There is no possible world without dysphoria (there may be some possible worlds without my dysphoria, but there is no possible world in which there is no dysphoria; the projected remedies for dysphoria are incompossible. Foucault: it will always be intolerable to the necrophiliac that he is denied access to the mortuary). Therefore it cannot be the object of a politics of dysphoria to “make it better”.

In fact, dysphoria does not provide politics with an object; it deprives life-worlds of whatever legitimacy they claim on the basis of their ability to satisfy their inhabitants, and foregrounds the question of what, other than personal satisfaction, can legitimise a political order. I might accept a world in which I personally was unhappy in certain ways, if I could see that it was also just. (Anyone who isn’t a complete egomaniac does already accept some aspects of the world that chafe against them or deprive them of personal satisfaction, because those aspects at least of our common life do seem more or less just and equitable).

Dysphoria is probably not very politically interesting outside of a particular context: that of societies whose citizens (that is, a privileged segment: not slaves) expect to be happy, and believe that their society is a good society to the extent that it provides them with a life-world in which they are comfortable and able to enjoy themselves. A good society is - to a first approximation - one in which the construction of a shared life-world is the ongoing concern of everybody in that society, and in which dysphoric exceptions and exemptions are part of the critical intelligence that society brings to bear upon its own constitution.