Kirjahaku

An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan.Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire-the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within-"the trouble with pleasure."Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the "Critique of Pure Complaint" he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as "mutually compatible symptoms"; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s "literature of the death drive," including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.

A provocative book that proposes a new and surprising inspiration for philosophy today the canine thinker from Kafka s story 'Investigations of a Dog.' Written toward the end of Kafka s life, 'Investigations of a Dog' (Forschungen eines Hundes, 1922) is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author s oeuvre. Walter Benjamin remarked that it was the one story he never managed to figure out. Kafka s tale of philosophical adventure is that of a lone, maladjusted dog who challenges the dogmatism of established science and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. Schuster revisits this text, using the canine as a guide dog through which to rediscover Kafka s fictional universe, while taking up the cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and revolutionary thinker. Neither an exercise in literary criticism nor a traditional philosophical commentary, this charming and idiosyncratic book aligns itself with and develops the research program of Kafka s dog. It constructs an 'impossible' system based on the fourfold division of nourishment, music, incantation, and freedom or, stated a bit differently: enjoyment, art, institutions, and freedom. Schuster puts the dog in dialogue with psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Lacan), the history of philosophy (Plato, Diogenes, Descartes, Kierkegaard, German Idealism, Marx, phenomenology), and literature (Gogol, Melville, Flaubert, Cervantes, Lispector). Imagining the 'Unknown University' that Kafka s new science calls for, the book enlists new comrades in the dog s struggle.