On Happiness

This book attempts to approach the notion of happiness - and specifically, the question of whether it is possible to be happy - through the apparently paradoxical statement, "I am happy because I should be happy!" It is a treatment of the possibility of happiness without a reliance on the usual subjective notions of freedom, and choice. Hence, this is an attempt to think the impossible - perhaps even defend the undefendable - and posit that happiness is a state of otherness; one that seizes you, and perhaps even ceases you.

What is called into question is the logic that 'you can choose to be happy' - the hinge on which the entire 'self-help' genre revolves. Not only is this an anthropocentric gestures - as if the self is the centre of her/his world - but more than that, it is also a totalitarian gestures: if there is a methodology to control one's life, this also suggests that it is applicable regardless of situation; and more than it, it is replicable, repeatable. And by extension, all people are ultimately flattened into mere variations of the same. Hence, what is at stake here is the singularity of the person, of each person.

(Source: On Happiness blurb)