Review of: Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living, by Brian Treanor (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Poetics of Hope: Treanor's Invitation to the Mystery of Being (Review)
Comparative & Continental Philosophy, 2022
A study of the strain and striving in the heart of human finitude, Brian Treanor’s case for melancholic joy uses the resources of hermeneutic philosophy and the arts to galvanize a hopeful counterweight to despair. Though evil and suffering are tragically ingrained in the tissue of lived experience, and entropy and loss buffet our projects and aspirations, there remains in the landscape of being a durable mystery of goodness, beauty, and grace. Treanor pits such mystery against our calcified pessimisms and arid theodicies by drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s vision for a “second naiveté” of faith, gratitude, and moral responsibility that is worthy of living in – and up to – an order of things which is dark yet shining. Melancholic joy is neither resignation nor optimism, but an attuning praxis that can be realized through responsive modes of vitality, love, attention, and tragic wisdom.
After Dark: Neutralizing Nihilism (Review of Melancholic Joy by Brian Treanor)
Journal of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, 2021
This review essay introduces Brian Treanor's Melancholic Joy in dialogue with themes in Nietzsche's thought. The book invites this comparison in its penultimate section, which distinguishes briefly its own account from the tenets of Dionysiac pessimism. Finding that section fertile, but tantalizingly short, I parse in greater detail relevant points of convergence and divergence. The first section, "After Nietzsche," follows Nietzsche's development out of the first naïveté of ascetic idealism and into the wanderer's night of biting suspicion. It likens Nietzsche's leonine eschewal of metaphysics and morals to Treanor's sober engagement with the fruits of the physics and philosophy that have ripened in between. The second section, "Second Innocence," contrasts Nietzsche's vision of childlike innocence after nihilism, a renaissance beyond good and evil, with Treanor's vital response to an updated nihilism: a love of world that refuses to deny the many realities of evil, and that responds by embracing the many mundane realities of joy.
Hopelessly joyful in dreadful times
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
This article argues that hope is not an adequate affective response to dread. Indeed, hope and dread are more closely aligned than either critical or postcritical forms of educational philosophy would like to admit. The article proposes a shift from hope to joy as an under appreciated educational affect. To make this claim, the author pivots to Spinoza's emphasis on joy as an affect that increases one's potential to think and act in a world with others as a new starting point for education in dreadful times. The article also offers a Spinozian reading of Freire that unlocks the joyful dimensions of his work, especially through his reflections on laughter. In conclusion, a hopelessly joyful affective orientation is called for as a form of passionate educational experimentation with the potentiality of the world.
Joy and the Myopia of Finitude (Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol.8, no.1, spring 2016)
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2016
Philosophy, by and large, tends to dwell on what might be called the woeful nature of reality—finitude, suffering, loss, death, and the like. While these topics are no doubt worthy of philosophical concern, undue focus on them tends to obscure other facets of our experience and of reality, giving philosophy a temperament that could justifiably be called melancholic. Without besmirching the value of such inquiry, this paper suggests that philosophers have largely ignored the experience of joy and, consequently, missed its distinctive contributions to our understanding of the meaningfulness of life and the goodness of being. Traditional accounts of the problem of evil are rooted in what John D. Caputo calls “strong theology,” which tends to construe evil as a problem to which God should supply the answer or solution. However, if we call into question traditional accounts of omnipotence, evil ceases to be a problem, and we become free to engage it as part of what Gabriel Marcel calls “the mystery of being.” Thus liberated, we are free to assess more clearly phenomena missed by melancholic accounts of being, among them the experience of joy, attested to in diverse forms of philosophy, literature, memoir, and elsewhere.
The Gift of Joy (Conference Paper Version)
2021
Joy sometimes seems like such an old-fashioned word; it seems to bear an innocence or naivety that is unsuited to our times. In the literature, it is frequently compared to happiness: joy is understood to be momentary and fleeting, happiness to be more enduring. 1 Discussions of "the good life" often focus on happiness, and not joy, as the ultimate goal-even if what happiness means for philosophers is frequently qualified by the need to develop the habits of virtue. 2 Yet from a particular perspective, joy is the aim of the Christian life. As Augustine writes: "The happy life is joy based on the truth. This is joy grounded in you, O God, who are the truth, 'my illumination, the salvation of my face, my God' (Ps. 26: 1; 41:12). This happy life everyone desires; joy in the truth everyone wants." 3 In this paper, I seek to describe the phenomenon of joy, principally using approaches made available through the works of a constellation of philosophers who do not exclude as a matter of principle the possibility of a phenomenological dialogue with theology. Inspired by the characterisation of "expansive joy" by Jean-Louis Chrétien, I seek to explore the phenomenon of joy and how it is given to experience. Central to this examination will be the question of the intentionality of joy. Faced with Jean-Yves Lacoste's distinction between intentional and non-intentional joy, I draw from the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano to show that joy can be thought as an event that interrupts experience. I argue that joy is given prepredicatively to the affect and is recognised by its transformative effects in the self. Further, I maintain that these effects are open to being understood in terms of divine encounter. What is joy? Joy has been defined as "a vivid emotion of pleasure arising from a sense of well-being or satisfaction; the feeling or state of being highly pleased or delighted; exultation of spirit,
Lateral, 2021
Amidst the despair, desperation, death, and economic deprivation of the pandemic, poetry—and creative outlets more broadly—have arisen to assist us in both making sense of the world at large, as well as addressing our own struggles during and from these challenges. This essay seeks to put these works into conversation as part of a process—along with quarantine—of seeding, an opportunity to grow new roots and networks. Drawing from a field of established literary journals and ones established during and explicitly to address the pandemic, the essay aims to begin a process of distilling the ways that even amongst fear and loss we must (and will) find ways to find joy. This requires us to seek out new forms of elegy that elaborate and understand the importance of relations and joys between peoples, and the new relational possibilities that our life holds for us as we move towards a post-pandemic world.
2016
What is happiness? The word conjures sunshine, pleasure, expansiveness and possibility-and we could all claim some knowledge and experience of happiness. Nonetheless, happiness, perhaps more than any other experience, is as much defined and delineated in the negative. Happiness is not suffering, not anguish, not absence or lack, not loneliness, not depression, not melancholy. Happiness, it would seem, is an ideal state to be sought, to be cultivated, defended and even boasted about. That we do not in fact have grasp of a pure state, such as happiness, in isolation from its contraries is illuminating something important in how ourselves and our realities are structured. We are able to recognise it not only because it is already a part of our experiential repertoire but also because we are already familiar with its converse. This insight has direct implications for our experiences in general and for the experience of happiness in particular.
Journal of International Political Theory, 2024
The argument of this paper is that the experience and performance of joy can be a radical and subversive act of pedagogical agency. Although joy may seem out of place and out of touch in academia given the increased surveillance and policing of what is being taught in the classroom, and neoliberal administrative structuring prioritising uniformity and outcomes at the expense of creativity, it is here, under this oppositional structure, where joy is most subversive precisely because it is this dimension of human emotion that is increasingly being crowded out and disciplined in universities. Joy, as a positive emotion and dimension of wellbeing, has an underappreciated radical dimension only appreciable in contrast to its negative or oppositional dimension. Although joy has been a theme in pedagogy, its subversive possibilities there remain largely unpacked. This paper theorises joy through two themes that express its radical possibilities in and beyond the classroom. Specifically, joy is a relational and publicly embodied affect providing strength for the teacher, inspiration for students, and signalling resistance and defiance to structures of oppression. The paper concludes by acknowledging the risks and limits of joy that nevertheless are outweighed by its sustaining features found in our vocation.