ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytical theory problematized the relation between happiness and utilitarianism. But the discourse of ‘happiness’ is integral to philosophy. After its separation from utilitarianism and psychology, Alain Badiou’s philosophy links happiness to the formal theory of truth, or, better, to the ‘ethics of truth’. Putting in place the fundamental categories of ‘being-multiple’, the ‘event’, ‘truths’, and the ‘subject’ in his philosophy, Badiou offers a novel definition of happiness as ‘the affirmative experience of an interruption of finitude’. If the ‘category of truth’, Badiou explains, ‘is abandoned or inoperative, philosophy cannot face up to the challenge of an existence in servitude to commodity circulation or to the illogicality of communication. Informing us that the ‘force of an event’ resides in what it exposes in the ‘world that was hidden, or invisible, because masked by the laws of this world’, Badiou then proposes a possible definition of happiness: ‘to discover in oneself an active capacity of what we unknowingly possess’.
