Reading Adam Phillips’s recent Guardian essay on happiness, it occurs to me that “absorption” may be the concept that Cold World is missing: the term that names the passage from the “cold world” of dejection to a renewed sense of worldly engagement and commitment. In his conclusion, Phillips writes:

For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed.

This succinctly captures what I think I wanted to say about the significance of dysphoria, or “unpleasure”: that there is a moment of appropriation of unpleasure, of becoming “able to feel”, which prepares the ground for projects which may have nothing directly to do with attaining enjoyment. Frustration is not fruitful in and of itself - it is a condition of unfruitfulness, at least to begin with - but as Phillips says, it must be allowed to “take its course, to take its time”.

On the one hand, Phillips is making a plea for negative capability, for permitting frustration its proper duration; on the other, he is suggesting an active, perhaps even perverse and wilful, involvement with that which frustrates us. In learning to pay attention to our frustration, we learn new habits of attention: our capacity for absorption grows out of this expanded and modified attentiveness.

“Happiness” means, amongst other things, not having to pay attention: when we are safe and fed and loved as we wish to be loved, we are happy in our life-world, able to bask in its benignity. Parents want their children to be happy in pretty much this way; although, as Phillips points out, one of the things they want for ourselves in wanting this is for their children to be undemanding, “happy in themselves” rather than challenging or questioning. Adolescent frustration is not simply a failure to be happy in oneself, but a refusal to be unchallenging: a demand not only for attention, but for things worth paying attention to.

To be able to feel frustrated, Phillips says, is to be able to “register what we feel deprived of”. I’m reminded immediately of Larkin’s assertion that deprivation was to him what daffodils were to Wordsworth: something which required attention, rewarding it not with a substitute for whatever he felt was lacking but with a feeling of subjective mastery. When one is truly absorbed in something, one’s immediate bodily and emotional needs take on a lesser importance: absorption does not fulfil those needs, but suspends their urgency. (This is one of the reasons why people in dire circumstances sometimes dedicate themselves to projects which have seemingly little to do with the prerogatives of survival which might be assumed to be of overriding importance to them: why Messaien was able to compose his Quartet for the End of Time in a concentration camp, for example).

Much of the appeal of Badiou’s evocation, particularly in The Century, of the passions of militancy comes from the sense he conveys that “matters of life and death” were in some similar way of lesser importance to the militants of the twentieth century. This is precisely everybody’s complaint against them nowadays: that they were dedicated to “abstractions”, and criminally heedless of the lower rungs on the ladder of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But the capacity for absorption is a generic human trait, and it remains the case that material wealth or poverty is no predictor of the sudden, passionate and irresponsible, desire to make use of one’s intelligence for a change.