The expectation of happiness is hope, while the expectation of pain is fear. These are two emotions and are roughly symmetrical while belonging to different orders. The absence or devaluing of hope is depression, while the absence of fear is something else again, certainly not happiness, but not unrelated to it. Again, happiness is a social good while pain is a private evil, their modes of evaluation are different but the systems are entangled. Fear or anxiety is contingent to the self, while happiness or joy seems to be an essential attribute of the self. If the former is taken to be ontologically grounded then the self is viewed as contingent. This is an influential interpretation, but it contradicts our deepest experience, so that to retain it we must also take contradiction to be ontological. But on the other side surely the contradiction is even more salient? How can happiness be both social, and therefore entirely the result of a complex process of interpretation and evaluation, and ontological? The 'moneyness' of happiness means that it tends to melt into signs for itself. You imagine that money starts out as representing value, but you soon find that it only represents only different money. All its reality depends on the system of exchanges. Value is upheld by dignity and pride and depreciated by shame and guilt. The happiness which is the nature of the self does not enter into exchange, but this is why it can be the absent signified that sustains the circulation of imaginary values, and also why the response to challenges to those imaginary values can be so disproportionate. It is what makes identification possible, mistaking value in the system for the value outside the system.