwise dissimilar areas of philosophy there has been a fundamental

critique of what I have referred to here as narrative time, a time in which each event is made

sense of through reference to the finality of a whole. 55 The philosophy of life that runs from

Nietzsche to Bergson to Deleuze insists on the non-organic forces of life. The organism is the

vehicle through which life passes; the motor of desire that propels the self is not the self's own.

We deflect from our happiness, not because we ourselves posit some higher end, but because

life acts through us.

If the aim of life is death, this is not because the organism strives to return to the self that

it once was; it is because death destroys any closed image of life. The problem with Western

thought, its inherent moralism, is its image of time as end-driven, as a time of narrative coherence

96 NEW FoRMATIONS


in which each element or affect has worth and sense only through a purposeful image of the

world.

In quite different ways, and in conflict with the Bergsonian stress on a life beyond any of

its closed or meaningful forms, Derrida has also criticised the anthropologism at the heart of

Western conceptions of time. Any concept or thought oftime is already other than time, already

a return of time to the self. 56 The Bergsonian desire to think time itself, as pure act, is already

an image of a time that is neither lost nor dispersed nor ineffective. We have always thought

of time as a circle, as a becoming that ultimately recognises and realises itself Life and time,

Derrida argues, are traditionally determined as events of self-actualisation, with man functioning

as that being who realises and brings to presence the flow and effectivity of time .57 Time, the

self, and self-comprehension are inextricably intertwined. What cannot be thought is a time out

of joint, in which undecided events or a time without order, sense or direction opens the space

of the political. 58 Politics and ethics have been dominated by an ethics of self-determination,

self-reflection, self-formation and the priority of the active, worthy and earned. In contrast,

Derrida sets a justice and responsibility that comes from without: unannounced, undecided and

not anticipated or projected from the present.

It is the discourse of happiness, today, that evidences how close we remain to the morally

meaningful image of the closed self and its ordering world. The culture of happiness, I would

argue, both maintains and depends upon a normative and moralising image of the self. The

proliferation of manuals on happiness confirms the self's power to author and determine itself, testifying to a profound cultural narcissism. At the same time, such an insistence on self

formation also confirms a moral image of the world. If I am unhappy it is because I have been

deflected from my real interests. Happiness is, and ought to be, within my power, within my life:

I am nothing other than this power to free myself from any false image of myself. The culture

of happiness is a culture of worthiness, moral reward, active autonomy, self-formation, self

affirmation and narrative intelligibility. As Kant insisted, a world in which happiness merely

befell the fortunate would be a world without moral meaning, a world in which the human

would be abandoned to what lay beyond its own decided ends.

If the self is not a closed whole of self-authorship and if 'life' is not self-realisation with no

end beyond itself, then we might be prompted to move beyond a morality of praise and blame

to an expanded concept of responsibility. We can only, Kant argues, blame others because we

think of selves as responsible for their lives. For Kant this is evidence of the necessarily posited

free and noumenal self. For Nietzsche, this is evidence that blame or punishment produces the

fiction of responsible selves. 59 Recognising the self as this necessarily posited origin we can

both look to the impersonal forces that produce the moral subject and realise the power of this

moral image. Something like this double movement is given in new styles of narrative where

the forces that decide the self are neither the self's own nor morally meaningful. Part of the

scandal and horror that marks a text like Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is that its 'evil' is

not located within the psychology or intent of the central character. The character of Patrick

Bateman is itself a collection of undecided affects and quotations, producing a life that is never

definitively his. Character is a style or habit that is at once that of a culture in general as well as

being random, undecided, disowned and anonymous. The narration of American Psycho spells

NARRATIVE HAPPINESS AND THE MEANING OF UFE 97


out the detailed analysis of restaurant menus, speaks through the 'sleeve-note' or album-covers

discourse of eighties music, repeats the latest messages from the Pattie Winters show, and then

moves seamlessly into the description of human dismemberment and sexual torture. Evil is not

contained within a self: the self is nothing more than an act of narration, but a narration that is

always the technical repetition of material and affects that come from elsewhere. Bateman is not

some evil intent behind American consumerism, for the 'evil' lies in the absence of intent, the

sense that we are not being presented with the mind of a serial killer so much as a force that runs

across bodies and actions. This is an amoral evil, an evil terrifying in its lack of location, intent

or personal responsibility. If the narrative has a propulsive force this is towards the increasing

proliferation and exhaustion, rather than return, of desire. And as the affects proliferate and

become machine-like in their capacity to drive the self, the figure of Bateman desperately resists

with the literal image of a hard body. The body as gym-defined, synthesised and self-fashioning

then takes on its own violent force. Bateman is the effect of style, not its author. Indeed, not

only does the narrative of American Psycho destroy the wholeness of the determining self, it also

places the aesthetic of the closed self within the series of received affects that constitute Bateman.

The style and aesthetic that drives Bateman focuses in a frenzied manner on the very borders

of the self; the women he desires and destroys are referred to as 'hardbodies', while Bateman

himself, through food, drugs and exercise, becomes an organism resistant to all imposed or

received affect. But his self-investment always comes from elsewhere: from received styles, codes,

images and messages that are repeated with a force and desperation that drives the narrative.

His dismemberment of other bodies parallels his own frantic self-investment. American Psycho diagnoses the narcissism of narrative and the violent nature of that narcissism. The self who

forms himself, gives meaning and worth to himself, is a self governed by a violent will to order,

delimit and moralise life.

By contrast, we can imagine an ethics beyond the moralism of closed life, in which the

supposed personal forces of good and evil are seen to arrive from an impersonal, untimely and

anarchic genesis. This has both critical and positive implications. Critically, it allows a diagnosis

and responsibility for life beyond praise and blame. The self-formed moral agent, the self of

recognition and integrity, may be a gift of fortune. The self of destruction, violence, dissolution

and evil may be the production of inhuman and unintended forces. Moral responsibility may

be extended beyond decision, recognition and intent in order to recognise a new politics of

forces that produce us beyond the common space of communication and narration.

NOTES

1. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, X.8. 1178b8-b22. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed), Vol. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, ppl862-63.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,' in Untimely Meditations, R.J. Hollingdale (trans), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p60.

3. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (trans), York, H. Holt and company, 1911, pl34.

4. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (trans), with the assistance ofW. Horsfall Carter, London, Macmillan, 1935.

98 NEW fORMATIONS


5. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, Richard Howard (trans), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

6. Ibid.

7. Gilles Deleuze, 'Immanence, A Life,' in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Anne Boyman (trans), New York, Zone Books, 200 l.

8. Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (Penguin Classics), Frederick Busch (ed), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, p356.

9. Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction,' in Art and literature, jensen's Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and other works, Pelican Freud Library, ~illume /4, James Strachey (trans), Albert Dickson (ed), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.

10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p274.

11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2000, p204.

12. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Uoyd, Collective Imaginings: Spino:w., Past and Present, London, Routledge, 1999.

13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), Mary J. Gregor (ed), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

14. A random perusal oflifestyle magazines in December 2006 revealed a number of guides to achieving and maximising happiness. The British edition of Zest featured as its lead article 'Trust Yourself to be Happy' in which a number of experts defended appeals to intuition and listening to oneself. 'Nobody knows you better than you,' Zest, December 2006, pp14-18. An Australian lifestyle magazine from the same month offers 'Your 2007 Happiness Script' in which readers are encouraged to develop 'immunity' towards negative emotions. Advice includes various methods for strengthening and idealising the self. 'Then whenever you hit a setback, try to find somewhere quiet to sit for five minutes and conjure up the image of your "best you"', Good Health and Medicine, January 2007, pp62-65. An Australian fashion magazine, also from January 2007, consults a series of writers for an article 'The Happiness Recipe'. Here, a range of opinions are proffered from novelists and columnists, but the inset quotation that dominates the page-spread comes from Oprah Winfrey, 'Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all oflife's blessings', Madison, January 2007, pp188-193. In addition to the manuals for happiness within lifestyle, fashion and beauty magazines, there has also developed a new genre of popular psychology magazines all oriented to a cultivation of the self and a strengthening of self-worth. In Britain Psychologies mixes advice from both scientific and 'new age' sources, while the United States' Psychology Today of December 2006leads with two articles for 'self-invention': 'How to Upgrade Your Thinking, Reboot Your Attitude, and Reconfigure Your Life,' and 'We All Want to Change Our Personalities? At Least a Little'. Again, advice focuses on diminishing and managing the effects of the external world by focussing on 'a new internal vision', Psychology Today, December 2006, pp66-70.

15. Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, London, Riverhead, 1998. See also, Chris Prentiss, Zen and the Art of Happiness, London, Power Press, 2006.

16. Fredric Jameson, The Eblitical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London, Methuen, 1981.

17. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, H. Rackham (trans), Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1934, pp46-7 [l.x.1].

18. Aristotle, [2.i.4], ibid., p7l.

19. Aristotle [2.ii.1], ibid., p75.

20. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford, Clarendon, 2001.

21. Aristotle, 1098a pp16-18, op. cit.

22. Terence Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988.

23. Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, ppl3-l4.



24. John MacDowell, 'The Role of Ewlaimonia in Aristotle's Ethics,' in Mind, HLlue and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., H;nvard University Press, 1998, ppl-22, 10.

25. Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, Lucien Goldmann (trans), Alan Sheridan, London, Tavistock, 1975.

26. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.

27. Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, New York, Pantheon Books, 2000.

28. It is in this sense that Mihaly Csikszentmihayli stresses the worth of the 'autotelic' character- one who establishes their own ends, and so are able to maintain a fully masterful relation to outside objects and persons precisely because relations to those other forces are established from - rather than imposed upon - the self, Living WeU, New York, Phoenix, 1998.

29. To a certain extent I would disagree with both Luc Ferry and John Cottingham, who argue that the question of life's meaning demands some type of religious or spiritual focus, although they both try to retrieve the structure of religious meaning after the death of God. As long as there is life in an afterworld then we need neither question nor demand the worth of this life, but if we are devoid of religious consolation then we need to seek some value in this life alone, and if this life seems lacking in pleasure then we are required to posit a value higher than pleasure. This will require us to value some end of life, and it is just this creation of ends that defines happiness and introduces a structure of meaning. John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, London, Routledge, 2003; Luc Ferry, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

30. Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p8.

31. Martha Nussbaum, lnve's Knowledge: &says on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

32. Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, p30.

33. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, Georgia Albert (trans), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, p60.

34. Ibid., plOl.

35. T.H. Irwin, 'Kant's Criticisms of Eudaimonism,' in Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (ed), Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp63-101.

36. Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral judgment, Cambridge, Mass., H;nvard University Press, 1993.

3 7. Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

38. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant: Doctrine of Virtue, MJ. Gregor (trans), New York, Harper and Row, 1964, p377.

39. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of judgment (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, Paul Guyer (ed), Eric Matthews (trans), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

40.Jean Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the analytic of the sublime: Kant's Critique ofjudgment, [sections] 23-29, Elizabeth Rottenberg (trans), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994.

41. Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p13; Dieter Henrich,Aestheticjudgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992.

42.Jean Laplanche, 'The Unfinished Copernican Revolution,' Luke Thurston (trans), Essays on Otherness, London, Routledge, 1999, pp52-83.

43. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2000, p33.

44. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19 59-1960: The Seminar of jacques Lacan Book Vll, Jacques Alain Miller (ed), Dennis Porter (trans), London, Routledge, 1992, p118.

1()() NEW fORMATIONS


45. If narrative pleasure and pain play with the self that must both form itself actively but also be at one with its world, then laughter can be explained as a release from this stringent command of happiness. For it is in laughter that we are liberated from the well-ordered microcosm of the self. According to Henri Bergson, laughter often overtakes us when the purposive fluidity and responsiveness of the human body breaks down and the self is reduced to a mere mechanism. Slipping on a banana peel, being overtaken by the deck-chair one is attempting to assemble, a man's body controlled by the women's clothes adopted for a ruse: laughter here is release from the organism of the self, a freedom from the self's moral freedom. We laugh at the self that is no longer agent and narrator of its destiny, as though there were release from the moral strictures of the self as divine author of itself. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (trans), Mineola, NY, Dover Publications, 2005.

46. Laplanche, op. cit., pp69, 81.

4 7. According to Jonathan Lear, who accepts a linguistic approach to the problem, the ontology of happiness is inaugurated with Aristotle, who seduces the reader into an idea of a complete and self-sufficient good which is definitive of happiness, and then proposes contemplation as the fulfilment of the originally 'enigmatic' signifier, Lear, op. cit., p46. Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, argue that the image of the organism and of self-sufficiency is not a signifier imposed upon life but the consequence of life's own tendency to resist absolute deterritorialisation.

48. Serge Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, Marie-Claude Hays (trans), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp2-3.

49. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophyr. op. cit., p213.

50. 'Because man is conscious of himself as a self-moving machine ... he can, and is entitled to, introduce a priori organic-moving forces of bodies into the classification of bodies in general (21: 213, Op. 66).

We experience organic forces in our own body; and we come, by means of the analogy with them (with a part of their principle) to the concepts of a vegetative body, leaving out the animal part of its principle (22:373, Op.ll8; cf. 22:383, Op.l20). Forster glosses this passage in the following way: 'Our own bodily experience functions as the paradigm for the estimation of other objects as organic; it is the primary example by which we judge all others. But as a paradigm for natural purposiveness, it cannot be subject to the 'as if' principle of the third Critique: this principle fails to hold on the case of our own bodily organization. My body thus plays a unique role in my relation to the world around me ... ' Eckart Forster, Kant's Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus postumum, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2000, p28.

51. This 'organic thinking' (to borrow Elizabeth Wilson's phrase) can be identified in mainstream philosophy, popular science and neuroscience, and positive psychology. Elizabeth Wilson, 'Gut Feminism,' differences 2004, 15, 3: 66-94. In philosophy, Christine Korsgaard describes the self as necessarily committed to normativity due to the necessity of maintaining a sense of oneself as the same through time. In popular neuroscience, Antonio Damasio has drawn upon the philosophy of Spinoza to argue that the happy state of mind is our feeling of the bodily state of equilibrium. Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: joy, Sonvw, and the Feeling Bmin, Orlando, Fla., Harcourt, 2003. In cognitive science Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela have rejected the idea that thought must relate to some world, and instead insist that cognition is the autopoetic organism's way of managing its state of equilibrium; the outside or world is encountered only as this particular body's living environment. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Robert Paolucci (trans), Boston, Shambhala, 1992. In positive psychology, the emphasis on the state of flow privileges the state in which the self is in a position of such mastery that there is no longer a sense of something other than the self to be mastered. The self is at one with its action, and action is at one with the world. See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness, New York, Harper and Row, 1990.

52. In Artificial Happiness, Ronald W. Dworkin argues that we have lost all sense of achieving happiness and dealing with life because we have turned to the artificial happiness of drugs such as Prozac. Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class, New York, Carroll and Graff, 2006.

53. Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, ppl4-15; and Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, New York, A.A. Knopf, 2006.

54. For an account of a materialist philosophy of forces that extend beyond the human agent, but are nevertheless also open to transformation see, Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge, Polity, 2006.



55. For a sophisticated criticism of this concept of time and an introduction to a new philosophy of open time see, Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham, Duke University Press, 2004; and Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham, Duke University Press, 2005.

56. Jacques Derrida, 'Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,' Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans), Sussex, Harvester, 1982, pp29-67.

57. Ibid., p52.

58. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, Peggy Kamuf(trans), London, Routledge, 1994.

59. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Douglas Smith (trans), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

102 NEW FoRMATIONS


NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College.

Previous publications include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others and Postcoloniality

(2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology:

Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). She is currently writing a book entitled,

The Promise of Happiness for Duke University Press.

Lauren Ber1ant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director

of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is

author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy ( 1991 ), The Queen of America Goes

to Washington City ( 1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). She has also edited a number of

volumes, including: Intimacy (2000), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of

an Emotion (2004), and On the Case (2007).

Lisa Blackman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and

Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. She works at the

intersection of critical psychology and cultural theory, and particularly on the relationships between the body, affect, relationality and the psychological. She

is the author of Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience (Free Association

Press, 200 I) and joint author with Valerie Walkerdine of Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (Palgrave, 2001 ). She is currently completing two

monographs, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Relationality and the Problem of Personality (under consideration by Duke University Press) and The Body: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2008).

Rowan Boyson is completing her PhD thesis on pleasure and intersubjectivity

in Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic poetry at Queen Mary, University

of London.

Claire Colebrook is in the Department of English at the University of

Edinburgh. Her most recent book is Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum, 2008).

Carrie Hamilton teaches Spanish and History at Roehampton University in

London. She is the author of Women and ETA: The Gender Politics of Radical

Basque Nationalism (Manchester University Press, 2007) and is currently writing

a book on sexual politics and oral history in revolutionary Cuba.

Documents

Colebrook - Narrative Happiness and the Meaning of Life