A Meatloaf Concert on the TV, A Goldfish on the Floor

When I watched Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, I asked myself, why don't more people do that? Why don't more people go out that way, I mean, if they're going out that way anyways.

Well, it turns out they do, sort of.

Invitation to play that game that guy invented on his web site

The Trinketization blog quotes Adorno's Minima Moralia on the capacity for happiness. As Trinketization says Adorno says, "It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces...."

Elliptical as I'm being here (I hope), I spoke in Klartext there. My only profit on it is, I am cursed. Or pitied.

Trinketization's quotation led me back to Adorno, so I'll quote a different part of that same aphorism, "Invitation to the dance."

Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for happiness did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. [...] Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression...

And, further,

... a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and --inseparable from it--personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold of the life inside them, as if it did not have them firmly enough in its power from the outside.

Not that we're pessimists, Theodor and I. Adorno writes very movingly about happiness somewhere in Negative Dialectics. Wherever it is that he quotes that same parable about the kingdom of the messiah, which parable turns up in Bloch, in Benjamin, and in Agamben's The Coming Community.

Since this blog has gone all-quotations and no commentary, let me close by saying, you know who else has thought about happiness? Roger at Limited, Inc, and also Claire Colebrook. Colebrook wrote this great essay on happiness-through-the-ages (ages of philosophy), which was published in a slightly obscure journal of contemporary fiction called symploke. I look forward to the book version. I quote it in advance.

Im in ur jobz, making less money

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