Pursuits of Happiness
A Tentative Map
Abstract
This essay offers an introduction to the section on “Pursuits of Happiness” by attempting to trace a genealogy of the philosophical discourse on happiness converging in the Declaration of Independence of the United States and unfolding in its later cultural interpretations. Through an investigation of the tension between the normative and the subversive inherent in the “pursuit of happiness” notion, the essay calls for a retrieval of its unsettling utopian potential. By its appeal to the imagination and its capacity to effect a mobilization of desire in the political domain, the “pursuit of happiness” might reveal as yet unthought-of ways of imagining the political “beyond the reality principle.”
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