ABSTRACT
Happiness is consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as being what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life. As Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer argue, ‘Everybody wants to be happy. There is probably no other goal in life that commands such a high degree of consensus’ (2002: vii). Different traditions within philosophy have offered very different accounts of happiness, from classical Greek models of eudaimonia as a good and virtuous life, to utilitarian models of happiness as the greatest good. What is held in place throughout these traditions is the very assumption that happiness is what we want, whatever it is. Even a philosopher such as Immanuel Kant, who places the individual’s
own happiness outside the domain of ethics, argues that ‘to be happy is necessarily the wish of every finite and rational being, and this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of its faculty of desire’ (2004: 24). And yet Kant himself suggests rather mournfully ‘unfortunately, the notion of happiness is so indeterminate that although every human being wishes to attain it, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills’ (2005: 78). If happiness is what we wish for, it does not mean we know what we wish for in wishing for happiness. Happiness might even conjure its own wish. What kind of world takes shape when happiness is shared as a wish?
Simone de Beauvoir shows so well how happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish. As she argued in The Second Sex: ‘it is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them’ (1997: 28, second emphasis added). We can draw on such feminist critiques of happiness as a way of asking questions about the happiness wish. This chapter is assembled around what we could call ‘unhappy feminist
archives’. It is not simply a question of finding unhappiness as an affect or feeling in such archives. Rather, these archives take shape through the circulation of cultural objects that articulate an unhappiness with happiness. We can follow the weave of unhappiness, as a kind of unravelling of happiness,
and the threads of its appeal. To follow such threads might be to follow objects that have already acquired an affective value. My method is to explore how certain objects come to be affective over time: as if they can cause happiness or other feeling-states that we might wish for. I consider how some bodies cause disturbance, or become the cause of disturbance, because they refuse to participate in the happiness wish. To refuse the happiness wish involves an affective reorientation: while you can cause disturbance, you can also turn disturbance into a cause.
