Agamben and the Governance of Happiness

This is the first book to offer a systematic reconstruction of the concept of happiness within Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical thought, revealing it as a central yet overlooked category that traverses his reflections on sovereignty, economy, and ethics, and connecting it to recent debates in ecocriticism and environmental ethics.While Agamben is most often interpreted through the lenses of sovereignty, bare life, and states of exception, Alphée C. S. Mpassi demonstrates that the question of happiness constitutes a hidden thread connecting the critical (pars destruens) and constructive (pars construens) dimensions of Agamben’s philosophy. Moving beyond readings that reduce Agamben to a purely negative or aporetic thinker, this book shows how happiness functions as the conceptual hinge between his critique of modern apparatuses of government and his search for liberated forms of life beyond economic and sovereign capture.Through close engagement with Agamben’s key texts, especially the Homo Sacer series and his broader philosophical corpus, Mpassi reconstructs a radically alternative conception of happiness grounded not in consumption, productivity, or individual fulfilment, but in use, potentiality, inoperativity, and form-of-life. The book further situates Agamben within contemporary debates on political theology, post-capitalism, environmental ethics, and ecological crisis. In doing so, it foregrounds a neglected ecological dimension of Agamben’s work, arguing that his critique of oikonomia and governmentality also carries profound implications for understanding contemporary forms of environmental devastation.Offering a major new interpretation of Agamben’s philosophy, Agamben and the Biopolitics of Happiness will be essential reading for scholars and students of continental philosophy, political theory, political theology, environmental humanities, and critical theory.