The Promise of Happiness : Political Imagination in Contemporary Thai Society
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説明
This paper examines how emotions play an important role in Thai politics in the past decade (2006–2016). The specific emotion I choose to discuss in this paper is happiness. Certainly, the emotions of anger, hatred, and fear became the affective economy permeating Thai social polity for the last decade; but, with the consolidation of the new government led by Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha, Thai citizens are now subjects of an official campaign to “Bring Back Happiness” after the time of political conflict. How might we understand the political agenda of this emergent affective economy of happiness and the effect of the economy of happiness on Thai citizens? To answer the question, the paper explores two social phenomena sponsored by the government; namely, the song “Bring Back Happiness to Thailand” and the fair “Love and Warmth at Winter’s End.” In accordance with the government’s campaign to “Bring Back Happiness,” these social phenomena project a phantasmatic vision of a prior Thailand, located in an earlier moment when people lived in a peaceful, stable, happy national unity. The government’s promise of happiness achieves its power to the degree that happiness is forever postponed, thereby remaining phantasmatic, the psychic investment in believing in something that never exists. Pleasure and delight citizens get from listening to the song and visiting the fair direct them towards things associated with the vision of happiness. However, in order to live with the promise of happiness, citizens must follow a system of regulations advertised to them as means to achieve the end of national unity and thus happiness. In this sense, then, their attachment to the fantasy of happiness is similar to what the cultural critic and affect theorist Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.”
収録刊行物
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- Philosophia OSAKA
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Philosophia OSAKA 16 1-19, 2021-03
大阪大学大学院文学研究科文化形態論専攻哲学哲学史/大阪大学大学院文学研究科文化形態論専攻現代思想文化学
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詳細情報 詳細情報について
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- CRID
- 1390009224818872576
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- NII論文ID
- 120006953369
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- NII書誌ID
- AA12121507
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- DOI
- 10.18910/78340
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- HANDLE
- 11094/78340
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- ISSN
- 1880862X
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- 本文言語コード
- en
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- 資料種別
- departmental bulletin paper
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- データソース種別
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- JaLC
- IRDB
- CiNii Articles
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- 抄録ライセンスフラグ
- 使用可
