Against Flourishing: Wellbeing as biopolitics, and the psychoanalytic alternative

Authors

  • C. Wright The University of Nottingham Department of Culture, Film and Media Centre for Critical Theory

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2013.151

Keywords:

Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Martin Seligman

Abstract

This article critically analyzes what is at stake in the recenttranslation of the term ‘happiness’ into the inter-related terms ‘well-being’and ‘flourishing’ within Happiness Studies. Focussing on the work of MartinSeligman, the article argues that the category of ‘flourishing’ in particularhighlights Happiness Studies and positive psychology as a new, neoliberalinterpretation of utilitarianism. This is supported with reference to MichelFoucault’s late lectures at the Collège de France on the connections betweenneoliberalism and the direct political administration of life that he termed‘biopolitics’, a concept which explains the interweaving of health andhappiness in today’s dominant therapeutic cultures. Finally, the articleattempts to outline a radical alternative to the biopolitical notion of‘flourishing’ by appealing to psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanianpsychoanalysis - its critique of consumer happiness, but also its clinicalcommitment to working transformatively with unhappiness.

Author Biography

C. Wright, The University of Nottingham Department of Culture, Film and Media Centre for Critical Theory

Colin Wright is the Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Theory and Director of MA Programmes in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. He is also in clinical training as a Lacanian psychoanalyst at the London-based Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is the author of Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict (2013), Orientations: Psychoanalysis (2008) and Rhetoric, Philosophy, Ideology: Towards a Sophistic Democracy (2006), as well as several articles in journals such as Theory & Event, Subjectivity, and Culture, Theory & Critique. He has co-edited (with Cristina Demaria) Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation (2006) and (with Suzanne Dow) a special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory on ‘Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman’ (November 2010).

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Published

2013-11-15

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2013): Translating Happiness: Medicine, Culture and Social Progress

Section

Articles

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