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Happiness and health – a contemporary epitaph on living bodies

The starting point of the present paper is the assumption of the contemporary moral imperative that dictates happiness on the one hand and the concern for physical health on the other. Modern western society under the premise of freedom seemingly paves the individual’s path to happiness and pleasure, but turns out to be the most effective obstacle in this pursuit. Even more, when the demands for physical well-being and positive thinking are framed as moral imperative, wider social problems become depoliticised and individualised. Such a framework is regarded as one that nurtures the neoliberal ideology as ideology which, in pursuing its objectives, favours (economic) rationality and individualism. The rational subject in this context is one on whom economic criteria are applied and one who tries to silence the fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis, i.e. the category of unconscious. It is the conceptual apparatus of the theoretical psychoanalysis that the text further recourse to as to the source, where it finds the possibility for more efficient solutions of exposed problems. Through the prism of understanding in which the private pathologies are recognised as social pathologies the paper responds on modern morality with excessive ethics, ethics in psychoanalysis. In consideration that operates with previously exposed basic terms (desire, pleasure, moral imperative, anxiety, freedom) in the context of psychoanalysis it identifies the key from where the depoliticised politics can again be restored as political.

 


Article inside journal

Issue No. 266 - Social Psychopathology and Paranoia
Source
Časopis za kritiko znanosti
Numbering
2016 , volume volume 44 , issue issue 266
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