 Hello and welcome to yet another philosophical improvisation. Today we will speak about melancholia. Now it was recently a very much discussed movie from Lars from Trier I think. It was the only movie in my entire life that made me leave after five minutes with a deep feeling of nausea. I felt like vomiting. There was a deep nihilism, an absence of joy in such a movie. And I think there is in many aspects of our life that absence of joy. That sadness which can of course manifest itself in ways that are obviously sober and solemn and quiet and introverted. But the contemporary melancholia can also manifest itself in the form of so-called fun. If you look at some Friday evening TV shows with their display of collars and fake smiles they are profoundly melancholic. So of course for a philosopher like Spinoza joy was the fundamental feeling joy and its opposite sadness. Joy has an increase in the existential power in the feeling of active gratitude that leads us to co-create, co-shape forms of existing worlds, territories, epistemic communities, communities of practice. But also simply the community with oneself. The first novel I wrote was called Joy because I did believe that contrary to happiness which is sometimes very stereotyped, joy is something that is not necessarily related to a given object. It is more an emotion without object. Of course we can be joyful when we play with children for example. But more importantly I think joy is an attitude. Joy is a decision to see the world with the perspective of someone who knows what is important and what is simply the melancholic illusion of stress that the advocates of realism try to impose on us to fit on our fear and on our vulnerability. So joy is political definitely and it is not to be confused with fun. It is not political to go out in a nightclub until five o'clock. Joy is political because it questions the melancholy of capitalism, that production of nihilism that is based on the repetition of rituals that are not produced with any form of new life that are just confirmations of dead protocols, of dead values, of dead beliefs. That's it for today. This was yet another philosophical improvisation. See you tomorrow.