Capitalism and Happiness

I think I'm more struck by our inexhaustible search for contiguity than by how trapped we are (injustice isn't merely conjoined with the cage of oppression; or rather, oppression isn't merely a cage). What Freud calls displacement. "Desires are constantly displaced": this seems a constant mode of capitalistic suffering and happiness. We go to the next best thing. This is the metonymic relation: we cannot have the body, so we choose the hands, or fingers, or chest, or torso, or....or... Jesus, in his brilliance, reverses this: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it out; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell" (Matthew 5:29, KJV). The body cannot offend you: only these contiguities, these associations.

Why suffering and happiness? Because we misread this displacement and make it metaphorical: "I will have it later" or "This lack is a sign!" This is how we get happy; how we feel us getting stronger; our passion grows this way, for some reason. Indeed, suffering itself, as Marx says, is a kind of pleasure: we consume it, it becomes ours. It defines our happiness, in a sense, within the capitalist system of lack and possession: happiness must be attained, gotten, had, possessed, consumed, like capital itself, which is defined in its quest for consuming more capital. The goal: to become a body without organs.

Is this where we are left?