Joyful Power (potentia) and Collective Happiness: Affective Functioning between Spinoza and Simmel

Abstract

Capitalism is a mode of production of sad subjectivities. Likewise, contemporary capitalist subjectivity is permeated by material and immaterial, bodily and affective forms of precarisation. Affective precariousness produces sad subjectivities forced to cover up this state under the paradoxical appearance of a false ‘happiness’. To be happy in a world that precarises through the production of sadness is a condition that has become compulsory and that leads to the intensification and internalisation of psychosocial ailments that are increasingly pre- sent in our societies: depression, burnout syndrome, stress, anxiety and suicide. In the face of this, joy and happiness, as understood by Spinoza and Simmel, as potencies of life that increase through the ethical care of others and the commons, are outlined as conceptual tools to dispute other forms of life in the face of the sad happiness of capitalism. The dialogue established between these two authors does not result in assuming a ‘positive’ attitude towards sadness, which is precisely the trap of paradoxical happiness, but in politicising and collectivizing malaise in order to identify its structural causes, while at the same time constructing common relations sustained by joyful potencies and collective happiness.