Sara Ahmed

_The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including_ Mrs. Dalloway_, _The Well of Loneliness_, _Bend It Like Beckham_, and _Children of Men_, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

This article examines ‘collective feelings’ by considering how ‘others’ create impressions on the surfaces of bodies. Rather than considering ‘collective feeling’ as ‘fellow feeling’ or in terms of feeling ‘for’ the collective, the article suggests that how we respond to others in intercorporeal encounters creates the impression of a collective body. In other words, how we feel about others is what aligns us with a collective, which paradoxically ‘takes shape’ only as an effect of such alignments. The article considers different examples of racism in which a particular other is held in place by being aligned with other others. The ‘moment of contact’ is shaped by past histories of contact, which allows the proximity of a racial other to be perceived as threatening, at the same time as it re-shapes the bodies in the contact zone of the encounter. Feelings rehearse associations that are already in place, in the way in which they ‘read’ the proximity of others, at the same time as they establish the ‘truth’ of the reading. The article extends its analysis by showing that bodily proximity is not required to create the impressions of others, and offers an analysis of ‘collective feelings’ within virtual communities of global nomads. Proximity does not require physical co-presence: the collective can ‘surface’ through giving up on local attachments (where the screen becomes a substitute for the skin). The article concludes that collective feelings are not feelings that the collective ‘has’, as if the collective was a subject. Rather the collective is an effect of the impressions left by others on the surfaces of skins.