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Abstract

Public happiness is a form of happiness associated with political engagement, involvement and participation. This talk will take as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It explores what might it mean to reanimate public happiness today, in a time when representative politics reduces the scope of political action, and when it seems that happiness can only be a private and individual experience. The talk will also examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. This work will be read as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness while also critically adapting it to contemporary political struggles and movements. The talk will conclude by showing how specific examples of social movements and demonstrations in Malta, Europe and Latin America can be considered as attempts to reanimate public happiness today.

Bionote

Kurt Borg is a Lecturer in the Department of Public Policy at the University of Malta. His research interests revolve around poststructuralism and contemporary continental political philosophy. Kurt has published articles and book chapters on the political and ethical thought of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as well as applications of their work in the fields of trauma theory, disability studies and illness narratives. He co-edited Xi Tfisser Tkun Bniedem? (Horizons, 2023), a book consisting of inter-disciplinary dialogues on the question of being human. He is interested in the intersection between the personal and the philosophical essay, and a collection of his essays is forthcoming later this year.

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