America considers the pursuit of happiness an inalienable right. But where is this pursuit taking us? How valuable is positive thinking? In arts, melancholia has long been a source of inspiration.
Specialist of Ancient Greece Barbara Cassin will give a philosophical point of view on the topic, and historian of the French Revolution Sophie Wahnich will bring some insight on the conditions of happiness. They will be discussing with co-authors of 13 Words, Lemony Snicket's Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman, who is also a New Yorker cover artist and author of the acclaimed book, And the Pursuit of Happiness.
Bio
Barbara Cassin
Barbara Cassin is head of research at the CNRS, where she has directed an international research team.
Cassin published a Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles (European Vocabulary of Philosophies, Dictionnary of the Untranslatable).
She also worked on contemporary rhetorical and political issues, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, to experiment in concreto what kind of things words can do in our days. Her latest book is Heidegger. Les Femmes, le nazisme et la philosophie.
Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is an author, screenwriter, and accordionist whose novels include Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and Adverbs.
Under the alias "Lemony Snicket," he is the author of the internationally-acclaimed thirteen volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Maira Kalman
Maira Kalman is an award-winning artist who has illustrated numerous covers for The New Yorker and has written and illustrated a dozen children's books.
Her articles and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Interview, and many other publications. Now a teacher of graduate design at the School of Visual Arts, she has designed products for the Museum of Modern Art and sets for Mark Morris Dance Group.
Her first online column for the Opinion section of The New York Times, "The Principles of Uncertainty," ran from May of 2006 to April of 2007. It was followed by her latest book, And the Pursuit of Happiness, a yearlong investigation of democracy, inspired by the 2008 presidential elections.
Sophie Wahnich
Sophie Wahnich is a historian of the French Revolution interested in the relationship between emotions, feelings and politics. She is a CNRS head of Research at the Transdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology (EHESS).
Her method is to articulate areas that are not ususally connected: the history of politics, the analysis of political sovereignty in practice and the role of violence, the anthropology of rituals, revenge, or the sacred.
To achieve what she calls a "desecration" of knowledge, she wants to make visible, in the writing of history, a sensitive dimension that postulates shared political values, thus presenting history both as an historical science and as a practice of political conscience. Her latest book is Les Émotions, la Révolution française et le présent.
Movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799, reaching its first climax in 1789, and ended the ancien régime. Causes included the loss of peasant support for the feudal system, broad acceptance of the reformist writings of the philosophes, an expanding bourgeoisie that was excluded from political power, a fiscal crisis worsened by participation in the American Revolution, and crop failures in 1788. The efforts of the regime in 1787 to increase taxes levied on the privileged classes initiated a crisis. In response, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General, made up of clergy, nobility, and the Third Estate (commoners), in 1789. Trying to pass reforms, it swore the Tennis Court Oath not to disperse until France had a new constitution. The king grudgingly concurred in the formation of the National Assembly, but rumours of an “aristocratic conspiracy” led to the Great Fear of July 1789, and Parisians seized the Bastille on July 14. The assembly drafted a new constitution that introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Constitution of 1791 also established a short-lived constitutional monarchy. The assembly nationalized church lands to pay off the public debt and reorganized the church (seeCivil Constitution of the Clergy). The king tried to flee the country but was apprehended at Varennes. France, newly nationalistic, declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792, beginning the French Revolutionary Wars. Revolutionaries imprisoned the royal family and massacred nobles and clergy at the Tuileries in 1792. A new assembly, the National Convention—divided between Girondins and the extremist Montagnards—abolished the monarchy and established the First Republic in September 1792. Louis XVI was judged by the National Convention and executed for treason on Jan. 21, 1793. The Montagnards seized power and adopted radical economic and social policies that provoked violent reactions, including the Wars of the Vendée and citizen revolts. Opposition was broken by the Reign of Terror. Military victories in 1794 brought a change in the public mood, and Maximilien Robespierre was overthrown in the Convention on 9 Thermidor, year II (in 1794 in the French republican calendar), and executed the next day (seeThermidorian Reaction). Royalists tried to seize power in Paris but were crushed by Napoleon on 13 Vendémaire, year IV (in 1795). A new constitution placed executive power in a Directory of five members. The war and schisms in the Directory led to disputes that were settled by coups d'état, chiefly those of 18 Fructidor, Year V (in 1797), and 18–19 Brumaire, Year VIII (in 1799), in which Napoleon abolished the Directory and declared himself leader of France. See alsoCommittee of Public Safety; Constitution of 1795; Constitution of the Year VIII; Charlotte Corday; Cordeliers Club; Georges J. Danton; Feuillants Club; Jacobin Club; J.-P. Marat; Marie-Antoinette; Louis de Saint-Just; E.-J. Sieyès.
Yes: responding to Bonnie Walker... but the events that sometimes bring on these moments of elation or happiness are confusing when you try to articulate and make sense of why they made you laugh or cry or just feel good.
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