Language, Chance and Happiness

the psycholinguistic topography of the ‘Contractor manqué’

Shapiro, Carolyn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2987-8111 (2026) Language, Chance and Happiness. The Journal of Bentham Studies, 24 (Sptial). ISSN 2045-757X (Submitted)

Text (An article for the Journal of Bentham Studies thinking about Bentham's considerable influence on the French structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan which engages with a newly published personal essay written by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century) ShapiroThe Contractor Manque, Picture.docx - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (13MB)

Abstract / Summary

A close-reading 'A Picture of the Treasury' offers rich insight into Jeremy Bentham’s larger philosophical project’s complex understanding of happiness as his material groundwork. In this chapter, I zoom in on Bentham’s compelling characterisation of himself as ‘Contractor manqué’, the state to which he feels reduced after a long series of failed actions towards the end goal of constructing his national Penitentiary. I look at the linguistic figure of the contractor as an exemplary ‘performative’ entity, with all its high potential for infelicity. Compounded with the word manqué, what I am isolating here as Bentham’s primary figure resonates as a psycholinguistic formation that can be plumbed and explicated through twentieth-century philosophers of language and happiness Jacques Lacan and J.L. Austin, who, I argue, join Bentham in his radical shake-up of Aristotelian metaphysics. My close reading of Bentham’s rich usages of language in A Picture of the Treasury will be enhanced by a consideration of the visual material which accompanied his initial proposal to the English government and all its apparatuses to acquire the land and build upon that land, imagery which after reading this plaintive address to Lord Pelham manifests a deep psychic investment that encompasses his personal and greater philosophical convictions. I also open up the relevance and propitiousness of what C.S. Peirce presented later as the tychic register to Bentham’s overall felicific calculus with an in-depth analysis of Jacques Lacan’s indebtedness to Bentham’s theories of fiction. However, as central as Bentham’s theories around language were to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic, I argue speculatively that Bentham could have been borrowing from Lacan just as substantially when he configured himself ‘Contractor manqué’.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Infelicity; Lacanian symbolic; contractor; fiction; Tuché; Panopticon; performative
ISSN:	2045-757X
Subjects:	Art History & Theory Philosophy & Psychology
Department:	Falmouth School of Art
Depositing User:	Carolyn Shapiro
Date Deposited:	14 May 2026 09:00
Last Modified:	14 May 2026 09:00
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6472

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